Wakean Tourism: a Cartography of the Soul

Walking tours of Dublin are an absolute treat – some argue necessity – for the curious Joyce reader. You can do it either through the Joyce Centre on Great George’s Street, the James Joyce Summer School, or simply using xerox photocopies of the numerous maps from Don Gifford’s annotation books. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, and especially Ulysses will come to light in many wonderful and surprising ways, and the city of Dublin is very much ready to accommodate you if you’re seeking to visualize the experience contained in these three books.

Finnegans Wake is a different matter, though, and not just because its prose is difficult. For one thing, most of the Wake‘s Dublin references are to Phoenix park, and the Dublin tourism industry doesn’t seem to have any interest in providing Phoenix park/Chapelizod tour buses for Wake enthusiasts. We’re pretty much on our own, I’m afraid, and it’s not easy. The Phoenix park is Eurasia’s seventh largest municipal park, meaning a whole lot of legwork. It’s worth it, though, and not just for Wake readers. Surprisingly, the Wakean tour of Phoenix Park provides crucial insight into the other books – especially Ulysses. It is a little tricky, though. So where better to start than…


The Famous Quotation

The following is a famous quotation. No, I mean it – it’s really famous. I’ve heard it read out loud at Joyce conference panels so many times that as soon as I hear the words “Joyce once told Frank Budgen…” I already know what’s coming, and I have to actively prevent my eyes from rolling. For Joyceans, it’s basically the equivalent of “Four-score and seven years ago”, and it’s emblazoned on virtually every single Joyce guidebook and map the Dublin Tourism Center on Suffolk Street can shove into your hands:

“I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day sud­denly dis­appeared from the earth it could be recon­structed out of my book.”

-from Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses

Grandiose and provocative though this second-hand quote may be, it’s also hackneyed, simplistic, and hardly ever scrutinized. If we are to assume – as Budgen clearly intends us to – that Joyce meant Ulysses when he said “my book”, the Dublin we’d be reconstructing from its pages wouldn’t have a Wellington Monument…Wellington Monument

…or a Magazine Wall…Magazine Fort     …or a Dublin Zoo…Dublin Zoo

…or a Fifteen Acres…

Fifteen Acres

…or any other salient feature of the Phoenix Park for that matter:

Phoenix Park2015 GoogleMaps image with 1904 placenames
(present name/state in parens)

Perhaps Budgen mis-heard his friend saying “my books” – plural, for just about everything in the the above map is referenced in Finnegans Wake – in most cases repeatedly, and some ubiquitously. According to Louis Mink, over 300 direct references to and meditations on the Phoenix park and its features are distributed more or less evenly throughout the book, with that number essentially doubling if you include Chapelizod, the small strip of high-end suburbia that hugs the park’s southern border along the Liffey.

Ulysses is another matter entirely.

I encourage anyone interested to word-search the above place-names in a Ulysses etext – some of them are there, but without exception their references are marginal and unenlightening. Bloom recalls a water well near the “Hole in the Wall” (U5.296-7, 17.210), Molly imagines a trip “to the furry glen or the strawberry beds” (U18.948), and Stephen… …umm, okay Stephen doesn’t think about the park … or anything in it … or around it … at all. Add Bloom’s occasional and extremely vague, misinformed references to the “Phoenix Park Murders” of 1882 (more than twenty years previous), and there’s your complete list of meditations on Phoenix Park by the three main protagonists of Ulysses. There are a few other exceptions, and other characters give the park occasional mention, but that’s pretty much it. (Chapelizod also receives virtually zero mention in Ulysses. For the record, here’s the one exception from the ‘Aeolus’ chapter [U7.732]: “Ignatius Gallaher we all know and his Chapelizod boss, Harmsworth of the farthing press…”)

More to the point – and this is the big shocker – the only event in the whole of Ulysses to actually happen within the park’s boundaries is the following sentence:

William Humble, earl of Dudley, and lady Dudley, accompanied by lieutenant­colonel Heseltine, drove out after luncheon from the vice­regal lodge. (U10.1176)

…and that’s it – period. In sum, there is no Phoenix Park to “reconstruct” from the pages of Ulysses in terms of description. This is kind of astonishing considering the amount of sheer acreage the park constitutes: Most Joyce-readers are aware of the fact that Phoenix Park is big, but it’s still shocking to see just how enormous it is when you compare it to Dublin City as defined by its canals:Dublin and Phoenix ParkEven if you argue that Phoenix Park isn’t really part of Dublin City “proper”, you still have to explain why the novel would come so close to completely ignoring it, especially since four of its chapters take place much further away from city-centre than the park:Dublin & EnvironsPlus, while no actual Bloomsday event takes place in Howth, Howth would certainly be easier to reconstruct from Ulysses than Phoenix Park, as would Gibraltar, for that matter.

