Great spats over the electronic voting system about to be introduced in Ireland shortly. As far as I understand it, people are worried for two reasons. The new system no longer allows us to ‘spoil’ votes privately. We have a tradition of protest abstentions here, where you can write, for example, “No to warplanes refuelling at Shannon” on your ballot. You can also, if so inclined, indicate who you would have voted for before you got pissed off. Now, in order to abstain actively, you must notify a polling officer, who will switch off the machine and restart.

The other concern is that this system has no audit trail. No paper backup votes are printed for counting and it will be difficult to figure out if and when something goes wrong.

The proponents do not inspire confidence. On RTE’s Playback this morning, I listened in disbelief as the Taoiseach’s brother defended the new system. There would be no problems because these were not computers, he insisted. They were just machines. The baffled interviewer pressed him on this, to be told angrily that of course they weren’t computers, because they weren’t connected to the internet.

Well, that’s all right, then.

My first New York social engagement, a few hours after touchdown at JFK, will be an Oscars party in Brooklyn. New Yorkers don’t watch much TV—life there is too much fun—so for the big nights television owners generously open their living-rooms. This gay Superbowl is my favourite.

The Irish media keep running interviews with the Sheridan family, who are up for the screenwriting award, but boo, hiss! I say. In America was an okay film with dodgy dialogue. It’s not that I have much respect for the Academy, but I’d like to see Sophia Coppola win that Oscar and any others going, not least because I can trust her to wear a very lovely Marc Jacobs dress to the podium.

Lost in Translation was the first true American movie I’ve seen in years. In script, photography, casting, and music, she outdoes daddy and her gurning ex-husband (and skewers Spike Jonze beautifully by casting twitchy, zombie-faced Giovanni Ribisi as Scarlett Johanssen’s husband.) Bill Murray, bless his pockmarks, has always been my dream dinner date, and I would die happy if he ever serenaded me with “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?” And Johanssen, though her character is maddening and maddeningly familiar, does a fine job.

I hear complaints that the movie is racist, that it propagates Japanese stereotypes, that it shows only postcard Tokyo. They’re missing the point. This movie is about dislocation and fleeting recognition. We need to be at home in ourselves to explore, and her characters aren’t, yet. That’s why Coppola shows us faithfully the postcards and cartoons they see.

I will miss the Limerick County Library and the motherly ladies who run it. When I was small I got two Enid Blyton books a week here, and was forever afraid that the yellow-haired librarian would scold me for bringing them back late. She never did, as far as I recall, but my fear of authority remains overdeveloped.

I didn’t rediscover libraries while I was overworked and wealthy. I needed to own books then and gathered the spines in conquest, read or not. My first day back here I was startled they didn’t ask for ID in exchange for a library card. An interest in books was enough to earn the trust that I’d bring them back.

Now, when the library opens at ten o’clock I plug myself in near the magazine rack, type stories, and watch the future parade before me as the library fills with kids and immigrants.

In a sunny corner, retired men and a few stray nuns read the papers around a low table. A flotilla of kids in wheelchairs arrives to pick new books. They glide around the children’s section and giggle when I wink at them. A ten-year-old redhead stops to chat—is that laptop mine? Am I writing my diary? Yes, I tell her, and we discuss Mary-Kate and Ashley, and Roald Dahl, and school. My neighbour Michael arrives to pick up a book he’s ordered from the Irish Times reviews. A gaggle of nine-year-olds in burgundy uniforms whispers over a project on Explorers. They are afraid of a scolding too: one of them has just accidentally used the photocopier without permission, and who knows what might happen now.

My damn phone keeps chirping with texts; a maintenance dose of connectivity in the face of self-imposed internet deprivation. Texts, texts, says Tim, how Lacanian we are becoming.

I chat to Olu while his daddy browses. Olu is four and has a lot to say. He is particularly interested in the bike outside, which might be mine. He doesn’t know the Brooklyn singer Olu Dara, and nor does his dad, though he tells me he must be African too.
“Where are you from?” asks dad.
“Limerick. But I’m going back to New York in a few days.” He looks disapointed.
“We just arrived here from Portlaoise two days ago. We don’t have any friends here yet,” he says. I tell him, fervently, that he is very welcome to Limerick. But I don’t know how true that is outside this sanctuary of sense.

