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The Geography of the Imagination: Benedict Kiely’s Dubliners

Thomas O'Grady
p. 257-272

Benedict Kiely est peut-être mieux connu pour ses romans et nouvelles (et surtout pour son roman Proxopera) qui inscrivent le tissu social, culturel et politique du territoire dans et autour de sa ville d’enfance d’Omagh, comté de Tyrone en Irlande du Nord. Mais Kiely a résidé à Dublin pendant plus de 65 des 87 années de sa vie, inscrivant également sa ville d’adoption dans un certain nombre de nouvelles mémorables, en particulier « A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly ». Localisant les nouvelles de Kiely situées à Dublin et liées à Dubliners, le recueil emblématique de James Joyce, cet article engage une discussion sur la notion significative de Guy Davenport, « la géographie de l’imagination », pour éclairer la façon dont les nouvelles de ces deux écrivains importants, concomitantes dans leurs similitudes, sont finalement plus conséquentes dans leurs différences.

Entrées d’index

Studied authors :

James Joyce, Benedict Kiely

Texte intégral

1Surprisingly, given how virtually every word that James Joyce left behind has been subjected to microscopic scholarly scrutiny, relatively little attention has been paid to his own estimation of “Two Gallants,” the sixth story of Dubliners. In a letter he wrote to publisher Grant Richards in May of 1906, Joyce emphatically defended the story’s inclusion in what would one day become a landmark collection:

To omit the story from the book would really be disastrous. It is one of the most important stories in the book. I would rather sacrifice five of the other stories (which I could name) than this one. It is the story (after ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’) which pleases me most. (Selected Letters 87-88)

2Joyce’s satisfaction with “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is understandable: employing, essentially, the dramatic mode—an almost minimalist reliance on dialogue, as opposed to third-person narration—to expose the myriad failings of the cross-section of Dublin political hacks and hangers-on that gathers in Richard J. Tierney’s Committee Room, the story epitomizes the “style of scrupulous meanness” that Joyce had described in an earlier letter to Richards as a defining quality of Dubliners as a whole (Selected Letters 83). Culminating in Joe Hynes’s equivoque “One grief—the memory of Parnell” (Dubliners 135), the story reflects, via Joyce’s irony-tempered realism, the extent to which, more than a decade after the downfall and the death of messianic Charles Stewart Parnell, Ireland had still not awakened from what Joyce would later inscribe as the “nightmare” of history (Ulysses 28). This, of course, would endure as a central theme of Joyce’s writing all the way through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and even Finnegans Wake.

3Obviously, “Two Gallants” does not resound quite the same way through the entire body of Joyce’s work, either stylistically or thematically; nor has it attained in its own right the iconic stature of other stories from Dubliners, particularly “Araby” and “The Dead,” that have been anthologized too many times to count. Still, a reader of “Two Gallants” might easily suppose that Joyce was most pleased with the way the tune played by the Kildare Street harpist—Thomas Moore’s “Song of Fionnuala” (“Silent, O Moyle”)—allows the entire story to reverberate with Moore’s many other Irish Melodies that associate the harp with Ireland feminized; or that he was most pleased with how that particular melody directs the reader to the ironic implications of Moore’s footnote to the song that explains how “the coming of Christianity” to Ireland, signaled by the ringing of a mass-bell, would herald a salvific “release” for Fionnuala, a daughter of the Irish sea god Lir, who had been transformed into a swan (Moore 46). Or a reader might suppose that Joyce was most pleased with how he engineered the story’s ending to exemplify that “spiritual manifestation” he described in Stephen Hero—that “most delicate and evanescent of moments” he labeled “epiphany”: how when the reader looks over Lenehan’s shoulder at the coin illuminated in Corley’s hand, “Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance” (Stephen Hero 211-13). This is the very emblem of uncouth betrayal that gives the lie to the deeply embedded notion of romantic Ireland (a recurring theme of Dubliners) long before William Butler Yeats would declare “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave” (107-08).

4Actually, Joyce’s satisfaction with “Two Gallants” probably involved the amalgamation of all of those details and elements, along with the very simple evaluation of the story that he proffered to his brother Stanislaus not long after he had defended it to Grant Richards: “And after all Two Gallants—with the Sunday crowds and the harp in Kildare street and Lenehan—is an Irish landscape” (Selected Letters 110). In fact, Joyce’s confidence in his inscription of that landscape—the streets broad and narrow traipsed first by Lenehan and Corley together and then by Lenehan alone—anticipates by more than a decade his bold pronouncement, when writing Ulysses, that his intention was “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book” (Budgen 67-68).

5Yet as that very landscape of “Two Gallants” helps to illuminate, Joyce does not have an exclusive claim on either Dublin or Dubliners. Clearly, the opening sentences of the story stake that claim:

The grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur. (Dubliners 49)

6Yet, as registered in the opening sentences of Benedict Kiely’s signature story of Dublin, “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly,” that claim may be contested:

On a warm but not sunny June afternoon on a crowded Dublin street, by no means one of the city’s most elegant streets, a small hotel, a sort of bed-and-breakfast place, went on fire. There was pandemonium at first, more panic than curiosity in the crowd. It was a street of decayed Georgian houses, high and narrow, with steep wooden staircases, and cluttered small shops on the ground floors: all great nourishment for flames. The fire, though, didn’t turn out to be serious. The brigade easily contained and controlled it. The panic passed, gave way to curiosity, then to indignation and finally, alas, to laughter about the odd thing that had happened when the alarm was at its worst. (The Collected Stories 351)

7A “grey warm evening of August,” a “warm but not sunny June afternoon,” the crowds, the streets of Dublin…—mere coincidence of narrative “place setting”? Perhaps not.

8Or perhaps. For like Joyce before him, who declared to Grant Richards that “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories” (Selected Letters 89), Benedict Kiely recognized in his own right that the raw material of realistic fiction is grounded, literally, in place specificity. Obviously, this recognition determines so many of his short stories set in and around Omagh, County Tyrone, his boyhood town in Northern Ireland; indeed, with only a few exceptions, story after story in his substantial Collected Stories resounds with the author’s own version of the obsessive spirit of the narrator’s father in “A Journey to the Seven Streams,” the title story of Kiely’s first collection, published in 1963: “My father, the heavens be his bed, was a terrible man for telling you about the places he had been and for bringing you there if he could and displaying them to you with a mild and gentle air of proprietorship” (Collected Stories 200).

9Tellingly, in those few exceptions, set mostly in Dublin, Kiely is no less proprietary about the city where he lived for more than 65 of his 87 years. In fact, he is no less proprietary about Dublin than Joyce was, and yet the picture of Dublin—and of Dubliners—that Kiely presents is ultimately so different from Joyce’s. It would be simple enough to shrug away the difference by acknowledging that a span of a half-century and more separates the settings of Kiely’s Dublin-based stories from the settings of Joyce’s—that notwithstanding the wishful or wistful thinking of some readers that “Joyce’s Dublin” lived on and on (and lives on still), the city where Benedict Kiely made his life and made his living beginning around 1940 was not really the same “Hibernian Metropolis” that Joyce had engraved in his memory around the turn of the century. A more scholarly strategy might be to acknowledge that Joyce had a very specific agenda for his book of short stories: “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country,” he explained to Grant Richards in May of 1906, “and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis” (Selected Letters 82). A couple of weeks later, he declared: “I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country” (88). In fact, in projecting his writing as a “nicely polished looking-glass” (90), Joyce essentially established the realistic short story in Ireland as a viable and vital form of social commentary; Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain (among many others) owe much to his example. Benedict Kiely less so.

10But a little essay by the great American short story writer Raymond Carver may offer a much more interesting—and much more illuminating—way of contemplating the difference between Joyce’s and Kiely’s Dubliners. Carver observes:

Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else… Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone.
It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time. (13)

11Obviously, Joyce’s “way of looking at things” has been dissected extensively by fully three generations of scholars. “Who Killed James Joyce?” Patrick Kavanagh asked—and answered—as early as 1951, in a poem he wrote for the special Joyce-centered issue of the magazine Envoy: “I, said the commentator, / I killed James Joyce / For my graduation” (51-52). There have been a lot more guilty parties since then, and obviously the Joyce industry is still alive and well and thriving.

