Tuesday, October 30, 2007




John & Jack Finan's Farmhouse

My grandfather, his brother Jack J., and their father John J. were born here. Rare in the area as it's two stories and in an era when the British taxed the glass allotted a window, at least it has a bit of room allowing a stray sunbeam or two. Behind it, on the Ordnance Survey map, is marked a ringfort. You can see the trees to the left. so I wonder about the sídhe, or the Tuatha, who may lurk amidst the sacred whitethorn, beyond water or the iron blade's defiance. Curious as I am, I would not venture into that líos, that guarded circle against mere mortals.

This handsome house was built around 1851, according to the Land Valuation Records I examined in Dublin. My cousin, who was one of the last of the clan to be born here, tells me that it replaced an earlier house blown down in the Big Wind, which would have been in 1839. However, I could not find in 1797 records or pre-Famine tithe lists any trace of Finans living there. Granted, such documents remain scanty unless you happened to be one of the landed gentry or their agents. Flanagans, who worked with my family, on the other hand, seem to have preceded and succeeded them in the vicinity, as did Maddens.

Year by year, I followed in the ledgers until the 1980s the colored pencils of the inspectors who recorded what they saw, or what was reported. The house and the family grew, both flourished, but, a century after this structure was hoisted, the house declined. "Ruin," one note told me. "Bad condition." Another: "bog." By the 1950s, the land reform for which both father and son campaigned had been finally secured; but, the farmers continued to leave the land they now owned behind. Like millions of Irish, their farm could not sustain itself against the power of the city. North Roscommon was left for South Dublin, Loughglynn village for Rathgar parish, suburban three-story walk-up replaced perches of bog and hectares of silage.

I spent most of the past three hours working on a short e-mail reply in Irish to my friend Deaglán about his new daughter and related thoughts. I excerpt parts of it here, since a question I asked him-- as an expert in late-Victorian Fenianism-- may be of interest to those outside my family tree. I summarize it in English. The other part of the note not translated but kept below briefly recounts my herculean experiences with others better suited than "mo béal bocht" from Ireland and abroad learning Gaeilge last July at Oideas Gael, Foras Chultúir Uladh, in the Glen.

John J. Finan, raised beneath this roof, died in the summer of 1898. He worked as a Land League agitator seeking reforms for Irish farmers. This, naturally, aroused the Crown's suspicions. He, according to my cousin, was found drowned "in mysterious circumstances" in the Thames after he and other League leaders had gone to London.

Later that year, his son, and my cousin's father, Jack, arrived. He never knew his father. Yet, inheriting his paternal instincts, Jack combined schoolteaching with representing a "conservative-radical" party for farmers, Clann na Talmhan. This North Connacht-centered movement gained a short-lived, and mostly post-war, ascent when it joined a coalition government that unseated-- finally-- Dev's Fianna Fáil in 1948. He entered the sixth Seanad. The fourteenth Dáil found Jack a Teachta Dála, or parliament delegate; he served from 1951-54. Losing (as the party soon declined, finding itself unable to sustain momentum from a small constituency and a limited platform), he later worked, living in Rathgar, for the "Pigs & Bacon Commission."

But, Jack never stopped fixing up this haven in Ballyglass East townland. Thriftily, he would take the pensioner's discount rate, get there Thursday, and come back to Rathgar Road on Monday. Even in his eighties, he was installing running water and a toilet. He loved to garden, his daughter recounted. He escaped here the duties that had brought him, as a younger politician, away from his birthplace into the red-brick terraces of Dublin 6. Tragically, he died in a house fire in Rathgar 24 May 1984 that destroyed also his photos and papers. So, for two generations spanning nearly a century of Irish land reform, we have lost the records of what John and Jack contributed to make their nation what to the Fenians would have been only a dream: the prosperous multilingual land it's become today.


[...]Bhí mé ar feadh coicis é ar an Oideas Gael, Ionad Chúltuir Uladh, Ghleann Cholm Cille i Dún na nGall. Bhí sé go an-hálainn! Ach, bhí cúrsa fásta an-deacair liom; thosaigh mé ar an mean-rang. Ní raibh ag labhairt as Gaeilge freisin. Ar ndóigh, d'fhoglaim beágan agamsa féin. Léigh mé cleachtannaí agus fuair mé cuidíu ar an ghréasan. Ní bhíonn in ann rá liofa, ar an drochuair. Níl mé in inmhne ag dul cúrsa na trathnona ina gCathair na Aingeal. Tá amhain féin. Caitheann mé ag teagaisc ar an ám céann. Tá mé ag múineadh ar an ollscoil. Tá mé ag teagasc seacht rang; Tá mé ag obair as dhá campas ar an ráithe seo.

Mar sin féin, chuir an stiúrthóir mé ann mean-rang le Éireannachtái (leath a chuid lucht) agus dhá Meiriceánach tuilleadh agus mhíc leinn eile uathu. Tháinig siad go An Iorua, An Danmhairg, An Bhreatain Bheag, agus Sasana. Chaill mé seans go raibh ag lean an craíc! Ní raibh maith liom ag stopadh, ach cheapaigh mé go raibh mé ar an leibhéal is íslím ná grupa. Áfach, foghlaimíonn mé ar lag. Ní téann ar leathanta saoire go minic. Caitheann mé ag obair an blian ar fad.
[...]

D'fhoglaim mé faoi rúndiamhair. An samhraidh caite, d'inis col-ceathair agam faoi sinseanathair. Bhí sé ar an lucht "Conradh na Talún." Fuair sé bás "in mysterious circumstances" i Londain ina samhraidh le 1898. Bádh John J. Finan faoi na abhainn Thames. Tá sin ag dul ó scil ar fad orainn. An fhios agat faoi cás? (Bhí mac rugadh sé an bhlian ina dhiadh sin, Jack J. Finan. Bhí sé an TD go Lough Ghlinn ina gContae Ros Comain Thiar-thuiadh ar feadh  ina Dála déag idir 1951-4; bhí Seanadóir riamh ina Seanad séú idir 1948-51 é. Nuair togadh sé i Rath Gairbh in aice leis Bhaile Átha Cliath idir sin agus tráthas, bhí sé "Pigs & Bacon Commissioner"! Bhí Jack go raibh an teachta ar an páirtí "conservative-radical" Clann na Talamh. Bhí sé múinteoir, gaeilgoir, agus feirmeoir lag. Fuair sé bás go tobann 24ú Bealtaine 1984 chomh maith leis an t-athair aige; dódh beo bhatach é. Tineadh sé fein a adhaint ina seomra staidéar. Dhóigh a chuid páipéar féin agus grianghrafaí Ua Fhionnáin. Is cúis leis ní raibh fhios againn faoi John Finan, is dócha. Bhí sé sean-uncail agam; creideamh mé aige mar bhíonn agam féin i gcónai ar thaobh an mhionlaigh idé-eolaíoch!)

Feic faoi "Manchán Magan: Global Nomad 'as gaeilge'" le 28 Deireadh Fómhair 2007. Tá tú ábalta fáil altanna eile faoi Gaeilge ansin fosta. Líon mé focal beag (agus go dona) as Gaeilge agus focal mórán eile as Béarla fá dtaobh de "céist na teanga". Tá dúil agam ag léamh fúithi le déanai. Measíonn mé go mbeidh lascannaí go casadh idir an phoblachtachtas ag sleabhac, an domhan ag crith, agus an náisuín ag creach.

[...]Bhuel, scriobh mé an nota seo. Is maith liom ag déanamh dúshlan as an teanga beo! Críochnaigh mé litirín seo faoi trí h-uair go fóill!

Diarmuid Ó Murchú's "Reclaiming Spirituality": Book Review

I confess if this book had not featured the author's name on the spine at the used section of Bodhi Tree, I'd never have picked it up. Yes, he's a Murph from Cork by any other name, a missionary (but not a priest) counselling in London in an apostolate as what must be quite an open-minded social psychologist. This review appeared today on Amazon US. (N.B.: see the footnote about faulty pagination. I wish I had noticed this before paying $8 for my copy.)

The strengths of this book rest in its asides more than its direction. While I sympathize with much of what Ó Murchú's critiquing concerning the dead hand of religion vs. the living potential for change within that which precedes the Church and all organized structures, the spiritual that attracts so many disillusioned or unable to conform to religion, his analysis offers little that is new. The book begins promisingly as he encourages religious people not to fear what's been labelled as pagan, primitive, New Age, or natural. He reminds us that we have been symbolic searchers for answers for at least 70,000 years, compared to at the most perhaps five thousand years of monotheism, which built its triumph upon the ruins it made of the societies and the more co-creative, maternal, and eroticized consciousness of our ancestors. Ó Murchú reminds us how much of our inheritance grounds itself in a deeper pattern of looking to the body, the stars, the earth, and our own needs for connection. These all predate, and have not yet been entirely obliterated by, the religions billions claim fealty to today. In these older forms of meaning, Ó Murchú excavates enduring evidence of a gentler method by which we may heal ourselves, our neighbors, and our psyche. And, perhaps, these lessons may generate changes that may restore our society and our world. So he ambitiously hopes, in this thoughtful, if flawed, analysis.

