Dánlann Nua Anseo, cuid a h-aon

Chuir mé suas gailearaí ealáine ar taobh deas síos anseo an lá eile. Bhí gá agamsa a cur íomhánnaí go raibh go líonta leis chaill agam. Fuair mé cúig léaráidí déag ar an ghréasán go mbeadh go pearsanta orm.

Rinne mé teorannú ann, ar scor ar bith. Chaith mé ag faighte gach íomhá amuigh ar an idirlíon ó bhunús. Mar sin, chonaic mé é an oibre ealáine nó ealaíontóra ar laghad roimh ré, ina leabhar nó leis mo shúile cinn! Agus, ar ndóigh, bhí maith liom é nó í go díreach, níos láidre.

Inseoidh mé agat abairt faoi gach pictiúr. Ar dtús, feicfidh tú griangraf le Ian Middleton de Ghleann Cholm Cille i gContae Dún na nGall; tá áit is fiú a choinneáil in gcuimhne agamsa féin. Tá íomhá is gaire ag tosú sraith péintéireachta siadsan.

Ceangail Léna-- tá sé an lá a rugadh í-- agus mé leis go bhfuil cion acusan ar Stanley Spencer agus Millard Sheets. Phéint Spencer "An Droichead" ar feadh geallta bád na h-áit dhúchais aice na Cookham ina Sasana. Phéint Sheets ag imeall na h-áit dhúchais againnsa féin na gCathair na h-Áingeal.

Go nádúrtha, is maith linn a léamh go leor. Tagann Eric Gill leis leabhairshuaitheantas is cathaitheach na "Éabha." Cuireann mé "Annie McGinley" le Rockwell Kent níos islé. Bhí ealaíontóir Meiriceánach é. Tá sé igcónaí ar an tuaiscairt na Ghleann Cholm Cille ag timpeall 1950. Leannan scribhneoir agus ealaíontóir Alasdair Gray leis an íomhá na file Albanach "Liz Lochhead" ann.

Bhí cuimhne liomsa faoi Peter Blake agus "Ophelia" nuair ag freastail Oideas Gael ina Ghleann. Bhain mé alt suas irise ina Baile Mór ann. Léigh mé faoi an íomhá cumhachtacht seo.

Scríobh mé faoi ar an gcéad leath an thogadh pictiúr os cionn. Beidh mé tuilleadh san uimhir seo chugam. Críochnóidh mé ag insint agat faoi seacht h-ealaíontóir muirneacha níos mo agamsa féin.

New Art Gallery Here, Part One.

I put up a gallery of artists along the right side down here the other day. I had a need myself to place images that may be filled with meaning for me. I got fifteen illustrations on the web that would be personal for me.

I made a restriction there, however. I had to have found each image outside of the internet originally. That is, I saw the work of art or of the artist at least beforehand, in a book or with my own eyes. And, of course, I liked him or her [or it!] right away, strongly.

I'll tell you a sentence about each picture. To begin, you will see a photograph by Ian Middleton of Glencolmcille in Co Donegal; the place "has worth to keep in my mind myself" [="memorable"]. The image next is starting a series of pictures themselves.

Layne-- it's her birthday today-- and I join with a liking ourselves for Stanley Spencer and Millard Sheets. Spencer painted "The Bridge" during a regatta in his native place of Cookham in England. Sheets painted around our own native place in the City of Los Angeles.

Naturally, we like to read a lot. Eric Gill comes with a most tempting bookplate of "Eve." I place "Annie McGinley" by Rockwell Kent lower down. He lived near Glencolmcille around 1950. The writer and artist Alasdair Gray with an image of the poet from Scotland "Liz Lochhead" follows there.

Memory came back to me about Peter Blake and "Ophelia" when attending Oideas Gael in the Glen. I got out an article from a magazine in the Big House there. I read about this powerful image.

I wrote about the first half of the selection of pictures above. I shall continue with the next entry. I will finish telling you about seven more favorite artists of mine.

Illustration/ íomhá: Pencil drawing/ Líníocht pionsail le Stanley Spencer. Dánlann/Museum, Cookham, Berkshire. "Ag Tarraingím Mise Elsie" "Me Drawing Elsie". 1943-44. Tá uilinn go suntasach é ansin!/ It's a wonderful angle there!

Dafydd Jenkins' "A Nation on Trial: Penyberth 1936": Book Review

Does a moral law overrule that of the State? What happens if you reject violent protest, but you still fight back practically? Can military installations turn legitimate targets for anti-war activists? Symbolically, would a small act of damage to an RAF bombing school turn a nation away from craven submission or economic capitulation to its dominant, ruling neighbor?

These questions, posed by later radicals such as the Catonsville Five, have been debated for centuries by theologians, judges, citizens, and especially among members of an oppressed minority faction. Schoolteacher D. J. Williams, Baptist preacher Lewis Valentine, and university lecturer Saunders Lewis directed their rage, only after eloquent and learned appeals to the Crown. The English-- who previously had saved a similar site in England for the preservation of swans-- determined to go on. As usual, the Welsh had been ignored, patronized, or ridiculed.

The English, preparing for another world war, built a bombing range and training school on the Welsh-speaking bastion, pilgrimage-hallowed trails, and natural beauty spot of the Llŷn peninsula in Caernarfon, beyond Pwllheli. While some locals welcomed the jobs this project would bring during the Depression, most Welsh people who were polled opposed this intrusion into an ecologically fragile and linguistically sensitive region. I reckon this may have been one of the first instances in a Celtic country when these two causes were explicitly linked.

Jenkins wrote this account originally in 1937 (in Welsh "Tân yn Llŷn" or "The Fire at Lleyn") six months after the trial for arson of what came to be known as "the Three" at what must have been a very young age, for he offers sixty years later an updated forward to this 1998 edition. Williams, Valentine, and Lewis were tried first by a Welsh court in Caernarfon and then, under great publicity for the refusal of the men to testify in English but only in Welsh, as moved to the Old Bailey in London. As with perhaps in more tense circumstances the arrests and executions of the Irish rebels after the 1916 Rising met at first with disdain or indifference among many of their countrymen and women who soon would rally to the Cause-- many Welsh people appear to have back then regarded "the Three" as cranks or crooks. They failed to ignite a national rebellion. Yet, their stance inspired those who had relegated the tiny Nationalist party Plaid Cymru to the far margins; from 1936 on, the momentum steadily grew, if slowly, for a revival of the language and a maturity in what would control the direction of Welsh nationalism.

Their decision to not only do damage to the military base, however minor, but to turn themselves in immediately so as to demand their right to be heard by a jury of their linguistic peers in a Welsh court, so as to make their case known to a wide audience in an honest and principled fashion, certainly speaks highly for their daring P.R. ploy. Jenkins offers a carefully presented depiction of the background, the arson, the two trials, and the stirring testimony of Valentine and Lewis.

The minister proclaimed his allegiance: "It was my responsibility for the Kingdom of God in Wales which led me to strike a blow for Wales in this act, since there is a higher law than the law of the English state-- our allegiance to Christianity is higher--"(at this point the judge interrupts; 74) Valentine defends their destruction as a means to alert people to the threat that war, ammunition, and imperialism represent for a nation that never invaded another land, and for a people who asked to be left in peace, free from the carpet bombing and mass murder that would soon overcome Europe again.

