Jean-Luc Hennig's "Rear View": Review

A thin, naughty book you pick up for two hours' dalliance at an outdoor cafe in a slightly seedy but raffishly charming market town. This is a collection of feullitons-- short essays that wear their learning lightly if ostentatiously. It's written by a scholar who's also a journalist. He also penned, the jacket flap tells us, an erotic history of fruits & vegetables. Rather than a theoretical tome or an array of pictures for a mature audience, "The Rear View" compiles his reflections, a commonplace book about an overlooked body part and often disdained foundation of yourself that you are probably sitting on as you read this review (posted today on Amazon US).

It's difficult when writing about erotic and sexual constructs not to slip into fulsome metaphor. This book shares a coyness blended into a more explicit entry into the nether-realm of the senses, Toni Bentley's (2005) "The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir." (Also reviewed by me recently on Amazon.) Strangely, Bentley does not mention this earlier account, the only other survey even skirting this topic from a mainstream American press which I have found.

Jean-Luc Hennig, a professor of "grammar," a former editor at Libération and Rolling Stone, occupies the intersection between academia and left-leaning popular journalism, so the erudite mixes with the familiar knowingly. He carries that Gallic "je ne se quoi" which in translation English-speaking readers may be titillated or annoyed by in equal measure. 32 short chapters follow the style and tone of Roland Barthes' "Mythologies," as they ponder the derriére from anthropological, historical, literary, and especially aesthetic points of view. The early Christian classification of this as a no-man's zone, and repressive medieval social and theological reactions (perhaps for their scantier extant testimony if no less outraged coverage), do suffer considerable neglect here. Rabelais, de Sade, and courtesans all jostle, but edge others aside. For instance, the calumny that toppled the Templars and the alleged derivation of "bugger" from a heretical movement: both are missing from a chapter on the diabolic associations. Chaucer and Dante are absent; likewise Joyce and Lawrence.

Mark D. Jordan's 1997 "The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology" examines, if from a homosexual rather than heterosexual concentration, the misreading of the Genesis story that led to identification of the crime of Sodom & Gomorrah with neither inhospitality to strangers nor possibly gang rape but a canonical insistence that the sin of the townspeople referred to same-sex penetration. Jordan addresses, however, a learned readership within a narrower scope; Hennig appeals to a casual reader looking for thoughtful but lighter diversion. The learning's easygoing.

This topic, as well as the heterosexual experiences Bentley refers to in passing, lumbers about culturally weighted with considerable baggage ever since the Christian condemnation of this activity consigned those who investigate it into furtive pursuits. While queer theory and gay-oriented readings have dominated emerging study in the past few decades, the heterosexual contexts remain far less scrutinized in detail. Bentley documents her skill at the game, rarer her fellow fans; Hennig admires the crowd more often than play-by-play action. Lately, the topic's habitually consigned to queer theory or gay-themed cultural studies. For a male-female dynamic fully fleshed out, this androgynous "contested space" demands a mass-market study pitched beyond pathologists-- or perhaps psychoanalysts-- as far as I can tell!

However, considering the lack of competition, this jeu d'esprit, a witty bagatelle of 32 variations on an often furtive sight well lure you, as Hennig reminds us, to gaze with renewed interest at each other's passing by. It's full of suggestions and possibilities that leave you, as the book's only 180 large-type pages, with curious details and a sense that there's much more to be found about this subject. Perhaps this is the nature of any study of what appeals to the erotic sensibility and, for this topic, the conventionally forbidden expression of its fulfillment.

I wish the book had footnotes, as the references cannot be traced without any paginal documentation. No bibliography, either. Monochrome photos exist, but they were torn out of my public library copy before I checked it out, so I cannot comment. The examination of Hennig's sources, those earlier loving looks and hateful stares, remains superficial. This weakens the usefulness of this text beyond one man's heap of wit and arcane learning.

Nevertheless, it's a quaint perusal despite its often superficial array of ideas arranged more to graze among for a few minutes rather than to nourish into a more sustained examination of the subject. Hennig, like so many smart writers, makes an obvious point-- but one that you and I may not have expressed so precisely. The area of our own body least easily viewed by me is that open to your visual scrutiny-- and possibly the erotic attention of everyone else who follows us. Unless we look back, perhaps we never know who's taking the measure of our own rear view.

Academy of Linguistic Awareness

This Santa Barbara billboard, googled when lord knows what I was looking for given my recent forays (I hope spyware's McAffeed) into the realms of the cybersenses, sums up much about teaching, talking, listening, and enduring a polyglot mongrel of a balkanized dusty city less genteel than that resort town a hundred miles up the coast with enviable weather only my genial dentist can afford (at his weekend manse, a few doors down from which on The Mesa facing Shoreline Park last summer this time our family for a blissful week could pretend to live in the realm of a million-and-a-half dollar tiny 50s houses built on oil lands and considered once a downmarket neighorhood compared to, say Hope Ranch nearby not to mention Montecito the other side of town past what used to be the barrio).

The only Irish connection I can conjure after the past three bleary days immersed in dicey research involving Joyce and let's say for family viewing "transgressive" spaces of erotic contention is that Gerty McDowell even sounded a bit more high class than her hapless parodied counterpart a century later, sunbathing on another strand, tilting back to watch another fireworks display like the one we missed as we headed back to LA the Fourth of July, Gertie's likably peabrained, good-hearted, clueless, surely long-legged but perhaps less gimpy lass thinking of "it"--- no less than Toni Bentley (see here two days earlier posted, or the review on Hennig's "Rear View two days later-- indulging my "research" of late, blame it on Joyce) or you and me.

Robert Berry's "Ulysses 'Seen'" Graphic Novel Adaptation

A few frames shown here. Handsomely rendered. Unfortunately, only the opening page so far at: http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/08/09/robert-berry

James Joyce's "Exiles": Review

Amazon US, my review posted today. (Image from 1999 film "Nora.")

Worth a few hours perusal, as it's doubtful you'll see it on stage. Often relegated to the back of the Joycean shelf for its protagonist who resembles a nearly identical profile to his maker, nonetheless the play has its appeal as a portrait of the artist post-Stephen Dedalus. Written ten years after Bloomsday and the flight into exile by him and Nora, Joyce presents an update on his earlier portrayal of the young Irishman determined to turn his back on his mother, his homeland, and his faith.

The more you know about Joyce and Nora, when he returned to Ireland in 1909 to be consumed with jealousy by rumors that she had been unfaithful to him with Joyce's old friend Vincent Cosgrave, and then in 1911-12 when Joyce confronted Roberto Prezioso in Trieste, accusing him of trying to seduce Nora, the more you may find this three-act play, written in 1914, intriguing. Certainly it's in the style of Ibsen, and generally as a minor work has been regarded of interest more for its insights into the mentally tortured artist, Richard (or "Dick") Rowan, but the play moves along efficiently, if a bit melodramatically and wordily.

