RSS
 

Archive for the ‘endotic’ Category

Where am I and what am I doing? Writing about Parisian geography

14 Oct

At the bibliothèque Couronnes, a Perec mural

My essay on Georges Perec, the Situationists and Parisian geography appears in the third issue of the White Review, published this week.

I stood near the columbarium at Père Lachaise cemetery. I was there to see the locker-like vault containing the ashes of Georges Perec, kept alongside those of his aunt, Esther Bienenfeld. To the right of the plaque bearing their names and dates someone had affixed a wildflower to the wall with a Tom and Jerry sticking plaster. The columbarium contains thousands of urns stacked in a two-storey grid along one wall of the arcade. Its cloister-like arches surround the domed crematorium and its looming chimneys.

The grid became an obsession for Perec – his Lieux project and his novel la Vie mode d’emploi were planned using 12 by 12 and 10 by 10 grids respectively. Rather than being a limiting structure that undermined a creative impulse, the grid was seen as a constraint that would aid composition (in line with the literary group Oulipo’s view of the literary uses of limitation).

Perec’s Lieux project focused on 12 places in Paris, one of which was rue Vilin, the street where he had lived as a child.

Rue Vilin is in the neighbourhood of Belleville, in north-eastern Paris, and stands on hills overlooking the city centre. Perec’s Jewish family lived in an area described by his biographer David Bellos as ‘a whole Yiddish town within sight of the Eiffel Tower.’ While this street had an obvious emotional resonance for the writer, Perec sought to record his experience there as ‘simply, flatly’ as he could. A series of descriptive texts of each place made up one half of his project – the other half consisting of his memories of the same places. Perec’s descriptions of the rue Vilin capture a place that’s about to be erased: long designated a slum area, it has been marked for extensive redevelopment and reconstruction. It is far from a stable repository for Perec’s past.

Read more of the essay at the White Review. Or order a copy of issue three to read the whole article.

(Illustrator Badaude has contributed a poster to the same issue of The White Review that looks at Perec’s Tentative d’ épuisement d’un lieu Parisien; read her illustrated post about it here – I particularly like the tracing of pigeon trajectories around the place Saint Sulpice, something Perec does in his text. )

 
2 Comments

Posted in articles, cartoons, endotic, Essays, France, geography, history, Literature, modernism, Paris, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

Rue Monge: A guide to getting lost

29 Sep

Walking around the neighbourhood entails finding routes that aren’t immediately obvious to you when you arrive. Finding short-cuts and taking the long way around become activities you can pursue at leisure. Turn left along rue Linné, up the hill towards the Roman arena, hidden away behind the buildings on Rue Monge, then left again into Square Capitan; having wandered aimlessly in the park, realising that it connects with the arena, you walk down the hill, turning right alongside the university, then up rue des Écoles, pausing to look at the upcoming films in the Grand Action cinema. Transcribing the date and time of one of the films (François Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine (Day for Night) at 20h on October 5th), you swerve left up the hill, then onto Rue Monge, taking a side street back towards the mosque on rue des Quatrefages, then back towards your point of origin, a square quiet at night, but now, near lunchtime, teeming with university students, mingling with wandering children of secondary school age.

Georges Perec lived at the apartment building at 13 rue Linné. When I passed it, I photographed the building from across the street, then crossed and took a picture of the courtyard, a bicycle visible inside the gate, leaning against a wall.

The urge to wander has struck me in every city I’ve visited, even those towns in the American west that lack event the most basic amenities for pedestrians (e.g., footpaths). While walking these towns and cities I’m motivated by two impulses: the impulse to get lost, to find new streets and corners of the city; and the impulse to map new territory, to utilise the newly discovered places of the city to aid future navigation. The getting lost is play: it is loose and undefined, and allows you to make mistakes and then correct them, without the pressure of having to conform to the framework of a map, an adherence to which may restrict your wandering.

Nevertheless, my journey this morning was also informed by a sketchy knowledge of the geography of the area: rue Monge runs along a steep hill, sloping down towards the Seine. In walking uphill, you are invariably heading south. Although, just to mix things up a little, this is not always the case: small hills derail you from any over-determined geography of the area, injecting a sense of play into proceedings once you realise you’ve left your map of Paris on the kitchen table.

