Dublin

Dublin woke up Thursday morning as it usually does – strutting along its tangled lanes and trying to ignore another busload of bleary-eyed Americans. Our coach rolled through the streets at dawn, down the rows and rows of rowhouses and offices, all connected and stunted. There's only one building in Dublin taller than seven stories – a bank near O'Connell Bridge. For the rest of the city – save, of course, Christchurch and St. Patrick's cathedrals – a height restriction keeps the skyline flat and low, much as it has been for a thousand years, only wider now, and louder.

The organized activities for our group commenced in no time. A few hours rest in our rooms – Albany House, a hotel nestled among the Georgian houses on Harcourt, just south of St. Stephen's Green, the city's central square – and then we were off, jet-lagged and bloodshot, shuffling through the airy streets to various museums and galleries. We walked because in Dublin there's no sense rolling. Everything in Dublin is a fifteen-minute walk. Maybe a cab out to Phoenix Park or the Landsdowne Rugby Ground, but everyone walks everywhere else. Hordes of Dubliners stuff the streets from dawn to midnight, marching onward to the beat of the city's economic boom.

First to Trinity College and the elaborately presented Book of Kells, an eighth-century volume of the four Gospels hand-copied and ornately embellished by monks. The poor saps lived such harsh, stark lives – shaved heads, fasting, mortifying their bodies – they reached for beauty by painting such extraordinary typography. At the Kerlin Gallery, I was taken by a piece called Lost by Irish artist K. Pendergast; it's a map of the United States featuring only cities, towns, lakes, mountains, passes and other features with word "lost" in the name. Lost Canyon. Lost Lake. In Oklahoma: Lost Creek and Lost City. Certain areas of the country had clusters of lost names – along the Sierra Nevadas, a bunch in upstate New York, most of Oregon, along the rivers in Tennessee. What made people name these? Lost in America.

Jet-lagged and nerve-wracked, I begged off the day's remaining museum stops and tried to summon my seventh wind in Stephen's Green. Tea from a pub on the north side, with a sign outside that said, "Guinness As Usual." A cold wind in the gathering grey gloom. On the nech next to me, a teenage couple with her legs draped over his, sucking face. A father and his young boy throwing bread to the ducks on the pond. Joyce was here. Behan was here. Hell, Bono was here, is here. Visiting in dad in up Howth tonight, in fact (so the papers say, interviewing lads who sold him chips). I'm here. What is the significance of following footsteps?

Dinner that night at the Mermaid Cafe, seafood extraordinaire, straight from the refrigerated Irish Sea two blocks north (though why was my appetizer called New England Crab Cakes?). People there from the Irish Arts Council, the Irish Times, radio stations, arts boosters, etc. I sat with Barbara Maltby, wife of our director, Mike Janeway, and it turns out she's the daughter-in-law of Richard Maltby, trumpet player and bandleader. He's listed in the lounge-music record guide I co-authored with my Tulsa World colleagues, late '50s gems such as the song "Lady in Red" and the LPs Manhattan Bandstand and Music from Mr. Lucky. She told me Richard's whole tragic story – how he got his own band in '49 just as the big-band craze was dying down, how he wound up arranging for Lawrence Welk, how he died disappointed and depressed. Some bloke from the Irish film commission came into the conversation late. Later, the boozy bloke asked me, "So what does that mean, lounge music? Is that like pub chants?"

Lunch Friday afternoon for two and a half hours at the Tea Room in the Clarence Hotel, the one U2's Bono owns. Great food, sterile atmosphere. Might as well have been a Holiday Inn Express in a renovated landmark. Bartender was mum about the boyo 'cept to say he "likes his Guinness, like a good lad."

The Irish Music Hall of Fame is a compact exhibit of Ireland's immense wealth of popular musical talent. The exhibits rush through the 20th century, through the Irish showband phenomenon, to get to the roots of Irish rock – Christy Moore's Planxty and Van Morrison. From there, it's back to the town boys, Thin Lizzy and Ireland's Jimi Hendrix, Phil Lynott. I hadn't heard much Thin Lizzy beyond "The Boys Are Back in Town," a standard '70s rock compilation nugget, and this tour made me a fan. Listening to their first hit, a rock re-creation of the standard "Whiskey in the Jar" (29 years pre-Metallica, thank you), intrigued my sense of boundary-pushing artists. The Undertones, the Boomtown Rats, Sinead O'Connor, Enya, the Divine Comedy – they were all represented. Except, of course, there was one glaring omission: Elvis Costello was not mentioned anywhere. (Have I gone insane? He's Irish, right?) Or Kate Bush. Did they ditch Ireland too quickly, too thoroughly to be counted? In a closing bit of film, Bono summed up the surprising reality of Ireland's musicians: "It's amazing for the size of the country how good we are."

