WILDE/ VILDE
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011Globalized readers! I’m just back from my first visit to Ireland, where I was really happy and honored to read at the Cúirt Festival in Galway with Geoff Dyer, one of my favorite writers about books.
In light of the recent kind comments from Anthony Powell fans, I will cite one line I particularly admired in Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi:
In some ways the [Venice] Biennale was like A Dance to the Music of Time condensed into four days: the same people cropping up, expectedly and unexpectedly, generally looking somewhat the worse for wear.
I remembered this line when I reached the description of the Biennale in Temporary Kings (Volume Eleven of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time): it isn’t clear why Ada is there with Glober, and whether the artifact made of “zinc, horsehair, patent leather and cardboard” in the French pavilion is supposed to look German-African or German-Japanese, and I thought that Dyer must have had this passage in mind, that there must have been the idea on some level of collapsing the whole twelve novels into the Biennale scene. But he told me in the taxi from the airport that he never actually got past volume five!
Anyway, I had an amazing time in Galway. I had barely been in town fifteen minutes when a kind editor bought me a pint of something called a Galway Hooker. Later, a wonderful local artist drove me and Dyer to a beach in Connemara, where we climbed on some rocks and looked at the Aran Islands.1 The local artist found some seaweed that she was pretty sure was the kind of seaweed which, if you soak it in very hot bath water and squeeze it, produces a lovely aloe-vera-like gel, although she wasn’t positive, it might have been just ordinary seaweed. She offered some to me and Dyer to put in our baths, but we both declined.
I greatly enjoyed our reading and discussion, which took place that afternoon at the super-old and potentially haunted Druid Theater, to a fantastic crowd with names like Fionnghuala and Saoirse. It was a pleasure and a privilege to inscribe copies of one’s book to people with such beautiful names!
I was also very moved by the combined monument to Oscar Wilde and Eduard Vilde, a gift to Galway from the Estonian people (the original is in Tartu). It commemorates a meeting that did not take place in 1892.
Here’s to conversations between writers, both the ones that really happened and the ones that didn’t!
- As a college freshman I remember having to write a response paper to a 3-minute sequence in The Man of Aran (1934), involving a woman rocking a cradle. I don’t think I ever felt more despair about any writing assignment before or since. Little did I know I would ever stand on a rock and look at the Aran Islands as part of a book festival! ↩
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