PLUS ÇA CHANGE

Just a day or so before heading across the pond for Dublin, I found a photograph of myself from a visit to Ireland in 1987—“Exhibit A” supporting my longstanding claim that I didn’t have a gray hair on my head before I became the father of three daughters.

That photo may not be a fair gauge of change for this visit . . . but inevitably I have been tuning in to various other measures. One that struck me particularly on my last couple of nights is the proliferation of taxis. Last night—my last night in Dublin, spent happily in the company of my friends Fionán and Paula and their fine children Oisín and Laoise—I needed less than 15 seconds to flag down a cab in the northside community of Drumcondra. I don’t think I would be exaggerating much to say that close to 50% of the cars driving the streets of Dublin at 1:00 in the morning were taxis. Chatting with the driver on the way back to the Burlington Hotel, I learned that this radical change came about partly because of an intense enforcement of drunk driving laws in Ireland and partly because of a deregulation of the taxi industry, which allowed pretty much every man and his dog to buy a hackney medallion and get into the business.

Another gauge, of course, is the gradual disappearance of various Dublin landmarks with literary associations—especially Joycean associations. One that I happened to notice whose days are numbered is the Ormond Hotel, site of the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses . . . and until recently site of the “Sirens Bar” as well. It is now shuttered and up for sale: I imagine the wrecker’s ball and the developer’s dream will give an entirely new face to that old Liffey quay.

But some things also remain the same—including Bewley’s Café as an essential place to grab a bite to eat and a restorative cup of tea or coffee. There used to be a number of Bewley’s locations in Dublin—there are fewer now and the only one that I visited is on Grafton Street. I had a great lunch there on Saturday with my old friend Robert Duffy, who drove up from Hacketstown, Co. Carlow for the afternoon. Robert and I go all the way back to 1977 and have managed to keep our connections alive over the years by get-togethers on both sides of the pond—in Indiana, in Boston, in Carlow. But we hadn’t seen each other since 1998, so it was great to get caught up on personal, familial, professional, and writerly matters: just before I left for Ireland I read about halfway through Jack in the Box, an engaging collection of short stories, set mostly in small-town Ireland, that Robert published a year or so ago. . . . After Bewley’s, just to punctuate—or “christen”—the reunion properly, we decided to grab a pint at one of Dublin’s true landmark pubs, McDaid’s. Associated with Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan, among many other writers of “Bohemian Dublin” of the 1950s, it is a grand place to raise a toast to “the good auld days.” But as one more measure of change, right across the street from McDaid’s, in front of the Bruxelles nightclub, stands a larger-than-life-sized statue of the late Phil Lynott, lead singer of the band Thin Lizzy that rocked the charts back in my student days in Dublin in the late ’70s. It seemed apt that Robert and I pose for a shot with the man who sang on the hit single “The Boys Are Back in Town”!

46A

Back in the day, the Burlington Hotel was a pretty fashionable address. But times have changed—several times—and now even a visiting academic with a small budget can afford to stay there. The hotel is still stylish and well-maintained, and for my money I could not have asked for more. And as for location, location, location . . . well, it was about a 12-minute walk to anywhere I wanted to go in the heart of Dublin—the National Library, the National Gallery, St. Stephen’s Green, Grafton Street—and also my old stomping grounds of Ranelagh and Rathmines. It’s also on the AirCoach bus line—a direct ride from and to the airport for just 8 Euros each way—and it’s on a couple of regular bus lines as well, the #11 that goes far into the northside and the 46A that goes south. . . .

I took the 46A last night out to meet my old friends Bairbre and Gerry (and their sons Oisín and Eoin) at my old “local” back in 1977-78, Byrne’s Galloping Green pub on the dual carriageway in Stillorgan. Bairbre was one of the first people I met when I came to Dublin as a student in 1977—we’ve almost fallen out of touch a couple of times, and I hadn’t seen her and Gerry since 1998 (in Galloping Green) and had never met their handsome young sons. But seeing them after a dozen years made no big difference—time collapses under the substance of old friendships and we spent a wonderful few hours together. Now if only I could do justice to Gerry’s stories—including several about a friend’s yellow Ford car! Gerry was insistent that his stories were not only “good” but also “true” . . . Hmmm.

