Friday, June 1, 2012
A Happy Turn

Memorial Day Weekend, the beginning of the American summer season, passed, without my thinking about it. Here in Dublin it is cloudy and moist, although no rain. Even so, I have my hotel umbrella, and although I had to discard three tops and my wool socks to please the check-in people in Santiago, I still have the green country jacket I bought at the Emmaus sale in Besancon.

The hotel, which is called the Roxford Lodge, is a townhouse converted to a businessman's hotel. My room is, again, tiny,but the hotel takes the prize for the most electric outlets with the least apparent risk of fire. Instead of an electrical strip, the plugs have been set into the electrical wiring, and there is one for everything. The desk (with ingeniously includes a mirror), has a printer/fax machine, a wireless internet hookup. A hair dryer is set into the wall above the printer (dry your hair while sending a fax?) while in the round window above is set a tray carved to fit its curves, on an electric kettle, a cup and saucer and the fixings for tea, including non-perishable milk.

The sauna stands next to the bed, a wooden box I first mistook for a closet. It makes for a fine clothes dryer --"Yes", I washed out my socks and underwear last night.) It has a radio and CD player and antenna sticking out of the top. Above the end of the bed is the television, and on a shelf below, the controls, along with complimentary DVDs: The Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4.0, Dances With Wolves, Juno, among others. There is also a DVD about feng shui.

My room has a total of five windows, including the roundel, with its stained glass. I am in a basement apartment, looking out on the parking lot. Immediately outside my window, next to the sauna, is a bubbling brook, something bought in a garden shop and placed next to a brick archway garnished with shrubbery that comes up mid-window. It is a small space, but ingeniously designed, a garret in a basement.

I make myself some tea with the electric kettle, putting one of the remaining the tea bags without theine I brought with me right in the water to get the most tea out of one bag. After it has steeped, I pour myself a cup and help myself to the milk. The tea is awful: when I am in Dublin center (a twenty minute walk away), I will have some Irish tea from a freshly made pot.

Paddy is coming to pick me up at 8:00 p.m., and Grainne is coming in from her overnight trip to London around the same time, so we will have dinner together. Tomorrow there is a party for me, I am not sure when. It will be good to see these friendly faces again. It has been sixteen years since Bill and I made a flying visit to Dublin from London for the day, a day which started when we caught the first flight out and ended on the last flight in, a pub crawl of a day. I worked with Grainne at Greentrees, coffee shop in Rockefeller Center my last year in law school, 1985. She returned to Ireland, then moved to London, taking a job with a Turkish carpet seller named Alton, a man of phenomenal disorganization. Grainne and Paddy were living in an apartment in Bayswater, where I camped out after the Bar. I went on to Dublin and spent three weeks with her family in Ranelagh, getting to know her sister, Niamh, her mother Clare, and her father, Augustine Martin, the Yeats scholar and member of the Board of the Abbey Theatre. The next year Niamh came over and I helped her get settled and find a job --she was at my wedding. My memories of the Martins and Paddy --who is a Bolger-- are very happy ones.

***

Those memories notwithstanding, Dublin overwhelms me with the scope of its transformation in sixteen years, let alone thirty. Gone are the old bookstores on Grafton Street that served Trinity College; the Georgian revival has led to the houses off Merrion Square (one of which, #1, was where Oscar Wilde spent his childhood) becoming offices for corporations and law firms, as in London. Grafton Street is pedestiranized and full of chain stores of the sort found in every city with a claim to being "international".

I walk along the inside perimeter of the park on the opposite side of Merrion Street: it is a pleasure to do so, its cool green path coming to an end by a statue of Oscar Wilde with many of his most famous quotes. Finally, Dublin recognized his genius.

Coming into Nassau Street my eye is caught by Read's, the largest bookstore in Dublin. The postcards on sale outside are hilarious: the caption under a photo of dilapidated cottage says, "One more payment and its mine" --The Irish may be down, but they are not out, if a sense of humor is any guide. In fact, yesterday the country voted 60% in favor of an amendment to the treaty with the European Union which provides that the deficit shall not exceed 3%. Until the property bubble made millionaires and just as quickly paupers of many, the Irish always held living within your means as a virtue, the return of which may be heralded in yesterday's vote.

