Read my story about the return of the Bram Stoker commemorative plaque in today’s Irish Times here. (Scroll beyond Tony Clayton-Lee’s article.)

Find out more about the plaque’s disappearance: my Guardian article from 2010 here and previous blogposts here and here.

Stoker plaque at 30 Kildare Street. Photo by Warren Whitney.

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.

30 Kildare Street before the reinstatement of the plaque

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. )

From The Readymades’ Facebook page:

‘Holten has expanded the scope of the contemporary novel’
— Brian Dillon

To mark the first Irish presentation of John Holten’s novel The Readymades Broken Dimanche Press are pleased to announce an evening discussion between Holten and writer and journalist Karl Whitney.

Holten has created a unique fiction that uses a variety of forms, genres and found texts to tell the story of Đorđe Bojić and the LGB art group. In collaboration with the Serbian artist and filmmaker Darko Dragicević, they have resurrected contemporaneously a catalogue of LGB artworks from 1995-2007 that accompany the story of The Readymades.

BDP, together with our new partners at Galerie Gojković, will be presenting this work through exhibitions that will mark the launch of the book across Europe this autumn. We’ve already started in Oslo at Gallery 1857 in August, and this discussion will lay the ground for a further Dublin intervention in the coming weeks.

This fiction is on-going; the novel is dead, long live the novel! Time for a fight

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.’

Continue Reading here.

“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 Magazine here.

30 Kildare Street. The space where the plaque had been attached is visible between the two ground floor windows.

The plaque had been erected by the Bram Stoker Society on 27th July 1983, and Albert Power wrote recently, in his excellent history of the Society that it was ‘without doubt [...] the most significant achievement of the Bram Stoker Society in these early years’. (The Society had formed in 1980, and was based in Trinity College.)

Present at the unveiling were Leslie Shepard, Chairman of the Bram Stoker Society, Ann Stoker, the author’s granddaughter, Ivan Stoker Dixon, great nephew of Stoker, and the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Michael Keating. According to the Irish Times report on the occasion, two coachloads of schoolchildren passed by during the ceremony, shouting ‘Up Dracula!’ Stoker Dixon, an actor, then performed a portion of his one-man-show, ‘From Clontarf to Castle Dracula’ for the crowd.

Dublin Tourism were heavily involved in the unveiling (the organisation was responsible for the erection of plaques within the city, and each plaque bore the Dublin Tourism name), and its chairman, Gerry Byrne, gave a brief biographical talk at the ceremony.

The plaque, photographed in September 2006

When I rang Dublin Tourism in November to ask where their plaque had gone, they said it wasn’t their responsibility; that I should talk to someone in the city council.

I eventually established a narrative of the plaque’s disappearance: the building, which had been occupied by a solicitor’s firm, was sold in June 2006 for €2.3 million. In the adverts in the property section prior to the auction, the auctioneer emphasised that the building was ‘of historical note’ because of its association with Stoker, and showed a close-up of the plaque.

The building was sold to the Shelbourne Development group, who acquired the adjoining buildings at 31 and 32 in the same year. Their properties on Kildare Street are blurbed on the Shelbourne website here. The building is now occupied by a plastic surgery clinic, which moved in to the property in September 2008.

I attempted to contact Shelbourne Development, who, as my Guardian article pointed out, have many pressing problems at the moment; they failed to reply to my correspondence.

The plaque disappeared at some point between September 2006 (when I photographed it) and September 2008, when the clinic moved into the building.

The responsibility for the plaque lies with the owner of the building. Astoundingly, however, it seems that a plaque can be removed from a building by an owner at his/her own discretion. I have heard this several times, both first-hand and second-hand. However, if a building is listed as a protected structure, the owner must secure planning permission before making structural or cosmetic changes to a building.

The building at 30 Kildare Street is listed in the Dublin City Development Plan as a protected structure:

Planning permission was never sought to remove the plaque, nor, presumably, would it have been granted. As the plaque was removed without permission, it should be reinstated.

The present Faubourg retains few material traces of this glorious past, and only the friends of Red Paris mentally raise their hats when they cross Rue Charles-Delescluze and remember that at the crossroads of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine and Rue de Cotte they are on the site of the barricade where the representative of the people Alphonse Baudin was killed for twenty-five francs. But even if the proximity of the Bastille Opera now disagreeably contaminates the first few metres of the Faubourg, even if Rue de Lappe, long since deserted by the Auvergnats, is no longer the haven that it once was for modern art, still the Aligre market, the fountains on the corner of Rue de Charonne and in the square in front of the Saint-Antoine hospital, the courtyards where illustrators and computer buffs, Chinese artisans and photographers, work cheek by jowl – this unique mixture maintains the quarter’s identity as plebeian and industrious. If, taking up Marcel Duchamp’s idea, we should manufacture cans of Air de Paris, it is certainly that of Faubourg Saint-Antoine with which I would fill mine. (124)

Eric Hazan will be in conversation with Iain Sinclair in London’s Institut Francais this Wednesday 3rd March. (Details here.)