Comparisons between "the Three" to Martin Luther King, Gandhi, or the Dalai Lama may or may not have been made before, but they'd be intriguing ones. Do you go limp before the fire hoses? The later president of Plaid, Gwynfor Evans, twice to my knowledge went on hunger strikes: do these offer a sensible offensive? How far can totally non-destructive protest go? Can there be, as some argued in Irish republicanism, legitimate economic targets that can be hit, with no risk for loss of life? Could this provide strategies for an alternative radicalism? Or, especially post 9/11, must we expect only "state-sponsored terrorism" to be met by state-sponsored aggression in an endless if sanctioned war on terror levied from us all?

For Lewis, his intellectual rationale overlaps with Valentine's Christian antinomianism, but this critic of Welsh literature tends to assert a subtly structured, yet boldly stated, rationale. He regards the arson as another lesson to prove his studies relevant, to assert a Welsh Wales. As president of Plaid Cymru, he had and has often been denigrated as a highbrow out of touch with popular instincts. Yet he roused a few (under Evans) who led the party into a resurgence. Their rearguard stance in retrospect may have saved much of what remnants remained of Cymraeg or Cymry Cymraeg from annihilation under cultural colonial carpet bombings.

I cite at length from Lewis' defense, for his statement deserves consideration in the wake of what has happened among many liberation movements and freedom fighters before-- and since.

"I have repeatedly and publicly declared that the Welsh nation must gain its political freedom without resort to violence or physical force. It is a point I wish to affirm today. And I submit to you that our action in burning the Penrhos aerodrome proves the sincerity of this affirmation. Had we wished to follow the methods of violence with which national minority movements are sometimes taunted, and into which they often are driven, nothing could have been easier than for us to ask some of the generous and spirited young men of the Welsh Nationalist Party to set fire to the aerodrome and get away undiscovered."

The strategy had been deployed to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the Union in 1536. The marches and petitions had not worked. The Welsh needed, Lewis and his colleagues reasoned, an event to rally around. He continues that "the Three" had "determined to prevent any such development" as a regression into mob rule or assaults by vigilantes and fires set under darkness. Instead, they vowed to take responsibility for their crime, and then in court to aver it was no crime at all.

"When all democratic and peaceful means of persuasion had failed to obtain even a hearing for our case against the bombing range, and when we saw clearly the whole future of Welsh tradition threatened as never before in history, we determined that even then we would invoke only the process of law, and that a jury from the Welsh people should pronounce on the right and wrong of our behaviour." (77)

This savvy ploy earned them a degree of attention, if less than might have been expected. John Davies in his forward examines the mixed legacy of Penyberth's burning, for it meant Plaid members expected their leaders to suffer trials and incarceration on behalf of those at large, afforded "delightful political thrills." (xi) Ann Corkett's translator's note cautions that the tactical side of Lewis may have been obscured by his rhetorical stand. Yet, as she agrees, our knowledge in hindsight of what Jenkins may not have known in 1937 regarding legal countermoves by the defence does not diminish the real risk "the Three" took. The maximum sentence of penal servitude for life may not likely have been employed, but it remained an option for this trio of mild, kindly, and sensitive men who faced the possibility of prison.

This book originally appeared while they still served their terms. A brief appendix sums up the main players, an afterword recaps the reasons why Penyberth had been so highly regarded by lovers of Welsh culture, and a bibliography in both languages steers readers further along a fascinating episode in Welsh history, as well as a precursor for other such principled reactions to power and war later last century. One wonders if a Tibetan, Cuban, Palestinian, or Chinese reader might learn about Penyberth today, in some half-forgotten library. While not an easy book to procure even in its reprinted editions, it remains a thoughtful and valuable account of how ordinary folks can stand up to tyranny, however benignly or inevitably masked.

(Posted today to the half-forgotten listings of Amazon in US & Britain.)

Michel Faber's "The Fire Gospel": Book Review

Featuring a splendidly observed chapter, "Judges," which shows an eager if rather callow, previously unknown, scholar on his book tour checking his Amazon rating, mulling over his reviews, Faber as a bestselling author (the deservedly successful "The Crimson Petal & the White") knows his subject. He revamps the myth of Prometheus for "The Myths" series from Canongate; this story of the hapless mortal who steals fire from the gods enriches the manic, wry, and entertaining story comprising this brief, fast-paced, witty novel, readable in a sitting or two.

Theo finds nine scrolls written by Malchus, Caiaphas' spy who had his ear severed by an angry Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane. Malchus watches a less than edifying crucifixion of Jesus and renders an alternative account of the Deposition (removal of the body of Christ) which challenges the gospel accounts of any bodily Resurrection. He converts to follow Jesus after an ironic, yet movingly told, inversion of baptism.

Malchus writes his report in the language Jesus and his disciples spoke, Aramaic. The scrolls are dated circa AD 40, far before any Gospel. They predate Paul's letters. They relate the last hours of Jesus in the vernacular of Roman Palestine, therefore "the oldest surviving piece of Christian literature," from a witness on Calvary.

Naturally, when Theo, a flabby youngish Toronto-based academic, spirits these documents back from their hiding place-- revealed after the museum in Mosul he visited was bombed-- he begins to study them. Well-preserved, they represent a dramatic statement. Not for their polished prose, but for their fiery power to undermine what the churches and preachers control. Understandably, in the wake of "The Da Vinci Code," he's excited by their potentially lucrative contents.

He's also bored. Their literary quality lacking, their narrator a tiresome nebbish, they're still a truly eyewitness telling of the good news that, fifty years prior to Matthew or John, appears (according to expert Theo) verifiable. The early portions prove as dull as most real-life apocryphal texts. However, I must admit the section in the chapter "Acts" overcame tedium and ends movingly. A clever salesman of his own text, Faber lets the story Malchus tells unfold gradually as his narrative of Theo's impetuous promotion of this "oldest Christian gospel" continues.

It's a credit to Faber that he manages to imitate both the awkward quality of Dead Sea Scrolls-types of scriptures, and the sporadically poetic verses of Gnostics. While parts of the storyline of Theo's promotional forays veered into welcome if tangential satire of the book world, the main structure elaborates intriguingly upon Prometheus, whom Theo will come to recall as his adventure escalates. (I recommend Wilton Barnhardt's "Gospel," by the way, as another novel on this general theme.)

Ultimately, as with fire, the power of what's marketed as "The Fifth Gospel" lies more in how Malchus' handwritten documents are interpreted, rather than their inherent value. Of course, this could be said of any religious writings.

But, the set of manuscripts maxes out at thirty pages with ample margins and large font. Theo has to expand these complaints and anecdotes of Malchus (Faber's little novel earns 213 generously formatted pages but Amazon lists it at a meager 186!) with his own tale of how he came to find them in Iraq and how he got them home.

Like the text that Theo Griepenkerl finds literally dropped at his feet, this adaptation of an ancient story that holds appeal thousands of years later, despite translation and shifts in faith, has found its critics for some padding of a slight plot. I do think a few pages could have been sharpened; the plot for a significant stretch does follow not very surprising directions after its red-hot first half. And, I don't know what to make of Jennifer anymore than Theo apparently did.

Yet, Faber wraps it up in the last few pages with aplomb; Faber shows again how his skewed perspective aligns with his graceful humanity and his vision of meaning. Advance reviewers appear to be let down by the second half. I was not, for he makes a comeback in the very last section, as he has before. A longtime admirer, I'm as delighted by Faber as I have been with his fiction. You can find his shorter stories packaged as "Vanilla Bright Like Eminem."

