But here’s the thing. Horace didn’t say that. “Carpe diem” doesn’t mean seize the day—it means something gentler and more sensible. “Carpe diem” means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be “cape diem,” if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.
What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things—so that the day’s stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant—pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That’s not the kind of man that Horace was.
Nicholson Baker, from his novel The Anthologist (2009)
(via clusterflock)
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
Stephen Hawking, from his book A Brief History of Time (1988)
(postcard scan via Flickr)
About half of today’s college students are willing to sacrifice career satisfaction for a bigger paycheck, according to a survey taken by Experience, Inc., a Boston-based career services company.
From an article in today’s Boston Globe, “Half of college students going for the paycheck, says study.”
The balding thing: It’s really not a big deal. If we loved men more or less based on the state of their hair, we’d all have become lesbians in the eighties.
Debi Mazar, “10 Things You Don’t Know About Women,” Esquire, September 2008
Any time I hear a song or record that meant a lot to me at a certain moment or I was listening to at a distinct time, I’m instantly taken back to that place in full detail. Whenever I hear “Feel Flows” by the Beach Boys, I’m taken straight to the back of my parents’ car on the way to my grandparents’ place, fourteen with Surf’s Up in my Walkman and the Cascade Mountains going by in the window. .... I can ascribe exact memories to songs by the Microphones, Joni Mitchell, Built to Spill, Dungen, Harry Nilsson, and so many others, and it’s a form of recall that I can actually trust.
Robin Pecknold, April 6, 2008, from the liner notes of Fleet Foxes’ self-titled LP
A dozen years ago, writer Cintra Wilson opened her epitaph for her best friend and lover, Kevin Gilbert, with the paragraph below. I’m reviving it because it’s wasted on the dead and it’s a good description of what my friends mean to me.
Certain people are like big good anchors in your life that hold you to the world, that give you a sense of exalted, meaningful belonging and true comradeship in the highest sense. They are co-conspirators, people who get all the jokes. When someone understands you that well, you can never truly feel alone in the world.
In Memoriam, Cintra Wilson, Salon, May 27, 1996
In my view, books should be brought to the doorstep like electricity, or like milk in England: they should be considered utilities, and their cost should be appropriately minimal. Barring that, poetry could be sold in drugstores (not least because it might reduce the bill from your shrink). At the very least, an anthology of American poetry should be found in the drawer in every room in every motel in the land, next to the Bible, which will surely not object to this proximity, since it does not object to the proximity of the phone book.
Joseph Brodsky, from “An Immodest Proposal,” The New Republic, November 11, 1991. (At the time, Brodsky was U.S. Poet Laureate.)
I write in ‘splurts.’ Like hitting a ketchup bottle, eventually something will come out—splat.
Actor-Musician Minnie Driver, in an article posted to People.com today
As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences, everything gets distorted. Language is just no damn good; I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it.
Marcel Duchamp, from a New Yorker profile by Calvin Tomkins, February 6, 1965.
Inspired by a recent conversation:
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
first paragraph of The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) by Janet Malcolm
Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.
Franz Kafka, from The Blue Octavo Notebooks (1917-1919)
I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.
Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency (1957)
En el limón cortaron los cuchillos una pequeña catedral.
Cutting the lemon, the knife leaves a little cathedral.Pablo Neruda, “Oda al limón” (1957)
The human being by nature and necessity is neither egoist nor altruist; he trims a difficult course between the two; for the most part we are, within the limits of our powers of expression, egotists, and our desire is to think and if possible talk and write about this marvellous experiment of ourselves, with all the world—or as much as we can conveniently assemble—for audience.
H.G. Wells, from his introduction to W.N.P. Barbellion’s Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919)
A New York friendship is a friendship with a person you have met at least once. If you have met a person only once, and you are a New Yorker, you are entitled to say, whenever that person’s name comes up in conversation, ’Yes—so-and-so is a friend of mine.’
Kurt Vonnegut, Politics Today essay (1979)
‘I might be a little disappointing,’ Junpei said. ‘A pianist could play you a tune. A painter could draw something for you. A magician could perform a trick. There’s not much a writer can do on the spot.’
from “The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day” by Haruki Murakami
The internet stuff is spooky.
