Blush and Bashful

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I’ve been feeling kind of bad for taking a photo of an actress during a theatre performance… and posting it on my blog… and Facebook.

I was raised better than that. It’s just, the way things worked out…

  • there were no assigned seats so we had to sit in the very front row even though we got there 20 minutes early and I bought these tickets weeks ago.
  • the actress’s teenage fan club in front row center (we were front row, stage right) were taking photos with their phones the entire time.
  • I double-checked that the flash was off on my iPhone, and the sound had been off since I entered the theatre.
  • she was right in front of me and not involved in any action at the time.
  • the friend who was sitting right beside me did not realize I had taken a photo until I showed it to her at intermission.
  • I’m pretty sure famous actresses are used to that sort of thing.

We’ve had a little discussion of paparazzi photography in my Publishing Law class (what with the Royals and all), and I’m pretty sure my essay topic will somehow involve photo rights, so this is something I’m kind of curious about. Did I break any laws (copyright), or violate any rights (privacy), or was it simply bad theatre etiquette?

In my mind, I’m publicizing someone doing her job (well, I might add) in my immediate vicinity. I was certainly no more disruptive to the play than the members of the audience who kept chatting after the new scene had begun.

I also feel kind of creepy because I now follow the actress on Twitter, and her posts lately have been links to Instagram photos of places I recognize. It’s like delayed stalking – “Look! Mischa Barton was at the Claddagh on Friday! Oh, she visited the Cliffs of Moher today!”

I hope I’m not weirdly violating someone’s right to privacy. I rarely watched The OC, and someone had to tell me that she was in The Sixth Sense. (However, I swear I saw her on the cover of a Saddle Club book when I was working at Half Price Books, and that’s kind of an obsessive thing to notice – it was just so startling!)

I just think it’s cool she did a play here because I love theatre in Galway and it’s nice to see TV/film stars stretching their acting muscles on stage. And yes, I wanted my Facebook friends to see how I spent my Friday night, but “Mischa Barton in the Julia Roberts role” was only one part of that… it’s a pretty big deal to see one of the biggest movies of your childhood – set in the next state over, no less – brought back to life almost 30 years later in another country.

Still, I might have been feeling a little remorse when I walked into a church this morning. Unbeknownst to me, it was the day of a very special performance. So special, in fact, that there was a man holding a camera/videocamera hybrid who shot footage of the entire hour-and-half long service.

He photographed/filmed the congregation too. He took several up-close flash photos of me, and also captured my (stubbornly stoic) reactions on video. As a first-time visitor to that church, I am now going to play a supporting role in the home movies of several families, and I am no doubt featuring on someone’s Facebook feed at this very moment.

When the service was over, the man sitting behind me said: “Hope you’re prepared to have your photo shown all over the world.”

Karma, Ms. Barton.

“He makes a mean Cherry Coke.”

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Last night I went to a stage production of Steel Magnolias at the Black Box theatre. The show has been traveling around Ireland, with The OC star Mischa Barton in the role of Shelby.

The southern accents were great, although one or two of the characters gave Shreveport an extra syllable. Still, they managed to pronounce Louisiana like natives.

Since the play is set in the 1980s, I was curious as to why a 1990s Faith Hill song was playing during an interval between scenes – and more than a bit surprised when my friend from Poland started singing along.

I brushed it off, but during the next scene, Shelby tapped the radio in Truvvy’s salon like she was The Fonz, and another sassy Faith Hill song started playing as she sashayed out the door. That, kids, is what’s known as an anachronism, a chronological impossibility. I guess I know my polished pop country crap a little better than the Irish production team anticipated.

All was forgiven, though, by the poignant placement of Willie’s version of You Were Always On My Mind. The play is set entirely inside the beauty shop, so the audience never sees Shelby in the hospital, just listens while her mother tells the ladies everything. I’ve seen the movie a million times, and I was still fighting back tears.

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Motivation

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When I arrived in Galway exactly six weeks ago, I had three places I needed to go before I went anywhere else: my hotel for a shower, campus for a day of orientations, and Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop.

With a little help from Vinny, I walked out of the shop with a copy of I was a Boy in Belsen, the non-fiction account of one of Ireland’s two living Holocaust survivors. Tomi Reichental lived in Slovakia until the age of 9, when he and his family were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944. He survived, and has lived in Dublin for the past 50 years. His story was published by O’Brien Press.

I was a Boy in Belsen was the first book I bought in Galway, and it has been sitting on my shelf for the past six weeks. I kept meaning to read it, but there’s so much to read for my course, that I kept putting it off.