(That anthology was tellingly retitled for the American market from "The Fahrenheit Twins;" also find novellas collected as "The Courage Consort" a.k.a. in Britain as "The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps"-- I reviewed both books on my blog and on Amazon US. I also enjoyed his daring novel "Under the Skin" along with that triple-decker "Crimson Petal"-- my wife loved the latter's CD-audio version. By the way: why isn't "The Apple," further "Crimson" stories, in print outside of Britain? Faber earns his right to satirize the fickle book business here.)

Faber's prose shines. A few early examples? As he's kicked out of their flat, telling his suddenly ex-girlfriend about his escape from death in Iraq: "Meredith was unimpressed by his little display of sublimated joy in the dismemberment of a female." (13) Soon after: "The cold bed was waiting for him, there was half a pound of salami-encrusted, Pepsi-marinated mozzarella lodged in his stomach, and Meredith probably had her legs wrapped around the neck of the wildlife photographer by now." (38-39) To a publisher: "'My book isn't about teaching dogs geometry,' Theo reminded him." (48: this passage makes bemused sense in context!)

And, speaking of misspellers, hacks, ill-informed or pedantic audiences, Faber's chapter dramatizing Amazon's rating and reviewing system from an author's perspective deserves applause. (I recall one fictional predecessor applying a plot-point through this review process, a brief episode in Jonathan Raban's novel "Surveillance," also reviewed of course by me here and on Amazon!) Only one of the reviewers quoted takes time to thoughtfully critique Theo's work in a balanced, scholarly, and complete manner. Yet, the odds are stacked. "Twenty-three of fifty-nine people apparently found Frank Felperin's review 'helpful', which, given the trouble Frank had gone to, seemed a tad ungenerous." (85). I know that feeling!

Regarding the debased ravings-- and Faber glories bitterly in their typos, rants, and boilerplate-- that get posted on this very medium: "He wished there was a more dignified, alternative version of Amazon that well-educated people could access, an Amazon where such trash was automatically filtered out. He felt like a classical conductor forced to share a stage with a bunch of simpering pop babes." (79) (I add that many classical CD's feature cover shots of only the most luscious divas or prodigies, if female at least; savvy marketing works to hawk higher culture as well as middlebrow wares.)

Back to Theo's dilemmas after he captures the divine spark: are those goods stolen if the museum had no idea they had been hidden-- in the statue that falls apart in the bombing as Theo cowers inside a museum chamber? Are they Iraqi patrimony? How will true believers react to this obscure atheist on talk shows hawking his wares? Can he assert his claim to them vs. those on the Net ready to pounce on the "fire gospel" he translates, as public domain, once the book-- complete with silver-foil embossed title and cut-away double cover-- draws the attention Theo craves along with the profits and luxuries? Will he be able to handle the leap from linguist to sybarite?

I will not reveal anything beyond the exact mid-portion of the plot. Enjoy this fable yourself, especially as an Amazon scanner of reviews. Yet, one hint: at the apex of his powers, a lissome publicist warns Theo, at number one on the New York Times list. "'Go easy on the hubris, lover,' she cooed." (105)

(P.S. Christian Griepenkerl [1839-1912] painted "The Theft of Fire.")

(Obviously, cross-posted to Amazon. Second in the queue; another critic beat me to it earlier today.)

John Berger's "G.": Book Review

This dense, philosophical Booker Prize-winning novel of ideas took six years to write. Appearing in 1972, it follows the amorous adventures of an Italian-English gentleman as he seduces, from a predictably precocious age, many women. Yet, this Don Juan, for me, lacks appeal. His encounters, recounted by an intrusive and omniscient narrator, intersperse with eloquent meditations on sexuality, eroticism, love, and desire as a construct trapping or freeing men and women in late 19th and early 20th century Europe.

Berger's mix of reflection and fiction may not flow lightly, but it moves often dazzlingly. The distance that the author places between himself and "G." serves to keep the reader apart from the characters, and G.'s lovers come and go suddenly, without conventional seductions followed by affairs ended by breakups. You get their couplings in fragmented, often very evocative and momentarily graphic depictions. But, without the aftermath, what accrues are episodes from G.'s love life, mixed with narrative reflection, historical and political mini-essays, and an account of the times from both a bourgeois and a proletarian perspective.

The result's better cited in its prose, so below I give examples of Berger's success. While I found many parts uninvolving, such as Chavez' first flight over the Alps, the accounts of rebellions and the WWI glimpses held my attention much more, not to mention many sensuous moments. But, this novel, in its fragmented nature and editorial intrusion, may put off readers rather than get them off.

It's a heady experience, nonetheless, for the more intellectually minded reader wanting philosophy mixed with affairs if not of the heart than of the groin. By entering this disturbing, powerful, and unsettlingly limned realm, Berger tries to demythologize romance. He offers instead an analysis in fiction and speculation of how it takes place, emerging from within the society of a hundred years ago. Less concerned with character and even plot, G. as protagonist and his antagonists may not grip you as much as the vignettes of passion whether in fighting on the street or coupling in the boudoir. It may be an exchange you are willing to accept, in return for so many thoughts about sex, death, desire, and longing so well told.

G.’s mother: “The mystery of her own poor health began with his [her father’s] death and gradually established the foundation of a lifelong right: the right to be less than present, the right to withdraw.” (3)

1898 Milanese workers’ rebellion: “On the road between the soldiers and the barricade, absolutely still, are the seven stones that have fallen short.” (74) “A cubic metre of space; empty it of your conception of that space; what remains is death.”

The body: “The process of maturing and, later, of ageing involves a gradual but increasing withdrawal of the self from the exterior surface of the body.” (84)

“The focus of sexual desire is concentrated and sharp. The breast may be seen as a model of such focus, gathering from an indefinable, soft variable form to the demarcation of the aureola and, within that, to the precise tip of the nipple.” (110) “All generalizations are opposed to sexuality.” (111)

The narrator's method: “I write in the spirit of a geometrician. One of the ways in which I establish co-ordinates extensively is by likening aspect with aspect, by way of metaphor. I do not wish to become a prisoner of the nominal, believing that things are what I name them. On the bed they were not such prisoners.” (137)

The battle of the sexes, "amour prope" a hundred years past: “The subjunctive realm of the woman, this realm or her presence, guaranteed that no such action undertaken within it could ever possess full integrity; in each action there was an ambiguity which corresponded to an ambiguity in the self, divided between surveyor and the surveyed. The so-called duplicity of women was the result of the monolithic dominance of man.” (150)

“For the nineteenth century European middle classes the state of being in love was characterized by an excessive uncertainty in an otherwise certain world. It was a state exempt from the promise of Progress.” (151) “For the woman the state of being in love was an hallucinatory interregnum between two owners, her bridegroom taking the place of her father, or later, perhaps, a lover taking the place of her husband. . . . The surveyed-within-herself became the creature of proprietor and agent, of whom both must be proud.” (152)

Speaking of the components of sexual desire, Berger finds some “violently nostalgic,“ reaching back to birth; others leap ahead to the unknown threshold of our annihilation. "At the moment of orgasm these points in time, our beginning and our end, may seem to fuse into one. When that happens everything that lies between them, that is to say our whole life, becomes instantaneous. It is thus I explain the protagonist of my book to myself.” (142)

Camille, one of his mistresses just before her first union with G.: “I have as many hairs on the back of my neck as you may have ways of touching me.” (202) “Undressing was the act of shedding the interests of those who make up the interests of her life. With her clothes she discarded the men he hates.” (203)

A wife may despise the accumulation of her future as she lives next to her husband; a widow “embraces the inexorable,” returning to an idealized past filled with her husband’s absence as its main event to come. A wife may be trapped within her husband’s reality; a widow refusing remarriage "tries to make her own life timeless.” (235)

“Von Hartmann argued that his wife’s adventures and extravagances should be appraised in their special relation to her lifetime with him. The licenses he had granted her had to be so graduated that she did not exhaust the possibilities of his compliance until she was too old to find another man.” (257) Jamesian style echoes?

