Seán Costello

@seanjcostello

Editor at large

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Seán Costello@seanjcostello· 23d

You ain't seen me, right? #GardenVisitor

A frog trying to look inconspicuous in a remote corner of the garden

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· 25d

King of the beasts

Miniature wire-haired dachshund striking a heroic pose on an overgrown path through a field

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· 26d

Another view

Looking over a field of wildflowers towards a line of trees and a cloudy sky

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· 26d

Garden visitor

A young hedgehog venturing onto a path in the garden

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· 26d

High summer meadow

Looking over a field of wildflowers towards low hills and a patchy blue sky

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· 26d

Alchemy: Joseph O’Connor on returning to The Catcher in the Rye

What’s most remarkable about the book is how it alters its meanings depending on the reader’s age. Only the greatest novels manage this alchemy. The Catcher is in the same league as Ulysses or The Handmaid's Tale in having built into its texture a perpetual self-regeneration. I return to it every few years, the closest thing in my life to a pilgrimage. Whenever I do, I’m reading a different novel, as vivid, strange, edgy and unnerving as the one that switched on my lights 45 years ago. (Joseph O’Connor writing in the Guardian, next to an image of the front cover of the novel, 18.07.26)

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· 28d

She was such an extraordinary artist/designer. Love her non-conformist chair.

Non-Conformist Chair (c.1926) by Eileen Gray at the National Museum of Ireland

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· 28d

At the old Collins Barracks #Dublin

The almost deserted main square at the old Collins Barracks, surrounded by neoclassical buildings that are now home to the National Museum of Ireland.

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· 29d

“Ah Mootie. What do you know of Dublin? I could make it all up and you’d never know.” This is Dublin all right, but Keith Ridgway has a way of making it new and strange that gets under your skin.

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 14

Smithfield stop #Dublin

People on a Luas platform next to a passing tram, with the dome of the Four Courts visible in the distance

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 13

Park light #Limerick

An artist standing at an easel in a sunlit park by the river Shannon in Limerick

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 9

Always a joy to revisit

A copy of The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse on a table in the garden

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 9

The Voice of the People: a reminder from P.G. Wodehouse (via Bertie Wooster) that this kind of thing is always good for a laugh

“The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’” (from The Code of the Woosters, 1938)

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 7

Players

Two wire-haired dachshund pups playing in the garden, one of them intent on the ball, the other not so much

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 6

Allez les Belges!

Belgian World Cup jersey with the words “Ceci n’est pas un maillot” hidden in the neckline in homage to Magritte

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 5

Taken aback by this bit of intertextuality in Barbara Pym's No Fond Return of Love, in which she slips in her own debut novel, Some Tame Gazelle #NowReading

A shelf on the wall held a selection of books, their covers now faded and buckled by steam. Viola noticed The Brothers Karamazov, Poems of Gray and Collins, Enquire Within, The Angel in the House, and a few old Boots Library books, A
Voire Through a Cloud, Some Tame Gazelle, and The Boys from Sharon. By the bath there was a tin of Gumption and a rag.

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 5

Approaching Rachel Whiteread's Nissen Hut in Dalby Forest

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 4

Enjoyed this unsettling, Festen-like family drama. Anne Hathaway is a revelation as the sister of the bride.

Poster for Rachel Getting Married (2008), directed by Jonathan Demme

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 4

Nissen Hut (2018) by Rachel Whiteread, Dalby Forest

Concrete cast of the interior space of a Nissen hut surrounded by trees and ferns

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 4

Adder Stone, Dalby Forest (with dachshund for scale)

Weathered sandstone block riddled with holes said to be caused by serpents

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 3

“Now I have taken a closer look at my desk and realized that nothing good can be done on it.”—Franz Kafka, born OTD in 1883 (from his Diaries, tr. Ross Benjamin)

Kafka’s drawing of a weary man at his desk, c. 1901–07

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 3

First US edition of Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel (1957)

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 3

Garden ornaments

Two wire-haired dachshund pups lounging in the garden

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 3

Pity the poor debut novelist: Elizabeth Taylor, born OTD in 1912 (from her novel Angel)

Her vanity had been stunned by the way in which her book had been received. No trumpets had come thrusting out from behind clouds, proclaiming ‘genius’ and ‘masterpiece’. For a long time nothing at all had happened, and then, slowly, the
abuse and sarcasm had begun. The very passages of which she had been most proud, had been printed as if they were richly humorous; her dialogue, her syntax, her view of life, her descriptions of society were all seen to be part of some new and quite delicious joke. No one had wept, it seemed, when reading the funeral scene – unless it was with laughter.

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 2

Happy birthday, Larry David

LD facing the music in the “Beloved Aunt” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The caption reads “what”.

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 2

Hello, it's me

A miniature wire-haired dachshund pup emerging from the undergrowth in the garden

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jul 1

Stefan Zweig fled Nazi Germany for England in 1934. Today he will be honoured with a blue plaque in London. This is what he witnessed in the city in 1939:

“They were all crowded together there, former university professors, bankers, businessmen, property-owners, musicians, all of them prepared to go anywhere, over land and sea, with the pitiful ruins of their lives, to do anything and put up with anything just to get away from Europe. They were like a company of ghosts. But what shook me most was the thought that these fifty tormented people represented only a tiny advance guard of the vast, scattered army of five, eight, perhaps as many as ten million Jews already setting out in their wake, millions of people who had been robbed and then crushed in the war, waiting for donations from charities, for permission from the authorities, for money to travel, a gigantic crowd, cruelly expelled and fleeing in panic from the forest fire started by Hitler, thronging the railway stations on all European borders, an entire disenfranchised nation forbidden to be a nation, but a nation all the same, wanting nothing so much, after two thousand years, as not to be made to go on wandering, to find quiet, peaceful ground on which they could venture to rest their feet.” (Taken from The World of Yesterday, tr. Anthea Bell)

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jun 29

Prospect

A field of ripening corn with three trees on the horizon and some poppies in the foreground

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jun 28

Wild in the country

Looking over a meadow full of wild flowers to a view of low hills on the horizon

Seán Costello@seanjcostello· Jun 28

Happy birthday, Mel Brooks, who as well as being a comic genius and a mensch, also gave us David Lynch