Kurt Vonnegut, November 5, 1995
If Murakami were so inclined or Cortázar alive, I’d want him to write a story about an internet that forgets, a living mind.
On this internet, blogs would shed entries as they aged alongside their author. Some text would grow small and indistinct, but certain passages in desert places would glow like embers in a dying fire. Language would be forgotten, sentences would decay, meanings would invert. Some passages would mesh and recur as dreams, while others would advance in time as déjà vu. Florid details of youth would be compressed into dry generalities. Searches would lead to inaccuracies and dead ends.
The internet now never forgets. It’s sometimes referred to as a hive mind, but other than its general unreliability for accuracy and penchant for trivia and frivolity, it’s like no mind I’ve ever known, expanding infinitely into distant inky reaches.
It’s the emotional implications that make found photographs so fascinating. They look much the same as the snapshots that fill our own family albums. Yet cut loose from their points of origin, they become objects of deep mystery....
These unofficial images answer a persistent need to believe that photographs can still capture some essential, unvarnished truth about the subject. Where, even before the digital era, professional photographers were often shown to have manipulated images that might appear to represent actuality, amateur photographers can still be given the benefit of the doubt. Their directness, ineptitude, and lack of artifice become signs of reliability. The taste for these pictures is a measure of our enduring hunger to experience unmediated reality.
Rick Poynor, Print magazine, March/April 2006
I have ... determined to keep a daily journal in which I shall set down my various sentiments and my various conduct, which will be not only useful but very agreeable. It will give me a habit of application and improve me in expression; and knowing that I am to record my transactions will make me more careful to do well. Or if I should go wrong, it will assist me in resolutions of doing better. I shall here put down my thoughts on different subjects at different times, the whims that may seize me and the sallies of my luxuriant imagination. I shall mark the anecdotes and the stories that I hear, the instructive or amusing conversations that I am present at, and the various adventures that I may have.
[....] In this way I shall preserve many things that would otherwise be lost in oblivion. I shall find daily enjoyment for myself, which will save me from indolence and help to keep off the spleen, and I shall lay up a store of entertainment for my after life. Very often we have more pleasure in reflecting on agreeable scenes that we have been in than we had from the scenes themselves. I shall regularly record the business or rather the pleasure of every day. I shall not study much correctness, lest the labour of it should make me lay it aside altogether. I hope it will be of use to my worthy friend Johnston, and that while he laments my personal absence, this journal may in some measure supply that defect and make him happy.
James Boswell’s London Journal, November 15, 1762
Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shinbone.
Mark Twain, on Jane Austen
If you savor English country dances and tittering young ladies, Pride & Prejudice is your film. While watching it tonight, I kept thinking that Keira Knightley is just a little too hot for 18th century England, particularly her gleaming, perfectly aligned teeth. Her love interest, the brooding, tight-lipped Mr. Darcy (played by Matthew MacFadyen), is positioned as a rather stationary running joke, lurking in the background of nearly every scene to cast smoldering glances towards Knightley’s character, Elizabeth.
I’m told he does a lot of smoldering in the book, too, which I haven’t yet read. But having seen most of Austen’s book adaptations and knockoffs via the mighty Merchant Ivory British Drama Machine, I’m well versed in the conventions: the clash of classes and privileges, the lust to marry, the sniveling bachelor pastor with eyes for the heroine, the sage father and worrisome, meddling mother, and The Big Misunderstanding, in which our hero is mistaken for a jerk when in fact he’s a upstanding fellow who also happens to have huge tracts of land. Yet through it all, I couldn’t help but smile contentedly even though I knew what was going to happen; in that respect, the movie’s a success.
There’s a lot to look at in Pride & Prejudice, plenty of gorgeous castle-like country homes with improbably lush landscapes, soft focus sunsets, carefully casual poses copped from the Renaissance masters, ruggedly handsome men on horseback, etc. It dragged towards the end and the sugary closing scene with The Kiss caused some scandal amongst Austenites on both sides of the pond: the U.S. ending makes it clear that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy have affirmed their love for a lifetime. However, upon the film’s initial release in the U.K., the ending was edited to make their happy coupling more ambiguous. That dénouement has since been replaced by the U.S. version, causing the British publication Entertainment-Wise to gripe about “the cheesy extra ending that was filmed especially for those cringe loving Yanks.”
