So here I am...

A few weeks ago I was taking with a friend and the subject of whiskey came up. Somewhere in the conversation I said, “I should go to Ireland and visit a lot of distilleries.” He replied, “That’s a good idea.”

So here I am in Belfast.

I’m not here to drink, I’m here to revisit the two adjoining neighborhoods that personify The Troubles: Shankill Road for the Protestants, Falls Road for the Roman Catholics. The last time I was here was 25 years ago, before the Good Friday Accord, and I wanted to see how the neighborhoods might have changed since that treaty went into effect. And I wanted to see how the prospect of Brexit is affecting this city.

I’m only here for two days; going to Dublin for another five, where I do plan to visit a distillery. Or two. But any more than that would just be ludicrous.

Look—once you’ve seen how one company distills its product, you’ve pretty much got the workings down.

So far, it’s been an…interesting trip. Aer Lingus was more than two hours late taking off; I heard some people talking about how they knew that they’d miss their connections on to elsewhere in Europe. I don’t understand people who book international multi-leg flights with less than two hours of layover. My own plans were to take a bus into Dublin to catch the 0930 train to Belfast, which was about a four hour gap from the original ETA. I’d decided that trying for the 0730 train would be just asking for trouble, and turns out I was right. As it was, I made it to the Connolly Street Station with about 40 minutes to spare.

I have to say I was disappointed in Aer Lingus—not just because of the delay; stuff happens. But their overall effort was just lackadaisical. Their amenity kit consisted of: socks, an eye mask, earplugs and mints. This is the first time I’ve had an overnight international flight where you didn’t get a teeny toothbrush and toothpaste, and maybe some moisturizer. Trust me, when you haul your butt out of your seat after a six-hour flight, you want to brush your teeth.

And then there was the catering. Here’s a picture of the worst champagne I have ever had in my life:

Allegedly “Jean Pernet Tradition Brut NV”, whatever that is. This is how bad it was: I didn’t finish it.

The meal was 1980s-era airplane food: steak tasteless, haricots verts incinerated; “Chocolate Nemesis” cake was more like chocolate pudding; and the croutons in the salad were stale.

Well, but because we were late taking off, I was treated to this sight out my window:

That was nice.

I chose my hotel here in Belfast for its central location. I think it’s supposed to have either four or five stars. I’d booked an “Executive” room, which turns out to be their bog standard, and which does not include a bath tub. For that you need to have at least a “Deluxe” room, and pay £20 extra per night.

Yes, I did. When I’ve been out exploring all day, I want a hot bubble bath. End of.

And looky what was perched on the taps:

Interestingly, there was one of them in the bathroom of the first room I was given; the one without a tub. The sea serpent seems to be a symbol of this hotel, for reasons I do not know. Here he is without his wrapping:

And—also interestingly—when you put him in the water, he keels over on his side. Every single time.

I’m calling him Cecil.

UPDATE: Apparently, this guy is a seahorse, not a sea serpent. I still don't know the connection. And I'm still calling him Cecil.

But another interesting thing: my bathroom here has a sink, a tub and a shower (which includes a rain shower option). I was given two bathrobes, two pairs of slippers, two sets of very nice towels, two shower caps and two "grooming kits". They left a single bar of soap.

Also: four or five stars and the closet has those "anti-theft" clothes hangers with a single pin stem that fits into a ring around the closet rod. The ones you can only hang on the rod and therefore can't hang them over the shower rod to let your clothes that have got a soaking dry out. I didn't even know these are still a thing. 

The only thing I did yesterday was walk the labyrinth at the Cathedral Church of St. Anne. Its design is unlike any I’ve seen before; technically I wouldn’t even call it a labyrinth because you exit by a different way than you entered. But I walked it.

That’ll be the light part of this visit. Today I’ve booked a black taxi tour of Falls and Shankill. We’ll see how light or dark that is.

Gratitude Monday: beauty in the soup

This being Spring in The District They Call Columbia, Saturday was like living in vichyssoise: cool and slimy. The temperature in the People’s Republic scraped into mid-70s, but everything I touched inside and out was damp.

I went out in the morning to try some photo tips; I wasn’t exerting myself particularly, but by the time I got back I was utterly drenched, as though I’d spent 40 minutes on the treadmill.

However, the Nature around here is worth the effort, and that’s what I’m grateful for today.

Lowering the Barr

For the record, this is not the Attorney General of the United States hiding from Congress:

It’s a squirrel in my back yard.

Chasing your customers

Poor, poor JPMorgan Chase. For all their squillions in assets, and the billions they pay their senior executive team, they just do not get this whole social media thing.

It’s been five and a half years since someone thought it would be a good idea to have an Ask Me Anything Twitter session with the investment banking side’s vice chairman Jimmy Lee. Before he even got into his corner office that week, Twitter had dumped so thoroughly on the concept that JPMorgan cancelled the session.