He is best when illuminating his topic with explanations or analogies. He evokes, for example, his native Cork hillside, and contrasts its allure with the grotto placed there-- apparently close to if not that which in the mid-90s electrified the Irish media as a supposed "moving statue" at Ballinspittle. Ó Murchú asks: which possesses the true power of the creator? The hillside or the grotto, the natural or the man-made? This sort of image, for me, sums up the provocative energy that energizes the book's most accomplished sections.

These, I found, were earlier in the narrative, as he provides a nuanced understanding of how a seeker can be turned away by the institutional Church or establishment. He encourages a genuine openness to searching, while realizing that many of us go in and out of periods of belief, and may wander long throughout our lives in a pattern that reveals both our need for faith and our suspicion of what's touted as solutions to our human condition. It seems that part of our humanity consists, if Ó Murchú is correct, in simply not knowing, and being aware that such a state can bring its own peace rather than leading to more anxiety.

Parts of this study merited more elaboration. Among them are the Trinitarian patterns that he only alludes to as being part of many non-Christian systems, the sacralization of work (he touches upon the now-"post-Christian" provocateur Matthew Fox's work here; similarly much of the book relies upon, being written in 1997, what's now found its own niche as "creation spirituality"), and the importance of a non-procreative, trans-genital (my term) sexuality that takes in the entire body and mind as part of our union with the transcendent. These subjects all earn some attention, but not enough.

Rather, much of his rather reductive cultural analysis merely repeats such popularizations as Riane Eisler and Fox have provided themselves already. While I can consider their suggestions, I remain somewhat suspicious of the nearly total acclaim given by the author to many of his sources. He assumes a total paradise before agriculture fomented the lust for land, horses, war, and conquest. Spirituality linked everyone to his or her surroundings, harmony ruled, and strife never entered the garden. This appears to suspicious me as a bit too pat.

I lack the in-depth knowledge to verify how far subsequent scholars have questioned and challenged the somewhat tidy dichotomies of maternal vs. patriarchal societies that Ó Murchú accepts. However, I suspect much of his anthropological suggestions which are collated here may rest too securely upon such controversial academics as James Lovelock, Marija Gimbutas, and Mary Daly. I wonder how much of our restlessness can be attributed to the ravages of the past five thousand years, and if, as Ó Murchú insists, our farther-removed progenitors possessed only sweetness and light in what must have been often brutal lives and difficult times.

This is not meant as a denial of their Mother Earth ideology. It's admirable that Ó Murchú takes on the conventional and tired pieties. On the other hand, his own plan for reviving the "Basileia," the radical, spirit-driven dynamism he imagines that Christ himself wished in his mission to overthrow the dominant religious system, remains too utopian. The Church is eroding, no doubt. Yet, it has not shown the openness to the transformative suggestions which those allied with Ó Murchú have advocated. Ten years later, I wonder if it ever will.

Now, my hesitation has been anticipated by him. His applications encourage a community-based, imaginative, and sincere effort to replace our will-to-power with rituals geared towards our innate will-to-meaning. I only wonder, however, since the New York Times the other day buried on page A-8 a small piece about the UN warning us that we are much closer to a dreadful "tipping point" of no return in harming our planet, if any such prescriptions as Ó Murchú and like-minded idealists offer can palliate the poison that the systems, religious or pseudo-religious that pass as our drives for production, consumption, and expansion all push us further down the road to self-destruction.

A note on the 1998 Crossroads printing: my copy has pp. 87-118 missing while pp. 119-150 are printed twice. My post on this book, therefore, needs to be considered in this limitation. I give it three rather than about 2.5 stars, therefore, acknowledging my limits. Shame, however, on the publisher. Caveat lector emptorque!

Sunday, October 28, 2007


Manchán Magan: Global Nomad 'as gaeilge'


This Irish- speaking polyglot, peripatetic maker of documentaries with his brother, Ruan, for TnG (Teilifís na Gaeltachta: the Irish-language TV channel) and now travel writer, has been described by Roísín Ingle last August. You can read her interview (and all the other references via the link I have inserted to MM's "Global Nomad" site and related if sporadically updated blog, a plain-wrap Blogspot cousin over at "Irish Media") with this "disturbingly youthful looking encyclopedia." He's about a decade younger than yours truly, but reminds me (and resembles me a bit) of the type I might have become if I had his educational opportunities, that family lineage, and its culturally enhanced mindset. Even at a great remove, I sense that Manchán shares, at an attenuated and diasporic remove, a bit of my perspective on indigenous language, global change, and ethnic identity.

As every blurb about him states, his great-grandfather was "The O'Rahilly," one of the chivalrous rebels who waxed his moustache, kissed his pregnant wife good bye, and went off to fight and die in the Rising of 1916. His grandmother was none other than the formidable Sighle Humphries; I had no idea she had married, since a character in Thomas Flanagan's "The End of the Hunt" who I thought was based on her (if not her!) seemed a spinster devoted only to the Cause. (But that may be Dorothy Macardle, about whom has appeared a new biography.) Manchán made an RTE documentary, filed under "staged history" on the channel's site, "The Struggle," which examines the place-- a house made into a sniper's den-- as it re-creates the time with her firing away, a few sad years after the death of The O'Rahilly, at the Free Staters-- alongside Ernie O'Malley. Quite a legacy.

Which may explain this hippie-ish hermit's desire, despite his UCD degree in Irish and history, to leave Belfield's "concrete wasteland" for the 1990s countercultural, drug-addled wilds of Canada and South America. He roamed the desolate roads of Central Africa. He spent a long stint seeing visions and drinking his own urine in the Himalayas. All of these immrami, or pilgrimages of a modern heir to St Manchán (onamastic if not paternal forebears number eight; the name's a diminutive for "monk") have appeared in print.

I hope if the author reads this he's pleased to find I have sought out at no small expense his India narrative. I am searching for his African account. (Scriobh Manchán é seo as gaeilge amhain; ta leabhar eile aige faoi eachtrannaí na h-India go raibh ag cuireadh amach mar "Baba Ji agus TnG" le Coisceim; an bhfuil "Baba" an sceál céanna chomh sin é go bhfuil ag foilsigh mar le "Manchán's Travels"? Níl fhios agamsa.) "Angels and Rabies" appeared last year, about his earlier American adventures as Béarla-- this title's actually stocked by Amazon US. The 1996 formation of TnG brought him, via Ruan, back to the habitual use of Irish as a medium in which to interpret the planet. The Brothers Magan film their segments in Irish and then in English, sensibly, to widen the marketability of their two dozen (to date) travelogues.

Now, he lives during the downtime with the Net but without the tube near Mullingar in a cool (literally) eco-hut. May I send my congratulations to a new near-neighbor of his and another scholarly, urbane gaeilgoir, Deaghlán, on the birth of his daughter. Scriobh sé dom faoi Niamh, "grá geal mó chroí." His post-doc fellowship furthers his research on Conrad, terrorism, and the modern British and Irish novel. Deaghlán and Manchán would hit it off together. Manchán writes eloquently, as well as sending up (there are You Tube clips of the recent doc that made him better known, "No Béarla," that has him-- a Swiftian or at least Myles-ian mirror image of Yu Ming, ironically or fittingly given Manchán's own multi-cult cred and fluency in Chinese and five or so other tongues-- gadding about speaking Irish to crowds of uncomprehending, angry, bitter, shamed, or a few admiring native islanders) the Rising-inspired republican-induced fiction of a society that encourages daily (and damningly, governmental) use of its "first official language."

While drafting this entry, I paused. I watched the first episode of "No Béarla" (a crawl in English early on: 'we apologise for the lack of subtitles') and came away deeply ashamed. And, not only for my own stumbling in the Irish. This fatal flaw of mine can be accounted for duly. Blame my Murican mumble and my lack of Irish inculcation in my formative years halfway across the globe. Is it romanticism or remorse that colors my own disheartened reaction to viewing Manchán? His Munster-accented, loping blás makes his speech to me more easily understandable that what I encountered in Donegal-- although that Cork teacher, Áine, week two sent many of us (with all of five days previous qualifying us as vets in the mean-rang) for a dialectic loop compared to local Liam's Northwest lilt week one in our upstairs loft!

As we adults (Irish residents mixed with us foreigners) in Glencolmcille struggled against our own lack of ability, and against the neighbors' understandable if also discouraging reluctance to deal with our halting Irish in the shops, we too witnessed the counter-reaction to Irish in its eroding heartland. I can relate. Teaching ESL to Korean students currently, I could only imagine how tiring it'd be to have an endless-- at least in the high season-- parade of garbled greetings and rote exchanges with whomever walked through your store or passed you on the road. However, without such an tangibly rewarding influx as we "dia dhuit's" (as they say in Conamara of us) provide, would there still be a viable Gaeltacht at all? The Glen now counts only half of its residents as using 'an teanga beo.' The beauty of the land, the rise in holiday homes, the comfort of the EU, and the affluence of the island all fill the boreens with more imposing bungalow bliss. I think of raw concrete and dirt yards, full of jeeps and devoid of beauty, facing the rocky shores above Malin Bég.

We return to the "theme park" resentment, the reservation, the zoo animals, that so many in the heartland ridicule. However, as Angela Bourke observes, the Gaeltacht today evolves into less of a fixed location and more a "hot desk," where one check in briefly to get down to business, before commuting back home. Both natives and visitors, aided by technology and travel, can mesh electronic with sociolinguistic frontiers. Whether this can assure the survival of the habitat, as Aodan Mac Póilin warns in a related essay (in the collection "Re-Imagining Ireland," reviewed by me here recently, on Amazon US, and submitted to the online project The Blanket), remains one of our century's experiments as our planet changes.