Ah, yes, we Yanks enjoy cheese with a good cringe, and while we do, take a look at our gleaming, perfectly aligned teeth.
President Bush told two high-ranking Palestinian officials that he had been told by God to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and then create a Palestinian state to bring peace to the Middle East, they recall during a documentary on Middle East peace that airs next week in Britain.
“President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God,’” said Nabil Shaath, who was the Palestinian foreign minister at the time of a top-level meeting with Bush in June 2003. [....]
“God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq ...’ And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.’ And by God I’m gonna do it,” Shaath quotes the president as saying [...].
From an article by Matthew Kalman in today’s San Francisco Chronicle (emphasis added)
I loafe and invite my Soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass....A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, (1900)
They went on between high hedges of clipped beech and up a steep winding path amidst great bushes of rhododendron in full flower to the grey rock and heather of the crest. They stood in the midst of one of the most beautiful views in the world. Northward they looked over Ireland’s Eye and Lambay and the blue Mourne Mountains far away...
H.G. Wells, Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education (1918)
I’d avoided reading a paper since I got here since, hey, it’s vacation and no use fretting over events, but this morning over breakfast, I took a look at the Irish Independent, the country’s best-selling broadsheet newspaper. One of the top news stories Ireland has been obsessing over has been that of Dolores McNamara, who won 115 million euro in Europe’s largest lottery, instantly becoming Ireland’s seventh-richest person. Quoting her solicitor, a story in the paper dismissed reports that she “planned to buy soccer star Michael Owen’s villa in Spain or a pub in Turkey” and in fact was staying put in her modest Limerick home. I guess somebody has to like that grubby town.
After breakfast, Dana made us some sandwiches and we set out for the Cliff Path, which wraps a few miles around the Irish Sea to the town of Howth. As we hiked up, down and around the steep path, we watched the tide roll in.
Along the way, we saw ancient ruins, lighthouses, beaches, birds, wild raspberries and blackberries, and, in Howth’s bay, Ireland’s Eye, an island on which stands the remains of a tower and an eighth century church. These days, it’s a bird sanctuary and tourist destination. We paused on the Howth boardwalk to eat our sandwiches, then stopped for some Mauds ice cream, a popular Irish-made brand.
Before my flight back, we wanted to top off the day with a visit to Granger’s, Dana’s favored local pub and just a few blocks away from her residence. But it was closed; signs posted outside noted this was due to the death of Adam Finnegan, grandson of Hugh and Ann Grainger. We instead went to Granger’s rival pub, a few blocks in the other direction, and had a quick bit of Guinness before Dana drove me to the airport.
The flight back was uneventful, unless you count the lone woman laughing throughout the in-flight movie, Monster-in-Law.
Overall, I had a great time in Ireland and I’m grateful Dana did all the pre-planning and driving. It was a relaxing time in a fine country and I wouldn’t mind returning someday to see even more of its sights.
I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.
James Joyce, on his novel Ulysses
Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.
Booker Prize-winning author Roddy Doyle, quoted by The Guardian (February 10, 2004)
After breakfast at Dana’s, including coffee from the house’s brand-new coffeemaker, Dana and I spent the morning in downtown Dublin.
As I am a fan of art museums, we went to the National Gallery, where the highlights were Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, a masterwork of light and shadow painted when the artist was only 29, and Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter.
We browsed some thrift and record stores, and lunch was at Beshoff, Dana’s favorite fish-and-chips chain. That’s some greasy grub, but tasty.
Then it was off to the James Joyce Centre, a townhouse built in 1784 that now houses Joycean memorabilia, a research library and audio/visual materials on his life and works. Inside are enormous rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows and the decorative pastel-colored plasterwork on the ceilings resembling frosting strung delicately atop a cake. The proprietors of the center admit a “rather tenuous connection” between the house and Joyce—at the turn of the 19th century, one Professor Maginni, a dance class instructor and flamboyant man-about-town, lived there. He was known to the young Joyce and pops up a few times in Ulysses.