  • 1 Incidentally, Davenport was the first student ever to write an Oxford M.A. thesis on Joyce, circa 1 (...)

12The Kiely industry has not been so robust; nor has it been so lethal. In fact, Kiely’s body of work has suffered not from over-attention but from the benign neglect that trends and tendencies in the literary marketplace and in academia can effect: Kiely has suffered not even from being misunderstood but from being un-understood, to adapt from Myles na Gopaleen a coinage he applied to early readings of Joyce (6). One way of redressing that un-understanding is by engaging with a sampler of the short stories that represent his “unique and exact way of looking” at his adopted and adoptive city of Dublin via a strategy described by American man-of-letters Guy Davenport in his essay “The Geography of the Imagination”: “The imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we must reeducate our eyes” (5).1 Davenport’s wonderfully cryptic comments may be interpreted to mean first of all that the writing process is largely intuitive, that the writer can only follow imagination’s lead and thus cannot easily reconstruct the incidental path that it cuts; and secondly that the reader thus needs to recognize that imagination confounds easy mapping—the reader needs to be alert to the sometimes subtle (sometimes even barely perceptible) and unpredictable twists and turns that the writerly imagination may have taken en route to its narrative destination, and the only way to have that alertness, paradoxically, is to allow oneself to become wholly intoxicated by what the writer has concocted and distilled. Given the astute observation by John Wilson Foster that “Kiely is hypnotised by his own verbal facility” (5) and another by Daniel J. Casey that “at times his story outgrows the printed page and has the author in its grip” (40-41), Davenport’s simile involving the drunk man’s watch seems altogether apt.

13And so does his simile about “speech and custom” which, taken literally, takes the reader back to that first paragraph of “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly”—actually to the last sentence of that first paragraph and the single brief sentence comprising the second paragraph—as a point of entry into “Kiely’s Dublin”:

The panic passed, gave way to curiosity, then to indignation and finally, alas, to laughter about the odd thing that had happened when the alarm was at its worst.
This was it. (The Collected Stories 351)

14With that announcement of narrative intention—or perhaps with the “alas” that precedes it—the reader is suddenly in the “intoxicating” midst of a Kiely short story. Abruptly abandoning the detached, third-person past-tense narrative of the opening sentences of the story, Kiely adopts an engaged and engaging present-tense account of the plight of a half-Japanese prostitute known as Madame Butterfly—“From a window on the top-most floor a woman, scantily-clad, puts her head out and waves a patchwork bed coverlet, and screams for help”—and before long the narrator has announced himself in the first-person, in effect denouncing the purported “omniscience” of the story’s beginning as he admits of the lop-sided protagonist, Pike Hunter: “Why he sagged to one side, just a little to the left, when he sat down, I never knew” (Collected Stories 351-52).

15As Declan Kiberd has noted in his essay “Story-Telling: The Gaelic Tradition,” many well-known modern Irish writers—Seumas O’Kelly, Padraic Colum, James Stephens, Daniel Corkery, Frank O’Connor, Mary Lavin—“employ in their stories a style which verges on the conversational” (20). Just a few years before the first publication of “A Ball of Malt” in The Kenyon Review in 1969, however, Irish short story master Frank O’Connor had complained in his book The Lonely Voice that “generations of skilful stylists from Chekhov to Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce had so fashioned the short story that it no longer rang with the tone of a man’s voice speaking” (xix). As “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly” exemplifies, Kiely set out to restore that voice. For although the narrator of this story of not-quite-requited love identifies himself only late in the narrative as a newspaperman—a common Kiely persona, not to be confused with the author himself—his presence is felt throughout in the remarkable variety of literary references and allusions that, even if conceivably attributable to the obsessively literary Pike Hunter, could hardly have been passed on intact from the prostitute Butterfly, his paramour, to the fireman Austin, her confidant, who is the narrator’s primary source for the anecdote on which the story as a whole is purportedly based. In a tour-de-force performance that includes quotations from and paraphrases of not only William Butler Yeats, who has a walk-on part in the story, but also Joyce, John Millington Synge, Edmund Spenser, Guy de Maupassant, and Gilbert and Sullivan, the narrator plainly reveals—and revels in—his own literary background and bent.

  • 2 For specific background details regarding “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly,” see Frank Kersnows (...)

16More than one Kiely commentator has suggested that his narrative style shows “characteristics of oral narrative” that reflect his exposure to the storytelling of seanchaí during summer visits to the Rosses in Donegal during his boyhood (Dunleavy 160). Essentially an urban folktale that Kiely admits “I built around many stories told me by men older than myself” (The Waves Behind Us 125), “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly” certainly exemplifies a feature of the oral tradition noted by J. H. Delargy in his important study The Gaelic Story-Teller: “the art of the folk-tale is in its telling” (13).2 But by way of that abrupt transition—the typesetter’s two hard line breaks, the first taking the reader to “This was it,” the second into the immediacy of the story—“A Ball of Malt” exemplifies another crucial feature of that tradition as well, as it creates for the reader the illusory experience of the story being heard not read: as scholar Vivian Mercier has noted in “The Irish Short Story and Oral Tradition,” the distinct and distinctive relationship between the narrator of a story and his audience is “the indispensable component of the oral tradition”—“without it, the finest of storytellers loses his function” (110).

  • 3 In his memoir Drink to the Bird, Kiely acknowledges his basic writerly strategy: “You pick a bit fr (...)

17In fact, when we “trace” (in the way that Davenport suggests) the meandering path taken by Kiely’s literary imagination, that relationship between narrator and audience proves indispensable even in his Dublin-based stories with more “literary” first-person narrators. In each of these stories, the narrator bears a resemblance to Kiely himself—each is a newspaperman or a budding writer: in “God’s Own Country” the narrator writes for the weekly Catholic newspaper The Standard, in “The Green Lanes” he works for a Catholic “missionary magazine” (perhaps based on the Father Mathew Record), and in “Your Left Foot is Crazy” he is a minor civil servant, originally from County Tyrone, who (like Kiely in the 1940s) is writing a book on William Carleton.3 The role of the narrator in “God’s Own Country” may be the most unusual, as the first six pages, a series of vignettes (including several cameos involving a character identified simply as “the big poet,” readily recognizable as Patrick Kavanagh), seems to establish the story’s focal point as the offices of The Standard with the narrator at the center of all of the activity. Abruptly, however—as abruptly as those line breaks in “A Ball of Malt” but without the announcement of “This was it”—the first-person narrator (with all the liability and unreliability associated with that narrative point of view) morphs into a third-person omniscient narrator who proceeds to recount, with full authority, fully unwarranted, the journey of a fellow newspaperman, Jeremiah Slattery, to the Aran Islands with two bishops (one Irish, one American) and a cameraman:

The night before the voyage they rested in a hotel in Galway City. The wind rattled the casements and now and again blew open the door of the bar in which Jeremiah sat alone until well after midnight, over one miserable whiskey. Nobody bothered to talk to him, not even in Galway where the very lobsters will welcome the stranger. The bar was draughty. He wore his black greatcoat, a relic of his clerical ambitions. (Collected Stories 306)

18The best explanation for this sort of unconventional shift may be embedded in the admiring review of Kiely’s collection of stories The State of Ireland published on the front page of the New York Times Book Review in 1980: “His skill is such that we have to distinguish between writing stories and telling stories. Once you have seen how Mr. Kiely builds a narrative, you must admit that he is not doing what Joyce or Chekhov or Maupassant were doing. His is a different art altogether.” Coincidentally enough, that review was written by Guy Davenport (“An Irish Story” 1).