Trapped by our time: “Certain experiences cannot be formulated because they have occurred too soon. This happens when an inherited world-view is unable to contain or resolve certain emotions or intuitions which have been provoked by a new situation or an extremity of experience unforeseen by the world-view.” (104)

The final pages: “Perhaps death when it arrives is always a mounting surprise which surprises itself to the point at which all reference—and therefore all self-distinction—disappears.” (315) “The horizon is the straight bottom edge of a curtain arbitrarily and suddenly lowered upon a performance.” (316)

Six years in writing, ’65-71. Dedicated “For Anya and her sisters in Women’s Liberation.”

(The start of this review and a few quotes posted to Amazon US today. Typically, the British edition has a better cover design, shown here. Vintage paperbacks in the US invariably suffer by comparison.)

Ag eisteacht ceol roc ar an bóthar

Nílim ag eisteacht go ceol roc go leor le deanaí sa mbhaile. Cén fáth? Éistím de gnáth leis mo h-iPod cheana féin. Taistealaím ar traenachaí agus ar mbus ar áit i gceann oibre go hionduil le breacadh an lae.

Mar sin, cloisim amhrain éagsúlaí i rith an lae. Mar sin féin, tiomáinim gach seachtain fós. Caithim ag múinteadh faoin oíche anois.

Iarr mé a tógáil ceirníní difrúilaí nuair ag tabhairt mo ghluaisteán. Is maith liom a féachaint a chur ar dluthdioscannaí níos úr. B'fhéidir seo go raibh 'scrúdú tiomána' agamsa féin?

Bím ag fáil ceol roc liom. Tá sé níos fusa ag seinm os ard mé féin. Tógaim de rogha ceoil leis dordán. Dúisím nuair ag tosú leis rithim siúl tiomána.

Tá bualadh fuaimthoinne go mbeidh ar cur le chéile leis cuisle cothrom. Cá raibh bannaí go mbailí mé ag dul ar an bóthar mór is fada? Is docha, líonfaidh an steirea leis Uncle Tupelo, Bedhead, The Gun Club, or Kinski. Na habair Swervedriver nó Galaxie 500!

Ar scor ar bith, ní bainfidh mé ar mo charr Yo La Tengo ar chor ar bith. Bhi maith liom freisin. Ach, thug Léna siad ar a carr is fearr orm.

Listening to Rock Music on the Road.

I am not listening to rock music a lot of late at home. Why? I listen usually with my iPod already. I travel on trains and by bus to my place of work ordinarily at day break.

Therefore, I hear various songs in the course of the day. All the same, I drive each week also. I must teach during night now.

I seek to select different records when I take my car. I like to pick out fresher compact discs. Perhaps this may be a "driving test" of my own?

Habitually I take rock music with me. It's easier to play music louder by myself. I make a choice of music with a drone. I wake up when starting with a propulsive (=driving pace!) rhythm.

It's a beat of a soundwave that will match with a steady pulse. Which bands might I gather to go on the very long highway? It's probable I will fill the stereo with Uncle Tupelo, Bedhead, The Gun Club, or Kinski. Not to mention Swervedriver or Galaxie 500!

However, I will not take out to my car Yo La Tengo at all. I like them still. But, Layne took them to her car too often for me.

Griangraf/Photo: Ní maith liom na bannaí seo ag cur ar liosta anseo! I don't like these bands put up as listed here! Loud Music in Cars/ Ceol Ard i gCarrannaí.

The Black Angels' "Directions to See a Ghost": Music Review.

Any CD that credits not only "rogue sitar" but "drone machine" better deliver fresh assaults, not rehashed revamps from the first peyote era. This betters, as I'd predicted (see my review yesterday here and on Amazon US of "Passover") their début. It stretches out with ominous beats into austere horizons on the eight-minute "Never/Ever" up to the sixteen-minute closing track, "Snake in the Grass." These bookend a well-arranged second half (more than that in the elapsed time) of the tracks here.

The first half of the album follows more its predecessor, not blazing a new trail yet. It's solid, but not until "Deer-Ree-Shee" with its sitars did I begin to turn up the volume and want to listen harder. From this point on, the intensity builds. The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (BRMC--back when they tried to sound more acid-drenched and less faux-bluesy), 13th Floor Elevators (also from Austin) all come to mind, along with an inevitable nod to The Doors, Mo Tucker of the Velvet Underground, and to me Ian McCulloch's vocal delivery from Echo & the Bunnymen. My son heard early on what it takes track 7 "Never/Ever" to fully prove, an appropriate use of the band Clinic's "Visitations"-era processed spooky, echo-laden, dubbish croon. Like Clinic, The Black Angels build their own pinnacle atop a venerable edifice of neo-psychedelia that improves upon the foundation. As with Black Mountain near them on the shelves, they study the past to enrich their future as musicians able to incorporate the best from forty years ago.

But, as on the first CD, where the Black Angels (like Darker My Love may be doing in a poppier vein) begin to break free of their competitors is in their density of sonic production. I've heard The Warlocks (as in their latest "Freaky Deaky Skull Lover") enter a similar maturity, hammering down a thicker, insistent, and forbidding aura that somehow propels itself rather than miring itself in homage to sludgier pioneers of doom. What helps this for the Angels is the sonic space opened, and an additional member to the band. More guitar allows more diversity.

The vocals do get used more as texture than dominance. Fine in the studio, but I suspect a live concert would embellish these tunes even more. On record, they tend towards a broader spectrum than "Passover," and the self-consciously psychedelic filagree ornaments the songs nicely. As before, it's hard to carry off this music without sounding fey or derivative, but they've done it, improving the promise of album number one. A final thanks for the album design and layout-- this shows a smart group eager to "emboss" upon the same old template their own distinctively complex mark.

P.S. I wish the bonus tracks were available that were only sold at concerts or for pre-order: some of us fans only found out about this too late!

(Posted to Amazon US today.)

The Black Angels' "Passover": Music Review

Along with Darker My Love's "2" and The Black Angels' follow-up, "Directions to See A Ghost," (see tomorrow's entry for the latter) this is a strong recent record in the droning, doomed, and dirge-soaked genre of neo-psychedelia. I was frankly expecting, based on the band's name and description, a far more derivative band, and I am relieved to find I was mostly wrong. If this band can stay focused and progress, they might make a brilliant record.

For a debut, this is one solid album. I'd hesitate for five stars only because I predict they will top this as they grow into their songwriting and realize a more complicated lyrical and musical vision. While certainly not only the Doors (of which I am not a fan!) but The Gun Club (both lyrical and vocal similarities to Jeffrey Lee Pierce) and Echo & the Bunnymen (not in the sound so much as the post-punk attitude and their sinister yet accessibly pop-oriented vibe) will echo here, they create an appealingly grim sound scape for these death-haunted, obsessively structured, somber songs.