This incipient frugality notwithstanding, prices of things are as dear as New York, if not more. New paperback books in Read's are, even with the 25% discount, expensive. The culture of shopping has firmly entrenched itself in Ireland, judging from the number of people out looking at the shop windows early in the morning. I am not enthused about staying on another week, a feeling that a visit to the tourist office at the end of Grafton Street does little to disperse.

John, a charming agent for a family-run tour bus company tries to get me to buy a 3-day package of bus rides to the West Country, even offering me the student discount. He was a trader in Hong Kong, lost "millions" in the property market, and set up this business to keep afloat. He is smart as a whip, and I enjoy talking with him, but after the Castro Mil, I do not want to be on a long-distance bus again, ever.

I try to reach Aer Lingus on my cell phone, which I have been able to buy an Irish SIM card for. However, the airline is having problems with the computer that books reservations, and will be down for a good part of the day. I try several times before calling American Express, which has the same problem. However, the travel agent is able to tell me that I could leave Dublin any day between June 5 and June 9, although it will cost me at least $450 extra. I am reminded of a criminal law professor, Abraham Abramovsky, who once paid a taxi driver to take him from Albany to New York on a Friday evening, even though he had to be back in Albany the next Monday. "It was worth every penny", he said, in reference to the unsatisfying prospect of a weekend in Albany. Not that Dublin compares remotely, but I know the Martins have busy schedules, and limited time to spend with me. If I cannot find some activity to justify staying through to June 11, I might as well save on the hotel and come home early.


The answer to my quandary comes in my visit to the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street. It has an incomparable Yeats collection and a new exhibit about the poet. At the entrance to the exhibit is an announcement that next Thursday there will be an all day seminar on James Joyce, focusing, as Bloomsday is nearly upon us, on "Ulysses".

While I read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I have not tackled that work, and this might be the best possible circumstance to consider doing so. And at 30 Euros for the seven and a half hour day, the price cannot be bettered. I go to the office of the library in charge of registrations and put my name on the list, deferring payment until Tuesday, to give me time to think about the prospect,. While doing so I learn that the Dublin Literary Festival is on from June 4 through June 10. Combining the two would give my week the snap, crackle, pop that would justify the expense --particularly as a writer I have long admired, Mario Vargas Llosa, is speaking the day before I depart. If I can get a ticket, I will pay for the Joyce seminar.

I have to go to the festival office in Temple Bar, an area popular with young tourists. Taking in the tatoo parlors and the bars cheek by jowk, Temple Bar reminds me of Soho in London: a bit rough, but with its own energy. At the Theatre Festival office I am able to purchase a Vargas Llosa ticket --and a good one, in the eighth row --and my decision is made. I am also able to get a ticket for a session on James Connolly, an influential leader of the movement for Ireland's independence, and I am on the wait list for a talk by Alain de Botton on Religion for Atheists. I thought I would overlook my reservations about Edmund White because he would be interviewed by Colm Toibin, whose novel "The Master", about the late years of Henry James, I admire. However, White has had a stroke and will not be travelling, so the talk about his book "Jack White And His Friends" has been cancelled. Richard Sennett, Alice Leahy and Gavin Titley, too, were to have appeared together to discuss "Living Together --The Lost Art Of Cooperation", but one of them has taken sick as well, so the event will not materialize. I am uninterested in the W.G. Sebald celebration and screening of an accompanying film, Patience; likewise, Bosnia Twenty Years On --which would bring me up to date on a conflict I watched closely as it unfolded.

There is a seminar on Thursday evening on cultural connections between England and Ireland --always a sharp topic, especially in Ireland-- but after a day with James Joyce, the best thing might be a pint.

Tickets purchased, I discover that the Irish Film Institue is around the corner. They are showing "The Turin Horse", a Hungarian film in black and white about the day on which Nietzsche, seeing a horse cruelly beaten, descended into madness. On a lighter note, there is a new comedy from Ken Loach, The Angel's Share about two Glaswegians obsessed with single-malts. I will have more than enough to provoke my thinking over the course of the week here without having to fall into the stereotypical tourist round.