Fortified, I spent the rest of the day record shopping in the Temple Bar district. Urban renewal, or whatever it's called these days, may often reek of kickbacks and designs for anything but living; however, Dublin's Temple Bar is a triumph of accidental cultural growth. Defined as the narrow strip of tight alleys and cobbled streets along the River Liffey between the Bank of Ireland and the Civic Offices, Temple Bar was once the SoHo of Dublin – lined with galleries, cafes and restaurants due to short leases offered in the area because of a planned bus station complex there, which never came to be. It is now, of course, utterly gentrified but still the liveliest part of town, full of cool record shops, pubs and restaurants, not to mention curious street life and colorful street musicians. Temple Bar is also where I wound up spending most of my time in Dublin.

Temple Bar is also where you can see the heart of the Celtic Tiger: Dublin's new demographics. For one thing, half of Dublin's population of 1 million souls is under 30. The streets are full of young'uns, not the old men in tweeds you might expect. In fact, the young population combines with the incredibly early start most kids get on their drinking habits (the 18 drinking law is a rough and often ignored guideline) to make many Temple Bar pubs resemble high school proms. We fled several lounges in this area and along Grafton Street simply because the self-consciousness of young patrons – look at me, see me drinking and smoking? – spoiled the relaxed air of a respectable pint. On the other hand, Dublin isn't so damned white anymore. For decades, or even centuries, Dublin and most of Ireland has remained stark white and Catholic. People didn't immigrate here because there were no jobs. Now the economy's booming and people are washing ashore – Indians, Dominicans, Spanish, Jews. Not many, mind you, but enough to give at least the Temple Bar a more heterogenous human face – and a couple of good curry shops. "But we're behind the curve in learning how to deal with multiculturalism," said our Irish Arts Council guide Fiach. "There are some hard lessons ahead for us there."

Out that night to the Abbey Theatre for a production of "Big Maggie." More wandering in Temple Bar after that – Indian food, pints at the noisy and bright Stag's Head pub. We found the place, tucked away in an alley, thanks to a kind Dubliner (redundant) on the street. "Where are you from?" he asked. New York, I said, still feeling that's a lie. "Oh, Dubliners have wet dreams about New York. Are you from Brooklyn? God, don't tell anyone here if you are. They'll follow you home."

Saturday involved more schlepping – the James Joyce Center (see Words), the Irish Writers Museum, the Hugh Lane Gallery (Monet's Waterloo Bridge, a stunning Van Gogh-like city scene titled Boulevard Raspail by Ireland's Roderic O'Conor, countless paintings by Yeats' dad John), the Guinness brewery (Fritz Lang meets the Discovery channel), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (pretty amazing for a country not known for its visual arts). I ducked out during the afternoon for a pilgrimage to the General Post Office, site of the Easter 1916 proclamation and first notorious independence revolt (see Revolt 1916).

My cab to the modern art museum that afternoon was driven by a sprightly middle-aged tuft of hair named Gabriel. The brogue that trickled out from underneath his salt-and-pepper pushbroom moustache was as rich as the local black pudding. I told him my destination and he said, "The museum of modern art. You wouldn't think a peasant cabbie like me would know about that, but I do." Boy, did he. He gave the entire history of the museum building, the old Kilmainham military hospital, complete with pointed-out factoids from his three city map books, bundles of pages barely held together and so dog-eared the edges were flaking like dandruff on his seat covers. Early on, I mentioned I didn't know the exact location, only that it was west of where he picked me up. "Oh now you've made your first mistake," he said. "You've told your driver you don't know where you're going. Fortunately, even on this rainy day you've found a saint of a driver. ... I wasn't going to pick you up, but I looked you up and down and thought, 'Gabriel, there's a fella's got a mother somewhere." How I welcomed the opportunity to talk about Ma – in Oklahoma. It felt good to talk about Oklahoma roots instead of pretending to be a New Yorker. Gabriel understood this. "You can't keep the cows from coming back to trough," he said. I think this means something along the lines of you can take the boy out of the country... and such.

The pub crowds that night were watching the tellies for news of Sonia O'Sullivan, an Irish runner competing that day in two consecutive races (1500m and 3000m) at the World Indoor Championships. "She's got bird legs, but she flies, don't she?" said one of the chaps at Neary's. (Alas, she did not fly in either race, losing considerably.) A group of us dined at Juice, a swank but slow vegetarian restaurant on So. Great George Street. Plenty of offerings in the big city that night: free jazz concert at Trinity, Mark Mulcahy (former Miracle Legion singer) at Whelan's, and a chance discovery: electronica pioneers 808 State at The Isaac Butt. A small group and I opted for the third option, if only to explore a club with such a conversation-stopping name. (Isaac Butt, it turns out, was a home-rule advocate in the 19th century.) 808 State, for all intents, formed much of the mold that electronica music filled or attempted to break during the last decade. Their DJ set at this tiny basement club (decorated like the belly of Jonah's whale) was hardly advertised and sparsely attended. The mooks present, however, danced their Nikes off, and by the time "Pacifica" was whorling from the woofers, even I was shirtless and smacking my hitch up. I get the urge to go dancing about once a year. This escapade – fine drink, grand company, gorgeous Dubliners all sweating at the feet of musical war heroes – should hold me for 2001.