I have written about the eco-critical component of learning Irish in its homeland in an essay:

www.estudiosirlandeses.org/Issue2/Issue%202/pdf/Eco-criticalLanguagePolitics(JMurphy).pdf

Certainly, such a community may evolve at Oideas Gael. Formerly, students left the Glen and returned to forage with little sustenance at home regarding Gaelic that would fill their stimulated appetites. Now, as the director told us, we have the wealth of the Net and classes worldwide to urge our steps forward.

However, the knowledge of what we ("gabh mo leithsceal's" ["pardon me's"] as the locals at the pubs sneered sotto voce at my classmates politely entering Teacht Biddy's) "from the Irish college," (as I heard us mentioned by the lady who ran the post office and the adjoining store) represented, in our eager but self-conscious attempts to try out our phrases on the weary natives who nevertheless snapped up our euros, shows the other side of the Bord Fáilte postcard moon. The dark side-- from within what's becoming the breac-Gaeltacht, as the language retreats behind the front door out of earshot and beyond the tourist's gaze and student's garble. The shadows where Irish lingers that-- again as Maírtín Ó Cadhain's graveyard craic conjures a refined erudition and bawdy spin impossible to translate-- we "strainseíraí" or blow-ins or the most ardent (and I sat next to my share in the Glen) linguist cannot follow. They say that as a language retreats, its speakers raise up higher barriers against those who pursue it into its labyrinthine, domestic, and nested confines.

This makes me hesitate. Is Manchán's Chinese exponentially better than, say, my Irish? Of course, I assume. But, what enables some of us to better the rest of us? How nimbly does a polyglot speak his acquired languages? Are some skilled beyond mere mortals mortified like myself of making a sound, let alone a mistake? Or, do they possess some supernatural poise that enables them to assimilate. Sir Richard Burton going native in Mecca; Isabelle Eberhardt taken for an Arab boy; Tim Mackintosh-Smith chattering away in a Yemeni sub-dialect. They all gained total ease in Arabic, one of the most daunting languages. (I heard that our military gives 72 intensive weeks to gain basic skills, compared to about 20 for Spanish. It is telling that Manchán learned Arabic on his own, in his hay-bale home in faraway Westmeath.) Meanwhile, the rest of us circle or slink. Just as we have seen our peers erase blunder, overpower resistance, or conjure seduction while we gawk and stutter. Perhaps imperialism and travelogues enable this skill, or will, to power. I imagine Casanovas and Don Juans possess similar dexterity and diplomacy.

Skilled in more languages than one hand can count, Manchán returns, with mixed feelings, to the one in which he was first raised, until the age of five. Manchán's article for "Lá" laments, in strikingly plangent Irish prose, what in brusque English comes off perhaps less poignantly. In either language, he wonders if such an old method of expression has not, finally, outlived its four thousand years of North Atlantic shelf life. Steve Fallon, earlier this decade in his memoir "Home with Alice," (reviewed by me here and on Amazon US) finds parallel reactions as he-- a Bostonian and Lonely Planet guidebook writer-- tests his own acquired Irish on the Gaeltacht agus Galltacht. The language, as Liam Ó Cuinneagain, our director at Oideas Gael, told Fallon, emerge as a cyber-language even as its physical domain diminishes. Angela Bourke's essay in "Re-Imagining Ireland" maps the new century's shifting boundaries over this same psychic and also visible terrain.

I sense in Manchán as with Fallon, despite their energy and devotion, a fin-de-seicle weariness. Should any of us try, a century after the Revival in which both sides of Manchán's family played such a leading role, to resuscitate Irish once more? Many critics doubt that adult learners can make much of a real difference; as Liam notes, it's what's heard on the playground that matters. Is Irish on life support, as "No Béarla" and "Home with Alice" appear to prove, in its native habitat? Do we let it die? Antoine Ó Flatharta, in an interview cited in Maírín Níc Eoin's lit-crit study "Trén na bhFearainn Breac," agreed with Manchán's gloomier prognosis: forget triage. Hang a toe-tag; leave the patient in peace. Euthanasia equals dying with dignity rather than the dumb-show and lip-service given it by a state in which, this month's news tells me on the Gaelport.com site, perversely, that Polish is now the true second language of the truncated Republic for which Sighle, Ernie, and The O'Rahilly dreamt and shot. Are we propping up the riddled body of Irish, as the British did James Connolly, only to face a firing squad? Not only manned by the English, but the forces of the EU, open borders, and cheap labor?

What about the resurgence, post-insurgency, of Irish among the young? Gearóid, a teacher in Dundalk, boasted about his Nigerian students who took to Gaeilge without tears, freed as they were from any of the negatives lingering among many Irish parents, past and present. The Dublin 4 crowd both participates in this interest and critiques it, apparently. Éilis Ní Dhuibhne celebrates in "Hurlamaboc" Irish as she is spoke by Malahide's texting teens. Schools teaching in Irish fill to bursting. The language, I read via Gaelport.com, is both decaying as a Leaving Cert standard and thriving as a hip BÁC lingo.

I base these varied observations on not only my own conversations and study, but upon the buzz and sales afforded the paperback by David McWilliams. A relevant excerpt appears under the "No Béarla" section on Global Nomad, about two Dublin gaeilscoileannaí. It's taken from McWilliams' pop-econ bestseller "The Pope's Children." (I could not find this in either Dublin or Belfast when I needed it to give my Ballymurphy hosts last visit-- the only copies I had seen were back at the well-stocked Four Masters Bookshop in Donegal town, a great place to spend the time waiting between buses as I did, suitcase next to me, lugging it across the Diamond for a messy but healthy repast at the organic grocer Simple Simon.)

McWilliams diminishes the practicality and dismisses the increased enrollment as a fad driven by the higher quality of Irish-medium education. But, he frames such choices within the shadows of class separation and secular independence from the clerically (if nominally) supervised traditional set-ups for schooling. Dublin 4's media have done their best to equate such schools with snobbery against immigrants and the working class. Such prejudice in the press, as a hundred years ago, often aligns a populist campaign to reclaim Irish with a contempt for progress, globalization, and anglicization. Or, today, if not capitalism-- for a century after Connolly all worship this not only in Dublin-- then a disdain for the conventional.

Manchán links to McWilliams from his page, along with a chapter from a book I reviewed on Amazon US and my blog, Ciarán Mac Murchaidh's "Who Needs Irish?" Here, Kate Fennell's equally melancholy reflections in English illuminate what Manchán expressed in Irish for "Lá": the essential personality of any language itself. Sapir-Whorf, I confess, always intrigued me. This flavor cannot be duplicated 'as Béarla'. Yet, reading about these native speakers, I glimpse how it must feel for such as Kate, Manchán, Deaghlán, and thousands of Irish who grew up speaking Irish at home. Many of their parents where not from the official Gaeltacht. Their families had learned, or passed on in Manchán's case, a hard-won decision of the previous, rebel, generation, to rouse the spirit of 1916, a dream so denigrated by not only revisionists today (and not always without reason, Kate Fennell's father's forceful rejoinders notwithstanding).

The loyal if quixotic mid-century speakers, and those who earned their fáinne in the "jailteacht," witness the legacy of physical-force nationalism tangled with state-sponsored language reclamation. This, backfiring, flared into a guerrilla revolt against compulsory Irish and the inept manner in which it was taught and enforced. True believers, those 'cigirí agus gaeilgoirí' who pricked Myles na gCopaleen, appeared not only in the Gaeltacht but Northern cities or Dublin suburbs. Often linguistic idealism married republican ideology. For all its excess, at best I sense a sincere desire among these converts from English to Irish. They became the emblems of guilt for the Free State and then the partial Republic. They countered the relentless Anglo-American pressure to surrender. Kate's father, activist Desmond Fennell, labelled this "the Post-Western Condition"-- a consumerist malaise fueled by our 'Ameropean' masters.

But, as with Hugo Hamilton and Lorcán Ó Treasaigh in Dublin, when these citizens of the municipal Gaeltachtaí opened their front door, they faced-- reminding me of the jeers Pearse faced when reading the Proclamation at lunchtime in Easter Monday's Sackville Street-- hostility, incomprehension, or shame. They leave their school steps-- at least as dramatized in "No Béarla"-- only to find a mix of pride, antagonism, and confusion when they seek-- and have sought-- to chat on Irish streets as naturally in one native tongue as the one which you and I use to communicate now.

I hope (thinking fondly of my introduction at Oideas Gael last July to Claire, Andrew, and Caomhnait who are studying at DIT, graduates of the same city's schools that McWilliams sends up) that Deaghlán's daughter and the children of my Belfast hosts will take pride in a nimble language that can survive and thrive. If so, it is in so small measure thanks to emissaries such as Manchán. If he reads this, I send my acclaim for his efforts for TnG, his books in both Béarla agus Gaeilge, and his desire (perhaps) not to consign Lazarus back to his grave. The O'Rahilly and Sighle Humphries and their ilk may not have had their hands totally clean when resurrecting the dying Gaul (or Gael), but they left an example for me. In more peaceful times for the island, asserting the value of what's for millennia been spoken can be done with joy and humor by all of its residents, regardless of allegiance, birthplace, or surname.

