John Marks' "Reasons to Believe": Book Review

After a polite Jehovah's Witness came to our door recently and we politely declined his message, my wife wondered if he thought we'd be damned. John Marks asks himself the same question. The book's subtitle {"One Man's Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind"} indicates his investigation into his teenaged embrace of, his young adult rejection of, and his mature return to investigate those who practice a born-again Christian faith. He holds out, unable to reconcile the demands of submission with the caprices of a god who witnesses abundant evils committed in as well as in spite of a loving god's name.

Powerful themes, and Marks as a veteran journalist takes them on boldly yet sensitively. The book, as he tells us early on, was one he's been waiting his whole life to write, and it shows. As he's only two years younger than me, I admit my own interest piqued as his own tastes in rock and his own pop culture connections often intersected with mine. And, any author who cringes at the thought of a heaven full of music in the key of Chicago or Blood, Sweat & Tears-- not to mention a preacher's promise of paradise full of ourselves acting like "five year olds"-- gains in credibility as far as I'm concerned. Like him, I favor the sounds and the example of Billy Zoom of X much more!

While the publicity for the book pushes the saved-or-damned conundrum, most of Marks' study's far less dramatic. He's not criticizing the right of people to have a faith that condemns people to hell if they are not baptized and accepting of Jesus as their own savior (he finds such an element, according to the Barna polls he cites, if taken seriously at levels of committment to be only about 7-9% of the U.S.) but the right of such a bloc "to assert their belief as a national religion." (16) "Can a pluralist democracy absorb and support an exclusive, nonpluralistic belief at the heart of its system?" (16) Although the extension of such an argument falls outside the book's scope, the dangers of fundamentalist surety or evangelical righteousness certainly connect with movements far greater in numbers in the rest of the world.

Marks wonders if he's betraying himself if he gives in and returns to the comforting "call" that moved him as a younger man. He weakens if barely, but determines as the narrative progresses to remain true to himself, as a committed secular student of a phenomenon he examines from a skeptical yet respectful distance. His dual identity as one who knows the insider's lingo yet stands apart from accepting it actually increases his ability to talk to believers, who understand that Marks will not distort or misunderstand or betray what they share with him about the challenges of their faith.

His father, when his teen son became "saved," predicted "You just wait. It starts with this, and it'll end up with him not believing in God at all." (230) Marks makes much of his own very comfortable suburban Dallas roots, and shows how his family's roots lie in a mainstream Protestantism which has been eroding under the triple assaults of three disparate movements, the fundamentalists now under retreat, the evangelicals gaining, and the Pentecostals flourishing. His research reminds us that contrary to media stereotypes, fundamentalists and evangelicals remain distinct, and he explains why the latter's more emotional style fits better with the megachurches and outreaches of millennial American attitudes.

His book, however, in following such trends does often bog down in interviews, recounting dutifully conversations with pastors and workers without much verve. Chapters on post-Katrina church efforts, homosexuality, his stint in Germany that led him as a college student away from his faith, the Christian music scene, or the Young Life youth movement are all informative, but rarely rise above that function. There's a lot of quotes that remind you more of an extended feature by a reporter in a newspaper series rather than a book that ties its threads together more tightly. Towards the end, a few of these strands turn up again and connect, but much of the pace slackens for long stretches, dulling interest and goading you as a reader to wait for Marks to recount his own story to perk up the cultural or personal relevance again. Too many of these pages kept me restless, and chapters often end suddenly or on the off-note of hesitation. He speaks often of his own doubts and uncertainties, past and present, and here's when he's strongest. The book combines reportage on the religious scene with some history, some sociology, and some theology, and ultimately, Marks uses the book to work out his own guilt at "losing" his faith and reclaiming his humanist creed, shaky a substitute it may be, as more honest for him.

"I had 'lost' my faith, in that I had wanted to keep it, but couldn't sustain it. The world laid out by the Bible, the reality of it, just seemed to nullify with the years, taking one blow after another till I could no longer hold on. I had seen human cruelty that sank my ability to buy the idea of a sovereign ruler of the universe. The faith didn't help me to understand; it closed off avenues for knowledge." (252) In his interviews with such Christians as Niki missionizing in Iraq, Colonel Birdwell surviving 9/11 at the Pentagon, Daniel at Biola, or his guide Don, Marks takes great care to present these people as having earned our respect, as being tested greatly by the God they love, while Marks insists upon his own autonomy from their faith that impels them to draw him into their closed circle of the elect, according to their inerrant reading of chapter and verse and their strict standard of salvation.

Finally, as when Marks places his own existentialist (he does admire Kafka's "The Castle") views against those of a believer who saw her husband and her fellow missionaries die in Iraq on a clandestine missionary foray, he arrives at a irrevocable truth both Christians and humanists may shrink from, even though it is the logical outcome. Honesty demands he says what he thinks. Niki's sacrifice of her husband and brethren in spreading news of God gains her a reward in heaven. As Marks does not believe in God, he will drop into everlasting torment. Or, she's deluded, having gone from her dream into reality-- a hostile land where her good news was despised and her friends and spouse were murdered. Her loss remains unredeemable, her sacrifice is based on a lie.

Marks concludes: "These two interpretations are incompatible. They are mutually opposed translations of the same original text and cannot be squared. Their two hells cannot coexist. If one is true, the other must be false. Or both are false, and the truth of existence lies elsewhere. Theoretically, we are free to choose, But I suspect that Niki McDonnall will stick by her story. The question is whether I stick by mine." (197)

Marks raises many such uncomfortable issues. Those on homosexuality, women who fear men, and roles of youth at camps all could have earned even more attention. Most of all, I would have liked more discussion about the ties between evangelicals and Jews. As Marks' wife and son are Jewish, Marks' own consideration of his eternal fate intersects intimately with his family. This poignant and disturbing relevance of the talk of dispensations and being "under heavy conviction" and being left behind at the Rapture before meriting, if one holds out, endless suffering certainly deepen the impact of Marks' study. He holds back somewhat, I sense, from fully delving into the complicity of some Christians with the cause of Zion as the manifestation of the End Times simply because the realities that such alliances mask prove too eerie.

A few errors have been remarked upon by other Amazon reviewers. I add that Texas "Catholic" University's likely from the context of its graduate before and after college to be "Christian;" Meister Eckhardt does not have an "e" after the "k;" on an "October day" in Prague's Jewish cemetery it'd be impossible that a "Jewish holiday, Sukkoth or Purim, had shut the place down." (352) The former commemoration, yes; the latter feast that takes place in January or February, no!

Marks rarely indulges in his own philosophizing, being at heart a direct writer for all his learning, but he hits the target: pulling at our loyalties are a pair of "great forces." Memory tugs us back "to our childhood, our roots, our homeland, our God. Desire flings us forward, to our future, our mate, our children, and, sometimes, to our death." He fights reductionism, but stays "certain that every human being lives on some kind of the line between these two poles and finds a balance, or doesn't, at one end of the other of a spectrum." (266)

He wonders in the final pages-- looking ahead past the 2008 election and a shift away from the "politics of faith" at least in the White House-- if such a desire as many have for the apocalypse filters into a "death wish for the world." He ponders evangelical panic at the declining acceptance of "bible-true" faith collides with technologies alternately denigrated by many Christians and embraced by many "dispensationalists" who wish to use them to hasten annihilation by "spiritual warfare." The victims of such divinely-guided wrath (nothing personal as his "saved" neighbors assure him), would be the likes of Marks, his family, and the majority of the people left behind on earth.

(Posted to Amazon US today.)

Dhá barúil a thabhairt ag foghlaim Ghaeilge.

Léigh mé dhá litir faoi ag foghlaim Ghaeilge Gaelport.com an maidín seo. Bhí dhá litir ag scríofa chuigh "Na Amanna Éireannach" leo beirt scríobhaithe. Tá beirt a fhreagairt orthu an litir le Phaedra Keogh ag curtha sí féin ar feadh an seachtaine caite. Féic anseo ar blog agamsa má go mbeadh mhaith leat a léamh sísean, le do thóil. Bláthannaí, Duine & Gaeilge

Is an chéad litir le Siobhán Wells. Tá sí i gconaí i Bhaile Átha Cliath. Scríobhann sí faoi leibheál íseal an theanga. Measaionn sí ní raibh ag foghlaim mic aici féin an Gaeilge go leor. Ach, fhreastail sé cleachtadh na scoil aige le ceithre bliana déag. Shíl sísean gur go raibh múinteoirí go dona uirthi. Is mian léi a deisiú slí óige níos mo. Is maith leí an shampla den chéad scoth Dheas Mac an Easpaigh; d'ímir sé feín leis an teanga bheo. Foghlaimíonn Deas sí go hiontach le bliain amháin!

Is an dá litir le Tómas Ó Dúill. Tá sé i gconaí i Rath Droma i gContae Chill Mhantáin. Dúirt sé leis smaointe difríulaí. Ní aontaíonn an Dúillanach le Bean Uí Eochaidh (=Keogh) nó Bean Wells. Insíonn sé go mbeidh a foghlaim Ghaeilge a dhéanfaidh ar do chonlán féin. Bheith freagrach i gníomhartha tuismitheoiraí. Go minic, d'inis sé, ní dhearna siadsan féin ag glacadh le cúram. Tá gach duine ag lochtú scoileannaí.

Aontaim leis an Dúillanach. Ní aontaíonn mé an oiread leis Bean Wells agus mac aici. Is é mo thuairim go bhfuil ár foghlaimeoiraí ag tosú a obair nios airde. Caitheann an póbal na hÉireann siadsan féin ag fáil seans níos mo ag rá leis an teanga beo. Mura bhfuil Gaeilge acu ní mearim leo. Beidh cosuil Laidín. D'fhoghlaim mé Laidin agus Gaeilge. Ach, tá me iarraidh ag éirí an teanga in Éirinn agus an domhain anois; níl dúil agam ag fáil Gaeilge-- chomh leis Laidin-- go mbeadh ag cloiste ollúna go beag acu agus ag foghlamhtha beagán coláistí amháin iontu.

Two Opinions about Learning Irish.

I've read two letters about learning Irish this morning. There were two letters written to the "Irish Times" by two writers. The two of them responded to the letter by Phaedra Keogh that she herself had sent last week. Look here on my own blog if you'd like to read about it, please.

The first letter's by Siobhán Wells. She lives in Dublin. She writes about a low level of the language. She reckons that her son himself was not learning Irish well. But, he attended to his school lessons for fourteen years. She herself thinks that there were poor teachers for it. She has a wish to repair a better way for youth. She likes the first-rate example of Des Bishop; he plays with the living language. Des learns it wonderfully in only a year!

The second letter's from Tómas Ó Dúill. He lives in Rathdrum in Co. Wicklow. He says different thoughts. Mr. Ó Dúill doesn't agree with Ms. Keogh or Ms. Wells. He tells that learning Irish should be done as one's own responsibility. Parents are responsible for this action. Often, he told, they themselves do not accept the duty. Everybody blames schools.

I agree with Ó Dúill. I don't agree so much with Ms. Wells or her son. It's my opinion that we learners have to start to work harder. The Irish people themselves must find a better chance to speak with the living language. If they do not use Irish it will not live through them. It will be similar to Latin. I learned Latin and Irish. But, I am seeking the rise of the language of Irish and the world now; I do not have a desire to find Irish that--as with Latin-- would be heard only by a few professors and studied in a few colleges.

Grianghraf/ Photo: "Stop and speak Irish"Scoil Iognáid, Bóithrín na Sliogán- Gaillimh. Scoil na Míosa- Aibreán, 2003

Howard Devoto's "Jerky Versions of the Dream": Music Review

Although the previous three [Amazon US, where this was posted today] reviewers rate this five stars, and at the time of its original release I admired certain songs on this very well-produced LP greatly, it's a notch below the heights of "Correct Use of Soap," or "Real Life" by Devoto's earlier group, Magazine. I'd rank it better than their last LP, the weary (even by their moody standards) "Magic, Murder & the Weather" (which ironically gave them their biggest hit) and more the equivalent of the group's second LP, the troubled "Secondhand Daylight," which disappointed at the time of its release some fans for its keyboard-heavy atmospherics.

I suppose, as a Buzzcocks fan (I love "Spiral Scratch"!), and an admirer of the instrumental prowess of Magazine bassist Barry Adamson and guitarist John McGeoch especially, that I favor therefore the more aggressive tracks on "Jerky Versions" over the synth-pop that to my ears even at the time appeared to link the LP too much to its time, rather than ahead of it obliquely. As a pioneer of the post-punk movement, Devoto and his mates bailed from punk early on but kept its edge even as they layered its menace within more erudite, less insistent, and very nuanced sound experiments. Like Wire, they made their best music when challenging the norms of both art-rock musos and the new-wave conformists. They also knew, as Devoto titled their debut "Shot by Both Sides," that this doomed them (like Wire) to follow their own muse outside of the mainstream or the current fad.

That's why, on "Jerky Versions," Devoto's solo debut can only go so much further than he'd already gone with his two bands. He sustains his pace on the best songs rather than sprinting into a new rhythm. My favorites remain, a quarter-century after I first heard them, thus the top-five of the original ten tunes: "Cold Imagination" for its anthemic dirge combination; "Rainy Season" for its lulling embrace of an accessible pop approach; "I Admire You" for the wonderful backing vocals of this album's overlooked enhancement, Laura Teresa (I wonder who she is and what else she did?); "Way Out of Shape" for its sharpened, metallic guitar recalling Magazine's best; "Taking Over Heaven" for its elliptical perk-up halfway through, again thanks to honed guitar and thickened bass.

The other songs seem to wander along. They seem more of their time, as they did when they were made, at least to my ears. "Some Will Pay" stalls in Bowie self-aggrandizing poses of an overwrought vocal; "Waiting for a Train" has that la-di-da music hall tossed-off delivery that I admit always irritates me; "Out of Shape With Me" fits its title-- a good bassline but dragging vocals; "Seeing Is Believing" also seems as clichéd as its title, as it merely meanders. "Topless" is a deal-breaker, neither outstanding nor mediocre, and it's made more into a synth-pop artifact in its alternate version here, for better or worse depending on your tastes.

The other remixes and alternate versions: "Rainy" gets mixed much faster; "Rainforest" draws it out into a instrumentally-dominant long song for the dance floor of a sullen nightclub; "Cold" for #13 has a chugging guitar I like and a bit more depth; "Cold" as #14 increases the treble and sounds like its compressed, if more "live"; and finally, "Some" redeems itself a bit with slightly less mannered vocals.

Devoto, as if you are reading this probably you know, has a dry, droll, and rather lazy way of getting his lyrics across. This can work against the grain of the tune or be buried within it, as he slurs or simpers. He's an actor, and he plays a role in his literate, theatrical songs.

He can be compared to Bryan Ferry in and after Roxy Music in exactly the same method acting. As I have explained, the textures here of the better songs manage to ignite such a singer's own tensions. When the songs sound too complacent, too plugged into the stances of Devoto's electronic and angular 1983-4 era, he too trudges through them with more than a little ennui. It's his determined style, yet as with Magazine's five albums, I like it when he picks up the pace and sidles rather than saunters. When he slows down, the energy dissolves. While he may have sought this very effect, hearing the remasters in retrospect, the drive of his music leaves me more satisfied when he speeds along recklessly rather than when he turns off the ignition and coasts along in the fog.

Nabokov's "Bend Sinister":
Book Review (after my dream it inspired)

The after-effects of "Bend Sinister," that sad Vladimir Nabokov novel that I finished before sleeping, inspired a poignant dream last night. In my reverie-- a series of overlapping, dissolving vignettes each only a second or two-- the world was ending. But, this happened as a ripple transmitted by visual media that slowly spread as those recording the phenomenon on camera themselves were overtaken by this soft annihilation. This repeated itself, at first for me as the spectator with curiosity but not comprehension. Then those whose faces the amateur or professional (as if it mattered in this age of YouTube vs. CNN) reporter had documented themselves, moments later as captured on the image before it too faded, themselves turned to nothing. Not that you'd see it on camera, but there was a subtle editing that transferred you to the next group.

As far as my dream logic (suiting Nabokov's own narrative so well) can figure out, it began when some alien force had plummeted straight down into a downtown full of tall modernist buildings, all harsh Objectivist angles and oblique shiny stone granite surface. Like some Robert Longo painting seen from a distance, suited figures still walked upright, but in the monochromatic tones, a few had begun to topple. A disaster had penetrated our atmosphere, but as recording devices tried to document it and share it, those who did so and those whom they filmed would only be on the screen a few seconds before the pictures evaporated and another group took up the attempt. This was all seamlessly connected as if controlled by an unseen editor.

The first time the dreaming "I" viewed this alien intrusion, I wondered why more spectators had not succumbed. After the progression of random scenes that then unfolded, all of ordinary people gazing with gentle confusion shading into insistent dread as the camera scanned their faces, I realized that the apocalypse was upon us. I wondered why it was not instantaneous. Why hadn't I died yet? It seemed that as long as people had not been put on camera, they were still not aware of the menace that spread over the very mundane looking scenes of urban life.

But, as in one strong shot, a few women inside a steel room about the size of a small truck camper's hold, hastened to close the door that a filmer had opened, too late. In my dream, seeing this image, I understood that the contagion spread as it was witnessed, a sort of sudden shocking virus. This reminded me of a recent news story about the infinitesimal danger of setting up one of those inexplicable (to me) supercolliders inside a mountain, that could set off theoretically a black hole that without us having the time to comprehend could swallow up our universe in less than the proverbial blink of an eye.

Then, the earlier image of the alien force returned before my eye, and I knew it was my time to vanish. There was no pain involved, and like the blink, it was no different than an eyelash's closing in duration or sensation. I then woke up.

Here's a review of this amazing 1947 novel below, posted today to Amazon US. I read it in the old TimeLife Reader's Edition, 1964. The edition sold now's a newer one.

Adam Krug's a philosopher who must kow-tow to the totalitarian regime of President Paduk, who has taken over the nation. Despised by Krug, who tormented the boy he called "Toad" when they were schoolboys, Paduk gradually tightens pressure for Krug to submit by arresting his friends and eventually, in a terrible series of satiric but chillingly evoked episodes, his little son. As the book begins, Krug has been at the deathbed of his wife, and he looks out the hospital window at a puddle. This sample shows the power of Nabokov's prose, exact, precise, yet with the slight tilt of one who has learned English better than we native speakers, so as to heighten its force and ornament its control:

"They have turned on the lights of the house I am in, and the view in the window has died. It is all inky black with a pale blue inky sky-- 'runs blue, writes black' as that ink bottle said, but it did not, nor does the sky, but the trees do with their trillions of twigs." (3)

This next excerpt displays the off-kilter realism of Nabokov's prose. The omniscient voice wanders in and out of Krug's mind as the author sees fit, in Joycean homage that reveals Nabokov's deft use of indirect narration while, somehow, deepening its power by Nabokov's manipulation of his acquired language. Also, the book reads as if taking place in a Kafkaesque realm, yet one darkened even more by the shades of cruel political apparatuses that even Kafka had yet to witness. (As an aside, in its use of a phrase like "politically incorrect" and a send-up of a true press controlled by the people's participation, it eerily anticipates blogging, corporate domination of much of the Net, and even Big Brother's Newspeak, although Nabokov beat Orwell to print by a year-- in my edition's 1961 introduction he brands Orwell as clichéd but admired K.) "Bend Sinister"'s both dream-logical and mundane as the mood suits the plot, and there's an editorial slant that heightens the absurdity of much of the Ruritanian dialogue while somehow sharpening the everyday nature of brutality-- as if Bloom mingles his mind with Dedalus within the Paduk police state.

"'The state is your only true friend.'
'I see.'
Grey light from long windows. The dreary wail of a tugboat.
'A nice picture we make-- you as a kind of Erlkönig and myself as the male baby clinging to the matter-of-fact rider and peering into the magic mists. Pah!'
'All we want of you is the little part where the handle is.'" (130)

I looked up this German term: it's from a Goethe poem on a child assailed by a supernatural being who takes him away to death. I did not know this when I bookmarked this exchange, but it proves the resonance and multilayered texture of this story. The tale shifts, in the middle, into a digression on alternate readings of Hamlet, and while inventive this section appears more a chance for Nabokov to insert some pet theories in the guise of Ember, rather than a chapter that moves the admittedly challenging narrative forward. I know Nabokov's inverting what we expect in this novel, but this whole episode could have been better a feuilleton or a tale separate from Krug's story, for it is Krug who inspires us to pity and horror.

Anticipating "Lolita," this earlier novel (written 1945-6) in English sends up trashy teens, slutty vixens, sycophantic professors, and thuggish youths. These witless characters provide walk-on parts for comic, sexy, bumbling, if uneasy relief-- for many of these supporting roles only serve to tighten the net that Krug and David find themselves in as their assurances of stability disappear. As with Kafka, Shakespeare, or Beckett, these tragicomic interludes make the more ominous stretches of the story a bit less unbearable in their tension. The story becomes more manipulated by the narrator as it nears its climax, yet this conjuring trick only makes us watch more closely the dexterity of its tricks. We willingly surrender to the illusion. We see the strings, yet this only puts us more in the hands of the master, whose very fumblings (with English? with our expectations of how it's conventionally deployed so lifelessly around us?) deepen our hypnotic spell. We place our selves in the power of a maker who tells us of his own construction.