On the way home, at 3 a.m., we saw Dublin proper: legions of drunk kids and twnetysomethings, all eating McDonald's and Burger King because they were the only places smart enough to stay open late. Grafton Street, the main pedestrian artery between Stephen's Green and Trinity College, was as crowded at 3 a.m. as it was at 3 p.m. Hordes of folks in gnarly Saturday night outfits stumbling about, shrieking, bellowing, tripping on the brick paving. A beautiful Amazon of a woman strutted through the circle at the head of Grafton, weaved a bit, stepped to a barren planter box and yacked heartily, then simply straightened up, wiped her mouth and kept moving. A gaggle of young mooks trotted along Stephen's Green West pushing one of their mates along in a shopping cart, his head lolling limply with the rough concrete topography and lack of shocks. "It's not funny," one of the lads said, "but it is hilarious."

Sunday, my Bloomsday – Tomsday.

From my travel journal:

Morning stroll down Wexford, listening to my Irish mix. Flashes of last night, dim now, dancing, regressing, renewing. Full Irish breakfast – bacon, beans, sausages, eggs, brown bread – at the NASDAQ cafe. [Little did I know its namesake was sinking in its own grease trap across the pond.] Menu offers a "healthy option": only one sausage, two strips bacon, poached eggs. Are there angioplasty kits behind every counter? Check email at Internet cafe on Grafton. Missive to Daniel, chat with David who's online, awake at 5 a.m. Mountain Time, just home after a night of rolling. Feels good to connect, touch base, assure myself of an established existence beyond this fairy-Lego metropolis through which I float. Float on the Liffey. Liffey worth living – leaving? Cactus World News playing: all that howling about washing and wearing the same old clothes, closing doors on the past. Slamming them with foot inside, in my case. Drifting through Temple Bar, swimming and paddling through people to the water, cars splashing me (did it rain while I was online?). Hung on the rail on Liffey Bridge, "Dublin" – "who does not adore the sound / of music in the names of towns?" So much sound in this city, talking, walking. Stared into the river for a while, at the reflections, never still, wavering, restless and unable to help it. Reznikoff: the ceaseless weaving of the uneven water. Constant west wind, cold. A chewed apple core floats by, a green apple in sickly green water. Then a McD sack, half sunk, under the bridge. Rare patches of blue sky skitter along the surface, existing in both air and water and still moving. Puffs of Papa Smurf's pipes. Words spoken and carried on the wind, morphing, changing, changed utterly. Allusion pollution. Dedalus: when will I find my own voice?

Afternoon spent in Cafe Gertrude on Bedford Row, a cozy spot run by pale-eyed French emigrés, loitering at a table by the window partly because I felt like loitering and partly because in Dublin no one cares whether you linger. No one cares about turning over the tables, moving the customers. This customer wasn't moving, by God. The other reason I stayed put: Chet Baker on the stereo, singing, "Look for the silver lining." The impish chef sang along: "I remember you, you're the one who said 'I love you.'" That album turned into Elliott Smith, bled white, "Don't complicate my peace of mind." Dubliners passed by the foggy window, colorful blurs of themselves. I ate a danish you wouldn't believe – flakier than the newsroom receptionist, its belly full of apples so fresh that Newton might never come down to earth. Chammomile tea in a stoneware pot and the Arts section of the Irish Times.

Wandered through Temple Bar, more record shopping. Flea market in the tiny square; bought Wooley a copy of Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday. He's probably got it, but ooh this sexy cover! Guy running the stall says, "Steinbeck woos de grittest Amettican oothah." On the way home, I detoured past the birthplace of one of the greatest Irish authors, George Bernard Shaw. The plaque outside is humble to the point of insult: "George Bernard Shaw, author of many plays."

The doors in Dublin are its jewels. Grey streets, grey skies, lots of grey stone and chimneys, but the doors – bright canary yellow, seering stovetop red, deep well blue. Sometimes whole facades are painted bright colors, making a rainbow of the narrow roads and quays. Like those monks – desperate striving for beauty amid a grey existence.