Seven broadband computers, booked by the hour, are the main attraction for some. An elderly Sri Lankan man arrives every day at two. I have seen him wheeling a happy grandchild near Dooradoyle. In any given time slot two or three new immigrants are rapt as they read email and write home. I have worn that look myself in so many places that I want to spit when locals complain about “the non-nationals hogging all the access.” They don’t know what it’s like to be far from home, and they haven’t the curiosity to imagine it. They believe, quite firmly, that they are better than people who don’t speak English with a flat Limerick accent, like.

‘Non-nationals’ has become a weasel word here, in a country already poisoned by nationalism. It’s a seemingly innocuous construction, but it’s really code for THEM, not us. But nationals need THEM more than THEY need us, though many are still too thick to see it. Eight years ago, Jason and I used to cringe at the unbearable whiteness of being Irish whenever we got off the plane at Shannon. It was the shock of sameness, as jarring in its way as the first experience of New York’s mix. And it is the energy of Ireland’s new mix that tempts me to move back here some day, as the crass Spar generation never could.

I watch fellow immigrants poring over textbooks and borrowing armfuls of books, as greedy as myself. I think of the awe of new arrivals from all over the world who first step into the New York Public Library, and feel glad that this is one small welcome we can extend too, even when our courtesy fails outside these walls.

To balance my visa-related whining, patient readers, these two snippets paint a broader story.

Ramón, a New York friend originally from the Dominican Republic, writes:

And, closer to home, Bernie reminds me what it’s like for Americans working in Ireland. He got thrown in Mountjoy! And deported!

The United States Embassy in Dublin is starting to feel like a Florida gated community; a fortress for the protection of the wealthy and worried. I am sad for them that this is so. The rest of us have now been demoted to queueing on the street outside the perimeter walls. Stretchy nylon barriers corral us on the pavement, and one by one we shout our business to the American woman behind the plexiglass. She checks through our paperwork making sure we have everything we need for the appointment. Over and over, she shouts back that the passport photos are too small, that photo booth pictures are not acceptable, and that the chemist next to the bank beyond the traffic lights will take the regulation 2 × 2 inch photos. She is pleasant. When everything is in order, she slides a small square of cardboard into the metal tray. It is green.

“Take your green card and present yourself to the security guys.”
Somebody has a sense of humour. It isn’t me.

In a small booth at the gate, the security guys check my name off on the list of 10 a.m. appointments. They are Dubs, and sympathetic to the Fortress America pilgrims. As they frisk me I ask them how they like the new system. One shakes his head.
“Ah Jaysus, every time we come down here there’s a new fuckin’ procedure.”

They search my bag, x-ray it, take my mobile phone and give me a pass. Now the next green card holder is let in to be searched, and I’m allowed to cross the grounds and enter the embassy, where another security desk is staffed by a smiling, dark-haired Dub. The presence of my own people is comforting in a place designed to make me a stranger.

Inside the door of the visa office, portraits of Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, and George Bush survey us masterfully and get the odd dirty look in return. (Is there a plainer man alive than Dick Cheney?) Every seat is taken; several are broken. There are several college students waiting for a J1 summer visa and fretting about their finals. Three Filipina nurses. (I hope they’re not leaving for good. Ireland just legalised work permits for their spouses to encourage them to stay, something America does not yet offer.) There are several cranky, veteran H1 “skilled workers” like me. Some green card holders from the Donnelly/Morrison handouts in the early nineties. Various unidentifiables.

I give my paperwork to an Irish staffer, who is patient when we discover that my passport is still stuck in the x-ray machine outside. He checks through everything again, preparing ground for the American visa officer. At the next hatches, the interviews are taking place. A helmet-haired Sandra Bullock type calls Irish names with midwestern tilt: “Christine DAHN-a-hue?” Fifty of us listen with interest as a Riverdance hoofer applies for a green card, possibly under the Alien of Extraordinary Ability program, though I can’t quite tell. An Indian PhD student is up next, forced to shout his financial means at the glass as we stare slackly, missing our text-phones. The visa officer asks him about his academic study in surprising detail. Arthritis research. We nod. Give it to him, go on.

