Literacy in Ireland...a visit to Pandemonium
As some of you may know, my wife and I spent 12 days in Dublin baby-sitting for the grandson (Alexander), 22 mos. old. One day it occurred to us that the poor lad had no building blocks, a great toy teaching patience, design, logic, balance, aesthetics, proportion, utility, practicality...what a deprivation!
Out we went to the local shopping centre, the Dun Drum Shopping Centre. It was like entering a Hieronymous Bosch or Dieric Bouts painting or worse, the capital of Milton's Hell, Pandemonium...
"At once as far as angels ken he views 
The dismal situation waste and wild,
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed:
Such place Eternal Justice had prepared
For those rebellious, here their prison ordained
In utter darkness, and their portion set
As far removed from God and light of heav'n
As from the center thrice to th' utmost pole."
(Painting of Hell by D. Bouts)
And so it was, a place where every shop competed in blasting the loudest and worst cacophony of music ever heard or conceived, where no product was sold that any person actually needed, where people ate Sushi (these were IRISH people)! I mean, really, eating sushi in a Dublin shopping centre. Every third shop sold jeans or sneakers. There was no bookshop. Noise was unabating...screams of kids, silly teenage girls shrieking, the aforesaid music, plus the shopping centre's own piped-in junk, all rebounding within the hard marble floors and walls.
The coup de grace was the large toy shop where we bought the toy blocks...it was blasting stupid rock music so loud that one could cry. There, kids are playing on the floor, mommies everywhere and this Scream from Hell stuff blaring.. Is there any sanity left? I asked to see the "manager" and she was a 22 year old who told me that was what they played. End of story. I asked her to look around at the 3 year olds and their parents in the shop. "Are you playing it for them?" I asked, "or for the employees?" She replied "I'll turn it down a little..." Pandemonium.
Literacy:
I walked among the 400 emporia in Dun Drum Shopping Centre, and re-discovered something I knew, that the possessive apostrophe is finished. With O'Leary in the grave.
Cast a cold eye on some of these professionally made shop signs in Pandemonium:
You get the message. No apostrophes. Ireland is the land of James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, Samuel Becket, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Richard Sheridan, Seamus Heaney, Louis MacNeice, George Bernard Shaw...need I go on. "All has changed..." as Yeats says.
P.S., The improper use of my surname by that shoe store is quite egregious.
P.P.S., Have received a correction from an astute Irish reader: there is a (quasi) bookshop at the Dun Drum Shopping Centre (on the top floor), it's an Eason's ( or Easons?) which is primarily known for its wide selection of magazines and newspapers.