So I’m going to do something that should make the Freudians out there smile (and everyone else grimace, consequently) and argue that James Joyce makes the Pheonix park as conspicuous by its absence in Ulysses as its presence is in Finnegans Wake. By way of example: three of Phoenix Park’s most noticeable features – all within Dublin’s city limits and all major locales in Finnegans Wake – are given no mention whatsoever in Ulysses, and careful comparison reveals an interesting pattern. We’ll start with the “biggie”:


The Wellington Testimonial

The Wellington Monument (officially “Testimonial”) is famously “toured” in the early pages of Finnegans Wake (the “Museyroom” passage, pp. 8-10) and from there, references to either Wellington, his memorial, or the Museyroom run all the way through the book.

Its COMPLETE absence in Ulysses could only be deliberate. The W.M. was by far the tallest structure in 1904 Dublin, over half-again as high as Nelson’s Pillar (the second tallest), and not to be outreached until 2003 by ‘the spire’. It would have been visible from any Dublin rooftop or southern quay on the west side of town. Joyce could easily have had Bloom take note of it any one of the numerous times he crosses a bridge over the Liffey, not to mention when he’s buying Sweets of Sin at the bookstall on Wellington(!) Quay – that would have been the perfect place to make mention of the monument, both thematically and practically:

Victoria Quay DublinBut no – neither he nor anyone else in the novel ever take time to notice or even think about the single largest landmark within Dublin city limits.

So what gives? Joyce didn’t have any kind of “author’s allergy” to it, witness Dubliners:

“Gabriel’s warm, trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window. How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!” (‘The Dead’)

Here’s where visiting the Phoenix park itself really starts to pay off. Gabriel Conroy’s idealized and overly-sentimental attitude would be immediately quashed if he actually did what he contemplates here. The Wellington Testimonial sits in the middle of a tree-less, shelter-less field and once you’re there, the obelisk is utterly impossible to take in – it’s just too big. Even with a foot of snow on it, Gabriel still wouldn’t have been able to see a “bright cap” at the top, and what he could see would have been even more vandalized than what I photographed in 2002:WM DetailsBecause of the design of the monument itself, I had to hold my camera way above my head in order to get these shots – getting them head-on would have required a telescopic lens. And note: the Irish are very careful not to vandalize memorials to people they like – O’Connell, Parnell, Larkin, etc., and climbing high enough to put the paint(?) on these inset plaques would have taken a lot of determined effort. This is the kind of stuff they were doing to King Billy’s statue, General Gough’s statue and Nelson’s Pillar before eventually blowing them up. Ask a native Dubliner why they didn’t do the same with Wellington, they’re likely to tell you that the Archduke was born in Ireland, and so gets a pass. I’m personally skeptical of this response: Wellington himself denounced his Irish lineage by quipping that a man born in a stable was not a horse – a deliberate insult if you ask me. I think a much more likely explanation as to why the W.M. wasn’t destroyed during the Troubles is because it’s made of solid stone and would basically require an ICBM to level; getting rid of the pillar was hard enough. The point is Wellington’s monuments and statues are loathed and vandalized all over the current and former British Empire, from Ireland to India. Of course they’re also celebrated; Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington is nearly as much a synecdoche for British imperial power as the royals or the Union Jack. The inscription on the right-hand side in the above photos reads:

Asia and Europe, saved by thee, proclaim
Invincible in war thy deathless name,
Now round thy brow the civic oak we twine
That every earthly glory may be thine.

This borders on straight-up supplication – the only thing missing is the “amen” at the end. No: Gabriel Conroy was wrong. No self-respecting Irishman claiming Nationalist sympathies would find the Wellington Monument during a nighttime January snowstorm even remotely pleasant.

Even in broad daylight the place is creepy.


The Magazine Wall/Starfort*

*Louis Mink makes a dis­tinc­tion bet­ween the Ma­ga­zine Wall – just south of the park, and the Magazine Star­fort – within the park. Joyce him­self doesn’t bother making this dis­tinc­tion, however, so neither will I.