How Nabokov manages to create a book totally aware of its fictionality, while using our distance from its shadows to draw us closer into its nightmares, remains an amazing feat. This novel, while imperfect, shines more brightly than thousands of better crafted, yet far more superficial, statements about our purpose. Nabokov here may have written a novel "lesser" only by comparison with his later works in English.

Of course, this novel does not flounder in getting too exact an equivalence between any specific system of grinding down the individual in the name of the common good. Six decades later, it's still therefore fresh, for like Swift, what's attacked is not a particular cabal, but the tendency of many people to forgo thinking for themselves. An historian who's capitulated on Krug's fellow faculty tells his craven colleagues: "Oh yes, a parliament or a senate has been upset before, and it is not the first time that an obscure and unlovable but marvellously obstinate man has gnawed his way into the bowels of a country. But to those who watch these events and would like to ward them, the past offers on clues, no modus vivendi-- for the simple reason that it had none itself when toppling over the brink of the present into the vacuum it eventually filled." (40) So we repeat history farcically and inevitably.

The novel lurches about as our own minds do, between the Big Questions and the messiness of routine. Krug tries to take as an academic on the eternal mysteries; his wife's death plunges him into chaos, while all around him Krug's Ekwilist ideology (sort of a predecessor of the self-esteem fads of the later 20th century) enables the stupid to inherit this Slavified corner of a dismal world. Throughout, phrases from the "native," unnamed language are bracketed from a mingling of Russian, German, and other tongues either invented by the polymathic author or unknown at my lesser level of literacy. Again, while no explanation for these linguistic comments is given, they provide a layer I suppose of commentary for scholars and those more fluent in Slavic speech, and an estranging element for the rest of us.

Still, this novel humanizes Krug despite formidable obstacles placed by Nabokov's narrative structure and authorial tone. The relationship between departed Olga and child David deepens our connection to Krug even as we know that he's a puppet and the whole charade of Padukgrad itself plays out, supposedly as Nabokov instructs us, as another elaborate type of Potemkin village of archetypes, stock characters, and fictional ingenuity. In this too's mixed speculation on the role of the intellect.

"What is more important to solve: the 'outer' problem (space, time, matter, the unknown without) or the 'inner' one (life, thought, love, the unknown within) or again their point of contact (death)?" (154-55) While this talk may seem daunting, it unfolds as naturally (or artificially) as the surprisingly engrossing story, about which you are never sure how Krug's fate will transpire until the end (although Nabokov gives away his strategy in his introduction, if read closely).

Finally, in a manner that for its deceivingly random structure reveals much more verisimilitude than more realistically scripted depictions of organizational oppression and scholarly inspiration, Krug blurred into the narrator wonders about the ultimate purpose of any introspection, put on paper. What may have started for Nabokov as ridicule of a cult of the Leader becomes a memorable inquiry into the survival of the human within a capricious universe. We panic over our fate, the narrator notes, but we cannot imagine "the infinite past, which extends on the minus side of the day of our birth." This happens since we've already gone through eternity, but from the opposite end. It holds no fear. We've already "non-existed once," so why worry? "What we are now trying (unsuccessfully) to do is to fill the abyss we have safely crossed with terrors borrowed from the abyss in front, which abyss is borrowed itself from the infinite past. Thus we live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds." (172)

Such a book, which for admirers of not only Kafka and Joyce but Borges and Beckett (and even Orwell) must be essential reading, manages to integrate such meditation into a moving portrayal of loss, an often mordantly funny burlesque of institutional conformity, an expression of contempt for mass culture and glorification of Everyman, and a horrifyingly exaggerated yet somehow convincing depiction of the inner life of one man collapsing under the weight not only of the truncheon and the megaphone but of the weight of mortality.

Images: P.S. Dieter F. Zimmer's filmography on the Zembla site about Nabokov has stills of a film adaptation of the novel: Film stills. Right, "dexter" although N. unconvincingly denies heraldry to interpret the title, British Penguin (they always have better art-- this ambiguous photo works well). On the left, or "sinister," U.S. Vintage. On the other hand, whoever designed the American paperback chose a precise visual "negative" of a very emblematic episode! Of course, as an intrepid fan of another equally baffling artistic creation by The Fall, forty years after the novel, now I must go back for clues to give another listen to their identically titled LP.

Owlshead Mountains & Mt. Washington

I've made an armchair expedition today, with the help of Google given the fact that oil prices, a heat wave, my often remarked sun sensitivity, probably a four-hour drive one-way, no vehicle worthy of the trek, and lack of cash all prevent me from venturing to these barren expanses myself. But, as when I was a teenager, poring over maps of San Bernardino County's deserts eccentrically inspired my imagination. We form, I read, a deep attachment to a spot that we saw, maybe only on an outing, as a child, and no matter the mundane reality, this setting lingers in our soul.

Wandering with the help of photos on the Net (see below for two of the area I write about now) and charts makes it a wonderful way to vicariously roam while saving the toll on Mother Earth. Maybe too it's her way of warning us that our footprints, carbon or tread, have left too many paths that time cannot erode, and that we need to cut back our manifest destinies so as to ensure our survival in more humble manner? Or, as many jeeps and 4WD's will still pummel the desert floor despite my own retreat from that fray, will my stance matter? As with recycling, you do pause when so many around you toss into the trash next to you what a few more steps urges you to dispose and renew. But, the green part of me hopes that more people pause before their thoughtless behavior endangers our future. This may be the upside to energy costs, although I doubt if many Indians or Chinese, let alone most of my neighbors, care much about Earth Day. Perhaps more of us will be vacationing this cyber-friendly way as fuel rises, incomes stagnate, and roadtrips for many of us become luxuries rather than impulses? Wasn't it in "Soylent Green" where the man dies as he sees on the big screen panoramas of a natural world long despoiled?

Maps always spark my dreams of travel away from the smog that comes with such urban destruction. I too long for escape-- even a lazy stick-in-the-mud who longs to retire not to the oasis but the fog. I loved Mojave placenames left by miners and railroaders. And, as I like owls, here's the best of all: "the curious twin basins on the southwest edge of Death Valley, which appear to form the eyes and face of an owl, gave rise to their current name, the Owlshead Mountains." (Richard Lingenfelter, "Death Valley & The Amargosa": 83).

Intrigued by the owl shapes, I have tried to find a suitable image of the aerial terrain that allows me to pinpoint the avian features projected by wishful men upon indifferent shrugs of tectonic nature. There's places with this name in (at least) New York, West Virginia, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Nova Scotia. Google Maps does not help much for California; there's no image I can find on-line of the sketch that christened the Owlsheads that Lingenfelter reproduces in his history on pg. 84. That survey done in 1856 and published the next year would be the first for the newish state of California establishing its borders with Nevada-- in hindsight all the more necessary given the Comstock Lode sparked a rush in 1859. Claims would soon matter much to another new rival state.

The map done by William Denton's crew chops up the owl image since any level ground's erased of features. More about that in a moment. The topographical-like maps I can locate show, oddly, "Owl's Head" immediately north of a double ring of "eyes" that to me look more like twin orbs. Not so much a couple of basins to me as a pair of circular peaks. Perhaps the lack of mapping accounts for present-day border disputes and another century's realities of the importance of deserts for more than gold. Back neatly, in a recursive hell that brings the wheel spinning back to apocalyptic prophets and pious assassins from another continent's pitiless buttes. Coincidentally, where we also find oil-- spinning into the RVs and dune buggies that crawl about the grit and dust today. Yesterday a hulking pick-up cut me off as I tried to enter a treacherous and poorly signed freeway onramp. The back of the glittering black truck had an enormous sticker: "Glamis." It's the endangered sand dunes near the Chocolate (another great title) Mountains in the Imperial Valley, which attract heaps of emissions, stink, and trash. That's only the drivers. Apropos, there's an "Owlshead Mountains Aerial Bombardment" facility listed, at the lowest end of the Panamints at the southwest corner of the National Park, north of the Marine base at Ft. Irwin where tanks prepare for combat in another arid latitude of dust and grit across the globe.

About the place, well, it's desolate. The Panamints seem quite barren, and early travellers recount how they rose to eleven thousand feet above a depression, in more ways than one, nearly three hundred feet below sea level. The exaggerated contrast, heightened by the snow that sat on the top of Telescope Peak and the two-thousand foot fingers of stone called The Minarets, must have disheartened many lost pioneers. But, as the photographs credited below also show, in the snatches of spring that the area enjoys, wildflowers soften the plains and ease the glare. A "vision quest" (I wonder what the Shoshone and Paiute there think of such pilgrims) has been logged on the Net as one man's encounter with the area, Off-roaders share their trails-- the map link gives a NGS map of the one-way road into the area; the military apparently controls the rest of the region, although part of the Owlsheads have recently been added to the park. Not that far away, news last month of investigations at Manson's '69 hideout (pre-infamy) at Barker Ranch in the canyon and possible leads for more bodies buried out there in the empty lands raises the specter of madness that accompanied so many taletellers who left this place, or pretended to have entered it! Saltpeter, it appears, firing up greenish spontaneously at night on the floor of Death Valley, is to blame.

So, not only New Agers but insane messiahs seem to have a short shelf-life left out here in unforgiving territory. Surveyors in 1856-57 drew optimistic "township lines" that showed farming or ranching plots-- I suppose wherever the ground was flat enough. Why? The maps were not at fault, but if you look at them, you see they leave numbered squares across any place where no elevation's highlighted. Even the owl is half-drawn. The rest of his head's a tidy grid on featureless white. A developer's dream, and a mapper's profit, but an explorer's shortchange and a government's defrauding. The cartographers were paid by how many of these wide acres they subdivided. Similar to the robber barons today who buy untouched hills, draw up plans for housing tracts in pristine open space, and then sell the land at inflated values to the nature conservancies that we taxpayers foot the bill for.

Lingenfelter explains that this practice led to suspicion of these maps. Salt flats, sand dunes, and mountainsides "so steep and rugged a man could hardly climb up them." Same problem today where I live near the lower slope of Mt. Washington (all of 800 feet!). There are "paper streets" on older maps of the neighborhood for homes and roads that would have to defy gravity, but unfortunately we have technology today able to cantilever and blast our way vertically, like goats.

Although the bulldozer replaced dynamite (a recent invention around the mid-nineteenth century, I suppose, by Alfred Nobel). So, at least until for me the welcome collapse of the housing bubble, it became not only feasible but, given inflation affordable, for speculators to tear up vertical rocky outcrops and wrench holes deep enough to plunk concrete blocks with windows. Three of these monoliths (one on a triple lot at thrice the size) have been erected around me the past three years, so I have reason for frustration.

To ease my edge, I can look at these photographs. Q.T. Luong, whose pinkish Panamint Range vista I included on this blog last week, here has another shot with flowers:Butte and Owlshead Mountains. Ron Niebrugge has his shot that I post, looking south, and perhaps I conjure owlish eyes on the foothills, of Hairy Desert Sunflower and Owlshead Mountains, from Ashford Mill, Death Valley. TrekNow has a good map of the general road, but the more fanciful viewer cannot make out the underlying roll of the birdland well. Map of Owlshead Mountain Trail. Finally, an article from BioEd Online: "Owl's Ears Map the World"

An Unlit Candle: Seders for Tibet

I read about this in the current "Forward," which arrived today. Jay Michaelson, whose column "The Polymath" invariably comes closest in print to what I myself believe in my better moments (despite being neither gay nor Buddhist, let alone a law professor, lauded poet, overachieving Ivy Leaguer, urban urbane wit, must I go on?). I wish I knew about his new effort seven nights ago. He's promoting, if a week too late for our home's Passover, this campaign for not only remembering at the commemoration of liberation the unfree Tibetans, but for helping to save them.

Here's an excerpt from his grassroots effort:

"And now, as the Chinese Olympic torch is met with protests around the globe, we call on you to join the effort to shed light on Tibet’s suffering by extinguishing a torch of your own.

We call on all Jews to include an unlit candle on their Seder Tables this year. The candle symbolizes both the Olympic torch, whose light has been dimmed, and the unmet hopes of a people still living without freedom.

In the Jewish tradition, light symbolizes freedom, hope, and renewal. On Shabbat, Chanukah, and on holidays including Passover, we light candles to shed light into our hearts, thank God for the blessings we enjoy, and commit ourselves to our religion’s ideals of justice and freedom for all.

But for three million Tibetans living under military rule, the light has been extinguished. Tibetans may not freely practice their religion, display their flag, or honor their leader, the Dalai Lama. Doing so puts them at risk of jail, torture, or worse.

The point is not just to have another symbol on your table. Rather, as with the rest of the Seder, the point is to stimulate discussion and action."

Michaelson writes about supporting the Tibetan cause, of course, but I think that his suggestions do not go far enough. Personally, despite the Dalai Lama's calls for no boycott either of China nor the Olympics, I wonder why such efforts should not be done. I know the Buddhist understanding seems less sanguinary, and more sanguine, than our Western theologies of liberation and teleologies of deliverance. But, perhaps without sounding ethnocentrist, a little kick in the ass might be what the Panda Bear needs? Forty years of ping-pong diplomacy do not seem to have eased the suffering of the people there, nor have they in this span surpassing the Exodus in length found their Pure Land of promise.

Surely a boycott would provide a truly powerful counterattack to the economic hegemony and political dictatorship that increasingly we outside the PRC also feel in our daily lives, as debtors, consumers, and workers who see our own democratic (such as it is in theory) gains slipping away as the foreign superpower grows in prestige and influence? I have mentioned this issue (search keyword "Tibet") more than once on this blog the past two months. Typical, you might carp. I go on the Net rather than march in the street. But, the Olympic torch never came within 500 miles of me. Like it or not, for we post-boomers, this is our cyber-Berkeley. And, where you and I share our attenuated dialogue has become the agora for our new Athenian dialogues across much more space than even Socrates knew or Aristotle defined. A few weeks ago, when on this blog I listed sites I'd found that advocated such a campaign, I found only a few, often desultorily, advocating this effort.

Most people shrug off this as too difficult; a recent book "A Year Without China" gained about as dismissive reviews as one that also came out about a year without shopping at a chain store, for much the same lethargic reason. Too much of a hassle, not worth the trouble. As for me, I look for the non-union label, so to speak. I'm tired of not having any choice on the shelf but to buy shoddy goods made by exploited workers. Personally, if the Irish had bothered to turn against the British chain stores and auto makers (back when they made cars there), the troops would have heard "slan abhaile" long long ago. Never understood why Grattan's "burn everything British except their coal" became nothing more than a rousing slogan two hundreds years hence, but I'm naive, I know. Same cognitive dissonance that makes ManU the leisure apparel of choice for the average non-Celtic fan throughout most of the 26 Counties. Yet try finding a Galway City football cap or hoodie.

Back to boycotts. If Britain was so righteous in the past to disdain diamonds from South Africa or the U.S. to prohibit cigars from Cuba, why not put our principles to work and cut ties with China? Maybe for the same reason our armies and our leaders in revenge went down rabbit holes after Afghan warlords and Iraqi 'insurgents' rather than strike the petroleum-rich pulse of the Islamofascist threat: the Wahhabi regime who, in the name of piety, has gone so far as to bulldoze Muhammed's birthplace for fear of idolatrous haji. We go after the Grenadas and Panamas with gusto, while Saudi Arabia and China (as MFN status, naturally) bask in the profits we so willingly give them with our SUVs, Wal-Marts, and daily "freemarket" choices at the market, the gas pump (I paid $25 for 6 gallons today), or the dealer. So, I agree with Michaelson's strategy, but in a spirit he would share, I also challenge his definition of what should be a far bolder initiative in the cause of human rights.

There's a link at Unlit Candle to nobler, less testy minds than mine. (I suffer from the Irish disease of begrudgery.) These more enlightened souls write nuanced articles on Tibet. Jewish activists add their own perspectives; there's also thoughts for the Seder, and a hyperlink to, among other sites, The International Campaign for Tibet at SaveTibet.org See more: An Unlit Candle

Bláthannaí, Duine & Gaeilge

Déarfaidh mé rudaí teangeolaíochtaí agus luibheolaíochtái agus daongrafachtaí go beag fúthu. Tá sé litir ar Na h-Amanna Éireannach le Phaedra Keogh go fhoilseoidh ann inniu. (Féic síos, le do thoil.) Smaoineamh mé faoi an hábhar seo céanna freisin go minic. Aontaig mé féin léisan. Scríobh Keogh as drochbhláth an theanga ina scoileanna go leor ina hÉirinn.

Mar sin féin, tá mé ag iarraidh a usáid Gaeilge beagán agam. Cruinníonn mé leis obair ar an idirlíon go rianta. Go hiondúil, d'fhoghlaim mé féin amháin. Nílim ábalta cuimhne a choinneáil go líofacht. Déanann mé dearmad leis gach focal eile!

Ar ndóigh, caitheann mé ag léamh fiche noimoid ar an maidin nuair imíonn mé ar an mbus. Chríochnaigh agallamh Bheo leis Deas Mac an Easpaig le Caiomhe Ní Laighin inné. Bhí maith liom. Thosaigh mé air dó a trí nó a ceithre de sheachtainí. Léigh mé mír gach lá. Léifoidh mé rud céann aríst. Léann mé trí huaire air, ar an laghad.

Shíleann mé faoi Ghaeilge fós. Fuair mé leis eolas faoi bláthanna léana ar mo intinn go luath! Tá Keogh i gcónaí ina Áth na Fuinseoige. Chuir mé cuairt anseo. Tá sé gaírdíní go halainn ansin. Chaith mé ag dul ar fad ag fáil an radharc seosan lasmuigh cá bhfuil mé i gcónaí. Thiomaint mé an iarnóin seosan triu ar bruchbhaileannaí Ghallchnó agus Coibhina Thiar. Tháinig mé an bóthar difriul. Bhí bóthar motair ag dúnta. Ní raibh sé ag oscailte. Chónaic mé an mullach na sleibhte leis capín shneamh. Rug mé ar feiceáil go beag ar mustard scéine ar an cnoc in aice leis an bóthar, ach níl sé go leor. Cén fath?

Maireann duine ar imeall anois. B'fhéidir, bhí siad ag tagtha le Oileáin Fhilpeaneacha go pairceannaí sin i gcluasa ansin. Feiceann tú an straid leis an ainm: "Leann na Mainile." Tógann siad teachtaí milte. Cailleann cluainte. Thiteann crannaí. Úlloird bás a fháil. Tá sean-scéal ina gCathair na nÁingeal agus fobhaileannaí ar feadh an treimse go bhfuil i gconai anseo. Beidh scéal amháin. Chuala mé siadsan riamh ó shin nuair bhí mé óg.

Flowers, People & Irish

I'll talk about things linguistic and botanic and demographic a bit. Here's a letter to the Irish Times from Phaedra Keogh published today there. (Look below, please.) I think about this same matter often as well. I myself agree with herself. Keogh writes concerning the language's ruination in many Irish schools.

Nevertheless, I am attempting to use my little Irish. I gather my work on the Net regularly. Usually, I learned by myself. I'm not able to keep a memory for fluency. I make a mistake with every other word!

Of course, I spend twenty minutes reading in the morning when I go off on the bus. I finished an interview in "Beo" with Des Bishop by Caiomhe Ní Laighin yesterday. I liked it. I started it three or four weeks ago. I have read a bit each day. I would read something again. I read it three times, at least.

I thought about Irish also. I found information about wildflowers in my mind earlier! Keogh lives in Ashford. I visited there. It has many beautiful gardens. You must go a distance where I live to see this view outdoors. I drove this afternoon through the suburbs of Walnut and West Covina. I came a different road. The motorway was closed. It wasn't open. I saw on the summit of the mountains a little cap of snow. I caught a little look at wild mustard on the hill near the road, but there was not much. What happened?

People live in the outskirts now. They came there perhaps to these fields on the fringes from the Philippines. You see a street with the name: "Manila Way." They built thousands of houses. Meadows are lost. Trees fall. Orchards die. This is an old story in Los Angeles and the suburbs during the period that I have been dwelling here. The story will be the same. I have heard it ever since when I was young.

'Wretched' level of Irish in schools
Madam, - How amusing it is that it takes a man from Flushing, New York (Des Bishop) to arouse even a bit of interest for our young people in the Irish language?

How typical is it that the RTÉ programme aired last Thursday (In the Name of the Fada) ends with Bishop - alias Mac an Easpaigh - trying to get explanations as to the inexplicable lack of spoken Irish in our schools, with the Minister for Education waffling on about change. And the conversation about Irish was in English!

