If cities are sexed, then Cork is a male place.
April 21, 2016 1:13 AM Subscribe
Low-sized, disputatious, stoutly built, a hard-to-knock-over type. He has a haughty demeanour that’s perhaps not entirely earned but he can also, in a kinder light, seem princely. He is certainly melancholic. He is given to surreal flights and to an antic humour and he is blessed with pleasingly musical speech patterns. He is usually quite relaxed, and head over heels in love with himself”
If writing about Cork is a thing then here's mine.
My partner & I arrived in Cork 2 days before Christmas. There was nothing to do, as all right-thinking Corks were holed up in their grey houses. We stayed at a hostel slightly to the north of whatever river there was, next to a cemetery. The hostel was full of French students and one Irish guy.
The Irish guy was a problem - he wore camo and tramped up and down the corridors of the hostel at night. The first night we were there I went to the toilet at about 3am. I flicked on the light of the toilet block and there he was, in full camo, staring at himself in the mirror. He had been staring at himself in the mirror in the dark.
On Christmas Eve we went to the common room of the hostel and joined in cooking our dinner with everyone else. Camo guy had disappeared, but the French students were in full swing. They dissed our wine ("C'est Australien!") and generally ignored us, but I noticed that our duck dinner was more appetizing than their attempt at Christmas Dinner. (To be fair - we could afford good food. They could not.)
Wherever we went in Cork my partner (an Australia-born Chinese woman) was regarded with deep suspicion.
In summary, Cork was grey, odd, unwelcoming. Definitely a man.
posted by awfurby at 3:04 AM on April 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
My partner & I arrived in Cork 2 days before Christmas. There was nothing to do, as all right-thinking Corks were holed up in their grey houses. We stayed at a hostel slightly to the north of whatever river there was, next to a cemetery. The hostel was full of French students and one Irish guy.
The Irish guy was a problem - he wore camo and tramped up and down the corridors of the hostel at night. The first night we were there I went to the toilet at about 3am. I flicked on the light of the toilet block and there he was, in full camo, staring at himself in the mirror. He had been staring at himself in the mirror in the dark.
On Christmas Eve we went to the common room of the hostel and joined in cooking our dinner with everyone else. Camo guy had disappeared, but the French students were in full swing. They dissed our wine ("C'est Australien!") and generally ignored us, but I noticed that our duck dinner was more appetizing than their attempt at Christmas Dinner. (To be fair - we could afford good food. They could not.)
Wherever we went in Cork my partner (an Australia-born Chinese woman) was regarded with deep suspicion.
In summary, Cork was grey, odd, unwelcoming. Definitely a man.
posted by awfurby at 3:04 AM on April 21, 2016 [4 favorites]
I know Cork well. It's a dump with a lot of personality. I do not mean any part of that as a compliment. The sole redeeming feature of Cork is that it's not Limerick.
posted by Italian Radio at 4:59 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Italian Radio at 4:59 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
All of this unfortunately very much makes me want to go to Cork.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:06 AM on April 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:06 AM on April 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
Great post, the Cork self-importance is accurately and sympathetically portrayed, but this line really rang true as well:
They treated Dublin with disdain – trade ideally was with the Continent, and Cork was the most northern city of the Mediterranean.
This was the case for a long time, even outside of Cork city. The line I always heard was that the lords in west Cork drank more and finer French wine than the viceroy in Dublin.
For non-Hibernians, consider the attitude New Yorkers or Londoners hold about the importance of their respective cities, and now transplant that attitude to a place the size of Waco or Colchester. It's still the third largest city in Ireland and the second largest in the republic, so I'm probably being unfair - as a Dubliner, it's hard to avoid - but it's notable enough to be a thing. A charming thing.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 5:28 AM on April 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
They treated Dublin with disdain – trade ideally was with the Continent, and Cork was the most northern city of the Mediterranean.
This was the case for a long time, even outside of Cork city. The line I always heard was that the lords in west Cork drank more and finer French wine than the viceroy in Dublin.
For non-Hibernians, consider the attitude New Yorkers or Londoners hold about the importance of their respective cities, and now transplant that attitude to a place the size of Waco or Colchester. It's still the third largest city in Ireland and the second largest in the republic, so I'm probably being unfair - as a Dubliner, it's hard to avoid - but it's notable enough to be a thing. A charming thing.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 5:28 AM on April 21, 2016 [3 favorites]
We stayed at a hostel slightly to the north of whatever river there was, next to a cemetery.
