Ireland, from coast to coast
All pictures © Willeke Van Eeckhoutte, 2002-2018
Kick-Ass Ireland
Some days I sit still and think about how my life became a dream full-circle. There’s William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Brendan Behan. Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, Land of Heart’s Desire and Yeats’s grave. Dubliners, Ulysses and Bloomsday. The mountains, lakes, Dublin, Sligo and the Shannon. Brú na Boinne, Corcaigh, Beara, Daingean Uí Chúis, Zú Bhaile Átha Cliath, craic agus ceol. Brian Ború, Michael Collins, Theobald Wolfe Tone and Daniel O’Connell. Seven hundred years of cruelty, yet still able to endure hard times. Writers, dancers, taps, tin whistles and uilleann pipes. Books, almighty libraries and small bookshops selling secrets. Friendships gained, lost and renewed. New alliances forged in foothills and strengthened on mountain tops. “You, the Irish” becoming “Us…
Book lovers, unite!
"I love words, funky ones, cranky ones, utterly ridiculous ones as well as justified paragraphs, intense fonts and long sentences that shout for shortened versions. I’ve been living in Ireland for 12+ years now, and honey, we simply don’t do short sentences in Ireland. Ask Joyce, who once wrote something so flabbergastingly fantastic that he forgot to add punctuation, a sentence of 4,391 words, no less. Molly Bloom must’ve gasped for air once she finished dreaming or thinking it. I am still gasping for air after tackling Ulysses. Talk about kick ass literature."
Back with a bang!
I am. In Dublin once again after a short stay with my mum. She moved houses last week but instead of having me pack boxes with her with lots of… well… you know yourself when you move houses and how much you gather in the space of about 60 years or so. I stayed in her new apartment by the marina, 5 minutes from the beach and 3 minutes from the main shopping street – my mum knows how to pick her favourite spots – so she chose wisely. And while I stayed by the marina for a week before her moving in, my mum was slaving over packing boxes in her old place, doing admin related to the move and so on. For a week I had no internet…
Haunting Joyce
Words. Letters strung together to form sentences filled with thoughts, ideas and emotions. I thrive on them, books and communication in general included. I am a true bibliophile. After library studies, I ended up working in libraries for years before moving to Ireland. Books were my life as a kid, a teen, a young adult and they are still my life right now. I cannot begin to guess how many books I have read or how many I handled while working in a library and each one was special. According to Wikipedia, a bibliophile is someone who “loves to read, admire and collect books, often amassing a large and specialized collection. Bibliophiles do not necessarily want to possess the books they love; an alternative would be to admire them in old libraries.”…
What about it?
3.30am. Eye pain and headaches have taken an option on my sleep, wanting to do better than each other. In addition to that, ideas for a blog post keep flying in my head. My mind is busy compartmentalizing thoughts while my eyes are in charge of my sleeping patterns. Nice! And now my hair also hurts. Seriously, it does! The frequent – if not chronic pains – have prevented me from blogging much lately so I am slowly turning into a state of anarchy. Several attempts of writing happened but none were finished because either sleep came knocking on my door, or I have to analyze a few episodes of James Joyce’s Ulysses for the reading group I’m in, or I have other things requiring attention. So if I do…
Quotes from Ulysses, by James Joyce
“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. Paintings of Moreau are paintings of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom; Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.”