 
No Comments

Posted in Cinema, endotic, France, geography, Paris, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

The City’s Edge: Dublin in Fragments 3

13 Jul

Living in the centre of the city is both heaven and hell. Preferring the latter, I attempted to investigate the infernal underground workings of the area, drawn to the gloomy inky-dark streets of the south inner city. I lived just off a road called Blackpitts – its name a reference to the filthy puddles left by the River Poddle when its flow abated during the summer months. The street is built directly over the course of the river. I often wondered whether ‘Filthy Puddle’ wouldn’t be a better translation of Dubh Linn, one which would undoubtedly lend the city’s name a subversive undertow. Blackpitts is tucked to the west of Clanbrassil Street, down a short incline that hints at the presence of the river: the slopes on either side of Blackpitts are the valley, and the street itself is a substitute for the subterranean river that runs below.

Blackpitts is the gateway to a dense warren of streets packed with terraced houses and small factories, under all of which a complex network of man-made rivers runs. The houses date from different points over the last hundred or so years: the redbrick terraces grouped around Hammond and St John’s streets (this area was where I lived for a few years) are from the last years of the nineteenth century, and are the product of the Dublin Artisan Dwelling Company, who also built the terraces in Stoneybatter. Just behind the redbricks off Blackpitts is the area known as the Tenters, named after the ‘tents’ of flax fibres stretched out to dry on frames across the fields in the days when weavers were based in the locality. Houses were built here in the 1920s.

But it wasn’t just the history of the area around Blackpitts that interested me. Desirable as a place to live because of its proximity to the city centre, it was targeted in a serious way for redevelopment. It was an area that was far from settled: on a daily basis you could trace the changes as your footsteps drew you towards long-deserted warehouses, past fenced-off tracts of waste ground from which an old building had recently been cleared.

While the boom years made Dublin a site of constant flux in terms of property development, nowhere was the tension between construction and destruction more obvious to me than in the area where I lived. One day, as I walked down the street, a row of redbrick houses were being knocked down, brick-by-brick. I had previously thought the houses to be occupied – there were bicycles chained to the railings outside, and they otherwise showed no more signs of neglect than did my own residence. Half-knocked now, the lower floors of their front facade stood, sawn off just at the sill of the upstairs window, a spooky reminder of what was yet to be erased completely. The clinical precision with which the operation was being carried out made the top of the wall seem as sharp as a razor’s edge, when glimpsed in silhouette against the dull afternoon sky.

At the end of Blackpitts is Newmarket Square, an immense windswept plateau bordered by anonymous redbrick warehouses used by multinationals for document storage, and, at the western end, a cluttered and uncomfortable looking apartment development. A shuttered pub, Grey’s of Newmarket, stands at the north centre, on a corner where a road opens onto the new Cork Street extension. This pub was the scene of a gangland killing in 2004, and is one of a number of pubs that have been shut down in the Liberties area.

At number 48 Newmarket Square was a rooming house where Lily O’Neill, a young woman known as Honor Bright, lived; she was murdered in 1925, her body found on a quiet mountain road to the south of the city. Working as a prostitute, Lily made her way from her lodgings on the night of her murder along New Row, past St Patrick’s Cathedral towards Bishop Street, and onwards towards St Stephen’s Green. That walk was less than a mile, but it bridged two sharply contrasting worlds.

One of the streets she walked down, New Row, had also been built over the Poddle river – an early version of the streetname was New Row-on-Poddle. The point where the street meets the western end of the Coombe also marks the confluence of two different branches of the river, where the network of streams rejoins the Poddle proper. This is where George Sala, on an assignment in 1853 for Charles Dickens’s Household Words magazine, had found ‘semi-continental picturesqueness’ amongst the dirt and poverty of the Coombe’s inhabitants.

Tracking the different branches of the Poddle could occupy someone for weeks. For a while I became obsessed with tracking it, believing that an unlovely, unloved and largely hidden river was more valuable than those more celebrated watercourses: the Seine, the Thames, even the Liffey. I believed that its very insignificance held the key to its significance. That it was banished from sight as a result of its unholy stench made it even more intriguing. Yet it also emerged above ground briefly in the oddest places.

One day, I went a few steps from my house, and tried to find an exposed stretch of the river that appeared on maps of the area. In the grounds of Warrenmount Convent, I asked a groundskeeper about the river, and he brought me to the point where it had appeared on the map. A forbidding stone wall of at least ten feet in height, marking the extent of the convent’s grounds, stopped me in my tracks. There was no sign of the river within the boundary of the convent.

