Summer is late at Lake Superior, but Autumn comes early. It’s about 11°C/50°F today, and the wind is whipping rollers and whitecaps on the lake. Great thunderstorms roll in in the evenings, knocking out the phone lines. The skies are grey. The campers and the college-student rangers have gone home. The animals are gobbling the rest of the harvest before winter.

It feels like the west of Ireland, like mornings walking the windy cliffs in Kilshannig, Co. Kerry. Last night I cooked up a dinner that would shock my mother, who thinks my tastes are dainty: what we call “a big feed of bacon and cabbage and spuds” (boiled ham hock). I saved the ham stock for soups all week.

At night I read the Brehon Laws and Brian Merriman’s poetry (and because I have the best sister in the world, I’m about to get an Amazon package with the Seamus Heaney translation I wanted). The stereo is stacked, five CDs deep, with Irish music, though I hardly realised until I listened to them all through. On No Prima Donna, a Van Morrison tribute album, I listen to Liam Neeson’s spoken-word cover of “Coney Island” (the real Coney Island, in Van’s northern Ireland). It is rapturous. If Lou Reed were Irish, this is how “Perfect Day” would have sounded. Suddenly I want to be drinking Guinness with soft-spoken people again. (You can get the MP3 here.)

On the same album, Sinéad O’Connor sings “You Make Me Feel So Free”, whispery Colin Farrell vocals backed by an over-the-top orchestra. I have a love-hate relationship with Sinéad, the poster child for neurotic Irish women, and this cover is dreadful. No amount of Nelson Riddle strings will convince me that she has ever felt free in her religion-addled life.

A Tired & Emotional Mary Coughlan takes modern Ireland to a Midnight Court of her own on her smoky Galway blues albums: “I want tah be se-jooced,” she purrs in an accent straight out of Ringaskiddy. She was faintly scandalous when I was growing up in the 1980s: a thirtysomething single mother, a blousy redhead who sang about drinkin’ and smokin’ and men. Gay Byrne clucked like an old hen whenever she was on The Late Late Show. Ireland has changed so much.

It is fourteen months since I was in Ireland, the longest I’ve ever gone without a visit. Time to go back soon. In the meantime, I’m halfway there.

I bought a copy of The Economist on my monthly grocery run to Sault Sainte Marie, a special treat even though it was a week out of date and hidden behind Yoga Journal at Cole’s bookshop. It was that or People, and I was so horrified by the before-and-after pictures of Melanie Griffith’s big-mouth-bass lip surgery that I couldn’t bring it into the house.

The 20-something behind the counter snatched up The Economist.
   “Ohmigod! That’s my favourite magazine! And nobody buys it; no one ever reads it except me. I don’t even know why they stock it.” He swiped it reverently. “What’s your favourite section?”
I was unprepared for this level of detail. “I’m sort of a lightweight. The one at the back, “Moreover“, I think it’s called. And the Science and Technology section.” He looked disappointed.
   “I like the International Politics.”
   “Me too.”
   “Are you from the Soo?”
   “No, just visiting. I’m from Ireland.”
   “Oh.” Disappointed again. “See, I told you no one around here buys this.”

Reader, I think I could have had a Cougar Moment. But he’s right. The Economist is terrific. I never know what my opinions are until I read them in The Economist. I wish the old gray hag had the sense to poach its editors.

From this issue’s Lexington column, a sly description of the Democratic candidates’s wooing of Joe Sixpack.

My friend Ramón, who grew up in the Dominican Republic, writes in response to last week’s post about Graham Greene:

Periodically my mother suggests I write a travel book or magazine article. She doesn’t read travel books, but she is worried that I don’t have a job (or the apparent prospect of one) and would be much happier if my trip were funded by a massive publisher’s advance instead of by foot modeling. This is reasonable. But there are obstacles, at least some of which do not include incurable laziness, limited talent, and a floundering publishing industry.

The traveling part is fine. I enjoy it. And a notebook is an indispensable outlet for a natural talker forced into solitude. The problem is the small print, the trip details at the end of the glossy article, or the third-person preface that explains the vision behind the intrepid journey now immortalized. I would have to fake them.

My inky, food-stained notes were never meant to be printed on shiny paper. I am not Cond&eacute Nasty enough, though I know what’s required:

Dervala Hanley traveled to San Crist&oacutebal de las Casas on Aero Mexico, $1599-$1999 RT. She stayed at Hotel Posada Albergue de la Finca, $359 per person (based on double occupancy). Helicopter trips to the Sumidero Canyon $260 for 45 minutes, Eco-Chopper Tours. Massage and spa packages by Adorable Indian Lady, Inc. For more details on local handicraft markets, visit www.gringobasura.com.