So, with my own great-grandfather a visiting Land Leaguer found-- fished lifeless from the Thames in 1898-- "in mysterious circumstances," and my own tenuous ties to the Revival retrieved this past summer, I too take hesitant heart. I go back in odd moments to the RTÉ series (reviewed by me here and on Amazon US) "Turas Teanga," turn on the subtitles in English and wish they were in Irish, and find I can follow a bit more easily what, before my fortnight's study in the Glen, eluded my fumbling comprehension. Certainly the brighter side of the moon to quench the miasma from "No Béarla"! My own travels, by the web and along the TT course, may not be as publicized or impressive as Manchán or his eloquent Irish peers, but by my own desultory gait, I try to keep up with the pace set by my own, now silent, ancestors. No matter what language we mouth, the "journey in the language" takes us back to silent thought. My longing to learn and the comfort I gain from Irish, as with English, nourishes me.

(Image: Manchán Magan and a friend in a Jordanian wadi.)

Tuesday, October 23, 2007


Re-Imagining Ireland: Review

The University of Virginia hosted a 2003 conference convening many prominent academics, writers, musicians, artists, and journalists who pondered Ireland's past and present predicaments as consumerism and globalism overtake tradition and conservatism there. This handsome volume collects ten historically focused presentations by plenary speakers, along with shorter pieces accompanying the longer essays. (A documentary DVD is also included.) While predominantly scholarly, mirroring its venue, this anthology tends to (at its best) diminish campus shop-talk and reliance on theoretical jargon and can be read (at its best) by anyone wanting a realistic view of Irish change. Most of those who add their voices here speak positively, reflecting a neo-liberal, largely secular, and consistently pro-growth and pro-immigration standpoint which will surprise any listener or reader of the mainstream Irish media not at all. This is meant less as a criticism than a reality. It'd be doubtful that the Irish and American governments, political entities, fundraisers, corporations, and the long list of financial backers that prefaces these essays would have it any other way. The editor, Andrew Higgins Wyndham, thanks many influential wheelers and dealers. I expected that such growth as they profit from is, according to the professoriate and the literati, great for the Irish, and I was not-- for the most part-- surprised by what I read.

Here's an overview. Helen Shaw takes on the clichéd Celtic Tiger, and voices join hers in seeking out who benefits and who has yet to do so-- the poverty endemic within parts of Ireland, at least as of 2003, remains higher than one might suspect. Theo Dorgan takes, being a poet, a Wallace Stevens-inspired 13 ways of looking at globalism in Ireland. My favorite anecdote concerns a group of raggedy, hippie-ish Irish adrift with him in London who decide on the spot and for no reason really to rag on some bewildered tube riders in Irish itself, and who find that the most stereotypical fellow Undergrounder, bespoke and heading from or to the City, is himself a Gaelic speaker. Lenwood Sloan gives a moving reminder of the African American experience and its attenuated ties to the Irish, in an eloquent address.

Luke Gibbons' piece on ethnic and racial identity, contrarily, wanders considerably around this topic. Eventually, he joins "Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom," (Daniel O'Hara's short film, linked on this blog earlier this year) by now a touchstone for any Irish student of multiculturalism, to Oliver Goldsmith's "A Citizen of the World" neatly, and shows how much of this subject, to which in the past decade so many critics have devoted acres of trees, still can reward a careful and patient thinker. Similarly, Angela Bourke's entry on the reality of the Gaeltacht shrinking in territory but expanding into cyberspace provides a necessary investigation into this crucially decisive topic. Given the environmental sensibility we are supposed to be cultivating as Goldsmith's heirs, the lack of sympathy afforded by many Irish citizens to the plight of the Irish-speaking community, and the counter-structures being built in cities today, offer an important exchange of ideas and perspectives.

Bourke and Aodan Mac Póilin, in his too-brief essay about the Shaws Road Belfast gaeltacht, remind us how urban families seek to create in the city a place where Irish is spoken as a learned second language by adults, who then generate schools and facilities for their children. As Mac Póilin now sees with his own daughter, this city's core of speakers will be able-- perhaps-- to pass it on to a third generation. Two thousand children in Béal Feirste attend school through the medium of Irish. This success reminds me of what earlier generations had confined, with decidedly discouraging long-term results in the late 1930s, to Rath Cairn in Meath, for example, and which had failed as the inhabitants needed to understand each other's dialects, and giving up, resorted soon to English. I read today that a Baile Gaelach is being planned for the exurbs, and it invites all who wish to create its own village where Irish can be spoken together. Mac Póilin has loads of invective for the eccentrics and misfits who flock to Irish, as well as the naysayers who belittle its future. With spirited folks like himself, a middle ground between idealistic dead-ends and begrudging nihilism may find that our century can gently shift Irish, far from its coastal redoubts, and transplant it to a thriving botanical garden inland. What a century ago receded, he wonders, may return with a new tide.

Anticipating this book's related preview of the Scot-Irish combined An Leabhar Mór art-book initiative (plates of the art are featured in this anthology), Malcolm MacLean reminds us that current Scots Gaelic culture regards itself as Ireland's Lost Colony, and stresses what only with the Peace Process, in his opinion, has been able to emerge after the end of this, the last gasp of the Reformation. The common Gaelic heritage unites across the Irish Sea. He also notes that Ibrox, bastion of Glasgow Rangers, derives from Átha Breac, or the crossing of the Beavers! So much for the persistence of the native tongue!

Following this, Declan McGonagle connects the pictorial images included here to the ideas of the conference, within a more academically phrased analysis of Irish art that (unlike some previous keynote lectures) feels more akin to the seminar-room than a public forum. Mick Moloney, on the other hand, can take his learning from academia and enliven it by his own skills playing-- as he narrates here-- the tenor banjo. He reminds us how few instruments are "native" to Ireland, and cites a decidedly outraged editorial assault from a 1907 paper, the Gaelic American, against the foreign menace of the accordion. Martin McLoone ambitiously wideranging if inevitably overlong survey of recent Irish film covers many of the expected names and more. Rod Stoneman in a short piece that cites but three articles, all his own, manages to annoy those who think that the Irish can nurture their own "film industry." Fact is, he notes, 96% of the cinema traces itself to America, and he sees no more hope for Ireland than most of the world outside, say, India, to keep pace with the slick Hollywood expertise that all cineastes pay homage to-- the other side of globalism.

Mary P. Corcoran's entry on the 'built environment' of Dublin proved rather stolid. She inadvertently reminded me of how disheartening I find so much of the capital. Each visit there discourages me further. Susan McKay also trudges dutifully through her topic of Paisleyism in an essay that roams all about, jumping from tidbit to factoid in an essay that could have benefited greatly from re-writing. The facts are there, but scattered and showing signs of a lot of cut and pasting on screen from a mass of interviews and data, I suspect. Arthur Aughey on Unionism and Ed Moloney on the Peace Process offer what you'd expect, but their entries benefit from concision. Aughey opines that republicans fought not out of a desire for unification so much as a hatred of their province. He reminds me of Anthony McIntyre's observation that gave the title to Jonathan Stevenson's book about the Troubles: "We Wrecked the Place."

Finally, Kerby Miller takes a jaundiced and welcome view, therefore, that puts paid to many of the pieties recited by other academics in this collection. He, and his fellow contributors Henry Glassie and Patrick Griffin, debunk the revisionist notion of "two traditions" that so often divides Protestant and Highland or Ulster Scot from Catholic and Irish Gael. Intelligently drawing upon Miller's current work in editing emigrants' letters in colonial and 19c America, this historian insists that the dichotomy has proven for the American as sinister as it has for the Irish themselves.
Miller, Glassie, and Griffin end this collection fittingly, looking beyond the coasts of Ireland to distant horizons, glimpsed in Scotland or once unknown in America, as they attempt to broaden what Irish identity represents.

[Posted to Amazon US today, and submitted in slightly expanded form to "The Blanket."]

What Makes a God Start Fires?

Nature's revenge continues, as the chaparral ignites in the high pressure Santa Ana winds, and the subdivisions that tear away at the hills become threatened, if not consumed, by the brushfires that used to rage and renew the earth every few years with little lasting damage-- before twenty million of us decided to move here the past century. Our tracts interfere with Mother Nature. We think that we have a right to be here. But, we forget the powers that air-conditioning, cul-de-sacs, and patio decks cannot defeat. The L.A. Times quotes one resident of Irvine, I mean Foothill Ranch (too arrogant to be identified with the rest of that "planned community"). Beige and stucco sprawl-- about as ugly as you or at least people with decorum could imagine. And that was before the tinder slopes blackened.

One exurbanite of that red-tiled testament to our hubris told the paper: "'We've been through this before,' Karen Royer said. 'I believe in God, and I know everything will be good.' Minutes later, a dark plume of smoke lifted over a ridgeline. 'Can I revise that?' she said. 'Now I'm scared.'"

Speaking of hubris, and acknowledging my own ecological culpability grousing here (but our house was first, in 1944!) as more homes sprout from the dust all around me-- soon there could be nine where three once stood on our street-- here's (in that same paper today) excerpts from a noted classicist's take on our trust in the Deity, the One, and how perhaps it'd be better if we hedged our bets and didn't rely on a single, and apparently as Royer can attest to, capricious Almighty who insists in that First Commandment that she, we, and He can place no other gods before what is truly a jealous G-d.

