Saints & Sinners

The week before last I went to a reading by Edna O'Brien and Gabriel Byrne at McNally Jackson in Soho. In a sea of Barnes & Nobles, (though admittedly, and perhaps ominously, a dwindling one) this is one of the city's real gems of a bookshop. It's not huge, but what it has is well selected and well priced and even in the trendiness of Soho it has a neighbourhoody feel, or at least a feeling of having a loyal crew of regulars. In addition to great books and greeting cards and coffee, they do a good series of literary events.

The reading was lovely; engaging and intimate, and followed by a warm and engrossing Q&A between Gabriel Byrne and Edna O’Brien. It was strange to be sitting in New York City in 2011, and hear this veteran Irish writer speak about an Ireland which seemed very far away. Not just geographically, but chronologically. When O’Brien’s The Country Girls was published in 1960 it was seen as scandalous, and was banned, burnt, and denounced from the pulpits of Catholic Ireland. In a time and city where it feels like anything goes, its supposed evils seemed so laughably tame, and the reaction it garnered so impossibly unfair.

Fifty-one years on, I picked up a copy of the author’s 30^th publication Saints and Sinners and while getting it signed I had a few words with the gracious (and at 81, extremely elegant) Ms O'Brien. It has been just one in a glut of really pretty amazing Irish arts events I’ve seen recently, under the banner head of Imagine Ireland. I was on my way out the door when I fell into bad company, and ended up enjoying a few post-reading plastic cups of wine with a very entertaining assortment of acquaintances and new faces. A bunch of us continued the merriment after our polite eviction from the bookshop, and long, long past what would typically constitute the sort of time you’d get home from a literary reading. It was a great night, and introduced me to lots of smart, fun new people.

Among the grouping was Gwen, a journalist who lays no claim to Irish-ness other than a love of it, particularly as a fiddle player. A few months ago she set up her New York Irish Arts blog as a forum to cover many of the great events going on in the city. I had met Gwen just a few days previously, at the Irish Film Institute’s Revisiting the Quiet Man film series at MoMA (another event at which our apparently indefatigable Cultural Ambassador was also actively involved, including a very funny interview with Jim Sheridan. And all this in the same week as the man found time to impersonate Jedward on The Late Late Show!)

Gwen’s commitment to the blog and passion for Irish arts has her keeping a very busy schedule and between, quite literally, the jigs and the reels, she wasn’t able to cover one concert she’d very much wanted to, Julie Feeney in Joe’s Pub at Lafayette Street last Wednesday.

So last week I went to see Julie Feeney. For my thoughts on the gig, and for lots of great write-ups of all of the other interesting things of an Irish arts bent that are going on about the city at the moment, check out http://newyorkirisharts.blogspot.com I hope to be keeping it up – both getting to more and writing more!

Maybe it’s boring to talk about the weather.

But I am Irish, after all, and so it’s my birthright. And living through a first season somewhere, weather is so much part of the fabric of your experience of a place. Weather’s ability to still deliver something new, when you feel you have already lived in all its many shades and colours, is really quite surprising. Of course, the temperate damp of Ireland’s Atlantic coast does not prepare one for real extremes: there have been days here where the forecast range seems to run in 24 hours the full breadth of an Irish year.

Yet never have I lived somewhere where the seasons have been so firmly delineated. It’s like a classroom illustration of a year: a different quarter of a circle showing a tree with leaves budding, blooming, falling, bare.  It was by all accounts a long, hard winter. And then overnight! The trees all erupted into blossom, and the narrow residential streets of West Village redbrick and brownstones became lacy and pink. When a breeze picked up closer to the river, confetti petals tossed and blew in a manner which it is simply impossible not to be fanciful about. The temperatures soared, and suddenly my snow boots and down coat seemed like relics of some ancient world.  As if this were not rude adjustment enough, in the space of a weekend the ubiquitous black tights of the New York business woman had been stripped away in favour of bare legs. I know I was not the only one recoiling in horror.

Memorial Day Weekend, and it is as if the weather received a memo to commence Summer immediately. While the previous couple of weeks had been warm and pleasant, now it is just plain hot. It is hot in a way that rarely ever happens in Ireland, the temperatures lasting into the evening and night even after the sun has dropped, and the air remaining balmy and still. Going out in the evening there is no need for a jacket or cardigan.

Last week everyone had told me that I would be amazed at how the city empties out for Memorial Weekend. Those who can jump ship to their Long Island pads typically mark the official arrival of summer by decamping en masse and swapping sweating concrete for coastal breezes. It  felt however as though every single other person left in the city without the luxury of a Hamptons bolt-hole had the same idea as I did in heading to the opening weekend of Governor’s Island. Serviced every 30minutes by a free ferry service, I have never seen such queues – interminable lines of daytrippers and picnicers and bicycles and strollers. It seemed as if getting everyone on, much less off, the island was simply not possible. But that is the saving grace of New York – they know how to deal with numbers. The ferry carries 1200 people. And boy was it was full – 12 times over.

Despite the lenghty wait, the island itself is only about a 5 minute trip from the tip of  Manhattan; an old army barracks which is now given over entirely as an outdoor amenity for the city, located alongside Liberty and Staten Islands.  It is a curious experience in a city of such ceaseless industry to be transported to somewhere that is solely dedicated to leisure. There is a beach, a bar, a castle to wander through, cycle lanes all around, aritst studios and installations, open greens to lounge on, trees to shade under, ice cream trucks, and the Hudson lapping gently at its edges. It is a brilliantly well conceived and maintained civic space. On this weekend, of course, there was also an awful, awful lot of people. But for better or worse, that’s what it means to live in this city.

The weekend ended in true Memorial Weekend style, with a rooftop barbecue. Burgers and hot dogs sizzled in the heat haze as my Scandinavian and Latino neighbours poured Manu Chao into the evening. The cityscape palette eased from blazing sunlight to dusky greys, and gradually the daylight faded and the electric and neon lights of skyscrapers formed a new picture entirely, traffic pulsing up 7th Avenue to an invisible horizon; the outline of the Empire State Building lit up in red, white and blue.