November 3, 2018
Walking clears my head. Especially here, on the eastern lip of the Atlantic, the fresh winds gusting in over Galway Bay clear the cobwebs of editing and writing from my mind. When I need a break from work – from books, paragraphs, sentences, words, letters – I walk.
Sometimes, though, the letters follow me. This one gave me a proper surprise, almost glowing in the wet autumn ground:

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15 Comments |
Ireland, nature, personal, photography | Tagged: autumn, autumn leaves, climate, Galway, graffiti, Ireland, leaves, letters, mystery, nature, nature photography, personal, photography, Q, stencil, street art, walking, weather |
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Posted by Stan Carey
August 19, 2018
Last weekend, driving to the Burren in County Clare (just south of Galway, where I live, and an endlessly interesting place to explore), a friend and I picked up the relevant Ordinance Survey map to get a better sense of the terrain.
Maps are a reliable source of pleasure, firing the imagination as we pore over their flattened geography, their special codes and symbols. Digital maps are ubiquitous now, but I still love to use paper maps when the opportunity arises.

View of Co. Clare from Mullaghmore (‘Great Summit’ or ‘Big Summit’)
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film, Ireland, naming, personal, photography | Tagged: Burren, Cape Fear, County Clare, film history, filmmaking, films, geography, Gregory Peck, hiking, hillwalking, history, Ireland, Irish history, Kilmacduagh, landscape, maps, Martin Scorsese, monastery, movies, Mullaghmore, naming, personal, photography, round tower, ruins, The Burren, thriller, travel |
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Posted by Stan Carey
July 15, 2016
Every so often I make a poem by stacking books on top of one another so their titles line up felicitously. I call them book spine poems, or bookmashes for short. Here’s a new one.
*
The Accidental Grammar
Voices in stone
breaking the rock:
the accidental grammar,
the loom of language,
the awakening of intelligence,
the mind’s eye reborn –
Renegade presence,
gifts of unknown things.
*

Some of these are recent additions to the bookshelf; a few are old favourites. There’s a strong bias towards non-fiction here, with Ali Smith’s the only novel. In 2013 I found a close ratio of fiction to non-fiction in my bookmashes, but I’ll have to review the figures, maybe when I’ve done 40 or 50 (we’re at 37 now).
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books, language, photography, poetry, wordplay | Tagged: Ali Smith, book spine poems, bookmash, books, Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, Ernst Doblhofer, found poetry, Frank Palmer, Frederick Bodmer, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Jolene Babyak, language, language history, literature, Lyall Watson, Mark E. Smith, Patsy Rodenburg, photography, poetry, Susan Sontag, visual poetry, wordplay |
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Posted by Stan Carey
December 7, 2015
A few years ago I edited a master’s thesis for Michael O’Meara, a Galway-based chef and photographer. Michael owns Oscars Seafood Bistro, which he runs with his wife Sinéad and a talented team. His thesis won an award for academic excellence, and he was pleased enough with my editing and proofreading that he sent me a testimonial and said he’d be in touch again when he wrote a book.
Michael was true to his word. After much research and compilation of material he put together a manuscript, and with the tireless help of the wonderful Connemara publishers Artisan House the results of these efforts are now complete. Sea Gastronomy: Fish & Shellfish of the North Atlantic is a prodigious achievement, with 440 pages of recipes, zoological notes, and more, covering 120-odd species (some of them very odd) from the bountiful seas around Ireland.

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books, editing, food, Ireland, personal, photography | Tagged: animals, Artisan House, books, Connemara, cookbook, cooking, copyediting, editing, fish, food, Galway, Ireland, Michael O'Meara, Oscars Seafood Bistro, personal, photography, proofreading, recipes, sea, Sea Gastronomy, seafood, shellfish |
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Posted by Stan Carey
July 13, 2015
On the Daily Post blog, Cheri Lucas Rowlands has invited WordPress users to share photos of doors as part of a photo challenge. For a break from my usual subjects, I’m joining in with a repost from 2010, just because.
Doors, Cheri writes, can be a source of beauty in the mundane, and in this case I love how an old building with a certain mournful, dilapidated charm was briefly transformed by an anonymous street artist into something quite magical.
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art, Ireland, photography, stories | Tagged: art, buildings, dancing, door, dpchallenge, Galway, graffiti, Ireland, photo challenge, photography, stories, street art |
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Posted by Stan Carey
August 1, 2013
A few tweets from earlier today, to introduce and summarise the topic:
[An interesting discussion ensued that I’ll assemble on Storify later. Update: Here’s the Storify chat.]
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grammar, language, linguistics, photography, pragmatics, syntax, wordplay, words, writing | Tagged: electronic communication, grammar, image macros, internet, internet culture, language, language change, like, linguistics, memes, photography, pragmatics, slang, speech, syntax, Twitter, wordplay, words |
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Posted by Stan Carey
July 19, 2013
Photos, for a change. Last weekend three old friends and I climbed Croagh Patrick, a mountain in County Mayo in the mid-west of Ireland. (Croagh is an anglicisation of cruach, Irish for stack.)
The Reek, as it’s also known, has a cone-shaped peak that dominates the surrounding skyline. You can see it in the distance here on the road to Westport town, our home base for the day.

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18 Comments |
Ireland, nature, photography, stories | Tagged: climbing, County Mayo, Croagh Patrick, geography, hill walking, holy mountain, Ireland, Irish history, mountaineering, mountains, nature, nature photography, outdoors, photography, Saint Patrick, stories, walking |
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Posted by Stan Carey