Gerard Donovan's "Young Irelanders": Book Review.

I've reviewed (here and at Amazon US, where this review appeared yesterday) this Galway-born, New York-based novelist's previous work: "Schopenhauer's Telescope," about a Balkan-ish standoff, in educated exchanges, between a captive and his captor; "Sunless," (aka "Doctor Salt" abroad) a dystopian take on the pharmaceutical industry set near the Great Salt Lake; and "Julius Winsome," a feral blend of Shakesperean invective and wilderness revenge. All three should be made into films. [I think of the first (which he told us in 2006 was just optioned) directed by Srdjan Dragojevic as a less scabrous "Pretty Village, Pretty Flame"; the second by Todd Haynes in "Safe" fashion; the third by Sam Raimi as with "A Simple Plan."] You can see from these three novels how broad Donovan's range can be, and in this first collection of his short fiction, thirteen Irish settings intensify rather than narrow his artistic scope. (In Britain, its title is "Country of the Grand.")

At a reading of "Julius" in Oregon about two years ago, I heard the author explain why he didn't write Irish-themed fiction; it simply did not demand his attention the way his other plots had. Still, he's been building up a solid stack of it over fifteen years. This anthology reveals Donovan's ability to hone in with his clear gaze, poetic glimpses, and delineated scrutiny upon the difficulty of relationships. Set in Salthill, Galway city, Ennis, Moycullen, and such often overlooked (save in the Jack Taylor noir series by Galwegian Ken Bruen, also all reviewed by me) hubs on or near the suburbanizing Irish western coast, these depictions concentrate less on the scenery, little on the blarney, more on the b.s., and lots on the contemporary despair.

They're linked, loosely, by themes. In "Morning Swimmers," a cuckold overhears his friends talk of his wife's affair. He spies on those he had trusted, as they "tip over like milk into tea. They swim once around the tower, bodies static but busy, insects in a toilet bowl." (20) "How Long Until" follows a man who suspects his wife; "he wondered what kept any couple together, what preserved a marriage from the people in it." (30) The writing's efficient, moving the pace along firmly yet modestly, befitting its conflicted characters. Donovan favors the guise of transparency. His characters tend to drift along, yet beneath their predicaments, time pulls them out of their shallow introversions. In "Shoplifting in the USA," the protagonist "wanted it to be true that people like me can survive, but hope can break you if you keep insisting on telling yourself the truth." (53)

This underlies the storylines. "Country of the Grand" follows a man's mid-life crisis compressed into an early evening. Married nineteen years, his wife calls him at the office: "He put the phone in his pocket without going to voicemail." (57) "By Irish Nights" reminds us of Donovan's start as a poet; this brief narrative itself unfolds as nearly a prose-poem, harnessed to the natural power beneath the man-made dominance of the island. This tug sustains itself over the much longer account of "Archeologists." At first, the struggle of the paired Neolithic excavators racing ahead of the relentless construction that bulldozes bogs appears pat, but with one's patience in the uncovering of the literary layers, deeper meaning sifts in.

"The little flakes of stone and soil could have been planets at the end of her brush, so far away they seemed," and the female archeologist cannot "bridge the gap somehow," for "those people from the past did not speak loudly enough about themselves." (100) But, she perseveres, although what she unearths unsettles. The last sentence: "They stared under the creaking wire as the brown and mute bones of the Young Irelander moved in and out of the dark." (108)

"Glass" regresses to 1974, before the boom, and reminds us of less distant-- if nearly as remote given current Irish consumerism-- struggles for survival. Fewer options then. A teenager recalls his mother's admonition. "But a lot of men would like to meet a widow who lives in a clean house. I'm going back to that pub. I'm going to meet a nice man on his holidays." (123)

The later stories explore dislocation. These drew me in less readily, but this may reflect only my own identification with the characters rather than any inherent lack of quality. A new widow finds out about her husband's secret past in "Another Life;" this story reminded me of Frank O'Connor or Seán O'Faolain in its reminders of a more domesticated, middle-class, scenario of an aging woman's loneliness. "A photograph is dated instantly by color, she once heard Paul say. But black and white is timeless." (134) For "The Summer of Birds," a shadowy presence of new immigrants parallels the creatures fed by a young girl in her mother's mysterious absence from their estate. "We lived in a suburb east of the city, another development of many that spread white houses over the green hills like spilled milk," she reflects. (148)

"The Receptionist" moves into stranger studies, of a cuckolded voyeur's unsettled presence at a Galway city hotel. His upheaval's expanded into "Harry Dietz," the longest entry here, and one that in the protagonist's mental confusion recalls the main figure trapped in "Sunless." Donovan's on to a clever idea with his transposition of Cold War-era bomb shelters with terrorist threats today, combining into Harry's flight into a Chicago subway station. Still, parts of this lengthy story drift about in verisimilitude that may not keep every reader's attention span sharp!

"New Deal" precedes this with its own violence, physical rather than mental. It's the only story with any action. The reliance on psychic rather than visceral struggle may make, after one reads story after story, less of an impact. I think, as with "Julius" and "Schopenhauer," that when Donovan enters the world of payback, his fiction does take a leap into a more immediate grasp of tension if not resolution. After the cease-fires, those crossing and recrossing the Irish border abandon slogans for robberies. "We used to kill for country, now we had something we could count." (175)

The volume concludes with "Visit." Old age comes to the narrator's parent, at a home in Mullingar, exiled in the midlands away from her home: "My mother faced west where the sky breached the uneven rooftops and the early evening light pressed the orange doors of the houses. She was smiling. Her eyes were closed and her face was calm, turned to the sun." (222)

The sun may be setting, but the peace of this last story pervades with welcome closure after the many wanderings of its earlier characters, lost and desparate, as on the outskirts of the author's transformed hometown: "Galway had spread in the last decade, gushing for miles along the roads that led to it, pink and blue neon signs, huge hotels standing alone till more business built up around them, and then the rabbit-cage houses." (32) Out of this new terrain, Donovan digs his own path.

P.S. Short Interview with Donovan at "The Short Review".

A.N. Wilson's "My Name Is Legion": Book Review.

Wilson, a biographer of Jesus and Paul, an historian of the Victorians and the loss of faith in God, and a veteran novelist, is also a journalist. His authorial breadth serves him and the reader well in this sprawling blend of social commentary, Fleet Street satire, and theologically tinged thriller set in today's London. Imagine Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop" updated to a stand-in for Robert Mugabe, insert Lugardia for Rhodesia and Zinariya for Zimbabwe, and place as the protagonist a British colonial, first a soldier there, then a celebrity monk preaching liberation theology against General Bendiga's corrupt regime. The regime, supported by and supporting Lennox Marx's "red-top" tabloid "The Daily Legion," finds itself clashing by a psychomachia within a teenager who carries many secrets and scandals inside his fevered consciousness. We hear the multiple personas of a teenaged boy, Peter, who takes on the fearsome voices of one possessed, perhaps by demons as much as by schizophrenia. He's a modern version of the man who lived among the tombs that was cured by Jesus, who drove out the devils into the Gadarene swine in that eerie Gospel episode.

It's an ambitious novel. The fates of a few characters, such as blackmailed Ed Hartley, the conceptual artist Hans Busch, or counselor Kevin Currey, appear too muddled. This may be intentional, to show the cruelty of their predicaments, but I wondered what roles they served; the Happy Band's ultimate goals also remained shadowed. Still, these are minor shortcomings that do not detract much from the cumulative interest that accrues as, once you're in a couple of hundred of its five-hundred pages, the novel begins linking its many subplots.

Wilson, better than Nicola Barker's experimental novel "Darklands" (also reviewed by me here and on Amazon US recently), evokes how many characters inhabit a young man's mind. In demon-haunted Peter, we hear an array of stock figures from stereotypical England, stolid then and multicultural now. Wilson wittily, but with compassion and justice, enters Peter and many other figures with intelligence, energy, and tact. This novel, although about sensationalism, by its balance of tell-all gossip and elegant restraint, manages to convince you of the reality of even the exaggerated figures he-- especially at the "Legion"-- delights in parading.

The novel captures a grimy, rainy, weary capital, especially its southern bank and inner suburban districts, those less chronicled. The chav, the Coldstream Guard, the campaigning padre, the frightened child, the Bahamian immigrant, the social climbing Eurotrash, the careful spy, the frustrated mistress, the overeducated scribbler, the sashaying hack: all sound as they should.

The city, too, enters, seen from a decaying urban park: "From afar, beyond the neglected graves of ten thousand south Londoners," Catford's "high-rise blocks" and Bromley's "endless streets" sulk.

"Today they suggested a limitless waste of life, a humanity which stretched sadly as far as the eye could see, indulging in its youth in the activities which so obsessed the graffiti-artists in the bandstand; scurrying, in middle age, to the bus stops and railway stations which, even in the heavy rain, the eye could discern, to go to work in London, to pay for the mean residences which stretched in endless terraces; lying, eventually, in the cemetery whose identical headstones made their cruel commentary on the rows of houses of those who were buried there." (360)

God seems absent from here, often if not always. Wilson gives Father Chell two magnificent sermons, one a rant on liberation theology, one a eulogy about the death of the "God of the Philosophers" on Calvary replaced by a post-resurrection deity who "had looked very much like the gardener sweeping the path" in the Garden. (300) Father Chell speculates later about the departure of God from humanity as symbolized by the Ascension-- the human construct rises into the sky that we populate with gods. Meanwhile, in the city where some still pray, the voles and dogs and cats "breathed and moved and fed without the need to project their mentalities into the indifferent surroundings, or to look for personality in the vast impersonal processes of the natural world." (426)

Wilson's omniscient narrator holds back, rarely directly editorializing, but when the craft justifies such an entrance, the effect's moving. While not a showy writer, Wilson takes care on every page. In the indirect first-person voice that eases in and out of his main characters, he makes comparisons to Bonhoeffer, Homer, Marx, Dostoevsky, Christ, or Shakespeare that reflect the level of a character's own knowledge. One journalist, having compromised on early promise for a steady income: "Now he sounded like a man who was so used to mixing with, and writing for, people stupider than himself that he was in a world where just to know the names of great writers was something for which you expected applause." (214)

Such allusions, occasionally deployed, work well.

"On the TV news, when the idiocy or wickedness of politicians had forced another great section of humanity into a position where home was a place of dread, one saw them queuing at borders, streaming down dusty roads or railway tracks, many an Aeneas with old Anchises on his shoulders, refugees, old women bundled in prams, fly-blown babies. And always such bedraggled figures in flight had grabbed, quite arbitrarily perhaps, their 'things'. But why in such circumstances of despair had they bothered to take anything at all, unless that was merely clutching at an object, as a child clutched a comfort-blanket, offered in inconsolable circumstances a faint alternative to consolation?" (295)

England here has little pride left. The parks once meant for adults now find their cafeterias, playgrounds, and benches coated with trash and scrawls. "The Queen, no longer a radiant young woman, now looked like an old frump made out of pastry, grumpy and about to crack into floury powder." (476) The ceremony of welcoming Lennox Marks as a Lord shows to such as Chell how primitive, beneath the Americanized fast-food, muggings, petty crime, and fumes and endless swearing of a dumbed-down populace, ritual endures in "the tribal hierarchy which still persisted here. This man, for all his dependence on modern techniques of communications to make his millions, on plate-glass towers and computerized newspaper production, wanted nothing more than to drape himself with dead animal skins and, mumbling imprecations to the spirits, make obesiance to his tribal chieftains." (490)

The loss of national will-- as a Brigadier explains with the IRA battling for a compromise so as to make the Ulster statelet "seem implausible," and so come to power-- dominates a cowed yet cock-headed Britain. Wilson may find hope in a few individuals that as always refuse to serve their prostituted masters. But, these by the end of this story seem few. The position of the kingdom, dependent on oppression to keep its post-colonial power, manacled to capitalism that presents both the only workable situation at present and the method by which billions suffer to serve a billion, deepens the ideas that the characters fumble with, as journalists, readers, and perpetrators in a society with little belief and lots of junk. Wilson reports in an often much funnier (if rather scattershot in its many easy if deserving targets!) prose than my serious excerpts may have indicated, but his moral analysis can be scathing.

(Review posted to Amazon US today- the first one. Please rate my efforts there. Link at the right sidebar's Blog Links under "My Amazon Profile & Reviews.")

Do You Have Gaps in Your Knowledge?

Despite neither Harvard doctorate nor Cambridge Tripos-- and blowing an oral intelligence test when I was five for insisting that, yes, you could put your pants on over your head-- I managed to evade the machinations of this remote viva voce. Better than my dissertation defense transpired! I paused over how many legs an insect sports. But I aced it. Only due to the lack of math problems, luckily.

I knew at five the capital of Greece-- the only other question I can recall from that pre-computerized scrutiny. And, my stubbornness about the wrong-way trousers stemmed from my confidence that if you tugged hard enough, one pant leg would rip and the slacks would slip down my skinny body somehow, albeit in shreds. I insist that I deserved extra credit for my sartorial ingenuity.

Later in school, I faced more I.Q. tests. My score fluctuated, to my chagrin, over a seventeen-point range depending on when. My official record for my transcripts, of course, proved the lowest. My highest placed me in the precise cohort alongside Gary Gilmore and Charlie Manson.

I failed another match of wits the other day. My début at "Play Chess Against the Computer" at Chess.com found me pitted haplessly in front of its baby computer engine. Repeatedly, I reeled punchdrunk pummelled by the infant incarnation (inlapidation?) of Deep Blue's doppelgänger on its "easy" setting. I desperately needed an ego boost. If chess bested me, I bettered another calculator.

If you want to test your wits, here's that quiz at Blogthings. 21 questions today, compared to only four for yesterday's blogged here about musical psychology. I guess next, illogically, will be the one featured on their sidebar seeking my "leprechaun name."

Update: I already tried it. Don't bother. I repeated the prompt via various names of mine, eliciting aleatory but anodyne Darby O'Gill-ish monikers. The banner ad caught me off guard, a wimpled lass shilling for the "world's largest Muslim matrimonial site."

Where you have gaps in your knowledge:
No Gaps!

Where you don't have gaps in your knowledge:
Philosophy
Religion
Economics
Literature
History
Science
Art

Chart: I.Q. Bell Curve

Deerhunter's "Microcastles": Music Review.

I liked "Cryptograms" PIL-type assaults better than its bliss-out comedown tracks. This new CD may, therefore, please listeners who favor the softer side, akin more to Bradford Cox's solo project Atlas Sound. Since I love shoegazing, "Microcastles" satisfied me especially in its later tracks on disc one. These built up to thunderous feedback, and like tracks 3 and 5 on the first disc, showed a fuller band sound that appealed more to me than the many songs that, stripped-down and simpler, seemed more like home demos recorded by Cox himself.

The strongest tunes, as on the previous CD, remain those with a full-on wave of mutilation. They can begin softly, tentatively, before cresting, nearly without you realizing it, into giant splashes of sonic boom. This characteristic of Deerhunter's delivery, to me, shows the talent that they're capable of as a forceful unit, instead of anyone expecting only a Cox-led group of back-up players using the older band's name.

My son heard Jesus & Mary Chain here and there; I heard Grandaddy! The range of influences distorted and sensitive, beyond a less overdriven My Bloody Valentine, does account for the intelligence of the songwriter and his bandmates. The experimental confidence on "Cryptograms" isn't as extended as I'd expected on "Microcastle." It's there, but it ebbs and flows. The record's tracking may account for lulls, especially midway, but these must be intentional to offset the amplified tracks; this same distribution of tone and pace for structure can be heard on "Cryptograms."

There's not many bands an older fan (me) and a younger (my son) can share, and this breadth of vision that Deerhunter's been entering holds promise for their career as a band, rather than a more famous musician and his crew. This cohesiveness, heard best in the elaborate, fully instrumental songs, indicates their potential at its best. I look forward to more songs with this louder, faster, thicker attitude. If Atlas Sound can provide Cox an outlet for his delicacy, Deerhunter to me should provoke him towards more aggressive, denser, and more paranoid (but in a good way!) layers of drone and doom.

(Posted to Amazon US today.)

What Does Your Taste in Music Say About You?

Not sure about my purported athleticism, but the first question asked me what I'd rather hear in a bar; I chose rock. The second, a concert: folk. The third, a long drive with classical. The fourth, the genre preferred was punk. Granted the lack of alternatives or nuance of multiple choices, I guess I dumbfounded the therapy-bot.

We had three couples last night for Thanksgiving. One couple: both pro musicians. The next, one pro. The third, both amateurs. My sons: by one guest one learned flute and one the clarinet, now by another guest one's mastering the guitar. For me, although I learned the rudiments of the tin whistle a while back when my boys began tootling, I'm really a listener. But, as that's how I met my dear wife, a perk!

Thanks to Stephen R. McEvoy's "Book Reviews & More" blog for this link to a 4-question quiz at "Blogthings".

Your musical tastes are intense and rebellious.
You are intelligent... but in a very unconventional way.

You are curious about the world. You love doing something new.
In fact, you enjoy taking risks and doing things most people would shy away from.

You are very physical. It's likely that you're athletic, but not into team sports.
You have the soul of an artist. Beauty and harmony are important to you.

Graphic by Ciaran Hughes: It's pretty dull searching for "iPod listening," but better than "music listening" imagery. This came up around pg. 18! Richard Gray, 10 Apr. 2008, [London] Telegraph. "Apple to turn down volume on iPod."

Alexander Cockburn's "Idle Passion": Book Review.

These chapters, more like related essays, explore "chess and the dance of death." Cockburn asserts a Freudian interpretation; "in the world of games lie areas of darkness, of taboos, of cruel instincts and vile desires. For the time being, let us narrow our focus to the chess player face to face, as in so many medieval woodcuts, with Death." (13) Chess excludes chance and emphasizes skill; this relegates chance and accident to the margins-- away from where they fill history, science, and progress, and for Cockburn this ludic superficiality proves the game's idealist unproductivity.

Sections delve into Paul Morphy's fate; Nabokov's "The Defense," (reviewed by me here and on Amazon US); Stefan Zweig's novella "The Royal Game;" the social history of the game; miseries of its modern champions; its Soviet promotion and its Cold War symbolism (in the US: "we play poker, they play chess"); Bobby Fischer and Marcel Duchamp; and game theory. "Games become a strange parody of our existence, an ironic emblem of neurotic vanity." (95) Artists can sell their works; they produce tangible objects. Chess players do not, and even fewer masters than artists can make a living at their driven avocation. Why they devote their lives to a restless compulsion may not be answered in these pages, but they do spur Cockburn into his own treatment.

He relies upon Norman O. Brown's "Life Against Death," Johan Huizinga's "Homo Ludens," and especially Ernest Jones' "The Problem of Paul Morphy" to present cautionary case studies. He accepts that Freud can give rise to vapid speculation, but he relentlessly counters "the hostility of many chess players to psychoanalytical comment on the game," as "patients often fear that analysis will take their sublimations away by revealing their defensive function." (26)

Although unconvinced by Oedipal reductions of King-maters and Queen-pursuers, I followed patiently Cockburn's earnest efforts. He finds a lot of repetition, compulsion, repressed homosexuality, masturbatory fantasies, and morbid anxieties in the lives of a few grandmasters. Still, I am uncertain if this proves his point that chess if pursued at its highest levels can be equated with pathology.

However, his aside that this particular obsession rarely manifests itself in women "because they are happily without the psychological formations or drives that promote an expertise in the game in the first place" remains provocative. As J. C. Hallman's "The Chess Artist" and Paul Hoffman's "The King's Gambit" (also reviewed by me here and on Amazon US) more recently explore, the male-dominated world of chess professionals does invite psychological explanations. Cockburn contrasts this patriarchical realm with the reality that (until so recently that as of 1974 when this book first appeared the freedom may not yet have truly happened) "women have never been allowed the cultural space to foster that lethargic, yet zealous commitment to a useless pursuit that has fostered the bizarre careers of the great champions." (47)

Relating this insight to a lively summary of medieval chess, he shares Kenneth Colby's idea that the Queen's suddenly expanded force heightened aggression. "The innovator, argues Colby, was probably a weakling who identified with the weak King and desired to create a strong woman who would contend against the world for him." (121-22) (That the Bishop also found his reach extended always merits less attention!) Colby and Cockburn anticipate Marilyn Yalom's popularized, romanticized, if simplified argument a few decades later about the parallels between stronger female monarchs and-- around 1480-- the apparently much-delayed "birth of the chess queen." Yet, Cockburn counters with his own idea.

He reminds us that after the Middle Ages, women apparently played less often. He wonders if the Queen signifies "the degeneration of the feudal system" as "advanced technology" gives the advantage to attack rather than defense. He earlier investigates how two dozen legends exist as to why chess began; eight themes can be classified. Father murder-- chess exists as the "therapeutic agent"; war preparation; war substitute; diversion; intellectual contest; moral education; "the mater dolorosa" theme. (100) He seems on solid ground as he suggests that the medieval passion for chess may serve "as a device for sublimating political aspirations; the empty omnipotence exercised by his player over his pieces is consolation for lost power." (111) But, it will not help him regain land or command.

This supports his later studies of how chess became-- in early modern Europe-- the mark of a dispossessed gentleman of suspect and devouring leisure, as well as the trade of a con man. Or a villain (in perhaps its earlier meaning as well as its current one!): in films such sadists "often play chess. Heroes rarely do." (n. 6, 230) Cockburn's clever at distinguishing the rise of gambling and card sharps at this historical stage, as they displace the nobles who are caught between the bourgeoisie and the centralization of monarchical control.

In turn, this segues well into the Soviet exertions of what, in one of the best stretches, can be shown as a contradictory ambition of the USSR. Written at the peak of the Cold War, just after Fischer had beat Spassky, this perspective may be dated, but it's valuable for the tensions he dissects. This sentence from Pravda in 1936 typifies the Communist ethos: "Recently an All-Union Chess and draughts Congress of pig-breeders, dairymen and zoo-technicians met in the Stalin state farm, situated in the Moscow region twelve miles from the nearest railway station." (144) The problem, as Cockburn shows: chess could not be but "a perfect leisure activity: politically safe, sedate, and noncollective." (150)

He's a bit muddled on differentiating individual commitment to chess from its collective uses, and how his earlier thesis of its employment as a means to channel the frustrations of a group shut out from power aligns with the USSR's sponsorship, but he may after all mirror the inherent dialectic within the game! The Soviets tried to install chess as the ideal expression of dialectical materialism, but when it came to practically harnessing the efforts of so many pig-breeders-- or state-sinecured intellectuals-- away from their checkerboarded leisure back into the grueling construction of the "Worker's Monarchy," the synthesis eluded the commissars. "But what an irony for a socialist society to have achieved its greatest cultural triumphs in the arena of chess-- a parody of what the emancipation of the human personality can involve." (154)

That failure sums up Cockburn's reactions. The game imitated the orders of society in its ancient battle array and medieval ranked orders. But, with professionalization, the pursuit turned into work. Chess beckons with the promise of perfection, but humans cannot attain it given its receding horizon of a nearly infinite number of moves. The players "'know more rejection that any artist ever has.'" (Frank Brady on Fischer, qtd. 181, 195 & 216).

Thus, at the levels such writers as Hallman, Hoffman, and David Shenk (in another book reviewed by me here and on Amazon US, "The Immortal Game," which delves into the perfect example of Duchamp) later plumb, Cockburn trails after those who attain this rarified existence, playing a game that no longer's leisure. "The world of the expert player becomes an increasingly hermetic one, in which the repressed matter sublimated by the game may return with increasing vigor and malignancy." (215) As Zweig lamented: this pastime lures the unwary into "thought that leads to nothing," by "the ludicrous effort to corner a wooden king on a wooden board!" (qtd. 76 & 87).

(Posted to Amazon US today.)

Ag blogadh níos lag?

Léigh mé ar an Amanna Nhua-Eabhrac Dé Domhnaigh seo caite mar gheall ar "ag blogadh go lag." Tá sé anseo: 'Deifir, ag caite drochmheas air: ar blogadh chomh malltriallach le seilide'. Scríobh Sharon Otterman ar an 23ú de Shamhain 2008 faoi maidir ag titim ar an bpoist bhlogannaí i mbliana ar an idirlion.

D'imigh scríobhneoiraí teagmhasachaí ar "Giolcaire" nó "Leabhar ar Ghnúis" a insint mionscéalta pearsanta agus ur-lascannaí ar dhuine eile faoi seo. D'fhág diliteant ansuid. Fanann dícheallach ann.

Aontaím leis Otterman agus duine eile futhú. Go cinnte, tógaim mo h-altannaí as Gaeilge leis ag teacht an tseilide agamsa féin. Scríobhaim as Béarla, mar sin féin, go haireach go hionduil.

Go minic, athcheartaím. Fhill mé ar ais ar piosa seo aríst! Is iontach liom má go ndeántar ag blogadh leis aire do mhionphointí céann de gnáth.

Tuigim go bhfuil mo chairde ar an ghreasan ag déanamh seo, mar shampla 'AM', 'Bo', 'Tí Uí Mhurchú', 'Crios', 'Cadhóit', 'Inion ua T', or "Ecopunk"-- i measc eile. Is maith linn ar ndóigh a scríobh go tapaidh ina gnáthshaol agam. Ach, tá fiúntas ann "a déanamh deifir go lag', chomh leis an seanfhochal Láidin: 'festina lente'.

Slower Blogging?