How frustrating is it that we have been carrying on with this charade for the past 50years and more and that my son who, 38 years after me is in fifth year, cannot string one sentence together in a language that he has been learning for 13 years?

Could we please come to our senses and either confine the poor, even wretched, teaching of this beautiful language to gaelscoileanna or teach it so that people can actually speak it? If it took Bishop only one year to get there, why do we not have one or two years in primary school where everything is taught through Irish? - Yours, etc,

Phaedra Keogh, Killiskey Cross, Ashford, Co Wicklow.

Irish Times, 2008-04-25

Iómhá /Image: Label of a Lemon Crate/Lipéad chliathbhosca liomoid, 1920. "Mountain View, Covina"

Glyn Jones' "Selected Stories": Book Review

I read Glyn Jones' gripping "The Pit" in a later collection of stories by various Welsh writers, "The Green Bridge," (reviewed by me on Amazon US and here recently); the novella "The Green Island" here rivals it in length, plot and premise. Two uneasy lovers find that nature conspires against them and wonder if it's more than the elements that have it in for their adulterous actions. Jones combines the quasi-biblical cadences of many of his fellow Welsh writers who move between their native language's rich imagery and eloquent rhetoric into an English perhaps marginally more spare, and perhaps more blunt. The result can make for a stylistic register that may at first sound out of sync with contemporary English. It's stranger and more detached, even as its intimacy draws you in to a faintly archaic mode, despite the modern settings of many of these stories.

Like the Irish writer Liam O'Flaherty, who also went back and forth between his native Irish and English for powerful stories that often entered into animal as well as human souls, imagining their brutal and yearning lives on the edge of civilization, many of the stories here set up parallels. Characters appear often rather archetypal, and this heavier burden means that some stories remain clunkier by comparison. I liked the selections best in which, as Jones explains in an excellent brief introduction to this 1972 anthology, as a writer he gets to play God. The clash of conformity with instinct, the pairing of beast with human, sparks confrontations and tensions that impel the best stories.

Some, as he notes, are based on anecdotes he heard; one appears taken from a Welsh legend, and the rest, even though they take place in the middle of the last century, more or less, evoke often a distant time freer of distractions from passion, revenge, lust, and loyalty. Surprisingly, the mines so well described in "The Pit" do not appear here; the pastoral settings of the south-west Welsh coast contend against the Welsh city as the places for these stories, but, as with O'Flatherty, I reckon Jones favors the rural redoubt over the urban bustle. The peace may not come in either place for his protagonists, but there's less to draw his characters away from their silent, nagging, or insistent voices in their head as they face nature and enter themselves to wrestle with the big questions that, inevitably, they must answer.

(Posted to Amazon US today; I note a collected stories came out in 1999 from U of Wales Press. Too expensive, but worth seeking in a library!)

Painting: Sir William Nicholson, Tate Gallery caption: "The Nicholsons lived at Harlech in North Wales towards the end of the First World War and later. This view is from high above Harlech Castle, which is itself on the edge of a hill, and looks across Tremadoc Bay to the mountains on the Lleyn Peninsula. It is seems [sic] to be by moonlight, after rain, with a reflection from a slate roof and a pattern of shadows cast by the walls around the fields." "The Hill Above Harlech" 1917

Mad Dogs & Irishmen?

Englishmen proverbially roam imperiously under the sun, given it never used to set on their realm, suitably a ruddy or rubicund shade spreading over the Victorian globe. Take Ulysses, Chapter two, as Mr Deasy blathering about Shakespeare (quoting Iago's "put money in thy purse" but attributing that sentiment to his presumably thrifty Statford maker-- the authorial fallacy!) interrogates Stephen:--

He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth?

The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.

-- That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.

-- Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that. He tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.

I could go on quoting Joyce endlessly, but back to one problem of that empire. While much was made last century of the Irish "spiritual" conquest of the world, as a cleverly ethereal counterpart to the King or Queen's domain, the Irish still must have recorded many instances of being unable to adapt. When I was eighteen, I met a Capuchin Franciscan friar from Ireland, who disdained my own expressed sentiment to stay out of a hot summer sun. He'd suffered no harm, and couldn't understand why a native-born Californian like me would wish for shade.

As I've been thinking and reading about the desert lately, my mind keeps wandering back to the problem, at least for me, of "climate adaptation." I'd like to find out more about my pet theory that I cannot fully acclimate to Los Angeles despite my nativity (if not epiphany) here because of my Irish "blood," the fact that genetically for thousands of years-- possibly back ten or even fifteen centuries in Hibernia according to Stephen Oppenheimer's recent interpretation of DNA studies (speaking of this and Celts, French and otherwise, see my review here)-- my ancestors lived in cooler climes, which the body adjusts to, of course, over time. Not enough time, I counter in one's own lifetime, for fully adjusting to the newer region. At least for one as fair-skinned as me?

This relates to the Zionists who came back to Palestine from the shetl. Didn't they at least a notable number wilt in the Negev after so many years in the yeshiva? We all know the sabra stereotype of rugged he-men in little sun-hats toiling on the kibbutz, but I keep skeptical: surely many of them digging ditches and hoisting plows could not handle the relentless heat? While the unforgettably named (a stereotype of Victorian Albion but actually quite contemporary) Francis Spufford wrote (the title's a great quote from the gallant valediction of stoic Robert Falcon Scott of the ill-fated Terra Nova South Pole expedition) "I May Be Some Time: Ice and the British Imagination," has there been a counterpart for what Sir Richard Francis Burton titled, more erotically, the "Sotadic Zone"?

How did the mad dogs and not only English but Irishmen handle the midday tropics, the desert, the dunes? Burton famously learned a raft of lingo and disguised himself as an Arab, and we have plenty of erudite islanders who followed his eager steps into the Middle East. But, how about the ruddy nuns in wimples, the priests in black soutanes, the traders in pith and miners in denim? How did the Irish manage as they tramped the past couple centuries of trails in the name of Church, Crown, or Capital?

[Hard to find an image by name. I googled "mad dogs irishmen" to find this Indymedia blog entry, with a bowlered image from an anti-Orangemen mural, fittingly ablaze, at least pictorially so. No Orange March]

"Death Valley Lore": Book Review

Two Richards, Lingenfelter & Dwyer, edit this 1988 collection of "Classic Tales of Fantasy, Adventure, and Mystery." They compile them from sources that kindled the public fascination with this supposedly inhospitable, magically hidden, stupendously lucrative, yet utterly fatal place. So the legend was printed, to paraphrase John Ford. Forty-niners gone astray, John Brier & William Lewis Manly, provide their own powerful narrations from when they found themselves trapped there, the first white men to witness its terrifying and dispiriting sights. Prospectors like Shorty Harris and promoters like George Graham Rice share their polished, yet engaging, accounts, as do editors of newspapers from the camps. They're joined by a host of flimflamming publicists eager to cash in on the crazes in the later 19th and earlier 20th century surrounding hoaxes, self-dramatizing forays after lost mines, Death Valley Scotty's mendacity, and the Bullfrog discovery. Yarnspinners and poetasters-- the best being Paul DeLaney surviving the summer's heat and Sydney Norman's debunking of Scotty-- round out the breathless array of selections.

It's a handsome volume, but it would have benefited from a more detailed map than the dated, single inset one prefacing the book. I also wish more period illustrations had been interspersed throughout, instead of only at the start of each chapter. Also, the editorial material's very slim, a short introduction to the collection and brief notes prefacing the selections offering not much explanation or context for the entries. While these do often speak for themselves, the editors could have assisted the reader who does not know fact from fiction here.

For the truth, Lingenfelter's standard 1986 history, "Death Valley & the Amargosa," gives you in exhaustive but not exhausting detail a well-told in-depth survey; John Soennichsen's "Live! From Death Valley" entertains with a personal travelogue that captures the sense of the terrain from a modern perspective. (Both works reviewed by me on Amazon and this blog recently.) This subsequent anthology, on the other hand, revels in the rather dated, inflated and hyperbolic styles of the past. These types of stories made the impressions on those who never came within a thousand miles of the desert what it "must" have been like, in all its romance, horror, and hyperbole. Some of these impress-- the harrowingly detailed yet efficiently sketched forty-niner Manly or Brier's eloquence humbles you, when one realizes the limited formal education such men likely had, and how well they used their ability to tell a gripping first-person survival account better than any "reality" t.v concoction.

John Brier sums it up: "One tires of writing about yielding sand and impeding scrub, so effectual in stretching distance and consuming strength and time." (33) Either the teller begins to risk tedium by being honest, or conceit by being imaginative. Endless pages of despair don't hold one's attention; ghosts, skeletons, glitter, and wild Indians do. These rhetorical flourishes, set to separate elsewhere fools from money, or at least audiences from spare change for a paper, may wear down the contemporary reader, but they do provide an insight into how the popular press plays upon fads and puffs up trends. C.C. Julian (surprisingly absent from these earlier reports, but see Lingenfelter's history) and Death Valley Scotty foreshadowed the Tony Robbins and Donald Trump, relentlessly and inventively selling themselves as they sold you for decades on end still more of their secrets of success. They never let you peek openly into their hoard, but these early promoters know how to keep you hoping to learn more. Much of the stock market frenzy, seller panic, and buyer lust can be seen in today's e-commerce and globalized markets no less than the semi-fictitious boasts by inside traders and secrets whispered by PR spinners over a century ago from this place that still haunts dreamers and provokes schemers.

Photo: Harold Davis digitalization. See: Death Valley Sunrise 2

Richard Lingenfelter''s "Death Valley & the Amargosa" Book Review

With a fifty-five page bibliography and a hundred pages of endnotes, you'd expect this closely documented history of this region, published from a university press by a professor (of physics!) to read like most academic texts. It does not. It's witty, insightful, droll, while remaining relentlessly focused not on the feel of the area (for that, see his "Death Valley Lore" edition of century-old tall tales and/or journalism or John Soennischen's lively personal take "Live from Death Valley"; both books also reviewed by me here and on Amazon)-- but on its discovery by pioneers, its promotion by hucksters to gullible investors, and the sheer difficulty of getting its mineral and ore riches out of the Valley due to the lack of water and wood. No matter how tempting the surface finds might promise prospectors and speculators, the fact remained that more borax than gold came from there, and perhaps more lead than silver, and the enormous labor and climatic peril meant that, less than a century after it was stumbled upon by gold-rushers seeking a shortcut west, it became more lucrative as a tourist attraction rather than a mother lode.

Lingenfelter assembles his considerable data primarily from newspapers and government archives of the time. Maps both early and later help you visualize the places, and period photos give you a peek into a few of the sites. I wish more of these had been included, but it's a minor flaw. Chapters cover chronologically the pre-European settlers; the miners of the 1850s and 1860s; the Pocket Miners' boomlets that sparked buying frenzies for gold, silver, lead and later the humbler but savvily-sold borax; the copper and lead profits; and the rise of the auto, rail, and bus excursions that in the wake of Scotty's endless PR set the Valley indelibly on the map and on the silent screen. His opening paragraphs for each of the chapters and sub-sections serve as models for expository writing in their command of image, style, and intrigue.

The author wrote most of his account based on the contemporary reports from the area, and the abundance of press from the California and Nevada mining towns themselves must have rivalled dueling bloggers who try to cash in on the staked-out domains of the Net in our own feverish commercial marketing campaigns. Death Valley's Scotty and his lesser-known real-estate snake-oil rival C.C. Julian emerge from these closely printed, but largely engrossing, pages as larger-than-life promoters of their own image and of the dreams of avarice that they kindled in their readers all over the country. The narrative leaps energetically into such characters' humbug, and your patience for all the data on stock prices, lists of claims, and dutiful attention to grubstakes and legal battles, while all necessary for the foundation of such an informative text, is rewarded with a chance to feel the repelling yet fascinating charm of the salesmen who sold the spirit of the Gold Rush or Klondike or Comstock to later, more citified, folks, and delighted in the con all the way as much as perhaps many of their willing victims seemed to do. Likewise, the manipulation of Leadfield by Julian as the profits rose and fell on his considerable talents in advertising what his reader wanted can be rivalled by earlier, less-known efforts such as the Panamint and Bullfrog and Ryan mines that crested and tumbled their value on the stock exchanges in roller-coaster fashion.

Finally, there's a glimpse at such later figures as "Bob" Eichbaum, who built a toll road, sensibly, to found a resort smack in the middle of the Valley when his horses refused to go any further with his supplies for construction. He and the last to get rich off the Valley managed to do so by convincing Hoover, just before he left the White House, to protect the interests of those who had already cornered the market for the automobile-bound visitors. These developers wished to keep the mining going, while heading off any real-estate boom, and they succeeded in cornering their control of the concessions and sights, while getting the taxpayers to take over the bill for roads, maintenance, and upkeep.

Still, as Lingenfelter concludes, this may well be a great bargain, for in its appeal as a supposedly deadly, noxious, forbidden, or hellish place, its own Hollywood-fueled scenario makes it the largest National Park today. It also was spared the dispiriting subdivision of Palm Springs or the tacky sprawl of Las Vegas. In its not-quite pristine but still rather primitive state, it's a place where yearly one that half a million of us drive to, winter or summer, in search of the curious lure that impels us to look high up to Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the 48 States, while far below sea level at fittingly named Badwater.

Ag eisteacht Raidió Fáilte

Léigh mé an alt seo ar Gaelport.com: "50,000 Fáilte romhaibh" ar an eagran 22ú Aíbreán 2008 an nuacht Lá. Craoladh Raidió Fáilte ar an tuiscint. Is stáisiún Thiar Béal Feirste é ann. Scríobh "Aisling" nuair ag curtha sí an léiríu ar an blog seosan, 28ú Márta: ba chóir duit éist le Raidió Fáilte ar an idirlíon ag www.raidiofailte.com, tá suíomh nua ag teacht!

Cloiseann daoine go leor an Raidió Fáilte. Tá siad i gconaí ar an domhan ar fad. Is cosuil leis Raidió na Gaeltachta nó RTÉ anois. Má mian libh a cloisfidh Gaeilge beo, caithigi sibh ag fáil áiteannái go furasta libh teachtaí agaibhsa.

Dúirt mé leis Diarmuid Ó Tuama an samraidh seo caite. Tá séisean ag obair ar an stáisiún. Tá sé labhairt ar an raidió go rialta ansin. Tá craolachán dó An Chulturlann ar an Bóthar na bhFál.

Ábalta sibh eisteacht stáisiún ar an idirlíon. Chuala mé féin air faoi lathair. Bhí sé ceol na tuaithe a sheinm. Is maith liom rince tíre go minic. Ach ní bhfuair mé seans a cloisteáil dom focal uile. Measaim go raibh an t-am ar an iarnóin a imirt nó a codladh.


Listening to Raidio Fáilte

I read this article: "Welcome to 50,000 of you all" on Gaelport.com, in the 22 April 2008 edition of the newspaper "Lá." Raidió Fáilte broadcasts from the North. It's a West Belfast station. "Aisling" wrote when she posted a comment on this blog, 26 March: "It's right for you to listen to Raidió Fáilte on the internet at www.raidiofailte.com, it's a new location coming." {Her sentence sounds better if left in Irish!}

Lots of people hear Raidió Fáilte. They are living all around the world. It's similar to RnG or RTÉ now. If you wish to hear living Irish, you must get those places easily in your own homes.

I spoke with Diarmuid Ó Tuama this past summer. He himself works at the station. He's speaking on the radio there regularly. The broadcast is from An Culturlann on the Falls Road.

You're all able to listen to the station on the Internet. I heard it myself recently. There was folk music playing. I like dances from the countryside often. But I did not get a chance to hear any other words. I guess that it was the time in the afternoon to play (games) or to sleep.

Bemidbar: Passover 5768

"Into the desert" is the first phrase of the Book of Numbers, that dull census. It fits, however, our storytelling as we met for last night's seder. We hosted two families who, while they had only met each other at our own gatherings in passing over the past fifteen years, together my wife and I have known a long time. Longer, for her, as one of the women was her high school best friend. Seeing the six children, theirs and ours, at one Passover table, and the six of us at the other (although Layne cooked and cleaned so much as is her balabusta style that she rarely sat down with us, pillow and reclining if the ancients were to be strictly and luxuriously followed in their admonition to sit back and relax this night, for once), I thought about how Jews always-- and more recently non-Jews too-- have gathered for such yeastless feasts for three millennia. We had a question-and-answer, seminar sort of open-ended discussion as we navigated the venerable shoals and eddies of the "order" of Pesach.

I tried, given my own pedantry and the fact we had a professor up for tenure among us as well as a nine-year-old girl and a lot of restless teens and people with varying levels of commitment or patience for midrash jot-and-tittle minutiae, to keep it brisk. With kids younger, I've done it in under half-an-hour; this took an hour, but I hope we all learned rather than languished. Happening but yearly, the details do need repeating, and memories often lag meanwhile. The switch from a pedagogical to androgical set-up does help with older youth. Freire might applaud. We could ask them to help tell the story-- as Jews are commanded to do each Pesach-- and to explain why we do each part of the seder. In my teaching mode, I nonetheless avoid rote recitation. I used old photocopies of a family-friendly Haggadah I'd cut-and-pasted a decade ago, and we riffed off of these as older and younger moods fit.

Olivia knew lots about the rabbinic stories behind the text. She filled in helpful conjectures that have accumulated, given the centuries involved between us and the Exodus. Little Lucy perked up with the plagues and helped act out them in our traditional family charades. As Sarah pointed out, it does get easier to guess when you have only ten to start from. Layne commented that next year, she would not put the shankbone on the plate to commemorate animal sacrifice; the roasted beet could suffice as a friendlier substitute.

The last straw's that broke the oppressor's back's also a burden. Layne winced at the text's culmination in the sacrifice of the Egyptians' firstborn as a necessary goad to get the Hebrews out of that "narrow place," the land known in Hebrew as Mitzrayim. (Robin and I wondered why it's a plural noun ending). Yet, she also agreed that if there was some retribution involved in some Iraqi-vs.-American (or Israeli) atrocity today, we'd likely be unable to turn a cheek for another pacifist, unilaterally Kumbayah, cheek. Another reminder of how the two testaments differ, and of the lack of pacifists on the bristling frontiers around Eretz Israel for the past six watchful decades. Nobody celebrates with any more cinematic or bestselling "Exodus" concoction those who burrow there. About ten percent of those for whom the Law of Return attracted their parents from exile now live abroad. Many of these "olim" seem the main cause of traffic on my city's Westside! The others, as Manchán Magan has eloquently described in his two accounts of India and South America, appear to follow their ancestors, trekking across far terrain after their army service drives them away from the intifada to recover shalom. Those remaining "up there," the ones who've made "aliyah" and arose to the once-vibrant postwar challenge, face becoming a minority in their homeland. Debate between Zion as a land for "next year in Jerusalem" promise and Palestine as no land of "Israel Lobby" premise continues to roil even within our haggadah.

It lists the custom of putting fingers in our wine to take out a drop for each plague, as a reminder of diminishing the joy at the destruction of our enemies. Robin and I wondered if this was "liberal guilt." I'm not sure if this gentle gesture would find its imitation on much of the West Bank today or among those who managed, as I read the other day, to smuggle under their clogs three turnip peelings to use as "matzoh" in the clandestine seders held in the barracks at the concentration camps. As must have been all too easy in 1943 Dachau, Jews can summon up imperious injunctions from the Creator to never forget Amalek. You can't let your guard down. The enemies do wipe you out, down to the stragglers in the long line who lack the strength to flee.

But, for how long must Jews urge "never again"? Until the fourth generation? How long past 1948 is this? I can hear this as a kumbayah echo. What do schoolchildren in Hebron and among Hamas both memorize at their own dinner tables? What songs do they hum before another skirmish over this tiny rift between Africa & Asia?

My recent readings of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have refreshed in my scriptural mind such Levitical citations understood and perpetuated in their xenophobic paranoia. Dawkins cites George Tamarin's study that took Joshua's blitz of Jericho and tested the responses of Israeli children as to its morality. Tamarin found that even the secular students largely approved: 66% total, 8% partial, while 26% with total disapproval. Maimonides defended this too: "It is a positive commandment to destroy the seven nations, as it is said: Thou shalt utterly destroy them." When Tamarin replaced the biblical names with "General Lin" and "a Chinese kingdom," for a different group, only 7% approved and 75% disapproved. (255-57: "The God Delusion") But, if the Israelis lacked their Defense Force, would they have survived a month past independence sixty years ago?

Furthermore, for no Jewish argument's easy, the Chosen also have been long chided by their jealous God not to forget their own bullseyes. Almost like baboons: they cannot blend into the camouflauge. For, always each Hebrew's back(side) seems forever branded by that same Deity who placed them in this great continental divide so temptingly placed between Pharoah and potentate, three continents crossing, incense once and spices then and oil now all sought by a greedy world. Always in target range of their circling, and always multiplying, billions (it seems) of foes.

