Today’s Photo Friday theme is Purple, so here’s a rerun of an image I showed you in February, 2006, after a whirlwind weekend trip to Dublin. This weekend I’m taking a whirlwind weekend trip to New York City, where I’ll be spending time (and sleeping on the floor) with a bevy of bodacious blog-buds in Brooklyn. Although I’m taking my laptop in order to keep in touch with two online classes I’m teaching, I don’t expect to blog until I return to New Hampshire on Monday night. In the meantime, enjoy your own weekend whirlwinds.
Ireland
Feb 18, 2006
Last weekend, in the yard of Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral, I learned an interesting albeit all-but-useless lesson. If you offer a cat a heap of sliced turkey, said cat will drowsily ignore a nearby flock of fattened pigeons. Perhaps the peaceable kingdom isn’t so unattainable after all…unless, of course, you’re a turkey.
Feb 16, 2006
When Ivy heard I’d be in Dublin for the weekend, she recommended I try the hot chocolate at Butler’s Chocolate Cafe. If anyone knows her way around a cup of hot chocolate, it would be Ivy: when she was in New Hampshire last year doing a month’s residency at the MacDowell Colony, Ivy and I met up for hot chocolate in Peterborough. The woman is a chocolate connoisseur!
The above reflective shot (which is actually a panorama joining two separate pencam pictures) shows me enjoying my second cup of Butler’s hot chocolate: I imbibed my first take-away cup during that Viking splash tour with that girl on Saturday, and I fueled my postcard-writing muse over a second solitary cup on Sunday. Ivy’s right: the hot chocolate at Butler’s is damn fine, and I’d gladly treat Ivy to a dose of chocolate goodness if we’re ever in Dublin at the same time.
Feb 13, 2006
No trip to Dublin is complete without a quick stop to see Oscar Wilde looking fabulous from his languid perch on Merrion Square.
Later this morning, I’m off to the airport for my flight back to Boston. Yes, I’ll be taking my journal with me: to paraphrase Wilde, I never travel without my notebook, for one should always have something sensational to read on the plane.
UPDATE: Thanks to that girl for setting me straight about Oscar Wilde’s location: he’s hanging out in Merrion Square, not St. Stephen Green.
Feb 11, 2006
If you remember the hoopla back in Keene over Cool Jewels’ colorful Main Street facade, you’ll understand why I snapped a picture of this pharmacy in Dublin’s Temple Bar. So far, I’ve snapped very few photos in the city proper; instead, I’ve been rubbernecking like mad, trying to get at least a cursory sense of Where I Am before I try to capture anything about that Where-ness. After the blur of arriving, I’m still waiting to find my metaphoric feet, waiting until not everything I see seems foreign and unusual.
On Thursday’s first jaunt into downtown Dublin with that girl, I couldn’t begin to frame what I was seeing into discreet, digestable pieces: here a purple pharmacy, there an iron rubbish barrel. When I walk the streets of Keene, I can lightly ignore everything that looks usual and reach for my camera only when something jumps out as different: a certain slant of light, a shadow I’ve never seen before, a corner that never before caught my eye.
Here in Dublin, everything is catching my eye, and ear: even the ambient soundtrack of birdsong is different, with me trying to hold my Inner Birder in check while magpies and rooks and European robins flit and strut their Backyard Birdness around me. I knew to expect the oddness of everyone driving on the left; I knew that crossing streets would be particularly dangerous since my muscle memory automatically looks left-right-left when I look both ways, a habit that gets you run over on this side of the Atlantic. But even after having visited Ireland on a whirlwind over 15 years ago, I’m amazed and perplexed by the level of disorientation. How long does it take before you find your feet in a place, before common birds seem common, purple facades seem normal even in a “historic” district, and the flow of both life and traffic seems ordinary again?
I don’t know how long it takes to find your feet in a foreign place, but I know this stay won’t be nearly enough: if anything, I feel like a mountaineer using a single weekend as a kind of base camp, a place to acclimate to unaccustomed altitude before embarking on any serious treks. After more than a decade living in New England, I still feel like a flatlander there, so perhaps a certain level of Outsiderness is a good thing, the eyes of a foreigner catching the ordinaries that fly beneath natives’ threshold of perception.
As much as there is of the odd and unusual here in Dublin, some things I do understand, and some photo opportunities are simply too good to resist. Just as any decent journalist will go to extremes to protect her sources, I’m not telling exactly how I got a snapshot of Dublin’s funniest urinals. Let’s just say that local color is found in the most surprising of places.
Feb 10, 2006
Today’s Photo Friday theme is Blur, which provides an apt excuse for posting this fuzzy shot of a replica of James Joyce’s lapdesk, which is among the memorabilia and manuscripts on display at the National Library of Ireland’s current exhibit on James Joyce and Ulysses. After getting very little sleep the night before–and even less sleep during–my red-eye flight from Boston, yesterday I found Dublin itself to be a blur, a perpetually unwinding scroll of strange sights, sounds and sensations.
Touring the Joyce exhibit with that girl helped to ground me a bit: looking at Joyce’s heavily edited pen-, pencil-, and crayon-scribbled manuscript pages along with the literal scraps he used to record notes during his composition of Ulysses reminded me that art is a pastiche of ephemera: a sight here, a sound there. Now that I’ve gotten a full night’s sleep after my first day’s blur, I’m hoping today these sensations will start making sense, the jots and tittles of imagery and scribbled impression pulling together to make a semi-coherent whole called Here.