TCD Building on the Liffey 
Luas at Conneley Station 
Across from Conneley Station 
Chilly Dip at Dún Laoghaire 
Irish Maritime Museum 
Reminder of how much of Dublin is landfill 
Crescent moon and “FOOD” along the Royal Canal 
This cafe is never open but when it is, it’s good 
Spot the meme 
Houston station bound for Limerick 
Across from Rift Coffee 
St. Mary’s Cathedral 
Black Castle 
Distant Ben
Category: Uncategorized
The Very Mixed-Up and Peculiar Case of the Unfortunate Academy for Mysteriously Quirky Orphans
Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter
The first time I came to New York I rented a copy of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler from the library to read while riding the Greyhound there. The book follows a pair of siblings from Greenwich, Connecticut who stow their clothes and toiletries in their musical instrument cases and run away from home to go live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I vividly remembered the descriptions of the period bedrooms where the kids slept, the bathrooms where they hid, and the fountain where they bathed and scrounged for change from reading the book as a kid and I wanted to wanted to refresh this fictional memory of the city before I experienced it in person for the first time. The Met wasn’t as enchanting as I imagined it as a kid reading Mixed-Up FIles, but the city still charmed me enough for me to run away from my own home in Minnesota a year later to make a new home there.
I read a lot of books like this growing up. My mom is a children’s librarian so I have excellent taste. I liked fantasy stories but more than that I Ioved books where brainy quirky kids encountered situations that were fantastical without being outright fantasy. Blue Balleitt’s art-centered mysteries including The Wright 3 and Chasing Vermeer are a good example: a group of plucky youngsters breaking into Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and the Art Institute of Chicago to solve puzzles and collect clues. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is another, centering on a secret foster home for children with different superpowers.
Looking back at my childhood self, the fantasy I enjoyed in these books had less to do with art or magic than class. The main characters in these books are almost always orphans, which as a kid I read as being both destitute and liberated, that are inducted into a very elite and often secret society because of some inborn wit or unique ability. Despite their secrecy, these societies bear a lot of the marks of aristocracy – like the giant feasts, ancient castles, and always overstuffed armchairs of the Harry Potter series. The Mysterious Benedict Society, currently being adapted by Hulu, gives us a double dose of this elitism: the main characters are inducted into the titular society, located in an old creaky mansion, and are then sent on a mission to investigate a different elite academy, the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened. (As an aside, The Umbrella Academy does a pretty good job at picking apart this secret orphan academy trope.)
A Series of Unfortunate Events, my absolute favorite series as a kid, follows the same framework: the Baudelaire orphans, who are rich but can’t access their fortune directly for now, are shuttled between the presumably-not-quite-as-rich members of their late parents’ inner circle – who are of course also part of the secret society known as V.F.D. The events are all tinged in darkness, but the siblings still spend most of the series in beautiful homes, reptile sanctuaries, fancy apartments, a fancier hotel, prep schools, and countless private libraries.
I’m thinking back on all this now because I just finished the YA romance Red, White, and Royal Blue which follows the love story between the first son of the (alternate reality female democratic) 45th president, and the prince of England. As much as I loved living vicariously through their steamy-yet-YA-appropriate sex scenes and their romantic but carbon intensive flitting back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, in a lot of ways I couldn’t and don’t really want to relate. Especially when the novel would take them to a wild West Hollywood karaoke night, a Texas summer home, or a covert night visit to the V&A museum, I felt alienated by the fantasy. Sure, the author writes the characters as being frustrated with the families they were born into and critical of the colonial legacy of their respective empires, but it’s still hard to see myself in two of the most powerful people on the planet, even if they do like to kiss boys.
I felt this same alienation watching the BBC adaptation of Normal People. I’m thankful to the series for its Futura-y title cards and for giving us as good an analysis of class inequity as a prime network has ever done through the relationship between working class Connell and wealthy Marianne, but Connell’s trajectory does still smack of this same rags-to-riches fantasy. Connell works his way through high school to get into Trinity College and then alternates late shifts at a grocery store with late nights studying in the Berkeley Library, which I’m sad to report is far too echoey to be as good a study spot as the show would have you believe. But then after the difficult first year he’s given a full ride scholarship and can spend all of the show’s second season gallivanting with friends to Marianne’s family estate in Italy because of course Marianne’s family has a Italian estate.
