Jack B. Yeats’s For the Road, 1951. From cervids to equids. Famous for featuring horses, Yeats. Brilliantly explorative with colors.
Barrie Cooke’s Megaceros Hibernicus, 1983. Cooke began studying Biology at Harvard, but graduated with Art History. As with all Irish artists, his national identity comes through strongly - pointedly through his near-hallucinatory depictions of the grand, extinct Irish Elk.
Traced Poldy’s path in the Lestrygonians episode of Ulysses today. Had some delicious bangers and mash at Davy Byrnes. Saw the Book of Kells (just 2 pages) and some of the National Museum (archaeology and history). Also, the exhibition on W.B. Yeats at the National Library. Getting to know the Irish identity (as through the country’s history of oppression). Tomorrow, art!
We visited the Scottish National Gallery and saw, among many others, this wonderful painting. It is A Hind’s Daughter by Sir James Guthrie of the Glasgow school. Guthrie uses a palette with rich, deep greens and browns. A sky bleary white. He wonderfully captures the beauty of the country. An unforgiving, even unwelcoming landscape, but beautiful. Perhaps - to borrow an Irishman’s words - a terrible beauty.
So apparently one of James Joyce’s inspirations for Ulysses was the Encyclopedia. At times his vocabulary is overwhelming (I’m looking up a few words per page)… but generally Joyce’s diction and his elegant writing really inspire a love of words. Here are some of the words I’ve had to look up recently: weal - a wale or welt gleet - a thin, morbid discharge kip - the hide of a young or small beast sward - a grassy turf bole - the stem or trunk of a tree Humbling to find that I don’t know even all of the monosyllabic words in my native language.
I’ve been thinking about James Joyce’s story Araby, and particularly about the final line in the story.
“Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
It’s a clumsy line. Usually “ands” used in situations like these are mistakes, imprecisions. Is he driven OR derided by vanity? Are his eyes burning with anguish OR anger? Are both really true? And preciseness or conciseness aside… the ands throw off the rhythm. “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anger,” for example, has a better rhythm. The way it’s written, it sounds like it’s meant to continue.
And yet… in spite of these “flaws,” the line works. And more than that, it’s memorable. It comes to my mind more often than almost any other from the collection. Ultimately, I think that all of the words in the line are necessary. Although the line is rhythmically clumsy, the meaning would differ and the effect suffer if he hadn’t used both “driven” and “derided,” and “anguish” and “anger.”
Still… I wonder if an older Joyce would have written the line differently.
After a couple of rough nights, we are back at last to Madrid! Over the 2 nights preceding our arrival, I got maybe 6 hours of sleep… and Manny less. The first night we were up til 3 or 4 rambling waywardly through Barcelona in search of a discotech called Razzmatazz. It was closed after all, and we slept poorly after returning to the hostel (the beds had bugs). The night next we had planned on spending on an overnight train to Madrid, but woefully the train was fully booked. Instead we rode around the city, gorged ourselves on ice cream, people watched in the Barri Gotic, and rested wakefully in the Plaza Catalunya til the train station opened at 430. We spent the whole day yesterday (no exaggeration, 930a til 1000p) on regional trains making our way to Madrid on a roundabout route. Pretty miserable! We joke that having the bikes is like having toddlers… you’ve gotta watch over them all the time! Needless to say we were beat by the time we arrived at our friend Ken’s place last night, and we put the night away soundly. Rose to the screams of swifts, picked up a couple of bike boxes at the local shop in the afternoon, and now we’ve got the rest of the night to relax! Ah, welcome siesta.
A three day stint in Mallorca is over and we are back in Barça! Mallorca was as beautiful as I remember it. Warm turquoise waters surrounding green hills. Wonderful sunny weather. Little port towns and beaches covered with parasols and sunbathers. Having the rest of Spain to compare it to, though, I see it differently. Difficult to overlook the foreign influence and see the resident culture. Today we seek out souvenirs in Barcelona! Our trip is nearing its end and we can afford to carry extra weight now.
In the lively city of Barcelona! We trained in this morning, filled a locker with our saddlebags, and now we´re biking around the city. What a difference it is to bike without baggage! We biked from las Ramblas up to the Parc Guell - quite a steep ascent in some places, but no problem without bags. We´ve already seen a few of Gaudi´s works - the Casa Mila, the Casa Batllo, and of course the Parc Guell. Remarkable. Even amidst the vibrant colors and diverse architecture of Barcelona, they stand apart. Trying desperately to understand the connections between Modernists who worked in disparate fields. What makes a movement? Much studying to be done. This city has a wonderful energy. Colors, blacks with yellows and purples and reds. A terracotta cityscape. Diversity of overheard tongues! People of all types and MANY travelers.
A solid 85k morning and we are in Reus! The delta de l’ebre (as they call it in Catalan) was nice but a bit dull! We picked up a few new birds in the rice paddies - Squacco Heron, which looks brown and striated when crouching but bursts into white in flight, and Auduoin’s Gull which is quite uncommon outside of the delta. Besides birding a bit the day was spent idly! Tomorrow we ride to Barcelona!