Another contemporary "Black" band, "Black Mountain," may also come to mind in their shared quest to uncover an overlooked mother lode of late-60s psych, less flower power and frippery, more stripped-down and brutal. This is a harsher, gnawed, numbed entry into the psyche. It can be oddly erotic, but dredging up a lustful, aching, mournful passion. They remind me of a lovelorn person's sleepless nights.

The tribal drums here carry most songs along in the spirit of Mo Tucker from the Velvet Underground, while capturing the desert rawness of Roky Erickson's band 13th Floor Elevators. This newer band's also from Austin, and their appealingly dessicated quality in their relentlessly percussive, tormented folksy music makes a great soundtrack for a mental or real trip down a lost highway out West.

The album seems a loosely conceived saga of a soldier sent off to war and trying to come back home-- or not getting back entirely, in some profound sense of the soul. The last song's nakedly naive in its late-60s's folk slogan-protest march tone, but I think this expression of grief and frustration may be half-deliberate, half-accidental. The band's obviously intelligently incorporating sources from three and four decades back while they are conscious-- I think-- of not overdoing themselves as a soundalike homage. The inclusion of Iraq alongside Vietnam in the final track reminds us that long after the moratoriums and Kent State and Berkeley demonstrations ended, anti-war music remains for us still sadly relevant.

(Posted 1/29/08 to Amazon.)

Ag críochnú tainséiriní

Tá dhá fáth a chur ag críochnú tainséirini le deanaí liomsa féin. Cad is cuis leis? Ar dtús, tá crann ard amuigh ár fuinneoig anseo. An bhfuil fáth eile ann? Tá! Tá torthaí saor ann!

Ar ndóigh, tá torthaí blasta freisin ann. Is maith linn sobhlasta acusan. Ní maith linn seadógaí, ar scor ar bith. Tá crann sin is airde in aice leis an crann tainséirin ann. Tá torthaí buí leis blas searbh acusan ann.

Bainfidh mé le crann seo níos milis torthaí níos mo amárach. D'ith mé dhá dosean go furasta ar feadh an seachtaine seo caite. Thug mé torthaí liomsa ag áit oibre agam. Níl duine go leor ann go raibh ag iarraidh siad. Mheasaim go raibh sin go airithe agamsa.

Smaoínim faoi go raibh mé óg nuair ag bolaigh ciotras mise féin. Bhí mé i gcónaí ag imeall na h-ullord líomóide. D'imigh mé chuig an garrán. D'imir mé imeasc an coill go sona.

Ach, chaill crannaí seo anois. Agus, cailleann na torthaí sa bhaile inniu. Itheann ioraí ruadh tainséirini go minic fós. Is maith leo ag buaileadh amach na torthaí de craobhachaí síos sa talamh. Níor iarraidh muid a feiceáil seo.

Is ainm eile faoi ainmhí sin as Gaeilge. Is "madraí crainn" siadsan. Mar sin, bíonn breithíochígh atá ag dreap suas crannaí gach lá. Is docha go raibh ag ciap faoi gadaithe bradachaí le hachan daoine céillí gach uair!

Gathering Tangerines.

There's two reasons for picking tangerines lately by myself. What's the cause for this? To start, there's a tall tree outside our window here. Is there another reason? There is! There, fruits are free!

Of course, the fruits are tasty too there. We like the tastiness of them. We do not like grapefruits, however. That tree is higher there next to the tangerine tree. The yellow fruits have a bitter flavor themselves there.

I will pick from this sweeter tree more fruits tomorrow. I ate two dozen easily during the past week. I took fruits with me to my place of work. There were not many people there who wanted them. I judged that myself surprising.

I think about when I was young smelling citrus myself. I was living on the border of a lemon orchard. I went off to the grove. I played among the wood happily. But, trees there were lost now. And, the fruits are lost at home today.

Red squirrels eat tangerines often too. They like knocking the fruits off the branches down to the ground. We do not want to see this.

There's another name concerning that animal in Irish. They are "dogs of a tree." That is, they're beasts who climb up trees every day. It's probable that every person with sense may be annoyed by these thieving scoundrels every time!

Image/íomhá: Tá oráiste ann. Gabh mo leithscéal! It's an orange. Excuse me. Sunkist: Faoi lípeid i gcliathbosca/ About Crate Labels

Gwyn A. Williams' "When Was Wales?": Book Review

Arguing that Welsh identity's about to vanish, and that the one-fifth who speak Welsh out of the two-and-a-half million in the Principality (as of twenty-five years ago) hold the English-speakers in contempt as "di-Gymraeg" or "Welsh-less," Professor Williams ends his densely compiled, if relatively brief, Penguin paperback history dramatically. It's a leftist, populist, and straightforward response to romantics and traditionalists. Williams relates a series, from its formation, of rearguard if clever Welsh reactions largely to external, increasingly English, actions.

He criticizes those venerating the "hen wlad fy nhadau," the "old land of my fathers." Williams suspects any "Welsh Wales" set apart from the increasingly polyglot, multicultural, majority who leans in their suburbs and cities towards American even more than English culture. Concluding around the time of the miners' strike during Thatcher's term, the 1985 book circles back to its earlier contention: there never may have existed a separate polity. Wales, as soon as it was defined, had to place itself in relation to England.

As its own nation, "only one king in Welsh history is called good." (54) Medieval boasts of bards and kings gain Williams' cold scrutiny. Trapped by complicated "kindred" demands to share power and wealth among relatives, feudal Welsh rulers competed among each other and against the always encroaching Saxons-- their longest if not their only foes. No romanticization here: serfs and slaves remain silent, barely noticed among the chronicles, and Williams reminds us of their erasure.

The Welsh heartlands early on began to contract against the Saxons and their Welsh collaborators. The "gwerin" chose allegiance to their language, folk tradition, and soon the Welsh Bible. Their loyalty to Nonconformism and Dissent, and later the Liberal Party and then Labour, marked the separation of Cymry Cymraeg from the Marches, and the borderlands and coasts that the English began to populate and then industrialize. Those areas, especially in the south-east, turned into cities and factories, sharing only regional boundaries with the mountain people, and the north.

The re-definition of Great Britain, by the time of the union with England in 1536, strongarmed Wales as a "junior partner" in what Williams characterizes as a proto-mafia controlled by colonial capital and the imperial Crown. Wales never stood a chance against Westminster, but often weakened early on due to its own disloyal fifth column. The rivalries within medieval Welsh inheritance lured many nobles into offers they could not refuse with the Saxon mobs.

This intricate narrative moves slowly. While a mass market title, this could be used in the classroom effectively; John Davies' subsequent "Hanes Cymru"/ "A History of Wales" became a decade later Penguin's first Welsh-language title, and the standard reference in both tongues. Yet, Williams may provide a shorter, if no less rich, guide for readers wanting a history of Wales in half the pages. He also appends maps and a short reading lists for those needing direction; there are no footnotes outside of a few clarifications. Compact yet scholarly, its three hundred closely printed and carefully arranged pages demand steady attention-- if considerable familiarity with British history, Welsh culture, and English politics.

I was alerted to a minor slip when citing Williams. He may have erred in crediting John Dee for taking credit for the term "British Empire" in the 1580s. Dee along with Peckham and Hakluyt popularized this coinage in the later 1500s to propagandize for the Madoc legend revived by Humphrey Llwyd around 1559. This tale could justify British, via the Welsh, pre-Colombian settlement of the Americas, to strengthen Elizabethan anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic claims. This also co-opted Welsh intellectuals, explorers, and leaders into serving their new Queen.

