Dublin Culture Night

The second annual Dublin Culture Night is happening next Friday (14th September) involving 82 venues (museums, galleries, theatres, libraries, etc.) and 100 free events. Events will include such highlights as free tours of Dublin Castle, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and Croke Park, lectures on Dublin literary figures, art exhibitions, a film making workshop for kids, and loads more. Whether or not you decide to attend any of the free events, Dublin Culture Night will be difficult to avoid with guides and street entertainers spreading out across the city to answer questions and point people in the right direction.

As a preview to Culture Night, The Dubliner Magazine are holding a debate this Friday night exploring the notion that Ireland has lost its cultural identity. The lively banter will involve writers and musicians such as Mik Pyro from Republic of Loose and Sunday Independent journalist Victoria Mary Clarke.

Sand Sculptures

Upon arriving in Dublin this time last year, my wife and I stumbled across an excellent sand sculpture exhibition in the courtyard of Dublin Castle, put on by Duthain Dealbh. This year, they've done it again with an Irish literature theme. (Last year's theme was "the 5 senses.") The exhibition reflects the works of such literary figures as James Joyce, Jonathan Swift, Flannery O'Brien, and Samuel Becket. (Click on one of the pictures below to see more.)

W.B. Yeats Exhibition

On Wednesday I popped into the National Library of Ireland to have a look around and ended up spending a good hour in the current exhibition on William Butler Yeats. It’s a brilliant exhibition blending creative multi-media presentations and personal affects of the world-renown poet/playwright. (Click here for an online presentation on Yeats poem “Sailing to Byantium.”)

One of the things that fascinates me the most about Yeats was his preoccupation with the spiritual realm, primarily in the form of the occult. One of the documentaries being shown in the exhibition mentioned that his search for the spiritual was in reaction to the ostensibly empty forms of religion and rationalism that he saw in the late nineteenth century. Of course, throughout Ireland’s history “religion” has always been inextricably linked to political agendas. For Yeats, there had to be something more. And if there was, it was certainly not found in Christianity. Interestingly enough, he turned to Celtic paganism instead.