The action takes place over two days, and compresses as you'd expect much about the roles of artists, exiles, and lovers as the new century's own franker treatment of infidelity and its aftermath generate, beneath the dramaturgical machinations that do creak about, surprisingly moving moments of truth. Doubt and betrayal, the challenge of defying the bonds of sexual monogamy, aesthetic truth vs. job security, the benefits and the costs of an "open relationship"-- all contribute contemporary themes that for this era had begun to enter Irish theatre as they already had influenced (back to Ibsen) many contemporary Continental and British plays. One wonders about the hometown reaction if Yeats had not rejected it (it wasn't an Irish folk drama) for the Abbey in August 1917!

Reading the play, observers today, informed as we are by the life of the writer and his own tensions in love and vocation, can see how Joyce in the guise of Richard controls other characters, like it or not. Joyce's own guilty conscience in his alter ego of Richard dominates. Robert, Bertha, and especially Beatrice all revolve around the approval of Richard. Bertha & Robert make an appealing pair, in my opinion; their earthiness makes them more down-to-earth for our tastes, while Richard, unless acted well, may not escape priggishness beneath the attitude of a liberated modern freethinker. He, despite his hesitancy, rules this domestic roost. (Not much is even thinly disguised when it comes to this figure and his unmarried companion-- they have returned to Dublin after nine years in Rome.) Even if Richard is more of a stand-in for his creator, the "authorial fallacy" aside, the drama does enrich your understanding of Joyce in his own separation from not only Ireland but conventional moral standards and familial support.

It's rarely performed. Earlier versions, "A Brilliant Career" & "Dream Stuff," no longer exist. Joyce told Ezra Pound that he doubted it could work in the theatre. But the set-up, however schematic, between Richard, Bertha, his companion (and mother of their child, Archie), her wooer Robert Hand, and in turn his first cousin and thwarted amour, Beatrice-- who neatly longs for Richard-- does have its moments of tenderness, insight, and even a line proclaiming the need for Ireland to turn towards not only Europe but to coffee for inspiration!

Joyce's Ulysses Podcast: Paigerella

One man takes on reciting it all. Looks and must be genially manic, shares my now-dormant but once in dreams Madonna fetish (but I preferred her dark roots, attracted to brunettes rather than the drugstore dyed blonde), chose the great Marilyn Monroe reads "Penelope" photo that graces my Literature course site on E-College. Paige Boy reads the whole novel and is in the middle of "Cyclops," poor lad, at present. Isn't this a great Etch-a-Sketch of James Aloysius Joyce?

Also, admire this beautiful postcard from P's site. Note the fireworks bursting from the delta hidden beneath her decorously crossed stance within an invitingly open dress. Brilliant image. Reminds me of a provocative Cartier-Bresson photograph with a woman's face obscured behind an open book, her sexy legs curled out endlessly from under her elegant short skirt as she reclines on a divan, coy cover in hand. The paperback here is the overseas Penguin (Martello Tower on the front) that you cannot buy here due to copyright. Is Gertie reading about herself? Not from where her eyes and hand now join, but perhaps "Nausicaa" at the bookmark? As for the postcard, I recall seeing another one with a McCoy quote similarly enlarged, perhaps at a public place when scurrying about Dublin-- already long ago but only two weeks gone but alive in memory. As is June 15, 1904 for us all, thanks to one Dubliner who stayed with Gogarty & Trench but less than a week one September at the Tower, another genial maniac.

http://paigerella.libsyn.com/

Review: Toni Bentley's "The Surrender"

In which this blogger gingerly if intellectually considers sex, a particular variation in an "erotic memoir" treating an expression of love for which (fearful of a Pandora's Box of spam) I dare not speak its name, even if my wife's on-line musings edge nearer the everlastingly intriguing topic du jour as opposed to my more reticent self. At least I enriched my usual fare; this I picked up at the library with Rogelio Alonso's newly translated study "The IRA & Armed Struggle" & Bob Quinn's account of his 1940s childhood along Dublin's River Dodder in a downmarket "Smokey Hollow." Surely the first and probably last book I'll ever open from the Regan Books imprint that imploded in the Murdoch-OJ "If I Did It" scandal, which tames Bentley's "How I Did It" exploits. At least we have moral outrage in its proper balance, as smirking murder annihilates even blunt sex.

I dutifully introduce to this Amazon US review two Irish connections: the early medieval sadsack penitentials single out Bentley's confessed action as deserving of punishment but less so for heteros, at least. James Joyce, even if not accusing Bloom of this act unambiguously in his ambiguous "Circe" chapter, sidles near this "contested space" in his December 1909 letters to Nora, grandad's reveries that so angered Stephen Joyce and resulted in his ridiculous megalomaniacal control of the estate preventing scholarly access since Ellmann published them in 1975. I am not even "officially" to 1909 yet, having just begun the "Selected Letters" and only with the couple in Trieste at Berlitz so far. More about Sunny Jim and his "f---bird" Nora related to this and so much more (of course) anon.

"Words seemed the only way to mark the spot, to preserve my transitory experience of eternity. This is a testamentary document. Do not miss the message, distracted by the profanity of the act." (8-9) The seven pages that comprise "The Holy F[&%$]" earn five stars. As a man, within this book-- not my usual genre!-- I found this introduction revelatory: it shows the male how otherworldly the act of sex can become when made unfamiliar and raw and sanctified by its daring. The disorienting act of sex by its transfer away from the usual to the upended challenges the natural order. The rapture Bentley craves shares its closeness to that open to procreation. The loss of ego, however, she chooses to release not by the social norm for union but that proclaiming a humanistic defiance of the ordinary.

A rebellious decision that places a woman as truly pro-choice, even against the familiar voices for sexual freedom which themselves tended to disdain this action, which found few advocates among the now-PC orthodoxy of earlier pioneers for sexual liberation. Post-feminists, or more open-minded women, may find, as might many men, a potential for renewal of sexual possibility in this outre practice. In this brief memoir, hints of this arousing power echo from the introduction outward. While the rest of the book fails for me to expand upon the insights of the seven pages of text introducing this daring subject, Bentley is to be commended for her courage. She brings her idea and ideal of fulfillment by sexual longing to a mass market, mature, audience rather than where this book may have languished, in some "adult" category that no public library or major bookstore would have stocked.

