‘A brilliant little ramble through time and place’ – Steve Himmer, author of The Bee-Loud Glade
I’ve combined two essays I’ve written into one ebook: ‘Open space: walking the boundaries of Tallaght’ (shortlisted for the Some Blind Alleys essay grant 2012) and ‘The house that wasn’t there: Dave Allen’s ghost stories’.
The ebook is available to download for free from this site.
Both essays deal with an area of landscape around the Killinarden and Kiltipper areas of Tallaght. The first is an autobiographical ramble around Tallaght, attempting to trace the visible and invisible boundaries of the locality. The second discusses the comedian Dave Allen and the influence of storyteller Malachi Horan on his work.
If you have any feedback about the quality of the ebook files (especially the mobi file), please get back to me – I’m keen to hear responses, as this is my first attempt at putting together a digital book.
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TO DOWNLOAD:
Available in two formats (click format to download):
My essay, ‘Open space: walking the boundaries of Tallaght’, has been shortlisted for the Some Blind Alleys essay grant. An online readers’ vote has just opened. You can vote here.
There are seven judges and one public vote. The public vote is weighted as one judge’s vote. The judges are Kevin Barry, Carlo Gébler, Claire Kilroy, Molly McCloskey, Belinda McKeon, Philip O Ceallaigh, Keith Ridgway.
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.
Read the essay on the Some Blind Alleys website here.
Charles Dickens didn’t write the description of Dublin’s Coombe that’s often attributed to him. Instead, in 1853, he dispatched George Sala, a journalist for Dickens’s Household Words, who found in the area:
an almost indescribable aspect of dirt and confusion, semi-continental picturesqueness, shabbiness – less the shabbiness of dirt than that of untidiness – over-population, and frowsiness generally, perfectly original and peculiarly its own.
Read my article about Sala’s visit to Dublin here.
I’ve also written about the Liberties and the Coombe areas here, here, and here.
The Bram Stoker plaque, which had been missing from the facade of 30 Kildare Street, Dublin, mysteriously reappeared over the weekend. It had been absent for three, possibly four, years. I’ve previously written about the plaque for the Guardian here, and on the blog here.
Dr Albert Power, of the Bram Stoker Society writes:
‘On Tuesday 17th I drove specially into the city to check for myself, and – yes, there it was! [...] There’s no doubt that it’s the original plaque and not a replacement. The most recent photograph of it I had seen was John Moore’s from May 2008, when it had been coloured brown: it was blue back in 1983. Furthermore, upon close examination there looks like to be a faint shading or patina along its inner rim, which would suggest storage in a damp place or having been secreted under something which had left an impression. It also looked to me that it was hung ever so slightly askew. [...] It’s quite a while, to the best of my knowledge, since any of us did anything about this, and I for one had regarded the battle (with much sadness) as lost. Maybe the cumulative effect of all these efforts took its intended toll.
In any event – the plaque is back!’
30 Kildare Street before the reinstatement of the plaque
My essay about a walk I undertook around Tallaght last November is online at Some Blind Alleys.
This is how it begins:
‘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.’
This Wednesday 22nd June at 8pm, I’ll be talking about ‘City and Narrative’ in Shebeen Chic, South Great George’s Street, Dublin, as part of the Dublintellectual series of events run by Dr Marisa Ronan. It looks like I’ll be first on, so I’d say it’ll be properly kicking off at 8pm sharpish.
I’ll be discussing perceptions of the city, especially of Dublin. I’ll also discuss the walk I undertook around Tallaght back in November, about which I’ve written an essay (to be published soon).
Other speakers at the event: Andrew Hetherington, Co-Founder of Fund It, and Pat Cooke, from the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, UCD.
To round it all off, there’ll be a roundtable session about funding and the future of the arts in Ireland.
On Easter Monday 2008, Chuck Berry, one of the founding fathers of rock and roll, played a concert in The Grill music venue in Letterkenny. Berry, who made his name writing three minute pop songs about driving his automobile along the open roads of America, must have travelled to the Donegal town from London by a budget airline such as Ryanair, an airline that flies to Derry from its teeming hub in the Essex countryside, Stansted Airport. The image of Berry catching a Ryanair flight from Stansted is not one I can readily imagine. However, at that same airport, I did once stare agape at the Dutch soccer ace Ruud Gullit, who was standing in the same queue as me for a flight to Dublin with that same plucky budget airline, so maybe it’s not all that unlikely.
The Beatles, for whom international air travel became a commonplace during the height of their fame, wrote their song, ‘Back in the USSR’ about a BOAC flight from the USA to the USSR. This was partially a tribute to the Beach Boys song ‘California Girls’, but for the most part was based on Chuck Berry’s song ‘Back in the USA’, a 1959 composition where he sings, as his jet comes in to land, of how much he missed the highways and skyscrapers of America.
Cadillac Coupe de Ville, 1950
The thing is, Chuck Berry didn’t really write about going places by plane; he was mostly concerned with getting back to his beloved America, with its drive-ins and jukeboxes; his subjects were always about having cars and girls – or getting more cars and girls. (One lyric painstakingly documents Chuck’s attempt at trading in his ‘broken-down raggedy Ford’ for a ‘yellow convertible four-door’ Cadillac Coupe de Ville; he even goes as far as specifying the kind of insurance cover he requires for his new vehicle.)
His obsessions weighed heavily upon his real life too: in 1959 he was arrested under the Mann Act – which banned the interstate transport of females for ‘immoral purposes’ – for an incident involving a 14 year old girl he had brought from Mexico to work in his nightclub in St. Louis. Berry vehemently denied the charges, but was sentenced to five years for the incident, and wrote some of his best songs while incarcerated. He was released from prison at the end of 1963, and a subsequent single, ‘No Particular Place To Go,’ was an instant hit, getting to number ten in the Billboard Hot 100.
