Monthly Archive for June, 2011

The apparitions

Kevin Barry

Published on June 28, 2011 in The Journal.

It was October when the apparition of Samuel Beckett appeared on a gable wall in Ringsend. The spectral visitation was twelve feet tall and not quite inanimate – if you stared long enough, a strange flicker enlivened its hawklike eyes. The apparition was faint in daylight but more obvious at night – come dusk, his form would somehow illuminate. The gable was of an old tenement that housed a twenty-four-hour tanning salon and an infamous chipper. Soon it was noted that at a certain meloncholy hour, Beckett turned by the merest fraction to look toward the Liffey’s storied waters. By coincidence, the new Samuel Beckett Bridge had lately been slung across the river just west of Ringsend to link the Grand Canal Dock Redevelopment Scheme with the Irish Financial Services Centre, but let it be said that no apparent distaste clouded the falconlike gaze of the stout-hearted old Resistance fighter.

The apparition caused immediate difficulties for the Dublin intelligentsia. This was no Blessed Virgin taking form upon a tree stump in front of syphillitic peasants out in the hungry districts of west Limerick. This was a secular apparition, and it was incontestable – Beckett was absolutely there on the Ringsend gable. The intelligentsia found they had nothing smart to say about the matter, and an amount of hand-wringing and beard-stroking went on in the thoughtfully renovated terrace houses of Portobello.

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Open space: walking the boundaries of Tallaght

Karl Whitney

Published on June 21, 2011 in The Journal.

On a frosty morning at the end of last November, I set out from my parents’ house to walk around the edges of Tallaght: it was the day the government was due to announce cuts ahead of yet another emergency budget, but I wasn’t much in the mood to pay attention to the news. The idea was to try to stitch together my memories of the places I knew with less familiar areas. I also wanted to see if this far-flung zone was still traversable by foot – seeing it by car would not suffice, and anyway I can’t drive.

My journey took me along what I believed to be, more or less, the borders of Tallaght. These I hastily sketched on a sheet of A4 just before I left the house. They included trajectories along what were, broadly speaking, straight lines following the boundaries of Kiltipper Road to the south and Tymon Lane – the ancient roadway that runs parallel to the M50 between Greenhills Road and the elaborate motorway interchange at Balrothery – to the east. But the other boundaries were less defined, more permeable and unstable, and, ultimately, my route reflected that. I wandered along the roads that crisscross the Jobstown area, wondering how you can define the edge of the city in an urban sprawl that seems so haphazard. The problem is that you often can’t, and you have to rely on maps to tell where the boundaries once lay.

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Relaxation after a great fatigue

Ross Weldon

Published on June 14, 2011 in The Journal.

1.
Wake up in a warm single bed in my mother’s house, drink thick instant coffee. Walk the cliffs in Howth with my mother. My two dogs run amok. They just run and swim. The earth is damp like a sponge and the air smells of saltwater and wild garlic, beautiful, wake you up, whole cliff side covered in sunshine, looks like the West, stone walls and cattle in the fields, the orange grouse bushes tearing at the ends of my jeans. We talk about the family. No one’s heard from my aunt since she beat up my granny and left a Russell Watson CD on the bed with a note that read “I Love You.” Her daughter has moved in with a fellow recovering heroin addict in Finglas with their pit-bull terrier and new child, I think they gave it a stripper’s name like Crystal. I could watch the sea all day, whipping the rocks.

Had a beer with my father. He speaks in stories. Paddy Donnelly had been singing the only song he knows in the front bar again, long wiry beard and a large bottle of stout for a microphone:

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On the non-intervention of gods, a winter in Melbourne, and Nicole Richie

Aileen Armstrong

Published on June 7, 2011 in The Journal.

One night in 2006, when I was lying awake, exhausted, in a grotty mansion in Melbourne, Australia, in a bedroom where a possum had tunnelled into the inner wall and was racketing around, scrabbling at chunks of plaster and cement, a thought came to me with a clarity and conviction I have rarely, if ever, felt since, and it was this: that all of society’s failings could be summed up by the fact that we, as a people, were going to let Nicole Richie die, and that when she was dead, we would all, every one of us, be complicit in her death.

Nicole’s death would be simple and glorious, as celebrity deaths tend to be; in fact, we would all make a point of finding beauty in it. There would be hyperbolic obituaries and gleeful grieving, and then we would be left to try to make sense of it, to see if we felt ready at last to confront what had taken her, to confront what was taking us, too.

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