‘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):

epub (compatible with most non-Kindle ereaders)

mobi (compatible with Kindle ereaders)

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.

Download it in PDF here.

Eric Hazan, author of The Invention of Paris, will be speaking at the Alliance Française in Dublin next Tuesday 21 February at 6.30pm. More information here.

Click here for my review of the book and here for my interview with Hazan, conducted when the English language edition of The Invention of Paris was published.

I think Paris had a very particular growth: it grew like an onion, with a series of concentric layers. And that gives a quite special geography to the city, which is not exactly the same as it is here [London] for instance. And what was striking, when I began to work [on the book] was how sharp can be the border between one quartier and another one. Elsewhere in the city, it’s less precise, and even there can be transition – small pieces of the city – and all that makes, when you walk through the city, a very special psychogeography. I think it’s because the layers are so densely connected; there is this extremely dense – much more than here – there is nothing like what we call in French terrain vague: space, imprecise, where there is nothing, with not exact borders.

George Augustus Sala

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.

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. )

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Me with the 'Soccer in Tallaght' Luas Citywest poster; photo: Eamonn Hoban-Shelley

A few months ago I approached the Railway Procurement Agency (RPA) to see if they’d be interested in putting posters up at their stops along the new Luas tram line to Saggart, known as ‘Luas Citywest’. The line wasn’t yet open, but I knew that it was due to begin operations in June or July. I had started work as a local history researcher in South Dublin Libraries, and much of my research up until that point had been into the Saggart area. I saw an opportunity to put some of this research, and the visual content we have in our digital archive, out there, so it could be seen by passengers during the couple of minutes they wait for the next tram. I also thought it would be something fun to do. Ultimately, I wanted to put something at each station that I – and, hopefully, other people – would be interested in reading.

Aviation poster on a shelter at Belgard Luas station

In searching for precedents for this sort of thing, I looked towards France. I really admire the history posters on the Paris Métro, and a few months ago Laura and I stopped at the Hôtel de Ville Métro station in order to see the array of posters on display there, and to take some photos.

Raymond Queneau poster at Hotel de Ville Metro station, Paris

The aims of the Parisian project were, in the words of the RATP website:

‘[to make] the general public aware of the historical and cultural value of unknown or little-known aspects of the transportation network and its surroundings […] The information boards provide a link between the overarching historical picture and the personal stories, as well as between the transport facility and the surrounding urban area, enriching passengers’ travel experience.’

I kept these aspirations in mind when sketching out my own proposal. In this, I had the help and support of Maria Fitzgerald and Freya Smith – the project archaeologists from the RPA who both managed the poster project and were heavily involved in the creative process, including the research and writing of two of the six posters, at Fettercairn and Saggart. My boss at South Dublin Libraries, Síle Coleman, was extremely active in the sourcing of specific heritage material to illustrate the posters to a strict deadline (of which more later).

Luas poster: 'Aviation in Belgard and Baldonnel'

I had earmarked six stops for the heritage poster treatment: Belgard, Fettercairn, Cheeverstown, Citywest, Fortunestown and Saggart. I knew I wanted each poster to address a specific theme, and in the end we settled on: Aviation, Tower Houses and Dublin’s Frontiers, Soccer, Industry, the Dublin and Blessington Steam Tramway, and the archaeology of Saggart.

We already had extensive holdings for some of these topics: we had visual material about the airstrip at Belgard, the Library has published books about the tramway and the Urney factory on Belgard Road, and the RPA has published a pamphlet (PDF) on the archaeology along the Citywest line. (I’ve also written about the tramway for the Irish Times here.)

'Soccer in Tallaght' poster

What we didn’t have was much on soccer in Tallaght, but this was soon remedied with material gathered from Richard, a Shamrock Rovers fan who works in the library, and from the collection of photos held by Tallaght Stadium. For the Aviation poster, we had hoped to get clearance from the New York Post for the famous ‘backwards’ headline related to Douglas ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan’s solo flight across the Atlantic to Baldonnel, but we were sadly unable to achieve this before deadline. So here it is:

New York Post; source: Wikipedia

In the end, having spent a few months thinking about the posters, they were written and produced to deadline in just over a week: between the 19th and the 28th of July. And now, a couple of weeks after that, they’ve gone up at the stops. Get along to see them, if you can: they’re up for the month of August only!

See all the posters at the South Dublin Libraries site or the Luas site.

We’re organising a free guided heritage walk of Saggart at 2pm on Saturday 20th August. Find out more here.

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.

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.

I switched on the radio instinctively, as if I was going to hear news reports about the end of the world on TSF Jazz, interrupting some interminable vocal jazz performance.

In the end, though, it turned out that this is just a test: the sirens are tested on the first Wednesday of every month, all over Paris. One of the reasons for the sirens being used is that they need to be kept in shape just in case of nuclear war. Perhaps not the cheeriest way of looking at things, but practical too, I suppose.

The effect of hearing the sirens ring out across the city is to drag one back to a primal time where everything one did in everyday life was carried out under threat of war. The sound of sirens would trigger a set of responses that were almost programmed, so habitual had they become: run for shelter, wait for things to pass, put out lights. Cower and wait. All these actions ran through my mind when I first heard the sirens, as if I was regressing to a long-ago rehearsed set of habits that weren’t necessarily my own. When the sirens were again set off at 12.10, I expected them (I had instantly done an internet search to find an explanation), and even recorded them on video for posterity. This is how the most unusual phenomenon come to be accepted in everyday life: through repetition, which, when carried out enough times, breeds familiarity, then invisibility.