Perhaps needless to say, seeing Bairbre and Gerry under the roof of the Galloping Green pub brought back many memories for me, some with literary associations. One of them is Galloping Green’s claim to literary fame as the only pub that barred legendary writer Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien/Myles na Gopaleen from its premises . . . in writing. (Clearly, publican Jerry Byrne, who ran the establishment when I frequented it and who wrote the letter, took serious exception to something!) I believe that incident is recorded either in Anthony Cronin’s biography of his crony, No Laughing Matter, or in Peter Van de Kamp’s illustrated biography of the author of my favorite novel of all time, At Swim-Two-Birds. In fact, as I was riding the bus out to Galloping Green I had yet another memory . . . of my first-ever pint of Guinness, which I enjoyed at Kiely’s of Donnybrook, a well-known pub which happens to be on the 46A bus route. Not long after that experience, in September of 1977, I read for the first time this passage in At Swim-Two-Birds:

We sat in Grogan’s with our faded overcoats finely disarrayed on easy chairs in the mullioned snug. I gave a shilling and two pennies to a civil man who brought us in return two glasses of black porter, imperial pint measure. I adjusted the glasses to the front of each of us and reflected on the solemnity of the occasion. It was my first taste of porter.

The mind may be impaired by alcohol, I mused, but withal it may be pleasantly impaired. Personal experience appeared to me the only satisfactory means to the resolution of my doubts. Knowing it was my first one, I quietly fingered the butt of my glass before I raised it. Lightly I subjected myself to an inward interrogation.

Nature of interrogation: Who are my future cronies, where our mad carousals? . . .

Ah, what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed . . .

Anyway, there’s a funny story about Kiely’s pub, told by author Benedict Kiely—no relation to the publican, though he lived almost directly across Morehampton Road from the pub for the last couple of decades of his life. Kiely told me this story in person back in 1998, but I think he may have written it somewhere as well. It’s about an American friend who grabbed a cab at the airport and told the driver—vaguely, he thought—“Kiely’s . . . Donnybrook”: when the driver headed off without further details, the American thought that Ben Kiely must have really made a name for himself if even a random cabbie at the airport knew exactly where he lived. The American was dropped off at the pub . . .

ICONS

I didn’t set out to have lunch at the Hard Rock Café today . . . but as I was passing through the Temple Bar area of Dublin I had a “Lestrygonians” moment and, like Bloom, decided to duck in to a convenient establishment for a quick bite. While I was waiting for my fajitas—a brave menu choice deep in the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis?—I took a peek at several books that I picked up this morning: a new volume of poems by my friend Louis de Paor, a substantial gathering of poems by the late Michael Hartnett (about whom I have a little piece in progress), and a compilation of various short writings by James Joyce. Then I decided to record the moment for posterity.

DUBLIN MISCELLANY

As I recall, the Irish Times used to have a regular feature titled “Dublin Miscellany.” Maybe it still does. Well, I’m borrowing that heading as the umbrella for the somewhat random musings that follow . . .

First of all, a simple gauge of the changes that have taken place in Dublin since I last visited in 2005. On that occasion, on my first night back in the city I met my old friend Fionán for a pint at Conway’s pub on Parnell Square South. Competing with The Brazen Head for the title of “the oldest pub in Dublin,” it was for me an emblem of the radical social and economic changes that had taken place in Ireland during the roar of the so-called Celtic Tiger: not only were our pints of Guinness pulled by a woman . . . but that woman was Asian. As Fionán explained to me at the time: Irish-born people no longer work in the service industry. Well, five years later that particular gauge is moot . . . as that one-time claimant for the distinction of ultimate longevity is now shuttered and out of business. Hmmm . . .

Second of all, today I did some particularly Joycean rambling, covering a lot of territory in the process. Around midday I stopped in to the James Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street. I didn’t know what I would find there . . . and, frankly, I didn’t find much. It provides a very basic introduction to Joyce’s life and his works, mostly via a video and some displays. The major point of interest for Joyce fetishists would probably be the door from #7 Eccles Street, the real-world address for the fictional Leopold and Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Beyond that? Well, I don’t think there is anything beyond the door—it’s all façade!

In contrast, about 8 miles away via the D.A.R.T train, in the seaside town of Sandycove, sits the early 19th-century “Martello” tower that houses the James Joyce Museum, which I visited an hour or so later. I had been there before but I still found it to be “ambient”—Joyce himself lived in the tower briefly, and of course it is the setting for the opening episode of Ulysses, in which Stephen Dedalus’ antagonist Buck Mulligan describes it as “the omphalos” . . . the “navel” of the world. It has some interesting memorabilia, including Joyce’s old guitar and also a beautiful striped necktie given to him in Paris by Samuel Beckett. . . . Close by, of course, is the “Forty Foot” swimming place that Buck Mulligan plunges into at the end of the “Telemachus” episode. (“Forty Foot” also figures prominently in Jamie O’Neill’s fine novel At Swim, Two Boys.) It used to be “For Gentlemen Only”—it was essentially used for bathing in the nude—but is now a family swimming area.

