T-Minus 2 Days to Dublin

Welcome!

Although not required by my grant, I have chosen to keep a blog during my trip through Europe this summer as a means to help synthesize the information I gather and also keep my friends and family updated throughout my journey. First, a little more about me and my trip:

My name is Chris Scavone, and I am a rising senior at Yale University, majoring in English, where I am also a member of the varsity Cross Country and Track teams. My encounters with Joyce began the summer before my senior year of high school when I read A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man. Although I had always been passionate about literature throughout my life, my experience reading Portrait as the age of 17 was, at least at that particular time in my existence, one of the most transformative events I had ever experienced. Since enrolling at Yale in the fall of 2007, I have experienced Joyce several times, most notably in the second semester of English 129, where we tackled Ulysses, and more recently, this past spring, in the class The Modern British Novel taught by Pericles Lewis (for any Yalies out there, this course has one of the most entertaining reading lists of any course at Yale). In examining all of these works, the discussion often turned to Joyce's personal experience and the ways in which is was manifested in his writing; these discussions in seminars and discussion sections lit within me a powerful desire to see and experience the places where Joyce grew up in Ireland and the places abroad, where during his self-imposed exile, he wrote some of English literature's most seminal works.

The idea for this trip first took shape as little more than a pipe dream. I had often considered applying for a funding, but I was doubtful that I would be able to find enough to cover what is essentially 2 months of room, board, travel, etc in some of the most expensive locations in the world (Dublin, Zurich, Paris...you get the picture), but this past winter a good friend of mine encouraged me to at least send an application. I was in the middle of applying for numerous internships in New York City and Los Angeles, but with the clock approaching midnight on the last day to submit applications for the Bates Fellowship, I finally opened a word document and wrote a (very) rough draft of my proposal. I figured that if they liked the idea enough, then I could always revise what I had proposed before the interview. Two weeks later, I found myself rejected from several finance internships and in front of about 12 people in the living room of JE master Penelope Laurens. I had literally run down from track practice, and was sweating through my shirt as the circle around me began firing questions of every sort; for a group representing a diverse set of academic and extracurricular interests, they were all frighteningly well-informed about James Joyce. Halfway through my interview-cum-sauna, my phone, set to "loud" (of course), rang, and in my head I heard the faint squeak as any chance of receiving a Bates was crushed by my apparent brutishness. Nightmarish visions of spending another summer tutoring overly anxious high schoolers and their uptight parents raced through my head as I dejectedly left what I thought was a terrible interview. By some greater power, however, I received an email a week later informing my that I was being given roughly $7000 from Yale to make it happen.

And that's how it all started.

-Chris