In Monto

That is, Foley Street. Monto (aka Montgomery Street) hasn't existed for quite some time. I was there to collect a drawing by John Doran, the architect who had made drawing from several poems in an anthology of Dublin poems, including one of mine. I had been invited to read at the exhibition a couple of weeks ago. His office is on Foley Street and it was he who informed me that we were walking on what was originally Monto, something I'd never have guessed (though I knew it was somewhere near here). We went to a nearby cafe and had coffees and cakes. He insisted on paying, though I would have liked to. Least I could do, considering that he'd made me a present of his original drawing and they were asking 145 euro for them at the show.

Monto, Edwardian Dublin's red light district (apparently the largest in Europe at the time) is the location of that wild, Monty Pythonesque Nighttown section in Ulysses, where Bloom turns into a woman and a bar of Sunlight Soap gets up and sings. Nabokov suggested we regard it as the chapter in which the book (Ulysses) has fallen asleep and is dreaming.

Fascinating entry on Monto in Wiki. I never knew that the Dublin jazz/music reviewer George Hodnett had written the original song, Monto, made famous by The Dubliners. I met George (Hoddy) a couple of times back in the 70s. I once had a coffee with him in 'Guys' Restaurant/Cafe on Baggot Street (roughly where Chez Max is now, though nearer the corner of Fitzwilliam Street: Guys is now, like George, long gone). He was an interesting man, hatted and large-bearded, in (I think) a large trampish coat. Very much my type of guy. I told him I was reading John Berger's 'G'. I showed it to him and I remember he took out a notebook and copied out a paragraph in which Berger gives a colourful list of variations on names for the penis. I didn't think this odd, considering that George was probably, like many writers, Berger included, something of a logophile.

Ah, splashes of memory, the ghosts who walk in broad day, and the ghost maps.