Self arrived in Dublin yesterday. Just in time for the last day of Walking Squares!
Heartfelt thanks to Life of B for hosting and sharing the Squares Challenge, which made November 2022 so much fun.
Here’s a shot of the Grand Staircase at the venerable Shelbourne, 27 St. Stephen’s Green, hotel of kings and queens and John F. Kennedy (his visage is everywhere) and Charlie Chaplin and Bono.
Still reading Ukrainian writer Taras Prokhasko, whose essays from FB Galicia are included in the anthology Writing from Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays Since 1965, edited by Mark Andryczyk.
So glad that I decided to bring this book along during this brief visit to Ireland:
Self took this picture last night, near Grafton Street, Dublin.
Christmas decorations are up in Dublin — so festive and pretty!
Thanks to Clare’s Cosmos for hosting the Share Your Desktop Challenge.
Self’s hometown Fourth of July Parade was in-person this year, for the first time in three years. Though crowds were sparse, it really felt like a moment.
Posting for Brashear’s Mid-Week Monochrome Challenge.
Posting for Travel with Intent’s One Word Sunday Challenge.
Halloween-themed because . . . tomorrow is Halloween!
If anyone anywhere ever forgets the title of this story in the John Weir collection Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, it is “Katherine Mansfield”:
“And your Mom ingeniously seated me next to your twelve-year-old cousin, who’s blonde and sulky as the kid in Death in Venice.”
— “”katherine mansfield”, story # 6 in Your nostalgia is killing me
Phil, who has a girlfriend, brings the narrator, who has a boyfriend, back to his family’s for Christmas Day (Is it weird that self has not spent Christmas with anyone, not even when son was living in the Bay Area, not since maybe 2014? She can’t even remember what she did last year. Most every year, she manages to be abroad on Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. So probably that’s what she should keep doing, for her sanity). Anyhoo, this part of the story is very funny:
Let me just tell ya, passages like the above had self rolling on the floor.
Stay tuned.
Well, here it is: self’s annual Halloween appreciation post! She walked north along Hillview, to Whipple Avenue, then turned east to Hudson Street. The neighbors do go all out. Some of these are positively inspired!
Posting for Jez’s Fan of . . . Challenge.
Memories! Self spent last Christmas in Mendocino Hotel. What a special time. There was weather — storms and the like. It rained on Christmas Eve, but there were carolers, and the bookshop pictured here (only a few steps from the hotel) is one of her favorite bookshops in the entire world.
Posting for Monday Windows.
Circe is proving to be an excellent read!
The title character is a subversive spirit, giving nectar to the bound Prometheus (his whipping scene is quite something, don’t anyone tell her that women can’t write ‘gruesome’), unable to staunch her curiosity about mortals. Here she has her first glimpse of a very special mortal:
“There,” Aeetes said, leaning close to my ear. “Look.”
He was pointing to a mortal, a man I had not noticed before, not quite so huddled as the rest. He was young, his head shaved clean in the Egyptian style, the skin of his face fitted comfortably into its lines. I liked him. His clear eyes were not smoked with wine like everybody else’s.
“Of course you like him,” Aeetes said. “It is Daedalus. He is one of the wonders of the mortal world, a craftsman almost equal to a god.”
Circe, by madeline Miller, p. 33
Kanlaon 