Bentley recounts her literary, spiritual, and physical quest to find God in this tender but risky act of total submission to another man. She is a smart, witty woman. Not a natural writer, it seems; the introduction remains the most cogent presentation of her subject. Her own sexual exploits along brazen lines, in fact, make up "color commentary" compared to her main psycho-sexual narrative. Her reports from numbered acts among the nearly three-hundred "surrenders" spice up her reflections, the post-coital thoughts that as the quote I opened this review with demonstrates, she commits to paper as well as memory.

The topic, judged to make most readers skittish if judged by the coy refusal of the dust jacket blurbs to explicitly state her "holy act" makes this book controversial. This ultimate frontier is crossed by Bentley. It's probably the last to be explored, in our era where rumors of "rainbow parties" among adolescents, Monica and cigars, and casual banter have made another formerly whispered, semi-taboo act, that of oral stimulation, practically mainstream in our society. Bondage gear co-opted by Hot Topic, French maid uniforms by Halloween-clad grown-ups, sex emporiums franchised, there's little remaining even for half-prudish, half-brave Americans to contemplate that presents a higher barrier to overcome on the journey to knowledge through sexual union. For women who have the opportunity to have it all whenever and with whomever, Bentley asks: "is that all there is?" No less than a contemplative monk or nun, Bentley treats the "Sex & the City" generation to her candor and her own solution.

This disparity between what as Seneca lamented-- not to mention the boastful Doobie Brothers' album title!-- "what were once vices are now habits" of conventional vaginal and now (if only the past forty years) oral intercourse against that of alternative penetration make up the thrust of her argument here. Straight intercourse, she proposes, for her is by its "nature" meant to be too easy, too deceptive for the one entering, and too familiar. She counters the (in)famous passage in Norman Mailer's "An American Dream" that angered Kate Millett in the opening pages of her "Sexual Politics" decades ago. What's lacking in popular literature is a cultural history of attitudes towards this act, whose feared name, [Blog: when you articulate the municipal sin misattributed to the Cities of the Plain (see Mark Jordan's book to be reviewed by me soon here)] drips with condemnation, the taint of fire and the smell of brimstone.

"A raid on the Devil and a trip on back to the Lord" as Mailer sums up the difference between the two entries, but Bentley insists that this is a male view, and few males, she charges, have surrendered as she has. This sub-topic, however, is but alluded to in the rest of the memoir. Her consideration would have benefited from placing her own experience within a context of other men and women who have sought ecstasy beyond pleasure or pain. Her introduction posits for this form of trust in one's partner, one's own liberation on the way towards the mystical union with the divine. These are daring suggestions, and refreshing ones. But, for most of the remainder, her own affairs with men and a woman here and there take precedence over implications of this larger subject. It still awaits sustained and serious attention by a major publisher and a skilled interpreter. {See my Amazon review blogged here more recently of "The Rear View," Jean-Luc Hennig.) This background needs to be foregrounded, the sides reversed, the exchange of the dominant model of intercourse with the one that few today can honestly, openly confront.

My title of the review [Blog: "Sowing Seed in a Barren Furrow"] is one of the few analogies she does not use! But, I chose it as it symbolizes the decision to engage in an intimate encounter that remains the most confrontational in its refusal to follow the easier course, the natural destination we all drive towards, the road more travelled. Admittedly, it's difficult as Bentley herself finds to avoid bottom-heavy metaphors or puns, and she falls into this trap at the risk of silliness, which on the other hand lightens the self-analytical tone of her memoir. She reminds us that sex however pursued should be more enjoyable and less fraught with tension.

The issues she has with her father are covered in chapters I found rather predictable, and the arc of the affair with her lover "Mr. A" follows a familiar curve. While I recognize her commendable desire to overcome her atheist background by her search for the transcendent, and her own italicized couplings play well off the more detailed rationales and journalistic treatments, the balance of the narrative remains unsettled. Perhaps unavoidably in a book of this nervous search, but more polishing of the remainder of the manuscript to match the grace of its opening pages would have resulted in a better crafted study. Sex and spirituality deserve wherever an adept joins them a respectful, profound meditation.

It's as if she wanted to write a memoir about "it" and a study of "it," but then settled abruptly to chart her affair and end with its quick aftermath. She skims therefore in her conclusion a far more valuable integration of her Buddhist meditation. Surely the Tantric and esoteric teachings linking sex and spirit deserved more elucidation?

The book halts nearly too abruptly. Short chapters (two hundred large-type pages can easily be read in less than two hours) dash about between well-chosen quotes, statistics, random musings, and an admittedly intriguing comparison between the rigors of her quarter-century of ballet training and the demands that she places her body and soul into while enjoying the embrace of her adventurous lover. Recommended for open-minded readers, and I hope this book will encourage writers to consider more complex implications of the subversive argument and enticing situations Bentley uncovers.

(Blog P.S. A portion of Bentley's introduction excerpted via her site: http://www.tonibentley.com/pages/surrender-playboy.html

Image credit of author, from NY Times, titled "Once Forbidden, Now Championed," a rather Senecan allusion! Bentley had 33 previous lovers, is in her mid-forties; I am her age but with a tenth of her breadth of experience! "Mr. A." was the first into what Sir Richard F. Burton in Victorian times suggested as he roamed the nether realms of body and geography as her "Sotadic Zone."

Extra credit for author's inclusion on her website of deadpan reviews. Snappy comebacks, in soundbites: http://www.tonibentley.com/pages/surrender_pages/surrender-nerve.html.

About the "sacred sex" Bentley discovers in a Salon interview with a somewhat skeptical Rebecca Traister:} http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2004/10/08/bentley/index.html

Cambridge Companion to James Joyce: Review

Posted to Amazon US, today! The cover's odd; Mainie Jennett, although her 1922-44 modernist abstraction "shocked the Dublin art world," we find from the back blurb: "No connection with Joyce has been recorded."

This second edition (2006) adds essays by Garry Leonard on "Dubliners," Joseph Valente on sexuality, Jennifer Wicke on consumer culture, and colonialism & nationalism by Marjorie Howes. The others mostly carry over, with minimal revision if lightly updated bibliographies, from the 1990 book. The earlier essays often are barely revised, however; Seamus Deane manages to have his earlier, then-innovative "Joyce the Irishman" essay offer no bibliography with any works later than his own 1987 book. Deane fails to revise what could have been a widely read entry for a new generation of readers and critics following the scholarship that he and his colleagues in the 1980s had pioneered. Deane offers no new thoughts on Joyce to the considerable and innovative criticism of the past fifteen years, somewhat disappointingly. The post Field Day surge in critical debate in Irish Studies seems ignored.

Christopher Butler gives you a lot on modernist counterparts to Joyce but less of Joyce himself within this daunting context. Joseph Valente manages to make a solid point about how Joyce took on all of sexuality as if it transgressed the norm in the Irish Catholic ethos gone haywire, as if universally any sexual manifestation was tainted by its very existence. Unfortunately, from this enticing observation the essay descends into jargon that vitiates the juice out of this potentially engrossing topic.