The subtext is as follows:

Dervala Hanley is the kind of person who, like you, gentle subscriber, has a fabulous travel agent, Maria, who has looked after her for years. She also has the kind of hectic, dashing, New York magazine writer’s life that requires and deserves regular exotic spa vacations.

In no way does she resemble the kind of person who spends hours in an Internet caf&eacute booking cheap, one-way consolidator fares that then cost $600 to switch due to screwed-up dates. Nor does she ever choose hotels as a function of the fraction of an hour or hours she has already spent schlepping a backpack in the heat.

This stuff I can manage, sort of. I can be snotty and patronizing—I lived in New York for five years, after all. I can pretend to be wealthy. The really tough stuff is the Intrepid Preface genre:

Dervala Hanley was six years old when she first learned of the trained, formation-flying vampire bats used for hunting by the Y_______ Indians of Tabasco. Twenty years later she built a replica famine-era coffin ship and sailed from Connemara to Veracruz with an irascible donkey and a Toltec phrasebook. This is the story of how a young woman slowly won the hearts of a hidden tribe and their beasts.

She now farms and trains vampire bats in Co. Clare.

A truthful version would go something like this:

Dervala Hanley decided on a whim to go to Mexico because she couldn’t afford New York rent. Many of her friends had liked Mexico and conveniently, she already spoke Spanish. She also felt it would be reasonably safe for a solo woman traveler, an important factor since she is not very brave.

She traveled mainly by public bus and was frequently sick. Mostly, she followed routes recommended by her mass-market guidebook, though she discovered that since most tourists only want to meet each other it is relatively easy to find less-traveled paths. Unfortunately, she cannot remember the names of any of the villages she visited on these explorations.

She had many encounters with charming local Internet-caf&eacute proprietors, though she is only moderately interested in the lives of foreigners.

‘Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we are wishing to move the stars to pity.’
— Flaubert, Madame Bovary

My notebook is filled with passages copied out of Madame Bovary, which I finished in bed last night. It wasn’t what I expected—Emma is far removed from the hopeless grandeur of Anna Karenina—but I wept for her all the same. With her discontent, her striving after gimcrack dreams of frills and trimmings and romantic love, she is the model of a modern heroine. She died not because she was an adulteress, but because she was addicted to retail therapy. Poor Charles Bovary weeps today in twenty villages in Long Island.

As Emma thrashed in arsenic agonies, a woman in the bungalow next to mine yowled at a boyfriend.
    ‘Fuckin’ piece of shit. Fuckin’ piece of worthless shit. No more. He’s bad. He’s a bad person. I take his love away from him. Take all my love back. No good. Bad. Evil, evil, evil. Take all my love back.’
She kept wailing like a drunken, potty-mouthed toddler. It was midnight already. I gave her until Emma Bovary died to sort herself out before I banged on her door. Then she started to play the flute hysterically, which I hadn’t known was possible.

Charles Bovary was plunged into despair. The flute warbled on, accompanied by further rantings. Charles Bovary discovered the letters from Emma’s lovers. Still my neighbor ranted. Charles Bovary keeled over in the garden, dead.

I think she fell asleep.

The next morning, I saw her gulping water on the porch. She was not, as I’d thought, a backpacking teenager from Ohio, rather, she was a plain fortysomething with a motorbike out front. I threw her a dirty look but my heart wasn’t in it. She’ll never move the stars to pity.

Ooh! Ftrain Paul links to something lovely—“MANUAL”, a collection by the best web writers out there, including Mr. Ford himself. The organizing theme is the concept of ‘how to…’, and Dean Allen’s design is as elegant as anything yet produced by a bearded man.

How-to guides have a venerable history, from Addison and Steele’s 18th century Gentleman’s Magazine right up to The Rules (spoofed in this collection by Alexis Massie. I’m addicted to them, though rarely smart enough to follow the prescriptions. There can hardly be a group of people less qualified to advise than writers, so this collection should be entertaining.

She was ritually murdered in an Irish bog during the Iron Age. They found her preserved body two thousand years later.

‘So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.’
Mark is reading The Great Gatsby for the first time. Now I want to read it again too. It never seemed like a period piece, but when I first read it twelve years ago, Gatsby’s world was far-removed. After five years in Silicon Alley, it’s immediate. Parties where no one knows the host. Self-invented men with mysterious money. Lots of observers, and lots of hangers-on. And careless people, like Tom and Daisy, who smash things up and retreat back into their money.

‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….. And one fine morning- ‘

We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.—Byron