Was it Sheila's? I spent the better part of a week there once and there were a room full of guys just as you describe. Cammoed out and acting like they were into something they wanted you to think they didn't want you to know about. Mind this was back when one faction or another of the IRA was still planting the odd bomb on London bridges so I suppose it wasn't out of the question entirely. A few years later, a Muslim in the same circumstances would have been on his way to Guantanamo. As it was everyone rolled their eyes and got on with their drinks. The latter must have been the princely side...
posted by the christopher hundreds at 5:31 AM on April 21, 2016
Was it Sheila's? I spent the better part of a week there once and there were a room full of guys just as you describe. Cammoed out and acting like they were into something they wanted you to think they didn't want you to know about. Mind this was back when one faction or another of the IRA was still planting the odd bomb on London bridges so I suppose it wasn't out of the question entirely. A few years later, a Muslim in the same circumstances would have been on his way to Guantanamo. As it was everyone rolled their eyes and got on with their drinks. The latter must have been the princely side...
posted by the christopher hundreds at 5:31 AM on April 21, 2016
My husband's family is from Cork (about half still live there). When we went driving around Ireland on our honeymoon, we stopped in for several days to visit. They couldn't believe that we'd even bothered going to Dublin. Nothing to see there, we were told. Cork was the only place (and we'd visited Galway, Limerick, Dublin, Waterford, the Ring of Kerry) where we couldn't understand people - and that was with my husband having grown up listening to his dad and uncle and aunties. They are an island unto themselves and they're fine with it.
posted by candyland at 6:56 AM on April 21, 2016
posted by candyland at 6:56 AM on April 21, 2016
For non-Hibernians, consider the attitude New Yorkers or Londoners hold about the importance of their respective cities, and now transplant that attitude to a place the size of Waco or Colchester.
I find it more like Texans' pride in Texas or Yorkshiremen's pride in Yorkshire - it goes past mere pride into feeling sorry for you for not being from there. There are some long-running memes like "People's Republic of Cork" and "true capital of Ireland" that will give you an idea. Their sports teams are usually known for a certain arrogance. As the county colours are red and white, fans wave anything with red and white at games, which in the past has included the Confederate Flag, and the flag of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Was it Sheila's?
I stayed there during the jazz festival a couple of years ago and the only thing worse than the people staying there were the people trying to get in at 4 in the morning cos they thought they'd be able to get alcohol - one ended up in a full-on fight with the doorman and the cops ended up being called.
The jazz festival is great, by the way, but by the Sunday night there are a lot of people who've been partying since Friday and are a bit tired and emotional and things can get dark quick. I saw a guy stabbed outside Hillbilly's (fried chicken place) one year. Another year me and my friends were invited back to some house party and everyone vanished from downstairs - we went upstairs and they were all strung out on heroin, with a few small kids running around.
Also, this isn't Cork's fault, but I got the train back to Dublin one year and had to change at Limerick Junction, which is the most desolate place in the entire universe, and the closest thing to a real live limbo/purgatory on earth.
posted by kersplunk at 8:12 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
I find it more like Texans' pride in Texas or Yorkshiremen's pride in Yorkshire - it goes past mere pride into feeling sorry for you for not being from there. There are some long-running memes like "People's Republic of Cork" and "true capital of Ireland" that will give you an idea. Their sports teams are usually known for a certain arrogance. As the county colours are red and white, fans wave anything with red and white at games, which in the past has included the Confederate Flag, and the flag of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Was it Sheila's?
I stayed there during the jazz festival a couple of years ago and the only thing worse than the people staying there were the people trying to get in at 4 in the morning cos they thought they'd be able to get alcohol - one ended up in a full-on fight with the doorman and the cops ended up being called.
The jazz festival is great, by the way, but by the Sunday night there are a lot of people who've been partying since Friday and are a bit tired and emotional and things can get dark quick. I saw a guy stabbed outside Hillbilly's (fried chicken place) one year. Another year me and my friends were invited back to some house party and everyone vanished from downstairs - we went upstairs and they were all strung out on heroin, with a few small kids running around.
Also, this isn't Cork's fault, but I got the train back to Dublin one year and had to change at Limerick Junction, which is the most desolate place in the entire universe, and the closest thing to a real live limbo/purgatory on earth.
posted by kersplunk at 8:12 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
Another thing about Cork is a) it rains an awful lot, a lot more than Dublin (204 days of rain a year according to Wikipedia) and b) it's built on an island in the middle of a river, so it's constantly flooded, most recently about 2 weeks ago.
posted by kersplunk at 8:18 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by kersplunk at 8:18 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
If anyone wonders why I'm sticking the boot in, it's because I'm from Waterford. We're just bitter because we gave the world the Irish tricolour, Robert Boyle, Ernest Walton, bacon, Sean Kelly, Ryanair, the Christian Brothers, "by hook or by crook", Waterford Crystal, Gilbert O'Sullivan, Val Doonican, Newfoundland people, the most mercurial hurling team of the current century, the largest early Viking settlement in the world, and most of all, blaas, and even Irish people forget we exist half the time.
posted by kersplunk at 8:38 AM on April 21, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by kersplunk at 8:38 AM on April 21, 2016 [5 favorites]
Potomac Avenue: "All of this unfortunately very much makes me want to go to Cork."