Pints that evening at Davy Byrne's, famous for several reasons not the least of which is its appearance in Ulysses as the site of a crucial debate. Just off Grafton Street, Davy Byrne's is a beautiful pub – if you're comfortable with sports-bar gentrification. The bars are fresh Connemara marble, the walls salmon pink (Dubliners love to paint things salmon pink), the stools shiny chrome, the clientele thick with tourists and Dublin's nouveau chic. The boys at the bar were hardly Joyce characters – young, beefy, tan, elegantly gelled hair and ironed T-shirts, and everyone's cell phone rang at least once. The only debating here was about the footie match on TV to which everyone's eyes were fixed, though when Tottenham lost there was genuine emotion and an older man drinking Bud teared up.

The pints were fine, though. Mark told me how different the Guinness would taste in Ireland – how much sweeter and creamier it was since it came from a few leagues up the river instead of several thousand miles across the ocean in a refrigerated cargo hold – but I had no idea how stark and delectable this difference would be. I was simply happy to see someone pour a decent one – 70 percent full, let the head settle, top it off – instead of slopping it into a pilsner glass and sliding it down the bar, as has been my experience in the Midwest. Also, Guinness is the assumption in Dublin bars. You want a Guinness, you simply nod to the bartender; anything else you ask for by name (though the footie fans were hardly in the minority drinking their Bud, to my horror). How could something so black and bitter be so creamy and filling? Fulfilling. I drank a lot of Guinness on this trip and never woke up hungover. "It's so different from American beer," my friend Holly said. "It's, like, nutritious."

Later, a pub more my speed and style: the Palace Bar on Fleet Street. Lots of varnished dark wood, a checkered floor, a noisy crowd, no TVs. A sticky, well-lighted place. Sign over the bar: "A bird is known by his song, a man by his conversation." Jolly bartenders, friendly patrons. Our entire group was meeting here, but the lot of us simply blended into the mass of folks swilling pints and laughing loudly. There was no division between our group and someone else's, we just milled together, cramped, trying not to spill suds on each other, talking to strangers, slapping backs. I ordered Bailey's and a fellow next to me laughed. "You've seen the ads, eh? She doesn't look like that." I've no idea to what he was referring, but we talked for 10 minutes about the varieties of Irish cream. Bar tables piled high with glasses, ashtrays, coasters, cans, lighters, scribbled thoughts, someone's copy of Yeats poetry. And this was only the prelude to dinner at Dish and a night of drag shows (see Gay Ireland) and pretentious lounges (where young Dubliners pulled a few muscles posing and trying to look what Manhattanites surely must look like, right?).

A few of us stayed an extra night in Dublin, hoping to pack in some touristy things we didn't get to do with the group in tow. I finally made it to Christchurch Cathedral and then St. Patrick's Cathedral to pay homage to Jonathan Swift. He was dean of the cathdedral for a good chunk of his life – not to mention one of the greatest satirists in English – and is buried in the floor of the sanctuary. I've loved Swift since I read "A Modest Proposal" in high school – the first moment I realized that incindiary sarcasm was not a creation of the late 20th century. He once wrote to Alexander Pope about his determination to be a thorn in the side of complacency: "The chief end I propose to myself in all my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it." His quotations now litter a cathedral already cluttered by too many memorials, tombs and chiseled advertisements. They even put up this one: "We have just enough religion to make us hate / but not enough to make us love one another." Would that this were posted in every church.

The St. Pat's Cathedral displays also included a curious artifact: The Door of Reconciliation. It hangs there behind a velvet rope, a 500-year-old precursor to The Shining. Seems that back in 1492, while an upstart named Columbus was running into rocks while trying to circumvent the usual trade routes, two great Irish families were locked in a bitter feud – the Butlers of Ormond and the Fitzgeralds of Kildare. Black James, nephew of the Earl of Ormond, and his son fled a battle and hid in the cathedral's Chapter House. Fitzgerald pursued and, realizing that the fighting was spinning out of control, pleaded with James through the door for a truce. James suspected this was a trick to get him out of the house, and he refused to let Fitzgerald in. So Fitzgerald swung out his ax and hacked a hole in the center of the door, through which he stuck his arm, offering a handshake as a pledge of good faith. James was impressed; he opened the door and they received each other in peace. Apparently, this is the root of an Irish expression, "to chance your arm," which means to take the initiative.

The rest of the day was spent milling about, drinking tea and reading Joyce in Bewley's, reading reports of a Daily News poll finding that Bill Clinton would crush all opposition if he decided to run for mayor of New York, finding more record shops – and records: the last Whipping Boy album, at long long last! Packed that night and watched a thrilling film from '48 called Naked City, about an Irish detective (played by a fiendish little Leprachaun of a man) in New York tracking a couple of killers. It had great views of mid-century New York. I was ready to move west, but I was already (to my astonishment) missing Manhattan – the real deal.

The journey:

Recurrent themes: