SOFT DAY . . .

Today's travels and adventures could have been dampened by the rainy and misty weather constituting what is known as a "soft day" in Ireland--but we "weathered on" and had a great day of exploring north of Dublin in the area known as the Boyne Valley. . . .

We boarded a tour bus at Busarus--the central bus station in Dublin--and headed northerly, enjoying droll commentary from our bus driver en route. Our first stop was Monasterboice, the site of an ancient monastic settlement that is home to three impressive 10th-century Celtic Celtic crosses and a round tower built to ward off Viking invasions in the 8th century. The tallest of the crosses, known as Muiredach's High Cross, is generally regarded as the finest example of a Celtic Cross in the entire country. It features carvings of stories from both the Old Testament and the New Testament and may have been used as a teaching tool for illiterate worshippers.

From there we went to the ruins--or the remains--of Mellifont Abbey, a monastery founded by the Cistercian order of monks in 1142. We were given a very engaging tour of the site; our guide shared us the history not just of the Abbey and of the Cistercian order but also of Mellifont's later use as a private home. I think that we were all surprised by how interestingly complex such a history--of mostly crumbling ruins--can be. . . .

Our final stop of the day took us even deeper into the past than our first two stops. Given that American history (as most of us think of it) goes back about 250 years, we need to adjust our thinking considerably to fathom even 1300 years. Well, let's try 5000 years, which is the age of the awe-inspiring passage grave of Newgrange that we visited first virtually (at an interpretive center) and then truly via a shuttle bus. Newgrange is the largest of a series of passage graves--large ceremonial burial mounds--found mostly in the Boyne Valley of Co. Louth. Predating the Egyptian pyramids by about 2000 years, they are pretty much contemporaneous with Stonehenge--and those reference points are apt in another way: the feats of engineering involved in the construction of Newgrange, which would have taken numerous generations to complete, are just as mind-boggling as those involved with those other iconic sites. Even more mind-boggling is that the engineering incorporated precise awareness of the winter solstice into the construction of the passage into the heart of the tomb: every year on the three days of the solstice (around December 21st), the rising sun shines down the passage for around 17 minutes. Our fine guide explained this to us in detail . . . and then created a reenactment of it for us inside the tomb. Most of us were left without words to describe the sensation and the mystery of it all--the sensation OF the mystery of it all.

GO DIRECTLY TO GAOL . . .

Well, that's exactly how we started our day: we headed off mid-morning to the legendary and notorious Kilmainham Gaol [i.e., Jail] via the LUAS street-level train . . . and we kept on going all day long. . . . 

The Kilmainham part of the day was a powerful experience--very moving. The gaol is over two-hundred years old. Its last prisoner--Irish rebel (and later Prime Minister and then President) Eamon de Valera was released in 1924. The gaol then sat empty and in disrepair for decades before being restored as a commemorative site mostly for nationalist heroes, though as our fine guide pointed out, they represented only about 15% of the total population through the gaol's history. But what an impressive 15%! Robert Emmet and Charles Stewart Parnell pretty much bookend the 19th century.

And in the 20th century, many of the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 were imprisoned there . . . and were executed there by firing squad. In our class a few week ago, we read Yeats's poem "Easter 1916": "I write it out in verse-- / MacDonagh and McBride / And Connolly and Pearse / Now and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born." I think that every member of our entourage was touched by the spirit of place at Kilmainham--the sense of history and humanity that still inhabits the cells there. And to stand in the very courtyard where the rebel leaders were shot by firing squad--that is an especially moving experience. . . .

Perhaps it's just as well that we altered our schedule for the rest of the day. Originally we had planned to go straight from Kilmainham to Glasnevin Cemetery in an entirely different part of Dublin. But we decided to defer that visit to Tuesday; instead we went to the National Museum, which is less than a 10-minute walk from our digs at Trinity. I have been to the Museum a number of times, so I was surprised to discover that some of the displays I expected to see--and that I had advertised to our students--were not in fact there! It seems that the collection has now been spread over 4 different sites. Most of the Irish-related displays related to early and medieval Ireland--interesting and eye-opening . . . but not quite the complete picture we had expected. Well, no harm in leaving something for another time and another place. . . .