As much as these narratives frustrate me and as much as I know that this system of wealth inequality and massively unequal resource use, the system all these stories reflect and reinforce, is the cause of the pain and harm surrounding us – I still catch myself longing for it. Part of me, and not a small part, thinks there’s something in me that is special, that merits my induction into the secret society of the elite and once I’m there, once I enter into its ranks, then I can do my part to fix things. And here I am, at Trinity College, walking cobbled paths and reading old books surrounded by old walls and plaques that say things like “PLEASE DO NOT SMOKE OR LOITER IN THE HALL OF HONOR.” Here I am leveraging my future in the form of more student loans to engage with a system I know must die before it kills us all. I ran away from home a while ago and I’ve been sleeping in the museum ever since.
Roofers
There is
flashing along the edge of the roof.
It turns colder and so the
mortar is amended to widen
the window.
There is
a young person on the roof
dribbling a soccer ball between their feet
waiting for a doorway to articulate
what comes up.
There is
an elevator between here and the roof
ridden by Dutch girls and painters
puzzling through the jittering clicks
of the block.
There is
one and there are two and there are
flat peaks and steep slopes and there
we find the point and
counterpoint.
Nov 2018
5/20/2020
I woke up this morning to my room flooding with sunlight and immediately started to worry. I had set my alarm the night before which I haven’t done since the pandemic hit Brooklyn, and I was worried I had slept through it. My plan had been to get up early and bike to Greenpoint to get doughnuts for my roommate and I and to record the morning bells of the church on Manhattan Avenue for a piece I’m working on. I pulled on my charging cord, the phone had tumbled off the bed at some point, and read “5:40” on the display, almost an hour before I was set to wake. I felt relief and dull surprise, I knew this sort of thing could happen, but in spending every day inside I often forget that, yes the sun still rises earlier each day and that, yes my body is pretty good at waking up when it gets light enough. Outside my window I heard a bird call I immediately identified as “not an owl” and then confirmed with the Audubon Society’s website that it indeed belonged not to an owl but a mourning dove. I cracked my window open a bit, hoping to hear it again, and instead was met with the most beautiful New York morning quiet: no cars yet on our street, no ambulances, just some sparrows chirping mutedly from the tree down the block and the fuzzy muffled roar of thousands of distant air conditioners and cars and planes and people that, until it gets truly quiet, is difficult to recognize as sound at all. Looking at the sun rising over where I know the ocean to be, glinting off the buildings in the next block to the East, listening to the birds that get up before the starlings that normally provide my day’s musical accompaniment, I had a thought that I hadn’t had in a while: that I love this city. That kind of memory-yearning to be out in its streets and parks and beaches soaking up its brick corners, feeling its hum in my chest and its wind in my throat.
I’m attaching here a couple of pictures I took recently. The first taken while passing through Queens on a bike ride last weekend and the second of the detritus left by someone I, for the moment, no longer live with. I’ll also add the recording of me rushing to St. Andrews in Greenpoint at 6:58 followed by the church’s bell not ringing at 7:00, or at 7:01, or at 7:05. Church bell ringing schedules are notoriously hard to find on the internet but we’ll try again another day.
Stop Motion [fast and furious]
This piece was performed as part of FAST AND FURIOUS at the CYBERTANK on 4/2/2020
another day on Earth [fast and furious]
a rough and ready song and video i wrote, recorded, and edited in one week about daylight savings time and leap day and climate anxiety and biking with friends ! performed at the tank on 3/10/20 .
lyrics :
i’d borrow an hour from the morning
to work a little later into the evening
we could split thirty minutes for lunch
but i’d probably end up wanting the whole thingit’s barely march and the trees in the park are blooming
i never thought that collapse would feel so soothingbut time knows something that money never learned
that nothing can be given and nothing can be earned
time knows something that money never learned
that everything is borrowed and everything returnsand i would give anything for another day on Earth
i steal half an hour from work
to go walking by the river
to remind my self that this island
is surrounded by waterit’s barely march and i’m standing in the sun and sweating
spending all of my time worried about time i’m spendingbut time knows something that money never learned
that nothing can be given and nothing can be earned
time knows something that money never learned
that everything is borrowed and everything returnsand i would give anything for another day on Earth
the Earth goes round like a bicycle wheel
the calendar doesn’t care how i feel
and each and every fourth february
we get another day on Earth
On Phone In Nature [performance/installation]
This installation was originally performed at The Tank during Fast and Furious on September 3rd, 2019. To recreate a version of this piece for yourself play this video in a central space:
And encourage participants to follow the url tinyurl.com/OnPhone back to this page and play one of the links below on their personal device. Be sure that all videos have closed captions turned on. Enjoy the piece, have a conversation, take collective action.
gabriel coleman 