Yesterday we launched [murmur] Dublin Docklands. Poke around the website and take a listening tour of a rapidly changing part of this fine town. So fine, in fact, it might just be the neatest I’ve been to (after Toronto). The Irish diaspora is one of the biggest, and at the launch reception yesterday everybody listed off their Toronto connections for us (uncles, cousins, “a son living on Oakwood”). The stories for this project are largely from older folks, as it’s part of Bealtaine, the only national festival in the world that celebrates creativity in older people.
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Are any of the stories just recitations of passages from Ulysses? Because that would be kind of cool.
Sorry– the photo must be a mistake. Those are the apartment buildings on Bayview just north of Moore Park here in Toronto.
Jonathan> This city doesn’t need anymore Ulysses mythology. I gave a talk at the Abbey theatre the other night (the national theatre of Ireland, the house that Yeats built, etc.) and I said our initial motivation for starting murmur was to help build a mythology for Toronto (an under mythologized city) — but for these overly mythologized cities (like Dublin, like Edinburgh), it lets new stories get out from under the weight of that mythology. Ivanhoe and Joyce are heavy things to live with everyday.
bb> Heh. Check the foreign looking phone number on the sign. I’ll post a pic of the courtyard of that council development soon. It’s as bleak as a Morissey song.
Brilliant! Thanks very much for all your work on [murmur], Shawn. It’s always a treat to see the ear and know that there’s a story to a place. It really brings Toronto to life, and I’m always happy to hear it’s expanded to another town.
Luckily for me, I’m in Ireland this week for a cousin’s wedding, so I’ll try to make it down to the city and take a listen to these stories.