I’m proud to say that I joined the squadrons of trolls and did my part, my first experience ever with drawing even a tiny prick of blood.

It was a classic misstep—a total fiasco—and they don’t appear to have learned from it. Because on Monday, the consumer side of the megalith tweeted something that someone thought was clever advice for their struggling customers—under the hashtag #MondayMotivation—and the response was so [predictably] overwhelmingly negative, that they took down the tweet in less than three hours.

But of course, the evil that tweets do live long after their bones are interrèd. Twitterati continued to pile on to screen caps of the tweet, and here are some of the examples:

Two members of Congress who have been forthright in their criticism of Big Banks (both, coincidentally, women and Democrats) had a few thoughts to tweet. First up, Representative Katie Porter, who only a couple of weeks ago dragged JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in a House committee hearing by running him through the parlous financial situation of one of his actual employees in her Southern California district. She repeatedly asked the guy who received a compensation package of $31M last year what advice he’d give this bank teller on how to make ends meet. And he repeatedly replied, “I’ll have to think about that.”

Presumably he’s thought about it and would now advise his employees to eat the food already in their fridges and stop taking taxis for three-block rides.

And then Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who famously told WellsFargo’s then-CEO to his face that he should resign over the bank’s massive and systemic fraudulent practices, had something to say:

At some point during the day, a somewhat chastened @Chase posted this non-apology:

But here’s the tweet that pretty much sums up the world’s reaction:

As for JPMorgan’s social media woes: womp, womp.

Telling tales

Yom HaShoah starts at sundown today and runs to sundown tomorrow. It’s the day set aside by the state of Israel to commemorate the nearly six million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s. At 1000 local time, everything will come to a halt across Israel, and people will stand silent and still, remembering those deaths. It’s an astonishing thing to watch on my computer screen; I cannot imagine it in real life.

Rather than say anything myself, I’m sharing part of the opening lecture Elie Wiesel gave at an international symposium in 1974 at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. It’s included in his article, “Art and Culture after the Holocaust”, published in CrossCurrents.

“Let us tell tales. Let us tell tales—all the rest can wait; all the rest must wait.

“Let us tell tales—that is our primary obligation. Commentaries will have to come later, lest they replace or becloud what they mean to reveal.

Tales of children so wise and so old. Tales of old men mute with fear. Tales of victims welcoming death as an old acquaintance. Tales that bring man close to the abyss and beyond—and others that lift him up to heaven and beyond. Tales of despair, tales of longing. Tales of immense flames reaching out to the sky, tales of night consuming life and hope and eternity.

“Let us tell tales so as to remember how vulnerable man is when faced with overwhelming evil. Let us tell tales so as not to allow the executioner to have the last word. The last word belongs to the victim. It is up to the witness to capture it, shape it, transmit it and keep it as a secret, and then communicate that secret to others.”

  

The thing is, when we stop telling those tales, the Nazis win—generation after generation.

Upsoaring wings: A fundamental work

I’m closing out National Poetry Month with a poem by one of my all-time favorite writers, Primo Levi. A chemist by profession, Levi was a keen observer of life and mankind, and he had plenty to observe as a Jew in Auschwitz.

As a reminder that words matter, in all his books about his experiences during the war, Levi referred to the camps using the German word, lager. As though only the language of the architects of industrial murder is suitable for their constructs.

I’ve given you before his “Shemà”, which is a searing précis of the Holocaust. This time we’re having “Unfinished Business”, about the general human experience. It’s a somewhat different take on the stages of life than Yeats gave us in “Sailing to Byzantium”. And I think it speaks to us all.

This translation from the Italian is by Jonathan Galassi.

“Unfinished Business”

Sir, please accept my resignation

As of next month,

And, if it seems right, plan on replacing me.

I’m leaving much unfinished work,

Whether out of laziness or actual problems.

I was supposed to tell someone something,

But I no longer know what and to whom: I’ve forgotten.

I was also supposed to donate something — 

A wise word, a gift, a kiss;

I put it off from one day to the next. I’m sorry.

I’ll do it in the short time that remains.

I’m afraid I’ve neglected important clients.

I was meant to visit

Distant cities, islands, desert lands;

You’ll have to cut them from the program

Or entrust them to my successor.

I was supposed to plant trees and I didn’t;

To build myself a house,

Maybe not beautiful, but based on plans.

Mainly, I had in mind

A marvelous book, kind sir,

Which would have revealed many secrets,

Alleviated pains and fears,

Eased doubts, given many

The gift of tears and laughter.

You’ll find its outline in my drawer,

Down below, with the unfinished business;

I didn’t have the time to write it out, which is a shame,

It would have been a fundamental work.