Built in 1734 by the occupying British army in case of revolt by the natives, the Magazine Wall/Starfort – is about a half-mile west of the Wellington Monument. Here’s the GoogleMap aerial view:StarfortAnother locale that receives ubiquitous mention in Finnegans Wake (p. 44-47 et al), the Magazine Fort sits atop a hill (also mentioned frequently in the Wake – vide FW7.31-32 et al) where you can get a fairly decent view of the surrounding area. But the fort itself is essentially impossible to take in by the naive Joycean tourist. An enormous trench and thick overgrowth surround the entire structure, which is itself closed to the general public due to its current state of disrepair.Starfort OvergrownAttempts have been made to turn the fort into a museum, but what kind of traffic would this blatant reminder of Ireland’s Troubles receive? Were it not so sturdily constructed, my guess is that it would have been demolished long ago.

Creepy creepy. Unpleasant to visit, unpleasant to think about, the Magazine’s excision from the minds and memories of the denizens of Ulysses is somewhat understandable, and if you pair it with the neighboring Wellington Monument, you start to see a pattern of sorts – at least I do.


The Dublin Zoological Gardens

Like the Wellingtom Monument and Magazine Wall, the Dublin Zoo receives detailed and lyrical treatment in Finnegans Wake (pp. 244-246), and again, no mention in Ulysses whatsoever.

But wait a minute – zoos are much more pleasant to visit. Witness these stills from the Dublin Zoo website:Dublin Zoo Conposite…very pleasant indeed. I’ve been to the Dublin Zoo myself, and the habitats were quite nice – even if the animals within them didn’t seem particularly thrilled to be there.

Of course, one should bear in mind that zoos back at the turn of the century were a little different:Jardin de Plantes 1902This sketch was taken at the Jardin de Plantes, Paris, in 1902. I couldn’t find any comparable Dublin Zoo photos, but we can assume conditions in Dublin were just as bad if not worse. Joyce wouldn’t have gone anywhere near such a place, and not just because of the sickening prison-like atmosphere, or that the idiot dangling the doggie-bag half-a-meter from the tiger or the moron who laid his sketchbook inches away from the male lion’s grasp were likely to lose an arm. Admission in 1904 was prohibitively expensive for most Dubliners; only the posh, mostly pro-British class had any real access to it, and judging from the above sketch, their behavior inside would have been further testimony to the Brits’ general attitude of imperial entitlement.

Creepy creepy creepy.


Nightmare Fuel

The hard fact is that unless you were a polo-player, Phoenix Park would have been a miserable place to go on a Thursday in June 1904, even imaginatively. Any mention of Phoenix Park in Ulysses is likely to have the word “murder” nearby, and when you look closely at the final passage in ‘Wandering Rocks’, the Viceregal Cavalcade (avatar of imperial subjugation and the park’s single issue) is spit out of the Park’s mouth like a trail of venom and stops the entire city dead in its tracks as it makes its way to the Mirus Bazaar on the other side of town, nearly trampling Denis Breen, Dilly Dedalus and others in its violent wake.

So while Finnegans Wake is all that Joseph Campbell, Michael Begnal and others say it is – with its mono-mythologies blending the phoenix with Christ with the Buddha etc. all into a glorious dreamscheme of pluralistic humanity, it’s also the very unpleasant thing that Edmund Wilson, Kimberly Devlin and others say it is – the unreadable, the unthinkable, the impenetrable, the nightmarish. The museyroom passage tickles us with “tip” and its goofy cadences, but it also recounts some of humankind’s bloodiest pre-20th century battles. The “Magazine Wall” may very well be where Earwicker gratifies his desires, but it’s also where he is caught, mugged and humiliated. And while the cries of the zoo animals recounted in the Mime chapter may be stunningly lyrical (some argue it to be the most beautiful passage in the book), they’re also the cries of the caged, the oppressed, the conquered.

Chances are that this is the real reason why the Dublin Tourism Office doesn’t have much to offer Wake readers. Finnegans Wake has lots of lightness and comedy in it, but it is in its essence a study of the shadow-self, that part of us we prefer not to look at. Perhaps obfuscating the language is Joyce’s way of enticing us to look anyway.