Bring back the Greek gods
Mere mortals had a better life when more than one ruler presided from on high.
By Mary Lefkowitz

Prominent secular and atheist commentators have argued lately that religion "poisons" human life and causes endless violence and suffering. But the poison isn't religion; it's monotheism. The polytheistic Greeks didn't advocate killing those who worshiped different gods, and they did not pretend that their religion provided the right answers. Their religion made the ancient Greeks aware of their ignorance and weakness, letting them recognize multiple points of view.
[. . . .}

Openness to discussion and inquiry is a distinguishing feature of Greek theology. It suggests that collective decisions often lead to a better outcome. Respect for a diversity of viewpoints informs the cooperative system of government the Athenians called democracy.

Unlike the monotheistic traditions, Greco-Roman polytheism was multicultural. The Greeks and Romans did not share the narrow view of the ancient Hebrews that a divinity could only be masculine. Like many other ancient peoples in the eastern Mediterranean, the Greeks recognized female divinities, and they attributed to goddesses almost all of the powers held by the male gods.

The world, as the Greek philosopher Thales wrote, is full of gods, and all deserve respect and honor. Such a generous understanding of the nature of divinity allowed the ancient Greeks and Romans to accept and respect other people's gods and to admire (rather than despise) other nations for their own notions of piety. If the Greeks were in close contact with a particular nation, they gave the foreign gods names of their own gods: the Egyptian goddess Isis was Demeter, Horus was Apollo, and so on. Thus they incorporated other people's gods into their pantheon.

What they did not approve of was atheism, by which they meant refusal to believe in the existence of any gods at all. One reason many Athenians resented Socrates was that he claimed a divinity spoke with him privately, but he could not name it. Similarly, when Christians denied the existence of any gods other than their own, the Romans suspected political or seditious motives and persecuted them as enemies of the state.

The existence of many different gods also offers a more plausible account than monotheism of the presence of evil and confusion in the world. A mortal may have had the support of one god but incur the enmity of another, who could attack when the patron god was away. The goddess Hera hated the hero Heracles and sent the goddess Madness to make him kill his wife and children. Heracles' father, Zeus, did nothing to stop her, although he did in the end make Heracles immortal.

But in the monotheistic traditions, in which God is omnipresent and always good, mortals must take the blame for whatever goes wrong, even though God permits evil to exist in the world he created. In the Old Testament, God takes away Job's family and his wealth but restores him to prosperity after Job acknowledges God's power.

The god of the Hebrews created the Earth for the benefit of humankind. But as the Greeks saw it, the gods made life hard for humans, didn't seek to improve the human condition and allowed people to suffer and die. As a palliative, the gods could offer only to see that great achievement was memorialized. There was no hope of redemption, no promise of a happy life or rewards after death. If things did go wrong, as they inevitably did, humans had to seek comfort not from the gods but from other humans.

The separation between humankind and the gods made it possible for humans to complain to the gods without the guilt or fear of reprisal the deity of the Old Testament inspired. Mortals were free to speculate about the character and intentions of the gods. By allowing mortals to ask hard questions, Greek theology encouraged them to learn, to seek all the possible causes of events. Philosophy -- that characteristically Greek invention -- had its roots in such theological inquiry. As did science.

Paradoxically, the main advantage of ancient Greek religion lies in this ability to recognize and accept human fallibility. Mortals cannot suppose that they have all the answers. The people most likely to know what to do are prophets directly inspired by a god. Yet prophets inevitably meet resistance, because people hear only what they wish to hear, whether or not it is true. Mortals are particularly prone to error at the moments when they think they know what they are doing. The gods are fully aware of this human weakness. If they choose to communicate with mortals, they tend to do so only indirectly, by signs and portents, which mortals often misinterpret.

Ancient Greek religion gives an account of the world that in many respects is more plausible than that offered by the monotheistic traditions. Greek theology openly discourages blind confidence based on unrealistic hopes that everything will work out in the end. Such healthy skepticism about human intelligence and achievements has never been needed more than it is today.


[Mary Lefkowitz is professor emerita at Wellesley College and the author of "Greek Gods, Human Lives" and the forthcoming "History Lesson.] Blog title today a nod to the Minutemen's disc (could not find a decent image of the Raymond Pettibon cover art, however) "What Makes a Man Start Fires?"

Image: Dolores St. Baptist Church fire, 1993, San Francisco. Unfortunately, arson attack by a member of the "Arian Brotherhood," according to www.baptistchurchsf.org. Only in California would a church be attacked in what used to be at least a downtrodden neighborhood for "not caring about the poor" by a self-proclaimed adherent of a heresy 1700 or so years old. It looks like a welcoming place to me.

Sunday, October 21, 2007


Dhá podchraoladh / Two Podcasts in Irish
Tá siad dhá podchraoladh scoth den chèad as Gaeilge. Ar an laghad, nuair d'amharc mé inniu ar an idirlion. Tá sé an cead lathair go bhfuil An Saol. Tá sé ar an Blogspot freisin. Ta tu inniu clois agatsa ag an lathair in aice leis anseo
http://ansaol.blogspot.com. Mar sin, tá tú ábalta leamh agatsa de bhreis ar craobhscaoileadh seo ar an ghréasán: http://www.ansaol.com. Rinne Pádraig Schaler an bun-blog , an podchraoladh búnasach, agus an síopa beag. Maireann sé as Baile Átha Cliath.

Mar sin, tá An tImeall, le Conn Ó Muíneacháin, as h-Inis as gContae Clár. Tá sé ard-blog, le altannaí agus tuarisciu. Mar shampla, tá sé lasc (faoi An tImeall #181) le Raidió Fáilte as Béal Feirste Thiar. Éistigí! http://www.raidiofailte.com.

Nuair cuairtaigh a thabhairt mé ar An Cultúrlann ar an Bothar na bhFál samhraidh seo caite le mo chara, labhairmar le Diarmuid Ó Tuama. Craol sé ar an Raidió Fáilte ar an saolta seo. Cuidigh Diarmuid ag tógáil an scoil cead ar an ghaeltacht go bhfuil ag timpeallaigh "Andytown" agus "Shaws Road," ar feadh sna naoi déag-seachtoidí. Tá tú in ann foghlaim tuilleadh ar an leabhar, eagraigh Fiontan de Brún, "Belfast and the Irish Language." Scriobh mé leabhar a léirmheas níos mo. I dtósach, feic ar an blog seo. An dara cheann, cuardaigh ar an Amazon US. Tá aiste agam fosta as "The Blanket": http://www.phoblacht.net/SOM0506065g.html

i.s.: Scairím roinn cuid magadh an-maith agaibh (le do thoil, An Saol!)--

Lá amháin, bhí fear ag siúil trasna na sléibhte nuair a tháinig tart air. Stad sé in aice le sruthán. Ó nach raibh buideal ná rud ar bith eile aige, rinne sé cupán lena lámh agus thosaigh sé ag ól an uisce as an tsruthán. Ag an am chéanna, bhí feirmeoir beag ag teacht anuas ón chnoc lena chuid chaoraigh. Chonaic an feirmeoir beag an fear eile agus ghlaoigh sé “Hóigh! Ná hól an t-uisce sin, níl sé glan.

Thóg an fear eile a cheann ach ní raibh sé á chluinstin go ceart agus chuaigh sé ar aghaidh leis an uisce ól. Shiúil an feirmeoir go socair i dtreo an fhir eile agus scairt sé arís “Ná hól an t-uisce sin, tá sé iontach salach."

Ach níor thug an fear eile aird dó. Ansin, shiúil an feirmeoir díreach chuige agus ars seisean “Níorbh chóir duit a bheith ag ól an uisce sin ar chor ar bith, nach bhfuil fhios agat go ndéanann na caoraigh an cuid chaic sa tsruthán thuas ar mullach an chnuic?”

“I’m dreadfully sorry my good man, I couldn’t understand a word you said” ars’ an fear eile, agus blas fíneáil Sasanach ina ghlóir. "Oh I see" ars’ an feirmeoir, "I was just saying, erm……… if you use both hands."

{Summary in English: I posted about two podcasts, An Saol (The Life) from Dublin's Pádraig Schaler, and An tImeall (The Edge) from Innis' Conn Ó Muíneacháin. Each has its own blog. The first is simpler-- my level! The second is more advanced and also links to such media as the daily paper and Raidió Fáilte, both from West Belfast's Irish-speaking community. I then mentioned a chat last summer I had with a founder of the first Irish-language school, now a presenter on RF, Diarmuid Ó Tuama. Finally, after a plug for both the book "Belfast and the Irish Language" (no free copy came in the mail, by the way; ed. Fiontan de Brún) and my own review of it, a joke from An Saol. Who'd've thunk it, another bout in the eternal battle of wits between Gael and Saxon. But, some words defy the easy translation into our imperial, global, Net-hegemonic language. You need the Irish for this anecdote’s set-up, if not its punchline.)

Image credit: "Padraig Pearse," by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin. I will review his recent "Language From Below" on Irish-language political ideology soon. See his artworks, illustrations, and aesthetics at http://gaelart.net/

Friday, October 19, 2007


Imperial Teen: "The Hair, the TV, the Baby, and the Band" CD Review

Imperial Teen takes its time making deceptively chipper music. The lyrics, however, often provide the sour tang under the sweet surface. I was intrigued when the New Yorker described its first LP, Seasick, as "queasy pop," and despite the fact this is probably some of the sunniest music on my often gloomy shelf, the mature lyrics, intelligent themes, and sophisticated wit all burnish this collection, their fourth studio record. It goes by, as most of their albums, quickly, starting off in a Spector-ish flourish, but ending with a downbeat, melancholy tune that takes them off stage gently.