However, when I stopped and listened, I could hear the unmistakeable burbling of water, and I decided that it must be coming from the other side of the wall.

On the other side of the wall was a yard, used as a car-park by an Irish telephone company. As I walked onto the property, a guard emerged from his office, and told me I couldn’t continue my trespassing. I explained my reasons for being there, and eventually he relented, and pointed me towards the far corner of the car-park, where the gravel surface broke into scrubby waste-ground, and where there stood a couple of trees, which must have been 100 or so years old.

There, flowing freely along the other side of the convent wall, I found the Poddle – or, at least, one of its branches – and after a couple of minutes spent admiring it, I walked away satisfied, and the river disappeared from view once again.

 
No Comments

Posted in dublin, endotic, geography, history, ireland, Love and Death, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

The City’s Edge: Dublin in Fragments 1

08 Jul

Viewed on a map’s surface, as the city embraces the Irish Sea and lazily asses itself out towards Ireland’s midlands, Dublin appears curvy and welcoming, but, in person, it’s spiky and wants you to go fuck yourself. The Spire, a stainless steel needle that reached 400 feet into the air on O’Connell Street, is often nicknamed the Spike by those wishing it to stand humorously as a symbol of hard drug use in the inner city, but I prefer to think of it as a representation of the metallic, unyielding, non-stick attitude of Dublin and Dubliners in general. The city has an edge. As an additional point of comparison, it’s difficult to get a decent view of the Spire in the city centre. You can wander around the low-rise centre without ever seeing it at all; the same goes for Dublin. It’s simultaneously there and not there. For me, Dublin is still a great unknown, and I’ve lived here nearly all of my life.

This realisation led me to set myself tasks: would I be able to describe Dublin – not neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood, and not necessarily through its history – in a way that reflected what I think I already know about it, while also acknowledging that there are things about a city that constantly change, that you know only briefly before they’re spirited away, and there are things that you may never know.

Dublin is a place I hate; Dublin is a place I love. Both feelings jostle around inside of me as I make my way around the city’s streets by foot, by bike, by bus. I’ve never committed to either love or to hate the city, but often I decide on a position, before changing my mind later. I never really thought I did love the city, but sometimes I find myself doing so, before stopping myself. Sometimes the late evening light catches a stubby Georgian street a certain way, and you’re transported briefly to a transcendental city, one where you haven’t just stepped in someone’s vomit.

Dublin, most of all, is a city of fragments. It’s been broken into pieces. These pieces are spread around the map, and often, no matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to connect them all. Sometimes it’s impossible to connect any. This is partly a product of bad planning, partly because our minds rebel against the overwhelming experience of city life, and all we have left are fragments of urban experience to hang on to.

And this is the way I want to approach Dublin: through fragmentary glances down its streets and alleys, through midnight rambles in its industrial estates and exploratory hikes amongst its suburbs. Dublin is knowable through its fragments, or it’s not knowable at all.

In a way, all cities are the ruins of past civilizations, and Dublin is no different in this. The city, especially at its threadbare fringes and its sharp edges, testifies the recent death of a dream that consisted of full employment and house ownership for all. Incomplete developments that loom over country roads and adjoin supermarket car-parks concretize the optimism once felt about an ever-expanding property market, an optimism undermined by economic collapse. These estates are at times melancholy places, at times sites of a pioneer optimism. They are undoubtedly part of Dublin, but are also isolated fragments cast to the North, South and West of the city, thrown there by cheap land, the greased wheels of planning and good transportation links.

Dublin: pointy, sharp, steely, desperate, broken into pieces. Coming to a town near you, or it would be if you weren’t already there.

 
No Comments

Posted in dublin, economy, endotic, geography, history, ireland, urbanism, vaguely spooky travelogues

 

The Poddle: Dublin’s Unruly Underground River

14 Jun

Firhouse weir

I’m standing on the edge of a stone precipice beside the weir, peering down into the water as it violently crashes and breaks on the rocks below. Behind me, the hiss of tyres is audible: the ancient weir on the river Dodder in Firhouse is now concealed by the M50 motorway, and stands in the shadow of the imposing Tallaght interchange. On the hill immediately above me looms a concrete works, a landmark of the area, visible from miles away.