I was interested in the extensive exhibit on the censorship of that novel, generally recognized as Joyce’s greatest. The censors dogged Ulysses when its first serialized segment appeared in a magazine in 1918, halting future installments by 1920. The work was banned in the U.S. and in other English speaking countries making it a hot potato among the world’s major publishers. Undeterred, Joyce turned to his friend Sylvia Beach, who ran the Shakespeare & Co. publisher/bookstore in Paris (which I visited in 2004), and who agreed to publish the book—the first edition appeared in 1922. It wasn’t until 1934 that Ulysses was ruled not obscene and allowed into the U.S.
Dana pointed out a blurb on a Joyce timeline that I found amusing, given that I had, in my obnoxious editorial fashion, detected several highly public instances in Ireland confusing it’s and its. One was emblazoned in leaded glass at the Guinness Storehouse and I wondered if such apostrophe catastrophes were “an Irish thing.”
As the timeline anecdote goes, in 1939, Joyce’s last novel, Work in Progress was finally published as Finnegans Wake. “Although derived ultimately from the ballad about Tim Finnegan,” the timeline text notes, “the absence of an apostrophe coverts Finnegans into a plural and wake into a verb, so that the title may be read either as a statement or an exhortation.” Hey, or maybe some copy editor just fucked up. Then again, the whole of that book’s language is confounding.
Continuing our Joycean journey, we walked off for Guinness at Mulligan’s, a dark and friendly neighborhood pub that was already packed in the early afternoon with a mix of locals and yahoo travelers such as ourselves, who respected the vibe. Literary and journalist types drank there, including Joyce, who was a regular and liked it enough to reference the place in his short story “Counterparts” from Dubliners. According to Lonely Planet Ireland, Mulligan’s has the “best pour of Guinness” in Ireland and I must admit, it was good, but then, all Guinness there was damn good.
We decided to see a movie at the local independent filmhouse, the Irish Film Institute, and I picked 3-Iron, a South Korean movie directed by Ki-duk Kim, who also directed The Isle, which I saw and enjoyed on DVD in February. The conceit of a man who sneaks into other people’s apartments and homes while they’re out appealed to me. The guy never steals anything, just rearranges some stuff, maybe takes a shower, then photographs himself in the place and moves on. The movie turns unexpectedly, however, when he enters a house occupied by a woman with an abusive husband. That man’s 3-iron soon gets involved in a violent way, but not how you’re thinking.
The film started out reminding me of Raymond Carver’s short story “Neighbors” (a housesitter secretly and steadily integrates himself into his absent neighbors’ lives), evolved into a silent love story, and concluded in a dream-reality out of Haruki Murakami. The protagonist doesn’t speak a word of dialogue until the final minutes of the film, yet he’s highly memorable in his role. I don’t understand why it can’t be easier for American filmmakers to integrate such elements into their films to make them better, treating audiences intelligently and having them follow excitingly new, impossible-to-expect storylines and actions, instead of leading stock characters down plotlines that have been used and reused until they’re threadless and transparent. Anway, good show, Ki-duk.
The heavy-duty mysticism awoke in us a renewed craving for Guinness so we walked over to the Brazen Head, which I had read was the oldest pub in Dublin, and which Dana fairly warned me was “very touristy.” How touristy can it be, I wondered. Answer: very touristy. The “olde-style” facade and jutting flagpoles reminded me of Medieval Times, although I don’t think it was quite that bad. As it was nearing dinner time, most folks were eating in the outer courtyard, leaving the bar nearly empty for us and our pints. We reviewed the success of the trip to date and discussed the remainder. As a testament to the touristy-ness, taped-up dollar bills wallpaper the bar’s walls, each Sharpied with an autograph or a message, with lots of entertaining misspellings of Guinness. Speaking of which, on the wall, I spotted a handsome framed certificate from the Guinness Book of World Records that seemed to prove the “oldest pub” claim isn’t precisely true—it notes, “This is to certify that an inn has stood on the site of the Brazen Head Inn, Lower Bridge Street, Dublin, since the late 12th century.” I’m pretty sure there’s still a designation between “inn” and “pub.” But I suppose the point is, if you head to the Brazen Head expecting restrained and ancient grandeur, you should instead go someplace like Mulligan’s, which has only been around since 1782, but which actual Irish people drink at.
By now we were hungry, so we ventured out from Dublin to Howth, to El Paso Restaurant for spot-on Mexican food and sangria.
A pint of plain is your only man.
