I went to dinner this evening with some colleagues in Dublin, and was reminded once again just how wonderful it is to hang out with the Irish.<\/p>\n
Whatever the topic — Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Austen, Shakespeare or Beckett — we could all speak freely, quote lines from particular works, compare one author to the other, and know that everybody would know exactly what was being talked about.<\/p>\n
I’m not sure there is any other culture in the English speaking world where I could just relax into that basic assumption that “yes, we’ve all read the great authors, we remember them, and we’ve thought about their ideas quite a bit”. This is something you can just take for granted in Ireland — without any of it being a big deal.<\/p>\n
I love America. I love its energy, its boldness, and its continual sense of possibility. But for whatever reason, many American friends and colleagues whom I admire just don’t seem to know any of this stuff.<\/p>\n
Maybe the downside of a culture of bold reinvention is a relative lack of interest in what has come before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I went to dinner this evening with some colleagues in Dublin, and was reminded once again just how wonderful it is to hang out with the Irish. Whatever the topic — Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Austen, Shakespeare or Beckett — we could all speak freely, quote lines from particular works, compare one author to … Continue reading “Dinner in Dublin”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15136"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15137,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15136\/revisions\/15137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}