The view from the top of the weir at Firhouse

The area around the weir has changed a lot since Henry F. Berry, writing in 1891, suggested that his readers take a walk down to the weir from the main road, noting that ‘a steep irregular lane-way leads to it from the Blessington high road’. Now that lane leads from a network of footpaths that run around and across the motorway.

This weir played an extremely important role in the provision of Dublin’s first municipal water supply, and dates back in some form to before 29 April 1244. It was on that date the Lord Justiciar of Ireland, Maurice Fitzgerald, issued a writ seeking the establishment of a reliable source of fresh water to be carried to the city via the river Poddle.

The Priory of St Thomas owned Firhouse weir, and the city authorities soon came to an agreement with them: water would be redirected from the weir via a small canal to join up with the course of the Poddle in Templeogue.

As I stood at the top of the weir, I could still see, among the sprawling undergrowth, how the system of sluice gates would have diverted the water into the canal and towards the Poddle, a mile downstream. These still visible features date from the nineteenth century, when Andrew Coffey, the waterworks superintendent, reconstructed the weir. The channel in the direction of Templeogue is also discernible, although it’s now overgrown with wild flowers and weeds.

A sluice gate

The rerouted flow joined the Poddle, but ran with it for only a few miles until it reached ‘Tongue field’ in Kimmage, near Mount Argus. At this point, the river was divided by a cutwater called the ‘tongue’ or the ‘stone boat’. The Stoneboat pub on Sundrive Road is named after this feature.

The stone boat, which still exists, looks like an overturned clothes iron, a flat surface with a sharp point facing upstream. One sunny day over the summer, I sat on it and watched the water flow by. Now refurbished – presumably by the developers of the housing estate that now surrounds the river – the stone boat divided the flow of the river, allowing two thirds to flow north along the main course of the Poddle.

The Stone Boat, Kimmage

The other third flowed west along what was known as the City Watercourse, under the Grand Canal, through Dolphin’s Barn and into the City Basin, near James’s Street. The Basin served as a reservoir, with fresh water being channelled along James’s Street to the city. Initially the Basin only supplied Dublin Castle, but within ten years it also catered for most of the citizens.

The city watercourse formed part of a labyrinthine network of diversions from the main course of the Poddle that flowed through the area between James’s Street and South Circular Road. The diverted streams brought water to the mills that were once so numerous in the area. These streams still flow, but they’re now underground, so you need to know where to look: one flows above ground next to a car park off Donore Avenue, another flows through a derelict site against the back wall of Warrenmount Convent, near Ardee Street.

When I went to find these locations, the streams still flowed with quite a strong current, and the babbling sound made by the water seemed to impose for a moment a contemplative quiet on the wholly urban scene it flowed through.

Channelled and culverted for around 800 years, the Poddle can still bare its claws from time to time, when the wildness of nature reasserts itself and this little river, for so long apparently tamed, overflows. The river is for the most part covered over from Kimmage to the city centre, and as a result it is usually ignored by many, but periodically – forcefully – it makes its presence felt to the people who live and work along its course.

The heavy rain that fell on Friday April 4th 1823 caused a flood ‘so great on Saturday morning that the water flowed over the Street in Thomas Court and Pimlico’, an inspector’s report of the time recorded. The storms that lashed Ireland in October 1987 caused the Poddle to swell and flood the gardens of houses under which it flows on Lower Kimmage Road. The following January, one side of the road was closed so that the Corporation could re-cover the unruly river.

Residents of an apartment block in Newmarket Square weren’t aware their building was built on the river until the underground car park flooded in December 1997. Water from the river flowed into apartments and flooded Mill Street, including the basement of the Tenters’ Pub. ‘There was water up to the bonnets of the cars in the streets,’ one witness observed.

As the name suggests, Mill Street had for a time been the site of a millpond, recorded in 1829 as belonging to a Mr Busby. The eastern corner of Newmarket Square is also sited above the confluence of a number of streams, which then flow under New Row towards St Patrick’s Cathedral.

The meandering and subterranean character of the Poddle lends it much of its charm; the river’s numerous diversions and hidden courses imbue it with an enigmatic quality, ensuring it remains, as one Irish Times journalist labelled it in 1901, ‘that mysterious underground river.’

 
7 Comments

Posted in dublin, endotic, geography, Travel, vaguely spooky travelogues