I read in the New York Times last Sunday concerning "slow blogging." Here it is: "Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail's Pace." Sharon Otterman wrote on November 23, 2008, about the issue of a falling off in blog posts this year on the Internet.

Casual posters [=scribblers] went away to tell other people about social gossip and fresh links via "Twitter" or "Facebook" by now. The dilletante left. The diligent stay.

I agree with Otterman and other people about these (matters). Indeed, I construct my blogs in Irish at the march of the snail myself. I write in English, all the same, carefully and customarily.

Often, I revise. I returned back to this piece again! I wonder if someone blogging habitually does so with the same attention to details.

I understand that my friends on the web, for example "AM," "Bo," "Casa Murphy," "Chris," "Coyote," "Miss T" nó "Ecopunk"-- among others-- do this. I like to write quickly in everyday life, of course. But, it's of value to "make haste slowly," as with the Latin proverb: "festina lente."

Iómhá/Image: Tá alt faoi naircisíocht ar an blogannaí. Tá ábhar ábhal go deimhin. Bheimis an choir a admháil is huile. Here's an article about narcissism on the blogs. It is certainly a vast topic. We all should plead most guilty! 'Tá sé ag breathnaigh orm, a lheanbh!'/"Here's Looking at Me, Kid!" le/by Jan Hoffman. Ealaíontóir/Artist: Raghnall Bairéid/Ron Barrett. NYT: 20 Iúil/July 2008.

J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace": Book Review.

Lecturing in Cape Town university downsized to a technical college, once a professor of literature, now an adjunct in communications, one of the "clerks in a post-religious age," David Lurie seems older than 52. He begins to decline, long divorced, longing for solace and seeking it unwisely. "Because he has no respect for the material he teaches, he makes no impression on his students." (4) "The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those that come to learn learn nothing." (5)

Out of a job after he refuses to go along with the abjection that he believes, stubbornly and quixotically, is demanded by the administration after he is charged with sexual harassment, he retreats to the Eastern Cape, to join his daughter, Lucy, who runs a small kennel and grows flowers on a remote farm. The drift away from city habits to country attitudes adds poignancy to Lurie's slide into despair. You both cringe at his refusal to confess his wrongdoing, and sympathize with his pride.

The book, pivoting around the rape, off-scene, of Lucy, the assault on Lurie, and their gradual displacement by the neighbor who craves her land and knows more about the rapists than he lets on, Petrus, may be rather schematic in parts, but as with a drama, each character's defined according to his or her type. Coetzee's attention to details shows his commitment to each character in this serious, downbeat, and grim novel.

For instance, we view his accuser Melanie's signature on the document of her accusation, to Lurie through the limited omniscient gaze of the novel: "the arabesque of the M, the l with its bold upper loop, the downward gash of the I, the flourish of the final s." (40) In such mundane details, her attraction, and her vindication, swirl together to drag him down.

His rural retreat hastens his regression. "His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go." (72) He volunteers at an animal shelter. He tries to gain empathy, but he keeps his perspective: "So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution." (76) The novel's most telling moments, for me, came as Lurie begins to feel a connection-- but only to a point, eschewing sentimentality-- with the dogs he cares for, far from his former urban comforts.

As for his daughter, on her own, she faces the aftermath of the crime. The narrator muses how it's "a risk to own anything" in South Africa today. "Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day." (98) So the theory goes if not the brutal practice, the repayment of debts taken from the descendants of the settlers by those they subjugated.

Lucy's refusal to admit her rape galls him. She languishes, while he wants her to seek safety and earn justice. Lucy senses this is the cruel exchange, the test she must undergo to survive in the countryside of her transformed and restive nation. Lurie, meanwhile, finds the recuperation he came there for evades him. "Here he is losing himself day by day" as he cares for his daughter and does menial chores for covetous Petrus and at the animal shelter.

There, he has an uneasy, basic, affair with the shelter's supervisor, Bev. She's ungainly, with features like a troll, but Lurie rationalizes that now, this is the only kind of woman he will find for his shamed desires. "Half of literature is about it; young women struggling to escape from under the weight of old men, for the sake of the species." (190)

He explains to Bev how he's fallen. "Teaching was never a vocation for me. Certainly I never aspired to teach people how to live. I was what used to be called a scholar. I wrote books about dead people. That was where my heart was. I taught only to make a living." (162) He slowly regains his interest in a dramatic-operatic piece on Byron's abandoned mistress Teresa, and the conjunction of this failed romance with his own tangled lovelessness moves the final section of this story into a fitting meditation.

While Lucy, Petrus, and the hinterland's raw terrain prove ultimately uninviting, neither does the Cape, when Lurie returns from his extended stay, prove any more hospitable. The last sections show Lurie suspended between his urbanity and his pared-down life now, and show how his journey into the African interior has taken him into his own dark heart. As the title warns, this Booker Prize winner for 1999 unsparingly tears off the masks Lurie dons, until he and we must face his uncomfortable self.

(Posted to Amazon US. Typically, the blank American edition's cover's again bettered by the British Penguin.)

Mo fhoireann fichille nua.

Cheannaigh mé foireann fichille iniompartha nua deág laethanta ó shín. Chuaigh mé go hAlhambra in aice leis mo bhaile. Is ciall é "an Caislean Rua" as Araibis. Is brí é feiliúnach!

Mar sin féin, ní raibh fir fichille leis dath sin ansuid. Iarraidh mé seo mar go raibh dith agamsa a baint amach clár fichille maighnéadach. Chuardaigh mé ar an idirlion nó ina siopaí bréagán air. Ní bhfuair mé leis luachanna measartha ar chor ar bith.

Bhuel, chonaic mé amháin faoi dheireadh. Níor cheannaigh mé sin go cruinn. Bhí sé ro-dhear orm. Ach, bhí maith liom samhlachaí eagsulaí acu.

Mheas mé go raibh siad níos dathúil go cinnte. Scríobh mé mar gheall acu anseo go luath. Rinne siad i bPholainn. Tá dathannaí gorm agus corcra, dearg agus uaine fós acusan féin. Feicfidh tú siadsan ar an ghreasan.

Thiomaint mé go hAlhambra, áfach. Díoladh sé bealach E-Bay agam. Bhí clár fichille ar an stórálaim na hallmhairiú go tSín. Cruinníonn sé rudaí leis cluichí clisteachtaí, mar sin "Go," ficheall Síneach nó Eorpanach, agus mah-jong. Ní bhfaighidh mé foireann fichille níos saor i mball eile céad.

Ámh, bhí fadbh agam. Ní raibh de rogha air ach dath amháin. D'imigh mé leis donn. Níl granna é ann. Is cosuil le maide dubh. Shábháil mé níos mo fiche dollair; íoc fiche dollair air.

Ní iarraidh mé táirgí Síneach. Léigh mé ar an bosca fhioreann ní dhearna sé "leis oibre na paistí"! Duirt lipéad greamaitheach go "deanta i bPholainn." D'inis sé orm leis sé teangacha go tógtha ar crannaí ag fástha adhmad i bplandálachaí.

Nuair d'oscail mé an bosca, thit ceithearnach síos. Fhéach mé ag timpeall mo charr. Bhí fear bídeach ann. Ní fhaca mé ceithearnach is lu. Bhí mé ar mo glúine. Ní raibh ábalta feiceáil sé.

Bhí fearg ormsa go measurtha. Fhill mé ar mo bhaile. Rug mé laomlampa beag. Chaith mé ar feadh uair. Bhí trathnóna go tapaidh ansin. Bhí dall agamsa. Fuair mé sé amach leis mo mhéar amháin go críochnúil. Anois, imreoidh Niall agus mé cluiche ar aghaidh gach eile-- agus ar chéile.

My new chess set.

I bought a new portable chess set ten days ago. I went to Alhambra near my home. Its derivation's "the red castle" from Arabic. It's an appropriate meaning!

Nevertheless, there weren't chess-men with that color over there. I wanted this because there was a need for me to obtain a magnetic chess-board. I searched on the internet or in toy shops for it. I did not find any at reasonable prices at all.

Well, I saw only one finally. I did not buy that (one) eventually. It was too dear for me. But, I liked the various models of them.

I thought that they were more colorful, certainly. I wrote concerning these here earlier. They were made in Poland. They themselves have colors of blue and purple, red and green also. You can see them on the web.

I drove to Alhambra, however. It was sold to me by way of E-Bay. The chess-board was at a Chinese importer's warehouse. They gather items of games of skill, such as "Go," Chinese and European chess, and mah-jong. I did not find a chess-set any cheaper anywhere else.

Yet, I had one problem. There was no choice for me but one color. I went off with brown. It's not ugly. It resembles a dark woodiness. I saved more than twenty dollars; I paid for it twenty dollars.

I didn't want Chinese products. I read on the set's box that it wasn't made "with child labor!" The sticker told me that it was "made in Poland." It told me in six languages that it was constructed with trees grown from wood on plantations.

When I opened the box, a pawn fell out. I looked around my car. The piece was tiny. I did not see the pawn so small. I was on my knees. I wasn't able to see it.

I grew rather angry. I returned to my house. I got out a little flashlight. I spent an hour. It was twilight rapidly. I myself was blind. I got it out with only my fingers at last. Now, Niall and I will play the game against each other-- and together.

Don DeLillo's "Falling Man": Book Review.

This post-9/11 novel features DeLillo's detached, reflective perspective. The prose, while at times moving and well-crafted, retains its distance from trauma. This may mirror the shock of Keith, an executive in the Twin Towers who escapes, and his estranged wife Lianne's own complicated emotions when she finds him, a victim of "organic shrapnel," at her doorstep where he's staggered post-blast. Yet, I rarely felt drawn in to the pain of their revived relationship, nor did their son Justin's own reaction, or that of Lianne's mother or her lover keep me immersed in their responses to that memorable day and its aftermath.

However, Lianne's mother, Nina, and her enigmatic German paramour Martin do engage in spirited debate about the role that God played on 9/11. Both the perpetrators and their victims called out His name in their last moments. DeLillo's at his strongest when he considers the role that faith plays in Lianne and Nina's lives, or its lack. Nina rails: "God used to be an urban Jew. He's back in the desert now." (46) Martin ripostes: "One side has the capital, the labor, the technology, the armies, the agencies, the cities, the laws, the police and the prisons. The other side has a few men willing to die." (46-47) Whether its a social revolt or a fundamentalist surge charges Martin and Nina's conversations with an energy often lacking otherwise in these pages.

Hammid, a German-educated hijacker, one of the nineteen, earns his own small role, yet these chapters do not flesh out his character much. I compare this with the attempt of a similar work (also reviewed by me on Amazon US and this blog), John Updike's "Terrorist," to delve into the mind of a Western-schooled Islamic jihadist. DeLillo and Updike plant their young fanatic into the suburban malaise of our nation, yet DeLillo holds back his descriptions, favoring restraint. This stance permeates the whole novel.

Therefore, some may welcome this tamped-down delivery. I found it, on the other hand, too far away from what I wanted to find out about Keith and Lianne. Keith gets into gambling, and while this realm's detailed extensively, it failed to engross me; similarly, a subplot with Florence, a fellow survivor of Keith's tails off abruptly. DeLillo does this as before, as in "Underworld," and while this adds verisimilitude, it doesn't satisfy the reader wanting more fictional standards of closure.

Lots of this story drifts along as if hermetically sealed off. I understand this intent, but it fails to move me. The couple's son, Justin, speaks for a portion of the plot in monosyllables as an experiment, and I felt like DeLillo almost was parodying his own minimalism. Echoes of a less-foul mouthed Mamet echo in many sentences here, so pared down are they.

So, while this novel leaves me with enough to think about, there are far fewer particular sentences that stand out. The passages on belief stick longest. Lianne near the end of the story goes to Mass and wonders:

"She thought that the hovering possible presence of God was the thing that created loneliness and doubt in the soul and she also thought that God was the thing, the entity existing outside space and time that resolved this doubt in the tonal power of a word, a voice.

God is the voice that says, 'I am not here.'

She was arguing with herself but it wasn't argument, just the noise the brain makes." (236)

Such moments make the novel worthwhile, but it's an uneven (as in the anti-war march attended by Lianne and Justin, or the Falling Man performance artist's appearances) rendition of the aftermath of the attacks on NYC. Martin sees a painting reminding him of the attacks, with "the two dark objects, too obscure to name," (49) and in such instances, the dread reverberates well before it fades into the airlessness of most of this text. Again, while this may capture the dislocation of contemporary New Yorkers in the early decade, it may not satisfy those expecting a more in-depth, less pared-down depiction of these domestic upheavals.

(Review posted to Amazon US today. I show the British edition's cover, as it has the names more prominently shown.)

Henry Rollins in Northern Ireland: Media Review.

"Uncut" on IFC débuted last night, November 21, 2008, so I watched it. Alerted by a clip featuring Anthony McIntyre-- whose "Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism" I reviewed a week ago here-- I found the show fair and intelligent. A bit compressed, inevitably into an hour, and perhaps more difficult to follow for those less informed about the North. Still, Rollins comes across as typically confident, probing, and humbled by the replacement of his well-honed cynicism with a more tolerant, humane understanding of the need for all of us to listen more than we talk. He does both, balancing his own "stand-up" social commentary (I wouldn't call it comedy) at the Empire Music Hall in Belfast with interviews from politicians, activists, and veterans of the struggle.

It's heartening to see that veteran of my city's punk scene, from Black Flag-- a band that played my college dorm's rec room (he and I were born thirteen days apart) after they were banned circa '79-80 from many of the local clubs-- bring his own activist stance to the masses. Rollins has also visited Israel, New Orleans, and South Africa for similar investigations of the intersection of radical ideas, government oppression, economic inequality, and cultural ferment. As punks grow up, few of them continue their intervention in ways that go beyond the usual reunion tour for "filthy lucre" or re-recording their songs for "Guitar Hero"! (Yes, I know that the Pistols were screwed over by Malcolm, etc.)

The IFC site lacks detailed coverage of the episode. So, in the interests of anyone curious, here's my scorecard. I took notes as it ran, and I could not record it, so I did not catch all the data I would have wished; times are approximate. A few clips can be seen at the IFC site, but not the entire episode. (It may be up on YouTube, however, in time.)

00:00-05:00: Overview of the background to the Troubles. It's intriguing that Rollins refers to the tension beginning circa 1969 over the "Nationalists or Republicans" to wish to "remain" independent rather than submit to continued British rule in cooperation with the "Unionists or Loyalists."

05:00-10:00: Stand-up about shopping in Tescos with brusque and invasive locals.

10:00-15:00: Eamonn McCann in Derry shows HR the Bogside site of Bloody Sunday.

15:00-20:00: Anthony McIntyre as a former IRA member and prisoner at Long Kesh tells HR about the parallels between the NI and Iraqi occupations. This comparison weaves in and out of this entire episode. He alone in the episode is subtitled, although my wife, with her film industry experience, tells me it may be as much due to the outside shots of them walking around the shoreline with poor miking-- presumably HR only was wired up well-- as AM's Norn Iron articulation!

20:00-25:00: Kevin Ned Murphy, "Republican farmer, South Armagh," gives an rundown on British army surveillance. He contrasts the "nonsense" of U.S. claims that the Iraqi surge has been succeeding with his insistence that any occupied people will naturally resist.

25:00-28:00: Frankie Brennan and another man (I didn't catch his name; he rarely speaks) from Belfast's beleaguered Short Strand Republican enclave describe their situation under harassment and assaults by the surrounding Loyalists.

28:00-36:00: Stand-up about HR's easy cynicism vs. his mature realization of adult responsibility. He tells a moving anecdote about a worker at Subway's own family crises while the man makes HR's sandwich and deals with minimum-wage circumstances.

36:00-41:00: McCann returns to take HR around Derry's "insipid" Peace Murals. "SF/RUC scum" & "Kill all SF/RUC members" graffiti juxtapose with stylized hands releasing doves. McCann vigorously argues how the peace process fails to bring people together post-GFA. Rather than a "recipe for long-term peace," it's a "cosmetic" bridge. There's a hunger to get over sectarian divisions, while poverty remains. Radicalism's muted as if a threat to the officially sanctioned peace process.

41:00-45:00: Willie Frazier, "Protestant activist," shares his perspective. "The past is not past for us," and his people cannot forget so easily. Four Land Rovers pass in the background as he's interviewed; this attests to the continuing British military presence even as he talks of the "peace." (I am not sure where this was filmed.)

45:00-47:00: More evidence of a lingering military is shown. Security cameras monitor, and the lack of sectarianism in the Republican campaign is asserted.

47:00-49:00: Dawn Purvis, head of the PUP (Progressive Unionist Party) tells HR how in NI you're "born with a mental map in your head" of where it's safe to go. She suggests the goal should be instead a striving for common human connections.

49:00-50:00: Peter Robinson relates the importance of conflict resolution by dialogue.

50:00-52:00: Mitchell McLaughlin of Sinn Féin explores the possibility for Iraqi self-determination and NI parallels with the U.S. playing an "honest broker" role.

52:00-53:00: Purvis on negotiation with all willing protagonists as essential.

53:00-58:00: Stand-up on freedom. American-bred selfishness rooted in jingoism vs. the natural impulse to defend one's nation against invasion: contradictions of U.S. stance by its interventionists vs. the American pride in standing up to the British! Importance of giving dignity and respect to others.

HR's humbled at the lessons of freedom he's witnessed in NI as in South Africa, and thanks his audience. He tells them now he learns why poets write their poems about Ireland. He also appreciates why they fight over their women, and why even in NI, blues records are made.

Photo: from IFC "Uncut" site; Eamonn McCann wears the red, of course, skullcap.

Evelyn Waugh's "Decline & Fall": Book Review.

On p. 163, the 25-year-old Waugh intrudes in the voice of his omniscient narrator, revealing his protagonist Paul Pennyfeather as a hollow man of the Jazz Age: "readers must not complain if the shadow which took his name does not amply fill the important part of hero for which he was originally cast." By whom? The class system? Fate? His deceased parents or uncaring guardian? Oxford's "Scone" college's bullies who frame him and the masters who expel him for "indecent behavior"? The distanced stance taken by the author towards his creation in his début novel already reveals a more complicated tale than the side-splitter full of deadpan one-liners that casual readers of this novel may have assumed.

The satire begins lightly, but as Paul's unfair expulsion shows, there's a serrated edge to this fictional undercutting of post-WWI English society. Having to fend for himself, as did Waugh, teaching in a Welsh college of less than distinguished lineage, Paul's told by the headmaster: "I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal." (15) At a dinner party for his future fianceé and nemesis, Lady Beste-Chetwynde, the Vicar notes how "lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity." (91)

Neither Church nor the gentry can provide direction, let alone education or the prisons, war profiteers or white slavers, as Paul becomes enmeshed in plans he, as the opening passage I cited demonstrates, can never outwit. The central sections of the narration may, however, be the weakest. While amusing, their pace slackens and incidents follow one another without apparent reason here and there. This may well be intended to show Paul's lack of willpower in a frenzied decade, but the novel takes on, from our distance of eight decades, too remote a tone.

It's hard to care much for any satire when the figures are all figureheads. Waugh's aware, young as he was when publishing this. The novel gains gravitas as it follows Paul's further decline and fall. A tremendous passage halfway through articulates the traditional fear behind the modern era's mask of confidence.

Grimes laments:

"Our life is lived between two homes. We emerge for a little into the light, and then the front door closes. The chintz curtains shut out the sun, and the hearth glows with the fire of home, while upstairs, above our heads, are enacted again the awful accidents of adolescence. There's a home and a family waiting for every one of us. We can't escape, try how we may." (133) "As individuals we simply do not exist," he continues. We seem like "potential home builders, beavers and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth?" (134)

This reveals far more "The Waste Land"'s despair than a lighthearted send-up of Oxford, boarding school, snobs, or the smart set. Themes that "A Handful of Dust" would deepen in later years, as Alexander Waugh notes in his chronicle of his clan, "Fathers and Sons" (also reviewed by me here and on Amazon US), make Waugh deserving of our respect for the care with which even the less-weighty works of his early years are assembled, and how they tackle, glancingly yet bruisingly, the terrors underneath the romps. His Majesty's Prison no worse than a British public school, war mongerers awaiting their investments to be paid off in the next global scrap, the uselessness of journalistic churning of the "news" to the jaded, the haplessness of religious institutions or conventional schooling: these all appear here, as Paul's long shadows.

As the prison warden Sir Wilfrid Lucas-Dockery opines about Paul: "You could see with that unfortunate man what a difference it made to him to think that, far from being a mere nameless slave, he has now become part of a great revolution in statistics." (227) The vocal register here's exact. So is that which to us turns more disturbing, with the Lady's black lover "Chokey." Waugh does play this character close to the vest, but he does show that condescension gives as well as takes-- see the "rood screen" exchange-- in a manner that may prove more subtle and durable despite Waugh also displaying his own racial prejudices. It's a complicated scene, to say the least, with more than may meet the reader too quick to cast calumny then or now. "Chokey" stays elusive to survive.

Authors from around 1930 with more solemn approaches may lodge on college reading lists, but Waugh, in his blend of effortlessly recorded dialogue and accurately rendered blather of all classes, may have brought this combination off with humane compassion, outrage, wickedness, and insight-- better than some of his more ambitious peers. As Alexander Waugh reminds us, Evelyn labored to capture how people talked as well as how they acted, and sentences here beg to be recited as testament to his skill at reminding us that we still wallow in patronizing attitudes, class stereotypes, and cruel behavior. Calling attention to this as Waugh does, he knows he is no less to blame, but at least he has the upper hand, for he expects us to recognize the foibles here and to behave better than those at whose follies we cringe as often as we chortle. That's the mark of satire that has no expiration date.

(Posted to Amazon US today.) P.S. Re: Image: Why are British (Commonwealth here) Penguins always so much better designed as to their well-chosen cover art? Sexier invariably, yet classier. Clever marketing, as who reads a 1930 Waugh novel for the erotic frisson, come to think of it? Australian Penguin paperback cover

Sambo's, Sex, and Me?

My dear wife noted on her blog entry "Doddering Daughter-y"-- which nearly sounds like a Finley Peter Dunne moniker for a Chicago Irish pol in the Gay '90s-- my association of the chain restaurant of the 60s and 70s "Sambo's" with my first awareness of sex. She encouraged me to elaborate, given this prompt. So, here goes.

When I was ten, I got to go around California on a family road trip, my first. Before that, I'd never gotten further than a dimly recalled Indio and an even earlier night in a hotel room in El Cajon, near San Diego, both venues having to do with my parents' attendance at dog shows. And being too cheap for a babysitter?

Loving maps--both the ones I made up and the ones I pored over, I longed to see my native state. I spent many days wondering with my National Geographics and gazeteers (love that word too) piled up around me when I'd ever go farther than a twenty-mile trip to Fedco in either Pasadena or San Bernardino. I jumped up and down when my parents told me the news.

Off we went, the four of us in what could have been the Buick Riviera or the old fake-wooden panelled Ford Country Squire station wagon. North via the Grapevine towards Highway 99 to Visalia to stop, over into Mono County before hooking into Yosemite, along Highway 49 from Mariposa into the Gold Rush Country of the lower Sierras to Placerville. Three Dog Night played incessantly on the top-40 stations my sister and I cajoled our parents into tuning on their AM-only radio.

Back towards 99 into Sacramento and up across the Oregon border into Grants Pass and Rogue River vistas before back into the inspiring redwoods. My chart from Pacific Lumber Co, reviled by Humboldt State U's hippies, showed the comparison of a redwood's life to a timeline back into history-- Columbus, Crusades, Christ. Overnight in Ukiah, then down to my initial glimpse of the Golden Gate bridging the city I never have forgotten, San Francisco.

We stayed at TravelLodges; this cheap motel chain featured the logo of Sleepy Bear, paper covered drinking cups, and a lack of frills each time we spent the night. Yet, with air conditioning, for me it was a treat. I assume we zoomed down the coast, before Silicon Valley erased entirely the fertile Valley of Heart's Delight, into Carmel and Monterey. The latter remains one of my next favorite cities, along with nearby Santa Cruz.

I always thought that this was where the Sambo's I remembered was, and where I figured a Brazilian place on the north side of Ocean St. sits today. But, a check of the list (see note below) of former Sambo's shows none for Santa Cruz. My wife, when I checked now, confirms what I'd evidently forgotten; she recalls Santa Barbara as the sexy franchise. I guess my breakfast there was pretty traumatic.

Well, reconstructing this summer of '71 vacation, I gather we made our way down the coast of Highway 1 to Big Sur, Hearst Castle, and wearily we must have stopped at a Sambo's eventually. Probably the flagship one (details below).

All I can remember, just having turned ten, was going into the bathroom stall and seeing my first drawing of a naked woman. Voluptuous breasts and curves. The caption read "Watermelons."

Tim Putz' Sambo's Vintage Photos documents many of the former locations. Up over 1100 once, now down to the original coffeeshop along the splendid shoreline of Cabrillo Blvd. in Santa Barbara.

The name garnered the chain an unfortunate association by those ignorant of children's stories. In all innocence, so I surmised, this orange-bedecked, neon plastic flourescent vinyl temple to pancake-stacked sticky cuisine was christened and ubiquitously decorated in honor of the Indian tiger who spun his tail into a pool of butter. The rise of Afro-Americanism and nascent PC-cultural awareness fueled a backlash against the place, and this hastened, at least as I always assumed, their precipitous decline in a less innocent 70s. I also remind myself of another lost childhood icon, Bob's Big Boy's mascot, cheerfully chubbily checkered.