My last jaunt, at 5 p.m., before preparing to meet Paddy at eight p.m. in front of the Schoolhouse Hotel, is a walk to Saint Patrick's Church, where Jonathan Swift was Dean. The choir is rehearsing for choral evensong at 5:30 p.m. and the gift shop is closing. There are no photos of Jonathan Swift's two death masks, which are in a case in the Cathedral in the back of the pews; or any other likeness. I buy a card to memorialize my visit, read the biographical panels associated with the Dean --who, appalled at the treatment of the mentally ill in Dublin, founded the first hospital for the treatment of the mentally ill --the hospital where he was treated when he suffered the stroke that incapicitated him at seventy-five and under whose effects he languished until his death three years later.

Disappointed initially that he never was able to reach higher office in England, he came to defend, from his position in the Deanery of Dublin, the rights of the Irish, successfully defending their currency from devaluation and using his biting mockery to call attention, in A Modest Proposal, to the plight of its poor.


***

I was going to visit the homes for dogs in Dublin, and see about finding a puppy to bring home: the Irish have beautiful horses and dogs. However, while I am changing to go out to meet Paddy and Grainne, an amber and orange tabby comes to pay me a visit througb the open windows. I find her at he feet of my desk chair and put some milk in a saucer for her, which she laps up. She is very friendly and I regret having to call Desmond, the young man at reception who brought me tea to the room earlier, to ask what to do. The cat, it turns out, is one of three attached to the Roxford Lodge. Whenever anyone leaves a window open, they will come in. If I pick my new friend up and place her over the window she will find her footing outside. Indeed, she lands squarely on the window sill outside, not to say she likes it. She looks at me wide-eyed with reproach --I should have valued her magical capacity for inserting herself more.

***

Paddy picks me up in front of the Old Schoohouse Hotel. He has just dropped his youngest boy, Finn, off at a discotheque for young teenagers, from which he will be picked up at eleven. Paddy and I drive past Aviva stadium, and a new arts complex around which commercial real estate stands empty, as well as around the new docklands of Dublin, which imitate Canary Wharf in London, all luxury apartments by the river Liffey. We visit several other areas, some downmarket, which were targeted by speculators and inflated in value during the Celtic Tiger years, and now are worth much less than their mortgages. In another area, one of older houses, Paddy points out a house purchased for an astronomical sum, renovated for another, now unsaleable.

We arrive in Tenerure, where Paddy and Grainne live with their three boys: Tighe, Killian and Finn, about an hour before Grainne is due in from her flight from London. Paddy is a substitute teacher and a tutor in Dublin's schools, a job he took after spending many years commuting between London as a mechanical engineering consultant for the City's largest financial services firms. Grainne worked for a computer training consultancy, but was downsized three years ago, at which point she started her own training firm, which has been very successful. She travels several days a week, and is about to make her first training in Singapore, which will open up to her possibilities all over Asia. She has, coupled with great energy, the capacity to sleep on planes and a genuine love for her work. Paddy holds the fort down, taking care of the house and the boys, as well as nurturing their black Labrador and a dun colored Labrador puppy, both of whom have the run of the house.

It is as if we last saw each other yesterday: Grainne and Paddy remember every little detail of our times together, and I many others. They are leaving for ten days in Cadaques, returning two days after I leave, Paddy's first vacation in two years: why don't I house sit for them?

Their offer is like manna from heaven: it is not that I cannot tough it out at the Roxford Lodge, but it would be very nice to live in a house for a few days. Clare, mother of Grainne and Niamh, lives nearby, and Niamh, too is not far. I can see them, and still have time to go into Dublin. Of course, there are books everywhere, and a garden, and a refrigerator and a stove. I will have to take the bus into Dublin, but staying in Terenure, I will also get a flavor of Dubliners' lives, I would never have within the cozy confines of the Roxford Lodge. I gladly accept, and plan to settle in Sunday afternoon, after Grainne and Paddy are well on their way to Cadaques.