This harsh vibe after the hang loose-let live Santa Cruz spliff or Berkeley raga does remind us that when you're commanded to tell the impressionable children this perilous story of escape endlessly, that with it comes the reminder that you're a member of another tribe. Thus lots of killing of first and other-borns, on both sides of the Semitic divide, recorded in scripture, on videotapes, with stones. The leftists constantly urge us to respect The Other, and the sin of Orientalism looms large on curricula and in diversity programs. Yet, I did notice, from my own stints in conventional academia, how rarely today's few million Jews gain nuanced understanding.

Instead, it's always MOT stereotypes. A council of bearded elders plots trilateral world domination. IDF bulldozer crushes willowy peace activist. The tubby macher on the Malibu beach with the Botoxed shiksa trophy wife. Hollywood producer, twice intermarried, trots out another Broadway romp aimed at the upscale urbane (if shrinking demographic) able to chuckle at a deft sprinkling of verbal schmaltz. The latest Judd Apatow sex comedy with our nebbischy mensch pining after a perky natural (?) Nordic blonde. (Like the one he married in real life who gets to star in his movies despite a marked lack of talent.) It's ads in the "Forward" to rally with boycotts, against jihads, and amidst rumors of endless persecution. My sons with their monikers fending off snide remarks while their friends with the "right" surnames can blend in without any Jewish matrilineal connection, which I alone seem to find ironic. My wife shrugs at such tired images. It's a people always assimilating, yet never quite able to "pass" into.

So, being far from the Promised Land but with no Moshiach in sight, we at our seder returned to the edgy customs evolved of those who never quite fit in no matter where they dwell. Moses bred into Hebrews the need to cover one's rear guard. Where'd Jewish comedy be without such a nervous glance, a defensive disarming tic?

We opened the door to see if Elijah awaited. I heard this custom also arose out of the diasporic need to assure passers-by that no grounds for blood libel lurked within. A few minutes later, the Mexican neighbor's boy came to the gate to ask for Niall to come out and play. Our other neighbor, who was from Ukraine, had her partner's parents visiting. I wondered if she went to any seders after her own 1970s-era departure from the USSR, in what at the time was billed as the great rescue of Soviet Jews into freedom. As Layne and she have joked about, the expensive liberation brought about by a combination of Kissinger-type diplomacy, Israeli duplicity, and American publicity did not exactly fill the pews of our local synagogues with millions of grateful Semitic semi-Slavs. I also imagined (despite the windows being closed on her side) that our emancipated neighbor heard us all when our dozen voices sang the Four Questions demanding why we keep doing this archaic routine, Mah Nishtanyah, in Hebrew.

Leo piped up, for once, with an answer to why the Egyptians did not immediately let the Hebrews go. We recalled the chilling verse that "God had hardened Pharoah's heart," and I lamented a capricious God who changed the rules halfway through the game of life. He did it with Job, Moses, Judas, and Pharoah. I suppose that Lot finagled too when he bargained YHWH down at Sodom, however, and Moses certainly lied enough in his pimping Sarah off on various priapic potentates, one Pharoah included, as his "sister" to save his own sagging tuchas on his own desert expeditions. By the last "arranged marriage," she would have been withered considerably even by inflated biblical chronology, about ninety-odd. Did she laugh then as she had when the angel told her husband that despite being withered and unable to enjoy pleasure, she'd bear Isaac? And look how Abraham treated his own first-born, Isaac. Incomprehensible, but duly recorded and memorized, orders for slaughter of the innocent, to a dutiful founder of the Hebrews from an earlier disembodied voice above another barren mountain across that same desert's expanse.

Rosie answered why Moses had to flee into the desert. Olivia and Sarah told us why Moses stuttered-- the burning coal picked and sucked by him as a baby over the toppling heap of gold. Ben knew why he returned. No child knew the name of Moses' wife. I noted how compared to the likes of Esther or Rebecca that Zipporah (or even Tzippi if you're a sabra) failed to catch fire for the many mamaloshen of millions of mothers. We went on to the fabled events, and paused to note the late Charlton Heston's role in imprinting them on our imaginations. We oldsters all fondly mentioned the Easter apparition we loved, when both "The Ten Commandments" and "The Wizard of Oz" came on t.v., once each spring. Scott suggested that seismic shifts might have given rise to the parting of the Red Sea story; I compared the long race memory of what now archeologists confirm what must have been the post-glacial flooding around 8000 BCE that created the Black Sea.

Niall explained the symbolic charoset to commemorate the Pyramids built by the slaves (who would not have been the Hebrews, contrary to popular belief!); Sarah noted that this mortar detail actually came from the Babylonian "captivity" of the post-First Temple Hebrews exiled to Persia, long after the supposed events in Egypt. She told us how she'd studied the Joseph story in detail, and how scholars today believe that the Exodus account was "backdated" and invented to latch on to the Joseph tales. I also wondered if this could then be used to justify the Promised Land being given to the Jews, after they'd been somehow lured outside of its borders, and to defend their conquest of Canaan as being deeded them by the land-grant Lord in Manifest Destiny fashion.

Robin and Sarah also reminded us that Moses never entered the Promised Land do to his sin, not only of striking the rock twice for water (a pretty minor misdemeanor if you ask me) but for killing the evil taskmaster. Rosie pointed out that Moses only found out he was a Hebrew when his brother Aaron visited him at the Pharoah's court. I also remembered that Aaron made the golden calf, and when I suggested it must have been about six inches high due to the lack of gold that the fleeing Hebrews would have carried with them, Julia provided a rejoinder: "You don't know Jewish women."

Layne summed it all up, after an hour of such conversation, before the meal. I had mentioned to her yesterday I'd been wanting to ask folks this at our Seder, as we were all (except Lucy) grown-up enough. If as scholars now tell us, that the Exodus never really happened, why do we act as if it did? Ben observed that the Sinai was not so large as to get lost in it forty years, while Rosie noted that the disbelieving older generation longing for their shankbones had to die off first before the land of milk and honey could be entered-- according to God's relentless bookkeeping; Olivia and I agreed that the Egyptians would have noted the Hebrew episode if it had mattered in their chronicles or they'd have been too dismissive to record what would have been a minor tribe-- no 600,000 men-- passing through up and down past Gaza as they had before and since as of little importance: no plagues, no fire, no troops drowned.

The adult table spent most of their night discussing our own aging and the deaths of our parents. We all had undergone the passing away of loved ones the past year. Layne returned to the metaphorical etymology that I mentioned above, "of passing out of the narrow places." This appears to have taken on new currency in secular times, among Santa Cruz-Berkeley in spirit, NPR-demographic in substance Jews like those at our seder, as far as I can tell. These myths and those midrashim entice me, Olivia, Robin and Sarah. Nevertheless, for the less owlish at our tables, I suspected more compelling reasons to go through the ritual could be found in its symbolic enaction.

We have to overcome our limitations. In a self-actualizing manner, Jews and anybody else coming to care about this considerably hectic (if you do it right!) holiday-- note the black adoption of a "freedom seder"-- have learned to recognize that meaning lies beyond the trappings of eggs and spring fever. We dip greens and do spring cleaning and munch matzah (which may be the "bread of affliction" but less so if baked with chocolate another 18 minutes or so!). Not out of the fear that if we fail, that we'll be stricken with leprosy or that the seismic shifts may consume us as they did those cavorting around the metallic idol.

For me, I only eat matzoh at Passover: it reminds me of self-control, of the need for instilled discipline. I lack any Yiddishkeit, which for most of those last night at our home may compel them to keep up the injunction to tell this story "as if it happened to us" for so long. Any recollections of the aroma of brisket or the tang of maror for my first- and second-born will come only from this latest installment in the gnarled family tree that connects three of them back to the tribes who claimed--even if long after the fact, as inspired fiction-- they once fled across the wilderness into freedom. For us all, Passover's a reminder of how lost we are when we flee the fleshpots of Egypt alone to roam within our own bewildered souls, without comforting manna or a guiding pillar of fire.

May you live to be 120: so a woman at the Mitzvah Store blessed my firstborn a decade and more ago, across the street from my father-in-law, who died before he reached that symbolic age when Moses was buried, and, confounding fundamentalists if not rabbis, managed to write about it in the last of his Five Books. So the stories twist over the centuries into human contradictions, squaring the eternal circle clumsily. We need the company of others stubborn enough to call themselves or ally themselves with Jews: this lesson remains the conclusion of our seder. We continue on this long journey into the mortal desert that-- for we six at the grown-ups table last night different from all other nights-- will end our days at most not at six score but at best in forty years.

Image: J.M.W. Turner, 1800, Tate Gallery: "The Fifth Plague of Egypt" {Dever: cattle disease. At least I stopped eating brisket this seder, although you should taste my wife's...!}

Irish Miners & California Deserts

Googling these four words together, not much. The Gold Rush, sure; Virginia City, Nevada, some; Western entries that mention all four, certainly. The five entries I cobble together prove that Hibernian stereotypes may span the sexes. But the sons and daughters from the oul' sod bond over demon drink and/or in dissolute digs.

Mark Twain's Chapter XXI in 1872's "Roughing It" enters Carson City, where lodge fourteen members of the Territorial Irish Brigade, among them four or five commanders. As for their proprietress: "The Secretary and I took quarters in the “ranch” of a worthy French lady by the name of Bridget O’Flannigan, a camp follower of his Excellency the Governor. She had known him in his prosperity as commander-in-chief of the Metropolitan Police of New York, and she would not desert him in his adversity as Governor of Nevada." But no mother lode struck, 25 searched webpages times ten hyperlinks means I've dug deep enough for now. Libraries may well unearth more valuable ore.

Jack Keane, who named after himself Death Valley's very successful "Keane's Wonder Mine," was an Irish miner from Ballarat (not the Australian boomtown). With with a one-eyed Basque partner, Keane hit paydirt in the Funeral Mountains in 1903, after eight years luckless. He and the Basque cashed in their shares for $50,000 each (I reckon around two million bucks today). Keane, living large with two prostitutes back in Ballarat, got liquored up. He shot the "constable." And he shot the deputy, oh no. After being released from county jail in the ironically or aptly named Independence, Keane returned to his homeland. He killed a man in a bar fight there; he spent his last seventeen years in prison.

An online registry of television episodes unearthed this tidbit: "Kung Fu" episode: "Nine Lives": An Irish miner must find a replacement for his camp's beer drinking cat mascot- which he accidentally killed- in order for him to be allowed to return to work. b[roadcast]: 15 Feb 73. A far more comprehensive scan of a more informative site for "Bonanza" failed to produce such a gem to rival this in terseness and tension.

From a handsome website entry about Cerro Gordo, "fat rock," once a mining town along the western slopes of the Owens River Valley to the east of Death Valley: The combination of whiskey and women made the dance halls, and the red-light houses of Lola Travis and Maggie Moore, the principal scenes of gunplay. Dr. Hugh McClelland, physician at Cerro Gordo, reflected upon one such incident the night he accompanied a young man wishing to visit one of the dance halls. A hot-tempered Mexican girl overheard McClelland explaining to his younger companion the reason for her odd nick-name, and came at the good doctor with a stiletto in her hand. An Irish girl caught her by the wrist and disarmed the screaming Mexican, but not before a Mexican man was shot dead by George Snow when he tried to plunge a knife into McClelland on behalf of his girlfriend. This ended in a general shooting until the lights were extinguished. Owens Valley History Still, I realize we do not learn the Mexican hostess' "odd nick-name."

This next nugget did not get uprooted from the desert, but closer to my home. Still, I find it a splendidly random find from an inestimable treasure I mean to grasp-- one day-- in the Library of America edition to take with me into "The Mountains of California," as the title of John Muir's 1894 account tells us. Its concluding chapter's all about beekeeping, which Muir, as always, tells in splendid prose.

Today, near the Rose Bowl and the start of the Arroyo Seco above which I live about fifteen miles south, Eaton Canyon's the gravelly cradle of Jet Propulsion Lab. The expanses around it loom with a typically sub-par public high school named for Muir. Around what he would have seen as orchards are a century later endless substandard ticky-tacky apartments and houses on the flats. Elegant pre-McMansions perch upon the foothills, above mini-malls, over lots of ugly corporate parks. At one of these I took my wife to a doctor, where I thought about the rocky washes above in the San Gabriels. About these, hunt down John McPhee's typically lengthy essay about how we Angelenos hold back the boulders every wet winter in his New Yorker piece published in "The Control of Nature." I have lived most of my life within sight of these ten-thousand foot peaks. Often shrouded in smog or haze, but sometimes crowned by cobalt clouds or tipped in fleeting snow, they watch me grow, for a fraction of their own implacable timespan. Here's Muir, from the Full Books text, Ch. XIV, "The Bee-Pastures"

Setting out from Pasadena, I reached the foot of the range about sundown; and being weary and heated with my walk across the shadeless valley, concluded to camp for the night. After resting a few moments, I began to look about among the flood-boulders of Eaton Creek for a camp-ground, when I came upon a strange, dark-looking man who had been chopping cord-wood. He seemed surprised at seeing me, so I sat down with him on the live-oak log he had been cutting, and made haste to give a reason for my appearance in his solitude, explaining that I was anxious to find out something about the mountains, and meant to make my way up Eaton Creek next morning. Then he kindly invited me to camp with him, and led me to his little cabin, situated at the foot of the mountains, where a small spring oozes out of a bank overgrown with wild-rose bushes. After supper, when the daylight was gone, he explained that he
was out of candles; so we sat in the dark, while he gave me a sketch of his life in a mixture of Spanish and English. He was born in Mexico, his father Irish, his mother Spanish. He had been a miner, rancher, prospector, hunter, etc., rambling always, and wearing his life away in mere waste; but now he was going to settle down. His past life, he said, was of "no account," but the future was promising. He was going to "make money and marry a Spanish woman." People mine here for water as for gold. He had been running a tunnel into a spur of the mountain back of his cabin. "My prospect is good," he said, "and if I chance to strike a good, strong flow, I'll soon be worth $5000 or $10,000. For that flat out there," referring to a small, irregular patch of bouldery detritus, two or three acres in size, that had been deposited by Eaton Creek during some flood season,--"that flat is large enough for a nice orange-grove, and the bank behind the cabin will do for a vineyard, and after watering my own trees and vines I will have some water left to sell to my neighbors below me, down the valley. And then," he continued, "I can keep bees, and make money that way, too, for the mountains above here are just full of honey in the summer-time, and one of my neighbors down here says that he will let me have a whole lot of hives, on shares, to start with. You see I've a good thing; I'm all right now." All this prospective affluence in the sunken, boulder-choked flood-bed of a mountain-stream! Leaving the bees out of the count, most fortune-seekers would as soon think of settling on the summit of Mount Shasta. Next morning, wishing my hopeful entertainer good luck, I set out on my shaggy excursion.

Pictures: "The Irish Brigade" & "Light on the Subject" (of the tarantula that terrifies Mrs. O'Flannigan's boarders) "Fully Illustrated by Eminent American Artists" from Project Gutenberg's e-text.

Ag stánadh uait

Sílím faoin spás. Feicfear ach triú chuid achar go ceart nuair rachfar ar an díseart. Déanann muid dearmad; tá sé níos mó gur measaim muid. Léigh mé seo teacs ann. Fuair mé as "An Lámhleabhar Mhaireachtáil Dhíseart." Chuaigh mé ar An Leabharlann Lárnach i na gCathair nÁingeal ar lár.

Shúil mé i dtreo na h-áit inné. Bhí lá teas an earraigh. Bhí sé leathuair tar éis a dó tráthnóna. Fhilleadh mé as an grian. D'fhan mé faoi scáthannaí na ilstórachaí, nó teachtái na spéire. Chóir an lucht oibre go beag crannaí ar an cosáin shráide.

Tháinig mé isteach ansin. Bhí socair agus fuar istigh san fhoirgneamh. Tógann sé os cionn agus thíos trí i ngach h-urlar. Chuaigh mé anuas an staighre. Bhain mé an lámhleabhar de seilf, ach ní raibh sé ag tógtha liom. Ní rinne mé bearna ar an mála agam air. Cad a tharla? Bhí mian liom rudaí éagsulaí. Rug mé ar foireann seifeannaí na Stáir na gCalifoirnea leabhair Ghleann Báis eile.

Tá mé ag léamh faoi scéalaí go hiondúil anois. Feiceann ar an leabhar go hiontach le Risteard Lingenfelter go raibh dlíodóir sa fichiú céad déag i dtósach leis ainm céanna agamsa féin. Mhear Séan Ó Murchú ar an shraidbhaile mianadóireachta i bhfád Phanamint seisean féin! Tá baile thaibhse inniu go mbeadh ag cur cuairt agam go luath.

Ar raibh íonadh ar Seán an aturnae ann go uile? Ar fear Éireannach é? Bhí maith leis ar an te is cumhlachta sin? Ar raibh sé ag féichthe ar na radhairc go halainn is cosuil an iómhá na radharc seo, gur taispéantaim thuas? Cá fhad seisean go raibh maireacht ansuid? Níl fhíos agam go raibh fir go Eirinn ag imirt siar. Caitheamh eolas air. Foglaimeoidh mé go leor futhú. Ar ndóigh, tuigim go raibh (agus go bhfuil) mar áiteannaí go leor fír na t-ainmheannaí is coiteann céannaí leosan! Mar sin féin, tá ainm aige go raibh dífrúil níos coitianta domsa, leisean mean-litir "M."

Staring into Space

I think about space. One may see only a third of the correct distance when one is going in the desert. We make a mistake: it is bigger than we think. I read this in a text. I found it out in "The Desert Survival Handbook." I went to the Central Library in Los Angeles downtown.

I walked in the direction of the place yesterday. It was a warm spring day. It was half-past-two in the afternoon. I returned out of the sun. I stayed under the shade of high-stories, or houses in the sky (skyscrapers). A group of a few workers trimmed trees along the sidewalks.

I came into there. It was calm and cool within the building. It's built above and below three stories each. I went down the stairs. I took the handbook off the shelf, but it was not taken with me. There was no gap in my satchel for it. What happened? I brought from the shelves on California History other books on Death Valley.

I'm reading about the marvellous stories now. I see in the wonderful book by Richard Lingenfelter there was a lawyer at the start of the twentieth century with the same name as me. John Murphy lived in the remote mining hamlet of Panamint itself! It is a ghost town today that I would like to visit soon.

Did John the attorney wonder at it all? Was he an Irishman? Did he like that most powerful heat? Did he look at beautiful panoramas similar to this vista's image which I show above? How long did he himself last out there? I do not know how many Irish went out west. I must find this out. I will learn more information about these [matters]. Of course, I understand that there were (and are) many such places with men of the same very common name! However, his name was a more popular variant of mine, his with a middle letter "M".

Photo/ Griangraf: Q.T. Luong Desert Gold flowers and Panamint Range, Ashford Mill area, sunrise. Death Valley National Park

Colin Fletcher's "A Thousand Mile Summer": Book Review

What I remember about this compelling narrative, read thirty years ago one hot Southern California summer, is a simple scene. Hiking towards Death Valley across the Mojave desert, Fletcher's hat blows off. You can imagine the terror he felt from this loss. I'll leave it to you to find out more. It's an example, one of many, of the intriguing vignettes scattered through this account, from a time when backpacking (the journey takes place in the early 1960s) lacked so much of the hi-tech GPS, lightweight fibers and metals, and the advantages that allow many today, even if they do not dare to follow so far in his footsteps, to take more of our life into the empty places. The same places where Fletcher sought to escape the full places where most of us live.

This book reminded me of John Muir, a century earlier, when it entered into the Sierras; Fletcher's northbound journey, of course, takes him from Mexican to Canadian borders. The sylvan settings, however, became for me more muted in memory as compared to the evocative, harsh, and unforgiving sandy stretches that captured more of my imagination in recalling the power of this engaging narrative. It might not have gained the amount of acclaim (compare the number of Amazon reviews) that worthy books that came later, like Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire," earned, but the late Fletcher preferred to stay away from the spotlight, one senses from this early account of the walks that later made him a pioneer among those today who seek solitude in deserts and mountains across America.

Fletcher may have prefigured a bit the countercultural movement. Perhaps he missed out on the big-name recognition, but he gained respect among those who also preferred retreat rather than spotlights. But if you read of his own wish to escape the routine and do what back then far fewer would have even known how to do, you see his prescience. Like Abbey and Muir and Thoreau, Fletcher reminds us how much of America waits beyond the sodium-strip mall and the big-box chain store and the red-tiled roofs of the subdivisions-- even as these continue into what once were quieter forests and chaparral where Fletcher once walked alone.

(Posted to Amazon US today)

John Soennichsen's "Live from Death Valley": Book Review

He attempts to capture "my reverence for Death Valley's geology, history, and harsh environment. It is a reverence conceived in naiveté, nourished through repeated exploration, and polished with the passage of time. It is the story of how this region helped construct my views on the environment, tourism, solitude, and religion, among other topics. It is part memoir and part adventure tale; part history and part coming-of-age story." (xiii) He compares the Valley to a harsh mistress whom he still loves. One who "did not seek to hide its appearance with vegetative cosmetics, did not adorn itself in soft and sumptuous outer garments or employ subtly filtered lighting or cool desert breezes the tempt my senses." (xii) Not all the narrative, wisely, emerges from such extended metaphors. These are deployed sparingly, for maximum effect.