I smile at a foxy-haired man who looks familiar, sure I must know him from somewhere. He is with three or four friends and they all look hungover. He gives me a “grand girl yourself” wink and sits two seats down from me, edging for a chat. It dawns on me he is the lead singer in The Sawdoctors—in fact, the entire band is here, getting visas for their March tour. The signature lyrics of my sixteenth year were theirs:

I useta see her up the chapel when she went to Sunday Mass
And when shed go to receive, Id kneel down there
And watch her pass
The glory of her ass

Newly mindful of my ass, I am distracted when finally called up to The Hatch.

My visa officer, Sandra Bullock, is lovely. They all are. It’s not their fault I am not an Alien of Extraordinary Ability or a Bruce Morrison protegée. It is not their fault my sense of entitlement is so huge and so wounded. My lawyer has prepared every detail I might need, but the biggest challenge turns out to be the new inkless fingerprinting system. The whorls on my pointer fingers are faint, but Sandra does not lose patience in the eight attempts it takes to capture them. I really should stop playing with candles.

And that was it. The postman has just delivered my passport, battered and stamped from all my wanderings, and now with a full-colour H1-b visa issued at Dublin, Ireland, authorising me to work at Meetup, Inc., expiring in February 2007. On Sunday I’ll fly to Amerikay.

Alice Stewart was a doctor and a scientist who was one of the first practioners of a new post-war discipline, epidemiology. For what became the Oxford Study of Childhood Cancer, she drew up questionnaires, recruited volunteer interviewers, and assembled by hand enormous amounts of data about thousands of children. Her methods were unorthodox. She started the questions from conception, not birth. She tracked forward, from a healthy population, not backwards, from the sick. She did what none of the lofty, eminent men of her day had thought to do: “I asked the mums.”

She asked the mums. She gathered data, a beginner’s mind, and one brilliant statistician. With little funding, and sometimes active hostility in place of support, she and George Kneale coaxed stories from her facts and figures. Fifty years later, that data is still talking.

The most famous of her many discoveries was the link between x-rays and cancer, though it took decades for her findings to be accepted and for shoestores to stop x-raying for fit. Her later work on radiation and cancer was systematically squashed by the nuclear industry. Epidemiology, with its thirty-year studies, is a science for the long-lived. Alice was working right into her nineties, fighting suppression by powerful lobbies. As consolation for the Nobel Prize she may have deserved, she won the Right Livelihood Award, the “Alternative Nobel” awarded in Sweden. The British Embassy in Stockholm did not even take her out to lunch.

Her theories on leukemia epidemics were grounded in her background as a working doctor, not an academic. She realised, for example, that antibiotics had unmasked the true incidence of leukemia. It was the healthiest children who succumbed to leukemia, early doctors often noted. Leukemia dramatically compromises the immune system, so long before the disease visibly manifests, these children used to die of minor infections. When these infections were cured by antibiotics, they lived through long enough to develop cancers of the blood.

Her childhood cancer data also turned up a peculiar finding: twice as many children who died of leukemia under six months old were born between January and June than between July and December. Yet these periods are climatically the same in Britain—both half summer, half winter. The difference, she noted, was whether a month-old child was surviving into warmer or colder weather.

Alice, true to her name, looked the mirror image of this information and thought about SIDS deaths, which occur more often in winter.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) kills between 6,000 and 7,000 babies a year in the United States alone, or between 2 and 3 cases per 1,000 live births. Nobody knows what SIDS is, or why it’s on the rise. What is known is that it happens more often in winter than summer and that it occurs mainly between four and six months of age.

Bob Cringely’s account of his son Chase’s death from SIDS two years ago is hard to forget. As a parent he desperately wants answers:

Well, here is the theory of an extraordinary scientist who doggedly proved herself right so many times while she was alive. It seems to me, as laywoman as they come, to show all Alice Stewart’s practicality, intuition, and good science. Why is nobody testing this? For her memory, and for Chase’s, I’d like to think that someday someone will dig out those journals and try.