Flann O’Brien (pseudonym of Brian O’Nolan), “The Workmans Friend” (1939). The Irish saying suggests that a pint of stout can solve all of one’s problems.
We spent most of today driving back to Dublin from Killarney. For lunch, I insisted on stopping at a Supermac’s, Ireland’s answer to McDonald’s. Not too bad. It’s more like a bunch of fast-food concepts rolled into one because in addition to burgers and fries, the menu includes “wraps,” fried chicken and pizza.
Back in Dublin, we took a tour of the Guinness Storehouse. It’s not a tour of the brewhouse itself, presumably because such an enterprise would be impractical, but it’s a seven-story museum adjoining the factory. It’s new and modern with plenty of audio/visual highlights, like shuffling through a database of landmark Guinness commercials from the 1950s onward. Some exhibits were even olfactory, allowing you to smell, say, toasted hops.
I learned that Guinness is indeed made from local spring water, not Liffey water as apparently many a barkeep will deadpan. I enjoyed the Guinness ads from the 1950s, particularly the iconic cartoons of John Gilroy, who Walt Disney tried to poach for his animation studios at one point, according to the museum.
I wasn’t aware there was a connection between Guinness and the Guinness Book of World Records, but it was established by the managing director of the brewery to settle questions posed in bar bets. The specific question was “What’s the fastest game bird in Europe?” and the answer was the spur-wing goose (88 mph).
The most amusing anecdote to be found at the Storehouse details the hazing of new coopers at Guinness. The new guy would make his first barrel after which some senior coopers would stuff him inside, along with beer, water, wood shavings and anything else that might be lying around, then rolled him around town for a bit.
The high point, literally and figuratively, of the museum tour is the Gravity Bar on the seventh floor, where you are presented with a free pint of Guinness and a near-360-degree view of the city.
We had dinner at Romano’s Restaurant, a nice place in a dodgy part of town; we had to get buzzed in to get a seat. For dessert, we went over to The Joy of Coffee, a Dana-favorite, for coffees and a shared slice of cake.
I walked up this morning along the slope from the east to the top of Sybil Head, where one comes out suddenly on the brow of a cliff with a straight fall of many hundred feet into the sea. It is a place of indescribable grandeur, where one can see Carrantuohill and the Skelligs and Loop Head and the full sweep of the Atlantic, and, over all, the wonderfully tender and searching light that is seen only in Kerry. Looking down the drop of five or six hundred feet, the height is so great that the gannets flying close over the sea look like white butterflies, and the choughs like flies fluttering behind them. One wonders in these places why anyone is left in Dublin, or London, or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live in a tent or hut with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe this wonderful air, which is like wine in one’s teeth.
John Millington Synge, from “In West Kerry,” In Wicklow and West Kerry (1912)
We had reserved today to drive the Ring of Kerry, a 111-mile circuit around the Iveragh Peninsula, and the weather could have been better. Mostly it was grey and drizzly but we still got to see many amazing sights.
Killarney is the most popular starting point of the ring, and we purposely set out on it clockwise, as all of the tour buses circumnavigate counter-clockwise. In other words, we decided we’d rather be startled by busses hurtling at us around blind corners than getting stuck behind them and unable to pass. I think it was the right decision.
We drove through Killarney National Park, a special conservation area heavy with forest. We came across a deserted church across the road from a waterfall under a stone bridge.
We were assaulted by a clout of gnats at Ladies View, a scenic vantage of the Lakes of Killarney and named so because of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting visit to the spot in 1861.
Outside Kenmare, we came across a bike accident, then some sheep in the road, but I don’t think the two were connected. Dana thought she saw a rainbow over a valley.
We got lunch at a place called the Village Kitchen in the Dr. Seuss-ish named town of Sneem. After we got back on the road, we were overtaken by some intensely thick fog the higher we climbed in the hills. We came then upon the town named Waterville, which Dana and I knew in advance we’d be stopping at, as it shares the name of the Ohio village in which we grew up.
The seaside village’s main claim to fame, I found out later, is that Charlie Chaplin and his family enjoyed the place and visited several times. On account of the intense mistiness, we didn’t go down to the beach to inspect Ballinskelligs Bay but got some snacks (an excellent scone for me and some warm apple pie with ice cream for Dana) and coffee at The Chédéan, a warm little bakery that sold bedraggled used paperbacks from a cart near the fireplace.