The heavy hand of the academic interpreter does weigh down many of these essays, new and old; too fusty and theory-bound, they reflect not only the potential of younger Joyceans to suggest fresh readings but the tendency of the recent scholars minted and tenured to fall back into dense, dull, and deadly polemics that drain the vigor out of the texts they analyze. The enlightened non-professoriate for which Joyce also sought to write here lacks its contribution. The Joycean industry churns on, its own productions as the headnote to "Further Reading" listed at the back ironically notes-- none of the secondary listings annotated are judged as essential!

Therefore, given that they are the results of devoted toilers on the Joyce assembly line, the essays vary in quality. This was in 1990 the first "modern" Companion to follow only Shakespeare & Chaucer. Now, there are dozens, and no professor let alone educated reader can keep up with even one author or genre among those Cambridge carries. The recommended reading should guide you to the best of the past few years that's been published, nonetheless. But few of these books (however necessary are guides to Ulysses and the Wake) will provide the verve of the original texts. Also, the excitement I recall that linked all of those in the Joseph Conrad Companion is here vitiated by the combination of more mundane lit-crit merged with au courant theory and polysyllabic verbiage that has made the Beckett, Irish Drama, and Irish Poetry Companions more plodding in parts.

But, the best essays here deserve singling out. I rounded this up from 3 to 4, more or less, based on four or five entries whose strengths overshadow most of their competing peers. Editor Derek Attridge's encouragement in "Reading Joyce" reminds us of the multiple possibilities latent and apparent in the texts that have taught us how to understand modernism even if we have had little exposure to Joyce! His few pages should be required reading for anyone encountering the author for the first or fiftieth time. Garry Leonard's "Dubliners" chapter makes me want to read the professor's other works, for he reminds us of the care with which Joyce crafted his stories, and how much a few sentences from "Clay" can serve to illustrate the manner in which we can unlock the treasure of these enigmatic, pared-down, and endlessly suggestive tales. Similarly, Jennifer Levine beckons the nervous neophyte into the mysteries of "Ulysses" in a way that reassures the reader of the vastness of the novel, yet also grounds the ambitious narrative within a humanist, approachable, and sensible grounding in quotidian experience.

Jeri Johnson gives a spirited rejoinder to any student skeptical of feminism within the texts; Jennifer Wickes reminds us how even academics forget that they too are a targeted market envisioned by Joyce himself, and how his books encompass all of the world, mass culture managing to snare us all to our evident delight (as you read about my contribution to mass-cult here on Amazon in turn) rather than any retreat into elitist retreat (even for the Wake?) or recondite experimentation.

In summary, Attridge, Levine, Wickes, and especially Leonard remind us of the potential excitement that the texts hold for beginning or advanced readers. Joyce cannot exhaust, as Leonard admits in his classroom experience (about the only critic who acknowledges this crucial mode of transmission and continued reception of Joyce that surely enters the uncredited thoughts of every scholar here contributing), our ability to comprehend him. This Companion, for all of its shortcomings, does attest to the depth that great literature can offer us, the re-readings that carry us deeper into the labyrinth made by the inheritor of Dedalus.

MTV Ireland: Guidebook Review

Posted to Amazon US today. Thanks to Miss Templeton's colleagues at Wiley for the pristine copy. I learned a lot from it, not all of it useful to a monogamous, straight, introverted, non-dancing, bookish, middle-aged fellow like myself, but no knowledge is lost knowledge to me!

I recall that the "Let's Go" guidebooks for young travelers were started by Ivy Leaguers on summer break. They mix a commendable exposure to culture with practical tips on decent, affordable digs and eats. Their ethos speaks to a generation who combined a budget with a brain. By comparison, the title of MTV perched above all else proves the power of branding for the current demographic. They may not have come out of the Ivy League, however, and from the contents I've perused appear more likely to party all night down the pub, cruise for a genial hook-up, and crash the next day at the recommended hostel.

If you are wanting guidance on pick-up spots, internet cafe rates, gay-friendly hangouts, shopping sprees, or surfing or kayaking, this book, on the other hand, appeals to the young visitor more eager to chat up new friends for a night or a fortnight rather than take in another cathedral's nave or a dull display of a famous writer's scanty memorabilia. It does give helpful advice on ice-breakers for meeting folks in Belfast, how to turn down firmly but gracefully a persistent come-on from the next barstool, or how to tap with a coin your freshly poured pint of Guinness to know when it's best to hoist the glass. Nuggets of such information, often as blue-printed sidebars, make up for the rather mundane layout and lack of pictures. The book opens easily, the type is readable, and stars, "best," and "free" mark particular entries. Specific (a good touch for foreigners) credit card info, URLs, and phone numbers are included.

Unlike many competing guidebooks such as Rough Guide or Lonely Planet, there's no colorful illustrations to leaven the pages of text. Unlike the Moon Handbook (reviewed by me on Amazon), the maps are few and poor in detail. Unlike the Footprint guidebook (also reviewed by me), there is a paucity of attention given cultural or historical contexts. Surprisingly, however, the editing even for Dublin, for example, compresses too much. Only three bookstores are recommended for all of Dublin, while the well-chosen stock (with a generous emphasis on gay topics) at Books Upstairs receives no mention, contrasted with the rather fustier (but still it's often overlooked, and so deserves a mention too) Greene's. The county map at the back endflap is useless, indicating only the borders and 32 county seats. The space could have been used for a decent, if again minimal, highway and major cities and market towns map on this crucial portion of any useful guidebook.

The tone tends towards the glib, no surprise if you watch MTV. This is not a Frommer's (which however spun-off this via a John Wiley distribution with this guide!) for the mature and more affluent tourist, or a Fodor's with its calm recitation of the finer places to lounge and dine. The choices for both horizontal and reclining activities here tend to be ranked as Cheap, Doable, and Splurge, but all for a far more vibrant hipster crowd. Sleeping, Eating, and Partying (Bars/Lounges, Pubs, Clubs, Gay Scene, Live Music, Comedy Clubs, Performance Venues: subheadings in Cork City!), replace the more terse lists of a few pubs or cafes most competitors provide.

Basics, Getting There & Getting Around, Sightseeing, and Road Trips from hub cities are featured. This follows a sensible design that I recommend given the reality of how most visitors get to know a corner of the country for a few days. What to do lists if you have a day are also helpful. Maps however, may need to be supplemented by those in other guidebooks, or free maps from tourist offices. I do like, perhaps since the snarky attitude comes as a refreshing if soon annoying antidote to my usual preference in both armchair and actual use of Irish guidebooks, the honesty. The lack of pretense, after all, remains a certifiably native trait.