The music lacks the experimental edge that I liked on their second album, What Is Not to Love, and generally melds the straight-ahead but lower-key energy of Seasick with the polish of their third LP, On. But, overall, it's slower, lower in volume, and more subdued. I'd start, if you are new to the band, with On and then Seasick. This new LP matches these in style, but again, seems less jittery and less brazen.

The accessible, warm, affectionately old-school production, by Steve McDonald (Redd Kross) and Anna Waronker (that.dog) along with the band, heightens the band's guitar-bass-drums set-up, but Roddy's keyboards appear much less prominent than before. I found this not quite a disappointment, but I feel that the band's better served by the higher intensity tunes that allow it to stretch out rather than compress its take on indie pop rooted in 60s styles without aping the feel of the pre-psych, vaguely NYC-street styles that they blend into a more new-wave meets singer-songwriter approach. A song like "Sweet Potato" shows this off best, with lines like "She has a backstage pass but doesn't want to meet the band" and "the carpool lane's open but she's taking the bus" capturing a gal of easy virtue cleverly. Somewhere in our media empire this deserves to be a hit.

Will, singer on most tracks, has improved and has lost his Jersey whine that often marred earlier turns at the mike. Lynn's drums keep a punch with Jone's bass, and the tunes at their best, as in "Room with a View," sound instantly familiar. Glad to see the band's back after five years off; I'd feared they'd disbanded! One song, "Do It Better," sounds to me like I have heard it before on an earlier IT record! It's testimony to the band's talent that they can freshen up pop-rock, at this late stage in the genre, that recalls their influences without imitating them.

(I don't post my music reviews much on the blog, but why not? I haven't found much this year of interest anyway, and a band like this needs all the attention it can earn. Posted today on Amazon US.)

Thursday, October 18, 2007


"Othello": (2001) CBC-BBC Masterpiece Theatre: Review

(Directed by Geoffrey Sax; posted to Amazon US today.)

I teach "Othello" in an intro to literature course for non-liberal arts majors; it's their only chance to study literature at my college, and I find this a well-balanced counterpart to the 1995 Oliver Parker-directed film dramatization starring Laurence Fishburne & Kenneth Branagh. My students tend to prefer the "original" with Shakespeare's language to this BBC-CBC production, but I like this for the energetic gallows humor it provides. While some of my students have seen "O," made around the same time as this Masterpiece Theatre version, this is more adult, and less teenaged in its appeal. It's grimmer than "O," and moves rapidly.

The performances of not only Eamonn Andrews and Christopher Eccleston (who I enjoyed so much in Danny Boyle's "Shallow Grave" in an earlier, equally unhinged role) deserve acclaim. Cass and Desi and Lulu (=Emilia) all do well in difficult scenes, and the conflation of the Rodrigo character into the officer pressured by Jago into recanting his testimony provides a challenging example of how a modern adaptation can alter the original plot and alter characters into this admittedly manic, compressed, and entertaining version. Issues of race, gender, class, and trust all are explored efficiently; how the storyline places Desi's earlier dalliances into her now-faithful relationship with Othello again moves the story into current sexual realism and cultural mores.

Still, even if "Othello" appears to be the play that replaces (as in my textbook anthology!) "Hamlet," it cannot be glossed or streamlined. It is a tale of unrelenting deceit and unforgiving revenge. Trendy topics aside, at its dark core, Othello remains a depressing play, and the ironies and sarcasms of Jago, as with Iago, can be disheartening as you see Desi and Othello trapped. I suspect students recoil at how evil the villain is, and how, in this 2001 version, the contemporary twist at the end only seems to emphasize how our standards may have slipped even further from those of Shakespeare's cloak-and-dagger era.

A final note: the use of technology to enhance Jago's entrapment, using cameras, stalkers, the Net, tape recorders, and good old gossip, updates the story well into our own decade. Similarly, the race riot and nod to Brutus' "I have not come to praise Caesar" speech plays off Andrews' own quiet strength as well as the scene in the restaurant where he reveals his own "race card" in another episode that makes the story even more relevant to today's multicultural but still tense urban society. And, don't forget the substitute for the handkerchief: a nimble plot device! I daresay this improves on the original-- many of my students have a hard time "believing" the awkward manner in which the Bard drops the handkerchief into the storyline!

(Image: Desi's final romp with Othello, courtesy of Answers.com)

Wednesday, October 10, 2007


Space Needle, Tess Gallagher & Al's Ashes

Seattle, Tacoma, Port Angeles, and the Puget Sound: all these were names on a map until my first visit. With my devoted spouse, we went north by northwest with her father's ashes in a plastic bag. The trip had been arranged months before, as I was to deliver a talk at the American Conference of Irish Studies regional meeting on J. F. Powers and his wife, Betty Wahl, exploring their Hibernian residencies, their peripatetic careers as struggling writers, and their curious decision to live, in the 50s and 60s, more cheaply in semi-derelict fallen Georgian gentility in So County Dublin than they could in college town Minnesota.

Layne wished Al could have heard about our trip. I wished I could have compared my recollections of a city utterly transformed from the Depression-era when he grew up on its slick streets, and I wondered what he remembered from the hotel his family ran and the clothing store his uncle had in the gritty, faraway port two hours drive down and then up the other side of the great sound. We passed a sign for Discovery Bay, where in 1792 George Vancouver glimpsed what until then had been known only by the tribe at Jamestown-- who now were expanding along that same harbor their casino and soon to be opened "longhouse" with Chevron station, the sign over the plowed lot promised. A double rainbow momentarily spread over the bridge as I accidently pressed the video setting and caught a whirling few seconds of my roaming about in search of the colorful arch over the span of steel and water.

I drank in not only fine microbrews and the smell of salmon, but the fresh air that rain brought; after our measly record low three inches of rain the past season, the novelty of damp clear breezes cleansed my soul. It reminded me of the past summer, and three months earlier in Donegal. This picture was taken at the end of the Carbon River road at the border of Mt. Rainier National Park. Not the entrance that reveals the vista, but a northern secondary route. Still, this expanse of snow and heathery pine amidst a tree-blanketed slope reminded me of the passage in Betty Wahl's novel about the tweed's humble colors on the hills, and the beauty of the common panorama.

The Space Needle, as with so many such unnatural attractions, for we postmoderns schooled in Baudrillard and Barthes, has a sense of prefabrication that steals away your own ability to see the sights fresh from its 540-foot perch. At least, unlike the time my wife and I went up the Eiffel Tower on a cloudy, hazy evening, the view was clear. They say that the NY World's Fair of 1939, or is it 1964, was the last expression of confidence in progress. Seattle's 1962 Fair, seen from above, has a miniature football field, empty carousel and carnival rides, and two odd pairings that join too much money spent on Frank Gehry's fallen guitar roofed Science Fiction Hall of Fame joined to a music experience showpiece. These apparently are twin passions of Microsoft honcho and native Paul Allen, but we passed on the $15 to hear theremins in the former (already whining as we passed the outside speakers) and the latter (I imagined hordes of eight-year-olds banging on synthdrums and bells as they were amplified into the cathedral-high space inside). So, we walked on to the earlier, and equally silly structure. The icon's endearing in that way that any Babel-onian tower that pierces the clouds makes our folly of our wish to exceed our bounds and our dream of heavenly ascent into an enormous gift shop, a revolving restaurant with $30 burgers (so the driver of our Duck amphibean tour assured us earlier that day), and a 40-second elevator ride complete with tour guide condensed spiel.

Hearing Tess Gallagher, native of Port Angeles, talk about "Ray" and she going to Belfast in 1976, he for the first time, and of her own stay in the flat belonging to and at the moment vacant by Paul Muldoon and his girlfriend, who was Mary Farl Powers (the artist whose work I have featured in my blog reviews of her father's novels and stories) made me realize again how, in the Irish world of intellectuals and creators, small the networks are woven. Tess told me that she could understand how Betty felt, married to a full-time writer who had garnered the greater share of the acclaim. I had in my talk suggested that if Betty had been able to write more-- and care less for her five children-- that she could have become a writer deserving of her own fame. The obscurity into which Jim Powers had or has fallen (at least now his books are in print and I was happy to see at Elliot Bay Books, an enormous shop on the old "Skid Row," both JFP's story anthology and "Morte" on the abundantly stocked shelves; I bought Layne a copy of Tess' gathered poems on kisses with a great cover photo.) remains far shallower than that of Betty, whose only novel I stumbled across only when quite deep into my investigation of the limited critiques afforded her spouse.

She read from the collection of stories, speaking of collaborations between writers, that she composed out of the seanachie lore of her 83-year-old companion, Josie Gray. Blackstaff Press in Belfast, a fine firm, published this as "Barnacle Tales." I found her poetry, as recited, difficult to grasp. She declaimed it in a rather matter-of-fact tone, and I found this surprising, expecting more drama. Underplaying it made me figure that I had better look it up on the page first. I did notice in David Pierce's anthology of everybody worth mentioning who's Irish the past century that (he also includes J.F. Powers' title story from "The Prince of Darkness") he grants Tess two poems, both based on her Irish sojourns around Sligo in the 1970s.