Unfortunately (well no, to be honest, not entirely; not if you still live here), you wouldn't recognise it from this piece. Pretty much every landmark whose name Barry drops is long gone. Sir Henry's is a car park these days; the Western Rd Esso is waste ground (and, in Ireland, Esso is is Topaz now in any case); and the Well Inn is now the Franciscan Well, a brew-pub (with in-house pizzeria) whose beers are available in New York and London, much favoured by the local young tech-industry elite (who are, I suspect, the underlying reason that describing the rents as "not bad" got a pretty good laugh out of me). Not many people get into fights while waiting at the taxi ranks since the industry was deregulated, although they do post a couple of Gardaí by Hillbilly's on Grand Parade after chucking-out time (and on preview kersplunk explains why).
These days, you can just about still spend your twenties here as a low-rent Henry Miller, with cheap dope, no money, and damp in the walls; it won't be as easy as it was, but in twenty years you too can craft a similarly out-dated piece of solipsism that projects your quarter-life malaise onto the residence of a hundred thousand other people. (MeMail if you would like a job interview at the dive bar from which I am intemperately stabbing out this comment.) The cheapest rents are in the roughest parts of town; those exist here as they do anywhere else. If you stay for long enough and save up for a car — or at least work out where the bus station is — you may find yourself dangerously close to people in the suburbs and farther afield with a better sense of perspective about how closed-in the place feels, but then it's probably time to leave for somewhere else exotic.
That said, Barry gets a lot right (or close) about the city: not just the typical Corkonian's overweening and shakily-supported civic pride (cf. this comment, I guess, although I'm not a native of the city itself), but the smaller details too. As a teenager, I did work experience in the photographic library of the Cork Examiner (nowadays instead called, with that same hubris, the Irish Examiner) at around the time that he was working there, and he's right that the office had all the appurtenances of a movie set; the lift had emphysema and the hacks (all men) looked like their razors were going through a divorce. I'd completely forgotten about the elderly woman in the cowboy hat, tasseled jacket, and miniskirt who used to direct traffic outside the Capitol cinema (itself lately knocked down to make way for offices); I think she died while I was living away, and I'll have to find out what happened to her.
At the end of the day, though? It's just a city where people live (and yes, speak with a pretty incredible campy, sing-song accent). It's not a particularly good place to seek material for reheated Southern Gothic, but it's got a really nice covered market and for my money the best Indian restaurant in the country, and I'd be happy to show any passing MeFites the local fleshpots, but Cork is in no way as grubbily romantic nowadays as Barry makes it out to be, I'm afraid.
posted by Zeinab Badawi's Twenty Hotels at 8:53 AM on April 21, 2016 [6 favorites]
Unfortunately (well no, to be honest, not entirely; not if you still live here), you wouldn't recognise it from this piece. Pretty much every landmark whose name Barry drops is long gone. Sir Henry's is a car park these days; the Western Rd Esso is waste ground (and, in Ireland, Esso is is Topaz now in any case); and the Well Inn is now the Franciscan Well, a brew-pub (with in-house pizzeria) whose beers are available in New York and London, much favoured by the local young tech-industry elite (who are, I suspect, the underlying reason that describing the rents as "not bad" got a pretty good laugh out of me). Not many people get into fights while waiting at the taxi ranks since the industry was deregulated, although they do post a couple of Gardaí by Hillbilly's on Grand Parade after chucking-out time (and on preview kersplunk explains why).
These days, you can just about still spend your twenties here as a low-rent Henry Miller, with cheap dope, no money, and damp in the walls; it won't be as easy as it was, but in twenty years you too can craft a similarly out-dated piece of solipsism that projects your quarter-life malaise onto the residence of a hundred thousand other people. (MeMail if you would like a job interview at the dive bar from which I am intemperately stabbing out this comment.) The cheapest rents are in the roughest parts of town; those exist here as they do anywhere else. If you stay for long enough and save up for a car — or at least work out where the bus station is — you may find yourself dangerously close to people in the suburbs and farther afield with a better sense of perspective about how closed-in the place feels, but then it's probably time to leave for somewhere else exotic.
