Pico Pub Crawl — The Celt, Dublin

This is the inside of a Dublin pub called The Celt, shown on a Sunday evening in early October. (The first pub in which I walked around w/ my phone/camera leading the way is The Front Door in Galway City.) The Celt is located on Talbot Street in a district north of the River Liffey. Talbot needs some introduction. Although it is a calm and fairly dignified commercial and residential street today, it’s said to have been a boundary of the infamous Monto, Dublin’s red-light district and the largest in Europe during its 19th-20th-century prime. British soldiers were the johns in many cases, so when Ireland won its independence from Britiain in 1921 and set up the Irish Free State in 1922 (that is, for all but the six counties of Ulster Province in the north), the soldiers went home and the chief industry of the Monto district declined. ¶ But when it was going strong, it was notorious for disease and filth and poverty. In James Joyce’s novel “UIysses,” the two protagonists, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus, visit a brothel in the Monto, but that whorehouse is nowhere as shabby as the more typical brothel apparently was. ¶ We visted the Celt more than once. The energy to be seen in this brief video is mild compared with how electric the place can be. ¶ The second video in this post (below) gives a sample of the live music heard every night.

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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.