Williams tells such episodes from a typical tale, of Welsh pride mingled with frequent subservience, with mixed detachment and energy. When he discusses highlights such as Glyn Dŵr's rebellion, the Rebecca Riots, the "China" red-light section of Merthyr, the 1926 strike, or the determination to revolt against the Means Tests of the Depression, the tone lightens and quickens. The six pages describing "Imperial Wales" and the Liberal ascendancy under Lloyd George splendidly sum up a the dazzling facets of a confident period for a newly diverse nation.

Williams tends to distance himself from Welsh Wales, even as he knows it well. His sympathies, if well explained, side with the much-maligned majority that for him represents 80% of contemporary Wales. They made the modern nation prosper:

"Industrial capitalism came hard and it was fought hard. People were trying to build community in the teeth of it. To those problems, no tradition offered any answer; they had to find their own. They had to walk naked." (191)

Yet, much as he defends their interests, he honestly must face the imminent inclusion of Wales within an Anglo-American hegemony. Under Thatcher, facing nuclear threats and pollution from the sky, Williams characterizes his people with natural sympathy and millennial despair. After fifteen hundred years, their chronicler of his kinfolk wonders if now they're "nothing but a naked people under an acid rain." (305)

(Review posted to Amazon US 1/26/09. I worked on it while watching the Miss America Pageant. Miss Indiana won.)

Essentially Welsh Pop Music?

Here's my latest contribution to the AmeriCymru discussion forum about Welsh Rock Music, or its lack. Dave Martin posted lamenting how derivative Welsh bands sound. I earlier commented asking if there's any way ultimately to make a Celtic-language sung pop-rock music true to its cultural roots, if so many groups parrot the latest sounds from Anglo-American centers of production.

Dave Martin, I know what you mean, even sober as I am (now!). What Sarah Hill in her book [ "Blerwytirhwng:" See my review on Amazon and this blog] struggles with and to me does not articulate fully is how you take reggae, post-punk, folk rock, or psychedelia and infuse them with an undeniably Welsh essence. That exists (I'd suggest tentatively as an outsider looking in hearing the music but without intimate connection with Cymru I confess-- that's why I am here to listen and learn) in snatches here and there when I hear in what's sung in Cymraeg a whiff of a deeper link to the land and mythos and hiraeth. But, I too am trapped as a faraway fan, like those art schoolers who founded folk rock bands in Britain in the later 60s; I am trying to romanticize gwerin from my urban perch.

Ireland has, if I may compare, a solid trad scene, of course, but they have failed to produce any musicians able to jump from the trad to the pop or rock while sticking to a Celtic language. I have a new wave record in Irish that's dreck. I think it was the only one of its genre ever made.

Horslips in the 70s went back and forth between electric folk, trad, and hard-rock but they emulated in the end the slick West Coast El Lay studio sound and their success foundered as they tried to match Jethro Tull's arena anthems. Liam Ó Maonlaí on "Rian" (Hothouse Flowers), Iarla Ó Líonaird (on Peter Gabriel's label, tellingly), and Peadar Ó Riada on his two records in the mid-90s to my limited knowledge came closest to integrating a complex world-music inspired approach into their trad, blended with an indie-label rockish eclecticism. This seemed the most promising direction, but this also can dissolve seductively into meaningful moans above mushy synths and flutes stacked atop didgeridoos and tribal drums. (See: Peter Gabriel.)

Sorry to sound like the wannabee rock critic, but I concur with Dave's complaint here: there's a persistent difficulty in locating a tangible substance in music from Wales as truly different. You can't stick lyrics in another language atop the same old pop or folk or rock groove from Anglo-American conventions, and claim some triumph for Celtic reclamation of culture. This remains the problem with asserting there's some essential (that adjective again) difference in Welsh-language music that follows London or LA-based trends. Not sure if this will ever happen for anybody in the Celtic lands making music in the wake of the domination of the international pop conglomerate that shapes and segregates and reproduces our market-tested tunes.

Yet, one last comment. Hill notes how long the Welsh-pop evolution took; there was not a professional rock-pop band able to survive on their music alone until well into the 70s, and as long for a full LP! The whole pop music scene took much longer to evolve in Wales, whether folk and pop in the 60s, rock in the 70s, or punk and reggae in the 80s. The organic sound of The Band that Dave admires itself took patience, years of roadhouse gigs, and smart guys' exposure to lots of earlier, diverse, obscure music before it melded at Big Pink. So, perhaps the blend we're denying may take longer still to percolate into a "truly" Welsh medium of expression?

This poster by Ankst head honcho Emyr Glyn Williams I found at the Ankst homepage, Cardiff's epicenter for Welsh-language indie rock. John Cale'd love this! Andy needs no intro. His rival Saunders Lewis may be regarded by lefties as a Catholic Action Française Plaid Cymru Cymraeg Don Quixote, but the more I read of/about him, the more I admire his principles. More on him? See my post a year back about his Penyberth 1936 protest with D.J. Williams & Lewis Valentine. (If I ever get that pending ILL loan for Dafydd Jenkins' "A Nation on Trial," I'll be able to tell you more about Lewis, especially his leading role in the real-life courtroom case after Tân yn Llŷn.)

Craobh Curtin, Conradh na Gaeilge.

Bím gnóthach liomsa inniu. Mar sin, ní scríobhfaidh go leor anois. Ach, léigh mé dhá nóta le Dónal ó Milwaukee. D'inis sé ormsa faoi suíomh ar an idírlion go raibh go cruinnithe leis féin.

Tá sé anseo: Craobh Curtin, Conradh na Gaeilge ó Milwaukee. Foghlaimeidh tú faoi focail na geimhreadh, imeachtaí Croibhe, nuacht, stair, agus naisc. Go críochaítear ar ais go dtí Blogtrotter, mar sin féin.

Cén fáth? Chuir Dónal nasc leis mo phost faoi Séamas Ó Broine. Chuala Dónal agus mé an fidléir cáiliúl, trocaire air, nuair ag fanta i Gleann Cholm Cille. Bhuail muid linn ag freastail ar chéile go Oideas Gael.

Is cuimhne liomsa i mo rhanga cailín níos óg Cáit ann. Bhí mac leinn ar an Ollscoil Wisconsin ina gcathair Milwaukee ann. Bhi gruaig mageanta uirthi. Téann foghlameoiri fásta go rialta go Milwaukee go dtí Dún na nGall.

Fillfaidh Dónal agus duine eile ann an samhraidh seo chugainn. Smaoiním faoi an Gleann go minic. Níl mé ábalta a fágáil mo chathair. Níl dóthain airgead agamsa anois! Ach, gheobhaidh mé amach faoi cuairt is gaire go Wisconsin go dtí an Gleann airsean féin go luath.

Curtin Branch, Gaelic League.

I'm busy myself today. Therefore, I will not write a lot now. But, I read two notes from Dan of Milwaukee. He told me about a site on the internet that he designed himself.

Here it is: Curtin Branch, Gaelic League of Milwaukee. You will learn about words for winter, Branch events, news, history, and links. One may go back to Blogtrotter, however.

Why? Dan put a link with my post about James Byrne. Dan and I heard the famous late (literally= "mercy on him") fiddler when we stayed at Glencolmcille. We met attending together at Oideas Gael.