Interview With a VoiceGeek: Patrick Horgan

From whence comes artistic immortality for the actor?

I suppose we should be glad to take it where we can get it, but the great fantasy of being the next Marlon Brando or Meryl Streep with triumphs registered in the historical archive under The Godfather, Sophie’s Choice, etc. is rather hard to shake. God forbid we should go down as, say, Nazi-guy-in-helmet standing behind Leonard Nimoy in this scene from Star Trek season 2 episode 21: Patterns of Force:

Patterns of Force still Helmet-Guy-Number-Two is probably leaning to the left in order to make certain he’s in the shot, completely unaware that he is in fact over-compensating and that the frame is cropping him off at the left eyeball. I should know – I’ve been there:

LongmireLongmire, season 2, episode 1, approx. 7½ minutes in.

That’s me peeking out fuzzily from behind actress Nicki Aycox, damn near cracking a rib over that counter-top trying to get my mug into the shot.

Comparatively speaking, I have nothing to complain about at all – the Longmire episode wound up being pretty good, and even “Cropped-Eyeball-Nazi-Guy-standing-behind-Nimoy” has joyful anonymity protecting him. I shudder to think what Nimoy himself – who was raised orthodox Jewish – could possibly have been thinking while wearing that SS uniform, probably something like “Please God don’t let me be remembered for this.” Well, as the present deluge of warm eulogies for Nimoy clearly testify, the man’s legacy won’t be terribly tarnished by Patterns of Force, or Spock’s Brain, or Transformers: Dark of the Moon for that matter.

No: Nimoy has much less to worry about on that account than the actor in the foreground of the above Trek still. Patrick Horgan’s number-one Google hit happens to be Patterns of Force – a laughably bad Trek episode – and his most memorable line comes near the end of the episode, with:

Patterns of Force 3“Wait, soldier. There’s been enough killing.
Now we’ll start to live the way the Fuhrer meant us to live.”

Ugh. For this to be what Mr. Horgan is primarily remembered for would be one of popular culture’s single greatest travesties. So it’s high-time for a corrective: Patrick Horgan had a helluvalot more to say than this, and at the age of 86, retired and living with his wife, Susan Bedsow-Horgan in rural Connecticut, he still does. I can personally verify this – for very much to my shock and honor, he allowed me to interview him last week.


HorganIn many ways, Mr. Horgan’s acting career simply dwarfs that of Nimoy’s: in addition to his steady television work and extremely prolific stage career, he recorded somewhere in the neighborhood of 1800 audiobooks (his account) – mostly for the National Foundation for the Blind. Sitting atop these achievements is perhaps the greatest single audiobook accomplishment of all time: his 1985 NFB recording of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I argued in a previous blog that this is and will probably remain for eons to come the only accurate and completely unabridged recording of the book.

Inexplicably, however, obscurity threatens even this accomplishment. Here it is sitting atop its original packaging:

Horgan PackagingUgh. Worse, Mr. Horgan’s name is nowhere to be found on it. Flip the cartridge over, and the only thing printed there is “Property of U.S. Government – further reproduction or distribution is prohibited.” That’s right: as if the injury hadn’t been insulted enough, this recording is not legally available to the general public – I had to sign up for volunteer work at the New Mexico State Library just to have access to it.

I’ve gushed about this recording quite a lot, so the best thing to do here (and to Uncle Sam’s big stick I have but two words: FAIR USE) is to simply let it speak for itself. Below is Mr. Horgan’s reading of one of the Wake‘s most notoriously challenging passages: question #9 from chapter 6, found on page 143:

9. Now, to be on anew and basking again in the panaroma of all flores of speech, if a human being duly fatigued by his dayety in the sooty, having plenxty off time on his gouty hands and va­cants of space at his sleepish feet and as hapless behind the dreams of accuracy as any camelot prince of dinmurk, were at this auc­tual futule preteriting unstant, in the states of suspensive exani­mation, accorded, throughout the eye of a noodle, with an ear­sighted view of old hopeinhaven with all the ingredient and egregiunt whights and ways to which in the curse of his persis­tence the course of his tory will had been having recourses, the reverberration of knotcracking awes, the reconjungation of nodebinding ayes, the redissolusingness of mindmouldered ease and the thereby hang of the Hoel of it, could such a none, whiles even led comesilencers to comeliewithhers and till intempes­tuous Nox should catch the gallicry and spot lucan’s dawn, by­hold at ones what is main and why tis twain, how one once meet melts in tother wants poignings, the sap rising, the foles falling, the nimb now nihilant round the girlyhead so becoming, the wrestless in the womb, all the rivals to allsea, shakeagain, O disaster! shakealose, Ah how starring! but Heng’s got a bit of Horsa’s nose and Jeff’s got the signs of Ham round his mouth and the beau that spun beautiful pales as it palls, what roserude and oragious grows gelb and greem, blue out the ind of it! Violet’s dyed! then what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all?
Answer: A collideorscape!