But note the corrective explanation from the surviving restaurant's homepage:

"Sam is Sam Battistone and Bo is Newell Bohnett, known affectionately to his friends, family and associates as "Bo". Despite all the other stories - this is really how SAMBO'S got its name. 'The Story of Little Black Sambo' by Helen Bannerman was an afterthought. The SAMBO'S RESTAURANT already was established before the children's story was discovered and used as part of a marketing promotion."

Ag súil i ngarran.

Tá mé ag súil beagán nuair téann mé ag baint mo mhac Leon de scoil. Tá sean-garran eoclaip bídeach ag trasna na lána. D'éirigh mé de mo ghluaistéan. Thosaigh mé ag dul amach ag spaisteoireacht ansin.

Títeann na duilleoga a chaitheamh go leor inniu. Seasamh mé coirt crainne ag déanamh cnagarnach os ard. Tá fothram glórach ó rúsc go leor ann.

Ach, níl mothar ann. Ní bheadh tú ag dul isteach fáschoill ar chor ar bith fós. Is maith gleo mór go bhfuil ag déanamh mé ann.

Feicim radharc a fháil ar Glen Naomh Gabriel. Níl mé ábalta fáil ar fad, mar sin féin. Bíonn amharc doiléir go hionduil ann. Tá aimsir smúitiúil le deanaí freisin.

Is cuimhne liom mo coláiste. Bhí tríoch mblian go ham seo ar an laghad anois. D'imir mé cluiche peile agus cluiche corr in aice leis ar an líne eoclaipe eile ansiud.

Ceapaim go raibh na ranga sean-crainn ann. Is docha go raibh siad ag timpeall dhá scoil ag chéile ag fáschta ar feadh laethannaí rhainseoireachtaí. Measaim go raibh céad os a chionn i bhfad ó shín.

Bhí grá mór leis Séan Ó Mordha nuair ag déanta a thuras de shiúl cos thar sliabh agus gleann ag imeall bealach cnocha go direach taobh thuas Pasadena agus Altadena de scoil Lheon ca mbeidh mé ag súil aríst. Is iontach liom. B'fhéidir, tá mé ag lorg Ui Mordha a leanúint gach uair.

Walking in a grove.

I am walking a bit when I go to get my son Leo from school. There's a tiny old eucalyptus grove across the lane. I get out of my car. I start going for a stroll over there.

The leaves fall down a lot today. I tread on the bark "making crunchy" loudly. There's a tumultuous din from so much bark there.

But, it's not a thicket there. You won't find going in any underbrush at all there either. I like the great noise that I make there.

I see to get a look at San Gabriel Valley. I'm unable to view for far, however. There's usually a hazy vista there. The weather's smudgy lately too.

I remember my high-school. This was thirty years ago at least now. I played soccer and baseball near the line of other eucalyptus over there.

I think that the row of trees was old there. It's likely that they were planted around the two schools both during the days of the ranchers. I reckon that was over a hundred years way back.

John Muir had a great love when he made his trek by footpath over mountain and glen around the Pasadena and Altadena hillside way straight on the slope over Leo's school where I will be walking again. I wonder. Perhaps, I am following Muir's steps every time.

W.C. Fitler, "Eucalyptus Avenue." (Photogravure). 1888. Captaen/Caption: "As the title page promises, John Muir's Picturesque California is a vast medley of different mediums of illustration, depicting the scenery and daily life of the Rocky Mountain and Pacific West. The boulevards of a new middle class mecca like the town of Inglewood, 'wisely chosen where grand avenues of eucalyptus and pepper trees are already grown' are accorded the same artistic treatment as the glories of the high Sierra. All sorts of illustrative media rub shoulders in Muir's volumes, as jumbled as the scenery."

Alexander Theroux's "The Secondary Colors": Book Review.

"Color is fictive space," Theroux reflects in this companion book of essays to his on blue, yellow, and red as "The Primary Colors" (also reviewed by me on this blog in the immediately preceding entry, as well as on Amazon US.) The sections on orange, purple, and green, somewhat surprisingly, seem even more detailed than those on the previous hues. They're also even more free-associative in their range.

The book therefore reads more smoothly than "Primary." I'm surprised that there's even more pages in this volume, given that you'd expect red, yellow, and blue to weigh in with greater literary, religious, artistic, erotic, psychological, and musical references. Somehow, once again, I have no idea how, Theroux amasses a prose-poem's three hundred pages of reflections on eager to please, oafish, optimistic, if garish orange, regal and sensuous purple's pomp and resonance, and green's natural hues, that open us vividly to our surroundings.

Typically for readers (like myself, who recently reviewed "Primary," and his fiction "Three Wogs" and "Laura Warholic" here and on Amazon) of his stories, this author engages in a formidable presentation of his wit. He's a skilled translator of Latin and Spanish poetry, even if he leaves a lot of the French in the original! His vocabulary's rather tamped down by his erudite standards, but this helps us along. He's less intrusive as he guides us along his mental trains of thought.

Hearteningly, Theroux keeps his eye out for cant. It's intriguing to find that all three colors feature prominently not only in the fine arts but the invective of "race music," gay subculture, and Catholic iconography-- three of the author's many interests. The book's generally well-paced, although there's a rough edit from the time he takes to correct an unnamed novelist's (I wish I knew who) critique of Theroux's own supposed misogyny, followed by a jump back to blue and yellow's combination. Anyone would be challenged, nonetheless, to arrange the mass of information with any less care than he has.

He cuts down the puerile "poetaster Jenny Joseph" with her insipid "When I am an old woman/ I shall wear purple," nods to thousands of mentions of orange across the edible and visible spectrums, and glides through tangents devoted elegantly to green in all its guises.

Minor slips emerge; his vast erudition prevents me from finding out many, but he misspells Cyndi Lauper's first name twice, and claims Rusty Staub played for the Montreal Expos back in 1964 (rather than 1969-71 and '79). The World's Fair there had not even happened 'til '67; the team started in '69. He also, puzzingly, in one sentence, errs at least twice. He places Jim Jones in "Ghana;" he asserts that Jones shot himself. (He possibly miscounts the total casualties, although I'll grant him leeway as this number has been disputed.)

Such human slips may be inevitable in a book so crammed with data, musings, memories, and critiques. They may make the book a bit more accessible; even Theroux nods! And, as he notes with these three colors near his end, they, in their secondary status, manage to become all the more inviting next to their predecessors and progenitors! Read these evocative essays and find out why.

Alexander Theroux's "The Primary Colors": Book Review

He's one of my favorite writers (recently I reviewed on Amazon US and my blog here "Laura Warholic," his latest novel and "Three Wogs," his earliest fiction) but he's certainly sui generis. I have no idea how, especially pre-Internet 1996 and pre-search engines, he compiled the thousands of allusions, citations, song lyrics, art works, and trivia that accumulate here to explore blue, yellow, and red. His prose style here, unlike his fiction, may be either more accessible or less cohesive for his readers, but if they've enjoyed his novels, they'll welcome these brief, but densely packed, essays.

He raises, of course, many more questions than even he answers. And he knows a lot, such that you'll feel inept by comparison; a common reaction perhaps to encountering his formidably erudite prose. Still, if you want a counterblast to the usual piddle that passes for thought, he'll prove rewarding. As with all his books, it's not to be dashed through, but better savored for its style and contemplated for its observations.

Here's a few that struck me. Blue and green often mix in most languages; Theroux wonders if this may be due to a very recent development of our retinal cones that perceive blue. I'm curious if recent genetics can solve this crux. Also, colors enter most languages in the same order: first black and white, then red, and then either green or yellow followed by the other. The fifth color separates the third and fourth, resulting in blue. There's no footnotes or sources given, for if there were it'd be equal to the text itself easily. But, I wish I could find out from where Theroux piled up such arcana.

On pp. 102-03, for example, he goes in one paragraph from yellow eyes in Frankenstein to a Dickens character, Leon Trotsky about Stalin, Arab boys, a film based on Balzac, Catherine Deneuve's sister, a woman in Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer," another in a García Márquez tale, Sam Spade, and ends with "the Alaskan Gray Wolf, staring directly at you."

The yellow chapter, compared to the red and blue, appears more bilious and more disturbing, and Theroux seems to share in that color's enigma. (One minor correction on pg. 120: Christo's artistic display of yellow umbrellas "on a landscape in California" appeared not in 1984 but in October, 1991. Blue ones in Japan were unveiled concurrently.) Still, my favorite sentence is here: "And is there not a flow in the streaming tresses of willow trees, in the sweep of their thin xiphoidal leaves blowing in the wind, as delicate as Veronica Lake's aureoline hair?" (138-39)

Although the blue section appears to solve any question and hundreds more I may have had about that color, I still did not find a direct reference to why the music's so called, except for an implication that depression matches this shade. I had thought there was a connection between the indigo-picking slaves and their hands, stained with the plant, as they played and sang sad music.

But, that's not found, and neither is, except again indirectly through Eva Péron, any explanation of the association of lipstick with a particular amorous act in ancient Egypt by women who painted their mouths so! I guess we all end this book with our own further suppositions, half-recalled references, and ideas sparked by such a rich abundance of speculation, memory, and information about what we see all around us but rarely, I reckon, record with Theroux's diligence.

John Hatcher's "The Black Death": Book Review

"A Personal History": the subtitle's crucial to this fact-based "docudrama" narrative of Walsham in Suffolk during the five years spanning 1345-1350. The plague hit in the late spring of 1349. It wiped out about half the population in around two months, before receding as gradually as it had entered this English village. The landholding records kept-- combined with the medical, religious, and social contexts historian Hatcher integrates from other sources-- blend for this re-creation of mid-14c rural life.

As Hatcher reminds readers early on: "The language spoken by the characters, though modernized, has as far as possible been adapted from that contained in contemporary sources, and the voice of the narrator, who from time to time links the action and offers introductions, summaries, amplifications, and judgments, is that of a male contemporary writing after Master John's successors as parish priest. The intention throughout has been to banish the hindsight, overviews, judgments, and perspectives of the twenty-first-century historian from the text." (xvi) The result? Lots of data.

This amount may dissuade those not expecting detailed recitals of heriot (death-tax) livestock exacted from a local tenant, or statistics on how many monks in nearby Bury St Edmunds abbey died, or how a pilgrimage to the nearby shrine at Walsingham was conducted. There's two quite moving scenes: one when a wife over four days watches her husband succumb in the plague's early stages; the other, preceding this pandemic, when the local lord William Wodebite contends on his deathbed against Master John's insistence that he make full amends-- materially assisted-- before he receives the last rites. The tension between the secular and religious realms, as well as their shared interest in tangible gains, earns insightful treatment here.

The chronicler's tone, adapted by Hatcher's narrator, does keep today's reader at somewhat of a distance from the kinds of scrutiny that present-day academics-- for better or worse-- may heap upon the evidence from court cases, royal correspondence, or baptismal records of the time and place. This does free the raw material, on the other hand, from the dead weight of theory rather than an encounter with the primary sources, filtered by the imagination of its compiler, Hatcher, into a facsimile of what a Walsham scribe might have been able to reconstruct if he had given his life, back then, over to the recounting the fate of his neighbors, living and dead.

Much of the text takes place before and after the actual plague. You get rumors, far off, begin to become hearsay and second-hand around p. 50; a hundred pages later, the epidemic reaches Walsham; by about forty pages on, the plague starts to recede. The remaining hundred pages or so detail what's less remembered today: the disruption to the order that consolidated clerical and feudal power, and which enforced regal rule according to occupation and class. Thomas Wimbledon's 1388 sermon's cited (although not, curiously, from its standard 1967 edition by Ione Kemp Knight): "If laborers work not, priests and knights must become cultivators and herdsmen, or else die for want of bodily sustenance." (218)

The threat of turmoil continuing after the ebb of the plague; the profits that clever survivors begin to accumulate as they calculate the demand for work by their "betters" against the rise in pay that followed the labor shortages; the strain placed on devout priests as their own confreres died and were replaced by raw youths or conniving charlatans; the impossibility to match one's own repentence or lack of guilt with who lived and who died according to what was interpreted as God's vengeance after the disruption as the news of the plague from Asia and then Europe became less legend and more fact, slowly filtered in to a remote village-- these topics make Hatcher's ambitious approach a rewarding one. You begin to appreciate how tenuous was the hold of the desparate gentry upon the restive peasantry, and how the Church struggled against glimmers of individual sensibility where privilege counted less than merit, and principle began to challenge custom.

It's not a particularly quick read in parts. Debates over land division and legal inheritance may test most people's attention span. This is, after all, the gist of much of the records that survive, and what for us may be the more scandalous or exciting bits are few and far between, as we have to depend on those in power and those few clerics and clerks possessing literacy-- nearly always, they sided with the system rather than with its malcontents.

Sermons, songs, poems, trials, banter, and proceedings from extant literature as mixed in by Hatcher's "speaker," however, sprinkle verve and even wit into what could be rather sober recitals. The pace of a rather sober teller forces we moderns to slow down and take in lots of information for which we lack quick comparisons. Some may balk at this register, but for those patient-- a quality that the medievals probably cultivated far more often-- the clever use of Walsham's rich local lore as a representative case for how an English village might have coped with the onslaught of sudden destruction proves a valuable compendium.

(Posted to Amazon US today.)

Fuair Séamas Ó Broine bás.

Bhí fidléir iomrá idirnáisúinta ar Séamas Ó Broine ann. Fuair sé bás go deireanach. Chuir mo chara Dónal orm a ghriangraf dó ina tigh tabhairne Mhag Robartaigh. Sheinm Ó Brioine fidléir go dona. Tá clann Brionneach ina chónai faoin tuath i gceantar Mhín na Crois in aice leis Gleann Cholm Cille i gContae Dún na Gall ann.

Bhí Seán an athair Shéamais go raibh fidléir freisin. Bhí cáil mhór air fós. Léanim mo threoirleabhar Ghleann go bhfuil "traidisíun fada fidléireachta in iardheisceart Thír Chonaill, go háirithe i nGleann Cholm Cille. Deirtear go raibh fidíl in ngach teach i Mín na Croise ag tús na 1900í! Stíl ghasta, ionsaitheach, gan órnádiocht a chleachtann fidléirí na Ghleanna agus bíonn siad le cloisteáil i rith na bliana ag seisiúin sna tithe leanna"-- go raibh go hiondúil Mhag Robartaigh.

"Tá ceirnín aonair eisithe aige, mar tá" "An Bóthar ar Glenn Locha." Cheannaigh mé seo agus an dara céann ag an síopa leabhair na hOideas Gael. "Cloistear fosta é i gcuideachta" Uinseann Mac Cathmhaoil, Con Ó Cathasaigh, agus Pronsiagh Ó Broine ar "An Fidíl Práis."

D'fhoglaim mé go raibh sna 1800í lucht siúil tarraingt ar Ghleann. Dhíol siad "soithí stáin sa lá agus ag ceartú ceoil san oíche. Bhí an oiread sin airde ar an cheol acu go mba ghnách leo fidleacha stáin a dhéanamh chun cuidiú leis an mhuintir óg an fhidléireacht a fhoglaim go furasta. Bhí na huirlisí miotail sin ní ba shaoire ná na gnáthuirlisí adhmaid agus b'fhusa i bhfad bail a chur orthu dá mbrisfí iad!"

Chuala mé an duine uasal Ó Broine, leis Dónal agus mac leinn eile de Oideas Gael, nuair chuir mé cuairt ag Mhag Robartaigh faoi Lúnasa ar feadh an samraidh arú anuraidh. Níl fhíos agam má sheinm Ó Broine féin leis na fidléireachtaí cáiliúilaí sa chontae nuair ag tagtha siad an ócáid a cheiliúradh ag Oideas Gael. Bhí me ansin. Shúimím(?) ar an chéad rang ann!

Rinne siad céilí ómós a thabhairt Chon Ó Cathasaigh Theillean. Chuaigh Con ar ais Séamus féin i mbás. Go dtuga Dia suaimhneas dá anam.

James Byrne died.

James Byrne was considered an internationally renowned fiddle player. Death took him recently. My friend Dan sent to me his photograph of him at Roarty's public house. Byrne played (music) on the fiddle boldly. The Byrnes lived in the countryside district of Meenacross near Glencolmcille in County Donegal.

James' father John was a fiddler too. He was renowned also. I am reading in my guidebook of the Glen that there's "a long fiddle tradition in southwest Tirconnell (=the Land of the O'Connells), especially around Glencolmcille. It's said that there was no house without a fiddle in Meenacross at the start of the 1900s!" It's a sudden style, attacking, without ornamentation that's practiced by the fiddlers of the Glen and they (customarily) can be heard throughout the year at sessions in ale houses-- usually Roarty's.

"There is a solo record with his fellow musicians, that is" "The Road to Glenlough." I bought this and the second one from the Oideas Gael bookshop. "He can also be heard with" (=accompanied by?) Vincent Campbell, Con Cassidy, and Francie Ó Byrne on "The Brass Fiddle."

I learned that in the 1800s travellers were drawn to the Glen. They sold tin goods by day and composed music by night. They loved music so much that they made tin fiddles so that these could help with the young schoolchildren learning fiddling more easily. Those metal instruments were not as dear as metal-made instruments and they were far easier to fix if they were broken!

I heard Mr Byrne, with Dan and the other students from Oideas Gael, when I paid a visit to Roarty's in August during the summer before last. I don't know if Byrne himself played with the famed fiddlers of the county when they came to celebrate the occasion at Oideas Gael. I was there. I sat in the front row!

They made a musical gathering to give honor to Con Cassidy of Teilinn. Con preceded James into death. May God rest their souls.

Alexander Theroux on Burton Raffel's Chaucer

One of my favorite contemporary writers (currently I'm reading his essays on "The Primary Colors") reviews one of anybody's favorite medieval authors, as modernized by the skilled translator Burton Raffel. I happen to favor Raffel's over Edith Grossman's version of "Don Quixote," and sympathize with those who find daunting the shapes and sounds of Middle English. Along with Theroux, I sense less need for a translation of Chaucer, even though I do understand the difficulties presented by "The Canterbury Tales." Even if, as so many asked me when they found out I was studying Old English way back, it's not the same as Chaucer!

Theroux diminishes, as a man of vast learning and wit, the reasons why translations of the comparatively easier dialect of Chaucer need to be rendered into our English. I'm in the middle. Certainly I'd encourage anyone to take the trouble to look up the terms and figure out the original. Small effort for great gain. After all, I might add, it's not "Sir Gawain" or the Wakefield mystery plays. Still, he may underestimate the lack of preparation even English majors (if in America at least) will likely have when facing CT. Still, it's hard to recommend a totally modern version rather than an interlinear or dual-text edition. (Even when ordering a copy the other day of Dafydd ap Gwilym's poems, often argued by at least a few Welsh lovers as surpassing even Geoffrey's verse in their medieval poetic dexterity, I sought out Rachel Bromwich's bilingual presentation, to strain for an echo in Cymraeg of their packed power and intricate daring.) Therefore, I support Theroux's argument for rigor and the pleasures of navigating the original. He advises judicious attention to footnotes or glosses rather than a complete reworking-- given syntactical changes that twist awkwardly-- of the English of six hundred years ago into our vernacular.

Here's the conclusion to Theroux on Raffel about Chaucer. I recommend
the entire review in its expanded online form (the newsprint-- speaking of dumbing down-- tellingly cuts chunks from Theroux's review to make room for a supersized stylized drawing of our chubby customs man on his groaning horse):

"Preference matters, of course. I myself have a hard time imagining any reader who is interested in Chaucer in the first place having trouble reading the original lines. It is personal taste to gauge whether flavor is lost.

Flavor is everything in Chaucer. Words, images, passages. Beyond all else, his flavor must be kept in any translation. The poem, which is found prevailingly in pentameter couplets, needs that continuing bounce or beat for its rude, narrative value. As a college student, but even in high school, I read "The Canterbury Tales" in the original Middle English in Robinson's edition. All sorts of editions (abridged and unabridged) are available. There are prose format translations for easy readings. There are interlinear versions. There are duncical translations that turn the poem into a different entity altogether.

Surely no one can doubt that this splendid work should ideally be read in Chaucer's own words, even if it means occasionally glancing at a marginal gloss or a footnote. "Glosynge is a glorious thing," the Friar tells in "The Summoner's Tale." It is undeniable that such odd Middle English words like "hende" and "joly" refuse translation. Strange words proliferate: gypon, lixt, cloutes, lymytour, artow, mooder, kiken. (I say: look them up!) Chaucerian variants can also confuse. As A.C. Cawley points out in his well-annotated Everyman edition of the tales, one can dredge up something like 10 variants in the work for the word "horse" alone: ambler, hackney, caple, dexter, palfry, rouncy, stot and more. Theological terms can be arcane, as well. There is no end of feudal terms and topical allusions. It is Cawley who also sagaciously observes in turn that "glosses and paraphrases can be just as harmful as a modernized version of the whole, if they are allowed to take precedence over the original." He advises that where footnotes or marginal notes are not needed, they should be ignored. I personally love footnotes simply because I yearn to know. When I was teaching, I tried to assure my students that the day they started reading rather ignoring scholarly paraphernalia was the day they were becoming what a good student should be.

I commend Raffel for his ambition to get folks to read and understand this complex poem. But the problem is that, in so doing, while giving readers access to the mysteries, he ironically robs those mysteries of their beauty. The genius of this magnificent poem is precisely in its original words. The fault is not in the concept of the undertaking but rather in the nature of it. Translating Chaucer is hazardously compromising at best. Technical words become ordinary. Puns can lose their significance. Rhymes are lost. Colors fade. Substitution can seem like a violation. There is a rough equity to a degree, but it is what critic George Steiner refers to as "radical equity."

Chaucer is the crown, the full flower, of English medieval verse. As Ezra Pound declared in "ABC of Reading," "Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever."

(Photo: A better illustration than that in today's LA Times book review pages. Its inspiration, too, as a detail from the "Ellesmere Chaucer" MS, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.)

Anthony McIntyre's "Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism": Book Review.

As an ex-IRA "blanketman," already imprisoned in his teens, interned for 17 years at Long Kesh, Anthony McIntyre knows his subject by having lived most of his life as a volunteer. After prison, he earned a Ph.D. in political science at Queen's. This Belfast native collects various articles and interviews from the past decade or so that list the deathbed rattles and defiant ralliery of Sinn Féin, the IRA, and the stalemated peace process after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The chicanery with which this deal was finagled to a rank-and-file previously misled about the continuation of their armed struggle led to McIntyre's break with the "Republican Movement" at least as constituted under the control of Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and their devoted cadre.

Becoming a leading voice for those who disagreed, not for a return to the "physical-force tradition" but a renewal of the ideals which the IRA he and others joined had abandoned, Dr McIntyre combines two rarely encountered areas of expertise. As an insider, he betters the academics and reporters in relating the perspective of an Irish republican who's proven his credibility on the blanket. As a commentator, he's able to silence the "militant Republicans of the verbal type" eager to perch on barstools or boast to the naive their exploits, fueled with Dutch courage.

Admirably given his doctoral competence, McIntyre never lapses into jargon (although "etiology" escaped onto his keyboard once). He avoids sounding sanctimonious or overbearing. He, as with his model Orwell, manages to keep the human dimension within his sustained criticism of the IRA leadership that, for 320 pages, motivates his setting down-- with as much proof as can be summoned against an organization committed to double speak and clandestine councils-- the reasons why one can be principled, yet oppose the GFA packaged as "the peace process." Furthermore, he relates details to us in a calm, wry manner so that any newcomer can clearly understand the participants who support or oppose this intricate strategy.

It's a testament to his evenhandedness that one of the best moments comes when he's interviewing the chief of the reorganized Police Service of Northern Ireland (formerly the RUC), Hugh Orde. "It was the most I had ever talked in a police station," he admits. (282) While his sympathies remain throughout with the peaceful dissidents, he includes fair treatment of those later incarcerated from the splinter groups determined to fight for the cause abandoned-- with considerable cynicism, spin, and rhetorical acrobatics-- by the IRA leadership and Sinn Féin negotiators. Attention to the Loyalist perspective might have been welcome, but this anthology's already large enough. Counterparts to McIntyre or Ed Moloney's "A Secret History of the IRA" exist from the Unionist viewpoint. As the subtitle indicates, McIntyre's not providing a history of the past forty or hundred years in the North. He's analyzing the RM endgame itself, as a former player privy to many of the moves.

The book's organized into thirteen chapters. Each offers a few articles around a theme. I found the organization sensible, and there's an internal coherence that carries you from one topic to the next gradually, if subtly. An introduction by Moloney, whose own views have been met with the same outrage accorded McIntyre's among the party faithful, but with equal recognition of insight by those less aligned, provides background on the policy shifts. A glossary clues you in to who's Ronnie Flanagan or what's the IMC.

This will be a long review, as the ones so far I've seen have not dealt with the contents in depth. They've focused more on the controversy of the author and his thesis. What's missing from such terse attention? The flair with which McIntyre conveys his passion-- and his sobriety. There's little autobiography, but he's dealing with a shadowy, fatal, yet publicized and romanticized cause to which he gave his youth, and much of his adulthood. Half of his life's in the H-Blocks. He leaves to find himself facing a different IRA on the outside than the one he'd sworn to defend decades before. From the mid-1990s on-- along with like-minded volunteers, their families, friends, and comrades-- he's left to flounder while the party leaders posed for the cameras, accepted the acclaim, and betrayed the footsoldiers, those living and dead, those who had starved themselves rather than accept branding as common criminals.

