Good Sunday Stack November 23rd
Any typos are the responsibility of a 6:30 AM Ryanair flight
Good evening and greetings from London.
Until yesterday, I had spent eighty-two straight days in a city. Twelve in New York, four in Berlin, two in Dublin, and sixty-six here in London. It didn’t hit me that I’d gone that long without getting some fresh air until I was breathing it in.
Before walking Dún Laoghaire Harbour’s East Pier, my last time out of a city had been an early September camping trip to the Catskills. Since then, I’ve found my flat here, packed up my Greenpoint home, been a groomsman in a dear friends’ wedding, started grad school, and fumbled my way through fall in London.
This weekend was the first half of a home-and-home series with my friend Maddie. For most of our lives, Maddie and I have been neighbors. Growing up we lived a five-minute bike ride from each other, in Brooklyn a ten-minute walk, and now we’re neighbors across the Irish Sea. Her and our friend Ines were kind enough to let me tag along on their Irish reunion this weekend.
Over the first of a few Guiness pints, her and I both expressed how nice it was to let our shoulders down a bit in the company of old friends, neither of us having gotten to that point of comfortability with our new compatriots quite yet.
While Maddie worked on Friday, Ines and I wandered Dublin loosely in search of stew, quoting lines from Normal People to each other as we made our way through Trinity College.
Yesterday, after our trip to Dún Laoghaire, I took a solo stroll through the neighborhoods of Ranelagh and Donnybrook to check out some book shops. If you ever find yourself in Dublin, the elderly gentleman at Hampton Books on Morehampton Road and whichever regular happens to be hanging around will get you situated.
We capped off the night with the talk of the town, the Ireland-South Africa Rugby match being played just up the road at Aviva Road. We were fortunate in our pub to end up standing next to a kind Australian livestock auctioneer who helped us three American make sense of what we were watching.
After an early flight back this morning, a nap, a trip up the Weaver Line to watch the North London Derby in friendly territory, I’m settled in for the evening. With the days getting shorter, I was looking forward to spending weekends in pubs watching some good football. Though given Tottenham’s form of late I’m probably better off out in the cold than enduring 90 minutes of no attacking fluidity every weekend.
What I’m Reading
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami
I have a similar relationship to Murakami’s writing that I do to Wes Anderson films. Both have distinct artistic styles, easily traceable even as they’ve matured in their story telling. Each tell stories rich with quirks but easily comprehensible once you situate yourself into the world they create. They are also both so skilled at what they do, I never fear boredom, and The City and Its Uncertain Walls is no different. The story of a heartbroken man who forsakes a promising career in Tokyo to take over the head librarian position in a rural mountain town, only for a secret long suppressed to reappear.
What I’m Watching
Last Flag Flying
Richard Linklater continues to be the filmmaker whose work I most resonate. From Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some to Boyhood, he crafts an America that feels intimately familiar to my own upbringing. Even Bernie, although not as impactful personally, is a great encapsulation of a cooky American news story. Last Flag Flying follows three Vietnam veterans who reconnect when Larry ‘Doc’ Sheperd’s (Steve Carrell) son is killed in Iraq. Having lost his wife to cancer, he seeks help navigating the loss his son from old friends Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne) who’ve gone on to own a dive bar and become a reverend, respectively. What emerges is a melancholic, dry-humored hangout movie centered on grief.
This was a warm-up for Linklater’s new movie Blue Moon, which is finally coming to UK theaters this week.
What I’m Eating