This would not be "the" guidebook stowed in my luggage, although I'd skim it before my journey. But if you happen to be under 35 or so, or accompanied by younger folks on your visit, I'd give your target demographic pair of eyes a look at this guidebook with an nod towards packing it along. In the rural areas, many counties only earn a handful of sites or towns for detailed mention. This book covers the major cities better but skimps on the market towns and scenic but perhaps half-moribund (for the ravers' tastes) hamlets. It does cover the Aran Islands, yes, but it tells of the boredom that readers with a short attention span may find along with the beauty. Granted, you can tell the younguns to read the appendix, "History 101" that does give a few quick pages to necessary background for even the least scholarly member of your travelling road show to comprehend during the flight over.

I know this is meant for an audience that no previous guidebook has catered fully to, and more power to it if it draws its readers into a more sustained immersion in the craic and the warmth that even tawdry consumerism cannot totally eradicate. As well as taking the piss out of one and all. (A sentence not in the Amazon review!) We hope. Its persistent lack of depth regarding the Irish heritage (one page total for books, films, and music recommended, and many of these poorly chosen!) can be countered by a Blue Guide at the other archaeological extreme, or the New Age-Celt pilgrim might choose Cary Meehan's Guide to Sacred Ireland (also reviewed by me). Let's Go combines brains with frugality. Footprint & Moon are both commendable one-writer introductions that convey a single sensibility well while exhausting the island; Lonely Planet & Rough Guide stick to the path once less-travelled if no longer off the beaten track, and Fodor's & Frommer's do carry a gravitas that balances the tipsiness in MTV's p-o-v.

Origins of the British: Stephen Oppenheimer's book reviewed.


Not the place to begin, but this book may reward advanced readers who can handle a popularized but scholarly work on the implications of recent findings in DNA. Earlier readers posting {this is my Amazon US review posted today; search this blog for posts on Sykes' "Blood of the Isles" and DNA British origins} frequently disparage this book's ponderous prose and its massive array of recondite DNA analyses. After reading more accessible, and considerably shorter (no coincidence!) works on genetics and anthropology by Spencer Wells and Bryan Sykes (for both authors, their two most recent books reviewed by me on Amazon), I felt ready to tackle Oppenheimer's work, despite its difficulty. While the time invested paid off in a better knowledge of the Celtic and British origin debate and the possible influence of Germanic cultural and linguistic influences preceding not only the Anglo-Saxon invasion but the preceding Roman occupation, Oppenheimer while he may be a better scholar than Sykes remains a less entertaining writer. Sykes can popularize his findings in "Blood of the Isles" & "Seven Daughters of Eve." He also can profit from them if you note the enterprise Oxford Genetics. As I commented when reviewing Sykes' "Blood," it remains curious that two geneticists both at Oxford do not even mention the other colleague in hundreds of pages of closely documented and meticulously referenced texts.

This apparent rivalry aside, Oppenheimer acknowledges very late in his text that names given to Rostov or Ian or Helena are merely "aides memoires" for R1B-11 or the like in an alphabet soup of markers all geneticists rely upon. Readers of both Sykes & Oppenheimer sniff disdainfully at this popularization, but surely both scientists and lay people need assistance in imagining "Eve" or "Lucy" or the "Ice Man" to make more personal the findings buried in blood types or bone samples. Oppenheimer carefully explains his reasons for clarifying relationships among these difficult classifications, numbering in the thousands by now. Much explanatory material on genetics here is relegated to appendices and a glossary; while Sykes & Wells integrate more definitions and analogies into their briefer, more readable books, Oppenheimer opts for density.

This can bore a reader. My eyes glazed over in the second hundred pages full of dull genetics. The first hundred, tackling the Celtic origins debate and guardedly based on scholars such as Simon James & Barry Cunliffe, and Iron Age archaeologists such as John Collis, argues a southerly direction into the British Isles for Celtic infusion, not the La Tene Danube-Central European homeland and its overland route for entry into the Isles. Personally, I'd have liked to have Bob Quinn's book "The Atlantean Irish" (reviewed by me) credited for its prescience regarding the Atlantic Celt "fringe" movement that Cunliffe and others have since fought to replace the Continental migration theories of the 19c. This vexed matter alone, building upon the past two decades of Celtic revision, or Celto-skepticism, could fill an entire book easily.

But, I did perk up eventually. This is more a reference book on a variety of unevenly covered but admittedly provocative topics. He writes clearly in places and dully in many others, depending it seems on his diligence vs. his enthusiasm! This is an arduous trek, but you need to weather this if your curiosity's aroused about this intellectual terrain that for the first time geneticists and linguists have entered to do battle over, not to mention archeologists and historians!

Advances in DNA may soon rely on its suggestions, or they may overturn its assumptions. But, Oppenheimer bravely piles all he has amassed for the benefit of science. It may be too clunky and over-ambitious, but he has done specialized researchers, armchair genealogists, and academics like myself needing a non-technical explanation of dozens of arcane debates all a service.

Oppenheimer builds on this fact-laden if recondite foundation to posit that many of today's ancestors came to the Isles perhaps as early as around 15-7,500 years ago. The land bridge before the end of the last Ice Age became submerged allowed two major inflows of migration, from a Ukrainian-Moldavian refuge, and an Iberian refuge. The former provided a basis for North Sea movements added to later by Scandinavians, Saxons, Belgae, and other Continental peoples. The latter brought people in on the Irish, Welsh, and Scottish sides closest to the Irish Sea that opened up in the later periods of global warming. Germanic languages cannot have diverged in Old English so rapidly after the Saxon incursions, nor were (against the Welsh historian Gildas' spurious claims of Celtic "wipeout") the indigenous natives necessarily Celtic-speakers all prior to the landing of Hengist and his post-Roman mercenaries.

Percentages of genetic disruption rarely reach even the point of "decimation" of 10% in a handful of Anglian areas, according to genetic studies of inhabitants today in these long-stable regions of Britain. Simply and ineradicably, this persistent divide, genetically and perhaps linguistically, Oppenheimer proposes, persists in our DNA. This parallels the Germanic vs. Celtic division of languages in the Isles, the spine of mountains serving as an insular border between these two major routes for farming and colonization.

The hoary myth of a Celtic genocide by Teutonic overlords that inspired Arthur's last stand, it seems, proves more a "Dark Age" screed than plausible history. Granted that this early medieval era remains fraught with dangers for those reliant only on chronicles or a misleading archeological record, Oppenheimer here makes his boldest suggestion.