He knows the power of the fanciful placenames we use to try to account for Death Valley's weird formations. Our attempt to play Adam shows both our bold confidence that we can control nature, and our failure to understand the ineffable forces that outlast us. Our naming reveals their power over us far beyond what words can convey. Nevertheless, he tries in a variety of registers to explain some of the fascination that this territory's provoked in him and within a few hardy, or deluded, people over the past century and a half.

William Lewis Manly's tale-- as retold skillfully by Soennichsen-- of his fellow pioneers who took what would become a fatal short cut for some in their party in 1949-50 (ironically a much wetter winter and more forgiving climate than usual) here's interspersed with chapters on the geology and desiccation, the mining and pioneer days, the unpredictable weather, the flora and fauna, the crazy folks, The Devil's Racetrack mystery of gliding boulders, more crazy folks, his earlier forays into danger, burros, and what can be seen off the main roads that circle the National Park. Unfailingly, he gives enough insight into his own experiences without getting bogged down in superfluous details from the rest of his life.

He selects only what's appropriate to illuminate the Valley, from his point of view, and supplements it sparingly but deftly with the records from history and fellow sojourners. I sensed that much more could have been told about the mining camps in particular, but other guides and academic works did this. The context, nonetheless, for such efforts as the 20-Mule Borax Mule Team that in turn spawned the now-nearly forgotten (he makes an aside to it) "Death Valley Days" show by Ronald Reagan before he entered 60's politics remained undernourished. Yet, we can find out more in longer, or less accessible, works. He appends a short list of sources selected, but I would have liked much more annotation or specific suggestions for other media. (There's a URL given on the dust jacket with www. plus the main title of his book as a single word plus dot-com; I tried it today and found a dead link, however.)

This book earns five stars for its clear prose, careful composition, and thoughtful analysis of this infamous expanse. Although the cover and titular typeface make it at first look less than the well-informed investigation that the contents reveal, and the lack of a usable map or representative photos do detract unfortunately from my perfect rating overall, this book's recommended. The photos tended to be rather indistinct, as if random snaps, and did not depict the splendor or strangeness of the sights his words witness.

I admit a bit of confusion. He cites verbatim the dangers of dessication from Richard Lingenfelter's standard history, while he contradicts what Lingenfelter asserts on the previous page of "Death Valley & the Amargosa": that the Shoshone term "Tomesha" did not mean what Soennichsen in his own introduction's first sentence asserts: "Ground on Fire." (xi; cf. Lingenfelter 1986: 11-13--also reviewed by me here and on Amazon.) Lingenfelter traces this false "Paiute" etymology to a 1907 "one-liner" from a geologist. Lingenfelter gives "Coyote Rock" as the probable Shoshone derivation from what was once the largest Indian village there. Thus, as both authors agree, the mythic and the illusive certainly reign over the landscape.

Speaking of placenames, Soennichsen's map, while it reminded me of an affectionate sketch one might take away from an insider who shares his own points of interest on a napkin with you after a long conversation in a local bar near the Valley, on small paper's too cramped and idiosyncratic to serve the curious reader wishing for more precision and an easier comprehension of the many sites referred to in the text.

Yet, these remain minor faults compared with the book's strengths. I admired Soennichsen's style, both as a thinker and a chronicler of his beloved realm. For roughly four decades, as he sums up his book's scope, he's been roaming when he could these quiet lands, preparing to tell the tales in this brief, lively, but serious record of what lurks beyond the myths of this often forbidding, yet coyly inviting, place.

He's edited this efficiently told collection of interrelated essays down, I estimate, from a larger work, and the discipline in crafting his reflections shows in the meditative, yet never dull, pace. With touches of self-deprecation, memories of lots of beer in coolers, and the right amount of anecdotes, he tells entertaining yet educational stories. As with Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire," this updates the ancient wonder of the American desert for our times; Soennichsen has the advantage of moving further west than Abbey into what still seems to me a Mojave that has lacked the attention from nature writers that it deserves and earns in the hands of such earlier efforts as the late Colin Fletcher's "A Thousand-Mile Summer."

Soennichsen's final chapter accomplishes this feat of verbal reclamation best. Without revealing why I think his night in Surprise Canyon proved so apt a name for such an encounter as the one he relates, he also cocks a sober eye towards our hubris and chides our refusal-- in a wilderness that often punishes the foolhardy visitor-- to respect the limits that such a desert represents to all of us who drag motorhomes and generators out there into the silence. We wish to see Mother Nature from the comforts of only our frigid automobile window, or perhaps after tearing it up under our 4WD's spattered windscreen. Without getting sanctimonious or hypocritical, he marvels at relentless human endeavor to tame such an awesome place. Also, he elicits respect for the hidden places that should not be domesticated.

I did not expect the penultimate pages of this little book to end with a chapter citing Sartre, but it's again testimony to Soennichsen's skill that he can integrate a profound observation into his own reflections without it coming off as showing off. At Chris Wicht's Panamint camp, he finds intimations that connect with Wordsworth's "inward eye which is the bliss of solitude." (qtd. 168) Our existential solitude, as he learns one midnight, takes us into our minds as the most mysterious of all our landscapes, where even Death Valley may look tamer by psychic comparison.

(Posted to Amazon US today.)

Panamint Live-Forever

Reading John Soennichsen's "Live! From Death Valley: Dispatches from America's Lowest Point," I came across this cactus flower's evocative name. It's not that pretty, as this photo (C) taken by Br. Albert Broussard at St. Mary's College in Moraga, indicates, but still, it's a splendid taxonomical identification. I guess it's hardy enough to earn its title, as part of the Dudleya saxosa family of succulents.

CalFlora tells us: "Common names: Panamint dudleya [Hrusa 2001], Panamint liveforever [PLANTS 2001], Rock Live Forever [Hrusa 2001]. Communities: Creosote Bush Scrub, Pinyon-Juniper Woodland, Chaparral. Elevation: between 787 and 7218 feet [Calflora 2004 (m)]. Dudleya saxosa, a dicot in the family Crassulaceae, is a perennial herb that is native to California and is endemic (limited) to California alone [Lum/Walker]."

I don't live high enough to see it even though part of L.A. County's included in its range, but then again my native county contains an enormous amount of botanic diversity, if much of it around me crushed into the cracks of the pavement, given the relentless real estate development that obliterates chaparral into heat-trapping concrete. We hasten our own urban warming as we conquer the stubborn desert. I like the name maybe better than the plant, but then I've always liked the place "Panamint" for its tribal iambs too, even though so far Soennichsen's lively narrative's the closest I've come to visiting the actual "low point." That may change, at least when the weather drops-- already we're heading into the wrong time of year. I realize from reading how I have no worthy vehicle let alone enough money for $4/gallon gas, and a better map than the book provides that also will tell me how to navigate the Owlshead Mountains, another range to the south-west of the melodiously monikered if fatally formidable Panamints, the range that guards in turn the south-west entrance into the diabolic desert declivity.

The weekend a couple hundred miles closer to Mexico, far beyond the Owlsheads, near the Sonoran-Mojave meeting place, north of Pinto Mountain on its eponymous road, a month ago still captivates me. It proved my first meeting with a true inland panorama of dirt and scrub where I could finally hear, for minutes at least, the sounds of air without motors, radios, or tweets. I realize how little I know even of a realm three hours away.

For all its emptiness, the Pinto Basin, as I searched Google Maps, compared as I'd reckoned on our drive across it about the same size as the San Fernando Valley. But, with nobody rather than 1.7 million people filling its spaces. I thought when I saw the Pinto Basin of how to the Spanish in 1769 as they sought a site for their mission that this was what, more or less, the S.F. Valley also looked like in its immensity of scrub and sand. Today, by the satellite maps, you can swirl back and forth from the colors of we urbanites to the shades of near-wilderness over the 150-mile span on the wide computer screen, and you sense the relentless push no longer westward but easterly back into the Mojave for those of us unable to afford those cooler coasts.

Pinto towered thousands of feet, and its alluvial plain fanned out in greens and tans that must have given it its name. I was astonished to learn later that a century ago, in three separate moves that followed the ore findings, the Dale Mining District lured 3,000 residents into this bleak if lovely in its haughty disdain for frippery like verdant groves of trees, lapping lakeshores, or trilling birdsong. This enormous vista hypnotizes by its lack of immediate change.

Google's aerial views, however, show you more color from the rocks washed down in the flash floods that fill the skirts at the bottom of the ridges. Used to more variety, my senses were thrown off by the subtler textures beneath the initial monotony from a terrain that to me seemed devoid of any tree beyond a stick or two my height. The silence and the desolation, that attracted to Joshua Tree Keith Richards and Gram Parsons, to Death Valley Charles Manson and Tex Watson, that creates fanatic messiahs and also consumes them, certainly provides a terrifying as well as comforting answer to our eternal longings. In such, maybe the enduring bristlecone and creosote over thousands of years attest to the Panamint Live Forever's own wistful nomenclature, and our admiration at the hardiness of flora opposed to our own mortal frailty.

Ironic to me, who hates the sun, that I have always loved to pore over maps of the Mojave. A perfect armchair traveller, today I wondered as I looked up at the sandstone and drying bursts of gold in the dying wild mustard, clearing tumbleweeds from around the driveway and knowing that a rare cactus or coyote lurked even within walking distance, of how close the boundary remains between our shrivelling dirt patches that hint of the desert beyond and the city whose towers I can view if I scramble up the closest hill, only three miles away.

I grew up for a few years on the edge of the Mojave, if at its farthest fringe that no longer can be trekked as easily, on the extreme eastern edge of L.A. County above Claremont, and for its hardscrabble rocky expanse, such gravel and brush remains endearing to me for all its forlorn dustiness. My school was called Chaparral. I spent the happiest times of my childhood roaming such plain places, before the tract homes and the 210 Freeway demolished the quiet and felled the orchards.

I know it's risky to romanticize the Southern Californian landscapes-- they turn too quickly into mini-malls, red-tiled roofs, and sodium lit-sprawl. My life here's been disappointed by constantly increasing congestion and concurrently dispiriting construction. But, even if those bird-inspired-- or are they curvily shaped?-- Owl-headed hills likely will be no less bleak and more austere than any around me now, and the appeal of a name may be as whimsical as many that have been given to fanciful formations of Devil's Golf Course, the Racetrack, Badwater, Artist's Palette, or Dante's View, there's an enduring if atavistic fascination of such a disdainful and dangerous area. It reminds us of our limits. As Soennichsen concludes his book, he links existentialism to the place he chronicles. The results are both terrifying and humbling. The emptiness of such a locale brings out primal fear as well as wonder, and in such hideaways the sound of another's footsteps can stimulate solace or threat. He finds this in what's fittingly named Surprise Canyon one night.

The names we bestow on the plants and formations we find in these towers of sand and plains of salt witness our own record of encounters with the numinous and the strange. Out of such exchanges with nature, we try to control them as Adam did nature, by naming it to tame it. Death Valley, no less than Joshua Tree, attests to our human need to tell stories, three millennia after the Jews mythically wandered for forty years, about the stones and flowers gathered and glowing around us.

Derek Hayes' "Historical Atlas of California": Book Review

This chronologically depicts California's discovery, development, and divisions. It follows the guesses of the earliest European explorers (I wonder what a native map would look like, but none's represented) and you see the island gradually become a peninsula or archipelago before assuming over the centuries its coastline. Then, the interior begins to take shape, and cities and farms and railroads fill the spaces. A sort of time-lapse ideologically and practically from the past five centuries.

You better understand the gaps: Virginia is shown a few days from California in one early attempt, while the Gold Rush pioneers used routes that were narrowly drawn and could not be deviated from-- around the rest of the West there might be empty spaces, figuratively or cartographically. San Francisco benefits especially throughout its growth, and a 1906 aerial drawing shows dramatically the fire sweeping some--but not all-- of The City. Hayes informs us in his text how the fatalities had been underreported (under 500) when they may have been three or even six thousand. The speculators and profiteers did not want to ruin their chances of rebuilding and selling to new residents. Such chicanery can also be found in the early Spanish who kept their findings off the maps, or kept the maps secret, to avoid tipping off discoveries to the rival British.

Not only rail and auto and industrial, but oil, military, and unusual maps appear. Those in which the patterns of Los Angeles 125 years ago can be found in the train routes, and how these mirror the freeways today, are instructive. I also learned that a 185-mile interurban line once ran from Chico to the Bay Area, to my great surprise. Among other finds: the color-coded charts directing the Japanese relocations during WWII, Jo Mora's Sierra cartoon (but his Hollywood one's not here), and a 1887 Hollywood real estate map from its first booster who, typically, showed many more mountains than even a pre-smoggy day could be glimpsed from Tinseltown-- let alone the beaches!

The text is informative, but I caught an error: Henry Kaiser's steel mill would have not been built at Fontana "eight miles inland" to avoid Japanese attack. Perhaps Hayes meant "eighty"? I do wish some of the maps were larger; the book's affordable and portable enough, but this invariably cuts down the ability even with magnification to discern the kinds of precision that any lover of maps likely has who'd buy this book.

(Posted to Amazon today.)

On First Listening to Horslips, 1978.

Lee Templeton at Come Back Horslips and a related small media empire of informative and celebratory endeavors on this 1970s Irish electric folk-rock band asked me, to connect with her own reconstruction of the band's 1978 American tour, to share any memories I had about the scene for music
in Los Angeles at that time. Perhaps I'm the only one on the current CBH network outside of the five players and their roadies who might have any "native" knowledge of my hometown at the time, yet I admit that my own recollections remain limited.

I would have been still in high school then, ending my junior or beginning my senior year. One of my classmates, born in Co. Durham, brought back '45s from the Pistols and a copy of "New Musical Express" recounting the rise of punk. Word of mouth or a stolen glance at a newsstand's magazine's spate of monthly reviews: that was about it for publicity as far as it reached me. Furthermore, I knew nobody as interested in critically listening to, and analyzing, music as I was, or at least as open to eclectic styles. I wished I could play; those classmates kept to themselves.

The radio had many rock stations back then in L.A., but only one played regularly what one day would be called logically if dully "alternative." Concerts weren't an option. Even punk, curious as I was personally, acted itself out in distant suburban dives and skanky bars faraway. It too depended on the California tyranny of the auto, disaffected postures of its carefully displayed dishevelled denizens notwithstanding. They'd likely have borrowed mean ol' daddy's wheels, but these were not offered to me. With no car, little opportunity or tolerance for what nightlife a shy teen could attain, and obviously underaged even by more liberal 70s alcohol laws, I'm no regaler of any clubbing short stories or backstage tall tales. My first "real" concert did not happen until the following year, when the Clash played the Santa Monica Civic. I bummed a ride. My hearing has never been able to withstand amplification, so I rarely attend-- and cannot truly enjoy-- rock concerts.

So, what can I tell you? Better to re-create the isolation that a bookish rock geek sustained thirty years ago. I'd read about Horslips well before I heard them, first in (NME editors) Nick Kent and Bob Woffinden's "The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock," bought in 1977 for all of $7.95. Completed in May 1976: so, it's an indelible visual and textual artifact from the Anglo-American scene immediately before punk broke, or was hyped, by the same NME! Skimming it now, I find each page frozen still in my photographic memory. I pore over what now looks like a hodgepodge of grainy publicity shots, oddly chosen LP covers, and concert snaps. At the time, however, before video and when you'd never see reproductions of album art outside of the record store and its posters, this brought the hedonistic representation of the corporate rock world into my distant hands.

Three out of many of its pictures that remained in my mind: the cover of Carly Simon's "Playing Possum" (could have been named "Playing Pussy" with that come-on); a Barrett & Gilmour-era publicity photo of Pink Floyd that taught me "saturnine;" a caption under the LP sleeve for "Red Rose Speedway": "Wings' second album; too bad there was only room for McCartney in the cover shot." This in true "High Fidelity" form segues indirectly, as I learned many years later, closer to Horslips, for indeed this LP had a veteran of the folk and especially blues-rock Northern network, Henry McCullough join Wings. John Kelly in his semi-fictional novel "Sophisticated Boom-Boom" tells of his mother watching Wings on tv and casually remarking that she knew him-- he grew up on her street. The teen (Kelly's five years younger than me) was gobsmacked that his mum could have such a brush with (pre?-post-) Beatles-levels of fame. Such is Irish three-degrees-of-separation, as many of us have found out.

Like Kelly, I acquired a small melange of disparate rock records. I painstakingly saved up on a weekly allowance and later a minimum-wage summer job. Although I never cottoned to blues and avoided jazz, and while my folk interests developed unlike Kelly's at a considerable remove from the sources, I did share his timeframe when it came to the music. Although he was more precocious or I was more laggard. We began listening seriously around the glam era, when the hippie come-down thanks to, well, groups like Wings, softened the edgy acid and agitation of the Sixties into a mellower, pot-hazed mood enhancer. As Macca influenced so many others, into a pop-friendly acceptance that led musicians in the 1970s to embrace older traditions that their immediate rabble-rousing predecessors, while they may well have grown up on the same tunes, had not been able to openly admire then due to their street cred.

Same effect for the punk scene, when it became trés un-cool to credit such art- or prog-tainted bands as Horslips. British folk-rock, as with Fairport and Steeleye, still flourished when Kent & Woffinden published their tome. But, even a year later when I would have read their text, the market for such medleys of Celtic lore and British tales with electrified beats and glossier production had plummeted. I've written about this in my recent article that cites Pat McCabe's "The Dead School" with its hapless protagonist Malachy, whose rise and fall, I argue, follows that over the Seventies for Horslips, the band he admires and whose tatterdemain and hirsute look he cannot give up by the time the Clash dominate the trends of the Picadilly boutiques and the assaults on late-decade London airwaves.

He was too drunk, too destitute, and too demolished as he cried into his pints, but Horslips, as the campaign for "The Man Who Built America" that I reproduce above in its red and black graphics and determinedly New Wave design seeks to convey, sought to keep up with the airwaves and boutiques. Unlike Malachy, the tresses of all five band members were shorn--even Johnny Fean's--and they adapted (art student Charles O'Connor being in the vanguard much earlier, more pub-rock by even 1975) a harder production and a slicker sound. More radio-friendly, but I admit I never heard them played on the radio even on KROQ, which around '78 had found its niche in L.A. as the station championing Devo, Blondie, Talking Heads, the Pistols, and the newest rarities that only three or four import shops in our metropolis carried.

On pg. 111, the entry for Horslips in Kent & Woffinden lists the LPs to date, but ends at "The Unfortunate Cup of Tea." The five paragraphs dutifully summarize the discography and trajectory of the band. After the triumph of the "Táin," the editors concur with what had been the judgment of many critics (if not fans on such sites as CBH): "However, the band have not yet succeeded in building on this remarkably successful opening to their career, possibly because they have abandoned their Celtic music influences in favour of a rock-based approach." This sort of journalism must have goaded the band, and I'm sure the next edition of the book would have acclaimed the next LP "Book of Invasions" as a return to splendid form.

Until the summer of 1980, however, I never found that LP-- in the import section of Tower Records. And that took a two-hour bus ride. Probably the only place in L.A. that would have carried it. On its sleeve and that for TMWBA I learned my first words beyond "Erin go bragh" in Irish; BoI's liner notes by Eamon Carr explain the three ancient modes of storytelling, while the quoting of Máirtín Ó Direáin's verse captured the theme of exile that unified the band's latest concept LP. As I played it later in my college dorm, another student bounded into my room excitedly. He astonished me with the news of how he'd seen the band on TV, on a late-night appearance perhaps. I wonder if any CBHers can trace that allusion! Until that classmate, nobody I met ever heard of them; until I found CBH on the Net, this sonic lacuna gaped for nearly twenty-five years. Speaking of exile.

I'm not sure how I would have known about the release of TMWBA. Perhaps I had seen a mention in "Trouser Press," or had flipped through the miscellaneous "H" at the only store a bike ride from my house, the chain Music Plus. The promo copy, being from a band with the majority as admen, artists, and poets themselves, also cleverly reminds the reader that before Radar, Stiff, or Chiswick, true DIY pioneers could be found among the quintet. They kept control, in proto-punk form, of their product all the way up to its delivery to the conglomerate that packed it up, dutifully and deftly, to ship out to me thousands of miles away. So, they too tried to stay true to their own countercultural roots, despite-- as so many of their peers then and now-- having to nod to the idols of the marketplace in order to sway the Yankee masses.

Their big-label distribution deal, as the text I reproduced takes pains to explain, allowed them a chance to finally get their records out to the American hinterlands where I lived-- if all of fifteen miles from Hollywood. There they hoped, under the rather unlikely match of producer (Blood, Sweat & Tears) Steve Katz, to nail down "those silver bars" into that big West Coast production sound "that's gonna take 'em to the stars" that Barry Devlin and Jim Lockhart admired. And, on that same left coast, I finally found my first, if not their first, Horslips LP.