One does not have to accept their methods of the proxy bomb, the guerrilla attack, or the torture of innocents to accept what McIntyre and those whose stories he tells believed in: a united Ireland that through their guns would be gained. They gave up their lives in total or a portion for such an ideal. This vision dimmed under the glare of their commanders who proclaimed a treaty that echoed that compromise which they had rejected in 1975. That was thousands of killings earlier. The confusion and outrage of those left fooled again becomes a human call for justice and truth.

Chapter 1 laments the GFA. McIntyre in 1999 conjures up the tale of the pickpocket who robs his prey while unctously soothing his victim: "your personal security is brilliant." SF strips their communal base of its pride while telling its gulled voters how they were "the most politicised people in Europe." (10) In Chapter 2, the ghosts of the Republican Dead return to haunt those investigating in 2004 the 1987 pre-emptive attack by the British upon an IRA mission at Loughall. This is one episode that may elude those less knowledgeable about such incidents. I'd have liked more attention to the moral conundrum underlying the Loughall inquiry. The larger question of how ethical should the state be in eliminating or sparing those who seek its overthrow, however, remains sadly all too contemporary.

Poignantly, McIntyre confronts this problem personally. With his toddler daughter, he visits Bobby Sands' grave, only to hear the girl chortle; thus in a small way's fulfilled Sands' prediction that the revenge of the Irish would be the laughter of their children. In this 2004 entry, "Padraig Paisley," this sometimes reticent reporter offers one of his most powerful admissions of the cost of the long war upon those who had invested their lives towards a different ending than the one now on offer from their former commanders. In Long Kesh, they followed a leader who turned on them once they were freed. "Were I to have suggested a course of action during my H-Block days that would lead republicanism to where it is today I would have found myself residing in a loyalist wing." (40)

The space given as Chapter 3 to the hazily explained 2002 mishap of the Colombia Three surprised me, but this episode foreshadows later IRA-SF debacles in the Northern Bank Robbery and the fatal stabbing of Robert McCartney. It remains a muddled area; the murky accounts at the time show the difficulty in separating dirty deeds by the IRA's left hand from SF's right hand. When Adams is charged by Congressman Henry Hyde to "'appear and help us determine what the Sinn Fein leadership knew about the IRA activities with the FARC narco-terrorists in Colombia and when did Sinn Fein learn of them', it was clear that the knotted tie of the IRA was being moved uncomfortably close to the party windpipe." (50) The ten years of witnessing the RM's downhill slide proves grimly amusing, tracked from higher up this slippery slope.

Decommissioning magnifies the microcosm of the Colombian misadventure for global inspection. Not as a symbol, but as fact: giving up IRA arms dumps means the conflict's truly ended. 2001: As the leaders, pushed back from their goal of a unified Ireland into capitulation keep retreating and calling it progress, "they are moved muttering from one slain sacred cow to defend another before it too is slaughtered." (64) 2002: Those like him who complain will incur blame for raising their heads out of the trenches, where "they would immediately draw the attention and surveillance of thought traffic control and the fire of the verbal snipers, their weapons loaded with vitriol, eager to impose silence and prevent republicanism from becoming more democratic." (71)

Long before 2003, McIntyre's disgusted at "organised lying by organised liars. Half a century from now pilgrims, patriots, and prevaricators will flock to the graves of the Provisional Republican leadership to be greeted by an inscription meticulously inscribed into a headstone: 'Here they are-- lying still'." (78)

Cemeteries in West Belfast already fill with those who went to their graves believing in a patriotism that their leaders had, in secret, already abandoned. McIntyre has both outgrown his youthful enthusiasm and managed to nourish his righteous ideals. These matured, I would suggest, from the Fenian slogans of his teenaged years into a humanist skepticism towards totalitarianism in any form, however benignly promoted or however applauded by the chattering classes. He resists the cult of personality that has eclipsed the democratic socialist Republic of 1916.

Chapter 5, most notably with a twenty-page 2006 interview with fellow ex-blanketman Richard O'Rawe, delves into the difficult matter of how much Adams knew when in charge of part of the IRA contingent in the H-Blocks during the second hunger strike that left ten men dead in 1981. O'Rawe's "Blanketmen" book's claims are balanced by outside sources which both men carefully cite in their cautious yet charged dialogue. They explore O'Rawe's argument that Adams deliberately withheld information to advance SF electoral fortunes, rather than intervene with proposals relayed from British negotiators that could have ended the strike, thereby saving the last six men from self-starvation.

A quarter-century later, McInytre speaks at Bundoran to those who shared the years on the dirty protest. Addressing those who now oppose his own dissidence, he manages to affirm his own position while remaining respectful to his detractors. He defends O'Rawe, and reminds his comrades that the rumor-mongering against O'Rawe (and himself by extension) does the 1981 commemoration no credit. He paraphrases the press who lambasted the SF rally (with blankets sold to marchers) to commemorate the ten men dead "as resembling a Friar Tuck convention more than the austere era of the Blanket protest and hunger strikes. The contrast between the easy corpulence of today and the hard emaciation of twenty-five years ago was no more stark than it was on the Falls Road at that political rally. In a sense the imagery mirrored perfectly the ethical decay that has come to beset republicanism. The screws at least gave out the blankets for free." (115)

Suppressing Dissent, as Chapter 6, continues in similar tone. McIntyre allows us to hear more stories from those who speak out against party lines, and in West Belfast, who suffer for their rebellion. Brendan Shannon, "Shando," sticks to his guns as a proponent of the armed struggle. While McIntyre regards him as a cautionary tale of the true believer left stranded, he treats him with dignity and in 2003 tells his story honestly. In 1995, Shando explains to McIntyre: "I did not leave the Provos because they gave up the war. I left because they gave up republicanism." (139)

One who did not survive in early 2005 after standing up against the system, Robert McCartney, merits Chapter 7. His murder, along with the Northern Bank and Colombia 3 incidents, further tarnished an already dulled Sinn Féin. McIntyre and his wife ran the e-zine "The Blanket" 2001-08. They refused to back down to SF militia. They were harassed, raided, and intimidated. Most of the entries in this book originated with their grassroots Net campaigns on behalf of their cowed neighbors and harangued colleagues. They display to future historians and activists the birth of Web networks married to practical solutions. This harnessed solidarity for concrete gains rather than arcane monographs on republican community organizing.

These chapters also reveal McIntyre's growth as a more generous participant in his changing Irish reality. He almost encourages a PSNI officer with "good luck" as the police try to find Bert's killers. As one with his ear to the ground, McIntyre knows at least one culprit even if he's not charged directly. "IRA culture was drawn on heavily both to inflict the crime and to cover it up," (173) even if hard proof dissolves into soft supposition and perhaps a bit of brass knuckles on any witnesses out of the dozens of people who saw the fatal assault-- unless they were all as they claimed in the pub's jakes. The party interferes, so no allegations of collusion between the supposedly rogue IRA operators and SF can be sustained in court.

This leads to frustration. How can you fight such an implacable PR machine? Others join in the protest, but against those who complain. They defend Adams and McGuinness. Why do McIntyre and his colleagues oppose what so many voted for, North and South? The Loyalist veto's consented to by SF. The IRA surrendered. The Crown rules as long as most Northerners agree to a British ruler. McIntyre counters that "the process subverts the peace." (168) Many who favor cessation of violence do not assent to the process, he argues. Their disagreement with the GFA, moreover, remains non-violent. Meanwhile, the IRA and SF subvert the community they claim to advance-- with thugs, censorship, and discrimination.

Informers, long the republican's bane, now turn into its own agents of destruction. Freddie Scappaticci, "Stakeknife," and Denis Donaldson gain infamy. McIntyre's clever. He asks nimbly what Donaldson as a British agent did that Martin McGuinness as a British minister at Stormont did not. Both "shaft Republicanism." Rumors persist, and seem to be hushed, about IRA spies even higher up than Donaldson. The author knows the pressures that burden those volunteers fresh out of prison, unable to cope. "The choice was simple: Grow old and grey with imprisoned comrades and wake up alone each morning to the sound of clanging grills or come to beside a partner and to the laughter of children." (191) While never excusing what Stakeknife or others did by betraying their cause, McIntyre as an ex-prisoner and as one who has worked with many others like himself captures what few other writers could have expressed about the personal torment that a few of his weaker colleagues endured for decades as they fought, plotted, and confided in comrades whom they would expose to their own compromise, or often worse, at the hands of death squads within the IRA as well as among the Loyalists and British forces-- whether vetted or below the radar.

McIntyre's also compassionate towards the reputation that shrouds their children and grandchildren; he implies how this character assassination may be the worst crime yet hatched by such informers. "Provisionalism is being haunted by a spooky spectre," he confides in 2005. "What blossomed in spring has now become autumn fruit, as poisonous as it is bountiful." (193)

With Chapter 9, Comrades appear. These too have been weighed down by compromises when they emerged from prison. The late Brendan Hughes in 2000 tells McIntyre: "We fought on and for what? What we rejected in 1975." (198) A leader of the H-Blocks during the strike, on release he found himself cheated by building crews in West Belfast where he worked; those who were his bosses justified their hypocrisy by their ties to the cosy SF leadership. Exposing this immorality, he found himself expelled by those whom he once had commanded and respected. He concludes how the "Republican leadership has always exploited our loyalty." (200)

In 2006, "Granny Josie" Gallagher remembers when she visited her three sons, all jailed at Long Kesh, over twenty-two years. Two were in the Marxist INLA. Thumbing a ride in the snow on the way back from her prison visit, the Sinn Féin transport van refused her a ride. If she was at the H-Blocks to see her third son, in the IRA, than she might have earned a ride. Such was the discrimination and pettiness even within the RM, as McIntyre rues now.

For Dissembling, Chapter 10, McIntyre introduces other critics of SF-IRA groupthink. In 1994, when the cease-fire was declared, McIntyre was with his comrade Tommy Gorman when Gorman called to agree with Bernadette McAliskey on BBC's "Talkback" with her comment that "the war is over and the good guys lost." (226) From that point on, they and others discussed in this chapter found themselves the targets of the SF-IRA disinformation operatives. Their names were discredited, their supposed links to the militants were publicized, and their credibility was attacked. What differs between the tactics of any faction who has gained power in a putsch? Perhaps the fact that the leaders had led on the followers for so long, so fatally, while dissembling.

With the 2004 Northern Bank robbery in Chapter 11, there's not much point even pretending. "If, as has been widely alleged, the robbery is the work of the Provisional IRA's Army Council, then it is a matter of the rich robbing the rich." (254) Policing, in Chapter 12, finds SF in a quandary. Having lost the hearts and minds of those in projects such as Ballymurphy (where McIntyre had lived when writing these articles), the RM could not provide the protection the residents needed. Over nine months in 2006, 700 acts of violence or intimidation had occurred in his neighborhood. The collapse of the community, as former republican ideals to rally solidarity eroded under drugs, teen pregnancy, vandalism, and theft, showed another collapse of Irish idealism under British administration. The PSNI had first been castigated by republicans, and then clumsily courted, but this left the locals in an awkward situation of who to call on for help. The PSNI wearied, the IRA devolved into a gang, and with few arrests amidst the grim scenario, the costs of the long war's slide into a restless temper tantrum of dealing and dissing showed how hollow had been the claims of a peaceful Northern Irish settlement for so many in what had been Gerry Adams' heartland, his base for IRA action and a unified front pledging SF allegiance.

Strategic Failure, fittingly, concludes this book as Chapter 13. It includes the visit to Orde. What do republicans and dissidents do when the system's in place and the Loyalists remain in control with the consent of the nationalists, post-GFA? Learning to get along, in power or driven away from the dream of centuries of Irish men and women who fought and died for unification, republicans today may be the last of their line so bred to never give up the battle in every generation. Post 9/11, the lust for the brawl's faded. McIntyre's post-mortem for Moloney's 2003 castigation of the hypocrisy of the Adams-McGuinness leadership finds its eulogy repeated in his own compiled arguments here. "For those of us who sought a different and a better outcome-- more just, more egalitarian, more democratic, more honest-- read it and weep." (308)

One does wonder-- admittedly lacking the personal experience that informed the rationale of McIntyre after so much of his life fighting the British state-- if the author should finally blurt out what he locks inside. Why not, imprisoned for so long, as an ex-prisoner demonstrate your inner liberation? Why not embrace your local peeler?

Frequent criticism levelled at dissenters has been that in their refusal to change, they etch deeper the corrosive qualities of a toxic republicanism that will not glow much longer into our own century. McIntyre and his comrades debated against those who drowned them out in the mainstream media on TV most nights. They persisted despite direct and disguised attempts to shut them up. They refused to submit to those who had betrayed them; they turned away from those who beckoned them back to a useless fight. This collection offers carefully reasoned articles insisting that another form of purer republicanism still lingers that deserves resurrection. "The Blanket," as an aside, often featured spirited debate about this very issue, although the selection of more topical pieces by McIntyre may tilt his own anthology towards a clearer chronological, thematically cohesive presentation.

Perhaps, given the futility of the hardline remnant of compromised and infiltrated militants and the corruption of co-opted SF, any "third way" here appears a glimpse up a foggy cul-de-sac. McIntyre and Moloney convince you that the ground troops in the Fenian campaign have been betrayed, but like the Wild Geese, one now wonders what cause will answer their ambitions. Will those who visit the graves in fifty years look back on today's dissidents as students may skim the manifestoes from the ralliers for the restoration of Bonnie Prince Charlie or the Bourbon dynasty?

The failure of an alternative movement to counter the party machine resulted, eventually as this anthology tacitly documents, the folding up of "The Blanket" earlier this year. Its purpose appeared to have been finished; other community activists had taken up the watch, the governments had agencies in place, and the criminal activities that had replaced the RM with petty theft, drug running, and slum squalor appeared less the blame of the Brits and more the lassitude of post-GFA residents. The tricolor flutters and the strikers commemorated on murals still grace the closely packed streets, but one wonders if these depictions will in time fade into "tradition" as walls in other redoubts, those post-GFA Unionist enclaves. The whitewashing waits. McIntyre's anthology warns us of the impermanence of what once stood as an unshakeable foundation under any republican, dawn over a unified island.

(A shorter version will appear on Amazon in Britain and the U.S. Cross-posted as a long piece to "Not the L.A. Times Book Review." Disclosure: I contributed to "The Blanket" throughout its run, 2001-08, and know Anthony, not as well as I wish, but blame a continent plus an ocean's distance for that! You can read him at the archived 2001-08 "Blanket" and current "The Pensive Quill" or via the bloglinks at the right of this frame.)

Off the Grid, in the News.

Reading today in the paper about the seven-page form that the Obama staff is mailing out to anyone applying for staff positions, a firmly worded document on vetting all for not only shady loans, resumé inflation, and suspect associations to discriminatory country clubs, but now Facebook photos, YouTube videos, candid diaries, or blog revelations that may "incriminate the President-Elect," I realize again how much of ourselves we reveal through this shared medium. So, this entry today only seals my own fate for this or any future administrative appointment in D.C. Since my wife's already written about her advocacy and legal use of medical marijuana, no secrets spill out from me now.

My friend from Santa Cruz, who works for the county, sent me this long article from their Metro SC paper. I would say alternative paper, but that's probably redundant up there. He'd been there at his job when the medical marijuana was first distributed with the local government's approval to WAMM (see below for details and acronym!). This puts them, and California, into conflict with the Federal drug agents. We passed a proposition years ago, but this has been battled in court and beaten down ever since. This also reminds me how we have no politicians with the honesty to support medical marijuana and decriminalization, at least on a national level. I wonder if this will change with the new Democratic alliance? I doubt it.

Given the opprobrium that millions curdle towards any alleviation of God-given pain, and the cruelty of denying palliative care towards those who ache, I wonder why we withhold God-given plants from those who suffer. Yes, with such a sentence I betray my native state.

Still, Westerners may cotton to an ideal that allows individual pursuit of a common good over bureaucratic interference or theocratic meddling. As the blogger "Coyote" in "Diary Notes: Baby Boomers in Charge No More" back on September 5th (about the last time the race looked even) has reminded us, the failed candidates this election boasted a Western ethos. Perhaps part of the reason so many in America did not "get" McCain and Palin's idiosyncracies may be traced to their sagebrush and tundra mindset, their impatience with the usual laws and regulations. Now, as one who bitterly opposes the GOP for its laissez-faire lack of environmental and cultural protections in the name of free-market rapacity, I may shake my head back and forth rather than nod up and down, but point taken. We three thousand miles from Washington tend to distrust too much oversight. We stereotypically want to clear the lot, build the shack, shoot the moose, and park the truck. And, often, smoke the joint. (At least by hearsay, if any Federal agents review this damning evidence!)

It's easy to both admire and satirize this Northern California ethos, at least from my sun-baked "hot, brown, and crowded" terrain. Even in mid-November the glaring shimmer surrounds me with the dust and haze of a summer's day. Is it indeed global warming, or is it merely that I forget similarly unseasonal temperatures from my youth here?

Anyway, drifting in memory away towards this cooler, foggier, breezier stretch of the Golden State, I remember how different parts of this state can be. It's so large, so unpredictable, with so many microclimates, whether for hemp or wine. I tend to regard it as an endless urban sprawl, due to my myopic orientation, broken only two hours (I used to say ninety minutes) out of here finally by big farms, tall mountains, a desert or two, until you hit the ocean, which you may have a hard time seeing up close along Pacific Coast Highway 1 due to all the stucco that blocks its blue vistas. Build the (multimillion-dollar) shack.

Up in Santa Cruz County, north of that city and towards Half Moon Bay, the region has been saved from development. Farms still hug the cliffs. Lighthouses loom. Clouds waver. Winds whirl. Hawks glide.

I am inspired, scanning this piece about a hundred acres above the beautiful vistas of the coastal hamlet of Davenport. That's one of the prettiest panoramas I've ever seen outside of Ireland, and indeed I've been reminded of green and aqua and a lighter shade of brown when driving along the slower route to San Francisco. Here I'm noting context about Sogyal Rinpoche and Tibetan Buddhism in passing, finding yet another eccentric rich Englishman coming to the shoreline to seek wisdom and fund a retreat, and learning about Valerie and Michael Corral's struggle to sustain their foundation-- inclusive slash and all as "Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana." (At least it's not "Wo/Myn's.")

In an era of unpredictable change, when gay marriage gets blocked, when abortion continues to matter more than climate change to many voters, and when flag pins and who gets to be the First Dog for the White House bloat into headlines, the need for compassion-- in that Buddhist sense-- and wisdom-- in the human search-- return to remind us of essential comforts. My wife, I believe, guided by me on Mapquest by phone three hundred miles south, was directed towards the same Almar Street (same street as the Good Earth tea makers; I recommend their Original Sweet & Spicy mix, which even decaffeinated tastes wonderful, chicory and rooibois and cardomom and pepper) dispensary on a recent jaunt up to her favorite second city.

Often, I do come off cynical (a word rooted in the Greek for "dog") and sour. However, living where I do, part of me does find traces of the bold quest that has drawn so many (and so much stucco!) towards the Pacific. I hope that constant, that which impels us to work with nature to heal ourselves, can endure. This idealism proves that the countercultural legacy, and the spirit of informed quests that integrate humanity into its habitat rather than to hack and punish those who seek their own peaceful paths, struggles on, if in such blessed and privileged corners of our state. May this cause motivate others towards such goals everywhere. Here's a link to the WAMM Collective Website.

The MSC article's lengthy, but well-written. Here's an excerpt, after a DEA raid in 2002 on the Corral property destroyed 167 plants:

What happened next became a part of Santa Cruz lore. The city banded together with the Corrals and WAMM in a show of support for the club, Prop. 215 and the local ordinances that permit the use and growth of medical marijuana. On Sept. 17, 2002, the mayor, the City Council, the county Board of Supervisors and former Santa Cruz mayors gathered at City Hall with WAMM to publicly distribute medical marijuana in an act that would come to define Santa Cruz quirk. "Making medical marijuana available is an act of common sense and compassion. ... I'm standing with the Corrals," wrote Mayor Christopher Krohn in an Op-Ed in The New York Times.

"That's the tenor of this community," says Valerie with pride. "The government needs to cross out Santa Cruz on their list."

In 2003, Valerie pursued a lawsuit naming former Attorney General John Ashcroft and John B. Brown III, the former administrator of the DEA, as defendants, and was joined by six WAMM members, WAMM itself and both the city and county of Santa Cruz as plaintiffs. Although no charges against the Corrals were ever filed, the lawsuit could have major implications for the future of medical marijuana,

"We think this was an attempt to improperly hijack our state's right to make laws like this," says attorney Rice, who is representing the county. "There are so many good people in the community and supporters in the medical community and in our local government--what's happening to WAMM is a terrible, sad situation, but it's not going to mean that medical marijuana is not going to be as viable here as before."

"Paradise Lost," Jessica Lussenhop, Metro Santa Cruz, November 12, 2008.

Photo from WAMM.org: "Join Our High-Five Club." I suppose at 4:20?

Dealbh den Mhaighdean Mhuire.

Bhí mé ag taghtha ar an seachtaine seo caite an leabhar nua le Seán Hatcher, "An Marbh Dubh: Stair Pearsanta." Tá sé meascra fhírinne agus finscéalíocht ann. Insíonn sé faoi sráidbhaile ina Suffolk Shasana ag timpeall 1350, nuair ag tosaithe plá ansiud.

Thosaigh Hatcher a scéal leis tiarna talún. Liam Woodbite ab ainm dó. Fuair sé bás. Thug sagart Máister Seán an Ola Dhéanach ar an teach na Liam. D'inis Liam ag dul faoistine. Caithfear sagart a bheith umhal dó.

Níor iarr Liam i dtósach, ach bhuaigh Máister Séan. Bhrúimigh an sagart go seasmach agus go díosgraiseach air. Níor thabharfaidh sagart naomh sacramintí dó Liam mura inste a chontráileacht an seanduine sé féin. Athrinne Seán an athiarracht na riachtanais go dtí go raibh ag déanta aithri í bpeacaí ó Liam.

Mar sin d'fhoglaim mé faoi faoistin an bháis ina litríocht mheanaosta Bhriotanach nuair scríobh mé tráchtas agam, tá suim a chur i seo go leor ann leis an modh 'ceart'. Sagart dó Liam sochar agus beathúnas cille a bhaint as dea-mhéin a Liam!

Bhí Liam in uacht báis. Cruinníonn clann aige ag imeall leis an uair deanach ann. Chonaic Liam leis súil go lag dealbh sobhriste den Mhaighdean Mhuire. Tugann Máister Seán in aice leis sé ag Liam. Nuair léigh mé roinnt seo, bhí cuimhne liom duais-iómhá bheag agam fadó.

Bhi mé dealbh plástair gorm nuair bhí mé óg. Ghearr mé bosca pháipéir síoda. Pheint mé air leis brat péinte ghorm fós. Chuir mé míreannaí de macarón os ard.

Ansin, d'oscail mé sin ar mo dhealbh isteach ann. Thóg mé scrínín Mhuire. Deirtear ainm difríul leis Máire nuair ag ra "An Mathair Dé," amháin as Gaeilge. Is iontas orm má dealbh phéinteala fhínealta seo agamsa go raibh cosúil le céann caillte eile sin leis Seán agus Liam.

Lady Madonna's Statue.

I came upon last week a new book by John Hatcher, "The Black Death: A Personal History." It's a medley of fact and fiction. He tells about a village in Suffolk, England, around 1350, when the plague began over there.

Hatcher starts his story with a landlord. William Woodbite is his name. Death comes to him. The priest, Master John, brings Last Rites to the house of William. William goes to confession. The priest insists on obedience to him.

William didn't want to in the beginning, but Master John won. The priest pressed firmly and unrelentingly on him. The priest would not give him the blessed sacraments unless the old man told of his wrongheadedness. John repeated the necessity for repentance until William made his renunciation of sins.

Since I learned about the deathbed confession in medieval British literature when I wrote my dissertation, I have a great interest in this 'correct' procedure. The priest from William reaped benefit and benefice from him on his deathbed!

William was at death's door. His family gathered around him there for the last time. William saw with his weak eye an easily broken statue of the Virgin Mary. Master John came near William with it. When I read this section, I remembered my prized little figurine long ago.

I had a blue plaster statue when I was young. I cut a tissue-paper box. I painted on it with a coat of blue paint also. I put bits of macaroni on top.

Then, I opened that up for my statue inside it. I built my little Marian shrine. Somebody says in Irish a different name for Mary when speaking only of the Mother of God. It's a wonder for me if this delicately painted statue of mine was similar to that other lost one with John and Liam.

Iómhá: Driftwood Dreams (It's not mine, alas; níl sé agamsa, ochón).

"Frustrated Idealists?": 2 New Political Blog Links.

"Coyote" at Coyote Blue-Jay weighs in on what that blogger cites early on from the late George Carlin: dissenters as "frustrated idealists." These reasonable musings-- on culture, politics, and how the candidates have been portrayed by and manipulated within the press-- I have only been alerted to recently, as they began at CBJ only a couple of months ago. In my own efforts to articulate my own positions, varied and unpredictable and contradictory though they may be, that blog's stubbornly independent direction has intersected and guided my own bull-headed thinking.