My favorite was "Surrounded by Weasels," and I admit along with her it'd have been a fine title for the collection! This shaggy-dog or black-cat-crossed send-up expanded and kept delaying its end, building one punchline into a further boost of even more egregious energy. Sort of like a long sexual bout, if humor and orgasm could be both delayed and heightened. As with the Space Needle and the Tower of Babel and the ashes that Al's daughter surreptitiously tossed into the sky from the steel spire, our laughter at Tess and Josie's exaggerated narrative of schoolboy terror magnifying the mundane into the unspeakable mirrors our own urge to build stories and structures. We too fear being high up, facing the void, looking down and wondering how we got so high. Sex, death, love, loss, adventure, invention: the human ways we confront the urge that got God so angry in Mesopotamian millennia past: we dare to laugh at the universe that we face, full of frustration, rebellion, and restless curiosity.

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Guy Deutscher's "The Unfolding of Language": Book Review


I read this on bus and plane rides recently, and wondered if I'd fall asleep despite its concentration on an issue that intrigued me: how do languages evolve? Do we decide what words fade and which expressions survive? And, are languages doomed to decay? Word-mavens bemoaning the idiocy of our current state of English, or any other language, compared to the glories of past prose and universal literacy and elegant wit will be disappointed. Deutscher begins with a string of citations from the past, with a mandarin amidst his philistine generation hearkening back to a Golden Age now irrevocably vanished.

Language, he assures us, will always morph on two principles: economy and expressiveness. In speaking, we tend to be lazy. Our mouths move in intricate fashion to shape sounds. We tend to take shortcuts. Over time, endings erode and prefixes rot. Their residue collapses into the center of words. Meanings compress into the core. This, in time, frustrates us even as we inadvertently contribute to language change by our collective action, as users slowly adopt to what individuals, seeking order, impose in our quest for logical, systematic syntax. What appears to horrified schoolmarms as regression to the inarticulate is, Deutscher insists, the course every language must and has and will take. We seek the easy way out in speech.

But, we also turn restless. Unhappy with worn-out expressions, we invent new ones. Analogies captivate us and we want fresh ways to communicate what matters to us. So, we build up new endings, invent new verbs, add new prefixes, and twist and turn meanings and phrases into vibrant, contradictory, or plain attention-getting forms. For instance, he cites "wicked" as used by old ladies coming out of a theatre to comment on the performance; this is contrasted with two teenaged girls using "wicked." The first pair mean that the entertainment was "bad" or "evil" or "immoral." The second pair convey their delight in its imaginative qualities, and give a positive spin to the word. In the course of a few decades, we can witness, he shows, language evolving as we listen. No one person controls this, but we adapt to the innovative gradually, and the change happens so gradually that for a while (as with many familiar usages) we will understand both meanings. In a century, we can predict, "wicked" will have reversed what we today regard as its primary definition.

The roots of these principles are buried in our minds, our perceptions, and predate by arguably hundreds of thousands of years our few recorded instances of how we talk and write. These, being so recent, offer fewer clues than many of us imagine; our language may have been around 100,000-40,000 years ago and itself rests on the way we separate actions from objects, and thus nouns from verbs, static from (potentially) dynamic entities, and what can change vs. what endures. Primates and some lower-level animals share these abilities of cognition, and out of this understanding, Deutscher explains with immensely learned, marvelously diverse, if often recondite examples, we create sounds to match what exists in our minds, our world, and our emotions and activities-- a tremendous wealth of symbolic and practical power.

When I read John McWhorter's "The Power of Babel" a few years ago (also reviewed by me on Amazon), he explained that languages decline from an overly complicated order into a simpler one, rather than-- as we'd expect-- vice versa. McWhorter's book complements Deutscher's. McWhorter wished to defend language against critics bemoaning its death throes, and supported the vigor of language shifts. Still, I had wanted to find out more about why the earlier stages of language were so declined and conjugated and structured so rigidly, systematically, and (to me) overwhelmingly.

Deutscher offers a solution, at least as much as we can know from the comparatively brief information from a few thousand at best out of probably at least a hundred thousand years of language. "A reef of dead metaphors" becomes his guiding metaphor!
We compress and erode language by our wish to economize. The rich detritus itself generates material to build upon the rubble and create structures that rise, like an ancient city stratified, ruins leading to higher ground and material to build syntactical patterns and form neologisms and extend analogies and spin off metaphors anew. Even the dense, rigid Semitic languages that we can glimpse from 5000 years ago themselves may have grown from eroded roots, and this process of growth and compression, rising and falling, may be ingrained in the way we manufacture language.

The book addresses a general reader, but is not easy reading. He does not pander to a reader, yet he also takes pains to find hundreds of examples from our daily patterns of communication to support his scholarship. He popularizes his findings from many linguists (see his footnotes that carefully record his energies and his qualifications-- he draws upon a dizzying range of studies in dozens of languages) This etymological excursion proves bracing. Parts-- as he warns in one later chapter fairly-- can be rather eye-glazing. Linguistics can be daunting. Yet, its laws and controversies and jargon, as with any science, reward careful investigation.

Illustrations scatter throughout, many rather superfluous such as clip art engravings of historical figures. However, the family trees of languages and the maps of Indo-European and Semitic language groups are drawn elegantly by hand and enhance the volume. I would have liked more explanation of why Mark Twain's famous complaint about women being neuter and turnips being feminine in German might have been based in structural categories; Deutscher dismisses much of an investigation into this as beyond the historical record early on but in a later chapter raises the point again only to repeat that most languages have such categories rooted in originally if irretrievably logical earlier groupings that already, by the time writing came along to document such usages, had altered beyond the norm. Also, the manner in which verbs emerge from prehistoric, non-grammatical utterances of objects and things alone appeared too hazy. I realize these are both topics whose origins rest thousands of years before any records, and they may be beyond our capacity to fully explain. Still, I wish more attention had been given these elusive situations!

This serious, yet engaging, book demands attention, and Deutscher exerts considerable effort in making linguistic erudition understandable. This may be suited more for time (as my commutes) when you can get lost in its pages for hours at a time. After reading it, you will understand how metaphor and analogy embed themselves in so many more profound ways than the obvious. Language, as Deutscher lovingly lists, drifts and crashes and coalesces over centuries, and we all, unintentionally, contribute to its evolution in our innate drive towards mental acuity through elegant expression-- combined with our tongue's own tendency towards sloth!

(Amazon 10-9-09. See also his follow-up Through the Language Glass: How Our Culture Twists Our Mother Tongue in longer form reviewed by me at PopMatters and in shorter at Amazon in Sept. 2010.)

Tuesday, October 2, 2007


Robert Stone: Prime Green-- Remembering the Sixties: Review

For once, refreshingly, reviews all over the place from one to five stars for this memoir. I added my thoughts here and Amazon today. Yes, another reviewer already cited the cliche "if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there." I was, but pretty young, being born nearer their start. So, my memories lag behind Stone's

The title comes from the "green flash" which Stone, stoned, glimpsed from a Mexican beach. Much of the insight here resembles the recollectons one might expect from a friend of Ken Kesey, an acquaintance of Tim Leary, and one who hung out with the scions of the counterculture in New York City, New Orleans, California north and south, London, Mexico, and Vietnam. That is, pages at a time become illuminated with wisdom-- before sinking again into a miasma of mundane names, places, and events filtered muddily or waveringly through uninspired, if competent, prose. I have only read two novels by Stone, "A Flag for Sunrise," and the disappointing "Damascus Gate." Like the latter book, "Prime Green" stumbles when it could have soared on a promising premise.

The opening chapter rambles on about his stint in the Navy; polar-driven wind and the feel of being at the bridge gain evocative detail, but then the narrative wanders off into recollections of an Australian swimmer he fancied, a bit of action he glimpsed during the Suez crisis, and exchanging Playboys with a Soviet crew. All three anecdotes fizzle. They almost follow randomly, such is the nature of this compilation of memories. Perhaps this casual style conceals careful craft. But, from a writer of Stone's level, that is, of critical acclaim more than another hack bestselling scribe, the offhanded attitude towards such potentially valuable incidents became disappoining. They are treated so offhandedly you wonder why he troubled to bring them up. Much of this book follows suit. It reminds me of a few all-nighters, if you could tape them, with a great storyteller; the difference is, you tend to edit mentally what you were bored or confused by, and highlight the stories which enraptured you, to replay again in your memory. I'd return to this book in the same manner.

For instance, the Bowery and its sudden replacement of white old bums with tough young blacks released from prison circa 1960 sets up a treatise on this sociological phenomenon. But, suddenly, Stone in the next paragraph sidles off into how he wrote copy for a furniture firm. Admittedly, he excels at his harrowing yet hilarious description of writing for the right-wing populist NY Daily News, which like certain media today manages to arouse the contempt of the working class for the system that supposedly favors those less qualified, yet deflects any blame from capitalism or the rich themselves for this inequality and this cynical game of having the victims turn on one another.

His send-up of another bottom-feeding journalistic stint at what he calls the National Thunder, a sort of Weekly World News, is priceless. Anyone who could survive a paper that created headlines like "Armless Veteran Beaten for Not Saluting Flag" or a close runner-up, "Skydiver Devoured By Starving Birds," merits some acclaim for such anecdotes. His accounts of being under the knife for a burst vessel in his brain, of interviewing bitter draftees in Vietnam, of watching the moon on the night of the first landing in 1969 from the California hills, all ring true; his narrative leaps to fitful if brief elegance in these sections. On drugs, Stone glimpses time's wheel and struggles to convey his psychedelic revelation. I wonder if any bard from this time can do so?