Here's a snap from Lee's archive of a billboard on the Sunset Strip, at Kings Rd., suitably, for the medieval-themed arrival of the band with the equivalent of their name in lights. Minutes away from the famed import racks of Tower Records. The tattoo parlor may now be a burlesque house if it's on the south side facing the lights over West Hollywood. The taller building may be today either the garish hipster hotel The Mondrian or just another dull concrete & glass media conglomerate's fortress.


Promo for Horslips TMWBA: Weasy 8 Archives ca. 1978

Owen Sheers' "Resistance": Book Review

I like alternate history, stories about how people survived the Second World War, and tales from Wales. This novel combines these elements effectively. Sheers' debut demonstrates his careful, slowly paced, almost methodical, style of exacting prose. He writes with great--maybe too much for me as a city-boy-- attention to natural detail. The afterword tells how he placed the action of this book around his grandparents' farm, and his descriptions of life under the Black Mountains near the English border dig deep into rural life.

The morning of 9/11/01, he also relates in the afterword, he heard on the BBC an account of a home guard of last defence that the British had planned in the wake of a German invasion of the island. Sheers found out he had grown up with an older man who had been recruited for such a secret guard, and he got the idea for this story. Wehrmacht Captain Albrecht's the main character, who winds up guarding this isolated outpost of farms and farmwomen, among them Sarah Davies, whose husband has suddenly disappeared with the other local men, presumably to join such a home guard.

Without divulging any more details, a medieval world map, the sense of a respite from the world war that seems to be ebbing under a Nazi victory (if their own radio broadcasts can be believed), and the weariness of the Captain, whose wishes are for scholarship and reflection rather than commanding his small squad and continuing to follow the dictates of his superiors aligned with the SS, makes for compelling reading. After their men have slipped off, the women are compared to those spared after the Angel of Death at Passover has swept over their valley. The Captain recalls how a soldier's cheek, as the Normandy assault by the Allies was defeated, became streaked with a tear rivulet amidst the grime as he kept firing his machine-gun into the endless waves of enemy troops on the beach. A burn mark on a fragment of a dead soldier's pamphlet on how to treat the British resembles the outline of the coast that they are conquering. Such attention to the telling detail makes for intelligent storytelling.

Life on the farm and the other characters beyond Albrecht and Sarah, however, failed to rouse my interest. The amount of weighty yet rather mundane detail here given the backstory of the various farm women and the raising of sheep and the other soldiers failed to make them as vivid as the Captain and the woman who, predictably, begins to attract him. Less predictable, and certainly more impressive, the novel managed to make me not want it to end. I feared what would happen, and the last pages, and especially the coda, left me moved and intrigued. Sheers manages to play fair with the reader, while giving a remarkably subtle ending that suggests further scenes from the valley that inspired him may play out in a subsequent fictional return to this factual place.

Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion": Book Review

When over 1,100 have preceded me on Amazon US excoriating or exalting in this well-publicized defense of rational, Darwinian, and patient accretion from cooling rock to protoplasm to us over billions of years against the assertions of belief in any deity or gods, I find it daunting to join the boisterous queue. After reviewing here and on Amazon Christopher Hitchens' "god Is Not Great," Sam Harris' "The End of Faith," and Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell," I now come to the fourth in recently amplified rationalizations that both attack religious credulity and assert scientific inquiry. As a scientist, Dawkins shares with Dennett an ease in explaining laboratory findings. As one tending towards social impacts, Dawkins connects with Harris, whom he often cites. As a popularizer of intellectual currents, Dawkins addresses the same audience as Hitchens. I've found all four books fascinating, and all four have caused me to think harder about my own beliefs; all four also contain flaws in their perhaps inevitably sweeping claims that may not prove major, but nonetheless need to also be addressed respectfully.

I anticipate many who criticize Dawkins may need reminding of his early caution, twice repeated: "I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any other specific god such as Baal, Zeus, or Wotan." (31) He counters the "God Hypothesis" of a "superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us," with an "alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution." Creative intelligences come later into the process and cannot have designed it, therefore our attribution to a Prime Mover or Uncaused Cause is incorrect, and so that's the title of his book. He reiterates: "I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural. wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented." (36)

Dawkins employs the crane, i.e., a process of gradual construction that allows more complex construction from the ground up, rather than a skyhook, i.e., a "deus ex machina" (surprisingly he does not use this phrase) that intervenes in the plans from the opposite direction, and lacks an empirical foundation traceable in the geological and genetic and biological records. Much of the middle of his text defends scientific rather than supernatural causes for our evolution. Despite his credentials, he does seem to fudge Fred Hoyle's Boeing 747 argument as he does Anselm's ontological proof and Thomistic proofs, causing me to suspect he's stronger in science than philosophy; yet even with his insistent separation of chance from Darwin's theory, I felt as if Dawkins labored to explain this clearly. After he insists that this process is not by chance or by random unplanned happenstance, but by an immensely meticulous and attenuated internal mechanism of advancing by what benefits an organism in its survival, Dawkins enters the territory that Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett have also explored. Religious dictates to truth are undermined by claims using logic, improbability, and lack of external proof. If humans (see Dennett) have an inbred attraction to religion, it's like a moth to a flame-- the insect's been engineered to guide itself by the moon, and has not evolved past the stage of discerning and avoiding artificial light as its beacon.

Here, although compared to a radio interview I heard with him he devotes only a fraction of what I would have expected to this topic, Dawkins adds his own emphasis to the atheists' resurgence. I was peeved by his donnish dismissal of theology itself as a respectable endeavor. This may be logically true by his theorem, but it reeks of Oxonian snobbery. He denies that religious faith should be accorded any automatic respect per se. If its claims cannot be independently corroborated, then they lack the openness to revision that scientific inquiry by its nature possesses. Scientists willingly debate and recant and revise their positions based on evidence that emerges. Believers cannot do this; the base of the dominant world's faiths lies in pre-modern codes, imaginative tales, and archaic precepts said to be dictated from invisible beings and written down in haphazard and often contradictory fashion. "The teachings of 'moderate' religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism." (306) That is, any appeal by moderate religious adherents cannot be justified anymore than the extremist interpretations, for both ultimately rest on non-demonstrable standards lacking objective verification.

Finally, as with his non-believing colleagues, Dawkins urges us not to think of "Catholic" or "Muslim" children, but only offspring of "Catholic" or "Muslim parents." Young people, he warns, should not be subjected to beliefs by indoctrination; he agrees with Hitchens that such upbringing amounts to brainwashing. And, as with Harris' urging that if parents simply told the truth to their children, that religion would cease, Dawkins may appear quixotic in such an appeal to reason given our global diversity and immense differences in upbringing. Yet, the logic of Dawkins' argument emerges movingly, as it had at the conclusion of Hitchens. Both writers eloquently end their books by appealing to the long-term vision of humanist nobility, and a sense of our own fragile bursts of life within a universe that on its own terms has plenty to chill, dazzle, and fascinate us.

A few of his points in this predictably ambitious book needed sharper focus. Stephen Unwin's Bayesian argument for God's existence is converted by Dawkins into six points, but Dawkins glosses over them in his criticism. I'd like to have understood why #3 "Nature does evil things" and #4 "There might be minor miracles" do not fit. (107) Dawkins rushes to condemn all six points without sufficiently countering each one first. On language drift being probable "by the cultural equivalent of random genetic drift," Dawkins fails to give sufficient explanation. He continues that "I doubted that the details of language evolution are favored by any kind of natural selection, I guessed that language evolution is instead governed by random drift." (198) The tone here hints at Dawkins' unease. I'd consult Guy Deutscher's "The Unfolding of Language" (reviewed by me here and on Amazon) for an up-to-date elaboration.

Quoting Pascal: "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction" (249) Dawkins supports his desire for admitting that we can base our morality in non-scriptural sources. I agree with his demonstration from modern interpretations of Holy Writ that most believers do this anyway, rather than consenting to terrible punishments that ancient divine dictates demand. He counters how Israeli children support extermination in their own times that repeats that done to peoples in Jericho or Canaan in the Bible in a powerful application of half-civilized culture to our own advanced situation. George Tamarin's study that tests morality for young Israelis today by presenting them, no matter how avowedly secular, with their own reactions to genocide makes for provocative and disturbing analogies. Still, Dawkins yokes religious identity to political mayhem in a manner that Hitchens and Harris share; such a coupling does complicate matters of identity.

All three turn to Northern Irish sectarianism as a case study. They agree that labels there derive from Catholic or Protestant origins; Dawkins does improve on Hitchens' own more facile reactions. Dawkins admits how such wars and feuds "are seldom actually about theological disagreements." (259) Dawkins takes the time for nuances: "When an Ulster Protestant paramilitary murders a Catholic, he is not muttering to himself, 'Take that, transubstantiationist, mariolatrous, incense-reeking bastard!'" The reason's probably revenge for an earlier "transgenerational" tit-for-tat chain of killings.

He adds that: "Religion is a label of in-group/out-group enmity and vendetta, not necessarily worse than other labels such as skin colour, language or preferred football team, but often available when other labels are not." (259) Also, Dawkins delves deeper into the use of "inherited" labels--"without religion there would be no labels by which to decide who to oppress and whom to avenge." Still, you have the indelible surnames, unless the government decided to erase all traces of Gaelic or Scottish or English markers. I'm certainly not sure, however, how you'd extricate the giveaways of longstanding division among tribes from an individual today who bears the heavy weight, and perhaps familial pride (a factor not addressed by Dawkins) in his or her own genealogy and local history. Yet, I do concur that the world over probably "you'll find religions as the dominant labels for in-groups and out-groups" as "a very good bet." (260)

Dawkins later leaps into the Stalin/ Hitler atheist debate getting tangled in Adolf's profession of such, striving to uphold his main point: "Individual atheists may do evil things but they don't do evil things in the name of atheism." (279) Stalin's "dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism," however, did encourage mass destruction of cultural patrimony and attacks on religious confessionalists, so I became confused at too hubristic a simplification. Dawkins argues that religious wars, on the other hand, "really are fought in the name of religion" but no war "has been fought in the name of atheism. Why should it?" If atheists will not gain by their own credo any martyr's crown, Dawkins wonders: "why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?" Still, I wonder if such an anti-religious hatred as part of a perverted anti-cultural pogrom has not been responsible for the likes of the Khmer Rouge, Communist revolutions in China and Russia, or the current genocide in Tibet. I admit that many regimes distort the ancestor and hero worship and mass adulation and a cult of martyrs into a secular, godless pantheon, but Dawkins does not enter this idolatry (although Hitchens does with a fine entry on North Korea).

In less brutal versions, the clash of secular and religious still causes terror, according to Dawkins. Our society's often promulgated "respect" for other ethnic cultures Dawkins faults with unwise and foolish tolerance for female genital mutilation, media glorification of past Incan barbarities such as human sacrifice to the sun gods, or even the right of the Amish to raise children in "their own" way. Yet, Dawkins does not raise the "rumspringa" option, featured as the title of a recent documentary, that allows young Amish a chance to sample the delights of the world outside before they decide to return to their traditions and continue them. Dawkins overlooks this rather sensible "Plan B" when it would have strengthened his argument, if unintentionally, that religiously raised children should be given a chance to question their faith and not be treated as if dissent is never an option.

Inconsistency in the documented nature of Dawkins' enormously complex assemblage of disparate sources deserves mention. While he introduces his quotations, he unevenly cites them in the endnotes. Furthermore, most chapters have but a few numbered references; not all of the texts he uses can be traced to the bibliography. For instance, Anthony Kenny's description of his first months saying Mass cannot be traced, while two other authors on that same page 186 can be traced. Books often have only the link implied to the end-of-text works cited, and not the exact page of the quote; others, perplexingly, do have enumeration to the endnotes and precise page references. I cannot figure out why there's this disparity. For a controversial book like this, whose references by challengers and defenders will be hunted down, it's important that the same standards of scholarly reference be applied to every quote, summary, or paraphrase in conventional academic form.

When I finished and reviewed Hitchens' (livelier if more pugilistic; however, Dawkins baits the Templeton Foundation annoyingly too) book a couple of weeks ago, I wondered what would replace the legacy of religious thought, culture, and art for so many who-- when honestly confronting their often inherited array of impossibly verifiable beliefs and assumptions-- find them insupportable by evidence from science, logic, and commonsense. (Dawkins notes the odds of a child leaving his or her religious tradition being 1 in 12 even in Britain. I imagine higher odds in America, let alone most of the world). Hitchens took not only energetic enthusiasm (in the secular sense) but much contagious (if sometimes smug) glee in encouraging readers to leave behind their outmoded habits of faith. Dawkins, however, as his early vignettes of his own upbringing and of Einstein's non-religious belief indicates thoughtfully, addresses the plight of modern readers more coldly, and more truthfully.

For Dawkins, the "humanitarian challenge" must replace God. But, for many of us who may concede the probability that God doesn't exist, we still hold a "trump card." It's one I often keep up my own otherwise hidden or empty sleeve: our own "alleged psychological or emotional need for a god." (352) Even if our well-being depended on a belief in God, Dawkins rejects the truth of such a belief. Without independent criteria, it's next to impossible given the physical evidence that a Creator designed the universe. Dawkins here paraphrases Dennett's distinction between belief in God and belief in belief. Dawkins finds that while atheists may well despair, they appear to do so neither more nor less so statistically than their fellow believers. (He asserts too that non-believers do not differ on morality from the best of believers; as expected, he favors secular ethics for all.) Of course, and I support Dawkins here, he also suspects many who claim belief are less than certain deep down of any supernatural force or eternal life, yet cannot admit as such for a variety of understandable and familiar reasons-- or rationalizations or familial loyalties or societal pressures or mental evasions.

He ends his intermittently engrossing, yet ultimately scattered study with an analogy to "the mother of all burkas," asking us to imagine the tiny slit from which we see the world through our electromagnetic spectrum. Dawkins compares what we comprehend to a bat, or a dog, or a bug's vision. He reminds us of how astonishing such a realm as our hurling rocky planet is with its delicate envelope of air, and how "in Middle World" we evolved our own model of the real world with our sense data that differs from other organisms. This vast scale of improbabilities that allows us to live at this moment may be statistically nearly impossible to understand, but Dawkins inexorably insists that this is the evidence we have. The only miracle is that of our own anthropic presence in a universe that we have grown up within, and in "one of the minority of friendly places" we exist under laws and constraints that pressured us into becoming who we are, over billions of years and enough time, therefore, for not the impossible to happen with (or without?) a Creator, but the improbable to happen, after we beat the overwhelming odds for our own survival.

(Condensed version posted on Amazon today with an opening appeal to reason; I left my own beliefs out of that review, and wonder if it's warped pearls before swine, after sampling the past couple of months' worth of posted responses there. Sigh.)

Image: J.E. Millais, Mariana (1851) "Accepted by H.M. Government in lieu of tax and allocated to the Tate Gallery 1999": T07553.
"This is Mariana from Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure. She leads a solitary life, rejected by her fiancé after her dowry was lost in a shipwreck. But she is still in love and longs for him. Mariana’s tired pose, her embroidery, and the fallen leaves suggest the burden of her yearning as time passes. The painting was originally exhibited with lines from Alfred Tennyson’s poem Mariana: She only said, ‘My life is dreary– He cometh not!’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary–I would that I were dead!’(From the display caption July 2007)"

"Díseart" as Gaeilge

Bhí mé ionadh orm faoi an focal "díseart" as Gaeilge riamh ó shin nuair chuaigh mé soir go dtí Gleann na n-Iontas leis mo chlann. Is An Crann na Iósue é an-uaigneach. Is fairsinge í an-ciuin. Is maith linn an aít sin. D'imigh muid trí sheachtain go ham seo as an domhain níos folamh. Chríochnaigh ár cuairt. Bhain muid dínn ar ais teach againn siar ar an maidín Dé Domhnach Cásca de.

Déanann mé iontas freisin de tuiscint Cheilteach faoi an talun go mór agus ro-tirim. Níor chonaic manachaí go leor An Tír Bheannaithe. Mar sin féin, tháinig oilithreachaí go beag an turas go dtí Iarúsailéim ar feadh méanaosta. Fhill siad go Eirinn leis sceál na h-imrim go imirce agus go hiontach.

Chuala duine Eireannach eile faoi eachtraí orthusan. Bhí gaineamhlach mór an Phalaistín. D'inis siad faoi teas i mbrothall an mean-lae. D'fhoghlaim siad faoi na páganaigh. D'imir cluiche intinn inn leis samhailt faoi "camall" agus "pailm". B'fhéidir, thuigeann siad faoi "háram" agus "haisis".

Fuair mé ar foclóir agam focail "díseart" fúthu. Sílím go mbeadh smaoineamhái go beag faoi an idé seo. Is í go deacair ann. Tá an focal "fásach" ann. Tá ciall is cosiul le "fás," ach difrúil ann! Mar shampla, bhí Naomh Séan an Baisteach go raibh "guth san fhásach' ag an Biobla Naofa; tá "teach fásaigh" go mbeadh tí gan daoine ann.

Is "díseart" é an focal eile eagsula. Tá ciall Caithleach agus heirmeticeach(?) anseo, go ionduil. Tá sean-díthreabh "Dysert Ui Deághaidh" ar An Clár, in aice leis Cora Finna. Léamh mé faoi an ionad seo ina leabhar "Stripacheadh(?) i Coimidhigh" le Roísín-Máire Ní Mhurchú. Mheair sí ar an caislean aisteach faoin tuatha in aice an sráidbhaile ceann seo.

The word "Desert" in Irish

I wondered about the word "desert" in Irish ever since when I went eastwards to Wonder Valley with my family. Joshua Tree is very lonely. It's a very quiet expanse. We liked that place. We went away to there three weeks ago into the emptier world. We finished our visit. We took off back from there to our house westwards on the morning of Easter Sunday.

I wondered also about the Celtic understanding of the very large and too-dry land. Not many monks saw the Holy Land. Nevertheless, a few pilgrims went on a journey to Jerusalem during the Middle Ages. They returned to Ireland with a story about going forth faraway and wonderfully.

The other Irish people heard about adventures from they themselves. Palestine was a great expanse of sand. They told about heat, broiling in the middle of the day. They learned about the heathens. They played mind games with mental pictures about "camel" and "palm." Perhaps, they understood about "harem" and "hashish."

I found in my dictionary the words about "desert." I think that there'd be few concepts about this idea. It's a difficult one. There's the word "[wasteland/ brush/ lack of growth, but the root's "fás," the verb "to grow"!]"fásach". The meaning's similar "to grow", but different! For instance, St. John the Baptist was "a voice in {the} wilderness," in the Holy Bible; the "empty [fásaigh] house" would be a house without a person there.

"Díseart" is another, various, word. There's the Catholic eremetical sense here, usually. There's an old hermitage "Dysert O'Dea" in Clare, near Corrofin. I read about this place in the book "Whoredom in Kimmage" by Rosemary Murphy. She lived at a strange castle in the countryside near this same village.

Photo/ griangraf: "Ireland's desert, Connemara" as captioned/ go ceannteidealaithe

Peter Blake's "Alma Cogan" & "Ophelia"

Gordon Burn's novel, reviewed by me on Amazon US and here two days ago, featured on its flyleaves the two halves of Blake's Tate Gallery painting. As I could not find it anywhere on the Net, including the Tate itself's own holdings archived at its wonderful Subject Search (which has given me already three fine illustrations to accompany the difficult themes of belief and doubt and devotion the past few entries), this surprised me. So, duly giving credit for T.02285, if Burn's own 1974-76 Tate catalogue of acquisitions, pp. 54-6 is to be believed in a fictionalized account of a real singer and a real artist and a painting that takes up a key place in the plot and the presentation for we readers, here it is for future spectators. Maybe that's why I could not find it on the Web? Alma in the novel tells us that she took away a rare postcard of her own portrait. Getting into Borgesian, not to mention Walter Benjamin, territories of intertextuality and reality of qualia here.

The library copy has the d.j. taped to the binding, so I get the diptych effect of what's a single work, "oil on panel, 17 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 1 1/2." (156) What's uncanny is how the "right-hand" Alma, on spinach-green with what Burn's Alma notes as ghosted specters of her face in the background, and a lot of mottled and patchy skin and cosmetic effects I cannot discern from this nth-generation reproduction, has been reversed to face the other way on the scanner, while the "Fan's" Alma's correct.