Finally (for this installment), a note about my evening stroll tonight. I decided to see if I could make my way without a map to one of my old addresses—9 Effra Road in Rathmines. Well, I have to admit that I got very lost. I thought that I knew where I was going—I went past my previous “digs,” my bedsitter on Beechwood Avenue Lower, and I went past my friend Joan’s old flat on Dunville Avenue . . . but then I was suddenly in a brave new world: old landmarks had been replaced by new shops and condos, and even once-familiar street names seemed part of an utter “throughotherness.” I did end up in the heart of Rathmines . . . but even using Slattery’s pub (one of my old watering holes back in 1978) as a new starting point, I got desperately lost again. Finally I gave up and took a left turn that I hoped would bring me back in the basic direction I had come from. At the end of that street I paused for a second, my eye drawn by an ultra-modern looking house that was architecturally completely anomalous with the century-old (or more) row houses lining both sides of the street. I was truly stunned to realize that I was standing in front of 9 Effra Road. I had heard years ago in a roundabout way (from my parents, who met my old landlord—who happened to be celebrated Irish playwright, novelist and short story writer Eugene McCabe—when he received an honorary degree, along with my father, from the University of Prince Edward Island) that the house I lived in had burned down; but I had never imagined that it would be replaced by such an anomaly! Oh well . . . I am still in disbelief that I happened upon my old address after I had given up hope of finding it this evening.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS . . .

The social emphasis of my blog posts notwithstanding, my week in Dublin actually has a work-related dimension to it, and today was a total immersion in a couple of projects that are quite literally “earning my keep” here. The first of them, which I am just getting started on, is my “official” reason for making this trip; the second is one that I am literally putting the finishing touches on—I’ll be sending it out the door the day after I get back to Boston.

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 speakers 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.) We 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.

CANAL BANK WALK

“O commemorate me where there is water,” poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote in a poem titled “Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin,” continuing: “Canal water, preferably, so stilly / Greeny at the heart of summer.” Well, as the photograph affirms, he got his wish in the form of a statue of himself sitting on a bench situated at the side of Grand Canal. I wonder if I earned my own canal-side commemoration after all my walking along its banks today, perhaps my unintentional affirmation of another of Kavanagh’s well-known poems, “Canal Bank Walk”: “Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal / Pouring redemption for me, that I do / The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal, / Grow with nature again as before I grew.” That long, long walk—from Kilmainham back to Ballsbridge (I don’t even know how many miles)—was what linked the two major events of my day.

The first event was a cuppa java with Mary O’Donoghue, an old poet-friend from Boston who has just had her first novel, Before the House Burns, published by Dublin’s Lilliput Press. It’s a beautiful-looking book which I will sit down with when I get back to Boston. She launched it in Galway a week or so ago. I had hoped that she might be launching in Dublin too while I’m here, but no such luck. Back home in County Clare for the summer, Mary just happened to be in Dublin for the day, coming in by train from Galway. We had a nice catch-up at Bewley’s on Grafton Street. And then we walked a few blocks over to catch up with another Boston-based poet-friend, County Monaghan-born Aidan Rooney. Aidan knew he would be seeing Mary, but he did not expect to see me “out of context”! It was great to spend a few minutes with the two of them . . .

Then I set off to do some wandering around Dublin. I had no specific plan beyond simply absorbing the sights and the sounds (and the smells, too) of the city. But I guess I did more than wander—I just kept on going, following streets rather than a map . . . and eventually I realized that I was headed toward the infamous Kilmainham Gaol. Dating back to the late 18th century, this prison housed not only the full range of criminals—from debtors and petty thieves to ruthless murderers—but also many of the major figures of Ireland’s struggle for political autonomy—from Robert Emmett and Charles Stewart Parnell at either end of the 19th century to the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 (Pádraig Pearse, Éamon de Valera, Countess Markiewicz), fifteen of whom were executed by firing squad in the stone-breaking yard within the prison walls. The prison was decommissioned in 1924 then stood in disrepair until the mid-1980s, when it was restored and opened as a museum of—and a monument to—the Irish nationalist cause. Obviously, the conditions under which the prisoners lived were horrendous. I found my visit to Kilmainham to be very moving and very thought-provoking about what certain individuals will do—and also what they will endure—for love of their country.