Not that I agree with every transmission there or at the neighboring frequencies over at Liberal Rapture, but both plug me in to a charged galaxy of the blogosphere that appears to be signalling (mostly) reasonable alerts from those stranded amidst red-blue segregation. This moderation proves essential, now that the Democrats consolidate executive, legislative, and judicial control. I sense a tightening of the media's own grip on groupthink. Who will Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert satirize now? Can Pelosi, Biden, and Obama grant us the groans that Rove, Cheney, and Bush elicited? Perhaps it may be better not to have an triumvirate so transparent (or opaque) to ridicule.

Still, the fawning postures assumed by the Fourth Estate do make me cringe. My wife even recoiled a bit at the New Yorker's "Reflection" cover in tonight's mail. Above the Lincoln Memorial, a "O" in the logo shines like the moon above a dark pool, lit only by those handsome pillars. Does O eclipse now the lunar orb? (It was a full moon that night the magazine arrived-- the dogs were frenzied.) An evocative image, but too hagiographical for me. I wondered if the 44th had replaced the 16th president as a statue framed by the elegant columns. Even if I mumble along with some of the resurgent hosannas, it's still dangerous to proclaim with such slavish devotion, I yammer.

I've added these two links as the best of a small group of similar blogs that I highlighted earlier in my "Intellectuals" post this month. Since my family's weary of my rants, and my few friends remain mystified by my crankiness, I suppose this blog's a safer medium for the message within my madness. The Second Coming dawns January 20, 2009, so we're promised, but I predict a chance of showers on any parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. I do enjoy challenging my students, as under previous administrations, with getting them to think against whatever's the received wisdom. My own contrariness may be one reason I like to teach, and why I've stuck with it for, indeed, twenty-four years this fall.

Although much of what I wished for in 2000 has been delayed-- such as ecological solutions or the family planning programs we need, worsened by the continued aggression overseas and the capitulation to a security state at home-- am I happy with the Democratic hegemony? Yes, if it ends the War on Terror, develops clean energy, and hushes bible thumpers. Now, I agree with many of the Democratic majority's plans for decriminalizing drugs, legalizing gay marriage, assisting college students with financial aid, or cleaning up the environment.

So, why am I not a fervent Obamabot? Well, I disagree with his party over its refusal to enforce serious limits on legal or illegal immigration, their generosity towards spendthrift and duplicitous debtors, their bailouts of GMC and AIG, and their corporate ties to the oligarchy (or the market-funded economy run by the military-industrial-media-financial complex, to update and extend Ike's phrase). I don't fit in with lock-step blue-staters.

Neither does my tolerance of reproductive rights, my distrust of the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment, nor my dislike for intervention abroad shorten my inbred distance from the GOP. My weariness with the coddling of able-bodied or dubiously "disabled" recipients by the bureaucrats, my refusal to ennoble people of color or class over any other moral, melanin-challenged individual, and my disdain for the PC-riddled teach-to-the-test school system repel me from the unctuous big hug of third-party trustafarians. My leaving the Greens to register as "Decline to State" after their futile nomination of anti-Semite Cynthia McKinney demonstrated my disgust last summer.

I will end with appropriate links. Camille Paglia opines in typically splendid fashion in "Obama Surfs Through" about abuse heaped on Sarah Palin, the passivity of the press towards Obama, his equivocation on the relationship of him and Michelle with Ayers & Dohrn, and Paglia's own memories of Yma Sumac. If the professor wasn't bisexually already busily engaged, and I happily married, I'd probably stalk her. And, she has tenure! Although when she began "Sexual Personae," it's heartening for me to remember how she labored in academic obscurity. Too bad I can't sashay through the gender roles she so wittily dons and doffs. Still, anyone who remarks how ridiculous Sade (the libertine, not the smooth operator) can be-- well, she's a kindred spirit.

["Coyote"'s comment below links to Paglia's "Fresh Blood for the Vampire" from Sept. 10, 2008, on Palin's selection, women's ascent to power, and pro-choice vs pro-life feminism.]

As for another pundit whom I admire, Christopher Hitchens? As one of my dissenting correspondents craftily observes:

"An irony has to be lurking somewhere that the man who debunked Marxist behavior so thoroughly as to end up supporting Bush is now finding himself at the point where he has debunked religion so thoroughly he is ending up supporting the Marxistly tended Obama."

Proof of such: Slate: "Barack to Reality". I confess I lean closer to Hitch (at least in this article) than the other dissenter may! This twist in Hitchens' direction also is, I am assured by the same informant, "explored much better in this" "Letter to Christopher Hitchens from a longtime Iraqi friend," Ayad Rahim, at "The American Thinker."

I admit I'm intrigued Hitch resides at the Hoover Institute along with Shelby Steele, whose column "Obama's Post-Racial Promise", in post-Election Day's Los Angeles Times impressed me. The two letters to the editor the LAT printed both excoriated Steele, predictably. Steele's publication can be credited to morning-after guilt or a giddy lapse into editorial balance at the lurching Times.

For a parallel set of observations to those I (and I suppose thousands of other bloggers less PC than those toiling and tippling at the Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Slate, or Politico) muttered last week, Andrew Keen in the Belfast Telegraph limns the shift when the blogging protesters become His Majesty's Loyal Lack of Opposition:

Andrew Keen: Obama’s landslide will throw up conservative bloggers belfasttelegraph.co.uk

Monday, 10 November 2008

For the past few months my pre-breakfast morning ritual has been determined by American opinion polls. As a political junkie, the first thing I’ve done every morning over the last six months has been to check out the latest opinion polls at RealClearPolitics.com.

Then I’ve gone to Politico.com, FiveThirtyEight.com, CNN.com, News.Yahoo.com, and blogs like the HuffingtonPost.com, TheDailyDish.com and DrudgeReport.com that have done such an addictive job commenting on this most remarkable of elections.

So what now? What am I and the tens of millions of other politicos supposed to do before breakfast now that the election is finally over? With Obama’s landslide victory, American politics is supposed to change dramatically. But what about change on the blogosphere? What becomes of online political opinion when, on 20 January of next year, Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America?

The polls might have temporarily shut, but I suspect that the blogosphere is about to get really provocative. The internet is a natural medium of opposition, so expect American conservatives to embrace online media with much more gusto and creativity after 20 January. Whereas the blogosphere has been dominated in George W. Bush’s age by left-liberal blogs such as Arianna Huffington’s HuffingtonPost.com, Josh Marshall’s TalkingPointsMemo.com, Andrew Sullivan’s TheDailyDish.com and Marcos Moulitsas Zuniga’s Daily Kos, an Obama presidency will throw up new online conservative opinionators who will radically redefine American political discourse.

Just as the current doyen of conservative muckrakers, Matt Drudge of the DrudgeReport.com, made his name exposing the stain-filled scandals of the Clinton presidency, so a new ecosystem of online Obama-critics are about seize control of the conservative movement in America. On the internet, insurrection leads to insurrection to insurrection. It’s a broadband version of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. These conservative insurrectionists might be yet to be identified, but I’m confident that their online opinion will replace the polls as my not always edifying pre-breakfast nourishment over the next four years.

I was in Frankfurt last week to keynote the annual ZukunftsForum Medien event about the future of media, held at Lufthansa’s Flight Training Center at the airport. After my speech, a panel of four new and old media experts discussed the crisis of declining newspaper readers in Germany. I was particularly struck by a singularly dark comment by Hans-Juergen Jakobs, the online editor-in-chief of the Munich based Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest quality newspaper. Unless self-promoting journalists can make themselves more relevant to a German public more interested in social networking than in serious news analysis, “It will be over,” Jakobs predicted, starkly, about the end of the high-end newspaper business.

Andrew Keen is the author of ‘The Cult of the Amateur’

Images: Obama Diversity Logo c/o "The People's Cube.com: Correct Opinions for Progressive Liberals." New Yorker: Bob Staake, "Reflection," November 17, 2008.

Rowan Somerville's "The End of Sleep": Book Review.

Cairo's outer limit, Mara village around the Pyramids, and its teeming inner density both find Fin, an ex-pat Irish journalist, getting not much shut-eye during his adventures. Told in a rather appealingly old-fashioned register, yet one that pulses with contemporary menace and even hints of American geopolitical relevance, this novel by a London-born, Edinburgh-educated, Irish resident shows lots of promise. The scenes in which Fin must try to rescue his friend Farouk from the clutches of Omar, the evil dwarf & kebab king, blend terror and humor with vim and vigor.

The omniscient voice controls Fin's take on the manic events that envelop him after he seeks a resolution to the shaggy-dog tale Farouk begins about a neighboring rogue, Skinhead Said. Fin's so eager to find out more he nearly dies in the attempt. His inability to go with the flow of the Middle East, his Western impatience, serves to entangle him within events even at the novel's closing we don't fully comprehend. Early on, Fin wants a different narrative for himself: "His life should be a pacy linear narrative, with obvious and satisfying climaxes." (28) Yet,

"Farouk was not one to be led along linear narrative lines, or led at all. He would reveal details randomly, the way fragments of antiquity might appear over time, scattered over a vast area, tantalising generations of archaeologists. Fin was intrigued by the story, attracted to it in a way he did not understand, any more than a jackdaw understands the call of shining metal or a moth the fire." (30)

Later on, after an assault by Omar's thug, Fin realizes that "his life was still without direction, without even the story he had decided would save him." (86) Part of this can be his frustration at not knowing Skinhead Said's story, but part can be attributed to his own feckless tendencies, which spur him towards acts of kindness towards a mangy cur, a girl in a hospital ward, or a rescuer in the form of a garbage collector. They also lure him into danger, and threaten his companion's life.

Much of this novel's appeal lies in the setting. I found the passages about the desert less affecting than those of the city, but both share, as Somerville describes well, the same foundation. Is it a half-built house or a antiquarian ruin? Walking around Cairo, Fin reflects:

"It was the chorus of deterioration. Rubble everywhere, modern dwellings leaning upon ancient monuments like card houses, tower blocks riddled with cracks or collapsed, listing minarets and mosque walls severed by vertical canyons of subsidence. Age stood whispering impermanence, calling to Fin that, flawed as he was, insignificant as he was, history was woven out of tiny threads of life like him but that he too would decay and crumble." (98-99)

This story mixes philosophical leisure with breakneck flight. The smells of the fetid Nile mingle with skewered lamb spiced perfectly. Life and death collide suddenly. There's a shock of recognition of mortality. Fin in one splendidly paced episode taking shelter in a hospital ward, witnesses open-heart surgery.

"Fin saw in front of him the visceral physicality that pumped beneath everything. Whatever triumphs or catastrophes, love, disappointment or terrors he fantasised were important, his heart would beat, never despairing as he did, keeping up this vital kenesis, and when it stopped everything would cease. This was fact. Everything else was merely an idea." (143)

Such raw material sharpens Fin's awareness; it breaks through his pampered, lazy, half-plumbed awareness. While the last sections of this novel slacken the pace of the pursuit, and I found them less engrossing, their languor may be a calculated easing of the tension of the plot, allowing the slower gait to catch Fin and ease his scurrying about the city. Out of it, back in Mena village, he must face the vista that forces him to pause and wait rather than flee and rush.

"Farouk's roof was the axis, between the city-- the noise in Fin's head, the desperate urgency to find or do something-- and the desert, empty, vast and still. Sand everywhere, from the flaking stone of the roof, cracked and layered with tiny grains of loose rubble. Even the solid rock was made of the sand, no more than that. Sand, which by natural alchemy had consented to be formed for a time into stone, and then fashioned into buildings and cities by men, before losing its enchantment, its magical gregariousness, and like any magic or idea, disintegrating, reverting to its chaotic nature in the desert." (172)

Out of the frenzy of the city, away from the stimulation of the West, Fin must force himself into a more nuanced recognition of who he is. Somerville handles this, as with the dénouement of Skinhead Said's legendary exploits, with a touch of enigmatic craftsmanship. It's a testament to Somerville's ambition that he can fashion a novel both of the moment and one that hearkens back to a timeless storytelling long before the West was known by the East, or vice versa.

(Review posted to Amazon US today.)

"Tá mé ro-tuirseach."

Tá mé ag breathnú níos tuirseach le deanaí. Measaim go bhfuil ag dul níos sine. Ar ndóigh, tá fírinne agamsa féin-- agus gach duine.

Scríobh mé an rionnt seo os cionn nuair chuala mé anois amháin an h-amhrán na Bheatles, "Tá mé ro-tuirseach," ón "An Albam Bán." Ní mhaith liom port seo ó cheart, ach tá sé go cuí. Níor cheap mé faoi sé ag seinm go dtí i ndiadh stopadh mise féin. Bhí mé go eisteacht air ar mo iPod anseo. Cuirim amhráin trí chéile air.

Is iontas orm faoi an aimsir. Tá sé is tirim go deireanach. Bhí gaoth áitiúil ann. Is é "Na Naomh Áine." Déanann duine sa cheantar go mbeadh níos colgach. Faighim ar mo fhoclóir go bhfuil an sainmhíniú difríul ann. Tá 'aimsir cholgach', atá is searbh ann.

Áfach, iarraidh mé ag úsaid ciall guaireach. D'inis Reamoinn Chandler faoi uair seo. Dúirt sé seo go mbeadh uair nuair go samlaigh an bean a tí dúnmharaigh ar an fear céile ann!

I gCalifoirnea Theas, glaoigh siad ráithe fómharach seo i mbliana an "ionú dúnmharú." Mothaigh tú níos mishuaimhneach mar sin ní codladh tú go easca. Dúisigh tú go luath. Tá tart ort. Bheifeá súil a bhobail go leor agatsa, ach ní bhfaighidh tú faoiseamh ar chor ar bith.

Tá sé am marfach go deimhin. Beidh mé ag faire na faille a taitneamh a bhaint amanna níos fuar. Mar sin féin, beidh ardú teochta go dtí go mbeidh in aice leis céad céim an deireadh seachtaine seo chugainn.

"I'm So Tired"

I'm feeling more tired lately. I judge that I'm growing older. Of course, that's the truth with myself-- and everyone else.

I wrote that section above before I only now heard the Beatles' song, "I'm So Tired," from "The White Album." I don't like that tune really, but it's fitting. I did not think about it myself playing (music) until after it stopped. I was listening to it on my iPod here. I put the songs on shuffle on it.

I'm wondering about the weather. It's very dry lately. There's a local wind. It's the "Santa Anas." People locally make that they're more edgy (=bristly). I find in my dictionary that there is a different meaning there. It's "bitterly cold weather," which is very sharp there.

However, I wish to be using a rough-textured sense. Raymond Chandler told about this period. He said that it could be the time there when the woman of the house might murder the husband!

In Southern California, they call this autumnal span in the year the "murder season." You feel more restless so that you don't sleep easily. You rise up early. You are thirsty. Your own eyes may blink more, but you will not gain any respite at all.

It's the 'killing time' indeed. I will be waiting for an opportunity to enjoy a space of time more cool. There will be a rise in temperature until it'll be nearly a hundred degrees this coming weekend, however.

Iómhá/Image: Eric Gill: "An Gaoth Theas" "The South Wind" (1929)
Bath stone: object: 255 x 685 x 100 mm, 26.3 kg. Model for sculpture. Tate Gallery.

Purchased 1995. T06997. In 1928 Gill led a team of sculptors commissioned to carve stone reliefs symbolising the four winds for the exterior of the new London Underground Headquarters at St James’s Park station. Gill carved three of the total of eight figures (two representing each of the main points of the compass). They were carved in situ between November 1928 and February 1929 and are still in place today. This one of the three quarter-size copies that he made later. The style of the reliefs demonstrates Gill’s admiration for English and French Medieval sculpture. (From the display caption August 2004)

Is Blogging Making Us Stupid?

"Why I Blog," by Andrew Sullivan in the November 2008 "The Atlantic Monthly," opines well as an early adopter in his chosen medium on-line-- via the print issue I read and then for my blog linked to here back on-line. Will such circular transmissions, storage, and archiving continue? Or, will we give up paper for bytes?

It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—- impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in.

We're a hybrid form of communication, you, me, and pundits as famous or Sullivan or as obscure as Fionnchú mise féin. Going back and forth between our shelves and our Googling, Wikipedia and libraries, TV and music, films and videos, what we do off-line and how, for many of you if not quite technologically slower and less gadget-addled me, we bring smartphones and cameras and laptops into that off-line world to blur its boundaries even more. Ray Kurzweil, a visionary with an enviable if rather unsettling slew of successful predictions, figures by 2030 it'll be VR full-immersion injected nanobots into our brains to create and share whatever we call reality as our minds meld with our bodies, our networks with our consciousness. Cartesian separation may at last find its termination.

Another end, that of book culture, continues to be predicted. Beau Friedlander in the November 9, 2008, Los Angeles Times debates whether the Net's making us dumber. "The Internet vs. Books: A Peaceful Coexistence." Comparing Googling with reading books, he finds the latter more durable, less open to the merely individual rave or rant freed of editing, testing, or verification: "Books require a different sort of communion with one's subject than the Internet. They foster a different sort of memory -- more tactile, more participatory."

I'm not so convinced. I grew up loving books; I also was raised in a household with too few of them and too much t.v. Too old for that constantly plugged-in wired routine of my students, too young to have been educated by enough fervent mandarins who worshipped books as the repositories of the best thought and said. I turn to books habitually, but I also click away same as you have to get here.

We're a transitional generation. Will Kindle replace Barnes & Noble? Will we all be our own printing presses, downloading away onto drives rather than stocking our dens? Will our treasured volumes become as trashed, or as collectible, as our rows of vinyl LPs? Many critics rail against the Net as the final assault by the barbarians.

Yet, junk always clutters our vision. We've always needed educated guides to distinguish objets d'art from knicknacks. Any roam in a second-hand bookshop or a new shop's remainder stacks reveals that the gap between what deserves attention and what merits demotion has always persisted. Publishers rest on the same scale of prestige or vanity, niche or mass-market, as the blogosphere now builds. We let our preferences steer us, by Dewey Decimal or keywords, a friend's nudge or a reviewer's quotation. In a store or surfing the Net, we're navigating reefs of crumbling blather towards, we hope, a beacon. I'd respond that this medium you and I share allows for the pull rather than the push. We're more active, less passive.

Lately, I have discovered authors I never knew promoted by ones whom I have corresponded with personally after we met on the Net. My Amazon reviews continue and I solicit, post-election, your positive votes to keep my rank there high! I have found old friends, also whom I met first on-line, with fresh ideas about politics that I had not suspected they had! In turn, they directed me to other blogs and more portals. That's no sign, in my opinion, of a diminishment of my intellectual skills despite these being channelled on-line rather than through books or newspapers or craic in a pub.

The permanence of the coffeehouse diatribe, the bitter screed, the uplifting speech, the ribald anecdote, the essential reference, or the asserted factoid: we trust that the Net may in saving our thoughts and reactions, as quick as a diary jot, as long as an erudite monograph: may these outlast paper, fire, and mildew. (As long as Google stays not evil, no sabotage wipes out in a pulse all the terabytes of the past twenty years, and my account stays free and accessible: we do take a chance, don't we, with all our gathered eggs in one electronic basket?) I continue to seek out challenging opinions and stop by a few blogs to chat and leave comments that extend conversations that, despite what Carr, Friedlander, and Sullivan all charge, may deserve to last as long at least as the pulp and glue that surrounds me in my study.

Books rest all around me as I peck away. They wait for me, no less than the blank search bar at the right-hand corner of my screen lingers until my next urge fills it and off I go, to it as to my stacked paperbacks and clothbound packages of information and knowledge. I participate with you, and your comments and even the enigmatic squiggles of Google Analytics to trace the few of you reading this.

That allows, blip as it may ping, an objective correlative (Friedlander in an essay that appears too severely excised, cites T.S. Eliot, so can I in my entry that nobody can excise: the profits and risks of no other mediator) for my own acknowledgement of a loyal audience. If I publish an essay in a reference work, or even contribute to a scholarly peer-reviewed on-line journal my article, I cannot tell who opens it. I get no royalties, and unlike book authors, cannot tell who's consuming my labors in the real world or the virtual realm. For my efforts, I remain rather invisible-- unless I get an e-mail, perhaps, as happens now and then.

That's how some of you scanning these lines first met me, and vice versa. People who find each other by common interests. A decade ago it may have been discussion lists and participatory boards moderated on the Net. Now, blogs appear to have supplanted them. We all may wander the same bookstores and listen to the same music, but how would we meet out there? We've been scuffling about longing to confide in each other, but before the blogs, we could not easily find our kindred spirits. That's quite a bond that through the Net we can forge. It's participatory-- and a sustained and archived-- network of formidable memory merged with sensible expertise itself.

Friedlander mentions The Atlantic's July 2008 cover story "Is Google Making Us Stupid?". Earlier on this blog, I commented that Nicholas Carr appeared rather facile in his positive answer. Carr found himself forgetting basic information the more he relied on the Net.

As a teacher, I can see the advantages and drawbacks. As a contributor, on a miniscule scale, to Wikipedia, I assure students that it's not the babbling fountain of misinformation many of my colleagues decry; errors often vanish quickly due to careful editing. I'm amazed even delving into the most recondite entries how recently they've been last updated. Also, I favor open-source collaborations, blogs without advertising, and fora on the Net where we can contribute out of the love of wisdom rather than the reduction of yet one more public space to a shopping mall.

Do we have to remember so much? After all, my chemistry teacher sensibly figured we had the Periodic Table hung in the lab, across our textbook's endpapers, and we had no need to memorize it. If we harangue youth for not being able to go around with so much upstairs, by this logic we better take away calculators, maps, address books on their cellphones, and by that logic, reductio ad absurdam, books themselves. Detractors of the Net appear to forget that books are simply another form of portable data storage. None of us since literacy need to carry it all in our mind. I can admire those like Ramón Llull or Athanasius Kirchner whose powers of memory dwarfed mine, but on the other hand, there's a reason those names may not be immediately recognizable, compared to Gutenberg or Edison or even larval Bill Gates.

Typing this, I hunted in my brain for the title of the Borges story about the man who remembered everything. It took me a few seconds before "Funes the Memorious" bubbled up to drown out "Menes the Fumorious." (Which a nanosecond convinced me sounded like a biblical satrap from the Medes mingled with a Lewis Carroll adjective.) I could have looked it up, but "Labyrinths" and "Ficciones" are in the garage with much of my library. I did manage to dredge it up from my less capacious cerebellum. And, like doing calculations on paper (a risky task for a product of California public school's failed New Math program way back), I do try to stretch my noggin once in a while despite the technological alternatives.

Still, as my wife revels, the fact that we can obtain facts from a few clicks rather than a trip to the library or the "World Book" in the parlor (not that we have either one, although I have accumulated far too many books to rival a small library of my own) can prove delightful. Niall marvelled to me recently how he gets sucked into Wikipedia in his own quests for data, and Leo when he needed to know which songs to upload from some CDs I had borrowed from our hip neighbor did not sample them first, but he went (as I would have done) to Pitchfork and All Music Guide to compare their recommended tracks to his own possible picks: an efficient use of the mediator balanced with one's own final judgment.

That's the future: my teenaged sons with their technological literacy. No more bike trips to the library, but I take them regularly and we all split up looking. I might scan the new books, go up to 297 for religion or 796 for chess or 941 for Ireland; Leo likes graphic novels, Niall visits sports. Fiction's where Layne might receive her newest acquisition. I have three library cards for three districts now, and while I buy far fewer books than I used to due to space, budget, and mortality that looms before I can make decent use of the ones I already hoard, I do keep reading, my nose in the book, pointed at the screen, or aimed down and about as my fingers crawl over the keyboard. Just like the one you sit at reading this: the communion of me and you, perhaps no less ancient in its profundity than that of a scroll or tablet or a few ounces of paper dappled with ink and a splash of dye or buckram.

Photo: "Blogging: Now You Can Show the Whole World Why No One Listens to You."

Marxist Stockbrokers?



Lalo Alcaraz, "La Cucuracha" comic strip, archived for November 8, 2008. I saw it in today's Los Angeles Times. Sums it up.

Ag casadh ar gorm.

Dúirt Niall orm faoi oiche na Mháirt sin caite : "í dtólamh, beidh cuimhne liom nuair chuala mé go raibh a rogha ceannaire atá an fear príomh-ghorm." Tá fírinne ann. Mise féin. Bhí olltoghchán go raibh go stairiúil ann. Scríobh mé faoi an comhlann go laídir idir Obama agus McCain anseo ar feadh seachtaine seo.

Anois, tá mé go tuirseach beagán, áfach! Tuigeann agaibh faoi mo thuairimí. Ní scríobhfaidh chomh is mó fúthu-- ceapaim! B'fhéidir, inseoidh futhú ar an blogannaí eile, leis léiriú níos gearr!

Tá mo chroí trina chéile agus mé faoi an bua mhór daonlathach. Fhógraím go deireanach ar an taobh a thógail mise á diúltú a insint ag gúthaíocht go hoifigiúil. Vhóta mé, ach mo vóta a tugtha a Nader-- an ceathrú uair. Ní chréidim seisean féin go leor, ach ní bhfuil páirtithe polaitíochtaí a creideamh ormsa féin. Mar sin féin, iarraidh mé an fior-iarrthói an chead uair eile a vhótail.

