The Luck of the Irish

or the Irish-American?

So as it turns out, there’s this big Yeats* symposium going on in Sligo while I’m in Ireland this summer, so I think I might just go for bust and extend my trip for a week to go up and take advantage. The crazy thing is that my mom is totally in favor of this plan, even though she and I have discussed on more than one occasion the likelihood that I will chuck the whole academic lifestyle once I finally finish my damn dissertation . . . but hey, another week in Ireland, reading Yeats with Yeats people, who I am to turn that down? Sometimes the academic life can be okay. . . if only there were any jobs.

The downside of my current Irish fetish** is that it seems to involve a decidedly un-Irish new Ben & Jerry’s flavor called “Dublin Mudslide.”“Dublin Mudslide.” This is a downside because the absolute last thing I need while currently spending too many waking hours sitting on my ass working on a computer is ice cream. But damn, it’s good stuff: irish cream ice cream with chocolate chocolate chip cookies and coffee fudge swirls. I’m not even an ice cream person (unless we’re talking Cold Stone, and then it’s a whole other story).

*W. B. Yeats is perhaps Ireland’s most famous poet, and (more importantly), he’s the subject of the third and final chapter of my dissertation. Well, the chapter will come 2nd in the dissertation, sandwiched between T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, but it is the last one to be written).

**I’m obsessed with Irish music these days, and my obsession hems now to be bleeding out into other things like Guinness and Bailey’s and the above-mentioned Ben & Jerry’s flavor . . .