After the Museum we all still had some mileage left in our legs, so we headed south . . . toward the Grand Canal to visit a site commemorating the important mid-20th-century poet Patrick Kavanagh. "O commemorate me where there is water," Kavanagh wrote in a poem titled “Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin,” continuing: “Canal water, preferably, so stilly / Greeny at the heart of summer.”

After his death in 1967, his friends erected a bench in his memory with that poem inscribed on it. In 1991 Kavanagh was further commemorated by a life-size statue sitting on another bench along the canal. . . .

Going to and coming from the Grand Canal, we passed through St. Stephen's Green, the wonderful park in the heart of southside Dublin. On our way back down Grafton Street toward Trinity College Dublin we made note of several drinking establishments with literary associations--McDaid's, a pub frequented by Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, Flann O'Brien, J. P. Donleavy, Michael Hartnett and other denizens of "Bohemian Dublin" of the 1950s and '60s, and Davy Byrne's on Duke Street, where Leopold Bloom of Joyce's Ulysses ducks in for a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy. Sounds good to me!

THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS . . .

Well . . . we have another full day pretty much behind us, despite the still daylight-bright sky at 10:00 pm. . . .

We started our day together with a tour of our home base, Trinity College Dublin, beginning at 10:45 this morning. Trinity has a fascinating history--it was founded by Queen Elizabeth I--and many great traditions and lots of lore: our tour guide, a current student at TCD, did a fine job of entertaining us and informing us, though as a graduate of crosstown University College Dublin myself--like James Joyce and Flann O'Brien--I tried not to be too impressed. . . .

Eventually we ended up at the old Library, which houses the legendary illuminated manuscript The Book of Kells. It is on display under glass--literally a sight to see! TCD has done a good job of providing a lot of background and interpretive information in an anteroom. We all came away "illuminated"! From there we strolled about a quarter of a mile up Dame Street to Dublin Castle. Robert remembered visiting there a long time ago; I don't think I've ever actually set foot on the premises, though I've wandered past many times in the past. I think that we all agreed that, frankly, there wasn't a lot to see that dovetailed with our reading. The Castle was the seat of the British colonial administration in Ireland up until the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922. Then it became the seat of administration for the Free State government. . . .

Next we headed north, crossing the Liffey on the Ha'penny Bridge and then making our way along O'Connell Street where we stopped for a few minutes at the General Post Office, which was the headquarters for the Easter Rising of 1916: the Proclamation of the Republic of Ireland was read from the steps of the GPO on Easter Monday morning of 1916. And the rest is history. . . . And that history is commemorated inside the GPO by a statue of the principal hero of ancient Irish legend, Cuchulainn.

We then paused for a group photo across the street from the Gresham Hotel, where Gabriel Conroy experiences his "epiphany" in Joyce's short story "The Dead."

At that point we were starting to get hungry, so I took on the role of fearless leader . . . and fearlessly led everyone to a bar/restaurant across the street from James Joyce's old "high school," Belvedere College--but it was closed for the day; undaunted in my fearless leadership, I then led everyone to . . . a now-nonexistent coffee shop that I remembered from a visit to Dublin two years ago. Still undaunted, I then led us to an underground food court where everyone enjoyed--really!--very affordable all-you-can-eat meals of African, Indian and Asian origins. "When in Dublin . . ."

After eating our fill, we strolled up to the Dublin Writers Museum--which is just what it sounds like: it displays both books and personal items associated with a wide array of Irish writers from the 18th century to the present. We spent close to two hours there, fully engaged by what we found, including Patrick Kavanagh's typewriter. . . .

By that point, everyone was exhausted--not only by the day's walking but also from lingering jet lag--so we trudged back to our digs at TCD where we left each other to our own devices (literally in the case of me and my iPad). I managed to scoot over to the Hodges & Figgis bookstore just before closing time to purchase my first book of our visit to Ireland--a hot-off-the-press novel by Paul Charles titled The Last Dance. I had read a bit about it before leaving Boston--so I'm giving it a chance. . . .

Lots more on the menu for tomorrow. Stay tuned for the next report from deep in the heart of the Hibernian metropolis!

A NIGHT AT THE ABBEY . . .