Berry’s songs were forged in an era when the rhythm and blues of black musicians was being reshaped into the rough and ready melodic form that became known as rock and roll. Berry was signed to Chess Records in Chicago, a renowned blues label that recorded artists such as John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. Although Chuck Berry has been called one of the originators of rock and roll, it is hard to place when exactly it began, but there is much agreement that it started with a single record.
The record is called ‘Rocket 88’, and it was recorded in March 1951 by two rock and roll legends: Ike Turner and Sam Phillips. Accounts differ as to which was the actual day of recording, but many historians agree that the melding of distorted guitar and galloping drums with twelve-bar blues was the beginning of something bigger.
Ike Turner would later record classic tracks with his wife Tina, such as ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ and ‘Nutbush City Limits’; Sam Phillips was the man behind Sun Studios, run out of a small corner unit on a street in Memphis, Tennessee. Phillips would later discover the young Elvis Presley, and produce his early records.
‘Rocket 88’ was credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, but was actually performed by Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm. Jackie Brenston was the band’s saxophonist who added his urgent plaintive vocals to the track. Ike Turner played piano on the song, coming up with a staccato introduction that would later be lifted note-for-note by Little Richard for ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’.
Like many of Berry’s compositions, the song was effectively a hymn to a car: in this case the Oldsmobile ‘Rocket’ 88, a model that had only recently gone into production, at the end of the 1940s. Driven by a powerful engine, it was fast and efficient – the song praises the Oldsmobile’s ‘V-8 motor’ and its ‘modern design,’ contrasting it with rickety old ‘jalopies… and the sound they make’.
The song had been recorded for Chess Records by Sam Phillips, who worked out of the studio he had built the year before in a converted radiator shop at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis. The premises was so small there was no room for an office, and he had to conduct business in Miss Taylor’s Restaurant next door (usually at the ‘third booth by the window’, Phillips told writer Peter Guralnick).
Rock and roll went on to become a multi-million dollar industry, and some of the originators felt, inevitably, that they never got what they thought due to them. Sam Phillips sold Elvis Presley’s contract to RCA for what turned out to be a derisory sum, but made money elsewhere with some canny investments. Ike Turner felt demonised for his mistreatment of Tina, and in his later years (he died in December 2007) he found refuge in his status as one of the founders of rock and roll. But Chuck Berry is still on the road, keeping it rolling, not behind the wheel of a Cadillac, but by short-haul flight.
“It seems I’m happier writing away from, rather than towards, something. I arrived here at the height of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and therefore into an awful lot of smugness, which didn’t mix well with the country’s inherent parochialism and insularity. The smugness seems well and truly smashed now… A lot of the poetry written in Ireland appears far too preoccupied with the idea of ‘Ireland’. It places huge emphasis on place in rather territorial terms. And there’s generally an aversion to experimentalism. Poetry that uses ‘unpoetic’ language or plays around with convention is looked upon (at best) as an entertaining oddity. With few – but striking – exceptions, the ‘scene’ is dominated by a small number of established organisations which have an interest in maintaining the status quo.”
From an interview with SJ Fowler in 3:AM Magazinehere.
When I think of the markets in Dublin, I think of overcast Saturday afternoons spent circling the deserted streets around the market buildings, camera in hand, recording the intricate stonework decorating the corners of the sheds. On walks such as this, I’d have made my way from Dawson Street, around the area surrounding St Patrick’s Cathedral, up Francis Street in the Liberties, down the hill from St Audeon’s Church, onto Church Street on the Northside, near the Four Courts. The streets at the back of the Four Courts, where the Luas runs along, have their own particular ambience: the terraced houses that adjoin Church Street provide a dense, atmospheric, network similar to the houses around Blackpitts on the South of the city.
Often, when walking near the markets buildings, I would stop and think about what they were like in their heyday, when surely they were busier than they are now: were the narrow corridors between fruit and vegetable stands constantly thronged by customers coming and going? Were the streets outside full to bursting with carts and carriages?
A lot of nineteeth century architecture in the central city forces me to think this way: what was it like back when it really mattered? Of course, this might just be a nostalgic projection provided by my own wishing that Dublin must have been relevant at some point in the past. The former Irish Parliament building on College Green, now the Bank of Ireland, was an illusory centre of Irish political life in the nineteenth century – the real power being vested in the Westminster parliament in London. It was an empty centre: Ireland was then a peripheral part of the British Empire, and now stands on the edge of Europe, both geographically and in terms of its political relevance to the wider European Union.
But what can you make of the psychological effect of this emptiness at the core, instituted perhaps by the shadow-puppetry of colonial assuagement, but nonetheless preserved meticulously, unthinkingly, right up to the present day? One aspect: an enduring scepticism about the real worth of institutions combined with a compulsive habit of tipping one’s hat to power, in the absence of anything else to do with one’s hat. Governmental, media [insert the name of the state broadcaster and major national newspaper you are currently thinking of here]: any institution gets it in the neck verbally, but no one knows what to do in order to occasion any tangible change. The net result: no change of any substance. This is the kind of impotence that makes Dublin, and Ireland in general, a circle of hell for anyone inclined to interrogate it in this way. Better to keep your head in the sand. Better, indeed, to get on with the business of living: commute expensively, accumulate, keep your taxes low and your house prices high; pave; re-tile; repeat ad nauseam.