19The first-person narrators in “The Green Lanes” and “Your Left Foot is Crazy” operate more conventionally within their narrative structures. In “The Green Lanes” the eighteen-year-old editorial and circulation assistant at the “missionary magazine” has his eyes opened to the ways of the world—or at least to relationships between the sexes—not only by a forty-year-old mother-bridled drinking partner who is a self-styled womanizer but also by a sixty-year-old hunchbacked colleague who, twenty-one years earlier, fathered a child by a friend’s wife. In “Your Left Foot is Crazy,” the narrator-protagonist learns those ways of the world on his own, thanks to a pair of identical twin sisters and another pair of young women up from the country whom he and his friend Peter meet at a ballroom dancing academy near the Liffey. In each of these stories Kiely activates his impressive ventriloquial skills to invest his narrator with the ability to tell a story. Describing the twins, the narrator of “Your Left Foot is Crazy” observes:

One of them affected, as we’d have said in another century, bright colours. I’m talking now about the twins. The other went abroad in more demure shades. Brenda was the bright one. They were handsome girls, both of them: if one was the other almost had to be. They spoke well, the good, clear, unaccented (almost) English of the Dublin middle-class: as in Bernard Shaw. They had dark-blue berets and brown eyes that were always smiling. They were good-humored but never laughed out loud, not, at any rate, while we were with them. They were self-assured, capable I’d say, good managers, good housekeepers, the pride and joy of their parents, and rightaway I could see how they had Peter rattled. One of them would have rattled a veteran. Two was, or were, by much too much or too many. (Collected Stories 620)

20The narrator of “The Green Lanes” is not so loquacious, but what these stories have in common with each other and also with “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly” and “God’s Own Country” is that forged relationship, described by Mercier, between the “speaker” in the story and the “listener”/reader.

21As Colum McCann observes in his fine Introduction to The Collected Stories, “in all of Kiely’s stories, the writer and reader become twinned in an act of verbal and personal intimacy” (xiii). Indeed, Kiely’s narrators in his Dublin-based stories—or Kiely himself through those narrators—charm the reader into entering wholly into the world of clerks and newspapermen, domestic workers and dance instructors, priests and drinkers and prostitutes: the world of teeming streets, of bone-numbing and spirit-chilling offices, of green parks and green lanes where lovers rendezvous, of warm and welcoming pubs.

  • 4 This photo, from the archives of The Irish Times, appears on the cover of Peter Costello and Peter (...)

22But his narrators do not merely charm—they also disarm; and it is that disarming quality that allows his stories their ultimate power not just to entertain but also to move the reader profoundly. An apt metaphor for this effect might be the famous photo of Flann O’Brien/Brian O’Nolan/Myles na Gopaleen that shows that multifarious man-of-letters—“three men, or more, in one” Kiely once described him (The Waves Behind Us xii)—standing by a roadworks detour sign on Clifton Avenue in Monkstown; the sign, with an arrow pointing toward O’Brien/O’Nolan/Myles, reads: DUBLIN DIVERSION.4 Kiely’s narratives likewise operate as “Dublin diversions,” leading the reader by a circuitous route indeed—usually involving hilarity of one sort or another—to a place that, along the way, the reader probably did not suspect he was headed. Recognizing that as Kiely’s career advanced his stories became “more subtle, more suggestive, darker, more complex,” Daniel J. Casey, one of his earliest commentators, assured readers: “While they seem to lack narrative unity, . . . [these] stories move in loose psychological streams that have a tendency to keep doubling back on one another, melding in a single cumulative effect” (32). Colum McCann offers similar assurances: “Often the stories have double or triple helixes in operation, stories wound around other stories, layers of narration that would confound even the best architects, and yet the buildings remain essentially simple, we do not get lost inside them” (xiii). Perhaps American novelist John Gardner’s rich image in The Art of Fiction of how a writer composes an utterly coherent world begins to describe Kiely’s specific artistry in this regard:

to make us see and feel vividly what his characters see and feel—to draw us into the characters’ world as if we were born to it—the writer must do more than simply make up characters and then somehow explain and authenticate them (giving them the right kinds of motorcycles and beards, exactly the right memories and jargon). He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot… (46)

23“Bloodless Byrne of a Monday” is a good example of this art and craft. It is also a good example of a Kiely story that achieves that effect of “verbal and personal intimacy” remarked by McCann even while employing a less personal and less intimate third-person voice.

24While, strictly speaking, the protagonist of this story is not a Dubliner—and certainly not a Dublinman (“there is a difference” Kiely has pointed out emphatically [Dublin: Small Oxford Books vi])—the story itself has Dublin written all over it. Perhaps, as with “A Ball of Malt,” there is a whiff of urban folklore to this tale of Arthur, a hungover Sligoman who wanders into a recently vacated Dublin hotel room and briefly assumes the identity of its previous occupant, a fleeting figure named Mulqueen, ordering brandy go leor from room service while lounging in the man’s bed and taking telephone calls from his wife, his mistress and a business associate. As this passage displays, Kiely proves himself the equal of James Joyce in deploying Ulysses-like “interior monologue” (think Leopold Bloom, though, rather than Stephen Dedalus) to convey the state of his protagonist’s mind—and body—as Arthur skirts past the porter in the hotel foyer:

This morning anything is possible. He raises his left hand to reinforce his nod, and passes on. Upstairs or downstairs or to my lady’s chamber? Destiny guides him. So he walks upstairs, soft carpets, long corridors, perhaps an open, detached bathroom even if he has no razor to shave with. Afterwards, barber’s shave, oh bliss, oh bliss. He finds the bathroom and washes his face and those tired eyelids and tired eyes, and combs his hair and shakes himself a bit and shakes his crumpled suit, and polishes his shoes with a dampish handtowel. A bit too risky to chance a bath and total exposure, although he has heard and read the oddest stories about deeds performed in hotel bathrooms by people who had no right in the world to be there. Bravely he steps out again. A brandy in the bar, and the road to the bank and his own hotel and sobriety, and home: Bright sun before whose glorious rays…
Before him in the corridor a door opens and a man steps out.
(Collected Stories 578)

25But as Guy Davenport remarked admiringly in his review of The State of Ireland, “A Kiely story is usually several stories at once, for his finest habit is to tell a story within a story to illustrate a point, and his characters all have stories to tell too” (“An Irish Story” 37). In this case, the stories within the story—including (but not limited to) three Dublin dock workers exchanging anecdotes about a frightfully anemic, toothless, pigeon-fancying, feline-despising, and ultimately vengeful drayman named Byrne, Arthur’s nostalgic reminiscences of his annual male-bonding reunion in Dublin with former schoolmates, and Mulqueen’s apparent personal troubles (domestic, romantic, and professional)—finally culminate in Arthur’s grappling, through the haze or the glaze of morning-after brandies, with the recent death of one of his schoolmates and with vague misgivings about marital so-called bliss. After leaving the hotel, Arthur discovers that Mulqueen’s own life of quiet desperation led him to jump into the Liffey, from which he was ignominiously retrieved. Arthur ponders the implications of his having briefly played Mulqueen in his hotel room: “He has never seen the man’s face. Shared his life for a bit. Shared it? Lived it” (584). Obviously, the reader is enjoined to conclude, along with Arthur, that life could be worse.

26But it could also be better. And with that recognition the reader moves a bit deeper into Kiely’s Dublin landscape—the geography of his imagination—in search of that drunk man’s watch. For “Bloodless Byrne of a Monday” exemplifies how, almost invariably, a more ominous tone or note resonates behind even the most self-delighting voices of Kiely’s narrators and how the hilarity of even his most “diverting” stories tends to moderate if not into the sobering contemplativeness experienced by Arthur (and shared by the reader) then at least into an unsentimental poignancy capable of expressing otherwise ineffable aspects of the human condition.

