St. Patrick's Day: Memories of the Coombe

St. Patrick's Day reminds me of the year I spent living in the Coombe in Ireland, while teaching English at Trinity College Dublin. Here's a photo from that era, with my friend Serial Susan and two of the girls from the family next door, on the edge of the tarmac park just outside my front window. Not a lot of green space in the Coombe, a poor neighborhood a stone's throw from St. Patrick's Cathedral.
(Here's a Chieftain's tune called "The Coombe.")

One of my favorite memories from that year: the sonorous, joyous church bells marking the hours of the day. Spring in Ireland is a beautiful thing, as longer nights unfold and spring bulbs pop up in the parks. On the tarmac that year, all the neighborhood kids were doing the moonwalk.

Serial Readers Discuss 'Wives and Daughters'

My friend Serial Susan writes a blog called Serial Readers. This is an excellent place to engage in an on-going web-based book group, with guidance from a scholar. Susan David Bernstein’s (English) research and teaching focus (at the University of Wisconsin Madison) is on Victorian literature and culture, nineteenth-century transatlantic literature, as well as feminist theory and women’s writing. She's also co-taught a course on Darwin, but more on that another day.

The blog features chapter-by-chapter entries, calling attention to themes and interesting bits of the current book. Comments come from other dedicated readers. You can jump in back where the entries for a particular book began, and hasten to catch up.

Right now the serial readers are immersed in Wives and Daughters, a wonderful novel (or "every-day story") by Elizabeth Gaskell, first published in the Cornhill Magazine from August 1864 to January 1866. When Mrs. Gaskell died suddenly in 1865, the book was incomplete; the last section was written by Frederick Greenwood. The story revolves around Molly Gibson, only daughter of a widowed doctor living in a provincial English town in the 1830s.

There's a link at Serial Readers to a piece about web-based novels, or wovels. Making me wonder, will that irksome-yet-clever word also catch on?