Abairt as gaeilge an focal amháin ar an fear Aoifreach agus an dath na speire. Tá iómhá go tráthuil anois. Féic ar an mapa toghchánach ar na stáit go raibh "dearg" riamh. Tá siad níos mór díobh "gorm" inniu. Tá duine go leor ag measú faoi bua go mbeidh iompú bisigh.

Mar sin féin, athraigh malairt intinne go mall. I gCalifoirnea, tá an cheist go fíochmar ann atá á plé faoi an díomua na chéile comhraiceoirí ghnó na h-ochtú. Ní aontaionn faoi an céim ó tacaíocht air i measc vótáilaíthe Aoifreach-Mheireceannach agus Laidineach. Chuir siad an cuid sheachtrú a chéad na duine ghorm agus leathan na Lhaidneachaí-- le chéile leis coimeadachái mhéan tíre ar aghaidh an roinnt saorbhreathach ina thuiscint cóstaí dul chun cinn a chosc.

Sonraionn tairiscint pósadh idir an fear agus an bean amháin. Ceapaim faoi ár chairde dhíle, Críos agus Bob. Phós siad ar feadh an mhí caite seo. Tá beirt lánúin phósta sna dlíthe atá i bhfeidhm--ó shin, sula tríu laetheannaí fadó. Tá ár tír ag dul síos leis Obama; titeann mo stád ar gcúl leis ceist an h-ochtú.

Turning to blue.

Niall said to me about that last Tuesday night: "Always, I will remember when I heard that the president who was the first black man was chosen." That's true. Me too. The general election was historical. I wrote about the strong contest between Obama and McCain here during this past week.

Now, I'm a little tired, however! All of you understand about my opinions. I won't write so much about them-- I think! Perhaps, I will tell about them on other blogs, with shorter comments!

'My heart's divided together through'(=mixed emotions) about the great Democratic victory. I declared recently on the side to choose myself to decline to state my voting affiliation officially. I voted, but I cast my vote for Nader-- the fourth time straight. I don't believe in himself much, but there's no political party for me myself to believe in. Nevertheless, I want a real candidate by the next time that I vote.

In Irish the same word's spoken for an African man and the color of the sky. It's a fitting image now. Look at the electoral map of the states that were "red" before. They today have for them more "blue." Many people are thinking about the victory that it'll be a change for the better.

All the same, change of heart changes slowly. In California, there's a fierce question which is under debate about the defeat of Proposition 8's opponents. There is not agreement about the level of support for it among the African-American voters and Latinos. They combined for a seven out of ten share of the black people and half from Latinos-- together with conservatives from the inland they blocked progress against the portion of liberals from the northern coast.

The proposal defines marriage between a man and a woman only. I think about our dear friends, Chris and Bob. They married during the past month. The pair's a married couple under the laws in force-- back then, before three days ago. Our country goes forward with Obama; my state falls backward with Proposition 8.

Griangraf/Photo:"Scardan na Fhírinne"/"Fountain of Truth" Leis plé lasánta ar an blog ar áit seo/ With fiery blog debate at this place.

Chuir Bob lasc ar fheabhas seo orm/ Bob sent this perfect link to me. There's an opposing, most passionate view at the/ Tá radharc ar aghaidh is feargach ar an Daily Kos blog: "Facts Belie the Stereotyping of Black People for Prop. 8"

David Parlett's "Oxford History of Board Games": Book Review

I learned last week that my personality type seeks out pursuits not for competition or reward, but for the pleasure of the pastime. I get absorbed, as many readers of Parlett may, by the world within a game that mirrors and distorts our reality. Curious about the history of chess, and the personality quirks associated with it and other strategies occupying space on a grid, board, circuit, or pattern, I found Parlett's guide.

As with so much of gaming scholarship, throughout his entries, Parlett nods to the massive but uneven, now partially superseded, research of H.J.R. Murray on the origins of chess and varieties of other board games. I might add how it's easier to consult and use than Murray's exhaustive compendia. Now out-of-print, a companion to Parlett's card games history, this 1999 study deserves reprinting in paperback by OUP.

"The aim of this book is primarily to present a historical survey of positional board games, but extending the story to modern and proprietary games whenever they can be shown to advance or expand on a traditional idea," Parlett explains (p. 7). He suggests that "the power of involvement of its underlying abstract structure" determines, no matter the label, its abstract content or representational surface, the success long-term for a theme game. "What makes people want to go on playing a game once its theme is past its sell-by date is the fact that it remains engaging and exciting despite its outdated appearance and loss of topicality." For example, we do not go into battle with elephants, take counsel with bishops, or ride as knights into the pawns that comprise the enemy's ranks-- yet we still play chess with these pieces.

As Parlett cautions in his lively introduction, this erudite yet accessible survey's not meant to be read front-to-back, although I did so, at least to get the gist of it all. Its nineteen chapters range widely as they investigate varieties of race, chase, displace, and space games. Theme games conclude this compact yet dense enough volume. While not submerged by descriptions, those unfamiliar with specific games may find this better suited for reference about one's chosen pastimes; I found for my own interests those on "tafl" or Northern European strategy games and the section on chess most engaging. After a while, relying on print rather than observation, your mind bogs down in details, inevitably, of games that elude your easy comprehension when locked into words and a few illustrations, however instructive.

The reason it's a reference rather than a chronological narrative? It's likely you'll skip to the type of games here most appealing to your own sensibility. He breaks them down into roughly theme games and four related forms of chase, displace, space, and race! As an inventor ("Hares & Tortoises") as well as historian (he also publishes on card and word games), Parlett brings an enthusiasm for the process of how games evolve and how new ones appear I found contagious. Not that I'll ever figure out the game of "Go" any more than chess at my advanced age, but it's instructive to ponder how we tend to gravitate towards passing the time with imaginary hunts, wars, chases, captures, and climbs, no matter the culture or terrain we live in.

I've heard that such criss-crosses, dots, squares, and lines as cave dwellers made show these deeply grooved patterns in our minds. Parlett's brisk survey, often acerbic and well-written, takes you into the mystery of how such games mutate and shift as new ones appear while only those that speak to a lasting need for meaning and shape beneath the holiday season's latest movie tie-in or promotional throwaway fade.

It might have been entertaining to include games that have been conceived of on boards but that exist in speculative fiction. What about "Das Glasperlenspiel", the "Glass Bead Game" of Hermann Hesse's Castalia, for example, or fantasy games played only in novels? However, as there's plenty of more easily obtained real games in these pages to ponder, the scope of this book may have precluded such forays into the imaginative realm of pursuits. There's enough deserving ones to locate out there on the shelves. Or, to make up, as Parlett shows.

Mancala, chess, checkers (or draughts), go, backgammon: in many forms across many lands, what drives people towards these time-tested winners? They transcend trends, and outlast fashions. They coax from us, as Parlett documents neatly without too much withering detail, long-lasting satisfaction as we mimic our ancestors dashing about the savannah-- or substitute more safely for the hazards of the battlefield.

Photo, with Thomas Rowlandson's great illustration: David Parlett's website
(Book's PDF available from author at this URL. Review posted to Amazon US today.)

J.G. Farrell's "Troubles": Book Review

Before his Booker Prize winning "The Siege of Krishnapur," Farrell wrote around 1970 what's now joined with "Siege" and the later "The Singapore Grip" as his "Empire Trilogy." While "Siege" (reviewed by me recently here and on Amazon US) delineates the collapse of English domination in India as colonists hole up in a makeshift fortress during the 1857 sepoy mutiny, for those in Co. Wexford from 1919-21, during what the Irish call the [Black &] "Tan War" or the struggle for independence, the inhabitants also hunker down as the natives slowly approach, surround, and advance.

Farrell attains an arch delivery that tweaks his own Anglo-Irish sensibility, perhaps. He focuses on one Major Brendan Archer, recently demobilized after WWI. You get nearly nothing about his veteran experiences, but he's haunted by them and seeks to return to a rather diffident fiancée whose family owns the hotel on the Irish coast. The Major wonders about Angela and how before he went back to the front after a leave in 1916 he got so casually committed: "They had been somewhat hysterical-- Angela perhaps feeling amid all the patriotism that she too should have something personal to lose, the Major that he should have at least one reason for surviving." (11)

Later, he sees in rebel Dublin the sight of an IRA man shot: "Abruptly he collapsed inside the sandwich-board, subsided slowly to his knees and hung there, slowly supported by the boards, like an abandoned puppet." (100) There's a bit of needed wryness mixed with compassion, as when the Major's dying aunt recalls the noble demise of a tuberculer Mrs Perry, "whose husband, a ravening brute, had claimed his marital rights until the very end, causing [the aunt] to leave the sick-room for hours at a time, so that very often it would be nearly dawn before she was allowed back to comfort his victim-- who had been uncomplaining, however. Describing this, she would aim black looks back at the Major as if he were responsible." (135)

The steady, if shrouded, insurgency arrives even in sleepy Kilnalough against its rulers, and the Major and his neighbors at the Majestic face, like those in the "Siege," their fate. "It was like putting out to sea in a small boat: with the running of the waves it is impossible to tell how far one has moved over the water; all one can do is look back to see how far one has moved from land. So in the case of Ireland all one could do was to look back from the peaceful days before the war. And they already seemed a long way away." (138) Intriguingly, Farrell follows this passage immediately with a news clipping from an inquiry into one Lord Hunter, about his administration of martial law at Kasur, India.

The Major dawdles. Thwarted in love, "all he could do now was drift with the tide of events. Some strange insect had taken up residence in the will-power of which he had always been so proud, eating away at it unobserved like a slug in an apple." (266) As also in "Siege," pet animals often get poignant moments of their own on stage. Rover the blonde spaniel gets worse and worse along with his owners. Cats fill the upper stories of the hotel as it begins to fall apart. Going blind, Rover used to chase the felines; "as likely as not he would be set upon by an implacable horde of cats and chased up and down the corridors to the brink of exhaustion." Now, he begins to growl at shadows. The metaphor's apparent. "Day by day, no matter how wide he opened his eyes, the cat-filled darkness continued to creep a little closer." (281)

The plot's not what keeps you reading, but this Big House milieu. Farrell, to his credit, takes an early turn away from predictability around a hundred pages in-- this unsettles the rest of the book. It may not work entirely, but it's suited to the melancholic tone that permeates this work. (Derek Mahon's poem "A Disused Shed in County Wexford" was inspired by a late scene here, and he dedicated the verse to Farrell. Unfortunately, Mahon's poem outshines in a few lines all of this novel, which needed trimming easily by half.)

The action, in prose despite such cited moments, moves far too slowly. As with "Siege," much of the interest lies in Farrell's tone and his talent for set-pieces. Here, it's the dual attempted seduction of twins Faith and Charity by Mortimer and Matthews, two Tans, or British auxiliaries, after too much champagne by all and a formidable amount of fabric and fasteners in the form of ladies' undergarments to override. Farrell places such wit within a more symbolic depiction of the Hotel Majestic as it crumbles under fire, the sea, and decay. Its residents find, as in "Siege," their imperial notions of order undermined and while there's more food and arguably better shelter even under the conditions of another insurgency in the territories, there's also far less of the fascinating details that made "Siege" with its discussions of gunnery, cholera, germs, and Victorian ideas of progress so unexpectedly lively.

Here, a few Oxford pacifists suddenly stop by late in the story to lecture us about the background we need for the Irish question, but outside of this, the passive protagonist The Major and his semi-foil, Edward Spencer (note the surname's twist on at least one earlier English interloper) haven't much to occupy your attention during many of the nearly 450 sluggish pages. As even in "Siege," the pacing slows. The most vibrant passages again appear early on, and later, lassitude dominates. Even the denouement lags, a fault shared by "Siege." There's dramatic potential in the climactic scene (don't read John Banville's preface first; it spoils this. Interesting how Banville around this same time wrote his early Big House novel, similar in theme and mood, "Birchwood."), but the energy even there appears scattered and its presentation disorganized.

So, it's not up to the encyclopedic level of "Siege." It feels like the preparation for that novel which time has proven Farrell's best. Historical news items intersperse with a Big House conceit, a formidable symbol of the threatened Empire, but it's all in the end too neat in its formulations. While I enjoyed sections such as I've shared, I'd select "Siege" as the better achievement of an old bastion under assault by restive revolutionaries bent on destroying their colonial overseers behind such walls.

Race, Post-Race.

What's Reverend Wright have to preach now about his former congregant's rise to ultimate power? Do the headlines invalidate that clergyman's claims of our racist Amerikkka? Or, does Obama erase a more complicated racial identity that six hundred million has been spent to simplify?

Shelby Steele, a black commentator who leans towards moderation, weighs in with his views about Obama as a "bargainer." He seduced white America "with a vision of racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting with a racial motivation." As I commented in my predictions here yesterday, my wife argues back that we elected him based on his intelligence. I counter, and today find support from Steele, that Obama's ascension comes from his manipulation of our idealism and our guilt. Here's some excerpts from "Obama's Post-Racial Promise":

"His talent was to project an idealized vision of a post-racial America -- and then to have that vision define political decency. Thus, a failure to support Obama politically implied a failure of decency.
Obama's special charisma -- since his famous 2004 convention speech -- always came much more from the racial idealism he embodied than from his political ideas. In fact, this was his only true political originality. On the level of public policy, he was quite unremarkable. His economics were the redistributive axioms of old-fashioned Keynesianism; his social thought was recycled Great Society. But all this policy boilerplate was freshened up -- given an air of "change" -- by the dreamy post-racial and post-ideological kitsch he dressed it in."

Steele elaborates upon Obama's method. Starting in Iowa, he won whites over first, as blacks held back until they saw him rather than Hillary as a viable candidate with a chance of winning. His calculation, honed by his Chicago experience with the political machine, enabled this first-term senator to best his Beltway rivals.

"Obama is what I have called a "bargainer" -- a black who says to whites, "I will never presume that you are racist if you will not hold my race against me." Whites become enthralled with bargainers out of gratitude for the presumption of innocence they offer. Bargainers relieve their anxiety about being white and, for this gift of trust, bargainers are often rewarded with a kind of halo."

The majority, according to Steele, wants Obama to validate their own anxieties over race. They elected him less on his track record than on his stance at the starting line, if I may invent my own metaphor. Steele knows that the weight of allegory hangs over Obama, as "the cultural meaning of this unprecedented convergence of dark skin and ultimate power will likely become-- at least for a time-- a national obsession." Steele delves into the cultural dynamic underlying his political ascent.

When whites -- especially today's younger generation -- proudly support Obama for his post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation. They think and act racially, not post-racially. The point is that a post-racial society is a bargainer's ploy: It seduces whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation. A real post-racialist could not be bargained with and would not care about displaying or documenting his racial innocence. Such a person would evaluate Obama politically rather than culturally.

Obama's talents, Steele explains, have been exhibited more by his relentless campaign and his careful articulation rather than much evidence from his past. We have elected a rather young man, with the most liberal voting record in the Senate he's only attained for two years, much of that spent away running for the Oval Office. He's skeptical about the practical impact of the symbolic role given Obama, given the 70% illegitimacy rate among blacks, their SAT decline these past decades, their 55% share in federal prisons vs. their 13%-- and declining-- portion of the population. Gaps persist in the black middle class regarding education, and disparities, Steele predicts, will continue no matter what glow Obama's presidency casts over us all.

But it was the peculiar cultural manipulation of racial bargaining that brought him to the political dance. It inflated him as a candidate, and it may well inflate him as a president.
There is nothing to suggest that Obama will lead America into true post-racialism. His campaign style revealed a tweaker of the status quo, not a revolutionary. Culturally and racially, he is likely to leave America pretty much where he found her.

Less loftily, as usual, columnist Sandy Banks tells of her growing up in racially divided Cleveland and her interview with a then-less known Obama:

"We have to earn racial reconciliation, he told me in that 2005 interview. 'In the same way I earned . . . a sense of resolution between the white half of me and the black half of me,' he said.
'I struggled and made mistakes and tried to be honest with myself. . . . We shouldn't be lazy or complacent or pat ourselves on the back. We have a distance to travel. . . . We're not there yet.'"

I find it intriguing that the Los Angeles Times writers tiptoe around the complicated nature of Obama's self-understanding. Banks' aside remains the only mention in today's voluminous coverage-- outside of the lead paragraph under the enormous front page "It's Obama!" that identifies him as the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya. Still, we package him as he, when he left diverse Hawai'i for the more straitened mainland, began to place himself within the African-American community that gave him much of his crucial margin for his victory.

Even Steele's ideological rival, Michael Eric Dyson-- known for his championing of hip-hop and sociological studies that challenge more conservative black observers-- notes in his adjacent column amidst Tupac lyrics and "indescribable elation": "Regarding Obama as an exceptional black man-- when he is in fact an exceptional American-- hampers our whole nation's desire to clear the path to success for more like him." Still, I keep nagging this muffled definition. Nobody appears to agree with me, so I may be wrong. But, for me, Obama's half-white, biracial, multicultural upbringing outside of traditional African-American-- let alone mainland American-- society marked him indelibly. Yet, as this status does not easily match our two-toned expectations, nearly all of us have colluded with Obama's own acquiescence to a more familiar, easier to recognize, brand of packaging. We view him as not a man who happens to be part-black, but as a black man only.

Those of us, like Steele, myself, or my intelligent colleagues, may resent what the third columnist, Tim Rutten, observes when he places this adjective in his summary of the coalition who provided the 52%-47% triumph yesterday: "slaves' descendents, young people of all races, Latinos, and educated white voters." This may not be an intended slight, but it inadvertently by its own racially-shaded "coding" does demean millions of thoughtful citizens.

My wife told me that her cohort, nearly eight out of ten voters with college degrees, went for the Democrats; I learned yesterday too that in humanities and social science departments, seven out of eight perch on the left wing. No surprise to me. Layne and I wondered how much of these career preferences can be attributed to our hard-wiring, and even our gender. Like it or not, on the inside as well as the outside, we're a challenge even to the complexion we see in the mirror, let alone the neurons guiding us within.

Image: Reverend Wright's thundering about the First Couple he married. Movin' on up. Plenty more to offend True Believers in Change We Can Believe In at "The People's Cube: Correct Opinions for Progressive Liberals." I hope anyone making it this far down does not regard me as a crackpot.

As that Irish forebear (despite him digging with the left foot) Swift, might concur: I'm an equal opportunity misanthrope. I root for underdogs, misfits, and autodidacts. Rev. Wright'd support my tolerance. If McCain and his veep had won, I'd be even happier with satirical prospects. Unlike his rival, he thanks to his Naval career if not his confinement for same has a bracing, salty sense of breezy, biting sarcasm. Sarah in 2012? T-shirts peddled already.

P.S. Heed this manifesto as a communique from those driven underground. It's a broadcast from the freshly bested, stubbornly ironic resistance: "Slogans for Spontaneous Celebrations at Victory Rallies." I challenge loyal ObamaNation cadres to respond as wittily. What would NPR, let alone Pacifica Radio, sound like if it revealed a sense of humor beyond its Sunday word-teaser programs? Maybe Al Franken will volunteer on behalf of the intelligentsia's vast left-wing conspiracy for Pelosi's ministry?

Morning, or Moaning, Again in America.

"Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive." If some regarded Palin as pretty, Biden as smart, and McCain as heroic, than I suppose that leaves, extrapolating from Graham Greene's remark in "The Heart of the Matter," Obama as appealing. Witnessing the minivan bumpers and maternal busts boasting "another mama for Obama," passing the posters with that benevolent two-toned gaze, I recall Orwell's nearly as ubiquitous paternal icon.

He's also our first half-white president. The novelty of this phrase shows how we let the one-drop rule dominate our perceptions. If Obama was not half-white but entirely so, if he was not our first truly African-American leader who by his biracial heritage combined with his deftly managed image rallied away from Hillary the support of many within the black community-- he would not be our president-elect. My wife disagrees with my analysis; see tomorrow's "Race, Post-Race" for some support from black intellectuals, however!

His strategic skills may prove genuine; they overshadowed his brief tenure in the legislature. His rhetoric dazzled many but dulled nearly as many. Those unconvinced will certainly endure countless chances to become persuaded now. Simply put, and perhaps inextricable from Obama's manipulation of his idealistic message, this is his substance: a concoction of novel ingredients and bold marketing. The form ineradicably tinges his narrative; the presentation and not the content alone accounts for his rise to celebrity. This branding assured his victory. Voters chose the new Coke over the classic, but it's still a corporate product we've been sold.

Fundamentally, market research as with any number #1 blockbuster put him on top. We fall for the reliable pick-up lines from our seductive leaders. Even though they disdain our company the first sunrise after they've wooed us. Obama won the chance to perform as the leading man, yet he swoons us not as our predictable matinee idol.

He wants to be worthy of the burden placed on him by those for so long disenfranchised. He seeks too to transcend such limitations, to be his own man. Those eager to claim Obama for their own clan may diminish the care given by his abandoned mother and especially her relatives, but raised without his father-- apart from his Kenyan roots-- Obama's own broken home and his struggle to restructure security provides a sobering lesson. Perhaps indeed as he promised by his example we can begin to repair half a century of moral irresponsibility and emotional damage done so to many children and through so many parents. A universal moral that clashes with so many, whatever their own ancestral origins, who insist on placing Obama so squarely within only the particulars. The stereotype should be subsumed by his ambition as he dominates our national stage.

Whether his talents will achieve applause remains for we, the audience, to award. He does, as more and more of his fellow citizens share his multicultural upbringing, represent a nuanced and challenging definition of who's seen as American. We're native and immigrant, savvy and clueless, slick and bumbling, grunts and stoners, hunters and vegetarians, Ivy League elites and Joe the Plumbers. That's a true rainbow coalition, in all its garish and subdued hues.

I do anticipate that perhaps, if Obama's term overcomes its hype, we can all welcome a government less obsessed by race, ethnicity, and checking one box on the census form. Allow me that moment of idealism. Will Obama's administration worsen or ease such identity politics, favoritism by complexion rather than by intelligence or merit? Given his own experience or lack of-- by this same storyline of ambition and smarts, connections and defiance-- it appears uncertain how Obama's blue-state's donkeys will bray in their triumph over House, Senate, and the White House.

Will we play more into victimization and special pleading? Or, will we begin to move on? Towards an equality based on our own potential rather than that granted by one's alma mater, one's pedigree, one's trust fund? Will the collective nannies tighten control or will we balance social justice with recognition of individual initiative? Can we curb capitalist greed unless the private sector's regulated? How much do we need in taxes? Will we admit that cautious homeowners deserve to be rewarded for frugality rather than fund debacles for their spendthrift neighbors, mortgage finaglers, hedge-fund managers-- or against insurgents in Iraq? Can we reverse the lost opportunity of the past eight years and rescue our failing environment?

Will the Democrats dump billions into woebegone schools that will reverse their decline, or will the cash be pocketed by teacher's unions, nebulous community agencies, and their crony contractors? The schools burst as playgrounds give way to more classrooms to house increased enrollments. Property taxes rise; majorities of urban renters pass measures to fund schools. Rates increase for homeowners, as congestion worsens given higher fertility rates of many newly arrived families.

Will we try to promote family planning again, reduce teen pregnancy, and advocate population reduction rather than celebrate the arrival of millions each year our ecology and our infrastructure cannot afford? What about immigration policy that does not pander to big business or gerrymandered Hispanic voters? Do we have a chance, apropos, of redrawing districts so both parties can have a chance at competing in truly representative elections? Can Republicans realign their party to listen to legitimate concerns of working-class and middle-class voters rather than PACs, multinationals, a rabid right-wing, and our military-industrial complex? And, what about a real third-party alternative? I'm tired of perennial Nader as the only option seemingly by default these past four national elections on my ballot.

Whether or not four years from now Obama will return for a second term with as much acclaim by the masses will prove, as the Chinese fortune tells us, that we may live indeed in "interesting times."

A "pitiless war" waged, and lost again, by McCain, his second defeat for a ambitious but mismanaged cause he believed in more than most of his nation. The results may not have been as immediately forgone as Uncle Joe's victories at the Soviet ballot box, but for me, the outcome remained no less in doubt. My wife and sons rushed to the television, Comedy Central at my suggestion, to watch along with the ecstatic majority, both on the streets as shown and by those journalists showing such scenes of history in the making being made.

What's less assured: the propositions. As for these, I'll avoid total "Dewey Defeats Truman" hubris, although Garry Trudeau's cartoon had been drawn well in advance of the ascension of Obama to the Van Allen Belt, so high have popular and journalistic expectations for his millennial reign soared. For all I know, the 2012 Mayan calendar aligns with Barack's rule over a gratefully cowed proleteriat as monitored by a compliantly reported world order.

What I'm curious about is how many of the ornery blogs that I skimmed last weekend and referred to as intelligent and entertaining commentary on the foibles of the nascent Democratic hegemony (I refer to these as anti-GOP sites remained-- at least until this morning-- legion and echoed through the morning paper or CNN, NPR and the BBC) will regroup after their relegation to instant irrelevance? For me, the excitement of the new regime remains not so much in its own spin control as opposed to the Cheney-Rove duo of evil, but how those now comprising His Majesty's Loyal Opposition will deploy the Net for a guerrilla campaign.

How will disenchanted feminists for Sarah, or gays for Hillary, or Latino vets for McCain track the emperor's march down Pennsylvania Avenue, in his new clothes? You Tube, viral rumors, cartoons and quips: whatever your own bias, you must admit it's part of the fun of our Natty Bumppo- deTocquevillean mob-misrule to satirize whomever's living large in D.C. At least we're rid of SNL's reprise of smarmy Tina Fey.

See what a $604,000,000 campaign, thanks to the winner's disregard for funding limits, buys us? Not to mention only the start of more stuffed-shirt bailouts by a party afraid of being labelled as socialists. So, for this largess from my paycheck and property taxes in lieu of/as wealth redistribution, I reckon I've earned the media spectacle. I anticipate low-intensity psy-ops waged beneath the networks and Net tycoons-- as I watch a man my age try to run this country. Not, we gamble, plummeting sharper than a Dow Jones graph, but ascending into an idyll of hope, change, and harmony. I'll be entertained by wooden Barry and doddering Joe more than by the departing administration's two dismal terms of torpor, terror, twilight.

Unless you're like (at least and probably not only) one Berkeley stereotype, cited in the New York Times I suppose as rare proof of diligent investigation into its demographic's own blinkered perspective. This woman last week drove all the way to Monterey, a Navy veteran's resort redoubt, about 150 miles south. Only there did she see her first McCain bumper sticker.

Although I wrote these preceding paragraphs at noon on Election Day, was I right?

P.S. I liked, in the few seconds I watched last night of Comedy Central's coverage, the footage from "Bambi" back-projected as the reporter weighed in from "Obama Headquarters" in corrupt Chicago. "It's always looking like this whenever he's in the Windy City!" Even before Colbert & Stewart went on the air with their show, the polls showed over 200 to 80 or so electoral votes for Obama, although the popular vote was only 300,000 apart; still open, of course, were such states as mine, liberal bastions. I went upstairs to read my novel, while my wife sat with laptop keyed in on results as she watched the Democratic total inexorably climb.

P.P.S. Image: The day after, Prop. 8 that limits marriage as defined in California to those of the opposite sex appears to mirror in reverse the 52%-47% margin of Obama's victory. I assume that-- as rumored-- many minority voters backing Obama also veered towards a more traditional reaction towards the legalization of same-sex marriages. As this issue's been bounced about in courts the past few years, the battle's not over. Meanwhile, is this one of the most confusing ads ever? Our friends, who had beat the deadline and got hitched up North last month, sent us this. They wondered about their own choice, as from this banner ad it's truly a narrow decision for Prop. 8 voters. A pair of strange bedfellows, ebony and ivory, hawk and dove, contemplating their nuptial options?

Ag lorg ar stór as Gaeilge.

Plé Ó Muiri faoi na áthas domhain 'meitfisiciúil' ag foghlaim Gaeilge. Aointaim leis scribhneoir seo. Léighim a lhéirmheas is fada de leabhar "Radharc Nua Gaeilge" bealach Gaelport.com inné.

Insionn sé faoi ábhar níos deacair áfach. Admhaíonn sé féin: "Tá foghlaimeoiraí go leor Ghaeilge-- agus cuirim mise féin-- a ní déanann, anois agus aríst-- níorbh aon ionadh leo faoi go mbeadh greim go daingean ag úsaid ar an teanga acusan." Deir Ó Muiri agaibh go bhfuil sé an foghlameoir freisin!

Chuir mé mo h-alt ar blog seo faoi an léirmheas areir. Smaoiním futhú inniu. Ní féidir a shéanadh nach ag obair leis Gaeilge go rabthar furasta nuair thar lear.

Cén fáth? Bhuel, ní fheicim comharthaí éagsulaí ag timpeall mé nuair ag tiomaint. Ní chloisim clárannaí dífrúilaí ar an raidió gach lá. Ní fhaighim scannán dátheangach ar an teilifís gach oiche. Tá an fhírinne faoi seirbhis as Gaeilge go deireanach ar an idirlíon. Tá mé ábalta breith orthu beagán díobh ann.

Mar sin féin, tá sé dúshlán mór. Tá iontas liom faoi mo luach saothair. B'fhéidir, bheadh imoibriú inchasta. Tagaim i réim athuair clainne. Is máthair breithe agam Gaelgeoir nuair bhí sí óg i nGaillimhe. Bhí sí imithe as a cuimhne nuair ag imirce a dhéanamh siad go dtí Beal Feirste.

D'fhoglaim mé i ndiadh ag foghlaim Gaeilge ar feadh fadó faoi mo clann atá go raibh grá ar an teanga beo acusan. Tá gaoltaí gairid agam leis gníonhréimeannái leis an bpolaitiocht nó méanáin acusan. Thosaigh siadsan féin as Gaeilge! Tuigim an cumhacht leis líne ghinealaigh go athaimsiú seo agamsa féin.

Searching for treasure in Irish.

Pól Ó Muiri discusses about the "metaphysical" joys of learning Irish. I agree with this writer. I read his very long review of a book, "A New View of the Irish Language," by way of Gaelport.com yesterday.

He also tells of material more difficult, however. He himself admits: "There are few learners of Irish - and I include myself - who do not, every once and while, wonder just how firm a grip they have on the language they use." Ó Muiri tells us that he is a learner also!

I put up my entry on this blog about the review last night. I've been thinking today about it all. It's difficult not to deny that working with Irish for somebody when abroad is easy.

Why? Well, I cannot see various signs around me when driving. I don't hear different programs on the radio every day. I do not find bilingual films on the television each night. It's the truth about service in Irish lately on the Internet. I'm able to catch a few of them there.

All the same, it's a big challenge. I wonder about my reward. Perhaps, it may be a reversible reaction. I revive a family custom. My birth-mother was a Gaelic-speaker when she was young in Galway. She forgot it when they moved to Belfast.

I learned after learning Irish for a long time about my family who had a love for the living language themselves. I have near relatives who had their careers in politics or media. They started themselves in Irish! I understand the power of this rediscovered family line.

Griangraf/Photo: "The Adult Learner" novel in Irish by Alan Desmond, for the same [audience]!/ "An Foghlaimeoir Fásta" úrscéal as Gaeilge le Alan Desmond acusan féin!

Pól Ó Muiri on Gaeilge's Future.

I excerpt freely from this excellent review by Ó Muiri from the Dublin Review of Books. There's much nuance; I could not cut as sharply as I'd intended. Those who may find this critique worthwhile, then, may forgive my lengthy borrowing. At least I formatted it and added italics for readability for my non-Irish-speaking audience! The URL is at the end of the entry for the complete version; mine's courtesy of gaelport.com for 3ú Samhain 2008.
Look West

A New View of the Irish Language, Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín & Seán Ó Cearnaigh (eds), Cois Life, 271 pp, E20, ISBN: 978 -1901176827.

Sa bhliain 1800, bhí cónaí ar mhilliún duine laistiar de líne ó Dhoire go Corcaigh arbh í an Ghaeilge a ngnáth-theanga labhartha. Faoi 1891, áfach, ní raibh fágtha ach 700,000 cainteoir Gaeilge sa tír, a raibh cónaí ar a leath acu i gceantair arbh í an Ghaeilge gnáth-theanga chumarsáide an phobail (ceantair ar a dtabharfaí 'an Ghaeltacht' in am trátha). Léirigh Daonáireamh 1891 go raibh 14 faoin gcéad den phobal dátheangach, gur Béarla amháin a bhí ag 85 faoin gcéad agus nach raibh ach 1 faoin gcéad ina gcainteoirí aonteangacha Gaeilge.

[In 1800 a million people lived behind a line from Derry to Cork whose usual language of speech was Irish. By 1891, however, there were only 700,000 Irish speakers in the country, half of whom lived in areas where Irish was the community’s language of communication (areas that would in time be called 'the Gaeltacht'). The Census of 1891 showed that 14% of the population was bilingual, that 85% spoke only English and that only 1% were monoglot Irish speakers.]

John Walsh, from An teanga, an cultúr agus an fhorbairt: cás na Gaeilge agus cás na hÉireann (Coiscéim, Dublin, 2004).

Irish is not doing badly in the world at large if we take the 2006 census figure of 1.6 million. By this yardstick, Irish would count as one of the 347 languages accounting for 94 per cent of the world’s population. In the European context only Maltese (371,900) and Estonian (1.08 million) are smaller than Irish, but Europe is perhaps unique in having within its borders such a large concentration of world languages (5 in the top ten) but only about 3 per cent of the world’s languages. Only about 5 per cent of the world’s languages have at least one million native speakers.

Nevertheless, to think of Irish as belonging to the big league of world languages with at least a million speakers makes it sound rather safer than would a comparison based on figures assessing the size of actual Irish-speaking communities. If we take the 2006 Census figure of 53,471 (3.2 per cent of the population) as the number of persons over 3 who use Irish daily outside education, or the figure of 17,687 (27.5 per cent) of the Gaeltacht population over 3 years of age who use Irish daily outside education, then we should direct our gaze towards languages of similar size (c. 8,000 to 54,000) and status. By this reckoning Irish belongs in a mid-sized group comprising about 25 per cent of the world’s languages with 10,000 to 99,000 speakers.

Suzanne Romaine, 'Irish in a Global Context', from A New View of the Irish Language.

The figures are startling, and perhaps confusing too. If there were a million native speakers of Irish in 1800 and 1.6 million speakers of Irish (native and learners) in 2006, then the case of Irish is not so bad as some would make out. Irish is not a world language - few Irish speakers make that claim - but it is a language of the world and belonging to the same category as 25 per cent of other world languages is no mean thing. Further, perhaps 'compulsory' Irish was not as bad as system as was thought. The numbers of native speakers living in Ireland is tiny in comparison with the figure for 1800 but the numbers who have learnt the language is impressive. (That they don't all get the opportunity to speak the language on a daily basis is an issue that will be addressed later.)

Looking back is the Irish speaker's curse. There is always something to be commemorated or remembered. If it is not the Battle of Kinsale, it is the Flight of the Earls, or Louvain, or the Famine, or Douglas Hyde, or the Gaeltacht as it was twenty years ago. (It was better then.) Even the most optimistic Irish speaker looks back - and not necessarily in the wee small hours when the drink is in and the sense is out. Looking forward is, of course, not unknown. There are some very forward-looking language pioneers who have achieved much in recent times. However, on the whole, looking forward goes against the Gaeilgeoir grain; looking forward is like a summer fad ' soon forgotten ' and quickly replaced by the dark impulse of retrospective introspection.

It is no surprise that looking back continues to hold such a firm grip on the mind. One could argue that those who fail to learn the language lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them. Then again one could argue that the language sector has been holding the same internal conversation for the last thirty years or so. It is somewhat ironic that the publishers of this collection of essays, A New View of the Irish Language, should take their template from a book that was published in 1969, A View of the Irish Language, edited by Brian Ó Cuív. The editors of the current collection, Seán Ó Cearnaigh and Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín, write that:

The future of Irish is uncertain. It requires us to look in many directions, at once, but never backwards or inwards. Raising the ghetto walls, in the Gaeltacht or elsewhere, is no solution. The new compass must include points both real and virtual, from geographical communities to cyber-based networks, from the Aran Islands classroom to the google-user of focal.ie inside the Arctic Circle. Looking 'west', however, must remain a source of inspiration and linguistic renewal for speakers of Irish looking in, while preserving and developing a living west is an urgent necessity for maintaining Irish-speaking communities in the heartland.

There is certainly truth in that statement. However, the reader is immediately struck by a paradox: there is an honest attempt to honour past work and yet, that act of honouring, is, contrary to the editors' desire, a look 'backwards'. Ireland has undoubtedly changed since 1969 - though those changes are not immediately noticeable in the editors' selection of essay. The essays concern themselves with Ireland, for which you can read the Republic. Ó Cuív's collection appeared at a time when Stormont still stood and when Northern Ireland was the alternative linguistic model for Irish on the island - a place where the language was effectively the preserve of the Catholic community and education sector and enjoyed no official status. The editors do mention, in passing, that: 'Looking north, the language must develop across the political spectrum, and this vitality sustained (sic) in future decades against the threat of waning enthusiasm.' There is absolutely nothing wrong with the sentiment expressed in that sentence. However, there is no attempt to put meat on those bones.

That the language faces huge problems is undoubtedly true and the editors’ assertion that the contributors 'tell the story as it is, a glass both half-empty and half-full' is an honest one. Nonetheless, the number of contributors has the unwanted result of making the story of Irish seem more complicated than it need be. Given too that the editors have aimed the publication at 'a broad public', fewer contributors writing more essays might have helped give the material a more sustained conversational tone. To my mind, there seem to be four main questions that a book like this should answer. First there is the philosophical one: why Irish? Why bother learning the language at all; what 'good' does it serve? Second there is the question of 'how' Irish? How does the language sector work? How is the language funded? Who gets the money? How do they spend it? Third there is the issue of the Gaeltacht. What is its role and its future? Finally, there is the question of 'why' and 'how' together. What results are there from the money spent on the desire to learn?

There is nothing very original about any of these questions and they are addressed on a regular basis in Irish language circles. Indeed, the 'Why Irish?' question was the title of a discussion document produced by the now defunct Bord na Gaeilge in 1989, Why Irish? Language and Identity in Ireland Today. The authors wrote:

More importantly, we would argue that it is far too premature to consign the Irish language to oblivion. The trends which have encouraged its marginalisation in recent years are not irreversible. Indeed, a number of movements already exist in Irish society which could, if they were pulled together, start to reverse these trends: the naíonra or pre-school movement, the all-Irish schools and the success of summer colleges; the growth of a commitment to Irish within some professional societies; developments in art, music, literature and dance; environmental and community movements which are integrating the language into their goals. The linguistic situation is there to be created, if we can convince ourselves that its creation is worthwhile.

Almost twenty years later, the 'linguistic situation' is still being created. The educational movements to which the authors referred are still there. Even better, there is a bilingual television service, TG4, an Official Languages Act, and Irish is an official and working language of the European Union. Despite that, the need to convince is as great as ever.

Many Gaeltacht areas are in decline, that is to say the numbers of Irish speakers using the language is dropping and the quality of the Irish they speak is evolving or fraying (depending on whether you look forward or back) into something other than it is now or was in recent times. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the State who know Irish but don't have the opportunity to speak it. That those people continue to mark their support for the language in the census, for example, is no small act of fidelity. Then again there are hundreds of thousands of people who despite their schooling in the State have nothing to do with the language and bear it ill will, if letters to the editor or newspaper opinion pieces are any accurate indication of the public mood. (And they are not always, it must be said.) Still, those who do rouse themselves to fury and disdain the language usually insist that it is of no relevance to them and write that they resent its very existence.

Yet the paradox for the Irish language is that this could be termed its Golden Age. Never have language organisations had so much money; never has the language enjoyed such legislative protection or indeed such powerful political patronage. It is only a matter of months since an Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil, Brian Cowen, and the leader of Fine Gael, Enda Kenny, spoke politics ' actually spoke as opposed to reading a pre-prepared statement ' in Irish with each other in the Dáil. There are Irish language entrepreneurs, Internet magazines, old-fashioned printed news publications and magazines, so much prose and poetry that you could not shake a stick at it, there is a television station, a national radio station and a couple of local ones, a professional caste of journalists and university lecturers that would warm the cockles of Aodh Mac Aingil’s croí, there is a Gaeltacht development authority and a cross-Border body and cultural centres and then there’s the money. Did I mention the money? Bags and bags of money. It's not so much
béal bocht as big bucks.

Time then for a new appraisal of the Irish language. High time, and the fact that A New View of the Irish Language is in English but addresses the Irish-language issue is welcome. There is a certainly a domestic and international audience for this material and the broad range of topics touched on - poetry and prose, issues on legislation, scholarship, teaching and learning and the media, for example - offers a useful primer. For someone with no or little knowledge of the language, it would be a fine enough start. However, the difficulty with individual essays is that the tone is not the same throughout and what is offered ' individual experts with opinions ' does not necessarily end up giving an insightful overview of the subject. As one contributor notes, the essay form has its limitations. Perhaps it is inevitable that not every essay carries the reader’s attention. After all, the essay ' like the interview ' is essentially a conversation between writer and reader and if you meet twenty people in one go the chances are that you will not be riveted by everything they have to say.

Iarfhlaith Watson's essay, 'The Irish Language and Identity', is the closest thing in the book to a focus on the 'why' question. He writes:

The Irish language continues to be regarded as an important aspect of Irish national identity. To the majority of people in Ireland the Irish language is primarily of symbolic importance ' It seems that the majority of people in Ireland believe that promoting the Irish language is important to the country and to them personally, but a lower percentage believe that actually speaking Irish is important to being Irish. Overall, the majority of Irish people appear to regard the Irish language to be of symbolic importance for Irish national identity and a very large minority regard the actual speaking of Irish as important.

He goes on to argue that:

Efforts to revive the Irish language reflect wider ideological processes. Although there have been ideological shifts, and identity has changed (because it is always under construction), national identity has remained at the heart of justifications for reviving the Irish language. People learn Irish and support its promotion because of this sense of identity. Moreover, the Irish language is supported by the state to a degree to which other minority languages are not. In general the public supports (or at least tolerates) this level of commitment because of the perceived connection between the Irish language and Irishness. Identification with the nation, although not as 'hot' as it once was in Ireland, remains. The Irish language remains related to that identification.

Watson's suggestion that Irish is being 'revived' is problematic. The language has never been dead and the preferred term for many in the language sector is 'maintenance', a process of underpinning what already exists and encouraging new initiatives. Of course, it could be added that the reason the majority does not actually believe that speaking Irish is important is because they simply do not get the opportunity and that the state support which Watson mentions for Irish as a 'minority language' is actually support for what the Constitution terms 'the first official language'.

Perhaps the reason why Irish and national identity seem so hard to define is because there are, in essence, two views of the Irish language in competition. Douglas Hyde and Patrick Pearse had visions for the language that were, in some regard, complementary and in other ways totally different. Those opposing elements have never been entirely reconciled. For Hyde, the language project was an intellectual one which aimed to maintain a native and distinctive part of Irish culture against a world language. Pearse did not entirely disagree with that but his project was also a revolutionary one; he wanted to reinstate Irish as the language of a Republic. Not surprisingly, both views are accommodated in the history of the language’s development in Ireland (by which I mean the entire thirty-two counties).

One of the difficulties that the contemporary language movement has had in persuading people to use the language is that the middle class ' a vague term, I accept ' are for the most part not taken with either intellectual or revolutionary projects. Language organisations that pitch the language to this audience as part of Ireland’s valuable cultural heritage are on a hiding to nothing. They cannot convince enough of this bloated, self-satisfied class (who hardly know holiday French or Spanish) that the rich, metaphysical rewards of speaking Irish are worth the effort. The little Englander attitude towards languages ' that they are all redundant in the face of English spoken loudly ' 'Another coffee, per favor!' ' is all too common. There is little mileage to be gained from extolling the beauty of language as language when the ultimate badge of identity is the physical commodity ' the car, the second home, the designer clothes.

Similarly, political parties who attempt - and not always with any great conviction - to tick the language box in their electoral strategies are wary of waving the flag too much in case it frightens off certain voters. The idea of preserving Irish as a revolutionary undertaking is not one that goes down well with many affluent voters or indeed some affluent commentators. Only the Provos have tried to push language as revolution. They have been rebuffed in the Republic (and not just on language grounds obviously) and they have probably done more harm than good in Northern Ireland, where they have poisoned the ground water with their rhetoric - and also with the blood of many dead.

So 'why Irish?' remains the question that cannot be answered - or at least not answered to the satisfaction of enough people often enough. Then again, perhaps the language lobby has lost the run of itself in its attempts to justify Irish. Perhaps the failure to place ' and keep ' the Gaeltacht at the centre of national cultural is finally bearing its own poisonous fruit. Perhaps the easiest way of answering the 'why Irish?' question is to point to the Gaeltacht and its distinctive and unique culture - which amazingly still survives, fractured but functional.

The relationship between Gaeltacht and non-Gaeltacht areas has shifted. Slowly but surely the importance of the Gaeltacht has been downplayed - even by some Irish speakers. The Gaeltacht has become simply another component of the language sector. The Irish that people learn in, say, Belfast is seen to be as legitimate as the Irish of Gaoth Dobhair, so much so in fact that some would argue ' and I have heard it ' that there is no need to leave West Belfast to learn Irish. That disregard for the Gaeltacht is shocking; it is a stupidity that is hard to credit, but one that exists and one that is not so difficult to understand. It is language as symbol rather than language as medium, that is to say you learn enough Irish to navigate the political issues of the day but never learn enough to realise just how little you know. That, of course, is frightening. There are few learners of Irish - and I include myself - who do not, every once and while, wonder just how firm a grip they have on the language they use. Only the vain and the ignorant have the luxury of ignoring that question.

The language question has become so difficult because it has become so confused and it has become confused because there seem to be so many questions. Perhaps 'why Irish?' can be best and most comprehensively answered with the simple answer 'Because there is a Gaeltacht.' Why provide services in Irish? Because there is a Gaeltacht. Why educate through Irish? Because there is a Gaeltacht. Why write in Irish? Because there is a Gaeltacht. (This is not to say that the Irish speaker who lives in the east or midlands of Ireland is less an Irish speaker than the one raised in the Gaeltacht.) But beside the Gaeltacht all else is secondary - not worthless, mind, not without merit, not unimportant - simply secondary. It is the Gaeltacht, above all else, that gives the language its authority as a national undertaking and the destruction of that Gaeltacht will herald the final and ultimate destruction of that authority. (Should the reviewer draw any conclusion from the fact that the essay on the Gaeltacht is ninth in this collection? It seems strange that a book aimed at the general public would have this topic so far back. After all, many people’s experience of real spoken Irish ' perhaps their only one ' is a youthful stay at a Gaeltacht summer college.)

As already noted, Ó Cearnaigh and Nic Pháidín have written that the Gaeltacht remains an 'inspiration' and that 'preserving and developing a living west is an urgent necessity for maintaining Irish-speaking communities in the heartland'. But if that inspiration is the only option what happens if the Gaeltacht dies? Seosamh Mac Donncha and Conchúr Ó Giollagáin write in 'The Gaeltacht Today' that:

Recent research serves to highlight what is readily evident to Gaeltacht inhabitants: the Gaeltacht as a linguistic entity is in crisis and struggling with the pressures of an advanced stage of language shift. The approach date has served to implicate our communal and educational institutions in this process of language shift rather providing proactive support to resist the pressures of this sociolinguistic endgame. As the use of English becomes more embedded in the social networks of the young, the clear challenge of educational and communal institutions in the Gaeltacht is to empower young speakers of Irish to counteract the pressures of the majority language in a manner that fosters the socialization of Irish in the social networks of the young living in the Gaeltacht. The obvious outcome of an inadequate response to this stark challenge is the completion of the language shift from Irish to English in the remaining Gaeltacht districts where the use of Irish still predominates as the communal language.

That question of language shift from Irish to English would seem to be the most important one at the moment. It could be argued that as the language sector has developed it has become so complicated that it has forgotten its own Gaeltacht roots. This is not an argument to abandon all Irish-language activity in non-Gaeltacht areas. That would simply be silly. Not every Irish speaker (this writer included) wants to live in the Gaeltacht. There has to be a balance in catering for Irish speakers outside the Gaeltacht and native speakers within it. But it would seem to me that the balance has shifted too much, with many regarding the Gaeltacht as just another part of the equation. If we argue, however, that it is the Gaeltacht that gives the entire language movement its moral right to promote the language on a national scale then if that Gaeltacht disappears, are not Irish speakers - despite their funding, their numbers and their legal protections - little more than the enthusiasts for Manx or Cornish, people who seek to revive a language that has no native speakers?

One wonders indeed if non-native speakers of Irish appreciate often enough just what a wonderful phenomenon the native speaker is? Is there a sufficient understanding that even the most parlous, holed, fractured breac-Ghaeltacht contains more native Irish than a dozen night classes for learners. This is not to deride the learners and it is not to talk up areas many of which may be fatally wounded. It is a simple expression of wonder that so many areas have managed to keep the linguistic faith, that despite emigration, unemployment, holiday homes and an indifferent officialdom there are still people who have clung to the language and who, given the right encouragement and support, might yet pass it on to another generation. Should it not be a matter of national pride that they have held on to so much despite the challenges they faced. Let me put it another way: were these people, say, cheese-makers rather than Irish speakers, would we not enthuse about their fidelity to old ways and marvel at the knowledge they had kept alive in spite of dungeon, famine and sword?

The reasons for the marginalisation of the Gaeltacht in the story of Irish vary from place to place. In the North, they often have their roots in politics, where many urban Irish speakers simply do not feel the need to go the Gaeltacht. There can be an aggressive chauvinism within cities towards the country at the best of times. It is not surprising that that might also find expression in language circles and that chauvinism can also be exaggerated by local politics. Tight-knit city communities can offer the fluent Irish speaker a small pond in which to swim. That the Irish they speak and the topics they address in that Irish will not necessarily chime with the syntax and subject of Gaeltacht Irish does not bother them: city Irish is as good as country Irish, they argue, though in fact, the city dialect is often a poorer version of the country one, with all the implications that has for the quality of speech.

[Discussion of the Údarás na Gaeltachta, Foras na Gaeilge, post-GFA party shuffling in the North, difficulties of a national organization for a disparate localized identity throughout much of the island, and the uneasiness in academia regarding lecturing "as Gaeilge" follow.]

That is one reason why a concluding chapter would have been welcome. Another would be to provide a manifesto for the weary reader. With the best will in the world, reading twenty essays will leave even the most committed general reader tired. That there is much of interest in many of the essays is a given. However, there is no headline, no one moment to focus the reader and say: 'Look, this is what we believe. This is our clarion call.' The book would have benefited from a reflection on what its contributors have said, not as a corrective to them but simply to bring their various thoughts and arguments together and to offer the reader a coherent overview.

With that in mind, I will leave the last word and the focal scoir to Suzanne Romaine, whose contribution introduced this review:

While it is critically important to confront openly and realistically the actual extent of the Irish-speaking communities at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Irish would certainly be a lot worse off without all the work on its behalf. Most threatened languages will not achieve anything like the relative success of Irish. A sign that once hung in Albert Einstein's office declared that 'not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted'. The active Irish-language scene probably comprises only 5 to 10 per cent of the island's population, and around one in three people (c 1.8 million) on the island can understand Irish to some extent. This means that the world in Irish will not be lost and the world can indeed still be lived in Irish by those who choose to learn it and use it. That is hardly failure.

Dublin Review of Books - Pól Ó Muiri review

Photo: Zazzle.com. They also sell "Sarah Palin in 2012," but their Election Day Special expires tomorrow, for some reason.

Tagging: Six of You Are It!

"Bo" over at erudite blogs "Cantos of Mvtabilitie" and "Expvlsion of the Blatant Beast" tagged me. It's a version of a cyber-chain letter, I guess! These are the rules, I think.

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Here are my responses, I think.

1. The tagger is "Bo."
2. The rules are above.

3. Six Random Things at random:
a) I engage in spontaneous divination.
b) I forget the order of alphabetical letters between "p" & "t."
c) I used to often dream I could walk on air.
d) I tire of television quickly.
e) I find my fingernails grow rapidly.
f) I have sensory integration disorder and so I spit out greens.

4. Taggers: you are CasaMurphy, HarperBerryHollow, Ecopunk, CBH, CBJ, Loon.
5. I have let them know this on their blogs.
6. I have let "Bo" know that this entry's up.

Cartoon: Playing Tag

Sneaking Truth from Power?

Rashid Khalidi spoke in a 2003 video given the Los Angeles Times in confidence. On it, evidently, Obama praises his former colleague at the U. of Chicago, a professor and "former PLO operative." Khalidi at his farewell celebration prepared to start at Columbia. Reportedly fellow faculty Bernadette Dohrn and William Ayers, once leaders from the Weather Underground, attended. According to the most deeply archived and linked meta-entry I can locate at Gateway Pundit, Peter Wallsten at the Times had written about the tape back in April, dismisses any brouhaha over its contents now, and considers the matter over. Talk about noblesse oblige.

Given the suppression of the tape, as with anybody else except Wallsten I've found it difficult to track what Khalidi declared at his testimonial dinner. Apparently, according to Wallsten's April 10, 2008, "Allies of Palestinians See a Friend in Barack Obama," Obama gave more anodyne comments about how the Khalidis had broadened his own outlook. Ayers-Dohrn and the Khalidis apparently go back a long way; the Khalidis additionally, according to Rachel Neuwirth at Campus Watch babysat the Obama children. (Neuwirth documents the ties between Khalidi and anti-Israel factions in depth.) Others attending the dinner bashed Israel and vowed to uphold the intifada, as you'd expect. The fact that Khalid takes over the Middle Eastern Studies program at Columbia aligns too with his polemical predecessor, Edward Said.

While at UCLA years ago, I heard Said speak at an English Department gathering. I am no hardcore Zionist. I regard Israeli rule of their occupied territories often as harsh necessity mixed with opportunistic manipulation. When the shrouded enemy blends in undercover among three million civilians, as the British found in Ireland, how justice and mercy can kiss proves difficult. Hard to sing Kumbayah and quote Scripture, at least particular verses recommending lovingkindness rather than extermination. No, I cannot lure lions to lie down with lambs, either. I have studied books from the Israeli right to left and in its middle-- from Meir Kahane & Thomas Friedman, Yossi Klein Halevi & Amos Oz, Hillel Halkin & David Grossman-- over the years in trying to understand this intricate situation.

Part of me as an anti-imperialist resents any takeover by an empire of a small nation; part of me as a minority cubed (!) acknowledges that all of our cultural legacies bring patterns of our own ancestral takeovers and inevitable pains that any of our histories attest to, of our own probable linguistic, religious, and political subjugation of others in the name of God, real estate, and power. Around the time Said came to campus, I would have been learning about Judaism. I cannot remember after so long what impelled me to get up and walk out, but I did in protest-- perhaps the only time I left in the middle of a public forum.

Said, as his posthumous biographers found, was not above his own rewriting his tale, as if he grew up practically in a refugee camp rather than Cairo luxury. Obama's own reworking of his narrative has and will earn attention by those far more informed than me. Ayers and Dohrn, and Obama's own duplicity in his lack of frankness about what he knew and did not know, has been treated smartly by blogger Coyote-BlueJay under "Stand Up Guy".

In a similar way, the complicity of the media with the pro-Obama contigent sounds to me like bias. Perhaps a counter twist to the claims that the press and politicians remain beholden to Zion, but two wrongs...etc. More about this when I ask my wife about the book she's making her way through by conservative author, from Detroit but for decades living in Jerusalem, Zev Chafets, in his 2005 investigation into the ties between the Christian Right and Orthodox Jews, "A Match Made in Heaven."

My wife, who supports Obama's stance on concessions to Palestine, and the Times regarding their protection of this video, nonetheless has wondered in "Hope Hurt Help" about Ayers and why Obama's campaign has been so chary to tell that truth. Still, she insists that the Rev. Wright association over two decades weighs in much more against Obama's innocence.

Neuwirth and Coyote, however, ask tough questions about a man's relationships with elements that appear to further hatred in the Middle East, anti-Semitism, and relentless assaults on Israel. Why can't Obama, with the most liberal voting record in the Senate, admit his sympathies? If he's so confident of his leftist agenda, his solidarity with Palestinian guerrillas and unrepentant Weathermen, why wait until the Jewish vote's cast? This I'd find more respectable than his calculated control of every single utterance he makes-- at least on video we're allowed to view.

I find myself in disagreement with many Israeli policies, but I have often been disappointed by the lack of consistent investigation by the media into the slant that pro-Arab and Palestinian factions have managed to frame around events there. You look long in the European press to find sympathetic accounts of Israelis, although given the power of certain voting blocs and the symbolism that Sarah Silverman exploits in her viral YouTube schlep for Obama, it's far less vitriolic within the U.S. This may be a mixed blessing. Still, you easily find soundbites on NPR or CNN calculated to blame the Jews for having to build the walls, shoot back at snipers, and search those grandmothers who may hide grenade launchers in baby strollers at borders. Yes, I am aware of sins on both sides, but I also encounter enduring prejudice against valuable and valid efforts to promote Judaism positively.

For example, on the Irish Studies discussion list on-line about a year and a half ago, I posted an innocent entry asking readers to assist, if they so cared to, in restoring the humble Irish Jewish Museum in Dublin. Given its Joycean and historical importance, I did not see such a request-- timed with the inevitable press that around March 17th connects the remnants of Irish Jewry with their commemoration-- as controversial. One of the leaders of the Marxist Official IRA, an intellectual whose own autobiography I reviewed with care and at great length, and who's now a Quaker-ish peace advocate, lashed out. He responded to the list with an attack on Israel's Zionist terror, and overwhelmed my attempt to remind Irish Studies scholars of what I figured were legitimate opportunities for safeguarding and perpetuating an dignified legacy of facing exile, fighting oppression, overcoming prejudice, and continuing culture.

Flashpoints also can fool us, no matter how informed we suppose ourselves, when interpreting symbols of one country's fears and another nation's rage. You probably recall the photo of Mohammed Al-Irsa's father purportedly sheltering his son. You may not know that the IDF apologized immediately for the boy's death. This was during the 2000 intifada. The suspicious circumstances that later journalists uncovered about the image publicized even on postage stamps in the Islamic world does display the world's eagerness to think badly first not of those who seek to demolish Israel, but those who defend it. What seems to have happened was that the Palestinians shot the twelve-year-old, while the IDF took the rap. This follow-up gained little attention. Nothing can replace a child's loss, of course. Yet, the blame should not be shouldered all by those attempting to quell a riot by guerrilla fighters in the streets who attacked the IDF stronghold on all sides, with innocents caught in the crossfire.

It's easy, as my students who are Iraq or Afghan veterans caution me, to pass judgment when you're safe behind a keyboard. These men do the dirty work that none of us, not under siege, not surrounded by millions of enemies, truly cannot fathom. It's tempting for us to play peaceniks, safeguarded by soldiers and oceans. As those who have visited Israel tell me, you cannot comprehend the place until you go there, and I betray therefore a marked degree of ignorance as I peck away.

Protecting this Khalidi tape from distribution may be defensible, as my wife argues, who professionally knows about the limits of releasing "intellectual property." My guests at dinner last night, Obama supporters, also agreed that the Los Angeles Times acted righteously. Yet, the withholding of a possibly inflammatory video days before Floridian Jews and swing voters still uncomfortable with the company that one belated Christian with the middle name Hussein keeps with the anti-Israeli majority on the left does smack, to me, of canny collusion. Although I guess it disproves at last that canard that Zionists dominate all of our media.

The prattle at Khalidi's shindig reminds me of widespread neglect of more measured alternatives from the educated Left. Perhaps, to give him the benefit of my doubt, Obama did toast Khalidi but with tact and diplomacy. I'm told by Obama's defenders of his tolerance. This video may attest to his even-handedness. I'd still like to be trusted to watch the tape myself that my hometown paper hides. By such ways our freedom to know gets whittled away by censorship in the name of protecting property. I know sources must be sheltered, but why has the transcribed content of the video been, if you scan the responses at Gateway Pundit, silenced?

Thus the need for dissemination of this video rebounds. We deserve to know. If Obama's showing his capacity to fight hatred with charity, then let's find out for ourselves. If he's representative of a new era of dialogue with our opponents, let's hear his prescience from five years ago. We rarely hear of principled thinkers who don't repeat what anyone in the London or New York Review of Books rattles off against the Zionist menace and Yankee evil. Yet, who do not fall into knee-jerk genuflection to fundamentalist distortions, whether rooted in gospel, Torah, or Qur'an.

The resident intellectual at the Times, Tim Rutten, reviewed Bernard-Henri Levy's "Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism" on October 8, 2008. I must quote Rutten on BHL at length, as it's bracing material. Here's relevant, if heady, excerpts:

It's an apologia based first on shared images, ideals and experience -- an aesthetic of loyalty, if you will -- and then on a series of critiques of the left's shortcomings, followed by concrete suggestions for their remedy. (The subtitle is borrowed from his initial anti-Marxist manifesto -- "Barbarism With a Human Face" -- which was itself a gloss of the Prague Spring's motto: "Socialism With a Human Face.")

American readers likely will find two of these chapters/lectures of particular interest. One has to do with the pervasiveness, persistence and perniciousness of anti-Americanism as an ideology. You can get a flavor of how the author deals with that by the fact that he terms "anti-Americanism" the "socialism of imbeciles." (There's really no put-down like a French put-down.) Levy's discussion of contemporary anti-Semitism is sophisticated, detailed and convincing. In his analysis, a new left-wing critique centers on Israel and accuses Jews of first, monopolizing the world's compassion by insisting on remembering the Holocaust; of creating an industry, Zionism, around that memory; and of using both to establish and maintain a racist, fascist and criminal state, Israel.

Levy is particularly good on showing how this new "progressive" critique of Jewish conduct has merged with traditional prejudices against Jews in commerce and professions to create a new, socially acceptable anti-Semitism in England and continental Europe. (It's worth recalling in this context that Levy always has supported Israel as a liberal democracy rather than a "Jewish state" and has simultaneously argued for the creation of a Palestinian nation alongside, which is today's conventional diplomatic wisdom.)

Levy offers as fine a description as you're likely to find anywhere of what the conventional international left -- political and journalistic -- has adopted as its worldview: "We are in a world in which, on the one hand, we have the United States, its English poodle, its Israeli lackey -- a three-headed gorgon that commits all the sins in the world -- and, on the other side, all those who, no matter what their crimes, their ideology, their treatment of their own minorities, their internal policies, their anti-Semitism and their racism, their disdain for women and homosexuals, their lack of press freedom and of any freedom whatsoever, are challenging the former."

The author is not only a committed secularist in the best French republican tradition, but also an atheist by principle and not simply through skeptical default. Yet he links religious insight with the "tragic wisdom" he proposes as the familial left's salvation -- albeit in that inimitable flow of rhetorical quicksilver that is the BHL signature. He begins with William of Orange's famed martial dictum: "One need not hope in order to undertake, nor succeed in order to persevere."

At the Hebrew bible's heart, according to Levy, is a similar insistence on the necessity for a "laborious, tireless, efficient morality":

"And that's the beautiful and strange invention of those Polish rabbis from the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century who -- in reaction to Hasidism and its excessive reenchantment of the world . . . -- proposed . . . the theory of a God who, of course, created the world; who wanted to do so and who therefore created it, but who after having done so, his need satisfied, then 'concealed his transcendence' and 'withdrew' -- leaving his creatures the responsibility to retain or not the pieces of this universe that he left to them. If men failed to take up the task, the world would fall to pieces."

On the other hand, "if they took care to keep the world from falling apart -- then they would manage to prevent that decreation. . . .

"That is how, in any event, it seems to me that politics ought to be thought of in the democratic age."

As an Irish lad, I do shrink a bit from William of Orange as my blog entry's indirect inspiration, but in this marketplace of ideas, peel away the label and the proverb stays fresh. I also, given my ethnicity, have long resented rhetoric indulged in by many republicans and nationalists who delight in eviscerating Israel's every strategy. Some of them were urban guerrillas who borrowed from the PLO inspiration, ammunition, and Marxism. My defense not only of Israel's right to exist but Tibet's against genocide earned me in my assertions no respect from a few virtual freedom fighters. Their craven devotion to anyone who opposed the U.S.-- China, Castro, Islamicists, or Irish socialists-- trumped my earnest arguments.

On my college campus I tried to start a DSA chapter (which meant me and a punk-loving classmate and that was about it, back in the Reagan years). I champion the sort of wealth redistribution that enabled me to attend college, drive on freeways, drink potable water, breathe less smog, and to live protected by police often jerks but I guess aren't that corrupt. So, I don't deploy "socialism" as a dirty word. Better that New Deal echo than Kapital stomping on a human face forever. Ralph Nader quixotically unfurled a banner on Wall Street last month: against "Socialism Only for the Rich."

As an aside, I find it risible that the GOP condemns socialism while backing corporate bailouts. If McCain had defended his own earlier opposition to such rescues, he'd have kept my respect more. I also figure if the Democrats are going to make us pay for those same fat cats, along with deadbeats, liars, irresponsible mortgagees, and those whose bankruptcies great and small I must fund, they should admit they're democratic socialists. Under leftist Obama, deliver us a European model we can drive. On the other hand, I resent dictation by bureaucrats. Neither capitalist or communist in my views, I lack a badge. I deny that anybody can run the state better on their own given our endemic ineptitude. So, for me, the "small is beautiful" unrealistic idyll of decentralized, non-statist, agrarian and communally based structures in anarchic ecotopia's my chosen dream of my impractical republic.

Levy, on the other hand, may show us a more realistic platform by which we can come together. Our belief in capitalism as our deity and globalization as our savior's as foolhardy as our idolatry of Obama or our hero-worship of McCain. Perhaps we contrary folks may revive a respectable forum for critiques both of Israel and the Arab world, without special pleading. A way in which we can resist interventionist America, consumerist Europe, or what Oriana Fallaci called Eurabia when these hegemonies threaten to crush the local, the communal, the traditional in their allegiance to a dominant market's doctrine obliterating nuance, dissent, or doubt.

Rutten's review, in fact, glances at many secularists who have sought to respect religious commentators. More than ever, after our current administration, I urge that we begin to listen to one another's confessions. Stop defining ourselves by labels. Those with whom I found closest allegiance in Ireland managed to do this after decades of self-scrutiny. "The Blanket" documents many of their journeys over the past eight years of transformation. Activists learned that their own party, their own tribe, their assigned denomination, did not answer all of their questions. And, in their freedom to wonder more than to answer all of their queries, they found liberation towards a skeptical, pliable, multivalent truth that leaves room for at least seven types of ambiguity.

Levy as filtered by Rutten, in this broadminded mode, mentions many philosophers who prepared for those Irish colleagues to emerge into political maturity today. Perhaps this post will find its path towards the same goal I share. Rutten's article lists those that I'd expect except-- perhaps for space-- it leaves out Christopher Lasch, whose "True and Only Heaven" back in 1991 I tried to muddle through. I dimly recall similar arguments to those made in this entry back in there. Rutten goes on:

In Levy's view, the "choice, after all, is clear": "the melancholy Left versus the lyrical Left." The former can move forward committed -- or, to borrow the French formulation, "engaged" -- to democracy, human rights and solidarity. The latter can drift from one self-delusion, the old messianism (the construction of new men and women), to a new demonology -- the Anglo-American alliance and Israel. Meanwhile, a force that would devour both if it were able -- Islamo-fascism -- lurks in the outer darkness, the new totalitarian threat.

This brings us back full if elliptical circle to what we'll face November 5th. Obama in charge, what happens to Israeli dependence on our subsidies, our fight against Islamic hatred, and the difficult separation of justified criticism of Zionist zealots apart from groupthink spewed by anti-Jewish propagandists? With the mainstream media's protection of Obama and his Democrat majority from investigation of Palestinian influence, this video's cover-up by the Times does not bode well for an ideological or practical version of "climate change."

Photo: Al Jazeera.net: "Belfast's Psychological Barriers." November 26, 2007. Danny Devenny's mural on the Falls Road. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find an image I could copy of this triptych from the "International Wall" near Divis Street. Kieran Nugent, "the first blanketman," the PLO flag, and "Palestine" with its painted caption: "Palestine..The largest concentration camp in the world!!! 3.3 million people tortured, denied their... freedom!"

A few years ago, I gave a paper about the shift in Irish republicanism from its early ties to Zionists and anti-British solidarity with its alignment in post-colonial struggle with the PLO; contrasting with this was the Loyalist appropriation of the Star of David, and I traced this back into British Israelite mythmaking. A presentation so long I never finished in the twenty minutes, due to the mass of information I fought to digest!

"Intellectuals Are the Shoeshine Boys of the Ruling Elite."

It's not a record review. But, it captures my mood after recycling this morning's newsprint. (A newspaper colluding to withhold a video that could discredit Obama with Jewish voters-- more about this in my next entry tomorrow.) Doonesbury's creator already has a celebratory cartoon for Wednesday. He backs his horse, or donkey, by citing but a 3.7% chance of the pachyderm's stomp. Such triumph will be echoed by those eager to see total control of Congress and the White House. Whether Obama's honeymoon will last more than a month, however, remains doubtful already, as even the L.A. Weekly warns "It's Going to Take a Whole Lot More Than a Democratic Majority to Save Us.". I am adjusting despite my grouchy drift to prepare for a new direction, away from the Bush dead-ends, if nothing else. For once, I agree with Marc Cooper's conclusion:

Four years from now, the less significant it is to be identified as a Republican or a Democrat, the more significant a leader Obama will be. That is my hope.

Shut out of the Fourth Estate's prime storefronts, honest people that you'll likely not find quoted in the likes of the Weekly abound on the Net with a lot of divided thoughts about the electoral choices we've been provided. They might not gain the attention garnered what half-hour informercials or banner ads can purchase for your anointed candidate, wealthy through connections marital or political. Yet, such overheard, if under-reported, voices represent to me what this defiant, half-baked, half-cocked plucky medium can offer us as a lesson in our own participatory democracy. Such as it staggers along, 232 years old.

I'm not a hero-worshiper by nature; this may be a problem related to my endemic pessimism! When my Reagan Democrat dad in the nursing home at 92 tells me that he's not happy with either candidate, you can tell choices, such as they've been narrowed, turn complicated. We all certainly yearn for change.

I have been mulling matters with friends who are very informed-- journalists, union organizers, grassroots activists, former Marxists-- who've revealed their unease about the American situation ahead. More than I contend that the mainstream media-- at least what I read in my five regulars, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, New York Times, Los Angeles Times-- have "allowed" themselves to cover fairly and sincerely. I sense many of the genuine Joe Plumbers and Rosie Riveters (if any remain in still-open factories) get their fears and confusions and hopes manipulated and belittled when we read about them in the press. This relates to my critique of Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?" in my "What's the Matter with Sarah?" a few days ago, a blog sermon that kept expanding despite my editing.

Unreasonably or rationally, I feel the weight of an oligarchy that runs roughshod over the interests of its constituencies, with cynicism masked as idealism. Alexander Theroux's rather inchaote, often insightful novel (reviewed by me at the start of September, when the race seemed much closer, on Amazon US & here) "Laura Warholic, or the Sexual Intellectual," has a long chapter attacking eloquently the presumption that the hoi polloi, plebes, proles, or plumbers can be trusted with self-governing themselves. Why? They rely on the elite, the masters of puppets. Seeing the manipulations of myself and my fellow voters by a billion dollars spent spinning millions of us towards their own direction, I despair at our own complicity.

I wonder now and then who pushes our buttons, even as we're taught we punch our own voting levers. As my patient readers know, my own political and ideological reactions roam widely and unclassifiably. While with Irish stubbornness, I do not recant my positions (nor may I account for their lack of consistency, Emersonian hobgoblin of foolish minds), I am trying to be fair to all sides in what I express on my blogs.

Finding recently, long after my own interests had jelled, my family ties to John J. Finan, my great-grandfather in the Thames found "drowned in mysterious circumstances" as a Co. Roscommon Land League agitator on a visit to London in 1898, and my great-uncle Jack F. (note too those common first names repeating down to now!) as a Dáil and Seanad member of the Western farmer's rights party Clann na Talmhan in the 1940s-50s with its own tangled populist-radical-conservative ideology, from the little I can find on it, confirms those studies, perhaps, now about in America that show how we're partially wired to vote by genetics and not reason! But only partially.

Both parties appear to have dug deep trenches to lob grenades at each other, while more and more people that refuse to take sides appear in the no (wo)man's land of the DMZ, wondering where to duck for cover. I graze all over the free range. This all sinks in my belly. Making me a cranky populist who distrusts everybody yet yearns idealistically for true change-- that even a skeptic can believe in!

As Irish critic Desmond Fennell opened his prescient 1999 study, "The Postwestern Condition: Between Chaos and Civilisation":

"But no one can dispute that it is high time that we stopped viewing the West today in terms of the circumstances of sixty years ago and the seating arrangements of the French Legislative Assembly of 1791." [8]

So, I gather below a half-dozen contrary, or uncategorizable, sites. Lots of them have a wicked sense of humor I too inherit. As comedians of all shades complain, that's the trouble with Barack: you can't ridicule him-- at least on the air. Well, you can on the Net. These sites tend to tilt farther right than me, but I do admire their sass and spunk. Not for the po-faced PC NPR subscriber. This skewed, funhouse, snarky perspective I was initially directed towards by a savvy, equally unpredictable, inconsistently pinned-down net-prowler.

When you learn about gay Chicago supporters of Hillary now on "hillbuzz" backing McCain; feminists arguing for a fairer consideration of Sarah Palin by the press; anti-Prop 9 libertarians; ex-pats chronicling this country's crowd control by the fawning media; snide scoundrels speaking satirically towards button-down or tie-dyed neighbors-- well, it's encouraging, whatever your reaction to such strange bedfellows, to listen in. In that dorm-room, all-nighter rhetorical register. For better and worse, you don't hear enough banter elsewhere.

We need to lighten up and take it seriously too. I'm sure many of the blogster pundits below will be busier than if McCain wins, anyway, documenting morning again in America. Dawn will come November 5th and we will all move on, not to Canada. As my wife's blog entry yesterday imagines, in another term or so, may we finally have cleared the fences of blue-red states, donkeys-elephants, or left-right, secular-religious divides? When we listen to each other with compassion, preparation, and sophistication, we may have a chance to repair the damage of the past forty years. And to post a video of the president's inaugural parade in his imperial new clothes-- garnished with tasteless captions and witty barbs.

Most of us, if we're worthy of our education and our franchise now, should have transcended such confined demographics that keep us penned and cowed as our leaders march by, if we have any capacity for individual thought remaining. If we refuse to parrot what spin doctors dictate. If we turn away from CNN graphs charting fourteen undecided voters in Ohio's minute-by-minute reactions to presidential debates. Maybe that's what we can rule on as a majority no longer silent: to refuse pollsters and revolt against PACs. My audacity of hope.

RealClearPolitics portal
Hillbuzz blog
Liberal Rapture blog
Bookworm Room blog
Irish Eagle blog
Coyote-BlueJay blog

Title: I found this deathless slogan on the treadmill, reading the newest New Yorker, its cover with the spooks running scared from a pair in McCain and Palin masks. In it, I found a capsule review of Wisconsin art-punks Killdozer. This titles their 1984 Touch & Go début, from that Progressivist bastion. But, I paste their "When the Levee Breaks" instead, for it had a better picture. Symbolic, I fancy. Great blog where I verified the release date. Ideal if you're musically quirky; if you're reading this, I know you belong: Silence in Architecture