I’m back from the first trip to Dublin I’ve taken in my life. It was a marvelous experience: this blog’s editor and I spent a weekend visiting Joycean sites, some obvious (Sweny’s pharmacy and Davy Byrne’s from Ulysses) and some more obscure (the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park where Mr. Duffy stands at the end of “A Painful Case” and the corner of Hume street where the girl from “Two Gallants” waits). At many locations, I read quotations from Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, and Dubliners. If you’ll forgive some flowery language, I later described this process as akin to casting magic spells around Dublin, “binding” my consciousness to those locations and to the city as a whole.

Read on to see some pictures and quotes!