Probably the first to enter this fray as a geneticist, he confronts linguistic assumptions about the rapid spread and dialectal evolution in only a few centuries of Anglo-Saxon in post-Roman Britain. Germanic languages, he opines, might have become established long before Romans, let alone Saxons, entered into what was not necessarily a Celtic-dominated Brittania. Celts themselves, whatever this term means given the looseness of this pseudo-ethnic linguistic concept, did not rush en masse into the islands, and they too were perhaps the harbingers of not a massive demographic invasion but an elite influencing cultural and linguistic trends among the natives, who may date back ten thousand years before the arrival of Celtic-language speakers. Unfortunately, traces of any words that are pre-Celtic lurk rarely in the archaeological record, according to most experts. We lack a Rosetta Stone to decode whatever insular peoples spoke before Celtic languages became the norm among both the newcoming elite and the long-settled old-timers.

Therefore, Oppenheimer turns to DNA for clues. He challenges linguists who for a century have been indoctrinated to ignore searching for language origins. He argues that science can offer tentative solutions that account for a Germanic undercurrent that may not be that apparent on the surface, but which aligns with what we know about rates of linguistic change that may have begun as long ago as 3000 BCE (estimates differ) that can be calibrated with patterns of genetic migration.

His thesis? Most of the original British Isles inhabitants descend from a massive "founder population"-- maybe far more than three-fourths or more of those today living in some locales. Due to genetics and settlement patterns, most humans stick to one place for millennia. This conservatism therefore provides a solid bedrock. It cannot be eroded even by the waves of more recent, and tribally-named, intruders. While closer to us in time and in the historical record (however tenuous!), these famous warriors themselves often number in the low single-digits (5% often!) in terms of percentages of genetic "material" we British and/or Celts carry today.

All subsequent immigrations, whether Celt, Roman, Saxon, Angle, Jute, Viking, or Norman, Oppenheimer states in the closing line of his epilogue, diminish by their traces in the descendants of the majority who trace their roots to British-resident or Celtic-origin DNA today. Most of the origins of the British predate even the Celts. Oppenheimer concludes: "we are all minorities compared with the first, unnamed pioneers, who ventured into the empty, chilly lands so recently vacated by the great ice sheets." (421)

American Carthusians: Transfiguration Charterhouse

Vermont's hermitage, the only foundation in North America, now, as of the feast of that name yesterday, has a website. It's full of texts, photos, and the accumulated wisdom of a way of life that by its austerity and isolation inspires those who have, for the past thousand years, been separated from-- but all the more drawn to-- its power. Many criticize monks for their retreat from our bustle, but I counter (against even those in my own family!) that we skeptics and doubters need the blessings that prayer, devotion, and good works done in private by the few and the humble generate. Perhaps our own unbelief or at least in my case nagging doubt may be balanced by the intensity of a purer, more committed, and totally sincere apostolate, one that focuses inward, magnifying the Shekinah, the rush of the Divine Presence, so it can burn a few chosen souls in Vermont and the few hundred male and female "eremites" around the world, all the more. God heard not in whirlwinds but "a still small voice."

The Feast of the Transfiguration at Mount Tabor with its odd talk of huts and the sudden shock in Joycean terms of raw unwanted devastating epiphany always appealed to me. A mystical passage, suitably, from John's swirling gospel narrative. The "desert," even in Vermont, is what the monks call traditionally their place of surrender to the void. In Ireland, "Dysert O'Dea" marks such an ancient locale set apart for "the white martyrdom" of renunciation to the Force. Carthusians wear white habits to attest to the blinding resurrected landscape that this Feast illuminated. Out of a blankness, into the overwhelming oneness that obliterates all other hues, these couple dozen holdouts on a New England hillside find as those on Tabor did their annihilating, ecstatic, rapturous lover's embrace.

In a time in which the official Church has been so weakened by scandal and tainted by compromise, the Carthusian charism-- as shown by Philip Groening's acclaimed documentary on the passage of time at Le Grande Chartreuse, the motherhouse, last year (reviewed on this blog) "Into Great Silence"-- shines even more sharply, as with the heart of Newgrange pierced by the solstice ray of light. (This reminds me of the start of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's "Feis," which I must translate here soon!) The harsh light depicted above the snowy path to the Charterhouse symbolizes this contrast. Excerpted below is sample "testimony" from one of three eloquent witnesses on this moving, purified, and genuinely simple website. (Look for more at the homepage under "Monastery.") "Elisha" writes as a psychotherapist working at the UN headquarters.

The silence of the Charterhouse is filled with an unfathomable presence. It is like heart tissue, alive and sentient, vast and deep, austere and pulsating. Through the grace of exposure and intention my life progressively has been shaped around this Carthusian heart of silence and solitude, a shaping that echoes the search for God in the depth of my own heart. I have come to know-through fits and starts and often in the midst of failure--the deep wisdom, the resolute ascesis, the intimate embrace, the hidden silent simplicity of being, the brilliant nothingness, and the whispers of Love that pour forth from the Carthusian heart.

Images from the site: Mount Equinox in the distance beyond the monastery walls; a shot with the belltower and the enormous Vermont granite blocks with which the interior and exterior are both constructed; the road in winter to the gates; "a solitary cloud, looking to the south."

http://transfiguration.chartreux.org/index.htm

Joyce: "Ulysses" MP3 Readings at LibriVox: Free!

While I paid (using a gift certificate to defray costs) for Donal Donnelly's marathon reading of the novel, 33 hours in a sort of Edwardian recitative swagger, and while I would like one day to compare it to the Naxos & RTE versions, for now, my impecunious (thanks to the remodelling?) hunt revealed this effort by devoted amateurs who read aloud and upload public-domain files of stories. "Dubliners" is in the planning stages, while "Portrait" and "Ulysses" can be accessed here. There's even an RSS feed for iTunes along with the sound files. Hugh McGuire's note warns of pub noise and creative additions that make this an exception to the quieter, more pristine, deliveries of other LibriVoxians.

This is part of the Lawrence Lessig-inspired Creative Commons movement. Much as I admire actors who read eloquently Joyce's language that demands a musical power on the tongue that can resound in the ear as well as revive the eye, we also need to free art from idols of the marketplace who would charge admission for every aesthetic creation ever displayed in the agora. What would Francis Bacon (the original one, not the painter of torment) do? Remember: demand alternatives to, contra Stephen Joyce & Disney & Sony & the RIAA, the idiocy of an era when we Americans suffer the Sonny Bono Mickey Mouse (aka Digital Millennium Copyright Act) corporate mania to protect for another thousand years their capitalist Reich.