I read about Blake, in fact, in the discards of a Sunday supplement last rainy summer at Oideas Gael in Donegal. The sour article, which may have been Waldemar Januszscak's from the Times, 1 July 2007, "Peter Blake at Tate Liverpool" described his mid-1970s sojourn with the Brotherhood of Ruralists. The critic recalls Ian Dury rounded on him when he last castigated Blake's rusticism in print, but my sympathies are with Mr. New Boots and Panties in defending his former teacher against Fleet Street! My own William Morris/ pre-Raphaelite/ Eric Gill enthusiasms aroused, I clipped the tiny reproduction of his "Ophelia" and stuck it in my little journal of my own sojourn that month through Ireland. Couldn't find this on-line either, so:

Although Blake moved on from the Ruralists, their work I found very much to my tastes. (The rip on the center-right's from my hand, lacking scissors, but it does fit into the textural foreboding and nicely compliments the tear in her blouse.) Blake's "Ophelia (standing frontally in water), Oil on board, 137cm x 94cm" as the Ruralists' cyber-catalogue records it, was one of twenty Ruralist depictions of the doomed waterlogged heroine at Bristol exhibited in 1980. Although one's titled "Baby Ophelia." Interest in their work continues. Here's their site: Brotherhood of Ruralists. Here's a brief, non-pictorial, review by Isabel Taylor of an overview published on their work: Artists in Arcadia from Winter 2007, Albion Magazine.

Gordon Burn's "Alma": Book Review

This ambitious if uneven novelization of the aftermath of a once-famous singer, the real-life Alma Cogan, departs of course from the truth that she died in 1966. Here, she lives three decades past her prime, into 1986, and she's therefore able to intersect, indirectly, with another formerly (in)famous British woman, the Moors Murderess Myra Hindley, who twenty years after the child-killing crimes under prison guard leads detectives to a couple of the last remaining bodies never found. As Newcastle-born Burn's the author of an earlier non-fictional account of Peter Sutcliffe, "The Yorkshire Ripper," one assumes his interest in such Northern tragedies attracted him-- I'm not sure if the particularly upsetting sonic link that the final pages of the novel here connects actually happened to tie Alma with Myra, again indirectly.

I'd add that while the British cover played up the Myra-Alma pairing, giving them both equal billing, so to speak, as large pop-art photos, the hardcover American edition, despite its very lurid and less successful hip-60s illustration-- the effect looks like chick-lit trash-- does avoid a rather misleading marketing impression that the Moors Murders share the plot. (The U.S. paperback reveals little, as if expecting American ignorance as to its eponymous subject.) Myra's return to the public eye's only peripherally registered a couple of times in the novel, until near the end for an off-kilter scene, but one still, thankfully for me, rather "off-stage" and reported as if second-hand. Anything more would reveal too much about the climax.

In a detached authorial tone at odds with its vividly described details, the book manages no matter how much is fiction and how much fact to ingeniously contrive situations where Alma confronts, thirty years on, the ghosts of her past. Artist Peter Blake, in the days before the Sgt. Pepper's album cover established his pop-culture prominence, already had done a wonderful depiction of Alma in two guises, and this is reproduced on the flyleaf of the hardcover. It's necessary to have this artwork nearby as you read Alma's encounter with it in the bowels of the Tate Gallery. Burn provides a poignant, yet honestly rendered, confrontation of the woman at fifty-four looking at her celebrated visage from the height of her career: two pop artists facing each other, again indirectly.

Alma later muses about this while browsing a collector's plethora of her own images. "Flash photography is forbidden in galleries because every picture taken apparently jolts loose a particle of pigment. And that's how I have always felt about being on the wrong end of a camera-- that some small part of me is flaking off; becoming detached and appropriated." (189) This aspect, the subject losing control of her own self, the duplication of her body, the sale to others, lurks as the most intriguing aspect of this complex, if perhaps too diffused, narrative.

This stand-off prepares one for the encounter with a collector,"F McL.," who sets up the climax of this oddly paced, wobbly, unpredictable unfolding of events half-explained by Alma in what purports to be a memoir. I doubt if any celebrity has ever been as ruthlessly candid as she's shown to be in these supposedly revealing pages, but much of the delight of this challenging narrative unfolds in the backdrop. Burn's evocation of the tatty nightclubs, off-stage glitz, and tawdry deals that cemented in a pre-Beatles Britain pop stars together with the older music-hall tradition lingers, the morning after the debauch. And that, in this novel, never quite happens with the detail you'd be waiting for. The whole book, then, holds off the advertised promise of easy fulfillment or lasting pleasure, intentionally perhaps.

I only realized after closing the book that never does Alma reveal what you'd expect most of all in a true memoir-- her loves or lusts. No mention of paramours, or for that matter of belief or its lack, enters this chilly world she lives in. You realize how lonely Alma has always been. She does sound formidably erudite for a woman whom you're presented with as never having had much schooling, but perhaps she had plenty of time for self-improvement in her long twilight years? The lack of logic here puzzled me. This feature appears to me to steadily weaken the novel, for the "voice" of Alma while you hear it channelled appears in a register out of sync with the one you'd expect from a late 1950's second-tier talent on the disposable pop charts and club circuit.

Also, the deracination of her from her Jewish immigrant parents, the lack of detail about her upbringing, makes her seem as if she appeared on stage at ten and never lived off of it? The moral of the story-- if it weren't for the fact that the fragmented narrative's far more concerned with the aftermath of her fame than the burst of fame itself. If not for the inclusion of an art gallery "catalogue entry" about the Blake painting, you'd have next to nothing to go on regarding her career's arc, her specific hits, or her impact on the musical scene. None of this can be sensed from this hermetic tale. It's as if she's shut off.

Still, whether an old folks' home for the once-famous (her mother's there, not her!), sodium-lit night-coach journeys, recalled meetings with such as Sammy Davis, Jr., morning in a dreary chain hotel, glimpses of exurban blight, and an evening in the company of a creepy (if pre-E-Bay) obsessive collectors of her ephemeral past-- they all gain harsh vignettes here. One detail well observed: the collector talks of Alma as he displays the wares he's hoarded always in the third person, even as he shows her his (once her) treasures. I note the other book Burn's credited with before this 1991 novel is a real-life look at the billiards scene, so once again the author's talent for roaming the lower depths behind the garish lights of the stage serve him well.

This isn't an easy read, and despite its brevity unsettles you. It's been compared, in its examination of the long slide down from the heights, to a recent novel (reviewed by me on Amazon US and this blog last month) about Kenneth Anger, Brian Jones, and Bobby Beausoleil by the American author Zachary Lazar, "Sway." Whereas that novel picks up around the point Alma's career would have started its descent, "Alma" brings back the giddy yet hungover time immediately before, the last of the vaudeville and variety act English fare that the Stones and the Beatles supplanted.

N.B.: Unbelievably, nowhere on the Net can an image of Blake's "Alma" be found. In the novel, Alma had to go into the Tate's climate-controlled inner-sanctum for a look at her image, so perhaps the real-world equivalent's as elusive. This indelible snapshot from her "playing the trombone" comes from a gal-singer tribute site as icky as those that a cyber-savvy F. McL. would've trolled today. I find there that "Just Couldn't Resist Her With Her Pocket Transistor" topped the Nipponese charts for a year. As they say, Big in Japan. Alma Cogan, 1932-66

Na Hiomalaethaí vs. Sliabh Olimpeas

Taispeánaim triu ghrianghrafaí leis An Droichead Gheata Órga os cionn. Inné, cuireadh in aghaidh "Olimpeacha gCinedhíothú," ina gcathair Naomh Proinsias. Dhreapaigh agóidí anseo a dhéanamh i dtaobh mórshiúl na trilseán mór. Is solas tóirse na cluichí Olimpeacha. Tá rialta Shíneach ag maoímh go mbeadh gniomh neamhpholaitúil air; mar sin féin, thosaigh Hitler i 1936 an chéad rás sealaíochta leis go an-comhartha na lasaim solas. Tiocfaidh seisean ar an lár sin Dé Céadaoin.

An maidín seo, léamh mé ar "Na Amanna na Aingeal" nuacht shluachorrailaí a thabhairt amach ó thuaidh i gCalifoirnea. Nílim sásta futhú. Bhí gearánái gafa. Tá seachtar ar a laghad faoí ghlas anois. Cén fáth?

Bhriseadh clamhsánaí na reachtaí. Dúirt na gardaí go bhfuil réabóir dlí. Fhoghail siad treaspás a dhéanamh ar dhúiche rialtais. Tá fhíos agam go raibh seo go fírinneach. Afach, ceapaim go mbeadh is mo níor bearfaidh muidsean agus gafa i bpríosún orthusan. Is duine níos dána. Creideann siad faoí ceartais go ceart ar an duine Thíbead.

Bheith ar nós cuma na cumlachtaí go mór faoí an marbh chultúr Thíbeadeach seo. Ní eisteann An Teach Bhán leosan ar chor ar bith. Níor chuala taoiseachái Méiréacannach leosan. Is docha é. Iarraidh siad airgead Shíneach amháin. An caillfeadh Tibéad seisean? Is cuma le ceannaire chapitlí leoga.

Caithfeadh muidse féin ní mbeidh ag dhéanamh níos laidír iarraidh a ceannach ábhar Shíneach. Cuireann san cruth eile ar fad ar an scéal. Ní dhearna dearmad. Arís, ná baineadh dearmad ar bith díot faoí an focal sin go breá as stáir na Eírinn: "boycott."

The Himalayas vs. Mt. Olympus

I show three photos with the Golden Gate Bridge above. Yesterday, there were protests against the "Genocide Olympics," in the city of San Francisco. Demonstrators climbed up there to opposed the march of the grand torch. It's the flame of the Olympic Games. (The Chinese government is claiming that it would be a non-political action; nevertheless, in 1936 Hitler started its first relay race of this very symbolic torch-light.) It will come to that city's center on Wednesday.

This morning, I read in the "Los Angeles Times" news about the mass-demonstrations that happened in the north of California. I'm not happy about them. The accusers were arrested. At least seven people are behind bars now. For what reason?

The fault-finders broke the rules. The police said that they are law breakers. They attacked (the Irish verb denotes "plundering, causing wanton destruction, pillaging") by making trespass into the domain of the government. I know that this was truthful. However, I think that it'd be best for ourselves not for them to be caught and held in jail. They're very bold people. They believe in human rights for the people of Tibet.

It matters not to the great powers about the death of this Tibetan culture. The White House does not listen to any of them at all. The American leaders do not hear them. It's probably so. They only want Chinese money. Could Tibet itself be lost? It does not matter to the capitalist rulers indeed.

We must ourselves make a stronger effort not to buy Chinese goods. "This is the big picture/ the larger story." Make no mistake. Again, don't forget about that fine word from Irish history: "boycott."

Links/ Nascannaí: Boycott Made in China
Olympic Watch
Reporters Without Frontiers: Chinese Cyber-dissidents & journalists

Joseph O'Neill Reviews Flann O'Brien

And so do I. Next calendar month for The Atlantic Monthly's not on line yet, but I enjoyed the photo above from my May 2008 print copy so much that I made it only my second scan ever. Fifteen minutes and hundreds of images skimmed failed to turn up this "Dublin Diversion" chestnut of an early 1950s Irish Times snapshot, so here it is, beating the magazine (perhaps?) to Net press. Joseph O'Neill, busy as his novel's out this month and he also reviewed David Park's "The Truth Commission" for the NYTBR last week, surveys in his article "The Last Laugh" more the legacy of Flann than Myles na gCopaleen or Brian O'Nolan. As my Feb. 24 blog entry linked to John Updike's New Yorker review, topped by Brian O'Toole's wonderful illustration of the author and his Trellised characters treed, today I'll elaborate on a few comments from O'Neill on O'Brien.

After reviewing his reputation and his career, placing him as the "bronze medalist" next to Joyce's gold and Beckett's silver, "the shadowy and indeed overshadowed hero of modern Irish fiction" looks like in front of the camera "like yer man without qualities." However, much as the unfortunate narrative of his life-- and of his colleague Anthony Cronin's splendid biography, "No Laughing Matter,"-- relates, O'Nolan remained lucky. His two best novels "were of an originality and durability beyond the scope of almost every other writer, no matter how committed or self-confident."

I'd agree; I re-read "Third Policeman" a couple years back in hopes of getting a conference paper on its purgatorial and limbic milieux accepted. While the organizers opted for typically post-modern ontologies rather than pre-Copernican cosmologies, the power of the novel resonated in ways that as a callow undergrad, with my NAL-Plume trade paperback with its oddly "PBS Masterpiece Theatre"-like detective show floridly hip cover, I could not have predicted. Given my doctoral dissertation on those uncertainly durable but endlessly perceived states of liminality, I now realize how prescient O'Brien had been.

As O'Neill notes, "At Swim-Two-Birds" anticipates the (unpublished during his lifetime) "Third Policeman" in such accounts of humorous terror. The creator of both works must have spent many nights up, in the dark, mulling over his mortal malaise and eternal fate. I know I do, but the distinction of O'Brien rests with his knack at making our own worries both accurately effusive and existentially reductive. While telling stories that mock philosophy, send up theology, and in the language of learning itself place depth charges in the verbose, recursive, and yammering self-pity, utter futility, and enjoyable risibility of our plight. The fact-- as O'Neill makes an aside to-- that out of the three contenders, only O'Brien stayed as they used to say in the bosom of Holy Mother Church may have exacerbated rather than eased the author's metaphysical torment. At least that's my hunch.

Although "Swim" has usually been viewed as the comic part of the diptych, the hinge that joins it to "Third" for me turns on both fiction's nihilism. O'Neill agrees. "If 'At Swim-Two-Birds' annihilates axiomatic notions of what it means to read and write, 'The Third Policeman' annihilates axiomatic notions of what it means to exist." And, decades before metafiction, structuralism, or intertextuality became staples of literary theory (let alone Derrida's Gallic ilk), there you have it with Himself.

O'Neill for my tastes quotes less than had Updike, but the Atlantic review's briefer (too much so for my wishes). Still, here's a sentence clipped from passage from "Swim" that O'Neill selects out of hundreds of possible canddiates for "affectionate, deadly renderings of petit bourgeois blather." Shanahan's on about how "the Irish race was always noted for" its leaping abilities. "Everywhere and all the time it is hats off and a gra-ma-creee to the Jumping Irishman."

As the reviewer praises, so do I the author's "extraordinarily sustained verbal and tonal control (ironic, given the novel's preoccupations)." I'm not sure how ironic, myself. Surely this control-- and not merely the intellectual stamina and structural legerdemain-- made this memorable for nearly six decades of flummoxed, chortling, and delighted readers? French 1950s dreary exercise in the nouvelle roman this ain't.

After all, it's not only the last book Joyce would "squint his way through" but one Beckett praised also from Paris-- and a lucky fluke that led in 1939 Graham Greene to be assigned to read the mss. for Longmans! Yet, as O'Neill points out, you could not have success that easily. 250 copies of his début sold. The rest of "the remaining stock being incinerated by the Luftwaffe."

O'Neill reminds us that "Third" gained a blip in pop culture for "a substantial new audience" when the paperback had a cameo two seconds on "the cult TV drama Lost." I hope it had a better cover than my 1976 edition. O'Brien as with Beckett and Joyce often has been overlooked as a fundamentally mordant humorist by many who quail at the formidable prose of all three learned Irishmen.

I see, with the past few month's encounters with blood relatives of mine, that habits that I had assumed were the mark only of middle-aged exposure to long-ago nurture can also be blamed on nature. Layne told me last night for the umpteenth time about my tendency to a mean, brittle delight in the misfortune of others, in my ingrained schadenfreude, my wish to see all others in this unfair existence I share taken down at least a peg. I could go on. She's right, of course. But, thinking about my affection for all three of these Irish writers, I also wonder if she's battling a rather disturbing yet literarily enduring self-imposed discipline.

Not getting airs above your station. (A great CD by space-rockers Kinski's titled this.) Beware of the begrudgers. Taayken' da piss owdda yiz. The Northern origins of the Strabane-born scribe also, in my opinion, deserve attention for his inbred curmudgeon disguise; O'Neill fails to mention what I wonder, given O'Brien's 1911 birth and frequent disruptions in moves and schools in his early childhood during a tumultuous dozen years, must have had a severe effect on the boy, despite his by eleven or so settling down as if a native Dub. This reminds me I must check out the work of his brother, Ciarán Ó Nualláin. His Irish-language (for the boys were raised 'as Gaeilge') 1973 short (110 pp. in English) rendering of Brian's early days, "Óige An Dearthár," has been translated by another of the clan, Niall O'Nolan, as the "Early Years" of-- all three names follow in the title.

Back into O'Neill's judgment, he puts it this way for O'Brien: "he undermined most claims to importance-- his own most assiduously of all. This creates a Flann O'Brien-worthy conundrum: How can we credit him with being a literary or philosophical radical if he had no intention of being one?" O'Brien has earlier recounted the writer's "liquid sense of reality" -- I don't think he means the Pint of Plain which is Yer Only Man but he could-- but the author's "inability to distinguish between fame and artistic success."

As John Ryan's "Remembering How We Stood" and Cronin's "Dead as Doornails" (both on Amazon US reviewed by me) recount dreadfully, O'Brien sank his energy, after "Third" failed to gain a publisher, largely into his "Cruiskeen Lawn" column. His journalistic output might be compared to our own time's witty blogger who never gets recognition as a respectable author. I can relate. (Although the "Things White People Like" creator's shot to late-night talk-show fame, pundit lifts, Internet buzz, and lucrative-- at least more than O'Nolan earned in his mid-century digs-- book contract in a few weeks. Conan as opposed to Flann O'Brien.)

Concluding, Flann O'Brien's seen as prescient in his theoretical concerns and as one "who wanted us to see through Brian O'Nolan and his hard-boiled Dublin dismissiveness, to see beyond the local legend of wasted talent. He wanted us to see Flann O'Brien: Why, otherwise, would we have bothered with him at all?" The genius, the reviewer says of his subject, rests on at least 2:5 of the works in the Everyman's Library collection, "The Complete Novels." Maybe there's hope for a reflexively dismissive fellow like me. Posthumously, will anyone find this blog in cyberspace and resurrect my reputation?

Ag breathnú Des Bishop ag mallú

Bhí mé ag breathaithe an chéad dhá eipeasóid na shraitheanna nua Dheas Mac an Easpaig (a shlionne as Gaeilge). Scríobh mé faoí "In t-Ainm na Fhada" an seachtaine seo caite anseo. Is maith liom gur ag spraoi leis an Gaeilge. Duirt sé féin againn ina lucht feachana: tá sé furasta! Níl sé níos ard. D'éirigh mo chroí nuair chonaic an radharc seo. Tá sé ag sneamh ar cuan in aice leis Lheitir Móir ar an cois fharraige Chonamara. Lhéim uisce a bhaint amach as bhád an madra de, freisin. Smaoinim gur ní raibh an trá níos fuar orthu!

Fuair sé féin ag foghlaim ar an teanga leis mhic léinn Cholaiste Lurgan. Is mór i a dhúil sa léann. D'imir sé cluiche peile ar aghaidh an foireann Cheathrú Rua. Thiomaint sé ar an bóthar triu An Spideal. Bhí aithne liom an stáisiún peitril chéana féin ansin. Líon mé an carr agam aít ann sin nuair tháinig mé ar an bealach amháin go An Clochan go dtí i gcathair nGallimh ar feadh ceithre shamhraidh seo caite.

Mar sin, lhabair Des an-focail mallachtachaí díobh ar feadh seó grinn ar an bhoinn is minic go bhfuil a scannanú fós. Léigh mé ina agallamh go cliste Dheas leis Caiomhe Ní Laighid ina Beo: Eagran 83; Márta 2008 ní bhfuil ag iarraidh Des an sraith (ag craoladh araon RTÉ) a líonta leis tuairimaí aige seisean feín go laidir ar aghaidh an Eaglais Chaitleceacht an mí-úsaid gnéis le buaicheallí-- agus ag bréagach faoí hómaighnéasach agus collaíocht a chur ina thost i measc sagairt leo féin. Insíonn Des Chaoimhe uirthi go raibh a fheadfaidh duine eile bariulaí go cumlacht aige de thaisme; níor tuigeann siad fúthu as comhthéacs. Tuigim seo.

Afach, chuir Des mallachtaí go leor nuair go bhfuil ag obair ar an ardán. Feiceann mé an gnáthchúrsa aige ar an sraith sin. Ach, sílím níl ábalta tuiscint a ghnáth duine uilig ar an lucht feachana ar an RTÉ. Leoga, ceapaim ní bhfuil duine eile is mo i n-Éirinn go mbeidh aontú liom. Nílim leanbh ann. Níl siad ag cur le chéile liom mar sin an sean-chúltur cráifeach ansiud go mbeadh ag insint focail níos salach chomh Méiriceánachaí is mo ag roghnaigh a rá go oscailte ina seol go laethúil. Mar sin féin, tá sé ag athrú!

Watching Des Bishop cursing

I was watching the first two episodes of the new series of Des Bishop (son of the bishop= his Irish surname!) I wrote about "In the Name of the Fada" this last week here. It pleased me that he's enjoying the Irish. He himself tells us in the audience: it's easy! It's not very difficult. My heart rose up when I saw this scene. He's swimming in the harbor near Lettermore on the coastline of Connemara. A dog makes a leap into the water from a boat, also. I think that the beach was not very cold for them!