27Another of Kiely’s Dublin stories, “Through the Fields in Gloves,” represents an extreme version of this tendency, as establishing his protagonist as the center of consciousness for the narrative, Kiely takes the reader right into the mind of a certifiable Dublin eccentric, or psychotic: a man who has made a name for himself—“Peter the Painter”—by way of his compulsion to spray red paint on slender young women. Apparently this compulsion was triggered by his overhearing a couple of lines from a minor poem by minor poet Frances Cornford that he took as a summons to prove his love for his exceedingly obese wife:

Once in a pub, he could remember exactly when, because it wasn’t often he darkened the door of a pub, redfaced bastards on whiskey and overdressed bitches drinking gins and tonics that cost the moon and sixpence, and a fat woman walked past to the loo as they called it nowadays and a drunk at the counter said why do you walk through the fields in gloves fat white woman whom nobody loves: and then said to the barman that that was a poem, as if anybody wouldn’t have known, even if it wasn’t much of a poem.Misery Martha can’t walk through the fields but she loves nice gloves. She has lovely small hands, not too pudgy about the knuckles and how did that drunk know that nobody loved the fat woman who walked out to the loo? (Collected Stories 604-05)

28But as Kiely reveals through the artfully managed interior monologue of the story, his protagonist is clearly haunted by memories of his obsessively gambling mother, “a thin, quickwalking, brownfaced woman, hat pinned on one side, sixpence each way, never more and you couldn’t have less, up and down the street all day long to the bookies, she could run like a hare” (604), and the squalid wretchedness of his domestic life is exacerbated by Martha’s devoutly religious live-in cousin Julia who spouts malapropisms about “Looseyah” (Sr. Lucia of Fatimah fame) and “the Children of the Atom” (606). Notwithstanding his belief that he is somehow defending the honor of his grossly overweight and chair-bound wife, his own obsession with assaulting young women with spray paint has about it at least a hint of deep-rooted misogyny. Perhaps the reader gets to know “Peter the Painter” a bit too well, as the “diverting” element here seems to produce a textbook instance of what Vivian Mercier described in The Irish Comic Tradition, his study of eleven centuries of comic expression in Irish literature and culture: “It seems to me that there is a laugh—call it the aesthetic laugh, if you wish—which laughs at whatever is not beautiful. Essentially, this laugh is provoked by the grotesque” (48).

29After an impressive array of “diversionary” tactics—literary allusions (William Carleton, William Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson), historical allusions (the practices of Gaelic poets, Napoleon, the Battle of the Bulge), references to movies and movie stars (Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron), the naming of traditional Irish dances (the Walls of Limerick, the Siege of Ennis, the High Caul Cap), glosses on Ballyvourney in West Cork and St. Gobnait, and sundry sidetracking anecdotes—“Your Left Foot is Crazy” ends rather grimly too, with the narrator-protagonist recounting first his discovery that the identical twin sisters had been randomly switching between him and Peter on dates and then his discovery that the two winsome country girls he and Peter had met at the dance academy had died in a bicycle accident: “They got two and a quarter inches, single-column, provincial papers please copy, and I kept the clipping for a long time. And that was that, the man’s bicycle one in the saddle one on the bar, brakes that snapped and the stone bridge at the foot of the precipice of a hill…” (627). “The Green Lanes” ends a bit more ambiguously, a couple of decades on, with the image of the now elderly hunchback being helped across the street by his handsome grownup son—“They were talking and laughing and he didn’t see me,” the narrator remarks—contrasted with the image of the once-cocky womanizer dying in his mother’s home: “His face was thin and old the last time I saw him and his sharp voice was failed to a feeble sort of a whisper. He was aged all of a sudden, I thought, but then I remembered that I was, at that moment, the age he was when I first met him. That’s the way it is in being friendly for a long time with people older than yourself” (Collected Stories 350). The narrator is wiser, yes; but he is also older.

30Has the drunk man found his watch yet? Not quite. But perhaps locating both “Two Gallants” and “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly”—or at least the way that each story ends—relative to a specific moment in Joyce’s Ulysses will help a reader to narrow the search for a remedy for the “un-understanding” of Benedict Kiely’s distinctive vision and narrative strategy vis-à-vis Joyce’s Dublin and Dubliners. That moment takes place in the “Aeolus” episode, which is set in the offices of The Freeman’s Journal (and the Evening Telegraph). Under the headline of DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN, Stephen Dedalus is about to share his “Parable of the Plums” with a motley assembly of newspapermen, idlers and scroungers (including Lenehan from “Two Gallants”). A tale of “two Dublin vestals” eating plums atop Nelson’s Pillar on Sackville Street, Stephen’s sketch is his first fully realized attempt to register Dublin as the Joycean “centre of paralysis”: too “giddy” to look outwards and “too tired to look up or down or to speak,” Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe are content merely to gaze obliviously at the statue of the “onehandled adulterer” Lord Nelson, in Stephen’s mind an ironically obvious symbol of the vitality—in this case a metaphorical virility—so wanting in turn-of-the-century Dublin. Steeling himself before these men whose prowess with words has already made him blush, “his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture,” Stephen considers what is at stake, his thinking conveyed by Joyce through interior monologue: “Dubliners.” Rising to the occasion, Stephen then emboldens himself, his thinking again conveyed via interior monologue: “On now. Dare it. Let there be life” (Ulysses 121-22).

31For Stephen Dedalus, this imperative amounts to a version of Raymond Carver’s “unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking”—essentially, the exigency for Stephen to inscribe “life” not simply as he knows it experientially but rather as he conceives it in an exact literary manner. Of course, this was Joyce’s imperative too, as just weeks after the fictional Stephen shares, on June 16th of 1904, his “Parable of the Plums” with his fellow men of words in the newspaper office, the real-life Joyce announced in a letter to his friend Con Curran: “I am writing a series of epicleti—ten—for a paper. I have written one. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city” (Selected Letters 22). Eventually, Joyce’s “unique and exact way of looking” would be reflected in the way that “Two Gallants” ends with the death of romance in Ireland exposed “epiphanically” by Corley’s cynical exploiting of the slavey so that he and Lenehan can have a night of boozing at her expense: “Corley halted at the first lamp and stared grimly before him. Then with a grave gesture he extended a hand towards the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm” (Dubliners 60).

32In telling contrast, Kiely’s story has, in effect, two endings. The second one involves Butterfly, the half-Japanese Dublin prostitute who had been able to reciprocate only within the limits of her profession Pike Hunter’s commitment to her, which was triggered by a chance meeting that he had witnessed on a Dublin street between the aged William Butler Yeats and his beloved Maud Gonne: “Something odd had happened to him: poetry, a vision of love?” (Collected Stories 355). “Poor Pike,” she says of the timid, retiring civil servant who hoped to win her with the words used by Yeats to woo that woman Homer sung: “he’d puke you with poethry” (360). Eventually, taking heed of the exemplary tale told to her by fireman Austin McDonnell of Lady Emma Hamilton’s rise from lowly slavey to celebrated mistress of Lord Nelson, Butterfly proves susceptible to a different vision: “She may have been wearied by Pike and his sad attachment to poetry, but she rose to the glimmering vision of herself as a great lady beloved by a great and valiant lord. A year later she married a docker, a quiet hard-working fellow who had slowly sipped his pints of black porter and watched and waited all the time” (367-68).

  • 5 This article revises a talk, titled “Through Streets Broad and Narrow: Benedict Kiely’s Dubliners,” (...)

33Pike’s ending comes first. Unraveling into clinical madness after a “fatally poetic” rendezvous atop Howth Head, where he tried to recreate the scenario of Yeats’s early (and not especially striking) poem “The White Birds”—“I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!”—Pike is committed, the narrator tells us, to “Saint Patrick’s Hospital where, as you may all remember, Dean Swift died roaring” (366). Effectively, the story concludes with the narrator’s audience—or Kiely’s readers—not quite roaring with the laughter that the story’s opening may have provoked. Call that last laugh “the aesthetic laugh, if you wish”: ultimately, “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly” emblematizes how Benedict Kiely’s “proprietary” view of Dublin and of Dubliners stands on equal footing with the distinctive signature of James Joyce’s “Irish landscape.”5

Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1960. Print.

Carver, Raymond. “On Writing.” Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1983. 13-18. Print.

Casey, Daniel J. Benedict Kiely. Lewisburg: Bucknell U P, 1974. Print.

Costello, Peter and Peter van de Kamp. Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography. London: Bloomsbury, 1987. Print.

Davenport, Guy. “An Irish Story: Kiely,” New York Times Book Review, November 16, 1980, 1, 37. Print.

---. “The Geography of the Imagination.” The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. 3-15. Print.

Delargy, J. H. The Gaelic Story-Teller. The Proceedings of the British Academy XXXI London: British Academy, 1945. Print.

