Ag stánadh uait

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

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

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

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

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

Staring into Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Posted to Amazon US today)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Posted to Amazon US today.)

Panamint Live-Forever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Posted to Amazon today.)

On First Listening to Horslips, 1978.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Promo for Horslips TMWBA: Weasy 8 Archives ca. 1978

Owen Sheers' "Resistance": Book Review

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

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

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

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

Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion": Book Review

Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion": Book Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Díseart" as Gaeilge

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

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

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

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

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

The word "Desert" in Irish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gordon Burn's "Alma": Book Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Na Hiomalaethaí vs. Sliabh Olimpeas

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

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

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

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

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

The Himalayas vs. Mt. Olympus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph O'Neill Reviews Flann O'Brien

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ag breathnú Des Bishop ag mallú

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

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

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

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

Watching Des Bishop cursing

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

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

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

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

Image/iómhá:Comic Irish Curse

"That Book Looks Bright"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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