Leaving Kilmainham, I followed my nose for water and found the Grand Canal, which I knew would lead me back within a block of my hotel. At least an hour later . . . I got back just in time to freshen up and head into Merrion Square—specifically to O’Connell House, the Dublin home to the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Center for Irish Studies. (In the 19th century, the building was the home of legendary nationalist Daniel O’Connell—the Liberator.) I had gotten wind that Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney would be giving a private reading there this evening, for participants in the Notre Dame Irish Seminar. I am grateful for the warm welcome I received from Center director Kevin Whelan and from ND Irish-language professor Breen Ó Conchubhair when I arrived on their doorstep: I’ve known both of them for years . . . but hadn’t seen either of them for years, so the friendly greeting from each of them was no small part of the evening’s pleasure.

But the larger part of the evening’s pleasure was, of course, Heaney’s reading. I have heard him read perhaps 8 or 10 times, dating back to 1981. This reading was particularly enriching—and enlightening—as he pre-viewed a number of new poems from his collection Human Chain, due out in September. He also read a number of poems that recognized the presence in the audience of his longtime friend and long-ago (early 1950s) classmate at St. Columb’s College in Derry, Professor Seamus Deane. For my money the preeminent scholar of Irish literature, Deane is also a fine poet and the author of the staggeringly powerful novel Reading in the Dark (which I have taught on a couple of occasions). After the reading there was the usual milling about, in the midst of which I managed to have a nice conversation with each of the Seamuses. Like Kevin and Breen, they were very welcoming of my being there.

On my way back to the Burlington Hotel, I walked along the Grand Canal again. Passing Kavanagh’s statue, I wondered if even that notoriously cantankerous man-about-town might have enjoyed some of the company I kept during this long and winding day.

BLOOMSDAY . . . THEN AND NOW

By sheer coincidence (“What other sort is there?” pseudonymous Irish novelist Flann O’Brien once mused from behind another of his pseudonyms—Myles na Gopaleen), my Bloomsday in Dublin ended with my reading the opening chapter of Ulysses and Us, scholar and critic Declan Kiberd’s newish guidebook for reading James Joyce’s “damned monster novel” (Joyce’s phrase—not mine or Kiberd’s . . . or O’Brien’s) Ulysses. I picked up Kiberd’s book while playing my part, I suppose, in what he describes as a cultish ritual commemorating the place-specific ramblings around Dublin of the fictional Leopold Bloom on the 16th of June, 1904. “Every year,” Kiberd writes, “hundreds of Dubliners dress as characters from the book—Stephen with his cane, Leopold with his bowler hat, Molly in her petticoats, Blazes Boylan under a straw boater—as if to assert their willingness to become one with the text. They re-enact scenes in Eccles Street, Ormond Quay, and Sandycove’s Martello Tower.”

So, what role did I take on? Well, I guess that like every other person is Dublin who did not “dress the part” (and I actually saw only a handful who did), I unwittingly played the part of a random character from the densely-populated “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses . . . which Joyce’s friend and early commentator Frank Budgen, explaining how Joyce wrote the episode “with a map of Dublin before him” and “calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city,” has described as “peculiarly the episode of Dublin.” (I must now briefly put on my robes of academe and add my own explanation in the form of a lecture-like digression. In describing in several “schemas” that he shared with friends a correspondence between his “Groups of Citizens” and the Symplegades, Joyce apparently conflates two mythological phenomena, the Wandering Rocks and the Clashing Rocks. Strictly speaking, the Symplegades were the Clashing Rocks located at the mouth of the Bosporous, in this case obviously the two banks of the Liffey metamorphosed into metaphors for church and state, forces that tend to converge on the individual. The ordinary citizens of Dublin who fill this episode seem to represent much more suggestively the phenomenon of the Wandering Rocks, like the Symplegades found not in Joyce’s obvious Homeric analogue to Ulysses but in Appolonius’ Argonautica. End of digression.) In others words, like the vast majority of the denizens of Dublin on June 16th, 2010, I simply went about my business as if today were just another day in the life of the city. (Allow me to put my robes back on for one more moment: in Joyce’s Voices, senior Joyce scholar Hugh Kenner observes that none of Joyce’s characters are aware of the Joycean roles they are playing, or else they wrongly think of themselves in other roles; I don’t have Kenner's book at hand, but one example that I recall him citing is that in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus thinks of himself not as Telemachus but as that other equally famous literary “dispossessed son,” Hamlet. So . . . was I or was I not one of the “wandering rocks”? Hmmm.)