Dunleavy, Janet Egleson. “Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Bowen, and a New Generation: The Irish Short Story at Mid-Century.” The Irish Short Story: A Critical History. Ed. James F. Kilroy. Boston: Twayne, 1984. 145-68. Print.

Foster, John Wilson. Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974. Print.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980. Print.

---. Selected Letters. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: The Viking Press, 1975. Print.

---. Stephen Hero. New York: A New Directions Books, 1963. Print.

---. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1986. Print.

Kavanagh, Patrick. “Who Killed James Joyce?” A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish. Ed. John Ryan. Brighton: Clifton Books, 1970. 51-52. Print.

Kersnowski, Frank. “Ben Kiely and His Ball of Malt,” Journal of the Short Story in English 1 (Autumn 1986), 17-27. Print.

Kiberd, Declan. “Story-Telling: The Gaelic Tradition.” The Irish Short Story. Ed. Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown. Gerards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979. 13-26. Print.

Kiely, Benedict. Drink to the Bird. London: Methuen, 1991. Print.

---. The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely. London: Methuen, 2001. Print.

---. The Waves Behind Us: Further Memoirs. London: Methuen, 1999. Print.

McCann, Colum. Introduction. The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely. London: Methuen, 2001. ix-xvii. Print.

Mercier, Vivian. The Irish Comic Tradition. London: Oxford U P, 1962. Print.

---. “The Irish Short Story and Oral Tradition.” The Celtic Cross: Studies in Irish Culture and Literature. Ed. Ray B. Browne, William John Roscelli, and Richard Loftus. West Lafeyette, IN: Purdue University Studies, 1964. 98-116. Print.

Moore, Thomas. Moore’s Irish Melodies. Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, Ltd., n.d. Print.

na Gopaleen, Myles. “Cruiskeen Lawn,” Irish Times 10 April 1957. 6. Print.

O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. New York: Bantam, 1968. Print.

Yeats, William Butler. “September 1913.” W. B. Yeats: The Poems (Second Edition). Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner’s, 1997. 107-08. Print.

1 Incidentally, Davenport was the first student ever to write an Oxford M.A. thesis on Joyce, circa 1951.

2 For specific background details regarding “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly,” see Frank Kersnowski, “Ben Kiely and His Ball of Malt,” Journal of the Short Story in English 1 (Autumn 1986), 17-27.

3 In his memoir Drink to the Bird, Kiely acknowledges his basic writerly strategy: “You pick a bit from here and a bit from there” (147). He also admits: “My father told me never to spoil a good story for the sake of the truth” (52).

4 This photo, from the archives of The Irish Times, appears on the cover of Peter Costello and Peter van de Kamp, Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 1987).

5 This article revises a talk, titled “Through Streets Broad and Narrow: Benedict Kiely’s Dubliners,” presented at the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin on July 30, 2013.

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier

Thomas O'Grady, « The Geography of the Imagination: Benedict Kiely’s Dubliners », Journal of the Short Story in English, 66 | 2016, 257-272.

Référence électronique

Thomas O'Grady, « The Geography of the Imagination: Benedict Kiely’s Dubliners », Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 66 | Spring 2016, mis en ligne le 01 mars 2018, consulté le 07 août 2020. URL :

Thomas O'Grady

Thomas O’Grady is Professor of English and Director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He has published articles, essays and reviews on Irish literary and cultural matters in many scholarly journals, including Éire-Ireland, James Joyce Quarterly, Études Irlandaises, Irish University Review, New Hibernia Review, Joyce Studies Annual, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, The Irish Review, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, The Recorder, The Clogher Record, An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts, and Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing.

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J. Phys. II France
Volume 2, Numéro 10, October 1992
Page(s) 1881 - 1888
DOI: 10.1051/jp2:1992241
J. Phys. II France 2 (1992) 1881-1888

Saddle-splay and periodic instability in a hybrid aligned nematic layer subjected to a normal magnetic field

A. Sparavigna1, L. Komitov2, O. D. Lavrentovich3, 4 and A. Strigazzi1

1  Dipartimento di Fisica, Politecnico di Torino, CISM and INFM, Unità di Torino, C. so Duca degli Abruzzi 24, I-10129 Torino, Italy
2  Physics Department, Chalmers University of Technology, S-41296 Göteborg, Sweden
3  Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, associé au CNRS, Bât. 510, Université de Paris-Sud, F-91405 Orsay, France
4  Institute of Physics, Academy of Science of Ukraine, Kyïv-28, Ukraine

(Received 2 March 1992, accepted in final form 16 July 1992)

A nematic layer with opposite boundary conditions (unidirectional planar and homeotropic) is considered, having strong anchoring at the planar wall. It is known that a periodic deformation of splay-type can intervene between the aperiodic hybrid alignment and undistorted planar state as one decreases the film thickness. This periodic state occurs due to the fact that the energetic cost for a mixed twist-splay can be lower than the surface energetic cost at the homeotropic wall in the case of undistorted planar alignment. Such a situation may also be achieved for nematics which have a bulk elastic isotropy. In this paper, the saddle-splay elastic constant K24 is shown to influence strongly the occurrence of the periodic pattern of splay-type, also in the presence of an external magnetic field normal to the cell plates, and the role of the geometrical anchoring in wedge-shaped cells is discussed.

61.30 - 61.30G - 68.10C

© Les Editions de Physique 1992

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Posted in God, Family, Friends

The Lonely, Sad Boy!

This boy was very lonely. His parents did not give him much love and attention. So he had to play alone by himself most of the time.

He had a brother and a sister. They were older than him. And they also ignored him most of the time.

He wanted to make new friends when he went to the park to play. His parents went with him and watched him play and stayed with him. Still, he tried very hard to be happy.

He was a wonderful boy. A wonderful boy trying to be happy. Trying to have friends. Trying very hard in school to be perfect.

He wanted a wonderful life because he really liked people. Because his parents were not always nice to him, he became interested in the people he met in his town.

But eventually, the little boy prayed and somehow found Jesus. Who walked with him and became his very dear close friend for the rest of his life.

People Person: my name is Judy Barbera. I am retired from selling. I have two daughters and two wonderful grandsons. I have a walking problem. I love my husband.

5 thoughts on “The Lonely, Sad Boy!

  1. Awh Mom I LOVE your special and touching story so much!! It is amazing how the boy gave his life to Jesus! I LOVE the picture you used of dad too!!!! 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

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There isn’t an answer to everything

After decades of unfunded research into human psycho-emotional sensitivity, spontaneous, sometimes suspect, transactions of love and memory, and the experience of a Baker’s Dozen of mysterious neurological and/or physical ailments and disorders which have caused various degrees of anxiety and paralysis, Juicy Planet is pleased to finally be able to report that there isn’t an … More There isn’t an answer to everything

Colonial clock

When the water pipes started to freeze no one was the wiser. It started first down by the potato bin, where all eyes were on the achy shaping of liquid into solid, which turned the outside of the pipe from dirty metal to blue to blue grey, until it looked like the dusty uniform of … More Colonial clock

The Moses frequency

Juicy Planet has been receiving slippery but persistent messages from UHF channel 52 on our black & white Panasonic TV, of various clips of Charlton Heston near naked on the beach from the film, The Planet of the Apes. But as it turns out, this scene cannot be found in the actual Hollywood movie! It … More The Moses frequency

ode to Patrick Chan

And on the sixth day of the Juicy Planet flu it was the ever-so-kind and thoughtful spammer who remembered us in our suffering persistently encouraging us to feel better soon through various get-rich-quick-while-helping-others opportunities (see incredible offer below!). For this we are grateful and offer in return the following Poem: ————————————— you bold fake Patricks … More ode to Patrick Chan

Inverted Stepford Wife-ism taking toll on Golden Rule

  Juicy Planet has been put on ORANGE ALERT due to the curious socio-medical condition whose origin has been traced to the DNA of females born and raised into the American upper middle, lower upper, and middle flyweight classes. The disease, popularly known as the Inverted Stepford, seems to take hold in female subjects in early … More Inverted Stepford Wife-ism taking toll on Golden Rule


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The Allure of Junk Part II: Keep It Simple

Junk. It’s everywhere. It makes its way from factories into supermarkets, onto our TVs and iPad screens and into magazines; it fills our bellies, minds and rubbish bins, and ends in the ocean and overflows our tips. It’s ingrained in our society and the system we know so well. It can rid us (and Earth) of the pleasures of pure living: healthy, strong, independent, sustainable, and aware.

