Dublin (1)
Up thousands of feet over the Atlantic in the not-sleep of an airplane night... “Do you think there will be snow everywhere?”
“Like at the end of The Dead? I can watch you and my dad both freak out.”
The intimacy of waking up in your own grease next to strangers with Irish accents and telling them about your family life thirty years ago.
A set of mythological graphic novels has claimed R.’s attention this month and has me brushing up on Apollodorus and the Homeric hymns. Some particular appeal in the rendering of Athena, spear and helm and the snakes on her aegis following her mood. R. knows she is on the California state seal, but it was my father’s department building at the University of Arizona that had olive trees planted in front, dropping heaps of black fruit split open to red pulp on the paving. Last week after the department holiday party, crossing campus in the rain, Athena’s presence in the groves seemed so overwhelmingly possible that I had to stop in the reading room where the undergrads were cramming for finals and check the inscription over the door:
SAPIENTIA AEDIFICAVIT SIBI DOMVM VENITE COMEDITE PANVM MEVM ET BIBIT VINVM QUOD MISCVI VOBIS
I am supposed to have a Ph.D. in resistance to slogans, and yet. This is why I can’t leave. We come in low over the island, shoot past the city into the strait and swing around. There is not snow everywhere. Gray water, green fields. A hill—is it Howth?
Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea
I got a message I can’t read
The Dublin airport seems new and clean and well signposted, the way things always seem when you leave our crumbling empire. No photography is allowed in immigration control. The Irish Gaelic word for “photography” goes on and on and on.
I bet TRINITY's chancellor wouldn't commit a solecism like "Fiat peace."
I recently found this blog, which along with John Pistelli's tumblr and wordpress sites express something close to what literature and books mean to me, albeit in a much more sophisticated and lucid way than I could myself. In any event, welcome to Dublin. It is not generally the case that snow is general here, alas - Ger O'D.
Thank you! Thank you for calling out Pistelli’s sites, which are new to me.