That second parenthetical aside notwithstanding . . . my unselfsconscious “wanderings” included picking up a few books—the aforementioned Ulysses and Us plus Colm Toibín’s newest novel Brooklyn (which I was reminded of when I brushed shoulders with Toibín first thing the morning previous—though by the time I realized who that familiar face was, he had disappeared, so I didn’t get a chance to say hi to him) plus John McGahern’s book of essays, Love of the World, plus Before the House Burns, the hot-off-the-press first novel by Boston-based Clare-born poet and fiction writer Mary O’Donoghue, whom I will be meeting for a cup of coffee tomorrow.

I also went to the National Library and took care of a little bit of research and to the National Gallery where I spent time mesmerized by the paintings of Jack B. Yeats. Both of those places are visited by Leopold Bloom in Ulysses—and the former is also the setting for the entire “Scylla and Charybdis” episode, in which Stephen Dedalus holds forth on Shakespeare’s Hamlet for the benefit of a motley gathering of librarians, poets and scholars. (One more academic aside: in his heavily illustrated Ulysses guidebook, James Joyce’s Odyssey, Frank Delaney includes not only photos from Joyce’s time, the turn of the twentieth century, but also more recent shots. The one he chooses for the interior of the National Library was shot in 1978—I know that for a fact because that’s me standing Stephen Dedalus-like at the ticket desk. No kidding!)

By mid-afternoon I had been mostly on my feet for hours, so first I sat down for a cuppa java and then changed venues for a coupla pints with old friend Fionán O’Connell, whose wonderful photographs are at the center of the research project I’m “officially” working on while I'm in Dublin. We met at Nealon’s, a fine old bar on Capel Street just north of the River Liffey.

The next stop on my “rocky wanderings” was a very fine restaurant called The Church, where I met my dear old friend Joan—we go back to 1978, and every time we see each other (not often enough) we just pick up our conversation exactly where we left off. She just happened to be in Dublin for meetings—part of the serendipity that seems to be shaping my visit to Dublin. We had a great meal and a great chat, then she caught the train back to Limerick.

But my wanderings were not over! Leaving The Church, I decided to walk all the way back to my hotel—a long way, as it turns out. Then almost as soon as I got back, my friend Rob Savage (see previous post) called to see about heading back into the City Centre, to O’Donoghue’s pub on Merrion Row, to meet yet another Irish Studies colleague, Joseph Lennon (recently of Manhattan College, soon-to-be of Villanova University) and a friend of his.

On our way back the hotel, Rob and I decided to stop for one more nip, at O’Brien’s on Sussex Street, which seems like the leading candidate to be our “local” during our stay at the Burlington. I think that James Joyce would approve.

“Bloomsday” was first observed in 1954, on the 50th anniversary of the day immortalized in fiction by James Joyce, by Flann O’Brien and fellow writers John Ryan, Patrick Kavanagh, and Anthony Cronin, and another friend Tom Joyce. Declan Kiberd wonders if the current “celebration of Bloomsday may in fact be a lament for a lost city, for an earlier time when Dublin was still felt to be civic, knowable, viable.” Well, without any sort of play-acting on my part, I found it to be all that—and much more—on the 16th of June in 2010.

THE SUMMIT

So far—less than 12 hours into my week or so in Dublin—the planets have been aligning very nicely, as I just got to spend a splendid evening in the company of two of my favorite friends . . . who also happen to be my colleagues in Irish Studies: Rob Savage from Boston College and Louis de Paor from the National University of Ireland-Galway. Rob and I go all the way back to 1987, when we met in the microfilm room at BC. When we discovered last week that we would be overlapping in Dublin—Rob is here partly to launch his new book, A Loss of Innocence?: Television and Irish Society, 1960-72—we decided to end up under the same hotel roof. That makes the socializing very easy. . . . Both Rob and I go back a long way with Louis too—an Irish-language poet whom I have written on not once but twice.

So we had an Irish Studies “summit meeting” this evening—over pints and pizza. As the accompanying photo documents, we found ourselves in a very fine old pub indeed . . .

While our conversation ranged widely, one matter that we did not engage with, but which is sharing the day’s news headlines with the FIFA World Cup, is the release of the official Saville Report on the “Bloody Sunday” massacre of 14 Northern Irish citizens by British paratroopers 38 years ago. The Report took 12 years and 1.2 million Euros to complete—and the verdict is that the British soldiers acted irresponsibly and recklessly in gunning down unarmed and unequivocally innocent civilians. I had forgotten that the Report was to be released today . . . until I saw a news report on TV as I passed through Heathrow airport very early this morning which included a statement by Ian Paisley, Jr., a British MP from Northern Ireland and a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. His notoriously cantankerous father’s son, young Ian seemed to be resenting at least the cost of the Saville Report . . . but I took his resentment with the proverbial grain of salt, as I had a flashback to about 15 years ago when I gave him and another Northern Irish politician (whose name eludes me now—but he was of Nationalist stock and had actually run, unsuccessfully, against Paisley, Sr. in a parliamentary election) a ride to Logan airport in Boston after an Irish Studies conference in western Massachusetts. Surprisingly, it was an altogether cordial hour-and-a-half, and one detail that I recall distinctly is Paisley, Jr.’s admission that sometimes he is burdened with toeing publicly the party line (literally) even if he does not really buy it wholesale himself. I suspect that burden was at least partly behind the stance he was taking on the morning news. Mostly the Saville Report has been warmly embraced on first read and is seen widely as long overdue not only in its timing but also in its conclusions.

