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.

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.

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.

UPDIKE . . . IN THE AIR AND ON THE BRAIN

John Updike is in the air. Last weekend the Kennedy Library in Boston hosted a symposium on his work and the New York Times Book Review included a review of his posthumously-published book of stories My Father’s Tears. Prompted by his death earlier this year, I already had Updike on my summer reading list; I guess those further prompts put him on my brain, so I decided finally to sit down with his novel Rabbit, Run. For whatever reason, I have not tuned in much to Updike. I know that I read his much-anthologized short story “Lifeguard” when I was an undergrad . . . and I think that I must not have liked it: that might have been enough to put Updike on my “non-essential” list. But recently I re-taught his just-as-much-anthologized short story “A & P,” which I quite like. In between I’ve read odds and ends—his iconic piece “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” for example, on Red Sox legend Ted Williams’ last at-bat, in 1960: “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark”—so it famously begins. And I've read quite a few of his book reviews in The New Yorker . . . though with those reviews I always felt like I was listening in on a conversation between Updike and his loyal readers that had begun decades earlier. . . .

Having now just finished Rabbit, Run, I can appreciate some of what I’ve been missing over the past few decades. Updike’s protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, is a thoroughly unlikable lout—an anti-hero in a literal as well as a literary sense—but the novel itself is compelling reading. I’ve never paid any attention to Updike as a poet (though I know he’s prolific) but there is certainly a lyric poet’s sensibility at work in the authorial eye for detail that defines the narrative. At the same time, there is a natural-born storyteller’s sensibility at work in the utterly persuasive symbiotic development of plot and character. And not just of Harry’s character: the Episcopalian minister Jack Eccles, his earnestness serving as an essential counterweight to Harry’s protracted adolescence, is fully engaging in his own right and steals several of the novel’s finely-wrought scenes. In fact, the novel comprises scene after scene that read as wonderful set pieces, with various characters coming to the fore, yet each and every one of these scenes integrates seamlessly into the narrative as a whole.

One of the scenes that I found particularly intriguing from a literary standpoint involves Ruth, Harry’s paramour (a far more polite term than Harry himself would use!). Is it just coincidental that her musings on Harry in a three-and-a-half page interior monologue about halfway through the novel remind me of Molly Bloom’s musings in the “Penelope” episode that closes James Joyce’s Ulysses? Perhaps . . . but factoring in that he names Harry’s foil “Eccles,” which is the name of the northside Dublin street where Molly and Leopold Bloom live, I suspect that Updike is giving a nod of acknowledgment in Joyce’s direction. Fueled by booze, Harry’s wife Janice’s interior monologue, later in the novel, is not quite so Molly-esque, though her resentment toward her husband’s sexual advance toward her shortly after childbirth also has a familiar ring to it: “Makes you feel filthy they don’t even have decent names for parts of you.” Hmmm . . .

Part of what makes Harry Angstrom so unlikable is his relative youth: he is in his mid-twenties . . . yet he wallows in an angst that would be a far better fit on a man twenty or thirty years his senior—Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, perhaps, or even Larry McMurtry’s Duane Moore. Still, I will probably—eventually—revisit this character by way of Updike’s sequels to Rabbit, Run: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. Maybe “Rabbit” redeems himself somewhere along the way . . .

ROCKY DE VALERA ON YOUTUBE

On my Irish Matters blog, which recycles various of my shorter pieces of published writing (reviews and so on), one post focuses mostly on the Irish retro rock ’n’ roll band Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers, first formed in Dublin early in 1978. Their resurrection late in 2005, almost a quarter-century after the original band had been laid to rest, testifies persuasively to the power of embalming. As further evidence of that power, check out their hot new video, just launched on YouTube. As one waggish commentator has already remarked, this video—filmed on the Hill of Howth—“obviously” alludes to Molly Bloom’s remembrance of that very setting in the “Penelope” episode of Ulysses, which culminates in that most famous of affirmations: “and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” Yes, James Joyce is rockin’ in his grave!

Postscript: 3/11/09:
As if that YouTube commentator’s remarks are not irreverent enough, yesterday’s Irish Times includes a column by Kate Holmquist, the wife—or “band widow,” as she puts it—of the Gravediggers’ pseudo-eponymous leader/vocalist. Styling herself “Mrs. Rocky De Valera,” she has a lot of fun at the expense of “Mr. Holmquist” and his protracted mid-life crisis . . . “which started at the age of 20.” Check it out!