…and the whole thing is this good. Talk about content outweighing form. According to Mr. Horgan, the project took less than a month:

I would record two to four hours a day, about five days a week. I don’t think it took more than three or four weeks.

Harrison Sherwood

Harrison Sherwood


Incidentally: Harrison Sherwood, the main recording engineer and producer for Mr. Horgan’s Finnegans Wake project, verified in an email to me that it all went by quite smoothly with nary a flub: “It was a pretty money-oriented environment for a nonprofit organization. The Library of Congress (our benefactors) were willing to put up X dollars for a recording of the Wake. We had to come in at or under that dollar amount. So there was an upper limit on the number of hours we could spend.” Sherwood, by the way, offers some great anecdotes about his experience with Mr. Horgan in a blog of his own. This blogpost is actually best if read in tandem with his. Why duplicate, after all? Here’s the link:
http://byneddiejingo.blogspot.com/2006/05/he-proves-by-algebra.html


So this is clearly a man with super-human talent, yet somehow “talented” doesn’t really do Patrick Horgan justice as a descriptor – enthusiastic comes more to mind than anything else. When I started by asking him where (and if) he received any formal actor training, it took him all of fifteen seconds to start talking about the Wake:


Not really. I learned by doing it. It seems to me that acting is a very hard thing to teach. I was actually a medical student for 4½ years. Everybody in my family were all doctors, so I kind of had to do it. But I packed that up – I got sensible and realized there was a better way to go. And I think that was the first time I picked up a copy of Finnegans Wake – when I was a medical student – so I must’ve been, oh, 19, 20. I couldn’t understand a word of it – I got to about page 16 and I thought, I don’t even know what accent it’s in! Of course it didn’t need an accent, but I put it away for years and years and years.

Rita Gam

Rita Gam

Then I was looking at somebody’s books – they happened to be Rita Gam’s books. She was married to the head guy at Viking, so she had all the books that had anything connected with the Wake that were published at that time. I reckon I’ve been working on it for 42 years now – 1972 was when I first started work on it. And I had thought that after 42 not doing it, and then 42 years doing it that I would drop dead, but I didn’t. I’m still sort of clawing my way at it, finding new things every day.


Bear in mind that, in 1972, publication of the first edition of Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake was still nine years away – and woefully sparse by today’s standards once it did come out. So Horgan was researching the Wake in a manner that we of the fweet.org generation can hardly fathom: He relied mostly on his own storehouse of personal knowledge to gloss the text and make judgements concerning pronunciation. If you open McHugh to his acknowledgements page, you’ll find Horgan listed there among the others, Fritz Senn, Adaline Glasheen, Louis Mink, Brendan O’Hehir, et al.

To call Mr. Horgan’s reading of the Wake “flawless” would be wrong of course, for the Wake itself is in many ways a study in the art of flaw-making, and Mr. Horgan’s own attitude towards his 1985 recording reflects the kind of eternal dissatisfaction any artist has towards a completed work. He cited a number of examples:


I had various things that I wanted to change. Sometimes you find that the passage doesn’t mean what you thought it meant. A case in point of particular interest to me lately has been the end of the fifth chapter, the one where it’s telling you what the alphabet is about. Joyce says “very potably so” (p. 118 line 15), and I thought it meant “very possibly so” from the phrase before it, and I’ve discovered since then – and this is in McHugh’s book – that there is a whole bunch of [Rabelais’s] Pantagruel and Gargantua in that. Pantagruel was looking for a book which had the oracle called “Bacbuc” (and Bacbuc is there with “bacbuccus”). So it’s not “very possibly so”, it’s “very drinkably so”. The oracle is giving the thing in the form of drink. And that’s made very clear in the actual text of Gargantua. And I hadn’t realized that, I was saying “o very potably so” [short “O”] but it’s saying “o very potably so” [long “O”] saying how tremendously good it was, rather than just “ho-hum”. That sort of thing crops up all the time. You’ll find a sentence that you’ve been saying one way and thinking of one way that isn’t necessarily that way. But then anything can be at least two ways, any word in my view.