He found himself learning the language with the students at Lurgan College. He's a great student. He played football against the Carraroe team. He drove on the road through Spiddal. I remembered the same gas station there. I filled my car there in that place when I came on the same way from Roundstone into Galway city during those four summers ago.

Still, Des speaks lots of curses very often to us doing the duration of his stand-up comedy act that is filmed also. I read in the intelligent interview of Des with Caoimhe Ní Laighid in issue 83 of Beo, March 2008 that Des did not want the series (aired on behalf of RTÉ) to fill with his own strong opinions against the Catholic Church with its own sexual abuse of boys-- and the lying about homosexuality and silencing sexuality among their clergy. Des told to Caoimhe that other people could by chance be able to come upon his powerful opinions; they would not understand them out of context. I understand this.

However, Des puts (into use) many swear-words when hé works on stage. I see his routine on that show. But, I think that some people viewing in the RTÉ audience are not able to understand his habit. I'm not a child. Indeed, I perceive that most other Irish people will not agree with me. They do not support me since the formerly pious culture over there would be telling dirtier words than most Americans choose to say openly in daily life. This is changing, nevertheless!

Image/iómhá:Comic Irish Curse

"That Book Looks Bright"

The past week, reading first on the commute Christopher Hitchens' "god Is Not Great," then an interlude with Seamus Deane's novel "Reading in the Dark," and yesterday beginning Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion," I've noticed the aura of coincidences that a believer would read more than chance into. Daniel Dennett, in "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon," argues that we have ingrained within our being an atavistic tendency to make patterns out of what's mysteriously for us, if not for those in the know, on our earth and in the heavens.

You can see in Turner's depiction "Mustering of the Warrior Angels" the human imagination at its finest fruition of sketching out order from what we cannot see but rather imagine. Yet, do I see in the wreathed clouds a ringed shadow around Saturn? These rings only revealed themselves to us with Galileo's telescope, not God's boasts to Job of His terrible cosmos and awesome creatures. The writers of the scrolls lacked our knowledge, of course, and their world-view reflects people with centuries of staring up at the lights above, but who failed to understand that unlike the claims of Genesis, the stars are not separate from the sun, and the moon does not light the darkness in the same way as the sun banishes it daily.

Turner's painted heavenly hosts are the culmination of our celebration of ancient wonder, if also the harbinger of our modern age of doubt that gnawed at the fabric of faith, of our habitual ordering of chaos. This tendency led to our ancestors creating gods who ran what we could not explain, who revived the dead we could not wake, and who placed the stars into the shapes that we view them from on earth. When I was young, I used to practice what I never heard anyone else doing until I read Yukio Mishima's "Under the Waves" in college, and a character did there what I did, which I later learned has been defined as spontaneous divination.

Hitchens and Dawkins, of course, feature in their screeds against superstition such rational debunkings of the tendency we mortals have of finding the divine in random happenstance. Relating to later in this blog post, Dawkins and Dennett have called for "brights" as a term that those proud to be non-believers should rally around, in the same way that "gay" has been reclaimed, and even "queer," by another contingent often reviled and forced to hide under our purportedly God-fearing rulers secular and clerical. Hitchens, from the literati rather than the laboratory preferred by Dennett and Dawkins, joins their ranks but on grounds of style eschews the awkwardly self-promoting verbal coinage. I'm finding all the books by these out-of-the-closet (although none of these public intellectuals are shy of the media) proponents of a New Enlightenment fascinating reading, even though as even they might expect, I cannot bring myself to agree totally with their spirited rhetorical appeals to reason.

They-- along with Sam Harris' "The End of Faith," the first in this series that I encountered a few years ago when teaching ethics and looking for an article to get my class riled up about philosophical vs. religiously based assertions for a foundation for right behavior that could be endorsed for all-- do intrigue me. Since so much of my upbringing has been immersed in Catholicism and so much of what I continue to study continues in that tradition, it's a brisk slap in the face of what I have deep down still harbored as "the way it's always been." As the Gang of Four sang: "every day seems like a natural fact."

Dawkins, in what I read today, cites Ambrose Bierce's definition of prayer. I paraphrase in clumsier language the vain hope that a single human, an a woeful weak sinner to boot-- can ask for universal laws of nature to be suspended so as to gain his or her petition's fulfillment.

What's happened since I read Dawkins, Deane, and Hitchens? An elderly black man got on the Blue Line at the Imperial junction. He opened a battered black suitcase with a neat sticker quoting John's gospel: "And I ask you, love one another as I have loved you." Opening the case as he sat directly across from me (I favor the end single seats near the door for legroom and lack of another possible human beside me), he read slowly, lips moving as his finger traced each line, Corinthians 12. Meanwhile, I hunched over Hitchens as he demolished such scriptural claims to truth.

The other chilly morning before dawn, I looked down as I waited for the Gold Line. A small piece of paper turned face down intrigued me. I needed a bookmark for the Deane novel, so I picked it up. It was a fortune cookie saying. "You will continue to take chances, and be glad you did." Numbers, for your own use if you play the lottery: 11/13/19/23/27/[period]/1. I get a share of the take.

This afternoon, on the Blue Line as I returned home from work, another elderly black man got on, this time with a cane, at Imperial. He sat, looked at me and the few other dozing or dazed passengers in the 2:30 doldrums, and inquired of us sotto voce: "Do any of you listen to gospel music?" He had, I then noticed, a duffel bag beside him; I figured tapes were inside. Nobody responded, and I nodded my head (you can guess which way) politely and returned to my drowsy perusal of Dawkins' current ripostes against intelligent design.

Half an hour or so later, the friendly ponytailed driver with a turquoise ring on each finger along with silver jewelry who often drives the Gold Line in the afternoons north noticed me. I was, after all, occupying the seat behind his booth in the first car. I sit here if there's an empty car so I can hop off easily. Knowing that the driver needs to get in the compartment to make the train go, I logically tucked my legs up.

My nose stayed in Dawkins as he eviscerated smoothly the Catholic dichotomy of claiming respect for scientific mechanics while requiring for canonizations miraculous suspensions of those same laws of the universe that petitioners seek, and as Bierce accurately if ruefully defined. The driver made his way, as he does every other time I've seen him, through the cabin, greeting each rider. He marvelled when he got to me, the last one, or the first. "If I ever need an escape artist, I'll call on you," he remarked. I guess I had contorted my legs akimbo. Maybe the mysterious arts of the East, a.k.a. weekly yoga, are working wonders after all.

As I left the train at my stop, I paused to put my book in my satchel. The driver often wishes the departing passengers at each stop farewell, but you can only hear this if you are one of them, from the train's outside speaker. He gave his valedictions, adding it seemed to me and for my benefit (as I and a young Latina were the only ones in earshot, except for the Sheriff on the other platform waiting to apprehend ticket evaders from the MTA's soon to be ended honor system with the installation of $80 million for turnstiles to catch the 5% who cheat the Man while violating the Commandment not to steal): "That book looks bright." It does have a silver brilliant foil cover even through the Brodart library plastic jacket. Or, was it: "That book looks light"? I could not decide what I heard. It was, however, not that dazzling a day, for clouds from last night's brief storm lingered in the gloaming sky towards the deeper cobalt haze over the mountains fifteen miles away.

Image: J.M.W. Turner, 1834 from the Tate: "Mustering of the Warrior Angels"

Seamus Deane's "Reading in the Dark": Book Review

While I enjoyed this novel for its evocation of the moods of downmarket Derry in the postwar mid-20th century period, much of the plot driven by the narrator's attempts to decipher the truth about his family's involvement with the death of a man falsely claimed to be an informer and the flight of the one who was the informer failed to engage me. It's as if the whole mystery that the unnamed narrator unravels stays more locked in his head rather than leaping across into your mind. The book has an extremely hermetic quality, and therefore recalls both the memoirs of Frank McCourt and recent Irish writers as well as, inevitably, Joyce's "Portrait." The scrupulous detachment of Joyce, however, tends to enter this novel more than the sentimentality of a memoirist. There may be about the same amount of humor as in early Joyce, but much more of this work deals with demons externalized rather than internalized.

Yet, this novel will not allow you to wander in your imagination through fully-realized Derry on paper. Contrasted with McCourt's Limerick or Joyce's Dublin, you will gain less of an external sense of Derry's streets; the mental demons and emotional tensions predominate. Deane wishes to place you inside a boy's growing independence from the inhibitions, betrayals, and surveillance that keep him enclosed in Derry.

The phrasing Deane--often deftly-- employs pays homage to his predecessor, and like Stephen Dedalus, the young boy grows up under the tutelage of Jesuits, a working-class urban neighborhood hemmed off by sectarian divides and municipal gerrymandering from its more prosperous neighbors, and an atmosphere redolent of corruption between police and prelates. There's a chapter with a Maths teacher's madly logical recital that could have sprung, on the other hand, from Flann O'Brien, and for lighter comedy many conversations on topics as disparate as curses from returned husbands at sea, the fort Grianan's secret passage, and the film "Beau Geste" -- the latter one made me miss my subway stop, so caught up was I in the wry comedic touches reproducing recursive Irish conversation.

Overall, however, this sober look back at childhood remains with you for the menacing touches-- of Crazy Jim's lubriciously leering ascetism, of a whiskey distillery exploding under police assault on an IRA squad, on the vignettes of suppressed lust and Ignatian spirituality and classroom banter. The book did rush past the Troubles and I wish this had either been left for a sequel, as it deserved fuller attention, or left out. The later decades are glimpsed, but so interesting is Deane's material here that you wish for more than the handful of pages that serve as a coda to the postwar emphasis.

Two brief examples of Deane's prose, both about the same event and place but recalled in chapters separated by five years and a hundred and fifty pages, illustrate his method. The narrator's trying to piece together the past and the fate of the informer that serves as the plot, however dispersed and slowly shared. Such distension of elements that make up this novel is characteristic, and may either lull readers or entrance them. "The dismembered streets lay strewn all around the ruined distillery where Uncle Eddie had fought, aching with a long, dolorous absence. With the distillery gone the smell of vaporised whiskey and heated red brick, the sullen glow that must have loomed over the crouching houses like an amber sunset." (32) This for me recalls a story from "Dubliners."

Compare: "And the distillery smouldered into the dawn, surprising the seagulls who came in from the docks to soar around it and cry away from its heat and smell." (193) This too may recall Joyce! Yet, I do not mean to place Deane within the formidable power only of Joyce. While resonances abound, the added edge of The Troubles and the Northern milieu do show readers elsewhere impressions of an bucolically placed, if often dolefully embattled, city on the River Foyle which, far less than Belfast, or even than neighboring Donegal, has earned much attention in Irish fiction.

While the novel by its ambling structure fragments the telling of the narrator's maturation into gradual understanding cloaked by familial secrets, and so dilutes the impact upon the reader and the narrator, the strongest features remain the telling of the tale itself, more than the tale's contents. "Ghosts of the Disappeared" haunt a field, a child's soul remains trapped in a window, rural changelings and the urban insane mingle in the streets of Derry and the stories of its uprooted people. They enter the city, yet cannot escape rural Irish superstition and the maledictions of their ancestors. This long shadow darkens and ultimately permeates the narrator and his novel.

(Posted to Amazon US today. Surprisingly, #45 in the queue, but the novel's been on my shelf since it's publication waiting for me, from over a decade ago!)

RootsWorld & my Oisín McAuley CD Review

Tooting here not my own horn but Cliff Furnald's at "RootsWorld," his "online magazine of the world's music," and its sister shop, CDRoots, "music for the road less travelled." Both sites span the globe, offer a plethora of information about artists, and allow you to whet your aural appetite. You can listen to sample tracks often while you read reviews at both related sites. Please visit and support RW/CDR!

This is my sample review, one of those on Irish and Celtic-related music that I contribute to the digest that Cliff publishes electronically, logically, regularly on such music. It's by Oisín McAuley, a Donegal fiddler from Carrick, a market town on the south-west coast very near the Glencolumbcille where I spent a bucolic, rainswept, sunny, delightful if pedagogically (reduced as I was to the other side of the classroom immersed "as Gaeilge") harrowingly vivid fortnight at Oideas Gael.

McAuley covers a tune named after Con Cassidy; at OG I had the pleasure of sitting in the front row of a hall seating and standing no more than a hundred of so folks as Altan's Mairead Ní Mhaonaigh and Dermot Byrne, along with many others such as renowned local player James Byrne, fiddled about on the release of a tribute to Cassidy released on Cló Iar-Chonnachta last July. The assault of strings filled the crowded room, full of Cassidy's family up from Teelin, center of much traditional music and storytelling, on what's now the edge of the Gaeltacht. I hope that such culture can survive the onslaught of endless summers of Béarla-laden visitors such as myself. Anyway, as also posted on Amazon, here's the review (RW limits me to about three hundred words, a blessing in disguise I'm sure.)

Oisín McAuley
"Far From the Hills of Donegal"
Compass Records (www.compassrecords.com)

Danú's fiddler, from the southwestern peninsula of Donegal, draws upon local inspiration for his self-produced solo debut. The regional style of fiddling emphasizes staccato bowing, a harsher (perhaps to some ears more grating and less accompanied) delivery, and influence from Scottish dances such as the strathspey and the highland. McAuley covers famous musicians such as Con Cassidy (a self-titled barn dance), Patsy Touhy (My Former Wife), and John Doherty (Paidin O'Raifertaigh). He adds Gille le Bigot's Swing and Tears, a tribute to a Breton guitarist, Ronan Browne's version of the air Port na bPucaí, and his own waltzes and reels. Peter Browne and Ronan Browne back him on button accordion and pipes respectively.

Guitarist (not the Pogues' frontman) Shane McGowan reveals a gift for understated, yet nimble, guitar on seven of the thirteen tunes. This recording eschews atmospheric keyboards, with the exception of the bland Tune for Gillian, in favor of simple, less-adorned pieces from mainly Irish but also Scottish sources. Less lush than Lúnasa, akin more to Téada, the Irish manner of playing here represents a preference for conveying instrumental prowess without production filigree. The retreat from the swirling, synthesized treatments favored by many Irish musicians in the past two decades should hearten listeners seeking out styles hearkening more to the village elder than the trends of the city hipster.

RootsWorld
CDRoots

Burning Down the House: Buddhism vs. Hitchens

One of the problems in Christopher Hitchens' "god Is Not Great," a wonderful if flawed "cri de coeur" which continues this past week to occupy my thoughts, lies in his dismissal of Buddhism. Now, even I fully know from reading all of, what, five books as of this morning on the topic over a quarter-century (!), that gods and goddesses exist in this "religion," for lack of a better term in English. I also realize that these deities, as Siddhartha Gautama preached, play a relatively lesser role in its doctrine. In fact, that such teachings turn much more inward and flexible for the believer. Above all, the practitioner emphasizes not vertical worship above but horizontal self-enlightenment. The ascension to higher states will come, and these do take the levels of cosmologies even more intricate than many Western stratifications. Yet, the Buddha, unlike God, directs one towards not eternal salvation or punishment within these realms, but a state beyond them, where like a flame one's soul's snuffed out. The indescribable then awaits. This gradual attainment of harmony while in our body, again contrasted with some Western models, does not rest within the "saved" person, but-- as the Buddha's example shows-- must then radiate outward towards fellow beings to guide them towards the same peace.

So-- as I suggested to my neighbor in a morning chat celebrating the sale to her of the lot she and her partner have saved for songbirds and cats next door from the developers who as I type are building two homes on our street and trying vainly to sell a third raw cut out of what was beloved if barren open space-- perhaps Buddhism's a "non-theistic religion," despite the etymological damage that term does to the Latin and Greek roots. I leave to scholars the precise language that fits best, but it's clear to me that Buddhism does not clearly compare with the dogmatic strictures of the monotheistic faith systems that take up 95% of Hitchens' attention. I wish he had taken more time to study Buddhism, for he could have used its contrasts to better suggest for humanists a promising integration of a spiritual system that detoured, if it didn't quite deconstruct the center of, traditional faith. Yet, it in my opinion offers a healing method for many who cannot find in meditation on the atom or a visit to the art gallery the same comfort they may obtain from cultivation of the soul along with a spirited exercise of good deeds.

This as before-- in three posts this past week-- does again drag me back to Ockham's Razor. Hitchens might respond that you can get psychoanalyzed without recourse to the Four Noble Truths, and that Nirvana might arise through existential courage to admit our loneliness in the universe, and that science can provide enough meaning for us to live up to a mature realization that no revelation, no gods, no gurus, await in this or other realms to lavish solace upon our planet's inhabitants. Yet, I continue my riposte that many of us, the way we are conditioned, need psychic and assistance beyond what the test tube or telescope might offer us intellectually as an object of natural wonder.

Mantras and mandalas serve this purpose for many who admire Buddhism. These may be like the "new toys" that the Buddha suggested in the Lotus Sutra will draw immature tots to look up from their baubles and see their house blazes and that they must escape. But, at their childish level, the best way to get them out of the fire is to tell them "new toys" await outside. Once safe from the conflagration, they can be told the truth. But first, they must be pulled away from "dukkha," the suffering that comes with misguided "tanha" or desire, and out of the house of "samsara," the mundane routine that we all keep running within. Eventually, even the mandalas and mantras will give way to a more profound "dhamma" for the skilled follower.

Finishing Damien Keown's "Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 1996), I compared his understanding to Hitchens. The latter writer fails to note the Dalai Lama's own insistence that if scientific inquiry proved false the words of the Buddha, he'd abandon the words; he also keeps, as Pico Iyer reported in the "Time" cover story I linked to recently, a model of the human brain on his desk. Certainly he's not the quasi-feudal potentate lording over theocratic serfs that Hitchens hints. Neither has modern Buddhism, as it evolves in the West, opposed to secular liberalism or psychological analysis.

Keown quotes the delightfully named Christmas Humphreys, a leading British pioneer in popularizing what he suggested a "new vehicle" of "Nava-yana" to "grow happily alongside, and even blend with the best of Western science, psychology and social science, and thus effect the ever-changing field of Western thought." He continued: "Just what it will be we do not know, nor does it matter at the present time. The Dhamma as such is immortal, but its forms must ever change to serve the ever-changing human need." (qtd. by Keown p. 121 from Humphreys' "Sixty Years of Buddhism in England," p. 80).

Surely Hitchens might find in such an openness a fruitful intersection rather than a solid wall that he erects that halts traffic, given the failings of the Dalai Lama that he castigates amidst the larger stupidities of such as the Bhagwan or the Maharishi. The catalogue of idiocies that he for most of his book skims comes from the three great monotheistic faiths born from arid wastelands. But, in the single chapter he devotes to demolishing the Eastern alternatives, he does overlook the fluidity of Buddhism open to progress, a feature that distinguishes its practical nature from the otherworldly states that Hitchens like most of us characterizes as the salient, and often only, differing feature of the Far Eastern seeker from the Western (or Middle Eastern, if I may open myself to charges of geocentric Orientalism) fanatic.

Keown, by contrast, as his short study promises in its title, gives us a friendly entrance by portals we recognize into what for me's been a mysterious panorama. He compares human nature's "five factors of individuality" taught by the Buddha to five components of an automobile. The parts shift in motion, the car demands the fuel of "tanha," but all of its five parts eventually will break down. This gas-guzzling car's propelled by perhaps the wrong octane (my metaphor) of desire, which equates with the First Noble Truth that we depend on "dukkha." We will need to diagnose this flaw before we can repair our vehicle.

Likewise, Keown uses fire to explain the metaphor of "samudaya," the Second Truth of Arising. He then defines Cessation ("Nirodha") in the words of the Buddha helpfully: "asking about the whereabouts of 'an enlightened one' after death is like asking where a flame goes when it is blown out." (52) The flame has not gone anywhere; the process of combustion has ceased. "Removing craving and ignorance is like taking away the oxygen and fuel which a flame needs to burn." You can see, although Keown does not belabor the image, how the earlier automotive metaphors compliment the traditional ones of the candle-flame to explain for we moderns a venerable set of Buddhist core teachings--which forms Truth #4 of the Noble Eightfold path of the Middle Way of sensible moderation in daily practice, "Magga."

I found the chapter on the Four Truths enlightening, and his on the life of the Buddha summarized efficiently the little we know in fact well. Other sections examine Karma & Rebirth, the Mahayana school, and Asian varieties. A short reading list, maps, and illustrations have all been chosen sparingly but appropriately; the use of text boxes to summarize key concepts makes this book reader-friendly, although the handsome typeface may be too small for some readers. Valuable discussions of ethics and Buddhism as adapted to the West should counter claims of many about the supposed non-worldly withdrawal from relevant concerns of human rights, scientific advancement, and mental health that show how this ancient teaching can be well integrated into current knowledge at the most advanced levels in industrialized nations, ecumenical dialogues, and secular cultures.

(These last six paragraphs form the core of my Amazon US review, posted today.)

Image: Tate Gallery. 1908, by the Welsh artist Augustus John (1876-1961). "Nirvana"