The new home has proved a good space for writing. I have a real good window, just as I remembered it. It appears the first completed long-form work of mine will be my memoir of 3 short months in Ireland and 3 days in Germany. This I can safely say as it has been the easiest to write. So far it meanders, lacks par descriptive elements and contains too many references and maybe one funny part. We'll try to stop her at 80 we think.
A few slices:
The dentist told me that I shouldn’t leave the country at such a dangerous time. Why leave him at a time like this? Of all the Daly’s, McCulloughs, McDonalds, McDonaughs and Murphys and Mulligans and that live here now, how could this person think my trip to Cork, Ireland a dangerous one?
I left my country on a plane to a place I didn’t know. Even if that place was one of the most Westernized, American friendly countries in Europe I knew it would still be strange to me. I wouldn’t know any one when my plane touched down. I was 21 and nervous in the excited way a cliff diver is, not caring the temperature of the water that is about to consume him just knowing he‘s going to hit it. For years my leg had bumped my foot up and down on the ground. I had wanted to breathe new air, see a new ocean. See an ocean.
Reading about rock in Dublin bus station...
The train station had large white windows and I entered it heavy with breathing, and feeling not nervous but just weird. I asked the man at the counter if the bus to Cork was ontime and he said of course. There was a little gift shot. There I found a rock and roll magazine. It would cost me 10 American dollars, but I still bought it. I had reviewed Cds for a few bucks in Oklahoma and the glossy pages full of new artists from all over the world in Uncut had always been a favorite. Now I could read it in the climate where it was printed!
I found a plastic seat with metal arm rests to plop my plenty. The Eastern European traveling girls laughed at me in their strange language. Their hair was knotty, their jackets were well used, and their shoes were narrow running shoe types. They rested their tough feet on big bags. I watched the girls shyly before returning to the pages. Sufjan Stevens had released Avalanches, a collection of B-Sides that was still a four star listen. He told an English reporter that he was a failure in his own eyes until he wrote a novel. He had ditched 8 or so. The big words in his albums haven’t aged so well with me, but at the time they were soothing ear serum. I read about the Cleveland punk band Peru Ubu and the re-release of their album The Modern Dance. Peter Laughner was in that band once, I remembered. He was the guy Lester Bangs wrote about in Peter Laughner Died for your Sins. Ha, bangs only wrote for his fellow New York club goers I think. I never tried to fashion my entire life like Lou Reed: dark shades, dark leather jacket, tough talk all the time, amphetamine, heroin habit. Just part of it.
What a time, I always thought. Those last two habits got Laughner kicked out of Peru Ubu, then killed him. My Morning Jacket released a live album that was apparently great. Lilly Allen was scatting about chavs: cheap, tacky, pot smoking English losers/walkers of the more beat down housing stacks Mike Skinner also poeticizes. All these earned good ratings with Uncut, which got me thinking in the Dublin bus station., these English rock writers like everything. Maybe I should become an English rock writer.
A young boy sold two expensive bikes to two American tourists. He checked their chains and shrugged and pointed, and told them if they needed anything else they could call him. The Americans knew nothing about bikes. The wife and man strapped on their happy helmets and took to the streets.
Clinton and the Irish....
American Airlines offered the cheapest flights to Ireland, so I took that one. On the first flight I went to Chicago O’Hare and experienced the wait that makes everyone in the United States grumble about O’Hare. Ever since I had opened up books in Yukon, Oklahoma I had been enamored with a photo of the journalist Hunter S. Thompson, let’s get it out of the way now, taken for a collection of his Fear and Loathing letters.
It’s a black and white photo. There he is, about to run you over as he marches out of a terminal with a front bent back like a rude boy in West Wide Story, a suitcase in hand and a cigarette in flapper case hanging from his tight mouth. Every paragraph of his story is lodged tight and suffering hilarious mutations in the ripples of a big, drug addled brain. But more to the point, here was a man who had seen many places.
Well, my weak lunges wouldn’t allow me to smoke as many cigarettes as Hunter S. Nor did a trip out of the country for 3 months allow me to take one really cool looking leather bag. I had an oversized backpack that one fashion editor at a school newspaper once laughed at when I suggested it might be a new thing. I was floundering down the wide, winding halls. There was another other 40 lb. coat case that I overloaded with a few essential books for the rainy provinces: Jon Savage’s punk rock bio England’s Dreaming, my then girlfriend’s book of Seamus Heaney poems. In a bag pocket was a New Yorker where the reporter, still Clinton struck, watched him give a speech in Africa where Bill quoted lines from Heaney’s Cure at Troy. Clinton like the ocean has ebbs and flows in the publics favor. As I write this the MSN “news” ticker is hinting at his racism. Months ago at a desperate juncture in his wife’s campaign Clinton condescended to compare Barack Obama to Jesse Jackson. It didn’t play well, and the motive has left some still sour.
If I may return to the eloquent Clinton who bridged a gap once here in my country I’d like to include The Heaney quote he read to African leaders at an AIDs education summit.
“History says, Don't hopeon this side of the grave.But then, once in a lifetimethe longed for tidal waveof justice can rise up,and hope and history rhyme.”
So I had a bit of Ireland in my foggy mind and an Irish poet in my bag. I don’t think Clinton’s a racist, but I think he’s a public official. Of them we don’t like to hear anything good. And I’ll do my very small part to counterbalance the hectoring of this public official by mentioning Bill’s taste in poetry.
I was later to be told that Seamus Heaney was Famous Seamus. People liked him all well and good. These faceless masses, as presented in the lecture, certainly liked him more than the professor who introduced his poems. To this day I admire his ability to write just as well about Greek battels as he does about the farm people’s loam, the spade, and most “famously” the wood coffin of one boy’s poor brother carried out on his own bitter graduation day. Our teacher told us that the young Heaney didn’t think he could be a poet until he read Patrick Kavanaugh. Yeats, who is spoken of first in Irish poetry, was a poet of puzzles, impenetrable at first....
.....
Famous Seamous points to an ancient battle to tell his readers of the present that in every lifetime there is a moment. Each generation has a chance to witness some kind of justice. It could be true for anything. Outside of a political contender. We can be moved very easily, and most people know redemption when they see it.
Seamous leaves a gap open to each reader with this “once in a lifetime” business. We are so nostalgic for the times that aren’t ours, but we are so silly not to expect them to be just the same…
For instance, people here still feel the need to hitchike. My mother and cousin in their youth in the 70s took a ride with some bikers from Texas to California. I know two people from OU who took the same random trips. One on bike, one hitchhiking. The need for flight doesn’t leave.
So it’s the waiting for the hope and history rhyming part that is hard. We have too many distractions and, while we wait, what if the rhyme has left. I can’t construct a sonnet or a moving iamb.
But there are those who are trying, I felt, and I wanted to look somewhere else for a while.
...
In my reminiscensesesssess (damn word) and in the search for an in into travel writing I discovered this flawed but searching essay I penned for a music web site. It attempted to weave the story of a Polish acquaintence with the plot of Once. I did respond to Once in a way I wouldn't have had I not seen the place for myself. I feel I have sung legitimate praises for the pic which is on video now
Listening: Conor Oberst "Cape Canaveral," Ola Podrida