That said, Barry gets a lot right (or close) about the city: not just the typical Corkonian's overweening and shakily-supported civic pride (cf. this comment, I guess, although I'm not a native of the city itself), but the smaller details too. As a teenager, I did work experience in the photographic library of the Cork Examiner (nowadays instead called, with that same hubris, the Irish Examiner) at around the time that he was working there, and he's right that the office had all the appurtenances of a movie set; the lift had emphysema and the hacks (all men) looked like their razors were going through a divorce. I'd completely forgotten about the elderly woman in the cowboy hat, tasseled jacket, and miniskirt who used to direct traffic outside the Capitol cinema (itself lately knocked down to make way for offices); I think she died while I was living away, and I'll have to find out what happened to her.
At the end of the day, though? It's just a city where people live (and yes, speak with a pretty incredible campy, sing-song accent). It's not a particularly good place to seek material for reheated Southern Gothic, but it's got a really nice covered market and for my money the best Indian restaurant in the country, and I'd be happy to show any passing MeFites the local fleshpots, but Cork is in no way as grubbily romantic nowadays as Barry makes it out to be, I'm afraid.
posted by Zeinab Badawi's Twenty Hotels at 8:53 AM on April 21, 2016 [6 favorites]
I spent some time on Cape Clear (which is lovely but.. weird, as was the Irish woman I was with) and that meant visiting friends in Cork on the way there and back. It doesn't take long to get the feel of the place, and a lot depends on what circle you fall in with. My pals were working middle-aged artist types, which seem to compose a decent fraction of Cork, and thus we stayed fairly clear of the darker side of the bohemian while hanging out with a bunch of decently eccentric but low-BS people.
I liked the place - more than Dublin, anyway - but it's clear there's plenty of trouble to get into if you're so minded. It's on my list of places I could happily live for a while if I had the right writing project to keep me busy: it has its own sources of inspirations and particular atmosphere that could feed a soul for a while. (I feel the same way, but with very different aspects, about the coast near Cannes on the Cote d'Azur; there's almost a gnostic balance of dark and light between the two places. Both put me in a very Ballardian frame of mind; once you've sat high in the hills above Cannes at night and watched a boat burn in the bay below, you get sort of entangled with the place.)
posted by Devonian at 8:57 AM on April 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
I liked the place - more than Dublin, anyway - but it's clear there's plenty of trouble to get into if you're so minded. It's on my list of places I could happily live for a while if I had the right writing project to keep me busy: it has its own sources of inspirations and particular atmosphere that could feed a soul for a while. (I feel the same way, but with very different aspects, about the coast near Cannes on the Cote d'Azur; there's almost a gnostic balance of dark and light between the two places. Both put me in a very Ballardian frame of mind; once you've sat high in the hills above Cannes at night and watched a boat burn in the bay below, you get sort of entangled with the place.)
posted by Devonian at 8:57 AM on April 21, 2016 [2 favorites]
kersplunk: "As the county colours are red and white, fans wave anything with red and white at games, which in the past has included the Confederate Flag,"
I have never seen this (but I believe you); that fucking sucks. I know we're supposed to be the "rebel county" and all, but come on now, lads. That's not Cork.
I did see, for whatever God-only-knows reason, a traitor's flag hanging outside someone's tent on the Friday evening of Electric Picnic in 2012; it was gone the following morning, and the rumour around the camp was that it was burnt overnight. I'm sorry to say I wasn't involved.
posted by Zeinab Badawi's Twenty Hotels at 9:04 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
I have never seen this (but I believe you); that fucking sucks. I know we're supposed to be the "rebel county" and all, but come on now, lads. That's not Cork.
I did see, for whatever God-only-knows reason, a traitor's flag hanging outside someone's tent on the Friday evening of Electric Picnic in 2012; it was gone the following morning, and the rumour around the camp was that it was burnt overnight. I'm sorry to say I wasn't involved.
posted by Zeinab Badawi's Twenty Hotels at 9:04 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]
I have never seen this (but I believe you); that fucking sucks. I know we're supposed to be the "rebel county" and all, but come on now, lads. That's not Cork.
Yep it's definitely a thing (also other rebel flags). Irish people rightly get annoyed when people make cocktails and call them "Black and Tan" etc. so you'd think we'd be a bit less stupid about using blatantly inflammatory symbols from other cultures.
posted by kersplunk at 4:42 AM on April 22, 2016 [2 favorites]
Yep it's definitely a thing (also other rebel flags). Irish people rightly get annoyed when people make cocktails and call them "Black and Tan" etc. so you'd think we'd be a bit less stupid about using blatantly inflammatory symbols from other cultures.
posted by kersplunk at 4:42 AM on April 22, 2016 [2 favorites]
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