God & Mammon

This used be St Andrew's Church (in Dublin's Andrew Street), but has long functioned as the city's main tourist office. I've always been struck by the different atmosphere between this colonnade and the street outside. The difference seemed all the greater this afternoon as the evening light faded and the lamps in the colonnade came to life.

I'd gone in to town with a bit of a book shopping list, and without too much hope of finding any of my choices. As it happened, I came back with four out of five, and was even able to shop around to get better deals in different book shops. I blame the extravagance on two things: (1) A review of Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, which in turn led me to Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Emma Donoghue's Room, and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides; and (2) The fact that I lost all my Freesat channels yesterday afternoon and have to wait until tomorrow afternoon for a technician to sort things out (which made me think in terms of reading rather than box-watching).

I'd only just finished my previous 3-for-2 selection, so I needed something new to turn to. SInce The Art of Fielding began the process which led to putting together today's list, I decided when I got home that that's the one to begin with, and I've begun. There will probably be future blips with my own reviews of this latest crop (though it could be a while before anything crops up here -- Infinite Jest alone is a bit of a monster (over 1000 pages)).

p.s. I'd almost overlooked publishing my blip for last Saturday (sometimes, when iPhoto imports photos from different days at the same time and I ask it to split the days into separate events, one of the days gets thrown back up to the very beginning of the Events list. That's what happened this time. Fortunately I remembered seeing this happen before, so my panic about where Saturdays photos had vanished to was quickly allayed.)

The actual blip is nothing special: Memorial.