literary interlude

journey through the liberties. 11/1/23.

There are many ways of walking down to the river from St. Patrick's Cathedral. The shortest one is to cut right through the heart of the Liberties, walking past discount chemists and open-air food stands until you hit a bleak, windy stretch of the river. From there I walk until I smell the hops burning and I see that great stone obelisk rising out of Phoenix Park, which always points me home. These days my phone is almost always nearly dead, so I walk on intuition. My sense of direction is awful my trips take anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour, but I walk quickly and try to right my wrongs wherever I can. Today I took a break because the arches of my feet were burning-I had gone for a long run that morning and had walked too far in bad shoes afterwards-and I watched a boy sit on an upturned crate and shake a box of Flahavan's oats on the ground. There were too many pigeons to count, and he seemed delighted by his good fortune. In the streets along the Liffey you can sometimes find secondhand shops, ranging in style of ware. The farther you are from Temple Bar the less they gouge the prices, so you are better off looking on streets where you walk for minutes at a time without passing anyone. The effect is amplified if it is raining, because each store will be like a little oasis, and you'll spend more time inside it than you would otherwise. I walked into one such store today, announcing itself against the red brick with a sunny yellow storefront. It was one of those secondhand bookshops so cheap that you felt bad not buying a few volumes. I placed a few on the counter behind which the only other person in the shop was seated, drinking a very small coffee with comically large hands.

"Are they any good?" I wanted to ask, but instead I asked him where he got the books from. Donations, overstock, that sort of thing. I wanted more specifics. "How do you pick which ones you add to the store?" It wasn't a very big store, so there had to be some sort of metrics. Besides I felt that I could see he had avoided the sort of Danielle Steel airport romance contingent, as well as none of the typical non-novel sections: cooking, gardening, art books, et cetera. I couldn't tell if he was very miffed or very excited by my question, but he rose up out of his chair and starting gesticulating around the store, pointing out volumes that were acquisitions and some he felt would attract people based on the cover, or the name, or others because he hadn't read them and thought he could try to do so before someone else bought them. "You can't tell if they're any good until you read them, I say." He said and I nodded solemnly, even though I have my own criteria for avoidance: garish design (a real photograph throws me off), titles that allude to content (something like "The Betrayal," for instance), positive reviews from other authors I don't like (probably rude of me). "It used to be that you could tell a book's value from its binding. If the author cared about the book they would bind it well, I mean in the 1930s you know, times like that. Nowadays any worthless thing is wrapped in the same packaging as the gems." This did not help me feel better about the volumes I selected, as the binding was starting to fall apart but neither were they published in the early 20th century.

We talked for a while, and he indicated that I should come to a few upcoming events for the Dublin Festival of Books, which I'd incidentally booked tickets for that morning. I told him I'd think of him when inevitably I needed to pack everything up to go back to the states and needed a place to safely deposit some well-loved volumes, and he said he'd give me store credit. This is kind of a bad deal at a secondhand book store, since I bought the books new, but I said thank you anyway and kept on wandering.

illustrated image of the secondhand bookshop.

I used to think Paris was the preeminent literary city. It sometimes made me very happy to think that, particularly as I walked by the bouquinistes on the banks of the Seine and stroked Aggie's fur on the top floor of Shakespeare and Company (may she rest in peace). It sometimes also made me very sad, both because the great contemporary French writers-all submitting to literary journals and giving talks around the city-wrote outside the scope of a deeply intermediate French speaker, as they well should. My experience of the great literary city was always mediated by my language skills, and in some ways by my course of study. I'd go to the same cafes on the Rue Mouffetard where Hemingway and Beauvoir had worked once or twice (not the famous ones, those are far too expensive) and I'd pull out some reading and it would be on trade deals or treaties or neoliberal transformations. Not that I'm uninterested in any of these things, but it certainly takes the romance out of spending the afternoon at the cafe.

I could never really write in Paris, and every time I tried, all I could think to write about was the city itself. Pages and pages of description of how the light shone off the tops of buildings or how the waiters moved with precision or the smell of baking bread. If you are like me and didn't spend much time in the grittier parts of the city, out of fear or privilege or both, Paris never stops being beautiful. It never stops shining. And you can spend all day writing and writing, and never really hit on anything crucial because you are enamored so thoroughly. Something about the city concentrates all of your feelings onto the city itself; it narrows your focus in a way that adds to its literary romance, certainly, but it is not sustainable. I found this distracting, though pleasant. And so Paris for me became a reading city, because when you read you can enjoy the thing that is always distracting you, which is of course the city itself.

But Dublin is a writing city. Not only because they have far more literary figures per capita than they deserve, numbers-wise. Beauty is not quite as cheap here, and neither are charming little streets or perfect stories watering holes from within which you can ponder and wander and draft. Everything is a hidden gem, because beauty here doesn't announce itself in the way that it does in Paris, or in any other European capital, for that matter. Everything is scaled down, not only the heights of the building (regulation standard keeps all buildings 60 meters), but options too.

In part there are more cultural and societal grievances from which to pull crucial stories. The last Magdalene Laundry, for instance, closed in 1990. You can walk the derelict site on Sean MacDermott street, which I have. These are centers where 'fallen women,' who had fallen pregnant out of wedlock, were sent into cramped conditions to perform forced labor by the order of the Catholic Church. Hundreds of dead infants have been found in nearly ever site, and many more were stolen from their mothers, shipped illegally and unknowingly for adoption in America. These women are still alive. They speak and they write. I read a compendium of these stories, edited by one of my professors, and they ranged from the straightforward to the transcendent. I don't think suffering necessarily makes you a better artist. Maybe its just that in Paris or even in the rest of Western Europe, in the big capitals with fewer recent generational traumas, storytelling doesn't have the same ring of justice, of vengeance. There is so much here that has come to light in the last few decades that the voices of those who suffered are still truly new. Nothing has yet been hashed out, so nothing can be re-hashed and retold such that it loses its potency. Maybe that is reading too much into the power of testimony, or of literature to transmit the concerns of a generation. But everyone I meet wastes no time in telling me how drastically Dublin has changed in their lifetime, not just because people are finally experiencing the kind of upward mobility that has thus far eluded most everyone, but that they've found out the truth about things: about religion, women, Sinn Fein, landlords. When you see a writer-a real one, not me-scribbling away in their journal in the back of a pub here, you can be sure they are writing something new.