DEAR, DIRTY DUBLIN

So . . . within minutes of getting settled into “the Burlo”—the Burlington Hotel on Dublin’s southside—I received an email from my old friend Fionán: “Welcome Home!” he exclaimed. And I have to say that Dublin does feel an awful lot like home. . . . As I was passing through the city on the bus from the airport, I was reminded of our family visit to Dublin in 1998: our three daughters were young and not really “into” urban life—“dear, dirty Dublin,” indeed—and we actually ended up cutting short by a day our planned time for wandering the city; but my wife told me afterwards that the girls whispered to her: “Dad just loves Dublin, doesn’t he? He seems so happy . . .” And I guess it’s the happiness of unselfconscious familiarity with a place—of still feeling comfortably and naturally at home in a place that once was “home,” even with the inherent temporariness of a student’s lifestyle.

I have to admit that I didn’t choose to stay at the Burlington with any great designs: my wife actually booked it for me after getting the unbelievable rate of $54 (that’s dollars, not Euros) a night. Hey, that’s cheaper than I can live at home! But its location is perfect for getting into and out of “the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis” . . . and today it was perfect for allowing me to walk about 10 minutes to the neighborhood of Ranelagh, where I lived in a tiny “bedsitter” at 103 Beechwood Avenue Lower for about 3 months in 1978. That building is still standing—and looks like it’s being renovated, maybe as a condo. But the rest of the neighborhood has certainly evolved—or been gentrified. Conspicuously absent is Beechwood Stores, the little grocery that used to sit directly across the street. But I was especially struck by the number of small coffee shops and other casual eateries lining the main drag of Ranelagh Village. . . though I was surprised that the Kylemore Cake Shop is gone. (I remember coming around the corner one morning in 1978 and seeing Johnny Fingers, the pajama-clad pianist of The Boomtown Rats, coming out of that Kylemore’s. That now seems so long ago—and in a sense so far away, though perhaps less so for me than for Johnny Fingers, who I’ve heard has settled in Japan, where he works as a “greeter” for visiting rock bands.)

So . . . “the Burlo” will be my base for the next 8 or 9 days. When I checked in today, the desk clerk asked me: “Are you here for business or for pleasure?” I replied: “Well, my boss thinks I’m here for business, but my friends think I’m here for pleasure.” Then—did I have in the back of my mind the fact that the Burlington claims to have the largest ballroom in Ireland?—I added: “I’m not sure what my wife thinks.” Without missing a beat, the desk clerk smiled and said: “Well, we’ll not let on to her . . .”

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE . . .

Sometimes you have to wonder what they put in the water around here . . . or at least on one corner around here.

A day or so ago as I was leaving my local gym I caught the tail end of a verbal altercation involving the resident masseuse (no kidding) and some big lug who followed her in off the street to give her a tongue-lashing for her poor parking job somewhere in the vicinity. Well, it seems that despite English being her second language, she gave as a good as she got in the tongue-lashing department, though her grasp of English idioms left me scratching my head. I’m pretty sure that what I heard was the lug offering as his lame parting shot, “Well, you need to get your eyes checked,” and the masseuse retorting: “Yeah . . . and maybe my ears checked too.” And then as the door clicked behind him, she muttered something about his needing a “psychologiste” . . .

Hey, he might have needed more than that if he had really gotten into it with her. And I’m not alluding to the trio of her fitness-freak co-workers—one of them a competitive bodybuilder—who happened to be in the gym’s lobby when the lug came in to make his point about her parking skills. A month or so ago I happened to have a handshake with the masseuse at an evening social event at the gym—and I thought I would need reconstructive surgery afterwards: I have never felt such a steely grip! Combine that with her Eastern European accent and she would certainly warrant a casting call back for any James Bond flick I’ve ever seen. Scary . . . That lug doesn’t know how lucky he is that he got away with just a tongue-lashing . . .

