travel and a bit about 1916

I have been traveling so much over the last month that I have not even had time to think about my life in Dublin. I have been to Boston and Seattle for job conferences, and Andrew was able to see my daily life here in Ireland.  I am off again to California at the end of this week for some job interviews in Los Angeles.  It has been one jet lag filled whirlwind.
Meanwhile, my courses and all my work continue.  This week I need to start focusing on beginning my three papers that will be due in April as well as preparing for the conference paper I will be giving in the same month.  It will be busy from now until the beginning of May!!  I have been reading three novels for next weeks classes - I think all of a sudden they have given us an even larger load of reading:  Amongst Women by John McGahern, Molloy by Samuel Beckett, and The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy.  All are extremely interesting and as a result I am not reading quite as quickly as I need to be to complete them all.
For the Single Major Authors course we have switched from Joyce to Beckett.  I am enjoying looking at the prose of a writer who I only knew for his dramatic works.  He is definitely a "singular" writer as my professor calls him.
In researching my first paper for this term, I found out that the ugly building I look at every day outside the window in front of my desk is actually a historical building.  It is the place that Padraic and Willie Pearse were born.  Padraic was a poet but he is most known for his role as leader of the 1916 Easter Rising.  He is the man who read out the proclamation from the GPO (General Post Office - served as headquarters for the rebels) that first morning.  Both Padraic (or Patrick) and his brother Willie were held at Kilmainham Gaol (jail) before they were executed by a firing squad.  I actually visited Kilmainham on my birthday and will make a separate post about it!  My paper will look at the idealized poetry of these rebel men and the focus on blood sacrifice that they believed would save their country.

Here is the birth place of these men.

The street I live on and that this building is on is now called Pearse Street.  When the brothers were born it was called Great Brunswick Street.