Then I heard that Tomi Reichental would be speaking on campus tonight. Since I didn’t have class today, I spent the whole day on the couch, reading his story. It’s heartbreaking stuff, even though Mr. Reichental and his family were some of the lucky ones – relatively lucky, that is.

He spoke for about an hour and a half tonight, before members of the university’s law society and other curious students. He revisited the story told in his book, but delved into some more thorough examinations of the political situation at the time. He presented a few articles and photos he had come across in his research, which may not have fit into the narrative structure of the book.

I felt a little sheepish asking him to sign my Charlie Byrne’s copy of his book, since he had several copies for sale tonight. He was extremely nice, though; he personalized the inscription and made sure I got one of his customized bookmarks.

I’m glad he came to campus tonight. I’m glad I already had his book on my shelf, and I’m glad his presence on campus motivated me to finally read it.

While I was waiting for his lecture to begin tonight, I logged into my campus email account, which I only do about once a week. I had an email from the library, telling me a book I have checked out has been recalled. I’ve had it for two weeks, and was supposed to have it for another two, but now I have until Monday to bring it back.

I guess if someone requests a book, the library can light a fire under the person who already has it checked out. I suspect the person recalling the book is somehow connected to the class for which I’m reading the book in the first place. Normally, I would be annoyed by this type of academic queue-jumping, but to tell the truth, I’ve been struggling to give the book the attention it deserves, so this deadline may be the motivation I need to finally get around to reading it.

Long Day

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There’s this habit I have, a bad habit I’m trying to break, but it’s so deeply ingrained that I don’t know where to start.

My whole life, whenever I’ve suspected that I wouldn’t succeed at something – or worse, that someone else would be more successful at it – I’ve found a way to convince myself that I never actually cared in the first place.

Over the years, I’ve gotten so good at avoiding the pain of failure that I’ve started predicting which things I am likely to care about – and therefore be affected by when I don’t succeed – so I can avoid them completely.

It’s cowardly. I don’t know how I got this way, but I hate it. I work so hard to preemptively avoid failing at things I care about that I no longer know what it is I truly care about. I honestly can’t tell if it’s me or my fear that’s making my decisions, because we’ve been together so long that my fear and I are essentially one and the same.

I can feel this happening right now. It’s tied up in school-internship-job opportunities, and I’ve gotten it in my head that I’m not cut out for any of this – not just publishing, but the entire work-a-day world, and life in general… so I shouldn’t even try. It sucks.

My Day in Writing

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(Emails, newspaper articles, academic photocopies, foreign and “non-widely spoken” languages, workbooks, homework, laptops, iPhones, literary journals, post-its, expired ephemera, postal parcels, scripted address labels, television subtitles, blog.)

I was late for my first class because I was sitting in the Irish-language cafe shooting off emails to sources for my first article in the student newspaper.

I arrived at Irish for Beginners and my professor gave me some materials he’d photocopied for me after I requested he expand on the “Irish terms for writing technology” topic. Of the three documents, one was in Irish, one in English, and one in French.

I realized I had forgotten my practice book and, alas, my homework. I took notes in my notebook, which is almost full (three out of five subjects have no more room for notes). Last week’s homework was returned to us and I got full marks!

My laptop battery was dead so I read the reply emails on my iPhone. One source crapped out on me, but the other proved extremely useful.

Camped out in the library to use WiFi. Got a rare email from my father, which is always good for a giggle.

Fiddled around with PayPal, essentially opening a third account because I couldn’t add my Irish shipping address to an account opened in the States, so I could subscribe to The Stinging Fly. This is the first time I’ve ever subscribed to a literary journal, but since I’ll be here for a year and I just met the editor on Friday, I thought it would be a wise use of my money (only 20 euro!).

Downloaded free (and legal!) PDF version of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity to my desktop.

Searched catalogue for book I should read before next week. It’s locked away somewhere confusing, so I’ll try again tomorrow.

Rifled through all the schwag I picked up at the event I was covering to compare what I expected to see with what I actually did see. Revised the newspaper article.

Went to the postgrad room and printed the article for a final edit. Also printed materials for class.

Received email from Contemporary Publishing professor detailing materials needed for tomorrow’s class: post-its, markers, old copies of ROPES and any other literary magazines we like.

Borrowed a few literary magazines from the postgrad room (Granta, The Stinging Fly, and An Sionnach). Also “borrowed” some expired ephemera off a bulletin board, which is now decorating my apartment.

Went back to the library to find old copies of ROPES, which cannot be removed from the library. Kicked myself for not bringing the 2010 edition I have at home and for not buying the 2009 edition I saw in Charlie Byrne’s last week. Sat on the floor in the stacks and flipped through every single old copy the library had (all 20). Wrote down the prices, printers, and the names of famous contributors.