(Image credit: is this Jim Dale the reader of Harry Potter? Here, as did Jim Norton for an abridged (of course!) Wake on CD from Naxos, Mr Dale tries out Joyce aloud. I trust S. Harris will permit this use of the cartoon for educational, non-profit purposes on my blog which earns me no profit, in the same open-minded spirit. I don't think bloggers should become shills-- although Leopold Bloom was an advertising canvasser!-- as this only worsens the relentless commercialization of the medium of the Net for us all. That's why I married a woman more practical and worldly than Mr. Peabody-lecturing distracted dreamer me, of course. )
http://librivox.org/ulysses-by-james-joyce/

Vivien Igoe's "Joyce's Dublin Houses & Nora Barnacle's Galway"

Review (cross-posted at Amazon US) of this 140-page guide (Wolfhound Pr. 1997). A new version expanded to 208 pp. (shown here, Lilliput Pr.) appeared in June 2007 but I haven't seen it; the basics in the older edition should remain the same. Perhaps URLs & updated transport data are added for the itinerary supplement that carefully leads you around by bus to Joyce's Dublin houses, each residence given a few pages per biographically organized chapter) and their environs. This handsome vademecum fits the hand, pleases the eye, and informs the mind of the Joycean pilgrim searching not along the streets for Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, the denizens of Nighttown or the cast from "Wandering Rocks"-- but their engenderer in his native habitat. This parallels not only the ubiquitous electronic and print guidebooks for walkers recreating Bloom's steps, but academic maps for the fictional counterpart, the topographical dictionary by Ian Gunn & Clive Hart, "James Joyce's Dublin," (Thames & Hudson, 2004). Igoe's title speaks for itself.

Igoe, a Joyce scholar and former curator at the Sandymount museum, gives requisite passages from Joyce's fiction, period and recent illustrations, and comprehensive but not mind-numbing biographical details that guide armchair visitors as well as direct real tourists. Neil Hyslop's handsome, readable, and hand-lettered maps recall the elegant ones that used to grace endpapers of historical hardcovers. They are easy to consult, spare enough not to be cluttered with extraneous information, and large enough to be accurate and not merely decorative.

(Blog note: An earlier entry a few days ago ties into two relevant websites: JoyceImages.com archive of postcards and period photos matching the text of "Ulysses," and Eishiro Ito's chronologically organized charts of his snapshots as he followed along Igoe's trail blazed in both Dublin and Galway.)

Irish-language Book-CD sets for learners

Review: Here's my impressions of Book-CD pairs, especially Turas Teanga, Gíota Beag & Gaeilge agus Fáilte. (Posted to the Learning Irish Yahoo Group today.)

I have reviewed on Amazon US (please visit and rate under John L Murphy "fionnchu") various CDs and beginner's guides in book format. I think that Turas Teanga is better if you have had "school Irish" or live in Ireland where you have picked up more easily a low-level exposure to phrases, words, TV channels, etc, or helped your children with their lessons. It comes in two halves, one the CD-book combo, the other the ten-part DVD series aired. The two overlap, but do not totally mesh. The book has more than what was aired, and vice versa! The two halves, confusingly, are not available as a three-media package! You have to order from RTE the book (which can come on its own too) with the CDs, and then buy the DVDs. It's not cheap, but there is no other competition. Warning: for us foreign learners, TT probably expects too much will ""come back to us" as we listen that we plain don't have!

Let me explain. If you lack earlier Irish classes way back, after a while the well runs dry and you're left gasping. TT assumes that your well of deep knowledge can come back by recall, and the series is designed to refresh your recollection. Since I am an adult learner, TT's pace very soon exceed my ability. You expect to be challenged, and this is not bad, but realize the demographic that TT aims at reassuring.

After two weeks in partial immersion at Oideas Gael in Glencolmcille, however, as I spent last month, I will return to the TT series and give it another go. (I can tell you as an adult learner from books and it turns out not enough tapes, that having other learners rapidly rattle Irish at you in a class and chat context is far more harrowing than learning as I have solo, as I never had the chance really to go to classes or speak Irish with others! I also know now that I must listen to the feeds for TnG4 now that we thanks to the web have no excuse abroad.) The teachers and advanced students recommend TT to reinforce such as TnG4 & RnG, although I know learners with a soft spot for Buntus Cainte with its little cartoons and dialogues-- it's now on CD and I have ordered it as backup help from Oideas Gael, whose non-profit site carries all these tape-book combos mentioned in this post. I recommend them highly, and you support a worthy Gaeltacht endeavor.

(As an aside, I have not heard the "Tús Maith" series, now two parts out with a third on the way next year to complete the package, which Risteard MacGabhann created for learners of Ulster Irish. One learner I know --who is a reader of this Yahoo Group-- highly praises this, and used it in his classes in Boston. It has the advantage that few language texts bother to incorporate, a loose-leaf binder that allows you to study a text without breaking the spine. Again, not cheap, but comparable in price to TT. Lots of diagrams and cartoons to show relationships and define connections. I have the "Learning Irish" Michael Ó Siadhail book, which apparently has been reissued with its pronunciation tapes long on cassette now as CDs, but having labored through this formidable text for over a year on and off and now 2/3 of the way through, unless you are a linguistically-enamored learner, this approach is more for the academic than the avocational among you.

Next, Gabriel Rosenstock, the Co Limerick guru-poet-translator, has a hour-long CD now attached to the Hippocrene Press "Beginner's Irish" short text, which blends the historical, cultural, linguistic, and plain idiosyncratic I think well, but the dialogues will not be the standard ones you find elsewhere, and its ten lessons are brief. Strong on prepositions, less so on practicality. Good side-dish, however, for the other main courses I sample here.

Finally there's an Urscealta Yahoo Group making its way through now the second Pól Ó Muiri "Paloma" detective novel for adult learners; Comhar Teoranta has these, some with CD readings packaged with these attractive stories about drugs and death and crime and refugees, some only as books. )

TT's advantage is the exposure to all three dialects each lesson. Among its drawbacks are an ambient video passage each chapter with absolutely no explanation of what the people are mumbling. Also, the graphics and fashions will look horribly dated very soon-- I know those who have watched the admittedly strong (I have never seen it-- the VCR and the cassettes both are becoming obsolete!) "Look Who's Talking" series circa the early 90s cringe at its "once-trendy look." The TT RTE website assists somewhat, but there are portions without answer keys, which annoys me no end.

I like the BBC-NI "Gíota Beag." In a way, ironically, the lesson helps and support at the "Blas" website and the other interviews and grammar lessons on the site that can be read and listened to put the RTE's TT site to shame. The BBC site is more tech-savvy, and has fun games and children's exercises as well as help for schoolchildren. GB is geared to a lower-level audience than TT, logically reflecting the demands of many in the North who have had no formal exposure to the language. I downloaded it to my iPod and it helped me get a feel for the Ulster "blas" before going to Donegal. Fearghal MacUiginn has a great accent, and gently encourages you along. The lessons are ideal, packing a lot of info if not much grammar into a five hours or so. The silly voices in the first series vanish in the second, and although too much time for my tastes is taken up with the hesitant travails of a sample adult learner, the series integrates place names, lore, culture, and relevant "sidebars" geared towards a Northern Irish audience effectively in fifteen lessons of about ten minutes in each of the two modules.