And then an hour later I was directly across the street at my local Bank of America. I had parked right in front of the door and when I came out the guard caught my eye . . . and then my ear. Nodding at the John Lennon “Give Peace a Chance” bumper sticker on the rear end of my car, he said: “I’ve always wanted to talk to someone about that . . .” I guess he took eye contact as encouragement, as he proceeded to give me a little lecture about the limited virtue of peace as a global goal. Hmmm. Did I mention that he had a pistol holstered on his hip? And that I didn’t have one on mine? Discretion being the better part of valor, I nonetheless suggested that he give a listen to Lennon’s anthemic song “Imagine”: “You may say that I’m a dreamer / but I’m not the only one . . .” Maybe I should have resisted adding that I had put the bumper sticker on my car during the last Bush administration. But I didn’t . . . which gave him the opening to say, “Well, I don’t like the yahoo we’ve got in office right now.” Shrugging, I suggested that the real “yahoo” was his predecessor, who left us in our current global mess. Should I mention that as I got into my car, I glanced across the street at the gym, hoping that the steel-fingered masseuse would have my back if this conversation went much further? But it didn’t . . . Imagine.

“VINTAGE” HERB ELLIS

While out on my appointed rounds a couple of days ago—picking up dog food, redeeming my wife’s shoes from the cobbler . . . the sort of tasks that fill up the “Honey Do” list—I treated myself to a copy of the latest issue of Vintage Guitar Magazine. “Guitar porn,” my brother-in-law calls this sort of glossy pictoral publication (as the owner of more than 100 guitars himself, he might speak with some authority on the matter)—and I have to admit that my eye was drawn by the sensuously curvaceous form on the cover: a to-die-for two-tone (light green body with avocado pickguard) Gretsch tenor guitar, circa 1960.

But what prompted me to buy the magazine (I really should subscribe) was the promise of an article on jazz guitarist Herb Ellis, who died in March at the age of 88. Written by guitar historian Jim Carlton, the piece is more a general appreciation than a full-scale retrospective, but it prompted me to spin the dial on my iPod and tune in appreciatively to Ellis’s signature style, which is summarized neatly by fellow jazz legend Mundell Lowe at the end of Carlton’s article: “In his music he loved two things—Charlie Christian and playing those Texas blues. He was the king at that.” Naturally enough, then, I started by cuing up a pair of his early albums—first Nothing But the Blues from 1957 and then Thank You Charlie Christian from 1960, the titles of which speak volumes about their content.

Inevitably, those two albums affirm an observation made by Barney Kessel that Carlton also quotes in his article: “He signed his work. You could always tell when it was Herb playing.” Indeed you can—and that is the basic reason why I find that so many of his albums as frontman sound pretty much alike . . . which is the basic reason why I find much more satisfying his albums where he is either sharing the marquee or else performing as sideman. In the first category, I have a particular fondness for the two albums he recorded in an extended session with Duke Robillard in 1999—Conversations in Swing Guitar and More Conversations in Swing Guitar: the two six-string swingers truly complement each other stylistically, and it seems to me that Robillard really encourages Ellis, pushing 80 years old at the time of the recording, to push himself “conversationally.” Ellis also recorded several albums with guitarist Joe Pass that stretch him beyond “nothing but the blues” and ongoing homage to the iconic Charlie Christian, who brought electric guitar to the forefront in jazz during his all-too-brief stint with Benny Goodman between 1939 and 1941. In contrast, Rhythm Willie, an album that Ellis recorded in 1975 with four-to-the-bar rhythm guitar legend Freddie Green and which features only Ellis playing solos, has a lot of “sameness” despite the winningness of those solos individually. (Coincidentally, this issue of Vintage Guitar Magazine also includes under its Fretprints rubric a piece by Wolf Marshall entitled “Freddie Green: Rhythm-Guitar Engine of Jazz,” which explains and illustrates Green’s singular technique—for five decades the foundational pulse of the Count Basie Band; this piece makes no mention of Green's collaboration with Ellis.)

As Carlton observes, one of Ellis’s true claims to fame was his long hitch in the drummerless Oscar Peterson trio, which featured Peterson on piano and included Ray Brown on bass. Most of the recordings that I’ve heard of the trio per se really showcase the prodigious Peterson—Ellis plays a distant second fiddle (as it were). But as Carlton also notes, the trio served essentially as the house rhythm section for the Verve record label, backing up myriad household names of jazz in the 1950s. At times, on an album like Stan Getz & Oscar Peterson Trio, Ellis is relegated to primarily a rhythmic role, and his presence is literally much more felt than heard in backing up tenorman Getz. For my money, tenorman Ben Webster’s Soulville is a more satisfying album with regard to Ellis’s presence—right from the opening plucked notes of the title tune. But perhaps my favorite of all of his sideman appearances on my iPod is on Anita O’Day’s Anita Sings the Most. Giving Ellis several solo spots as well as putting his expressive comping on display, this album is a “vintage” classic by virtue of not only O’Day’s vocals but also the sympathetic backing and the subtle interplay of Peterson, Brown and Ellis.

