The first of them involves the work of photographer Fionán O’Connell. Many years ago, I published in Colby Quarterly an essay centered on a selection of his Dublin curbscapes: “Through a Lens Darkly: New Focus on ‘Joyce’s Dublin’.” That essay focused (as it were) on how Fionán’s photos of contemporary Dublin complement the new literature of the city emerging in the early to mid-1990s—the writing of Roddy Doyle, Paula Meehan, and Dermot Bolger, for example—to create essentially a palimpsest over James Joyce’s etched-in-stone (as it were) representation of Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century. This new project involves a series of black-and-white photographs that Fionán happened to shoot around the same time—interior shots of Belvedere College, SJ, where he was teaching at the time. What makes these shots so interesting to me is first of all that they represent a variation on what I call Fionán’s “peripheral vision”—his method of capturing with his lens essentially what an individual might catch, almost subliminally, out of the corner of his/her eye: architectural details, shadows, odd angles of light, the physical texture of the place they were taken. But what compounds my interest is, of course, the Joycean element: like Joyce, O’Connell is an alumnus of Belvedere College—and in an intriguing (yet also coincidental) way, O’Connell’s photographic art shares certain aspects of Joyce’s narrative technique of “stream of consciousness” that he employs at times in 
Ulysses. Add to this the fact that Belvedere College is the setting for most of Chapter Three of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . . . and you (or I) have the makings of a promising exploration of cross-disciplinary artistic convergence.
So . . . an important dimension of my Dublin visit was my first visit ever to Belvedere College—which included not only a personal tour of the place by alum and former teacher (and current parent of a student) Fionán O’Connell but also an “audience” with the school’s Headmaster, Gerry Foley. By coincidence, I had met Gerry in Boston just a month before I set out for Dublin—that at least gave me a knock on his door. (I had to laugh when I found out that I would be sitting down with Gerry: I met him at an event in Boston in which one of the speak
ers described how difficult it is to get through to him directly—his responsibilities as Headmaster of Belvedere are all-consuming.) But after a great, wide-ranging chat about matters literary, Joycean, and Jesuitical, I—or Fionán—actually came away from Gerry’s office with literally the keys to every door in the Belvedere compound. With unrestricted and leisurely access to Belvedere, I felt that I was able to absorb for myself some of the “spirit of place” that Fionán registers in his photographs and that Joyce would have registered in person (in a literal, not literary, “stream of consciousness”) during his days as a schoolboy there in the late 1890s. Fionán has sorted and catalogued his Belvedere photos from the mid-1990s: my job now is to find the language of critical engagement to do justice to the idea that I have just sketched. . . .
But that is not the only work-related project I have had on my mind, and on my agenda, while I’ve been here. In fact, as always happens when I visit Ireland, I will come away from this visit with a stockpile a new ideas and a freshening up of old ideas that I already have on the multiple back burners (metaphorical) of my desk (literal). One of these is a follow-up to my twice-published essay on Dublin-based jazz guitarist Louis Stewart. I had the high hope of seeing Stewart play when I was in Dublin . . . but the rumor slipped to me that he was starting up a new residency this coming Sunday was off by one week, alas. . . . But I am still motivated to return to my Stewart materials and pursue another project that I feel has great promise.
However, the day after I get back to Boston I will get into the mail a slightly re-tuned (as it were) version of another music-centered essay—this one on retro rock-’n’-roll band Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers. I was at the band’s debut performance 32 years ago (hard to believe), and have been following their trajectory since their resurrection (as it
were—a lot of as it weres in this blog!) on New Year’s Eve of 2005. I had also hoped to see them perform while I was visiting—but as with Louis Stewart, no such luck. Instead . . . I got to play with Rocky himself (a.k.a. novelist, memoirist, screenwriter . . . and, briefly, long-ago classmate of mine, Ferdia Mac Anna) along with the band’s flashy lead guitarist “the Lizard” (a.k.a. Martin Meagher) and also Rocky’s son Finn on drums! Rocky/Ferdia secured a practice space in the bowels of the Button Factory in Temple Bar, the fashionably hip music and arts center of Dublin, and we spent a couple of fine hours together finding musical common ground and enjoying each other’s guitar-centered company. (I didn’t bring a guitar with me, but Ferdia lent me his beautiful red Gibson ES-335—a clone of “Big Red,” the axe played by guitar-hero Alvin Lee of Ten Years After.) W
e didn’t play “Taking Care of Business” . . . but we should have: for while this get-together was a real treat and a ton of fun, it also added to my serious critical/scholarly interest in the workings of a band named to satirize arguably the most prominent Irish political figure of the twentieth-century, militant nationalist rebel during the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Irish Civil War, founder of the Fianna Fáil political party, prime minister and president Éamon de Valera. The story of the band is interesting in and of itself . . . but that old question “what’s in a name?” really begs to be answered.
