From the penumbra starts here, a blog about liminal spaces and dark corners. In it you will find writing on any aspect of culture that strikes me and which I can tenuously fit to the rubric of liminal spaces and dark corners. As such, this tagline will serve more as a prompt than a theme. Few if any will read the early posts on the site, perhaps ever, but that’s okay. It will also serve as a home to a portfolio of things I’ve written for other publications. You can find selections of writing on arts and culture, as well as politics and business above, and readers are encouraged to contact me about any past, present, or future work. My nascent Substack, Through a Glass Darkly, can also be reached through the site, though time will tell if it and this blog merge together, or one cannibalises the other. The Substack is about pubs, or, as I prefer to say, things that happen in pubs. There is enough low effort content out there simply describing a pub’s appearance with cheap comments like ‘it has authentic charm’, or worst of all, giving tacky scores and rankings to aspects of a pub. I’m trying to do more with it than that.

As you might imagine, pubs will therefore be a frequent theme on this blog, though pubs are only as interesting as the culture they package up and display to us. Other spaces that crystalise instrumental cultural moments will be a common topic too, therefore, and I doubt I’ll have difficulty contorting my rubric to write about whatever I want in the end.

I say this because the blog starts as I’m living in Bologna, with a marked shortage of pubs, but no dearth of equivalents. Don’t be surprised when posts about Modena and Bologna pop up. These cities are characterised by their dark corners, being renowned for hundreds of miles of porticoes sheltering their pavements. This, I fancy, makes every street in Bologna a liminal space of a dark corner, so this is a perfect time to launch. Expect elements of polemic, psychogeography, and history based on my loose prompts.

To say a little about me, I am Ciarán Donnelly and I’m a journalist. Right now I’m spending most of my time writing for RN magazine and Retail Express – nothing too exciting. This will be where the rest of my stuff goes.