The fog made a comeback near Kells and on a sharp turn, we witnessed a car that had rolled onto its side, although no one seemed to have been injured. We made a few more scenic-view stops to better view the majestic green hills and valleys, goats, bridges and cows.
After our return to Killarney, we halfheartedly investigated an outlet mall near our hostel that appeared to have just opened. I noted that the usually fashionable Ben Sherman makes a line of regular, not-quite-so-fashionable broadcloth men’s dress shirts, which aren’t available in the states. We decided some pre-dinner pints were in order and picked a random pub for them, The 98 Bar. There we watched the end of the Chelsea/Arsenal soccer game, in which Chelsea won, 1 to 0, then caught some Simpsons reruns. Dinner was burgers at a place called Busy Bee’s.
Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.
W. B. Yeats’ advice to John Millington Synge (1896). Synge followed Yeats’ advice and wrote The Aran Islands. (1907)
The complimentary breakfast at our hostel’s large main kitchen area was comprised of an instant coffee machine, a small conveyor-belt toaster, stacks upon stacks of thick-cut white bread, many jars of jam, random Tetra-Paks of juice, and a huge group of perky young Europeans swarming about like it was tryouts for a Mentos commercial. Everyone was responsible for securing his own food and washing his own dishes when done. As soon as I dried my coffee cup, some guy snapped it up.
Invigorated by our bejammed toast, Dana slung the Punto into a coastal drive to catch the ferry to the Aran Islands. What began as what I would call a “scenic” drive quickly evolved into what I would call “hurtling” as we realized it was taking longer than expected to reach the ferry launch site.
We literally sprinted from our car then sprinted some more to the dock after the parking lot attendant told us we just might catch the 10 a.m. ferry. We didn’t, but there was one leaving half an hour later so it was no loss.
If motion sickness is not your bag, you will not want to take the ferry to the Aran Islands; a plane is your other option. The pitching and bobbing shook the breakfasts loose from several on board and there was the usual zombie-like lurching about from people who couldn’t find their balance, but the ocean motion soothed me. Our destination? Inishmór, the largest and northernmost of the three islands. Narrow and about nine miles long, it’s covered in green grass, cows and sheep, thatch-roof houses, beaches comprised more of soft, pulverized shells than sand, and perilously beautiful cliffs. An incredible maze of low walls, built from large, loose stones without mortar, map out grazing territory and property lines. It’s what you think of when you think of Ireland, only with more tourists.
Tour vans are lined up to ensnare tourists departing the ferry, the guides standing hopefully outside, and I told Dana to pick the weathered Irishman who she thought would offer the most entertaining commentary. Alas, our fellow, although he looked like a grandfather with yarns to spin, spoke about 10 brief sentences, most of them answers to questions Dana asked. We stopped at a 1300-year-old cemetery with seven churches. (“This is a 1300-year-old cemetery with seven churches,” the guide told us as we disembarked and he remained brooding in the van.) We also found out that about 800 people live on the island, most making their living off the tourism racket, and that although many of the thatched-roof huts on the island look romantically snug, only two of them are lived in. We stopped at one of these to take pictures and Dana pet the hut owners’ dog.
The highlight of the island was Dun Aengus, a fort-like stone enclosure atop sheer cliffs that plunge 300 feet into the Atlantic. (It’s the one from which Dana waved to me on Easter.) The site is especially marvelous in that there are no barriers to prevent you from falling, intentionally or otherwise, off the island, and Lonely Planet Ireland claims delightedly that tourists have been blown off the edge to their death by the high winds alone. We saw what appeared to be a park ranger standing off to the side but he wasn’t even trying to convince the backpacking Europeans to take a safe step back, merely casting a jaded eye over the scene like he wasn’t in the mood to firehose jellied tourist remains off the island base again. I crept close to the edge to take a few photos, but did so flat on my stomach. The experience was a rush, as if I was peering over the edge of the world.
I ended up losing my hat to the winds and although I’d like to tell you it was swept majestically into the ocean, nearly taking me with it, it in fact merely gusted off my head when I was standing nowhere near the edge, swiftly lofting over a rock wall onto a field that I probably could have retrieved by attempting to persuade the ranger.