So, we all have at least a partial day in Dublin under our belts. And everyone seems truly happy to be here! My trip across the pond was even a bit longer than expected as the plane from London to Dublin taxied on the runway for at least half an hour before taking off! But we made it--"we" being me and two of the students in the class, Megan and Cat. It was nice to have each other for figuring our way around Heathrow Airport in London. . . .

Everyone seems very pleased with our accommodations at Trinity College Dublin--and you certainly can't beat the central location. This evening all twelve of us went out to dinner in the hip Temple Bar area at a restaurant called The Quays.

Then we strolled over to the legendary Abbey Theatre--the National Theatre of Ireland--for a production of a Tom Murphy play, The House. Murphy is an icon for plays like Freedom of the City and Famine--though from where I sat, The House was not of the same caliber as those classics. We all chit-chatted for a bit afterward (we'll have some more formal--or least semi-formal--student responses to it tomorrow: each student has to present orally a "review" of two events during our Irish adventure together): the consensus seems to be that "it had its moments" and that it also has its overall merits. But beyond that, I'll not put words into other people's mouths! As I was watching it, I thought it felt a bit "baggy"--too many vague subplots; by the end, I changed my adjective to "boxy"--too many underdeveloped ideas being forced to fit inside each other and inside the overall structure of the play. Still, a night at the Abbey is a special experience--I think that we all came away from The House feeling that.

IRISH LITERATURE, DRAMA & CULTURE 2012

This blog will be an ad hoc accounting of the “travel” portion of a course titled “Irish Literature, Drama and Culture” offered in the Summer of 2012 by my UMass Boston colleague Robert Lublin and me.  A specialist in Theatre, Robert is Chair of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston.  The past three summers he has taken students to London for a total immersion in the world of theatre there; with London hosting the Olympics this summer, that was not an option this year . . . so Robert concocted a course that would end up in Dublin (another city with a great theatre tradition).  He recruited me to join him in the enterprise and the rest is history . . . and literature . . . and politics . . . and culture . . .

On Friday we’ll hit the ground running with the travel portion of the course (which will include an excursion to the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland): the 10 students enrolled in the course, Robert, and I will have made our separate ways to our digs at Trinity College in the heart of Dublin . . . and on Friday evening we’ll have our first official event—an outing to the legendary Abbey Theatre.  More on that on this blog either on Friday night or sometime on Saturday.

In the meantime . . . here’s how the on-campus portion of the course was designed to prepare us all for what lies ahead in Ireland; I’ve adapted this from our course syllabus:

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Aptly, if not inevitably, a central focus of this course involved the importance of place in the Irish imagination.  Self-evidently, Ireland is a “place of writing”—a place where writing happens—and an essential part of the study abroad dimension of this course will entail our walking literally in the footsteps of many of the country’s canonical and iconic writers: the literary made literal.

But Ireland is also a written place in at least two distinct senses.  First of all, it is a place written about, and we will engage with how writers in the three major literary genres—poetry, fiction, and drama—inscribe place.  Just consider how so many of our titles resonate with place-centeredness: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” The Playboy of the Western World, Dubliners, “Going Into Exile,” Outside History, “The Deportees,” The Lieutenant of Inishmore. . . .  In short, we will be alert constantly to how the literal becomes the literary in the crucible of the creative imagination.

Secondly, and at the same time, we will engage with how that very inscribing of place is also an imagining or a projecting of place.  ”To Ireland in the Coming Times,” W. B. Yeats titles one of his early poems; “the centre of paralysis,” James Joyce labels Dublin in one of his letters describing the concept behind his groundbreaking collection of stories; “Mise Eire” (I am Ireland), Eavan Boland titles one of her poems after one of Padraig Pearse’s poems.  Indeed, the very first text we will read—Cathleen Ni Houlihan—personifies Ireland as “Mother Ireland” . . . a phrase that echoes through any number of later works.

Implicit in both of those focuses on Ireland as written place is a third focus: the literary text itself as a “place of writing.”  So as we immerse ourselves in our reading, we will pay appropriate attention to genre—to the “translation” of a play script from page to stage, to the stylistic and formal elements of lyric poetry, to how in Irish hands the short story almost invariably subscribes to the conventions of literary “realism” (or “naturalism”): we will pay attention, in other words, to how the very form or mode deployed by an author takes on properties of “place.”

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Often, Boston is referred to in Ireland as “the next parish over.”  You can almost see the old country from here!