Upsoaring wings: Ladysmock and celandine

In a land known for its poets, Seamus Heaney still stands out. The committee that awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 cited his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”

Well, yes.

Born in Ulster, Heaney’s literary career took him many places, but he chose to live in the Republic and he wrote frequently about Ireland and Irish history. His “Requiem for the Croppies” is utter heartbreak.

Today, however, we’ll have something less terrible. Just the joy of spring in Ireland.

“May”

When I looked down from the bridge

Trout were flipping the sky

Into smithereens, the stones

Of the wall warmed me.

Wading green stems, lugs of leaf

That untangle and bruise

(Their tiny gushers of juice)

My toecaps sparkle now

Over the soft fontanel

Of Ireland. I should wear

Hide shoes, the hair next my skin,

For walking this ground:

Wasn’t there a spa-well,

Its coping grassy, pendent?

And then the spring issuing

Right across the tarmac.

I’m out to find that village,

Its low sills fragrant

With ladysmock and celandine,

Marshlights in the summer dark.

Gratitude Monday: fiscal responsibility

Even though I closed barely two years ago on my house, my mortgage has been sold on twice, and it’s currently held by Wells Fargo Bank, an institution known for fraud, exploitation and deception in every corner of its operations. Its executives probably have corporate apartments in DC for all the time they spend lying testifying before Congressional committees looking into their malfeasance.

I live for the day when it becomes financially feasible to swap them out for an actual responsible financial institution.

As far as the mortgage goes, WF does everything possible to ensure that making my payments is a complete kludge. TBF, I think that if I had a WF bank account (which I will consider the twelfth day after never), it would be easy to set up regular recurring electronic payments. Since I don’t I had to manually go online, enter all my banking details and submit every month.

Well, eventually, I called their “customer service” number and managed to get it set up from their end. But clearly their intent is to drive mortgage customers to their other financial products, so they can more easily establish fraudulent accounts and levy fraudulent fees.

Anyhow, a month ago I received notification that my escrow account was short and I’d need to make up the difference. They enclosed a payment slip and envelope for my convenience. The shortage was $0.25.

Yes, they sent me the bill for twenty-five cents. And would no doubt ding my credit rating if they didn’t get it.

I considered what would be the most obnoxious, most expensive for them way to top up my account. And last Friday I walked over to a branch, handed over the bill and gave the teller two dimes and a nickel. He raised his eyebrows at the amount, but said nothing. Dude—I don’t make this shit up, your employer does.

So now I have the receipt, a couple of thousand steps on my pedometer and the satisfaction of having stuck it—even in a miniscule way—to those creeps. That’s what I’m grateful for today.

Suck it, Wells Fargo.

Upsoaring wings: This fenced-off narrow space

Langston Hughes was one of the many vibrant and eloquent voices of the Harlem Renaissance. And like Yeats and Hopkins and Owen and Marlowe, I just can’t get enough of him; in the six years I’ve marked National Poetry Month, this is the fifth time I’ve included one or more poems by Hughes.

Today we’re having “I Look at the World” because I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be the out-of-place ones in our society. Hughes always captures that viewpoint concisely.

“I Look at the World”

I look at the world

From awakening eyes in a black face—

And this is what I see:

This fenced-off narrow space   

Assigned to me.

I look then at the silly walls

Through dark eyes in a dark face—

And this is what I know:

That all these walls oppression builds

Will have to go!

I look at my own body   

With eyes no longer blind—

And I see that my own hands can make

The world that's in my mind.

Then let us hurry, comrades,

The road to find.

Upsoaring wings: All the valley is dancing

The first writer from Latin America to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature was a Chilean poet, Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga; nom de plume Gabriela Mistral. Mistral was also an educator and a diplomat, like her protégé and fellow Nobel Laureate, Pablo Neruda, and she was an outspoken feminist.

Although her own formal education ended when she was eleven, Mistral’s career in the field was long and distinguished; she was a driving force in reforming schools and libraries in Chile and represented Latin America on education and women’s issues at the League of Nations.

Mistral’s poetry covers a variety of topics; her themes include nature, love, betrayal, sorrow and Latin American identity. The poem for today invites us to overcome whatever limitations that might impede us from experiencing joy. I think we do well to follow her advice.

“Those Who Do Not Dance”

A crippled child

Said, “How shall I dance?”

Let your heart dance

We said.

Then the invalid said:

“How shall I sing?”

Let your heart sing

We said

Then spoke the poor dead thistle,

But I, how shall I dance?”

Let your heart fly to the wind

We said.

Then God spoke from above

“How shall I descend from the blue?”

Come dance for us here in the light

We said.

All the valley is dancing

Together under the sun,

And the heart of him who joins us not

Is turned to dust, to dust.