Although I didn’t explicitly say it in the introduction of this series, minimalist and mindful ways of living and being are at the heart of this series and a big influence on my thinking. I’m no expert on these topics but I see that by freeing our lives of unnecessary clutter and junk – and I don’t mean only the physical kind – we’ll get closer to achieving inner peace and greater clarity in an otherwise chaotic world. It’s a constant process.

Thus begins Part II of the Allure of Junk series. I’m back!

“Simplicity, clarity, singleness: these are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy.” – Richard Halloway

The irony of this post is that I may not keep it simple in my writing – I certainly haven’t in the process – but I’ll give it a shot.

In the past couple of weeks, I feel like I’ve fallen on my head a few times. As a kid, I could get up, rub the pain, ask for help if I needed it, and just get on with the game, but sometimes it’s not so simple.

It’s easy to neglect the signs we’re about to fall on our heads when we’re caught up in ‘everything else.’ Yep, we catch that damn busy bug, and we get a shock once we’re down. Never fear!

We all ride emotional waves day-to-day; it’s a part of being human. Sometimes we need reminders (from ourselves and others) to get up, reassess where we’re at and to put everything back together into manageable pieces, essentially simplifying our lives, finding contentment and promoting efficiency. I know many of us are riding the same wave, so I’ve put together ways to review the things that cause the “busy-ness” to get to us. It takes time but here they are.

When everything’s piling up and your mind’s cluttered, sometimes all you have to do is step out of the ring and ask for time out, even if it’s just a day or a weekend. You’re allowed it. Call it. Time out is the only way you’ll have the chance to see where you’re at and what’s important to you, and you probably need some ‘me time.’ Ask yourself why you’re so caught up in whatever it is and if it’s taking up unnecessary space in your life. What’s preventing you from letting go? What do you need to do to clear your mind? Don’t make more commitments (yet). Get away from the screen (there’s that irony again). Hang with your SO or see your friends. You’re allowed a night off.

I am going to go out on a whim and say most of us attach guilt to the possessions that sit in our cupboards waiting for our attention. If you feel like you’ve got stacks of junk around your house (whether hidden under the rug or not), I guarantee you won’t be 100% until you deal with them, and that’s what I’ve been doing: cleaning up. Be brutal. You won’t be on your death bed wishing you had accumulated more stuff. When you get rid of junk, you create more space in your mind for immaterial goodies and creativity.

My Vegan Week

It’s ironic to not look after your body because you have “too much to do”, when in fact exercise and eating healthily improve efficiency!

I felt frantic because I stopped moving. I glued myself to the computer (working, writing, reading, wasting), and became too attached to commitments and too busy for exercise; silly mistakes, but the lesson’s learnt: my body thrives on attention and movement. The body is sometimes the last place we look when we’re feeling overwhelmed, but it should be one of the first.

When you look after your body, you also take care of other people. Food and activity tie us together. You can tell what a person eats or what activity they do in how they project themselves. By eating well (local, organic, etc.), we take better care of the environment and the people we love, ourselves included.

We’re the whole system: mind, body and everything in-between. We’ve got to respect the whole system if we wish to get in control, feel contentment and simplify our lives in the face of chaos. Find what works for you.

VIVID Sydney Light Tunnel

“By being kind to ourselves and others we are creating a world of wellness within and without our bodies.” – John C. Bader

On the journey to finding greater inner peace within the chaos of everyday life, it’s inevitable that most of us, unless we’re from another world, will slip on something along the way. Sometimes it’s a lot harder than “brushing it off” but there are ways to simplify, reassess and get on with the game once more (and better than before). Keep it simple, stupid!

Related Articles

How to Fall Right’ by Olive on Blonde. This article was a fantastic pick-me-up this week. So grateful!

9 Rules for a Simpler Day’ and ‘Do Less: A Short Guide’ by Zenhabits. Again, these posts came at the right time. The universe/interwebs delivered.

How Mindfulness can save your Relationship’ by Lisa Firestone. She writes, “As we become more mindful, we achieve a greater sense of inner peace that is beneficial to us and the world around us, especially the people close to us.”

The Purpose of Connectedness’ by Life as a Wave. This a great post on clarity, openness and connectedness. Their points tie in with the purpose of this blog.

Now, to get away from the screen…

28 thoughts on “The Allure of Junk Part II: Keep It Simple

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Queensland Trip in Photographs, April 2014

"Take time to recharge your batteries. It's hard to see where you're going when your lights are dim." ― Robert H. Conelly "Be of good cheer. Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourself a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you [...]


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Getting Started Guide

80 Pages of tips and tricks from the last 3 years working with the K40 laser cutter

Ebook contains 80 pages of informative articles , tips and tricks.

Great for anyone getting started with the K40 Laser Cutter

All content within the ebook is written by myself (Sam) and copyright and may not be sold or redistributed

If your new to the K40 laser cutter, then this ebook should get you up to speed on how to use your machine. In this ebook I’ve listed tips and tricks, how to make money off the K40 as well as the settings i’ve used for optimal results from the last 3 years of working with the K40

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me in the contact section of the site.

2 thoughts on “Getting Started Guide”

    1. k40sam says:

      Hi Danny

      It has tips and guide for whisperer (which I actually use) unfortunately I havn’t written any Inkscape tutorials as of yet but feel free to ask away on the forum and I can answer them there,

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Teamwork, fun, creative and innovative

With the activity of the paella contest and the gymkhana to get ingredients, we had a very fun time and it served us at the same time to do teamwork and bring out the most creative and innovative side of each. We recommend it.

Enrique Belda López, Wineries Torres, Business Innovation Consultant

We had a great time!

We highly appreciate your willingness and good work. We had a great time and my colleagues came out very satisfied with it. I also. We learned a lot from this team building and I wish we all put our improvement goals into action starting today.

Cristina Benedet, SIG Combibloc S.A.

Articles and News Team Building

Team Building in all these cities


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A quality camera like a Rolleiflex is worth a CLA (Clean, Lubricate and Adjust). This 30 years old (and older) equipment needs service from time to time, because these problems can occur:

  • Shutter or diaphragm blades can get sticky/slow
  • Shutter speeds can deviate
  • Self timer can get slow or can get stuck
  • The camera can get play on the front of the housing
  • Problems with the coupling system between winder and shutter can occur
  • Lens parts can get affected by fungus (haze)
  • The light meter can deviate
  • Etc.

In most cases these kind of defects can be repaired without any problem.

In general, all repair will be carried out as a CLA. By doing so, we can warrant the correct technical functioning of your equipment (and thus give a guarantee).

Will van Manen
Kamera-Service vof
Dorpsstraat 81
2712 AD Zoetermeer
(079) 316 33 39
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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K A R E N  P A L L A S
A London-based graphic designer. My practice is a hybrid of design and technology. My field of design explores internet technology in the lens of politics. I have recently completed a Masters Degree in Graphic Media Design at the University of the Arts London. I am proficient in Adobe CC, especially in Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign and After Effects. I am a freelance commissioned designer in my spare time.
Website is currently undertaking adjustments and will be up and working soon.


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NIT Techvaganza: A Melange of Activity

Saima Rashid

NIT Techvaganza 2014 -  Srinagar.

NIT Techvaganza 2014 – Srinagar.

The three day event ‘techvaganza’ 2k14’ organized by NIT hazratbal Srinagar is carried out with a purpose to test the practical knowledge of engineering students or the ones who are pursuing  engineering course in future. It is a competition cum workshop.

The very event was inaugurated by the institute’s director Prof A.H. Mir in presence of faculty members and hundreds of tech enthusiasts. There was no barrier in age groups; anyone was allowed to participate in the very competitions from almost 8th standard to MTECH students.

While addressing to the gathering, Prof Mir said “you are the future of this nation and you should be ready for any challenge”.

