It IS Easy Being Green! The Daily Post Photo Challenge, 22 March 2017

This week is all about color. For extra challenge, create a gallery.

— Michelle W., The Daily Post

Dog-Eared Books, Castro St., San Francisco: February 2017

Box from Irish Express Moving & Storage; Dog-Eared Books, Castro St., San Francisco

This book was in self’s unit: WAVES AND TREES by Irish poet Justin Quinn

1. Justin Quinn’s poetry collection was published by Gallery Press (www.gallerypress.com)
2. The sign was in the front window of Dog-Eared Books, Castro Street, San Francisco.
3. The box was provided to me by Irish Express Moving Company, San Francisco. I used it to ship books I needed to Annaghmakerrig.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Book # 1: Unit # 1, Tyrone Guthrie Centre

Am just freshly arrived in Annaghmakerrig.

The first task is to catalogue all the books this Unit holds.

Self was in this same unit last year. But she was not very organized. Not like she is now.

The first book she settles on is Thames Way (Alba Publishing, 2015), by Diarmuid Fitzgerald. There’s a dedication: To the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, February 2017

The man was literally just here.

He elected to walk the length of the Thames from the city of London to its source, a distance of about 170 miles. (Reminds self of one of her favorite books, read 2016: Matsuo Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about a journey Basho took in the 17th century, on the old Edo circular road. He also wrote it in haiku.)

The book is divided into three sections: Lower, Middle, and Upper.

From Lower:

no one wishes me
well on my long way
except for one old man

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Reading Life 2016

October 2016

1. Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission (history), by Hampton Sides
2. A Short History of Women (novel) by Kate Walbert

September 2016

1. The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (nonfiction), by Ben Ehrenreich
2. Brazillionaires (nonfiction), by Alex Cuadros

August 2016

1. Northanger Abbey (novel), by Jane Austen
2. Swimming Studies (memoir), by Leann Sharpton
3. The Course of Love (novel), by Alain de Botton
4. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Sketches (travel book, poetry), by Matsuo Basho
5. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (essay collection), by Olivia Laing

July 2016

1. The Green Road (novel), by Anne Enright
2. Girl Waits With Gun (mystery), by Amy Stewart

June 2016

1. The Girl on the Train (novel), by Paula Hawkins
2. My Brilliant Friend (novel), by Elena Ferrante

May 2016

Seamus Heaney’s Translation of The Aeneid, Book VI

Earlier this year, self was in Ireland, cutting out book reviews from a copy of The Guardian at the breakfast table in the Main House of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig. She was explaining to a writer from Belfast that back home in California she had file drawers full of book review clippings and now . . .

The writer just smiled.

What is it about the Irish? Self never has to complete sentences there. Never. They’re pretty observant and never waste words.

In the Wall Street Journal of Wednesday, 17 August 2016, there’s a review of Seamus Heaney’s last work, a translation of the Aeneid, Book VI, which according to reviewer Christopher Carroll, he completed just a month before he died:

• It is his last published poem, a poignant rendition of Aeneas’ arrival in Italy and journey into the underworld to see his dead father.

Right. Self is adding it to her reading list, as well as Heaney’s “Station Island” (1984) and “Route 110” (2010).

Stay tuned.

Really Delightful: Hanna in Anne Enright’s THE GREEN ROAD

The following excerpt could be either funny or sad, depending on your mood. Hanna is an aspiring actress with a drinking problem:

. . .  that evening, somehow, the baby got hold of her little Innocent bottle and spat the stuff out, spilling it all down his front and, never mind the hole in the fucking universe, when Hugh smelt the alcohol off the baby’s Breton striped Petit Bateau, the world as Hanna knew it came to an end.

. . .  The thing was through the washing machine on the instant, so Hugh had no hard evidence. But he had the baby. He was sleeping in the baby’s room. He would not fight with Hanna, he said, but he would not leave her alone with the baby. And when it came to Christmas he would take the baby home.

Hanna said, “That’s a relief. No, really. Childcare at last. Fucking fantastic.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Too Funny! More Anne Enright

• It was very ageing — fat. It made her daughter look like an old woman, which was a kind of insult, after all the care that was put into the rearing of her. The coat didn’t help. It was like an anorak, almost.

— The Green Road, p. 160

Sentence of the Day: From THE GREEN ROAD

Self has loved all the books she’s read so far this year. Some are lighter reads than others, but in general she’s been really lucky in her reading choices. Here are the books she’s read so far in 2016:

• Road Dogs, by Elmore Leonard
• The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy
• Candide, by Voltaire
• Watch Me, by Anjelica Huston
• My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante
• The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins
• Girl Waits With Gun, by Amy Stewart
• The Green Road (currently reading), by Anne Enright

This is a sentence from Enright’s novel. Two “boys,” Dan and Billy, are walking together on a clear Manhattan night, just “after rain.” One of the boys is out of the closet, the other not really:

• The boys’ winter coats were both open to the mild night, their long scarves hung down, blue and green.

And that’s it! There’s the sentence. Hope you like it as much as self did.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay night.

 

Still More of Anne Enright: THE GREEN ROAD

Self does not know how one can write like this. Where every sentence has such a pitch of intensity.

First there was Ireland and oh the sadness of a Sunday family dinner and people nattering on and seeming to erode to dust, right before our very eyes.

Then, we’re in New York in 1991 which was a terrible year, self can tell you right now, and right and left, people are dying of AIDS, and Enright writes a beautiful sentence about how a man can start reading the classics, later in life, and how he can become “tender of his eyesight and of his time,” and about Achilles’ dream and the dead Patroclus and about how in dreams there are no words and this is what the dreamer misses most because “words are also physical, don’t you think? The way they touch you.”

And self knows exactly what she means.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Still On: Anne Enright’s THE GREEN ROAD

The Green Road is taking self to some very unexpected places. Such as: New York City, 1991. Which turned out to be a watershed year for self as well. Just read her story “Lenox Hill, December 1991” in Charlie Chan Is Dead, Vol. 1, edited by Jessica Hagedorn.

Here’s an excerpt from Enright’s novel:

DAN – New York, 1991

. . .  if the question was whether Billy was still sleeping with Gregory Savalas, then the answer was that they had barely slept together in the first place. Billy was a blonde boy, on the sturdy side, with a thug/angel thing going, so there was a line of sad bastards queuing at his door; half of them married, most of them in suits. And Billy hated the closet. What Billy wanted was big, shouty unafraid sex with someone who did not cry, or get complicated, or hang around after the orange juice and the croissant.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Anne Enright’s THE GREEN ROAD

If you crossed the long meadow, you came to a boreen which brought you up over a small rise to a view of the Aran Islands out in Galway Bay, and the Cliffs of Moher, which were also famous, far away to the south. This road turned into the green road that went across the Burren, high above the beach at Fanore, and this was the most beautiful road in the world, bar none, her granny said — famed in song and story — the rocks gathering briefly into walls before lapsing back into field, the little stony pastures whose flowers were sweet and rare.

— The Green Road, p. 15