"There comes to a memory of me" (=I remember") a younger girl Cáit in my class there. She had magenta hair on her. She was a student at the University of Wisconsin in the city of Milwaukee. Adult learners come regularly from Milwaukee to Donegal.

Dan and other people will return there this next summer. I think about the Glen often. I am unable to leave my city. There is not enough money for me now! But, I will find out about the next visit from Wisconsin to the Glen from himself soon.

Lathophobic Aphasia: EFL Teacher's blog

This greater Birmingham-based EFL teacher reminds me of two other instructors. Mix erudite "Bo" over at "The Expvlsion of the Blatant Beast" and "The Cantos of Mutabilitie" echt-Oxbridge sites (see blog links at right hand bar) with beleaguered me in the polyglot provinces, educationally rusticated if simultaneously consigned a concrete campus in a bleak conurbation. That vocational blend concocts "Vilges Suola"-- his nom-de-plume's from the Sami vocalist Mari Boine's song translated as "white thief." He earns his keep in a classroom honing fine points of grammar; he grinds them into woefully, inevitably clueless greenhorns.

Any difference from me? He's in Britain, with a U.N. roster that I'm not sure comprises students there for the short term, or, as in my Californian case, here for the bachelor's degree. Matriculatory distinctions aside, I laughed out loud (a rare occasion, unless at unintentionally humorous news or my inherited schadenfreude) at his accounts of what it's like to be trapped in a climactically challenged room for hours on end, overeducated and likely underpaid, drilling callow youths with drudge lessons reminding me of Joyce's "is this an umbrella?" Berlitz tutoring in Trieste.

However, just as Joyce met Svevo and earned eventual redemption for his herculean labors, freed if not much richer from his Augean stable mucking, VS-- I was not far off when I thought his moniker was Finnish-- appears to enjoy himself and gets away enough to the Mediterranean. He's a Greek ex-pat (he fooled me-- see comments box for his kind clarification), furthermore, scattering about his blog that different alphabet (translated) alongside explicit art of "handsome males." I admit they are, but I eschewed opening his entries catalogued "homosex."

I did, however, plunge into VS's reflections on uses and abuses of language and teaching. His latest entry that popped up, on Babelfish's misuse, reminded me of Malcolm Bradbury's send-up "Why Come to Slaka?" Such manglings of globalized, agonized English in turn echo those in "Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry," a satirical travel guide I reviewed on Amazon US a while back.

I'll leave his entries under "language" and "teaching" for you to savor. They also have what I have never seen: a rating box for both/or "funny" and "interesting" after each blog post. I cast my vote for those classified under teaching or language; some earned both serious and humorous boxes checked.

Chortling aloud from his posts to my wife-- like me she's a former ESL teacher to adults in L.A.U.S.D.-- I distracted her from watching her Billy Wilder film on cable yesterday, "The Fortune Cookie." (I liked the prop, for personal reasons, of a poor box for "unwed mothers" in the hospital.) 1966, but I wasn't expecting Jack Lemmon to yammer "bitch" and "bastard" about his slovenly ex. You know she's a slut when she's filmed in a rumpled bed, hair post-coitally askew like the winningly lacquered Miss Indiana who won later last night our nation's beauty crown. She, the blonde in the film and not the brunette on stage, also smoked, while a man took a shower in the background, his bare bottom faintly discernable behind the frosted door of the open bathroom in her equally dishevelled flat.

VS links to language blogs such as David Crystal's. I wonder if "Bo" has ever met him-- meaning both the eminent linguist and the Greek British instructor of hapless learners-- at Cambridge? Certainly one wonderful feature of ferreting out bloggers like me: trivia. Next visit to Nick the Dentist, fluent first-generation scion from Ikarian parents, I may assert before novocaine: "I have a small dick" in hesitant koine, perhaps. But that'd be a lie. So I'm told, if not by "handsome males."

Illustration: No shots of handsome males. (Already dog-faced Walter Matthau was a year younger than I am now when he filmed this first comedic pairing with Lemmon! He had a heart attack during the making of it, and seems to drop out of the plot for long stretches. The reason I was surfing the Net while the film was on? I'm not a fan of Lemmon, but I kept my wife parlor company with my laptop.)

No stills of Judi West en deshabille appear extant. This is the only image I found of Miss West prominently displayed. Via an Italian blog; maybe you linguists can figure it out, in the absence of tutor Joyce & native Svevo? "Fortune Cookie" poster

"Spiked": Political Journalism

My friend Carrie from Ireland, with whom I have found much in common politically and intellectually over the years, has guided me often to books, people, and places that have proved rewarding. Both of us, coming up through long involvement in Irish republican issues, have chafed at the tightening straightjacket of leftist PC-speak and recoiled at the overcorrective lurch to the right wing's shrill hyperbole. I suppose there's a mixed metaphor in this unbalanced image!

It's hard as a dissenter by nature to find thoughtful discussions that can roam freely among many ideologues while remaining loyal to an allegiance which, as my recent switch on my voter's registration states, defines me as "decline to state." My wife deems me practically a fascist; my elders think me variously an egghead liberal or a sullen reactionary as they align themselves in reference to me. I always recall the advice, freshly minted with my Bachelor's, from a professor who had taught me four years earlier, first semester freshman year, my required (it being a Jesuit university) introductory course in philosophy.

He had us, eighteen years old barely, at a school whose president had summed us up as promising but "average Catholic high school grads," tackling Ayer, semiotics, and Habermas. Along with two textbooks surveying all of the Western intellectual tradition. This was, ahem, thirty years ago this autumn. Nowadays such "average" students would be subjected to gendered-this and socially constructed-that, but Dr. Blystone had studied in Mainz and took a more Continental approach from somewhere in the pre-PC era that we still managed to huddle in as dorm-sheltered undergrads.

Anyway, the kind doctor-- who I don't even think I'd seen since I took his course!-- asked me, gowned and mortarboarded, about my plans. When I responded "grad school in English lit," he advised: "Never be a slave to any theory." He encouraged me to learn from wherever I found wisdom, but not to be trapped by any demagogue or theoretical bent. Sometimes such simplest comments stick the longest, and this one did. Along with his comment early on in class that I looked "gaunt and aristocratic"!

Back to "Spiked," I suppose they take their name from the spiking of an article to be printed in the old newsroom. A lame lower-case spelling, and a dull logo, but those superficial markings can be easily penetrated to reveal a livelier core. It's the sort of community where, if we are truly Obama's peers (as I am born the summer he was), and we take the more fluid, less fixed identity of a cohort alleged to listen to a wider variety of views than our smug boomer and snide neo-con predecessors, perhaps this flexibility can signal an encouraging trend. I have avoided ranting post-election, preferring to comment, or snipe, now and then on "Liberal Rapture," which you can link to under my bloglinks.

Carrie referred me today to "Spiked." (Unlike "LR," this may be an exchange of wits even my progressively inclined wife might be able to endure-- if gingerly and sparingly. She did surprise me with a nod to scanning the "National Review" on-line along with "Politico" & the "Huffington Post.") It's a London-based online journalistic consortium. Established for five years, there's international contributors. I read an article by Wendy Kaminer, who previously had bored me with a essay in "Harper's" that dragged through theoretical muck. Kaminer, to her credit, weighed in with a sprightlier essay responding as an MOT to the Jesus-friendly sermon at the inauguration. Even though I had heard her tired Jewish joke already, I recommend "Rick Warren: A Pastor We Can't Believe In."

