Diablevert

I'm a bigot.

I hate American tourists. There. Now you know. It is similar --- though not quite as intimate -- as a 13-year-old's shame in their parents, the same burning impulse to drag them away from the normal person --- in this case, the Irish person --- hissing, "You guys! You are embarrasing me! Oh my go-od." For instance, there are three, middle aged, deplorably chatty American tourists bellied up to the bar in the Lord Edward, telling the bartender stories about how they got kicked out of a pub in Temple Bar last night --- "and it wasn't even fancy," --- and she is trying to explain to them such subtleties as the distinction between the unspoken admission policies of Old Man's Pubs (e.g., the Lord Edward) and the pig-eyed bouncers at the tourist rip off joints that cluster among the quays -- and they are replying, (in a phrase you can tell has already been rehearsed in their heads for the delection of the folks back home) "Well, I've drunk in a lot of bars in my life but I had to come to Ireland to get kicked out of a bar for being too drunk!" Which is ironic, you see, because --- stop me if you've heard this one before --- the Irish are drunks. Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle. Sigh.

Signs and Symbols

I think, I think, when your lawyer announces an office move by picking up a splintered board and painting the new address on it and then nailing it to the wall, I think it's time to get a new lawyer.

One chick's opinion.

Irony Has Gone Too Far

Has anyone seen the new McDonald's uniforms? I assume they're probably in the States if they're here. They consist of black t-shirts with yellow catchphases printed on them, left-aligned. The slogans I've seen are these: "Do you want fries with that?" and "My boss is a clown."

They make me wish irony had died after 9-11. I am considering writing a letter:

Dear McDonald's,

Here's the thing about your new uniforms. You are multi-bliion dollar multinational corporation. You are The Man. Sadly, I think it necessary to be quite clear: When I say that you are The Man I do not mean "You da man!" I mean that you are the The Man. And we are the People. It is our job to not let you get us down.

Printing ironic slogans highlighting the cultural stigma of working for you on your employee's mandatory uniforms --- as if the manifest indignity of grinding your hump for minimun wage slinging grease in a clip joint were a jolly joke shared between yourselves --- is a cruelty which even Orwell could not imagine. (In part because he entirely lacked a sense of humor, but that's another letter.)

Sincerely,

The 6.1 Billion Served.

The Ulysses Project

The Ulysses Project

I'm sitting outside a Starbucks this morning, feeling like a tourist. You'd think I'd feel like an exile --- sitting outside Starbucks typing away on a Powerbook; it's like a little bit of San Franciso landed on Dame Street --- but I really I feel like a tourist.

See, I've decided to return to the States for grad school; getting to spend time with my family and friends was a major factor in the decision, so on the one hand I'm excited to return.

But I'm also sad at leaving this place. I find it hard to say, precisely, why. Perhaps it's simply that I haven't seen enough, learned enough, met enough people, had enough fun, and I may never get a chance agin. Veni, Vedi, but no Vice, dammit, and that is unsatisfying. There's still plenty of parts of this city, this country, that I haven't gotten to yet.

So I was thinking that I ought to do something to make the most of the time I had left, some kind of mark of my affection for the ol' provincial boghole. And I decided that maybe the best thing would be to finally do something I meant to do before I even arrived.

I'm going to read Ulysses. I have made one previous and rather half-assed attempt, and got about sixty pages in before laying it down one evening and never picking it up again. (The evidence is on the sidebar, but please avert your eyes.)

That's why I feel like a tourist this morning; a Yank outside a Startbucks on College Green, beavering away on a laptop, might be a lot of things. But the same Yank with a copy of Ulysses beside her on the table, well, that just screams "over-earnest Poindexter somehow separated from her tour group."

But this sacrifice to my cultivated savoir faire I'll have to make. Today's Day One of the Project, the May Bank Holiday. I plan to finish up on June 16th, Bloomsday. In between, there will be 900 pages, and fair amount of money blown on Dart tickets, and a lot of pictures.

If you're not familiar with the book, Ulysses is an account of the lives of two men, Stephen Deadalus and Leopold Bloom, as they journey through Dublin in the course of single day (June 16, 1904), their paths occasionally intersecting. Their travels parallel those of Odysseus (or, as the Romans would have it, Ulysses) in the ancient Greek poem The Odessey. It is also, according to the back of my Penguin Classics edition, "an imperishable monument to the human condition," which just makes you want to tuck into a tote along with the beach towels and the suntan lotion, don't it?

I've got to admit I'm a little scared. The paragraph above represents about the sum total of my own knowledge of the plot, and I haven't grappled with modernism since I was an undergraduate English major who could use the phrase "grappled with modernism," with a perfectly straight face (and on a good day, possibly follow it up with an extended metaphor involving Greco-Roman wrestling and the Aeneid).

So don't expect me to get all heavy on ya. I'm planning to err on the side of blithe, and my posts will, I think, be a lot more "book report," than explication du texte. No, the thing I think will really be interesting is the travels; as I read, I plan to follow Leo and Steve on their treks, and take photos of the Dublin I encounter now in 2006 as I go, for your delectation.

Because that's the thing about Dublin in 1904 and Dublin in 2006 --- it seems to me that a lot of the former is still here in the latter, far more so than in any American city, even more than a lot of European ones. (Several of the pub mentioned in the tect are still around.) Mainly because it was spared World War II and was too poor for most of the 20th century to build anything new.

But Dublin is changing. Joyce's book is a broad canvas, a panorama of the Dublin of his day. This will be a mere Kodak Instamatic snapshot. But it will be one taken in tribute.

So: Onto the Martello tower.