Reference: All Alice Stewart excerpts are taken from Chapter 15 of The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation by Gayle Greene. (Many thanks to Alice’s granddaughter, Elly, for lending me her copy. )
See also “Our Brilliant Careers”, a 1996 documentary on Alice Stewart produced by Channel 4.

My application for a US work permit has finally been approved. It’s identical to three others I’d submitted successfully over the years, but under the baleful Tom Ridge regime it was rejected at first attempt, causing minor heartflips for me, my boss, and my lawyer.

Next I have to sit an interview for a travel visa. They used to do this as a same day walk-in service at the Dublin embassy, but now the appointment needs to be booked (or cancelled) two weeks in advance on an information line that costs $2.50 per minute. I need a special prepaid envelope for the return of my passport. There’s a $100 charge for the application, plus professional passport photos (no booth photos allowed). The work permit has already cost my employers—a small startup—over three thousand dollars and seven lost weeks of work.

It is impossible to consider living there long-term. From Luke in Toronto, a link to an article that speculates on what this kind of codology is really costing America:

“Creative Class War”

When we moved to New York we stayed at the Algonquin Hotel on 44th and 5th. Our taxi was stuffed with as many bags as we had been able to carry from London. Ed, the bell-hop, was neat, silver-haired, and buck-toothed, and his welcome was so comforting that I wanted to tell him my worries and fears about this new life. But I didn’t know how, any more than I knew how much to tip him for carrying eight bags upstairs.

The first room was cramped and dark and stank of smoke. I complained to Jason. Being Irish, I then begged him not to complain to anyone who could fix it. He called the front desk anyway and got another room, this one merely cramped and dark.

The hotel had just been bought. Builders hammered in the Oak Room and the new manager briefed important people. They were going to do so much more to capitalise on the wonderful literary tradition here, he said. Round Table, mm-hmm. Dorothy Parker. Thurber. Nearby, sleek Matilda dozed in her own glass-fronted, cat-sized suite and woke to prowl the lobby at night.

At the breakfast buffet I went back for refills and considered squirrelling away muffins for later. In the evenings the obsequious but unfriendly Indian waiters placed bowls of mixed nuts and Japanese crackers on the tables. I sat with a glass of wine and emptied them steadily. In my head I calculated over and over the daily cost of the room, breakfast, and dinner, which seemed enormous. Jason’s company paid. Every morning he walked to his new job on 45th Street, while I sat in the lobby with his laptop and didn’t write. We were two weeks married, and I was lost.

The other lobby residents were older. Couples talked about Broadway shows. Once I spoke with a German photographer over for a fashion shoot. He was out of place in this shabby gentility, but he liked it, he said, because the fashion crowd never came there. Once a middle-aged man told me how to close a sale, and then invited me uptown to see an art show. In the taxi back he confided that he couldn’t get it up except for phone sex, and I retreated to the hotel feeling stupid.

Allan spent almost as much time there as me. He was a threadbare impresario trying to arrange a series of what he called “cultural events” in the new Oak Room. Every day he wore a red sports jacket with too-short cuffs and sold his ideas over a coffee that grew cold. He leaned towards his audience of sponsors and hotel managers and doubtful actors. John Lahr would read from his New Yorker theatre criticism. Brendan Gill would discuss Maeve Brennan. Lewis Lapham would talk about something or other. I’d never heard of any of these people. I watched Allan from behind my laptop until one day he asked if I was a writer. He was disappointed, I think, that I was merely nursing an electric security blanket, so I offered to help him plan these shows.

I wasn’t much help, but I confirmed guest lists, stamped tickets, and shuffled. He gave me a free ticket to each show, though the two-drink minimum recouped their loss. The Oak Room filled with the kind of stiff-haired people drawn to a series called The Culture Project at The Algonquin. I was always the only person looking at thirty, or even forty, from below.

The talk I remember most clearly was by Brendan Gill, who died a few weeks later. Gill was a New Yorker writer of the old school, out-of-place in the Tina Brown era, and delightful. He spoke about his old colleague, Maeve Brennan, whose short stories had just been republished. I had never heard of her, though I had just graduated with a literature degree from Joyce’s university, and her Dublin stories were the equal of his. She had moved to Washington at the age of 17 when her father was appointed ambassador. She started as a fashion writer for Harper’s Bazaar, then she joined the New Yorker, where she wrote for Wallace Shawn, and published a book of her Talk of the Town sketches under the byline “The Long-Winded Lady”.