The libertarian-individualist oriented site takes on hot-button topics such as crime, abortion, obesity, Obama, US actions at home and abroad, crime, economics, policy, and the environment et alia multa. On their distrust of the EU, their championing of regional autonomy, and their sympathy towards populism, I sense congeniality. Far more free-market advocates than class-conscious, tree-hugging me, their positions contrast dramatically with mine on immigration, ecology, capitalism, and China, but that's the price to pay for admitting an open-minded exchange. At least I get riled up by some posts and soothed by others. Whereas my local paper tends only to rile me up. The problem remains that too few of us-- I suppose age plays its part in enlarging our blinders-- even consider other viewpoints on many controversies that we've made up our minds about, perhaps decades ago as undergrads! Reminds me of so many activists in Irish republicanism, come to think of it.

Getting over the left-right stalemate; overcoming the timidity of the media to question received notions incorporated from academia, government, and institutions; breaking out of dull bureaucratic standardization; shaking up political complacency. These to me seem admirable goals. I've quoted Desmond Fennell before, but his insistence about renouncing our loyalty, as citizens and as advocates, to the same old seating arrangements as the 1791 French Assembly remains my own rallying cry.

As that like-minded crowd admits under their masthead of sorts:

One consequence of spiked’s ‘question everything’ approach is that we often find ourselves going against the grain of a discussion or dissenting from a consensus. This is not because we are deliberately looking for ‘outrageous’ ideas. It simply reflects how narrow the accepted terrain of public discussion has become, at a time when ideas can be dismissed out-of-hand as being in bad taste or offensive. The dead weight of this new conformism means that society is in danger of losing its critical faculties.

Mick Hume, editor, sums up "spiked." Their valiant (if quixotic as ever for we erudite malcontents) manifesto:

What is spiked? It is an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms. spiked is endorsed by free thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, and hated by the narrow-minded such as Torquemada and Stalin. Or it would be, if they were lucky enough to be around to read it.

Photo: Never saw or even heard of this show, as I don't watch political coverage! Not only on Fox.

Ag íthe mír coirce.

Is maith liom mír coirce go leor. Measaim go raibh imeasc brícfeastaí is tofa air agamsa. D'íth mé an bia sin céann ar maidin seo.

Rinne Léna béile groí. Níor ith Leo cuid mhór airsean de réir cosúlachta. Is é is dóichí go ní itheann sé dhóthain cothú anois agus ansin.

Cén chaoi go raibh maith liomsa é? B'fheidir, gheobhainn babhla leis sútha talamh. Ach, nár fhaighe mé tortach toraidh talún úr ina samraidh anseo i gCalifoirnea ann.

Bíonn Léna go déanamh mír coirce leis rísíní nó sílíní fós. Ní maith liom oiread agus nuair go ndéana sí sé leis cainéal nó spóisra. Mar sin féin, ithim sé go sona!

Íosfaidh mé sé go minic ar feadh an seachtaine deireadh seo chugainn. Tá aimsir go casadh níos fuar faoi deireanach. Titeann fearthainn inniu. .

Is docha, titfidh barrchith. Níl bailc ann. Léigh mé ina nuachtan go raibh citheannaí beag.

"Tá bua na nuachta aige."-- Fuair an frasa seo i mo fhoclóir. Tá sé beirt cith agus mír coirce go cuí; tá beirt rudaí a chur i gcuimhne do geimreadh gearr amháin orainn ansiud.

Eating oatmeal.

I like oatmeal a lot. I think that it may be among my most chosen breakfasts. I ate that very dish this morning. {Can't use "favorite" adjectivally in a non-personal attribution in my Irish dictionary!}

Layne made a generous meal. Leo did not eat his share, likely. It's probable that he does not eat enough nutrition now and then.

How may I like it? Perhaps, I may get a bowl with strawberries. But, there may not be found an abundance of fresh fruit of a farm in summer here in California.

Layne (usually) may be making oatmeal with raisins or cherries too. I don't like it as much when she may make it with cinnamon or spice. All the same, I eat it happily!

I will eat it often during the next weekend. The weather is turning more cold lately. Rain falls today.

Probably, light rain will fall. There is not heavy rain. I read in the news that there may be few showers.

"It has the charm of novelty."-- I found this phrase in my dictionary. There's a fitting pair, rain and oatmeal; there's a pair of things that remind of only a short winter for us out here.

Introversion: Withdrawal Symptoms.

My wife blogged today about me (among other mixed blessings). She claimed that this article would be tattooed on my chest: "Introverts of the World, Unite!" Jonathan Rauch's essay for the March 2003 issue of "The Atlantic Monthly" remains among its top-five most e-mailed articles. While too lengthy, I demurred to the missus, for such "Memento"-like dermatological commemoration on my pale torso, I have ingested, intellectually and emotionally, Rauch's contents years ago.

Rauch argues that introversion's an orientation, doomed to misunderstanding by yapping, yipping, touchy-feely, domineering extroverts who lord themselves over me and my oppressed, or at least belittled, minority. Remember, I came of adolescence in the '70s, when guitar-spurred group hugs invaded even the sacrifice of many a Mass. I dreaded such earnest communism from that post-Vatican II "agape feast." Unless the ritual "kiss of peace" happened to embrace a nearby congregant of the opposite sex, if under about 40 and above 12 or so, excluding relatives.

Needing time alone, sidling away from small talk, dreading dinner parties, preferring "down time," or meeting new people's not a disability. Maybe the new DSM will include it for insurance purposes, but I reject classification (at least for this trait) as a deviant. The shrinks've lobbied shyness into an official "Social Anxiety Disorder," logically abbreviated as SAD. Introversion's not, the author insists and I agree, a lifestyle-- or what my spouse pithily and frequently has translated to as: "me being an a--hole".

I concur with Rauch's contention that an hour being "on" for an introvert means two hours "off" any social contact. As a teacher, one who actually has always enjoyed (for a quarter-century next autumn) being in front of a captive crowd regaling them with trivia, my reveries, and the occasional lecture topic as assigned on the syllabus, this may confound those who know me as their professor. Yet, I have by profession daily enough of other people. I get my mingling done. I ride the train, take the bus, and/or endure traffic. I go home and think and mull and read and blog.

This cocooning combines with my reluctance for therapy. Freud lamented the Irish being alone among those unable to benefit from his couch and the "talking cure." This stubbornness leaves me content but doubtless my family and few friends bewildered. However, Rauch sums up a weariness we stoics feel when pummelled about by everyone else in public each day we sally forth to do our duty and make our living.

We aren't misanthropes; we aren't cranks. Rather, we tire easily from dealing with others in situations that leave us liable to unpredictable encounters. Rauch reminds us, in a piece that I am unsure would be filed under humor or psychology, that our need for withdrawal "isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay— in small doses."

Photo: FearGod.net. Contrary to the marquee, I would not classify "timidity" as a near-synonym for "introversion." Timid folks would not, I aver, choose teaching as a career, or feel no more than the natural butterflies before standing at a podium. Furthermore, I doubted such a church existed. Who'd attend?

Returning to the site, I learned this display was concocted by the clever blogger at "Graham's Paddock" at FearGod.net. His explanation directed me to: Church Sign Generator. That URL comes with this cryptic warning as its first sentence: If you've received an offensive sign from 'Beth Sholom Synagogue' or 'Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church' or some other church or synagogue, please read this." (=hyperlink embedded under last phrase)