FORE!

So . . . I played my first round of golf of the season this past Sunday morning. Or was it just a half-round? It was 9 holes . . . but on a course with only 9 holes, the Milton-Hoosic Club, a tidy little private course tucked down a side road in Canton, just south of Boston. Considering that I hadn’t even seen my clubs since last August and that I had time to take only two practice swings before I was summoned to tee off, I played okay . . . for the first 7 holes. Then my morning jolt of caffeine began to wear off and my concentration—like several of my balls—wandered off into the woods. As it turns out, we were playing best-ball partners and my partner is a former club pro who has still “got game” . . . so we ended up winning. The thrill of victory included a $5 bet . . . which we didn’t bother to collect: we agreed that we would roll it over into a “double or nothing” round (or half-round) later in the summer with the same two guys who completed our foursome.

Anyway . . . both coming and going to the Milton-Hoosic Club, I drove (no pun intended) within shouting distance—Fore!—of another, literally “storied” (see next paragraph), golf course also in Canton. A 36-hole layout, Ponkapoag Golf Course was built in 1936 by legendary designer Donald Ross. A public course, it is often referred to as a gem . . . but it also often cited as an example of unfortunate neglect on the part of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. I’ve played it a couple of times—though not recently—and have mixed memories of some fine holes mixed in among holes in need of serious drainage work.

“In need of serious drainage work”: come to think of it, that is how I might describe a novel in which a version of Ponkapoag (well, it is actually renamed Ponkaquogue Municipal Course and Deli and is relocated to the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester) features prominently. The novel is Missing Links. The author is Rick Reilly, whom I used to admire greatly when he was a feature writer for Sports Illustrated; but when he was given a back-page column some years ago called “Life of Reilly,” he became a caricature of himself as thoughtful commentator on and gifted writer about sports . . . and that’s the effect that reading Missing Links had on me when I took a few swings at it several years ago: it was a mere caricature of good writing. In fact, I found it so bad that it turned into one of those rare books that I just couldn’t be bothered finishing even after committing myself to it. I found the Boston-area local color shady at best and the humor strained, and even the golf sequences (and Rick Reilly does know golf—it’s as a novelist that he’s a duffer) are characterized by more whiffs than solid hits. Maybe it reminds me too much of my own golf game in that last regard . . . but although I know that many readers sing the novel’s praises, I think I’ll continue to take a miss on Missing Links.

Instead . . . I will sit down and re-read sections from a golf book that I truly love: On Golf: The Game, the Players, and a Personal History of Obsession. The book happens to be written by a fellow named Timothy O’Grady (no relation to yours truly, though we are acquainted) and that might have been what drew me to the book in the first place. But what kept me there—and what keeps me returning to it—is the combination of the graceful writing, the deep contemplation of golf as a sport, a tradition, and a culture, and the author’s poignant but unsentimental musings on his relationship with his father, who introduced him to the game . . . and to the love of the game. On Golf should be on every golfer’s bedside table.

I guess that I love the game too—the physical/mental challenge that Winston Churchill once described thus: “Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.” But what I love most of all is the camaraderie involved in a round of golf. “Male bonding” happens best in side-by-side—not face-to-face—activities: at a hockey game or a baseball game, on a road trip, on a golf course, maybe even at a rock concert. . . . Mark Twain has said famously, “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” (One of my regular golf buddies once Freudian-slipped on that line, saying something like “Golf is a walk in the woods gone bad”; perhaps needless to say, he had spent a lot of his round that day following stray balls into the underbrush . . .) But it’s not just about a good walk—it’s also about good talk. That’s what keeps some of us swinging the clubs: golf is a good excuse for friends to get caught up with each others’ lives under the guise of being caught up in following a little dimpled ball wherever it happens to go. . . .

So says I? Well, about 15 minutes after I got home from those 9 holes on Sunday, I had an email exchange with my cousin, who affirmed indirectly that playing golf is not only or all about athletic accomplishment. “I need more time to practice,” he admitted trying to explain to his wife, but then added: “her response is that I’ve been playing for 40 years and if I haven’t figured it out yet—I’m not likely to figure it out now! (Sad, but true . . .)”