Back off the tour van, we begrudgingly paid our useless guide, walked to check out a beach and a church ruin, then perused the overpriced woolen items in one of the many stores near the island’s main bay.
After the return ferry ride and the drive back into town, we supped at Nimmo’s, “one of Galway’s coolest, smartest tables—a place to see and be seen,” according to Frommer’s Ireland 2005, and a dark, cozy little place that’s set back from the hubbub of the main tourist streets. On account of all the cows I kept seeing on the trip to date, I ordered a really tasty sirloin, with some potatoes and salad and washed it down with a half bottle of cabernet sauvignon. Dana got the clams linguini which was delicious as well, she reported.
Ireland is where strange tales begin and happy endings are possible.
Charles Haughey, London Daily Telegraph (July 14, 1988)
Dana collected me from the airport at about 6:00 a.m. local time. It was drizzly and we got some coffee at the airport before heading back to her house in Baldoyle, where I got a quick tour. Then Dana and I took a bus to the city center section of Dublin, where we checked out Trinity College, St. Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square Park, the pricey shops on Grafton Street, and walked along the Liffey. For lunch, we ordered homemade soup at the Soup Dragon, one of Dana’s favorite restaurants downtown.
Back to Dana’s place, one of her housemates dropped us back at the airport so we could pick up our rental car, a spunky blue Fiat Punto with yellow Northern Ireland plates, a missing wheel cover in the front and some cigarette burns on the driver’s seat. Other than that, it was in ship shape and of an appropriately tiny size to navigate the perilously narrow Irish country roads.
We set off immediately for Trim Castle (also known as King John’s Castle), which actor/director Mel Gibson used for exteriors in his 1995 film Braveheart.
They’re not keen on Mel there. The village thought it’d receive some nice publicity from the ordeal, but was subsequently forbidden from using photos, video or descriptions from the shoot or the finished film for promotional purposes. In kind return, our castle tour guide, a slight, animated old woman with white hair, relished in detailing some of the film’s gross historical and geographical inaccuracies.
She fit the soft-voiced, sweet old lady type personified by, say, Ellen Dow, yet she was also keen on topics such as beheadings. Some skulls had been recently unearthed on the castle’s site, she told us. Evidence suggested, she related a might too cheerfully, that the persons to which the heads had been previously attached were being punished for some especially heinous wrongdoing, as the blades used for the task were purposely dull to inflict more pain. The heads were then festively displayed on pikes outside the castle to deter future transgressions, she noted.
I nearly took off my own head when I whomped it on a particularly low doorway at the bottom of a steeply winding stair.
Tour Guide: Did you hit your head?
Me: Yeah, but there’s not much in it, so I’m OK.
Tour Guide [quite seriously]: Well, that’s the way it was in Norman times—attackers rushing in would hit their heads on the doorframes.
The castle’s keep, which was erected around 1200, is impressive. Most of the tall, 20-sided building remains, although inside, the second and third floors are missing and replaced by modern catwalks zigzagging across the open space. The marvelously sunny day took a powder as we reached the roof, when it suddenly became dark and drizzly, although in true Irish fashion, it had all cleared up 10 minutes later as we were leaving.
After a rollicking cross-country drive, we arrived in Galway and checked into our hostel, Sleepzone. Although it offered dorm-style rooms typical for hostels, Dana booked us a private two-bed room, spartan but clean and comfortable.
For dinner, we tried to get into this restaurant that specializes in potatoes with crazy toppings, but it was so packed and it was so late that we were denied entrance. We ended up trying out a Mexican restaurant that was quite good and had brightly colored tables, chairs and walls.
We then chose a random pub and Dana bought me my first Guinness in Ireland. As a regular drinker of “the black stuff” in the U.S., I can report it’s much better in Ireland. First, it’s richer. The head is thicker and creamier, like a lather in consistency, and the rest is more fully bodied: rich and “dark” tasting, with a slight but pleasantly bitter cocoa taste. Comparatively, in the U.S., Guinness often has more of a sweetly “sticky” taste and smell. The head is anemic and disappears halfway though the pint, whereas in Ireland, there’s deliciously goppy remnants of cream left in the glass after the beer proper is quaffed.