After the inaugural ceremony main events started which lasted till late evening. The prominent events among them were Mystery box, Smack Down, Make up my stamp, Codomonia, Embesys, Photographia, estimator and a workshop on Nanotechnology.

The electrical engineering department of the institute organized the Mystery Box event. The mystery box contained lot of electronic equipments which students had to test and later on they were supposed to identify the kind of circuit it is.

Umar Manzoor, a 4th semester student and organizer of the mystery box event said, “the main purpose of this event is to bring out the technological knowhow of young lots”.

The electrical department organized another event of gaming.

“Here we have three world famed computer game competitions including Counter Strike, FIFA and NFS Most Wanted,” an organizer Mohit said.

The department of Physics organized a workshop on NANO Science in which the experts highlighted the growing technological advances of the field. They said that the Nano technology holds the way forward for future development. The participants were given the basic ideas of how the technology works.

About Author

A journalist with seven years of working experience in Kashmir.

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SELFISH (a poem)

I want to be Sylvia Plath, words
slipping from my mouth in hopeless
abandon, aware of the mania,
craving the solitude of my mind.

I want an emerald pool filled
with money, so that my fingertips
are stained jealous jade, my nose
inhaling the scent of luxury.

I want a house, hidden in pines
and forest, a bright springtime
racing across the lawn, flowers
in bloom, and the scent of spruce.

I want a diamond engagement ring,
and the boy who will give it to me,
his eyes a cool, calm green,
two eclipses of satisfying luck.

I want what I can’t have,
and that’s what makes me coil
with envy, a serpent slithering,
just a soul withering in the soil.

Somewhere in the United States (2016)

Hello, my dear readers. This poem was written for creative writing class in December 2018. The poem is meant to cut into the “big” aspects of life: power, money, success, love, and jealousy. I’m not exactly sure how I was inspired to write this one; it just came to me. Maybe I was in a particularly envious mood. Who knows. However, I think this poem can apply to everyone. Jealousy is not a pretty trait, and we must all work on finding our happiness through what we already have–rather than what we want.

I didn’t write this poem to complain about what I want; I wrote this poem to expose what I see are the things that drive our actions. We all desire success in some shape or form, and that can be problematic. It can affect our outlook on life, and for some it will make things unbearable in the long run.

Therefore, let’s learn to be selfless. Let’s not focus on I want I want I want. We are all blessed by things in our lives that others covet, and we all struggle with things greater than ourselves. Let’s learn to be compassionate and not wither away, because selfishness does that to us. It’s a blight on crops, and it’s a toxin in our veins. An emotional toxin, so to speak.

Don’t let your selfishness rot you dry.

All right, my beautiful readers. I hope you enjoyed reading this poem, but now I’m off to do more studying.

Until next time,

27 thoughts on “SELFISH (a poem)”

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YOURS TRULY (out now!)

Hello, my dear readers!

I hope you are all doing wonderful and having a great beginning to April. I am sorry for not posting as much this month, as things have been quite busy as the school year wraps up. That being said, I wanted to do a quick post and tell you guys some very big news.

My newest book, Yours Truly, is out today! This book is a thriller that takes place in both New York City and Mississippi, and I’ll give you guys a brief overview below.

Eight years ago Eliza Oehlstrom was a college senior aching to graduate and get discovered by New York literary agents. Today Eliza Oehlstrom is a bestselling writer who has retreated to the quiet Mississippi hills.

Both Elizas are forced to reckon with unwarranted and haunting notes from a stranger only known as Yours Truly, who seems to know Eliza’s every move. While Yours Truly supports Eliza’s writing career, the stranger also makes it clear that Eliza’s every move is being observed.

But Eliza can only take so much.

Told from these two time periods, YOURS TRULY poses the question: Are we ever really alone?

***The book will be published on Smashwords, iBooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other formats. Since it is just now coming out, the URL links are not available yet, so I will make sure to come back and add in those links ASAP.

Thank you guys so much for your support! I promise I will keep writing soon. (Things will settle down here in a week or so, and I’ll get back to my regular schedule.)

Until next time,

yours truly-2

19 thoughts on “YOURS TRULY (out now!)”

  1. Hello Princess, will you love to contribute to an inspiring journal titled VOICES? I’m looking for just one person with the right words to write the epilogue of the journal and I see that you are the right person. Please, let me know if you are interested.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. VOICES is a journal airing the opinion of poets and essayists on a single subject matter. Our first issue discusses about love. In this issue, we are considering love in two different phases by asking this question, is love pleasure or pressure? I have the opinion of 13 poets and essayists on this issue already. I humbly seek your opinion on this subject matter which will make the epilogue of the journal. Your discussion should ask or answer this question, does love gives pleasure or pressure?
        Thanks princess, I hope to hear from you soon.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. I will be glad if your response can be available in the next 24hours. your response should be in a prose form, but if you prefer to write in form of poetry, it is also acceptable. There is no limit to the length of words you should write. Please write as much and as lengthy as you can. Thanks in anticipation. You can post your write up on your blog and send the link to me or send it to me via email at admin@giftedminds.com.ng

        Liked by 1 person

    1. Hi Princess, I have received your response and I have longed replied. I hope you got my appreciation note via your email.
      Princess, I would love to add your bio on the journal. Do you mind sending in a short bio and links to your blogs and publications.

      Liked by 1 person

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Have you seen Elementor?

Our flagship product, Layers has been acquired by the team at Elementor.

With a powerful, fast page builder, Elementor is the best way to get your site online with as little effort as possible.

Flatpack: Verify WooCommerce Shop Pages

WooCommerce creates a Shop, Cart, Checkout and My Account page for you automatically after installation, as long as you followed the instructions to click the "Create Pages" button (if not, de-activate and re-activate the plugin to trigger this action again, or create the pages manually). These pages may also be loaded by your theme's eCommerce demo content file. It is important that you only have one copy of each WooCommerce page under Pages as they are tied to specific functionality in your shop.

  1. Click on Pages
  2. Determine whether you have any duplicated WooCommerce pages. At a minimum, you need one copy of each of the following:
    • Cart
    • Checkout
    • My Account
    • Shop
    • Terms & Conditions (optional - this is only needed if you are forcing users to accept your terms prior to payment)
  3. If you see duplicates, check the page slug by hovering over the page title, clicking Quick Edit, and looking at the slug field.
    • Delete the version with a number after the slug, ie shop-2, then click on the Trash link and empty the trash.
    • If you notice any remaining pages that have a number in the slug, simply delete it so the slug matches the title, ie. "shop-2" becomes "shop".
  4. If you do not have any of these pages, click on Add New and create one page for each main link using the corresponding shortcode listed here:
    • Cart: [woocommerce_cart]
    • Checkout: [woocommerce_checkout]
    • My Account: [woocommerce_my_account]
    • (optional)Track Order: [woocommerce_order_tracking]
  5. From the main page index, Hover over the Shop page title and click the Quick Edit link (if you don't have a Shop page, create one and proceed to step 6) quick_edit
  6. Select the Shop page template from the Template drop-down and click Update shop_page
    • Note that some themes do not have a special Shop or Product List template (such as Handmade). In these cases simply leave it on Default
    • There is no shortcode for the Shop page.
  7. Edit the Cart, Checkout and My Account pages and choose the Full Width page template, then Publish/Update

Link Pages to WooCommerce

  1. Go to WooCommerceSettings
  2. Click the Products tab and verify the Shop page is selected in the Shop Page drop down
  3. Click the Checkout tab and ensure the Checkout Pages selected
  4. Click the Accounts tab and ensure the My Accounts page selected
  5. Click Save Changes

Still Not Working?

WooCommerce uses dynamic endpoints for generating sub-content of certain pages, such as the Login page, different views of My Account and so on. If you still have issues with 404 errors, weird redirects or nothing happening, check your endpoint settings.

  1. If you are seeing a 404 error (after upgrading perhaps) go to Settings > Permalinks from your WordPress dashboard and ‘save’. This will ensure the rewrite rules for the endpoints exist and are ready to be used.
  2. If using an end point such as ‘view-order’ ensure it specifies an order number. /view-order/ is invalid. /view-order/10/ is valid. These types of endpoint shouldn’t be in your navigation menus.

