Spirits of Galway

I love older well-designed, romantic pubs and restaurants, places with a human scale that above all are comfortable to the body and mind and pleasing to the eye. We stumbled on such a place one afternoon in the Latin Quarter of Galway. I managed to take this (jumpy) video of its interior — make that interiors, because this is a decorative warren of rooms and sub-rooms and little alcoves, an adult playset. And despite my penchant for the old, it’s been this way only since 1997 (but it looks old style). It consists of Malone’s Whiskey Bar, The Front Door, and a back gin bar (name forgotten) — all in all, 6 bars (not all shown) and assorted other hideaways on several floors. The whole of it was developed out of the lower floors of 3 separate houses. I was told that when they began, they didn’t have a final vision of what it would look like, just built one room first and then poked a hole in a wall and started making another, and so on. This is the end result.

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This street is Bowling Green in Galway. On the other side of St. Nicholas’s Church in the distance is The Latin Quarter. In the house on the right (with the oval plaque) there once lived one of the most famous muses in all literature: Nora Barnacle, who became the lover, mother of his two children and eventually wife of the Irish author James Joyce. Nora would move out of Galway to become a chambermaid in Dublin, which is where Joyce met her. To judge by the letters they wrote each other when they were apart for some time, Jim and Nora enjoyed as steamily erotic a relationship as any man & woman may enjoy. (I really do dare you to read those letters.) This house, which remained in Nora’s family for many years after she left, is exceptionally modest, perhaps even humble. ¶ Galway’s Latin Quarter is an exciting district of pubs, Irish music, restaurants, shops, etc. When we were there a few weeks ago (Sept. 27 to Oct. 1), I was struck by how the Irish girls and young women dressed to show a lot of skin, even though evening temperatures were in the 40s. And then I thought … How did Nora Barnacle (b. 1884) dress as a teenager and young adult in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Ireland then was more repressive than it is today, so she was probably modest, well covered up. But maybe that’s why she moved to Dublin, the big Irish city. ¶ Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was a bit of a wit (a trait he passed on to his son). When he learned that Jim’s girl was named Barnacle, he quipped, “Well, she’ll never leave him.”

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Pico Alaska

Former newspaper reporter and editor (Anchorage Daily News). Co-founder of the Alaska Poetry League and coach of the first Alaska teams to compete at the National Poetry Slam (2000, 2001). Adjunct instructor (expository, critical and creative writing) for 30 semesters at the U. of Alaska Anchorage. Volunteer-in-the-Park in Denali National Park and manager of Denali’s Kahiltna Base Camp (1986, 1987). Bronx native, son of immigrants from the Italian Mezzogiorno (Calabria and Lucania). Educated by Irish Catholics, liberal Jews, and the New York Review of Books. Husband to Kathleen, father of Maeve, and author of “Wind Blown and Dripping,” a play about Dashiell Hammett’s service as editor of a GI newspaper in the Aleutian Islands during WW2.