That all happened today—Friday, June 18th—deep in the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis.
Ulysses. Add to this the fact that Belvedere College is the setting for most of Chapter Three of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . . . and you (or I) have the makings of a promising exploration of cross-disciplinary artistic convergence.So . . . an important dimension of my Dublin visit was my first visit ever to Belvedere College—which included not only a personal tour of the place by alum and former teacher (and current parent of a student) Fionán O’Connell but also an “audience” with the school’s Headmaster, Gerry Foley. By coincidence, I had met Gerry in Boston just a month before I set out for Dublin—that at least gave me a knock on his door. (I had to laugh when I found out that I would be sitting down with Gerry: I met him at an event in Boston in which one of the speak
ers described how difficult it is to get through to him directly—his responsibilities as Headmaster of Belvedere are all-consuming.) But after a great, wide-ranging chat about matters literary, Joycean, and Jesuitical, I—or Fionán—actually came away from Gerry’s office with literally the keys to every door in the Belvedere compound. With unrestricted and leisurely access to Belvedere, I felt that I was able to absorb for myself some of the “spirit of place” that Fionán registers in his photographs and that Joyce would have registered in person (in a literal, not literary, “stream of consciousness”) during his days as a schoolboy there in the late 1890s. Fionán has sorted and catalogued his Belvedere photos from the mid-1990s: my job now is to find the language of critical engagement to do justice to the idea that I have just sketched. . . .But that is not the only work-related project I have had on my mind, and on my agenda, while I’ve been here. In fact, as always happens when I visit Ireland, I will come away from this visit with a stockpile a new ideas and a freshening up of old ideas that I already have on the multiple back burners (metaphorical) of my desk (literal). One of these is a follow-up to my twice-published essay on Dublin-based jazz guitarist Louis Stewart. I had the high hope of seeing Stewart play when I was in Dublin . . . but the rumor slipped to me that he was starting up a new residency this coming Sunday was off by one week, alas. . . . But I am still motivated to return to my Stewart materials and pursue another project that I feel has great promise.
However, the day after I get back to Boston I will get into the mail a slightly re-tuned (as it were) version of another music-centered essay—this one on retro rock-’n’-roll band Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers. I was at the band’s debut performance 32 years ago (hard to believe), and have been following their trajectory since their resurrection (as it
were—a lot of as it weres in this blog!) on New Year’s Eve of 2005. I had also hoped to see them perform while I was visiting—but as with Louis Stewart, no such luck. Instead . . . I got to play with Rocky himself (a.k.a. novelist, memoirist, screenwriter . . . and, briefly, long-ago classmate of mine, Ferdia Mac Anna) along with the band’s flashy lead guitarist “the Lizard” (a.k.a. Martin Meagher) and also Rocky’s son Finn on drums! Rocky/Ferdia secured a practice space in the bowels of the Button Factory in Temple Bar, the fashionably hip music and arts center of Dublin, and we spent a couple of fine hours together finding musical common ground and enjoying each other’s guitar-centered company. (I didn’t bring a guitar with me, but Ferdia lent me his beautiful red Gibson ES-335—a clone of “Big Red,” the axe played by guitar-hero Alvin Lee of Ten Years After.) W
e didn’t play “Taking Care of Business” . . . but we should have: for while this get-together was a real treat and a ton of fun, it also added to my serious critical/scholarly interest in the workings of a band named to satirize arguably the most prominent Irish political figure of the twentieth-century, militant nationalist rebel during the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Irish Civil War, founder of the Fianna Fáil political party, prime minister and president Éamon de Valera. The story of the band is interesting in and of itself . . . but that old question “what’s in a name?” really begs to be answered.That all happened today—Friday, June 18th—deep in the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis.
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