See WooCommerce Enpoint Documentation for details on what the default endpoints are and how to fix them.


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James Coltharp’s longstanding passion to create community impact & involvement is the genesis of the KeePressingOn Project, serving businesses, teams, and executives who seek to generate growth and increased productivity through relationships that build trust, encourage excellence, and create an expectant, positive view of the future. Consistent with that vision, Jim speaks with groups and organizations on the topics of peak performance, overcoming overload, responding to a setback, and strategic leadership development.

Jim is featured with the Worldwide Speakers Group, a leading global professional services firm providing innovative solutions in the global lecture industry to corporate, trade, education, and commercial customers worldwide. To learn more about Jim’s availability for your next event, please click the link below.

Peak Performance: How can I deliver my best when I need my best?

We all want to win. But are you prepared to win?

Gain a clear view of how to develop a Champion’s Mindset: deal with a fear of failure by knowing what to tune out, get better and become more effective, identify the habits that can slow you down and those that can help you focus more clearly while everything in the game is swirling. You can’t lose if you learn how to balance your business mind and heart!

Responding to a Setback: The first day of a great comeback

When the bottom falls out, that same day we can get up one more time and begin a great comeback. We can prepare differently and use available resources in a new way. In spite of the new challenge we face, we can be ready and become even stronger as the door opens to a new season. Jim shares a personal story of cultivating a positive vision when encountering trying times.

The group will consider: How do I start on the road to a great comeback? How can I keep a bump from becoming the end of the road? What new habits can I build to help on the comeback journey? How can I maintain a positive vision on dark days?

Overcoming Overload: If I rise to meet a career challenge, do I get to keep my life?

We know that the world is changing, and change is accelerating.  We like to think of the benefits of technology and change, but how does the pace of change affect my perspective and behavior as a leader? How does a change-driven outlook affect our organization, and what is the effect of continually working and living beyond our limits?

Learn practical ways to adjust to the present, prepare for the future, and set a sustainable pace that allows both you and your business to last. What habits and processes can we build over time to affect positively our mindset and lead others more effectively — and also enjoy our lives?

Strong Teamwork: Leading others to build energy and trust that endures
Strong teams build upon the natural abilities of each member in a way that enhances their peak performance and unleashes energy that builds momentum.Effective leaders build a vision to develop these team dynamics and work with each member to promote self-awareness, satisfaction, and performance. However, these kinds of leaders and teams are very rare. How can you create this reality in your own team or organization?

Learn practical approaches to promote strategic leadership development:

  • How do I identify and measure the natural abilities of individual members?
  • What will help strengthen and align team members to become more effective together?
  • How can we better understand the complexity and richness of the way individuals experience emotional energy?
  • What will help strengthen and align your team to build on their natural abilities and overcome strategic challenges?
  • What steps can teams take toward peak performance, even if they are already performing well?

Get In Touch

The KeePressingOn Project
1441 L Street NW 12th Floor
Washington D.C. 20005
202 734-2734


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Postural Assessment Utilizing a Biotensegrity Approach

January 1, 2020 - January 1, 2021
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Join this recorded class anytime! This online course is designed for the practitioner who is interested ...

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Returning To Our OT Roots – Practicing Holistic Therapy

January 1 - December 31

This three-part webinar series for the Occupational Therapist consists of skills and training related to cutting ...

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Holistic Business Practice-How To Run a Successful Holistic Healthcare Practice

January 1 - December 31
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REGISTER HERE Join this recorded course anytime! Are you new to setting up your own practice?  ...

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The Art of Coming Home Mastermind Group

May 12 @ 6:00 pm - October 12 @ 7:30 pm PDT

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION ENROLL HERE Class begins May 12th Description: This group was created ...

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Category: Startup

Difference Between Co-founder and Founding Member

This is my definition. Co-founder is someone who can understand your vision and give well-thought-out opinions that sometimes conflict with yours but help the startup differentiate itself from others in many ways.

On the other hand, a founding member is much more like operator who only believes in a vision thrown by the founder(s) and executes the tasks that are only relevant to his/her professional field.

The first thing you as entrepreneur have to do before formulating a startup is to find co-founders, not founding members. If you think you already have co-founders, think of above criteria and ask yourself a question “Do I really have a co-founder?”

If you find yourself making all strategic decisions alone or finding your prospective partners being not up to the mark where you cannot get the level of feedback you were expecting, you don’t have a real co-founder.

Your prospective partners might be able to give you lots of ideas and opinions, but these are so instant that you already thought of once or already have the answers.

I wouldn’t say it’s easy to find a co-founder who has ready-made ability to excel your level of thinking. However, I believe this is super important and very critical to the company’s success in the future.

What if you find yourself having only founding members? There are three ways to solve this. 1) Educate your founding members to become co-founders. 2) Look for someone else. 3) Dismiss your startup and start with other idea that is easier for people to understand.

At my recent startup I’m not following the latter two approaches yet. Instead, I’m sharing with my team members lots of information, sometimes too much, that I find useful on a daily basis. These information include updates from the competitors, new startups doing similar things, investor’s comment on industry trends, etc.

Someone might argue that giving too much information only introduces a chaos or creates an impression of the founder being not able to decide anything. I think that’s wrong because the environment surrounding a startup changes constantly and people in startup have to adjust them to new environment very quickly by consuming whatever information relevant to them. Otherwise, they will lose.

Startup Weekend is a great place to meet aspiring entrepreneurs and passionate people with startup mindset. Perhaps, at the same you have to realize that not all of them are qualified to be real co-founders especially at the moment you meet them for the first time.

Whether or not they can become real co-founder is completely up to you.

Venture Finance Intro

When I co-founded my first startup, I had almost zero knowledge about venture financing but I’ve gained a lot of knowledge about it for past 5 years.

So what is venture financing anyway? For those who read TechCrunch, Mashable or any other tech news websites you’ve certainly heard of a phrase like “Company X raised Y million dollars from VC firms A, B and C.” You are seeing it as the result of company that executed some kind of venture financing.

While it’s obvious to anyone above phrase indicates a company in question did raise some amount of money from investors, many things behind the scene that made the deal happen are still unknown to most people.

Let’s take an example of valuation. Valuation is the value of company and it is often used to determine what percentage of your company you want to give away for how much money when taking investment from someone. If the valuation is $10M and you are getting $2M investment, basically you are giving away 20% of your company.

However, in venture financing world a word valuation really means two things, namely pre-money valuation and post-money valuation. A former is the value of company before the event of investment and a latter is the value of company after it.

These two things sound similar but their outcomes are very different so an experienced entrepreneur always ask his investor a question “Do you mean post-money valuation?” in order to make sure the investor is referring to the value of company after the event of investment, not before it.

This is just one of the fundamental things you as an entrepreneur have to be knowledgeable about when raising money and we are just scratching its surface here. If you want to gain these kinds of knowledges and understand how venture financing works, I would recommend that you read a book called Venture Deals written by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson.

I also recommend that you read both authros’ blog websites. Not only their blog articles are valuable to those aspiring entrepreneurs but also the comments from other entrepreneurs are considered to be pure gems. I’m personally a big fan of both authors and their websites.

This book is still valuable even if you decide to bootstrap your own startup so get it and read it.

Startup Weekend Kyoto

My first experience attending Startup Weekend turned out to be great.

After I gave an initial pitch to the audience, 8 people decided to join me amongst 60 or so attendees. We spent exactly 54 hours to develop our product from scratch while having so much fun doing so. Lots of laughs, excitements and even pivots.

On the last day I gave another pitch to the audience, including the judges in front of us this time. Though I was sure that the concept of our product will stand out from others, I was certainly surprised when one of the judges actually gave us $10K investment offer right after I finished my presentation.

Our team won the final prize, which included:

1) Eligibility to participate DEMO Asia 2012 in Singapore
2) Two air tickets
3) 3 months free rent of incubation space
4) $200 worth credit of Amazon cloud services
5) Lots more

Things just got started. Looking forward to the excitements we’ll see in the future.