‘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.

—————————

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.

30 years ago today, novelist Georges Perec died in Paris.

He was also a crossword compiler, an indexer in a medical laboratory, a writer of extremely long palindromes and a member of the literary group Oulipo.

I’ve written a number of articles about Perec: here, here, here and here.

If you do one thing today in memory of Perec, question your teaspoons.

To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is not longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?

How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.

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.

Memorial at Charonne Metro station, 18:47h, 8th February 2012

50 years ago, 8 people died at Charonne Métro station in Paris. They were taking part in a demonstration against the Algerian War, the terrorist actions of the OAS, and the killing of Algerian protesters in Paris late 1961. Find out more in this short BBC documentary.

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.

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 Souquet 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 difference?