The remainder of the book, once Stone leaves in search of the elusive authenticity that takes him, seemingly with little money and the kindness of many strangers become friends, to Stanford on a fellowship, to London, to Vietnam, and to Mexico in a tumultuous but-- for a while-- rather childlike time despite his wife and two children (who are barely mentioned) to support does create in this reader a sense of how much could be seen and heard and experienced by carefree Americans with not much cash, plenty of drugs, and a sense of adventure that in our day has narrowed and priced out all but the affluent or the heavily guarded! Comparing his coming of age with the later century, the combination of a strong dollar, cheap costs of living, and goodwill manage, nearly, to create a glimpse of utopia. On the other hand, his escape from menacing sailors on a Greyhound bus ride from hell that winds up with him barely getting away from the ironically if improbably named hamlet of Highspire, Pennsylvania marks a gothic tale where Poe meets Genet.

If you want a sense of the Sixties, disjointed and disconnected, with wisdom scattered along with a lot of langour, this does re-create a tone appropriate to these times. No history, or even tightly written account, nonetheless for all its faults, I learned from it. The conclusions are the expected sadness at the decade's waste of its promise, and the government infiltration and corporate co-opting of its ideals and its innocence. Not as many knockout punches as I expected, for the book needed editing and substantial tightening. It keeps reeling about, when it should have cut the flab and trimmed up under a drill sargeant of an editor, such as he used to work for in Manhattan in the early 60s.

The book bumps into the famous, nods, chats, and shuffles off again, In its slackness, casual air of street cred meets the dinner party, and Hollywood mingling with the Bowery, perhaps Stone, who managed to be in all of the proper places, dreadful or erotic, exotic or hilarious, remains the jester-cynic who sneers at the powers that be but knows if he had his chance on the throne (he gets a quick perch during his Hollywood visit), he'd settle down there comfortably enough. Stone, in a sloppy but occasionally memorable account, emerges rather blowsily, yet endearingly avuncular. He's slightly askew, a fitting if exasperatingly rambling witness and slyly calculating chronicler for a messy decade.
Shalom Auslander: Fruitfully Multiplying

Annoying, yes, these former true believers who decamp full of self-promotion to whatever the other side is, and although this article's no more than slumming with Critically Adored Former Orthodox Jew turned Hipster Novelist in his old neighborhood of Monsey-- the picture that you can see above that accompanies his Rosh Hashanah drive-by does look as if Stepford was overrun by Litvaks (who probably are too liberal on those suburban shetl cul-de-sacs), the smarmy Auslander did hit a few targets. Albeit, shooting fish in a barrel.

This reminds me, tangentially, of the current controversy in former WASP bastion Hancock Park as Orthodox families move in, houses inflate, and parking spaces diminish. One house on 3rd St. was torn down. It was 3,600 square feet. In its place, arose a synagogue, with a basement school and library, of 8,600 sq. ft. Down the same Third Street, another dwelling also morphed. I don't like such surreptitious methods of expansion, Genesis' injunction to be fruitful and multiply notwithstanding. We have zoning and we have compliance rules for all residents. Leaving one's "faith community" susceptible to charges of false representation certainly appears unwise. Eruv Yom Kippur or any other evening, the congregation (which basically claimed squatter's rights in a totally residential area and then charged community concerns about parking and crowds and noise-- complaints made by many who were Jewish themselves-- as bigoted) had agreed to observe an 8 p.m. curfew. They did not.

Charges of antisemitism predictably surfaced as the mayor's bureaucrats checked out the capacity crowd at a post-curfew Neilah service. Hizzoner, a few days later and needing even the conservative Jewish vote, had to leave the arms of his willing mistress (who failed to show up yesterday for her new demotion and will not be exiled to reporting live from the Inland Empire!) to eat humble challah before the rabbi and the cameras. Readers will know of my own contempt for high-density housing, and my own disdain for development. Historic houses-- by minimal California standards-- of HP deserve protection from whomever bullies them into McMansions. On the other hand, the area's councilman, no stranger to personal expansion himself Tom LaBonge, was quoted recently: "We will build on every lot in L.A. The only question is how." And, our local land-use lawyer turned councilman José Huizar has certainly kept whatever promises he made to his pals in the construction industry as our hills echo with hammers and the sound of earth being replaced with concrete. Bring on the urban heat island!

To me, it's not an issue of who's breeding, but the results of spawning: unsustainable family size. We have 20 million filling our region and more arrive every day. Our city does not need more SUVs, houses full of Big Wheels, or teeming plastic playsets. This is a residential, small-scale, quiet and high-priced district. Hancock Park does not resemble Crown Heights. How many of us does God want on a planet that already has too many grazers with big-box, super-sized appetites? Which we do have here abundantly in L.A., albeit we lack in most districts of our city an eruv or shtreimels along with the Big Wheels driven by young and old alike. Overcrowding, traffic, congestion, and property taxes: our city wants so much to be like Manhattan. Combine that with failing schools, graffiti, and pollution. Which characterized the same city so many flee today for the endless suburbs where the mayor's latest conquest refuses to work in. Villaraigosa, of course, supports such infill and density that will not ease the pressure of the teeming millions but will, we are told, shorten commutes since the congestion downtown will force Angelenos to live closer to our work out of sheer frustration.

Back to the author du jour--who left for Woodstock adjacent, tellingly. I read a Forward review of the novel and it made me no more want to read it-- the title's too arch for me-- than his Critically Adored debut, a short story collection. A previous New Yorker reader enjoyed Singer and still does Roth; today the magazine features Auslander as our designated teller of tales from yeshiva and minyan. [The L.A. Times Book Review on 10/12 had an incisive critic taking Auslander to task for half Catskills patter, half NPR "This American Life" whiny boomer shtick. It also wondered why he's so limited to an irrational idea of God as the only possibility, but this seems to overlook the problem of belief in the type of God you're imprinted with at such a young and impressionable age. A great phrase: Auslander, the reviewer demurred, by his capitulation to an shopworn tin Deity, fails to match "Jewish clown intellects" such as, inevitably, Woody Allen.]

Yes, Auslander's clever; such dissenting voices have been hailed by those outside ghetto walls in the Enlightement ever since Spinoza. To end on an encouraging note, I do applaud Auslander's rephrasing of Pascal's Wager. Rather than denying God and taking the easy way out, he rejects the idea of a Being who could be bothered with being troubled by treyf-- or foreskins.

Intriguing to think of Auslander chatting with Joyce. I segue with a snip from the first chapter of Joyce's "Ulysses"--The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of the collector of prepuces.


Auslander's excerpts:

“The people who raised me will say I am not religious,” he writes. “They are mistaken.” He adds: “I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumbfounded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each more hateful and bloody than the next, as I’m doing my best to lose Him. I’m failing miserably.”

On the second day of the Rosh Hashana holiday last month, Mr. Auslander visited Monsey, a village in Rockland County, for the first time in years. Driving down the New York State Thruway from his new home near Woodstock, he worried that God might take this occasion to snare him in a fatal car wreck. He had even rented a sport utility vehicle, rather than risk being caught in the family wheels on a day when no observant Jew would even think of driving. “It was in the back of my mind the whole time,” he said. “That would be a great punch line — for me to die in Monsey just as the book is coming out. There is no sicker comic than God.”

He added: “I try sometimes to see myself through their eyes — as someone who has made a huge mistake. On the other hand, what if the big joke is that God has nothing to do with any of this, and doesn’t care about it at all?”

[Me again: He concludes with comments that make me wonder why so many ex-zealots to any cause always figure that they must totally renunciate their earlier allegiance. Why is it all or nothing for so many who had put their trust in a Being or Ideology? I suppose, lacking that fanatical or addictive tendency, I find this "love it or leave it" ultimatum, this absolute dichotomy, difficult to understand. Can we "get free" from God? Think of so many who reject religion but crave spirituality. I counter that the need for transcendence drives deep into our human core. And, I suppose, the emotional tug that pulls against the intellectual understanding that Auslander shares with Dawkins expresses this awkward psychomachia within Shalom. ]


“It’s ridiculous that I feel the way I do,” he said at the end of his drive in Monsey. “That I have this cartoonish view of God as someone who rewards and punishes. I feel like a fool when I read someone like Richard Dawkins,” he said, referring to the British atheist and evolutionary biologist. “But let’s trade childhoods.” Intellectually, he said, he understood Mr. Dawkins, but “emotionally I’m not there at all.”

He went on to compare himself, jokingly, to Moses. “There are two ways you can look at that story,” he said. “Moses makes one mistake and God shoots him in the head — he’ll never get to the Promised Land. But you can also say that he almost makes it and that his children will. I like finding the dark upside, and that’s why I ended the book with my son’s first birthday. I didn’t get free, but maybe he does.”

Man and God (and God’s Sick Punch Lines)
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: October 1, 2007. (NY Times, of course.)
Shalom Auslander, the author of “Foreskin’s Lament,” believes in a God who is not pleased when someone writes an angry and very funny book about leaving the Orthodox Jewish community.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/books/01lame.html?ex=1348977600&en=06e7e0d3b8a1cbcd&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink