John Moriarty: Slí an Fhírinne

I found out today that John Moriarty died this past June 1st, stricken by three types of cancer at the age of 69, in his beloved native Kerry. He departed on "na slí na fhírinne," the way of truth. A fitting metaphor for the journey into the next life. While the "johnmoriarty.net" site appears defunct, this blog, by a Dublin friend of his, Gary, chronicles Moriarty's legacy and his last days: http://blog.myspace.com/faustgar

See the Guardian obituary.http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2158418,00.html

Tony Bailie's "The Mangerton Shaman" blurbs "Nostos" on its 2001 publication and provides a bit of context. http://www.killarney.ie/moriarty.htm

Back to me. I wrote a year and a half ago this brief review (for Amazon Canada as the title was not then listed on the US site; I added it here since) of the first part of his autobiography, his formidable "Nostos." Admiring those authors with the prescience or timing to align their passing with their final writing--impressively a perfectly if lamentably timed autobiographical sequel-- I urge you to seek out the exertions of this philosopher-poet-gadfly.

For all of their rather off-putting incantatory style his publications demand attention. Bailie's article observes how Moriarty'd repeat three times key points in speaking-- a stylistic tick or habitual quirk embedded in his prose. (A subtitle "Horsehead Nebula Neighing" appears too clever; I've passed up more than once a copy in used book stores-- it's from a trilogy titled "Turtle Was Gone a Long Time." Combined, two phrases with too much symbolic dissonance for my own b.s. detector, I confess.

Call me a yokel. Accused in grad school (by one prof) of being "superficially brilliant" myself in a department of grad students diagnosed (by his colleague) as "neurotic egotists," I bear witness to my own psychic trauma akin to Moriarty's recounting of dropping out of academia. (And in those halycon days of 1960s campus expansion, Moriarty had gained a university post with only an M.A. It was in Manitoba, however...)

Nevertheless, Moriarty had the courage to walk away, drop out, tune in, and then retreat to Conamara, cultivating a garden-- if far from having the deluded peace suggested for our eponymous hero at the culmination of "Candide"-- near Roundstone. There, "Nostos" eases off. Moriarty's the prophet in the Irish (former/Fomarian/Fianna) wilderness. He later returned to his childhood Kerry. Wild hair, off-kilter eyes, and a striking visual presence. He concocts obsessive ruminations that in Celtic fashion spiral again and again recursively around mythic imagery and psychogeographical domains. I christen him as a trans-Catholic Irish sage, rare in this age, for his mythopoeic ideas and the force of his insistence that we must turn aside from our secular path to psychic destruction. He merits our attention. I wonder what he sounded like, declaiming on Irish radio.

Before I had left for Ireland the past summer, I bought a copy of one of his newest (he wrote three books in his last year) imaginative, forceful, and disconcerting treatises, "Invoking Ireland," where he argues that his homeland risks, in its embrace of postmodern consumerism, another emptiness akin to that of those who, 150 years ago, suffered by their survival of An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger. Then, the native language and indigenous culture by most islanders were abandoned; now, the remains of what made Irish character distinctive from that of what Desmond Fennell calls our "post-Western condition" in an Irish resident's willed amnesia. Five million on the island risk a second relegation of their five thousand year (at least) inheritance to the midden or dumpster.

Meanwhile, my sons belly-laugh at "The Simpsons" downstairs, classical music plays softly in my room, and three dogs sleep at my feet. My kids want me to stop bloggin and join them watching the Dave Chappelle show. From the sublime to the ridiculous!

Should I heed Moriarty? Or, have we always had Cassandras? If so, have we, unlike the Greeks, advanced far enough near the abyss that we must heed what our ancestors ignored? Will we-- as the UN warned last week, buried on pg. 8 of the NY Times, nudge a tipping point for our planet that we cannot right? Archimedes asked for a lever to move earth; we might wish for that Greek's ingenuity despite or in spite of all our mechanical acumen. I will begin reading "Invoking Ireland," (if after TV). In time will report what I find. Here's the Canadian review of "Nostos" from April 2006:

Canadian readers will be intrigued by Moriarty's account of his six years spent at the U of Manitoba, and his renderings of native myths. He gives a vivid depiction of "civilized" life led at the fringe of the Arctic assault.

One of the longest and certainly one of the most diffused books I have read. It reminds me of other Irish eccentrics, Denis Johnston and Francis Stuart, who also kicked against the pricks of an earlier 20c Irish conservatism and Christianity to, amidst the wreckage of that century, construct their own alternative mentality. They wrote in a prose style that refused to stand still or sit down. Like Johnston and Stuart, Moriarty can not fit in to the society that invites him to remain as a lecturer, a gardener, or a lover of one woman or one place. He roams from his native North Kerry where he was born at the end of the 1930s to Greece, Dublin, Leeds, Mexico, Manitoba, across the Arizona desert, to 1960s Haight-Ashbury, back to Canada, over to Connemara, and into Kildare and Wicklow as the story, not really the autobiography that its subtitle indicates, subsides around the mid-1970s. Some of the best passages, about his mother's death, a Native American tale of Mouse, and of his father's few but telling words to his wandering son, are right near the end.

While I along with Moriarty wondered aloud, long before he did on p. 300 of this 698 pp. tome, if he'd finally wearied of the same unending questions, the pace is set by him and we must keep up, out of respect and adventure if not comfort or complacency. This book is as grueling as a long slog through the decades of one man's mind, more an inner journey than one easily linked to years and fixed by names or limited to locales. While it has these all at times, its true encounters are as enigmatic and as powerful as those of Jacob as he wrestled--with himself, with an angel, with a demon, with a god, with God--at Bethel. To his credit, Moriarty likewise refuses the easy explication. He never has the Paul on the road to Damascus encounter I feared and expected him to find by the end of his millions of words here, and thank whatever deity or lack of such revelation, for that stubborn and honest fidelity.

This book spirals, in that old Celtic sense. Moriarty constantly circles around key passages from Melville, Pascal, the Book of Job, 19 and 20c scientists, and many myths to elaborate his own fusion of a post-Christian/classically informed/globally aware spiritual and intellectual project. He wants to admire the mountain itself, he says, not the Moses or the Mohammed who came to the mountain with laws and dogma.

If you looked at a page of this book at random, the shamanistic repetition, the invocations, the interruptions and the recriminations would appear as part-sense, part-ravings. But Moriarty, despite his formidable learning, his defiant and curly mane, and his considerable storytelling skills, is no madman on the bus next to you. This book demands attention and rewards introspection. I found myself impatient, intimidated, and irritated by it as much as I was inspired, informed, and impelled to re-examine my own muddled soul's reflection.

The Hills of Beverly

Pavement from Sacto on their second full-length record opened "Unfair":

Down to Santa Rosa, Half Moon Bay
Across the grapevine to L.A.
We've got deserts, we've got trees
We've got the hills of Beverly
Let's burn the hills of Beverly!!

Featured in today's LA Times, this column by Steve Lopez deserves attention, although I see that another school shooting, now with a You Tube tie-in, will unfortunately edge such stories off of the front page, albeit the "California" local news section. Yeah, making fun of matrons-in-the-making akin to shooting fish in that proverbial barrel, but I chortled. I excerpt the best parts here, as I am uncertain if the link gets you to the whole spiel. Why was I ever born here, let alone continue to live here? I will intersperse Pavement's lyrical rant in lieu of my own as I edit Lopez's reflections on La-La land. Jack Smith this ain't.

$3 million doesn't buy what it used to
Steve Lopez

November 7, 2007

Sabrina Gordon-Gilardian grew up in the San Fernando Valley with her heart set on living in one place, and one place only.

(Two clues: Swimming pools. Movie stars).

In February, it finally happened.

"I spent $3 million to live in Beverly Hills 90210. To be the creme de la creme of society. I am supposed to be at the pinnacle here," she wrote to me.

But little did she know that paradise could be hell.

[Duly mentioned: fires, burglars. Worst of all:] when coyotes ate her miniature beagle, Lucy.

"I am miserable living here and did not get what I bargained for," Gordon-Gilardian wrote, asking if I could help.

I drove as fast as the law allows to the Gordon-Gilardian home between Coldwater and Benedict canyons, just under Mulholland Drive. Gordon-Gilardian led me out back, where a nanny watched her two young boys, one of whom drives a miniature battery-operated Cadillac Escalade.

Gordon-Gilardian, 31, pointed up a steep embankment to the place where the vicious predators came through. She and her husband were just back from a weekend at the Morongo Casino, heard a yelp and made the horrifying discovery.

"That was my angel dog," she said, telling me the pocket-size beagle cost $2,000 at Pet Love in the Beverly Center five years ago.

For $2,000, you'd think you could get a full-size beagle. Not only did they lose their dog, but now they've had to drop $5,000 more on an electric fence to keep the coyotes from making off with the kids.

I quickly assessed the situation and observed that Gordon-Gilardian's property line abuts a wilderness canyon where, it can be assumed, some wild animals might be living.

Did that possibility ever cross her mind?

Sure, she said. She'd have no problem seeing the occasional deer.

"But we didn't know coyotes lived here."

While we were talking, she got a cellphone call from her husband, who trades with China in the import-export business, according to Gordon-Gilardian. She told him I was on the case and she hoped some good would come of it.

When she called the city of Beverly Hills for help, she said, she got the run-around and was told animal control officers might or might not come.

When she asked the Fire Department about clearing the brush next to her property, she says, she was told it was her concern.

"That's city property," she said, suggesting the city should be clearing the brush and trapping and removing coyotes.

I told her as diplomatically as possible that in my experience, cities don't tend to have teams of animal trappers on the payroll. They tend to see coyotes as part of the deal.

"Not in Beverly Hills," she said. "I didn't move to Pacoima. I was told by the Realtor at Sotheby's that this was going to be my dream life."

Pavement, verse two: Walk with your credit card in the air!!
Swing your nachos like you just dont care!!
This is the slow sick sucking part of me
This is the slow sick sucking part of me
And when I'm sucking kisses diee..worrkk [? ? ]

There will be some readers, I warned Gordon-Gilardian, who might say that we humans have invaded the coyotes' habitat rather than the reverse.

"I thought about that," she said. "But that doesn't give them the right to viciously maul my dog and pull her organs out. I paid $3 million for this. I paid $3 million."

Yeah, but $3 million ain't what it used to be.

Britney lives up there, Gordon-Gilardian said, pointing. And Paris up there.

Talk about wildlife.

"Everybody lives in Beverly Hills."

Pavement, verse three: Up to the top of Shasta gulch
And to the bottom of the Tahoe lakes
Manmade deltas and concrete rivers
The South takes what the North delivers
You fill hack? ?

"Now they're robbing Sherry Lansing and all the celebrities who live in the hills of Beverly Hills," Gordon-Gilardian said. "And I hear that a gardener said there's a mountain lion out here. If there's a mountain lion here, why isn't the city trying to catch it? I should have bought something in the flats, on the other side of Neiman Marcus."

I suggested Gordon-Gilardian consider hiring a game tracker to patrol her perimeter. Angelenos hire people for practically everything else, so why not that?

Pavement, verse four: Lost in the foothills of my mind
Drinking sterno, say good night
To the last psychedelic band
From Sacto, Northern Cal.
From Sacto, Northern Cal.

Before leaving, I promised to call Beverly Hills Mayor Jimmy Delshad, give him her name and address and see if he could be of any assistance.

Delshad got back to me quickly and said he was sorry to hear about Lucy the beagle, but he had even worse news for Gordon-Gilardian.

I called to break it to her.

"You don't live in Beverly Hills," I said.

There was a brief moment of silence on the other end.

But the ZIP is 90210, Gordon-Gilardian said. And on her mail, "the city is Beverly Hills."

As Mayor Delshad explained, lots of people get their mail delivered by the Beverly Hills Post Office but don't live in the city limits.

"You live in Los Angeles," I told Gordon-Gilardian.

I figured that was enough of a blow, so I didn't tell her there's only one wild animal control officer for the entire city of L.A., and he's so swamped with calls, he seldom leaves the office.

But I told Gordon-Gilardian she could solve a lot of problems by selling the house and moving into Beverly Hills proper.

Far as I know, there have been no coyote sightings anywhere near the Neiman Marcus.

Pavement, verse five and fade:Take it, neighbor; cuz you're my neighbor;
And I mean famous; you're my neighbor;
You do me favors; cuz I'm your neighbor;
Im not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.
Traaaaaash! traaaaaash!!![Lyrical credit: capitalized and corrected from a totally, like, lower-case site ActionNex.com for nacho-swinging plastic fantastic lovers.]

Yeah, I add (me, not Lopez or Steve Malkmus), I'm her f&^^$ing neighbor. She's at the "pinnacle," leaving me far from the froth of the "creme de la creme." With my three dogs, a few miles and many class stratifications over the chaparral (what remains after fires and pavement), from Pacoima to BH to my ever-diminishing foothills, choked with concrete McMansions and clueless bimbo trash in their non-toy Escalades like former Valley girl Sabrina. (Figures she'd have a name made famous by "Bewitched.") Glad to hear my municipal tax dollars should be going to avenge her toy beaglette. Should have bought a rescue dog with some cojones like our beloved Standard Poodle (half, the other I think of as exotic Saluki and not piss-flecked Irish Setter), American Staffordshire Bull Terrier (he's not a pit bull), or Pembroke (not Cardigan) Welsh Corgi. I do feel sorry, as does the mayor of the Hills of Beverly, for Lucy. Can't say the same for her "slow sick sucking" owner.

Mark Abley's "Spoken Here" Book Review

Subtitled "Travels Among Endangered Languages," the fact that this narrative roamed among two Celtic ones, Manx and Welsh, added to its attractions for me. While six thousand languages are currently spoken, one dies every two weeks, and by the end of this century, perhaps half will be lost. With each one, as this book chronicles, a world of insight and millennia of wisdom vanish. You cannot recreate one from software and tapes anymore than, the author warns, you can bring cheetahs back to life from a vial of sperm and a National Geographic video. Or, as one informant tells him, it's like dropping a bomb on the Louvre, with each destruction of a tongue. Languages differ since they not only limit what we can say but what we must say.

For those, as with the Mohawks who learn their enormously complex, and verb-based (rather than noun-based as English and many non-American languages appear to have evolved) way of thinking and speaking, the need to recover ancestral speech is akin to a phantom limb, one which yearns to be reattached, reanimated. But, as Abley finds in all of his travels, the prognosis for successful recovery is slim. Still, as with Manx, a few fight the odds. The trouble is, it takes an act of will to resist giving in to the dominant language. A visit to the Inuit effectively dramatizes how "melting at the edges," the tendency to slip into English tugs every day at speakers of other languages. If, as in Welsh, Abley tells, one day all its speakers turned to one another and substituted "good morning" instead of "bore da," the language would be spoken of-- but only in the past tense. It would have died.

Abley explores Native Americans among the Yuchi in Oklahoma, an "isolate" not related to any other language and Mohawk in Canada. The force of governments, armies, preachers, and traders has won the world for English, it appears, everywhere he goes. With it comes conformity to the majority, and erosion of tribal or ethnic identity. His look at aboriginal Australia reveals that a creole of a half-dozen languages, done under pressure to communicate among themselves when the peoples were herded by missionaries a century ago into encampments, is arguably thriving, but smaller languages are dying. Similar to the Americas, the relentless force of global English-- itself the reluctant do-gooder or haphazardly sinister villain behind every chapter here, undermines, of course, the Celtic tongues, as does French that of the vernacular-- known by many contending names (is it a dialect? language? separate dialects?) in Provencal. In Israel and enclaves in the diaspora, on the other hand, the mama-loshen of Yiddish appears to be strongest in the male bastion among Hasidic males, contrary to its once-disparaged role as "servant girl" stealing away favors of the Lady of the house, according to intriguing century-old Zionist propaganda cited.

Chapters alternate efficiently between Abley's encounters with each of these languages and more general, if equally thoughtful, shorter overviews of language debates. Chomsky's deep structure and his assumption that we all process the world through basically the same set of hardwired codes hoarded wins the academic bout. But my sympathies and those of many minority language speakers appear to be with Sapir-Whorf: the Mohawk section provides eloquent testimony. Abley paraphrases his argument that language indeed constructs our cultural p-o-v from a summary of Brian Maracle's "Back to the Rez" that I quote in full:

"John carefully paddled his canoe through the rapids yesterday," we'd say in English. A Mohawk equivalent could take several forms, but typically it would go like this: "yesterday/ through the rapids/ his canoe/ carefully/ he paddled/ John." Brian compares the English version to a movie scene in which the camera focuses first on John, then on his boat, and finally on the scene around him. In the Mohawk version, time and landscape take precedence, followed by the boat and then by a man in the boat; personal identity comes last of all. "These two movies," Brian writes, "represent two drastically different ways of looking at life. . . The way that the English-speaking world structures its sentences explains to me, in a small way, why western society is so self-centred and narcissistic, why it is so fixated on the cult of the individual and why it is so obsessed with celebrities." (186-7)

Certainly, such a comparison makes me ponder the reach of the language we use here. Wal-Mart, Abley wonders in Oklahoma, could be a fine comparison to global English; but, a native corrects him. Unlike the mom-and-pop stores, the chain fails to stock other products. Instead, once it takes over, it features the generic brand. Same with English; convenience, ease of use, and predictability follow its hegemony. While the book could have been, for me, more detailed on Hebrew vs. Yiddish and the countercultural politics and music that heightened the mid-20c campaign for Welsh, this book moves quickly and lightly over such material. There are notes pointing readers who wish more information on academic topics.

Abley encourages us, and shows in his last chapter how we can help practically such efforts that justifiably link endangered languages with ecological threats. Perhaps we can ease the impact of global English in this age of franchises and superstores and monolingual products.

(Reviewed on Amazon today in slightly modified form.)

Yo La Tengo: Ivar Theatre, Hollywood.

Last night, Nov. 4, taking advantage of the "fall back" option-- delayed a week this year by Bush 43 I guess to allow the Halloweeners more daylight savings?-- my devoted spouse and I went to both Saturday shows of YLT. According to their site, logically http://www.yolatengo.com here's The Concept:


The Freewheeling Yo La Tengo Tour is a rare opportunity to see this ever-surprising band in a setting more intimate and interactive than any tour in their 23-year career. A little bit "Storytellers", a little bit "Unplugged", with a soupcon of their famously varied Hanukkah shows, it will feature the band playing an almost-acoustic set of songs from their entire catalog, with stories about their life as a band, and an encouraged back-and-forth with the audience. Already famous for never playing the same show twice, this fresh look at Yo La Tengo offers rare insight into one of the most important, unique, and beloved bands in American rock. Yo La Tengo's latest CD, I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, will be the springboard for these shows, though anything can and will happen from there.

Actually, Ira Kaplan claimed the band was 24 years old; I had heard of them in the mid-80s reading the magazine "Option," but their Matador early records were, in those days of vinyl and trucks to deliver music, hard to come by Out West. It wasn't until at Rasputin's in Berkeley around '89 that I finally found "President," the e.p. that made a few critics take notice of Hoboken's finest (along with the Bongos, Individuals, Schramms, and Feelies -Trypes-Yung Wu-Speed the Plough configurations-- see, I know my trivia). One of my favorite songs ever's on that e.p., now issued on CD with their second LP, "New Wave Hot Dogs." "The Story of Jazz" has a typically bedroom-geek playing his guitar shriek, a spazzy unhinged series of riffs spiralling down, and a fantastic bass run that closes the three-minute tune decisively. I wanted to shout it out last night.

That's what fans did: yell out questions, some as dumb as where the band was from, how did they meet, how did they get their name. Ira gave a different answer than the standard one crediting YLT to a couple of Mets's fielders from south of the border. He claimed that they wanted a name not in English and "we found it in a book." The evening, being acoustic if not devoid of feedback thanks to pedals and distortion, was just right for me. Many fans, like me, probably enjoyed sitting in a theatre of about 400 to see this band, perennial critical darlings who, unlike any other band of the past nearly quarter-century to emerge from the early 80s college rock American alternative (when that term mattered) scene, have gotten better with time and who never made a bad album.

The early ones played up the folksy eclecticism; Ira remarked of this time how writing original material wore on them. Clearly, with "Fakebook" following "President," their winning streak started. "May I Sing With Me," "Painful," (which I heard one New Year's Eve at midnight on the clock radio as fireworks echoed), "And Then Nothing" (a bit jazzy, however), and especially "I Can Hear the Heart" established a solid set of albums, each with excellent songs and surprisingly few that I skip. They have held up far better than, say much of their better-known, rival record collecting geeks REM in the post-Nirvana, pre-9/11 period that saw alternative rock enter the mainstream.

Later CDs have slowed. I admit "Summer Sun" is rather gloomy, and "I Am Not Afraid" is played far far more often by wife than me. (I like the two gnarly freakouts more than the pop with a jazz tinge that this famously improvisational trio increasingly explores-- blame their enthusiasm for Sun Ra Orkestra but better them than Daniel Johnston; Jonathan Richman's bad enough.) Still, James McNew's bass-- as alluded to by Ira-- made the band the musicians-- rather than merely Velvet-Dylan-Kinks fans playing their influences-- what they have been for the past, I guess, two decades: a musically adept, genuine, and intelligent ensemble.

He knew the chords, he anchored the sound in a patient, intimate, and nuanced beat, and allowed Georgia Hubley-- who did nearly all of both sets with brushes-- to roam about as her husband squawked and grimaced as if Albert Brooks found himself on stage. The highlights were covers of the Byrds' ditty "Have You Seen Her Face," The Only Ones' "The Whole of the Law," and especially a song I knew they did in concert and which, I boast, probably five people at most that night knew in the original. Asked for a campaign song, they suggested "Drug Test" (which they played later) or "Bad Politics" by The Dead C, a seriously underground NZ noise trio even more cultish than YLT. I know, as I have all their albums on CD and had labored mightily to hunt them down-- I would have liked to know (given I saw them previously supported by David Kilgour of The Clean, and a song from him or them was playing on the system as we left the second show) what other Flying Nun or Xpressway-affiliated bands they admired. I think Chris Knox or Graeme Downes would be great collaborators with YLT.

Originals were fine-- L. recognized "Stockholm Syndrome" opening the first set; I admit many of their longer, 2000-era songs escape me as to titles-- one with Playhouse or Tried So Hard (but NOT the Gene Clark song they covered on "Fakebook"--this rock self-referentialism gets tricky) went over well, as did "Sugarcube," "By the Time It Gets Dark," "We're An American Band," a fantastic "Deeper Into Movies" (Ira and James deadpanned on the whole Tinseltown mystique) and one that was or very much like the Byrds.

Fans called for "Sugarcube" (great version) and "Stockholm" in set two but were disappointed. L. said the band was peppier and the show Friday flowed better. However, I got to miss therefore (I wound up wishing I went, as L. gave away the ticket as the show did not sell out-- this largesse may pay the good vibes forward, but I'd have pocketed the $26 or used it to buy a couple of CDs I've been thriftily coveting) a few of my less preferred tracks, such as "Autumn Sweater." They did reprise the latter, improving on the tiresome studio version(s). So did "Cherry Chapstick" and they did a Dylan song I did not know (not hard, given my lack of familiarity with much of His Bobness compared to the band's obvious encyclopedic knowledge as shown in their annual radio station fundraiser "YTL Murders the Classics"--see their webpage). I could hear-- given my inability to attend electrically amped concert venues as my ears, from the first time at one, blew out--in such a tamped setting their edgy, restless, wistful tunes, extending noise and tranquility equally well.

Luckily, although a fan behind us yelled for "Nuclear War," they passed; the two sets moved along nicely, but, seeing that the first set had us in the very back row and, getting out to the exit first, we got to be #'s 5-6 in line for set two, the front row ten feet from the band allowed us to see their weariness. It seemed James had command of the music better than Ira, and the quieter Georgia often looked drawn. A fan asked them what they think about during long songs. While she rejoined with "and what do you think about?" I liked the question. They make a living at their dream come true, and their craft, intimacy, and breadth of imagination make them, as I have contended long before my wife began playing them more than I do, the best American band of the past two decades.

I kept wanting L. to ask a question: either about their cook on the road or-- I would have impishly asked James-- her theory that couples in bands who have sex (with each other) make a different kind of wonderful music together. Or emotionally fraught and raw. Ira and Georgia evidently know both realms well. It makes me curious how James handles it all-- his aplomb, after all, set the band on the course that led to their greatest music. I hope they get some rest; their eight nights of Hanukkah charity concerts will begin a month from now.

(Image: YLT's home-field advantage: 1998, Maxwell's, Hoboken NJ. Haven't changed much in nine years; they wore the same clothes the night before that they did last night!)

Browsing Glendale: "The Reading Room"

I rarely get to spend an hour in a book or record store. Remodelling drove me out. I fled yesterday and today to Rockaway Records on Glendale Blvd. dredging up CDs-- at least the ones I could sample. And due credit to the clerk in charge, Amy. Although she didn't let the other clerk let me open the shrinkwrapped promo, at least when I bought the three CDs today which I'd found last evening, she was more gracious than the other two long-timers. Both had been rude to me in the past and caused me to rank the customer service at the level of the (late, note) Aron's. This year's a record low for buying-- the costs of home improvement have added to my thrift. Abetted by a dearth of incentives. Added to Great Lake Swimmers, Shalini (still wrapped so she better be good), and The Minus 5: akin to The Grateful Dead without Ritalin, Quasi's "Hot Sh*t." Bluesy perhaps in the fashion of Hot Tuna. Any rock fan even me who never listens to that sub-genre of head-jam-white boy now gray haired (I should talk) blooz knows how the duo had picked Quasi's non-asterisked title as their original name post-Airplane.

Perhaps out of a cruel test of Layne's tastes, but given her unfortunate taking to heart of The Hold Steady, this may float her sonic boat along with The Minus 5. To be fair to her, I found the band's site and the song about the Chill Tent at the concert did tell a memorable story well. I introduced her to AllMusic.com as a reference.

Not sure about GLS-- probably too somnolent for her? One of my first memories, musically, was L. reacting to my recent purchase of Neil Young's "Legacy." I had bought the triple vinyl used, more for the Buffalo Springfield-era than "Cinnamon Girl," "Cowgirl in the Sand," or, hey hey my my, his worst ditty ever, "A Man Needs a Maid." Dour Canadians. Nearer south, at least from Portland, I have a couple of Quasi's late-90s records. I liked Sam Coombe's old band Heatmiser, if not ex-wife Janet Weiss' Sleater-Kinney. The couple joins the ranks of White Stripes as rockin' lovers post-split, alongside Sonny & Cher? Ornate keyboards and drums with studio trickery ambles with equal mimicry and minstrelsy. How the post-punk Mic City duo take to the Souls of Black Folk may cause my wife to puzzle over my carefully chosen-- well, it was only $3-- CDs. She has taken to leaving them, however, in disarray all over the car's floor; my Yo La Tengo discs look dangerously scuffed and fingered amidst the cans of diet soda and tinned mints.

Over the Victory (1918) Bridge and the sun-facing Hyperion to Glendale, I arrived at Pacific Park branch. One of those stacks split half-kids, half-adults. But some architect smartly built it in a V-shape, so the grown-ups did not face the tots. Recalling an April 9, 2007, Bruce McCall New Yorker cartoon "The Reading Room." It's of a library with no books except those a bum shuffled through marked at a dollar in a cardboard box, in front of the gleaming racks of CDs, DVDs, video displays, and endless terminals of computers and pop cult detritus. An old lady gets ejected for trying to patronize the facility in the old-fashioned way; one shelf section's B-as-in-Britney. I too roam among pop music books, but rarely find decent titles. Like sports and film, these tend to be dog-eared; often titles exist in the catalog only as "lost" or "missing" entries.

This blog does not reproduce the cartoon; nobody does on the Net. But at least it mentions it and "Niamh" (that lovely name again) provides a Sony e-book context: http://booktruck.wordpress.com/2007/04/05/fiction-see-cartoon/
See also Library Journal: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6435523.html


So, imagine my surprise to find in this Armenian neighborhood both Don Snowden and Brendan Mullen's (thin) chronicles of LA punk, and Steven Stark's "Meet the Beatles," a cultural history of the band. Others on the Dead, Stones, Kurt, and Jimi. I took only "Meet," judging my time did not need to be spent even on the bus with the oral recollections of Tomata du Plenty, Su Tissue, Alice Bag, or Geza X. The Stones hold no allure for me; "My True-Life Adventures" with the band as penned by some grad student turned journalist was enough, although Shawn Levy's "Ready Steady Go" intrigued with the allure of "Performance"-vintage Mick dancing with Mr D but always stepping back in time as the abyss claimed less agile mates. As for the Dead, again socially they interest me, but not musically. The road goes on forever, as does the solo.

Not even a Fab fan per se, although I gave a closely detailed Amazon US review to Bob Spitz' book that I read over the winter break last year and am on the waiting list for Jonathan Gould's recent "Can't Buy Me Love." However, I am fascinated by the band's impact on changes in the 1960s. Hearing them by osmosis growing up, I never listen to them except when randomized on my iPod, and I have taken great pleasure in never having to hear again at least under my power, "Yesterday" or "Michelle." Not to mention dozens of other Beatles tunes. I admit, nevertheless, astonishment at their mastering and production-- their songs, digitized and scrubbed with who knows what budget, sparkle like no others. I only wish the early Who, late-decade Kinks, Yardbirds, or classic Fairport & Steeleye shone so brightly. Yet, homage must be due the band that started it-- or them-- all.

The other choice, the book that sent me there for the first time, was Georges Bataille's novella, "The Tears of Eros." Erotic intellectualism in fascist France. Typical choice of mine. Another odd selection for this 2000-era New Federalist-meets-Mayan edifice, adjoining a school and rec center, amidst fading tract houses and rinky-dink apartments from the 50s. Then, nearly a nice walk but not for me-- I drove past the enormous post-Grove monstrosity the high-end retail and entertainment (with a hotel, I guess for all the visitors from Yerevan) Commons that the city's voters foolishly, if narrowly, approved. What this'll do to the traffic can only be feared; perhaps the sales taxes will generate more obscure titles for the shelves. I do fret about how this'll affect the main library's parking in its tiny lot nearby.

That main branch (Brutalist pre-fab slab early 1980s vs. graceful Olde Pasadena's 1920-era counterpart)had my copy on hold of producer Joe Boyd's memoir, "White Bicycles." Serpent's Tail was too cheap to provide RootsWorld.com with a copy for me to review despite the editor's appeal and the fact that the editor's on-line store at CDRoots.com carries many Boyd-related British folk albums. Speaking of Fairport.

I also found Michel Faber's new story collection, and figured, finding Michael Patrick McDonald's sequel "Easter Rising" to his Southie coming-of-age narrative "All Souls" (and this being All Saints Day with All Souls tomorrow; Stocaí Dearga abu!), to find-- under "MacDonald family" on the shelf, the earlier book to read in tandem. Finally, a trip back on the way from Brand Bookshop reminded me to dash in for Raymond Carver's "Where I'm Calling From" stories. (I got home to see it looking on me on L's shelf. I knew she had it, but due to the construction that drove me out of the house, I figured it was AWOL.) I figured Faber'll pale by comparison, the latter's fine novels "Under the Skin" and "The Crimson Petal & the White" (talk about two utterly different tales) notwithstanding.

I knew that, despite no WorldCat library data outside of the industrial wasteland pastorally known as Santa Fe Springs listing it locally, that there had to be a copy of Bataille's "Erotism." After my experience in the stacks of Claremont over two decades ago, when I must've read him after a mention in either my myth-crit or Modernism seminar, I looked forward to another bout with the Gallic gnomon. Borders loomed nearby, but I resisted The Man.

An hour in the ordered and always engrossing stacks of Brand Bookshop came up empty. Still, I could not leave. I went, one more time, back to the Philosophy shelf. Sexuality, Mythology, Anthropology, Cultural Criticism, Religious Philosophy, Christianity, Counterculture, Mysticism, Catholicism, saints, and French literature all: no luck. Yet, my sixth sense persisted.

When I went back to the shelf I'd earlier scanned, desperate, there the City Lights reprint nestled, high up near the abecedarian start, near Bacon. Pencilled $7.50 over an earlier, other store's 5.50-- its reader may've sold it back in frustration at the author's arabesque style. Unmarked, spine strong, in better shape than the 8.50 copy at The Bodhi Tree. Better than the one "pages stained" and "acceptable" for 5.35 plus $4 s/h on Amazon that was the cheapest I could find. And, I swear, it was not there earlier. The stock date: 10/07. Fresh! Had it had appeared in the hour I had spent there today? I went home happy, with plenty to read at bedtime and on the train and bus. Reviews here will follow duly. Not yet Bataille, as he takes concentration, but the likes of John, Paul, George and Ringo, if not Georges, will do nicely.

Samhain/Halloween Deireadh Fómhair 2007

October resounds with imperial Roman authority; the month in Irish softens into "late harvest." A reminder of what All Hallow's Eve even in its commercialized, big-box Party Central instant-store frenzy, echoes dimly as trick-or-treaters crunch the leaves of millions of American sidewalks at dusk. I spent a day off yesterday on what's a ritual of my own, every two months or so. I get my hair cut (or styled as it sure ain't for $6-- an early and telling influence of meeting my dear spouse now nineteen autumns ago) on Melrose in West Hollywood, which sounds more glamorous than it is. Unfortunately, the uber-trendy Urth Café bustles near where I used to park, filled with exactly who'd you expect to see there, as the joint's often featured in those celeb-fave recommendations found in Vanity Fair, Vogue, NYT or LA Times sidebars. Valet parking to drink mocha frapps or whatever the caffeinated classes chat over ostentatiously.

So, I know places a few blocks away where I can park free for two hours, saving the coins I used to increase WeHo's tax base with-- as if that DINK gay mecca-cum- Russian pensioner's home needs my quarters. My hair always bristles with the gunk, a half-dozen times annually, that I get after my trim, usually while hearing Jonesy's Jukebox at noon and getting a bit of arcane rock trivia from Charles to boot. I find how little I listen to radio now, and how few of the bands I hear, or lament not hearing. Is this inevitable nostalgia, or a sign of the tedium of most bands today?

After, it's a dash across the always congested avenue to the Bodhi Tree, the New Age emporium. I rarely go in the main store, but a quarter-hour in the used annex usually suffices. I started coming here when I had to get here by bus from Westchester, immediately prior to meeting my dear wife, and the sections I scan spines in take little time in my efficient routine.

Monitoring the cash register, there's been the past few years an articulate brunette who reminds me of my classmate fifteen years ago in my teaching credential coursework, Penelope. This clerk is also German, from her accent, and strongly resembles my former friend. (I say former since I lost track of her, although it's odd since she'd go to the SRF--speaking of holiday festivity-- regularly, and that just a mile up the hill--and on the way--from us.) Well, she was in a brocaded Tibetan-type outfit, I am not sure due to Halloween or her New Age identification. I had exchanged small talk once in a while with her when buying books over the years once in a while, and always wondered if she was, perhaps, Penelope. But, I think I heard her called Sharon by another worker. So, Sharon is regaling a visitor with her recent contretemps at an outdoor concert, say, as at the Greek Theatre or the like.

I figured her as pretty demure. But, she lashed out, in her recounting how she vehemently told off a couple on their first date who kept babbling for an hour during a show. She spun around to tell them "will you f-ers shut the f- up or will I have to call security?" Sharon and the other woman continued to excoriate in such terms those whose rudeness ruined the women's enjoyment of other concerts. So much for the cultivation of inner equanimity. It encouraged me that Sharon and others at Bodhi Tree, evidently, remain beneath their beatific mien as frail and moody as I am!

I have wondered about the mental state of those frequenting the aisles, whether customers or employees, on past visits. Talk of Urania, zazen, magick, and crystals all have predictably filled the air. Once, my burrowing into a box of overstock books on Christianity sparked a hissy-fit from a sibilant WeHo stereotype. Somehow, my chutzpah miffed him. I assured the loopy local that I as a regular peruser I knew what I was doing and no harm befell anyone. Or as the Wiccans archaically advise, 'if thou harm none, do as thou wilt." It does always take me aback a bit when workers in public lapse into four-letter slang, on the other hand. Still, the store encourages positive vibes, dude. I guess the friendship she shared with the woman stopping in allowed for intimacy and verbal frankness. Here I am about to browse Sade yet tut-tutting about the f-word for all to hear. Priorities.

Petting a calico cat I had never gotten so close to before there, I pulled its tail gently and skimmed the spines. I paused at a newish paperback of Sade's collected writings (some of them; not sure if to be disappointed or not that he burned 3/4 of his MSS-- I think of Sir Richard Francis Burton's Catholic wife tossing that Victorian explorer's erotic notes and papers into the fire, to the immeasurable loss of scholarship). It was a dollar more than the same giant (750 pp.) Grove paperback that was there last visit, but which was the older 60s printing with a broken spine. This one was a newer reprint. It had a Courbet painting of two gentle, post-coital nudes, and more tasteful typography, but the same omnivorous omnibus inside. Maurice Blanchot's essay, Sade's letters and philosophical treatises, and an excellent introduction made this--not the old paperback I had from 1965 of "Justine" alone, as the work I needed for my reading that I have been pursuing on and off the past few months á la Foucault and Bataille and historians and lit-crit into studying intellectual sources for the passages in Joyce that perplex and intrigue me. Trouble is, I don't like a paperback that enormous, as the pages separate too easily from the cheaply glued spine. So, I demurred in hopes of a cheap edition of the 1965 hardcover.

Georges Bataille's "Erotism: Death & Sensuality," as a reviewer on Amazon mentioned, used to be the work on the subject before Foucault displaced his colleague. This book fascinated me when I read it in grad school; I never bought it, however, and its appearance in the philosophy section tempted me. But, even at half-price, it was considerably battered. I also am not buying books if I can find them at the library, so I put off this purchase. The equation between taboo, murder, violence, and the bounds of the sacred and the erotic all engaged Bataille's typically restless imagination. This collection combined a longer monograph on how sex and murder among primitive peoples shared links, with briefer essays on related topics-- including Sade.

If Bataille had been out in the age of Stonewall, disco, and AIDS, perhaps GB would have kept the rank that was pulled by his savvier, flamboyant disciple. But, recalling "Story of an Eye," Bataille's surrealist pornography, or erotic satire, certainly kept its own vivid evocation of the demi-monde. I think he wrote this as a record of his fantasies, and it cannot be taken as realistic any more than the events in Sade's dungeons. Some argue the same send-up in Sade of the whole sexual dance we follow, and I suspect this may be true. It's hard to keep a straight face when reading him; you can say the same of "The Story of 'O'." Yet, there is a tenderness in the latter, a spiritual longing, that many critics-- like Bataille's student, Pierre Klossowski, in my recent reading of his essays on the Marquis-- find absent from the debauched noble. Perhaps "Story" betrays, as Graham Greene astutely guessed early on, the hand of a woman at the pen. The via negativa to enlightenment that Pauline Reage charts for her heroine, by contrast in Sade-- so suggests Klossowski-- represents a negation of the divine, a defiance of the merciful, that so outrages the outrager that he, in Sade's raving litanies of transgression, can at last fall into the trap of exhaustion. The punisher's catalogue of sins adds up, but cannot find the frisson the sinner needs unless there is still a moral order, a purity, an order to batten against and swear at and taunt with blasphemous assertions and ever-more ludicrously lavish deeds. Feared for his foaming raillery, perhaps Sade can be tamed as the male libido's reductio ad absurdam? A quick aside: in medieval considerations, "libido" itself, as Augustine classified it, equated with sin.

This in turn roams back to Joyce's Nighttown, and other places in the psyche of not only Bloom and Stephen but Molly-- and, I aver, other assorted females in passing. The Catholic tendency to limit and the Jewish to expand, both collide in Dublin and perhaps too on Halloween as I witnessed it last night. More anon.

Before I left, I riffed through a book Layne has, but remodelling's removed from the place I always had left it unopened. "Carver Country" had b&w photos and excerpts from Raymond Carver's writings. As I teach "Cathedral," I paused at a blind man's two pictures. One had his eyes crossed. At first, as I was leafing the book in reverse (my Hebraic habit), I saw a more "normal" shot of a man on a sofa smoking and drinking. But, the first shot had the man with his eyes totally crossed; I realized he was blind, and the inspiration no doubt for the man in the story. I also noted Tess Gallagher in a field near Sequim, labelled on our visit as the world's lavender capital. But, the season had ended by our visit three weeks ago. She stood in the grass, and I could not help but wonder if this was the same expanse where now, across the highway from the town (where we had stopped for gas and I could survey the boomlet in construction that would open another small-box, strip mall in another open field), a massive subdivision marred the fields.

Here, and with a link to a 1986 piece by Tom Jenks on Tess and Ray, is a picture of them, perhaps near Sequim. Layne and I have been noticing the press given the wish by Tess to publish Ray's stories before the editing given them by Gordon Lish. I mean, finally, to read them all. When I met Layne, it was almost exactly around the time Raymond Carver died, and I remember her talking about him as her favorite writer.
http://www.narrativemagazine.info/pages/r_t.htm

I had returned from Ameoba Records-- surprisingly few revellers in Hollywood's heartland earlier in the day-- where I bought used/promo, for the sake of example concerning my tastes: Von Sudafed (collaboration of Mouse on Mars Teutonic techno-mayhem with Mark E Smith of The Fall's Joycean-streamed, eruditely scattered, determinedly slurred Mancunian vocal onslaught); Teenage Fanclub (early British 1995 compilation of odds and ends from when they rocked, sort of); Mitch Easter's solo CD (production wizardry and guitar mastery); Thurston Moore's solo CD (pastoral Connecticut apparently calming NYC skronk); Fiery Furnaces' newest (like their rest I know it'll be annoying and a testament to ADD meets ProTools, but their ambition does make mush of its peers-- and they covered The Fall's "Winter" a few years back!).

Finally, my one extravagance, the opposite of any MES-inspired effort: Mellow Candle's "Swaddling Songs." The cult classic Irish- freak-folk-psych LP from the dawn of the 70s. A bit wispy, from the one song I had on my iPod, but I hoped-- from what I have read-- not too wimpy. I had talked to the folk section's buyer last summer about this disc, and he acknowledged how rare it was to find, as the few copies he'd get for the store got snapped up quickly. Well, it was $20, but I knew how much more it was on the Net, how sporadic it could be seen, so I snatched it.
Steven Malkmus regarded this as one of his must-hears, by the way. And, my musically kindred spirit, Lee Templeton, acknowledges this record too as a necessary investment for we who explore the roots of Irish contributions to current folk and rock.

A home visit to what's been called in more than one recent article "grey" Rockaway Records, in hue and ambiance, also scored a couple of hits and near misses. I never go out of my way anymore to go here. I used to spend hours there, and in the thousands of dollars adding over a decade of intensive late 80s-90s clacking of jewel cases. Now, I stop in a handful of times a year.

When the store was thrice its current size, the walls resounded with the bang of dozens of customers rifling the stacks. The turnover of what you'd find was astonishing in the pre-Napster days. Now, it's shrunk to a concrete core, with often an even ratio of supercilious employees to hipster customers. I did find the re-issue of "Daydream Nation" maybe eighty cents cheaper than on my Amazon wishlist, so I bought it. But-- and two of those employees who refused me have seen me there at least a dozen years-- you can no longer open shrinkwrapped promo/used CDs to sample. They used to sticker the price on the cover and allow you to listen. So, forget the Editors' new one, and forget spending much money there. They are competing with Ameoba, so why they do this is beyond me. Getting to hear before you buy used is Rockaway's only advantage against the cellular darling's inventory. You do pay more at Ameoba, unfortunately, but "Swaddling Songs" or Von Sudafed don't show up on the Silverlake shelves. I was intrigued by Great Lake Swimmers, a Low-ish, Neil Young meets chamber-folk, project from Canada and disappointed by Bryan Ferry's Dylan cover record. Ferry's talent remains vocally, but the arrangements however well-produced smacked of too much gloss and not enough raunch. I admit I will return there, not finding it cheaper elsewhere, to get Layne the Minus 5 "Gun"-- she'd like the Wilco connection to this, Scott MacCaughey's long-running Seattle indie super-cult project.

Finally, off to take Leo to Silverlake again for hanging out as Flava Flav, and Niall with the Los Feliz contigent. Our co-host did not want to open the three-dollar bags of chocolate unless there were sufficient supplicants to demand them. Before Layne and Niall could return from their second round of appeals, the front door was shut and lights were out. Considering the fact that the hosts owned an opulent manse in a fine neighborhood, a few cents' worth of Snickers, even impecunious me reasoned silently, could be given out in, say, larger handfuls to the teens who increased as the night went on and the tots had retreated with parents in tow. We had supplied hosts and neighbors with Thai food, and I admit until my spouse accounted for our largess my own befuddlement at so much take-out. Now, chastened, I understood as a dutiful helpmeet must after, well, nineteen years. As Bataille's collected essays are titled: "visions of excess."

I wondered if this reaction against expenditure could be attributed, although at some remove by now, to similar Irish Catholic patterns of behavior. Earlier, I had chatted with the other host about Irish and its constructions that place hunger or thirst or weariness "on" one at a remove, or allow one to have a thing only as "at" one, or prevent you from owning but a "share" of money, land, or hair. He wondered if the same quality could be found in Romance languages, as in Spanish where a thing falls and breaks without anyone responsible, where the subjunctive graciously postpones action, and where the 'tú' vs. 'usted' allow dramatically intimacy to replace formality.

Maybe fatalism rests, this Samhain night when the boundaries between living and dead open to the powers of dark pasts, in my DNA. I got a bit down; the day had wearied me. I had before my linguistic discourse walked along with Niall and our host's boy as they knocked on the 1920s-era doors, beneath turrets and towers in that delightful Disney-meets-studio melange of what passed for gentility 80 years ago in a town filling these quiet streets with silent-movie stars and seekers. The Range Rovers and Botoxed moms in tights and dads with PDAs chattered officiously to Jared and Stone and Harper and Cameron (the latter two were girls). Larger families spoke Spanish. In sweats and hoodies they also navigated the sidewalks, tilted up by eight decades of roots.

Why was I low? I lack patience with the unending pace of this city, its noise, ever-growing traffic. The hum of Los Feliz Boulevard dominates the quiet of Ambrose Street. The bustle, at least in waking hours, lurks always there, faint, waiting, hissing. But so, I noticed at one point in my gloom, hovers also at night the restored copper dome of the Griffith Observatory. Bequeathed by a millionaire who shot his wife, in a rancho where an earlier land-grant don killed his paramour, or her lover. Why the place is named "The [plural] Happy" eludes me. But, Colonel Griffith sought to reclaim goodness by donating the ranch to the city.
It's free of the McMansions and the silent-era castles alike. It stands, despite recent fires, in calico (greener than the cat's coat) patches of what Layne, during boot camp exercise there explained, as eco-friendly verdancy to reseed the blackened chaparral. It gives the night sky a lesser-lit promontory, a respite from the endless stretch of mercury lights and porch bulbs and freeway signs that comprise the same city a century later.

Griffith Park surrounds our city's increasingly stuccoed slopes. Beneath them, our hosts can afford to live on Ambrose. Others may visit, as guests invited, or as revellers perhaps one night a year. Together, at least for one balmy evening under the theremin plaints and plastic cauldrons, we jostle in two languages (at least) as families pass, kids scream, and doors open at least on this night of modulated fright and manufactured fun to all.

John & Jack Finan's Farmhouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manchán Magan: Global Nomad 'as gaeilge'


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re-Imagining Ireland: Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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