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

‘My ambition, as Author, my point, I would go so far as to say my fixation, my constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an artifact that would, or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on notions of construction, of narration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word, on fiction-writing today.’

 - Georges Perec, A Void, trans. Gilbert Adair

The National division is effectively the third tier of French football, and Red Star, having just been promoted, are having a difficult time of it, especially at home. They’ve only won three games – one at home, two away (including a freakishly high 4-0 result against Paris F.C. at the Stade Charléty). So hopes were low coming into Friday night’s match, and were repayed by an insipid performance, with the Saint-Ouen side giving away an early goal. Red Star’s listless defence was repeatedly breached by an enterprising Ajaccio side, and they were lucky to go in only a goal down at half-time.

The second half began positively for Red Star, as they began to put together the kind of passing and movement that they’ve proved capable of in the past. But then, on 56 minutes, Ajaccio’s Colleredo scored the second, and Red Star had virtually no response. A frantic round of substitutions followed, but it made no difference. At the end of the game, as booing rang out, only two Red Star players came over to acknowledge the crowd. One lingered, and ended up being involved in a verbal spat with the fans. 2-0 to Ajaccio.

Stade Charlety

Getting to Red Star’s stadium, you leave the Clignancourt metro station and pass the huge markets at Saint-Ouen. In contrast, you can arrive at the Stade Charléty on a tram – and the station’s right next to the turnstiles. Running late, I climbed from the tram and heard the referee’s whistle signalling the start of play. But I was in my seat with three minutes gone, in time to see Paris FC’s well-taken goal in the fifth minute.

I thought I was in for a free-flowing and entertaining game, but instead things settled into a niggly pattern, with some hard tackling down the sideline, tight passing but little expansive play. I settled into trying to judge the capacity of the stadium (it’s about 20,000) and guessing how many people were in the crowd (about 300-400, I’d say). It was well into the second half before Arnaud Soquet went on an audacious solo dribble from near the halfway line that ended with him putting it past the Bayonne keeper from about 15 yards. Soquet’s run was achieved in part through passing the ball past opposition players, who each panicked in turn. The Paris FC forward showed real class and composure, and it’s little surprise that he’s been called up to the French under-20 squad. The Bayonnais turned up the heat on 90 minutes, with a brilliant curling goal from distance that made the added time distinctly uncomfortable for the home side.

During the game, I noticed something: goalkeepers, rather than taking long kicks downfield in the English fashion, were passing the ball to well placed defenders, who then tried to work attacking moves through midfield. This is the French third division, and everything’s played to feet. What’s the explanation, cultural differences?

I scrabbled about blindly in the undergrowth in the park in south Dublin. The fact was: Dave Allen’s house just wasn’t to be found. The old building where the comedian grew up had once stood on a site close to the swathes of knotted, twisted foliage I was currently fighting off – but the house had been knocked down in 1986. The morning was cool and bright, yet it felt like darkest night due to the canopy of vegetation hanging above me. Having the vaguest sense of being followed, and feeling slightly spooked, I ducked through an old stone doorway. It led into yet more jungle, so I struck instead towards the football pitches that adjoin the Firhouse Road, and into the light of day.

Dave Allen had been born David Tynan O’Mahony on 6 July 1936. He had lived near where I was standing, in Cherryfield House, on the stretch of land that’s now a public park running along the river Dodder. This had been where, on cold winter nights, the comedian’s father assembled his family to tell them stories of the macabre and the supernatural. Later, during his television programmes, Allen would insist that the studio lights be lowered as he told a ghostly tale; these moments recalled the sense of anticipation and fear experienced when his father began to tell stories by the fireside.

Cherryfield House (from South Dublin Libraries collection)

Allen once wrote that his father had ‘a natural flair for the narrative. Sometimes in the evenings he gathered my brothers and me around the hearth to tell us a story before we went to bed. They were frequently true, and often associated with Irish history, but there was always a special air of apprehension and excitement when he related one of his suspense stories, of which he had an endless collection.’

His father, Gerard John Cullen Tynan O’Mahony – known more simply as ‘Cullie’ – was the general manager of the Irish Times. Brian O’Nolan, Austin Clarke – who lived a little further down the Dodder, at Templeogue – and many other literary figures numbered amongst the guests at Cherryfield, not least when Cullie celebrated his birthday each New Year. ‘My father was born on New Year’s Day in 1900,’ Dave Allen explained. ‘He was the first baby born in Ireland in the new century. And, consequently, there was a fairly good shindig every New Year’s Eve.’

In 1974, Allen collected a series of ghost stories by authors such as Bram Stoker and M.R. James under the title A Little Night Reading. In the introduction, he credited another storytelling influence, ‘an old man with white hair and a flowing beard, who lived in the village and whom I believed to be a hundred years old.’ He calls this man ‘Old Malachi Horn’ – although his name is more usually rendered as Malachi Horan. In his account, Allen says that, as a child, he spent days listening to Horan’s storytelling: ‘I used to play truant from school just to go for a ride in his pony and trap, and listen to legends of wild banshees and headless coachmen.’

Allen’s estimate of Horan’s age is surprisingly accurate: the storyteller died in 1946, aged 98. Rather than living in a village, however, Horan lived in a thatched cottage at the top of Killinarden Hill near Tallaght, which is where Dr George A. Little found him in the early 1940s: sitting at the fireside telling grisly tales of botched hangings, violent local rivalries, and ghostly occurrences in the hills. Dr Little sketched Horan for the reader: ‘A square face of great power, eyes grey-green beneath a penthouse of bushy white brows; lips so firm set as to be almost immobile […] woolly-white hair and side-whiskers – a face set to the world, or to a purpose’.

In one of many chilling tales recorded by Dr Little in his book Malachi Horan Remembers, the storyteller recalls ‘the most fearsome thing’ he had ever met. The way Horan told it, he had been walking home, having successfully sold a young horse for a good price in Naas. After stopping for a few celebratory drinks, he continued down the Saggart Road in the direction of his house. As he walked, the wind howled and the moon became obscured by cloud, leaving him in darkness. Suddenly, he was struck – by a man’s shoulder, he thought. Having cheerily wished the other man a good night, the collision happened again, and continued to recur. He broke out in a cold sweat, for he now knew ‘it was no living man’.

Unnerved, and stemming his rising panic, Horan decided not to head for home, making his way instead in the direction of a friend’s house. As his friend let him through the door, Horan turned to see that ‘a fully dressed man stood behind me, but – he had no head; just a raw stump of a neck!’ Scared stiff, they agreed that ‘what was outside was the man killed by the steam-tram’, and said a prayer for his soul. (The Dublin and Blessington Steam Tramway ran along a nearby road, and it fatally felled so many casualties that its route was often referred to as ‘the longest graveyard in Ireland’.)

Although in later life Dave Allen confessed that he had never had an unearthly experience, a fascination with the grisly and the ghostly persisted in his comedy. Graves and graveyards were frequently exploited for comic purposes, such as in the sketch where two funeral cortèges race to be first into a graveyard, or the story he tells of a night spent in the house of a gravedigger – who had died of fright – during which the comedian felt a cold, heavy presence (it was his own hand, and, at least in this telling, his shocked reaction accounted for his missing left index finger – he bit it).

Allen also wrote that ‘as a young teenager walking home in the twilight through the local graveyard, I became conscious of a noise that continually followed just behind me, which only stopped when I turned round to see what it might be.  ‘The hackles rose on my neck, and I was in a cold sweat. My fear only receded when I reached the comparative light of the local village to discover a twig attached to my trouser leg!’

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

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 by a quick 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.