I remember having problems with one of the first words in the book: “Violer d’amores” (page 3 line 4). Now should that be a violer (short “I”, pronounced like viola, the musical instrument), or should it be a violer (long “I”), someone who is raping someone? I didn’t know which one to do. And I found that sort of thing throughout the book – where you can’t be sure which one Joyce intended, so how are you to do it?

I found one the other day :“Tuwarceathay” (490.28) It looks like tu-WARK-a-thigh, but it isn’t – it could be “cathay” at the end, etc. But actually it’s “tuar ceatha”, which is “rainbow” in irish. Now I think McHugh has that one, but to look it up you find that it really means an “omen of mist” in Irish. And how would you pronounce it? Should it be pronounced Irish? Nobody speaks Irish that listens to the recording, so they wouldn’t understand it.

Another Irish one: the pronunciation of the word “devious” – in this case “devious” is just a word or two before “the original document” (p. 123.31). And “the document” refers to the one produced during the trouble between the Irish and the English at the end of the war; the English had a peace treaty, and that was the original document, and De Valera made a new document and called it “document number two.” So clearly “devious” has to indicate De Valera a little bit. You could say “devious” (short “E”) and it would sound peculiar, but on the other hand it’s up to the reader to make it anything they want. Anybody who’s reading it can put any interpretation they like on it. I think everybody should have that right.


The Irish stuff in Finnegans Wake is indeed quite troublesome for an actor, as anyone who’s worked on Thunderword #8 can attest. I should point out, though, that Mr. Horgan takes great delight in recounting his pronunciation conundrums; he didn’t indicate even slight regret at a single decision he made during his recording. And his fascination with unlocking the puzzles of Finnegans Wake goes far beyond anything that an audiobook reader ever need concern himself with:


I find everyday more stuff to add to my pile, and at the moment I’m working on something I started on five or six years ago when I discovered that there was DNA mentioned in the Wake. Joyce hides it very subtly, but it comes up several times. I found that always where there’s DNA, there was an alda as well. So you’ve got the three trees. – the Irish alphabet is all trees, and “D” “N” “A” means “oak” “ash” and “elm” in the Irish alphabet! It’s there on page 503 [line 32] with “Oakley Ashe’s elm”, but the Wake actually begins with: “The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay.” Now there you’ve got your oak and your ash and your elm, and now somehow an alda has crept into it as well. And I looked up the books on all this sort of thing and I found that the received wisdom was that “ald” just meant old, but I found that in the Norwegian mythology, Odin went along a beach with his pals, and he discovered a couple of tree branches and he decided to make people out of them. Now everyone says that they were an ash and an elm because embla sounds like elm, but it isn’t an elm; it means an alda! So there’s a great fight between the trees as to whether the elma is the one thing or the another. So each time you’ve got DNA, you’ve got it being an ash and an elm (regular), but every time it occurs there is also an elda somewhere lying around in the vicinity. And over the passage of time I discovered that they were there forming a diagram like the floor-plan of a cathedral, with seven of them on each side and a dome at one end and a portal at the other end! I discovered that just this morning and I feel pretty excited about it.


I can’t say that I was completely able to follow Mr. Horgan’s line of thinking all the way to the very end here, but this was something he had only just started formulating that very morning, after all, and I’m sure that he would have fleshed it out better given more time. Besides, enthusiasm is often a language all its own, and if there is one thing I would impart about our chat above all else, it would be his extraordinary enthusiasm – he has every right to let it get the better of him.

So I suppose all that stuff I said at the beginning of this blog-post about legacy, i.e.:Trek Trading Card…doesn’t amount to much. If you can claim at the age of 86 the kind of vitality and exuberance Mr. Horgan has, the rest can’t possibly matter one rattling damn.

The HorgansThe Horgans as photographed by Fenella Pearson

Addendum 11/11/22

I only just now learned through the Joycean grapevine that the great Patrick Horgan passed away at the age of 92 last fall. The only online obituary appears to be from a soap opera website. What can I say – I have a newfound respect for soap enthusiasts.

Happy trails, Mr Horgan, and thank you.