The tiny redhead with the acute gaze had charmed literary New York in the Fifties, but remained mostly unknown at home. Though she spent the rest of her life in New York, her short stories never strayed from Dublin, and they are a unique portrait of a new republic. Maeve Brennan died alcoholic, mentally ill, and homeless, having spent the last decades of her life living in the women’s toilets at the New Yorker. New staff were told, “She used to be a writer.”

I read her stories, The Springs of Affection, in the Algonquin lobby and wanted to press them on someone.

After three weeks we moved out of the Algonquin to a company apartment next door to Carnegie Hall. Our roommate was a Serbian programmer. “New York is Shit. Hole.” said vinegar-faced Bogdan. “I lived before in Santa Berbera. Santa Berbera is not Shit. Hole.”

I called home a lot. I learned to watch daytime TV. I read The Newcomer’s Guide to New York, but it didn’t make me brave enough to face the place until I got an unpaid internship at the publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, where again I was a handmaiden to fusty Fifties New York. I read through the slush pile, filed press clippings, and filled Jiffybags with review copies. By phone I worked my way through more guest list confirmations. “This is Betty Bacall,” growled one, and I nearly hung up in fright.

Roger Straus sometimes appeared in the dusty, dog-eared corridors, still dashing at ninety-two. He wore a tweed jacket and a bright cravat, and had a sweep of white hair. He was, though I didn’t know it, a publishing legend: the playboy heir to Macy’s turned literary hero. He had escorted so many Nobel Prize winners that the Swedes believed he was the American Minister for Culture. There were rumours he was a spy.
“This one is Irish,” said Peggy, the kind and terrifying great lady of the house.
“Ah, like our own dear Edna O’Brien,” he boomed, “Do you know Edna, dear?”

It’s funny how I had forgotten that time. Eventually I found a paid job in a very different world, and invented a new story in which I was the cosmopolitan heroine in a so-fabulous New York. I carefully forgot that I had once got nervous ordering deli sandwiches, that I didn’t know how to give directions in a taxi, and that I had scuffed my shoes with shyness outside Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

But it all comes round again. I saw Lost in Translation a second time because it was true. A week later I flicked from I’m a Celebrity… to a late-night RTE documentary on Maeve Brennan’s life. Her cousin, Roddy Doyle—who knew?—was interviewed, holding her forgotten collection of short stories. Then they cut to the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, where Ed, bell-hop and beautiful man, fondly remembered “Miss Brennan”. Listening to his Queens vowels, I was back there on the fowth flooah, my worldly goods on his trolley.

May we all have such a eulogist.

Guilty as charged. With the magnificent megalomania of the miniscule, it doesn’t seem odd to me that any North American university whose navel is worth gazing at offers Irish Studies. But then Darren-in-Vancouver writes of his disbelief that American universities would offer courses in Canadian Studies. Why would anyone want to study Canada, he wonders? I can think of a few reasons. Canada is the most ethnically diverse country there is. It shares a border with the most powerful country in the world, yet chooses to maintain its own moral standards on education, healthcare, and foreign policy, standards which are—screw Chomsky—higher. Its literature is energetic. Its men are devastatingly attractive, except for Jim Carrey. Not to come over all Bowling for Columbine, but I’d be happier in an America that turned out more graduates in Canadian Studies.

It’s not just modest, self-effacing Canada. In Jeremy Paxman’s excellent book, The English: A Portrait of a People, he spends most of the introduction explaining—apologetically, by his standards—why anyone would want to write or read such a book. The English do not dissect their Englishness that often, beyond a moving fixation on sit-coms. Yet they are a fascinating people, having had the brass neck to take over the world, and then, like teenage shoplifters, grudgingly hand it back. They display a mixture of traits even quirkier than our own, with the Class System in place of the Catholic Church as the universal fuck-you-up factor.

I would ask why the difference, what makes us so sure we are unique and and worthy of endless study. But, you know, I have navel-gazing books to read.