Did the Krampus visit you last night or did Saint Nicholas fill your shoes with gifts? Happy Independence Day, Finland (let’s have a little Värttinä for that). My talk is today at the Moore Institute. It’s an update of my keynote address from April; I wanted to hit a lot of the same issues, but…
Category: Ireland
Happy Halloween!
A gloriously spooky day to you all! I know I have been remiss in my Halloween cards for the last couple years; I have as an excuse the general madness of my life lately — this year in particular. I suspect next year will either be incredibly dull and boring, or else more mad than…
Friday’s Forgotten Books: The Best of Myles
After the harrowing process of moving and desperately trying to unload many of my books, I have sworn to buy no more books and to adapt wholeheartedly to my gypsy life. Of course that lasted until I visited Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop, a Galway institution. I was there for a reading, but I couldn’t quite resist…
Fiction Slamming and Finally Meeting Pádraig
I ambled off to Octocon on Saturday after a good night out on Friday, where I had attended the 3rd Annual Fiction Slam put on by the local lit organisation, Over the Edge. I had no idea quite how it would go, but it was more or less like a poetry slam: that is, a…
BitchBuzz: Jane Eyre’s Everlasting Appeal
A perennial favourite of mine, for sure — especially in the Dame Darcy illo’d version, I wax rhapsodic about the book over at BB: Jane Eyre’s Everlasting Appeal By K.A. Laity This month marks the 164th anniversary of the publication of Charlotte Brontë’s immortal Jane Eyre. Women love Jane—well, a certain kind of women love this heroine….
Talk About the Weather
Everywhere I’ve lived people have always said, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” Even in Houston, which flabbergasted me because nine or ten months of the year it is relentlessly hot and humid with only the regular 3pm brief thunderstorm to break the hellfire monotony. It was slightly more true in Michigan,…
Cliffs of Moher
https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swfI had my first guests visit: Marie, a fellow Fulbrighter in Cork, and Jean, her NYC friend. We had a lovely dinner at Ard Bia Thursday night and we headed off to the Cliffs of Moher on Friday. We were lucky to have sun at the cliffs even though it was pouring in Galway. Here…
Well Done, Gardai
So, two trips wasted now.(V)-_-(V) I spent yesterday finding the Garda Immigration Office in Galway. It turns out to be in a mostly unmarked building (there’s a tiny plaque among the others) in the Byzantine wastelands of a charmless industrial park in the part of Galway that doesn’t end up on the postcards. After at…
Around Galway Bay
Autumn in Galway nonetheless has a lot of green yet… Galway is a busy working port with plenty of boats and bustling business. The swift-running Corrib meets the bay; must be nice to live along here. Along the piers where the river meets the bay. There are swans everywhere in Galway. Beautiful but not that…
Newgrange
A brief video before my batteries died (>_<) so you can see the area around Newgrange and the tree full of crows watching us (I'm sure they were amused). The narrow passage and deep interior really brought out my claustrophobia, but I waited at the end of the group to see if I could talk…