I’d wager the Guinness is better for at least three reasons. (For more on this subject and other entertaining facts, read the excellent Guide For The Un-Initiated To Buying Guinness In An Irish Pub.) First, they pour it correctly here—with skill and patience. In the U.S., it’s often rushed into the glass and served prematurely.
Second, it’s arguably “fresher” in Ireland, having not had to travel very far from the source, thereby avoiding extended stays in transport vessels and warehouses.
Finally, in Ireland, Guinness is made with tasty local spring water. I’d think that in the U.S., it’s brewed with local water (probably from Canada, since Guinness isn’t made in the U.S.), resulting inevitably in a different, inferior taste.
Having forced myself to stay awake all this time in order to adjust to the five-hour time difference, I slept the sleep of the dead.
Weary? He rests. He has traveled.
James Joyce, Ulysses
My flight to Dublin was out of JFK at 6:00 p.m. although the plane ended up driving around the runway for a spell, then took off 45 minutes late. Being Aer Lingus, there seemed to be a lot of actual Irish people on the flight, which was jam-packed full.
I sat next to a bejeweled grandmotherly type named Filomena who as near as I could tell was from New York but was born and raised in Ireland and was on her way there for an annual vacation. She liked talking. I tried to ignore her by pretending to read my magazines but she kept tapping my shoulder with her French tip nails. My neck ended up hurting from having it turned in her direction to listen to her.
I learned of Filomena’s many dislikes: scandalously dressed young people, black people in general, parents of rowdy children, rowdy children in general, the war in Iraq (no conversation between an American and an Irish person is complete without addressing U.S. politics), the hooligans I would no doubt encounter in Dublin at night, and how today’s pop music is wicked and depraved. I was amused that she chose to illustrate this last point with Stevie Wonder. “Every time that man sings, he’s on drugs of some sort,” she confided in me, noting that when she was a teen, she saw him perform in the West Village and even then, “he was stoned.” Stevie Wonder! Ha ha!
She eventually got distracted by the in-flight movie although she claimed her headphone jack wasn’t operational so she had to use mine. A bit later, she complained to a flight attendant about how cold it was on the plane, wrapped a blanket around her head like a turban, then nodded off for a bit. Later, she bought a bottle of Bailey’s from the duty-free cart. When we touched down in Dublin, it was cool and rainy. I was glad to be footloose and Filomena-free in Ireland at last.
The Universe is Big. Really big. It may seem like a long way to the corner chemist, but compared to the Universe, that’s peanuts.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Like a worm in rich soil, I’ve been making my way through Bill Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. I must admit, I wasn’t engrossed by the book’s first half, which deals mostly with the origins of the universe, the determination of its age, and the first scientists, their inventions and discoveries. I started getting more interested in the bits about the elements, followed by his chapters on geology.
I hadn’t realized that some of the most amazing Earth science discoveries are younger than I am. For instance, well into the 1970s, many scientists were insisting continental drift was a physical impossibility, whereas today it’s the most commonly accepted theory. And it wasn’t until 1977 that oceanographers realized why the oceans don’t get saltier with time. Deep sea vents, like those first observed off the Galapagos Islands, act as filters, keeping the oceans’ saline levels consistent.
Many discoveries await. Oceanographers have only explored perhaps a millionth of Earth’s underwater environments. As Bryson puts it, “It’s rather as if our firsthand experience of the surface world were based on the work of five guys exploring on garden tractors after dark.”
I also like how Bryson makes concrete the measurements of incomprehensible scope inherent in the scientific world. Two examples of this stick with me.
The deepest we’ve ever dug into the Earth is two miles (for gold mines in South Africa). That sounds deep, but as Bryson puts it, “If the planet were an apple, we wouldn’t yet have broken through the skin. Indeed, we haven’t even come close.”
And when looking at the apocalyptic possibility of a large asteroid smacking into Earth, he notes the closest one has ever come (at least that we’ve observed) is 106,000 miles. That may seem distant, but in cosmic terms, it is “the equivalent of a bullet passing through one’s sleeve without touching the arm.”
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.Ezra Pound, 1926
The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H. L. Mencken, “Bayard vs. Lionheart,” Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
Hey, it’s me. Just thought you might find it amusing that I just totally full-on collided with a guy. And I took like six steps and then a pigeon hit me in the head.
Voicemail from Andie, 4:09 p.m.