Got a lift from a friend to the faraway post office to pick up a package. Admired the fancy script my friend back home used to write my name and address.

Break for meal (salad with herring), exercise (walk around the horse-racing track!), and TV (old episodes of Malcolm in the Middle and Cold Case).

Came home and submitted the article for the newspaper.

Kept the TV tuned to TG4 (it’s not my fault they air Gossip Girl in English) and got my evening’s dose of Gaeilge while writing the world’s most pointless blog entry.

Galway Theatre Festival

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Tonight, I went to the culmination – at least for me – of the Galway Theatre Festival, which has been running this past week at venues all over town. I went to three plays over the course of the week, and for someone who claims to not like theatre, I had an overall pleasant experience.

I bought tickets for the Wednesday night opening of An Taibhdhearc, the Irish-language theatre in Middle Street, to see if I couldn’t challenge my Beginner’s Irish. The very first show in the theatre was to be Pinocchio, so I thought it might be an easy story to follow. This wasn’t Disney’s Pinocchio, but rather Pinocchio: A Nightmare, in which our little wooden boy is now a hardheaded Irish teenager (played by an actress with an accent I’m told is Corkian). The creativity employed in the bilingual production provided a great example for how I – or anyone, really – should approach learning Ireland’s native language. Bilingual conversations where one character’s Irish question could be deduced by the other’s English answers, humorous descriptive placards before scenes, detailed sound effects produced on stage by an actor visible to the audience, and simply great acting made it easy to see the complementary interaction between Gaeilge and English in modern Ireland.

The next morning, I caught the 11am showing of Sanctuary at the Blue Teapot Theatre. This was a play about the love lives of people with intellectual disabilities, and it was very sweet and funny. One of the supporting actresses, who becomes involved in a secondary love story, had some of the best comedic timing and deadpan delivery I’ve ever seen. It didn’t hurt that the group’s cool-but-sensitive-and-understanding carer, Tom, was played by a very attractive actor that had several girls in the audience giggling. An inspired set design and a few loose parallels to another Disney movie, Beauty and the Beast, brought it all together around the question we all sometimes ask ourselves: How could anybody love me?

I finally got to see the inside of the Druid Theatre when I turned up (and I seriously considered not going) for the 5-euro event “24 Hour Theatre” tonight. The participants (many of whom I recognized from campus) had 24 hours to write, rehearse, and perform 15-20 minute plays. There were three groups, with three plays, which grew increasingly more meta over the course of the evening. We started with a small-town Ireland take on Hansel and Gretel, moved to a hilarious group therapy session, and were spoken to directly about the nature of drama by the characters that manifested on stage as the actors themselves. The first play had the best writing, the second had the best acting, and the third had the best personalities. All in all, it was very inspiring and I’m glad I went.

Throughout the week, I’ve been hearing about all the plays I should have seen. Home has been praised frequently, and there was some Beckett I didn’t know about when I bought my tickets. I also heard good things about The Butcher Molloy, which is apparently set during the last time Galway won the hurling final and thus could have been a lot more poignant if the Tribesmen had gotten the win last Sunday.

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Great Irish Book Week 2009

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Let’s pretend it’s 2009; we’ve travelled in time to the same day in October, just three years earlier.

I want to tell you all about Great Irish Book Week, an event organized by Publishing Ireland to celebrate local publishers, bookseller, authors, wholesalers, and media. It’s happening October 24-31, with events all over Ireland (and perhaps some mad Halloween wrap party?).

There’s even a free publication called Be Inspired, which is a literary sample platter of everything Irish publishers have on offer. It’s quite a treat!

So back here today in 2012, I found this book in Charlie Byrne’s (and paid 4 euro for it) because the editor of Stinging Fly Magazine and Stinging Fly Press, Declan Meade, was coming in for Publishers on Publishing, and there was an excerpt of Life in the Universe in this book.

Just flipping through this book, though, has been such a confirmation of everything I’m learning in this course. I now recognize the names of most of the publishers, and can name the person in charge at about half of them. I know who is responsible for the last big bestseller, and I’m starting to pick up on themes in the writing itself. I also recognize a few words in Irish!

I don’t know if Great Irish Book Week was just a one-off event or if they plan to hold another one every few years… but I love this book. Absolutely love it. Enrolling in this MA programme may be the smartest thing I have ever done, and this little freebie confirms it.

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Bring free books to postgraduate students (current, beautiful, literary books at that), and your publishing company will have fans for life. Fair play, Declan Meade.