Finally, Annette Byrne's "Gaeilge agus Fáilte" from Linguistics Institute of Ireland & Gael-Linn came out around the same time as TT. I only purchased it recently, so I have not had time to study it in detail. It too comes as a book-cassette or book-2 CD combo, although confusingly often the book itself is sold separately from the CDs! It too is not cheap, although less than the whole TT package, certainly. It addresses the needs of learners different from both GB & TT. GB as I mentioned targets the Northern Irish resident who probably has had no Irish in school but for cultural and social reasons has picked up a bit of the language naturally, and takes first steps towards basic conversations and a general sense of sounds and sense. TT fits the adult wanting to return to earlier Irish learned and partially forgotten, at least as an active speaker. GF integrates the basic level of GB with the Irish resident (or student abroad in a class for beginners of Irish) who may be new to Ireland and who wants to discover both cultural topics and linguistic roots.

One downside is the marked paucity of information about this book on the rather moribund Gael-Linn site. There's no web reinforcement as there is for GB & TT, but I suppose the BBC "Blas" could enrich a learner in GF, and after GF, the learner might be ready for TT. GF's book's very colorful, and more in line with the bright graphics and plentiful illustrations that for better or worse characterize student textbooks for the current generation. Maybe a bit too "loud" for me? But, like "Blas," little puzzles and sidebars appeal to those learners needing stimuli geared at "multiple intelligences." It is aimed at a diverse audience of non-Irish immigrants, foreign learners, and possibly Irish learners in adult classes who somehow did not have much school Irish, so the level is for total beginners more like GB, not TT.

In fact, GF would make an ideal bridge between GB & TT, come to think of it!

http://www.Oideas-Gael.com

Blog P.S. There's also a 3-CD "Gaschaint" series with a book, each CD the same conversations with children for parents whose Irish is lacking, in the three dialects. Image credit: From a village in the Mayo Gaeltacht, on the peninsula near Belmullet, Inver NS children's paintings: www.inver.org/ceantar/tgaeilge.JPG

"I do not like that other world"

Martha Clifford's misspelling in her letter to Bloom speaks for nearly us all. Unless necrophiles, goths, or that Lady in Black who showed up at Valentino's grave each year on the anniversary of his death. Morrissey: "meet me at the cemetry [sic] gates." Irish newspapers have in their memorial obits after the name of the deceased, if an adverb, only two choices. Said subject died either "suddenly" or "peacefully."

Even in the boneyard, however, as Bloom notes, the gravekeeper managed to procreate eight lives amidst Glasnevin's monuments to the faithful departed. Perhaps less surprising given the visual stimulus amidst the crypts: the towering monument over Dan O'Connell's presumed grave in period postcards. So obvious this fifty-foot erection that I preferred a modest shot of the mortuary chapel with mourners, fitting the literary inspiration du jour. (Image from superb JoyceImages.com site linked a few days earlier at this blog.)

James Heffernan's "Teaching Company" audio lectures on "Ulysses" that I started on the flight over to Ireland have kept me company on the more prosaic commute by bus and train the past two days. The Dartmouth prof does wheedle in his preppie delivery. I thought the tapes would have deleted pauses, hesitations and mis-enunciations, but perhaps the Teaching Company keeps them for verisimilitude? It's done live. His enthusiasm and erudition balance on the whole well. He reminds me of much and teaches me in the extended course on Joyce Himself I never had either as an undergrad or grad, and never could have returned to for twelve hours via iPod regardless! A portable education. Heffernan mimics different voices in "Ulysses" effortlessly.

I want to know more about the RTE radio play from a couple decades ago made of the novel; while Donal Donnelly's version captures the period charm superbly (I also bought it and uploaded all 40 CDs to the iPod along with the public library's Heffernan & Edna O'Brien's short Penguin Lives biography, not to mention the Caedmon cast of dozens Dubliners and Jim Norton's Portrait. I also have a four-hour Norton sampler of the Wake-- the Naxos "Ulysses" looks splendid but was nearly twice the price of Donnelly, which is plain wrapped in a flimsy box with no annotation!), I'd like to hear a dramatization as opposed to a marathon reading. I wish the BBC 10-hour prototype of radio drama they did on cassette in 1984-- a great Stephen Rea as Stephen D!-- was full-fledged for the forty hours. But the RTE set is too pricy to buy unheard, and no review can be found of it online either. On their page they label the novel "Joyce's most ensuring work." [sic] RTE needs more effort put into their on-line shop. The sets there remain too tersely explained. You'd think the Irish radio station would do more to inform you about Joyce's masterwork issued on CDs and MP3s during the nationally-funded Bloomsday centenary PR media blitz.

Anyhow, this evening I finished Heffernan's talk on "Hades." So far, the emphasis on Stephen's need for the particulars and not the abstractions, and Bloom's insistence on the humanist, the concrete, the trivial out of which we build up our hope in the face of death to challenge it with our flickering life. These themes gain poignancy, given my own fresh encounters with forebears and their mortality. For now, this passage as Leopold leaves Paddy Dignam's internment at Glasnevin (which Wikipedia gives as a possible and terribly fitting (think of Rudy eleven days old/young) or heartbreakingly appropriate derivation "Glas Naoin" or "grove of the infants." This representative section as it moves away from the morbid to the mortal with vigor and determination (7.1000, thanks to Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom site for the online text) conveys the affirmative power of Joyce's narrative. I agree with Heffernan. This credo speaks of the creator's own sacramental revivification of the force that pulses within us against the fatal pull of open gates of dark mystery. Here reveals and resists eternity's vast reach:

The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time. Last time I was here was Mrs Sinico's funeral. Poor papa too. The love that kills. And even scraping up the earth at night with a lantern like that case I read of to get at fresh buried females or even putrefied with running gravesores. Give you the creeps after a bit. I will appear to you after death. You will see my ghost after death. My ghost will haunt you after death. There is another world after death named hell. I do not like that other world she wrote. No more do I. Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm fullblooded life.

http://www.rte.ie/readingulysses/test.html>

http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/ulysses/etexts.html

Flann O'Brien's Sea-Cat

Miss Templeton invited me back into the Come Back Horslips GB fray; they all began discussing cats after I had posted on, well, a Horslips-meets-academia dutifully posted "what I did on my summer vacation" last week. Yesterday, coincidentally, I thought about of all things Myles na gCopaleen/Flann O'Brien's An Beal Bocht/The Poor Mouth, and its illustration of the terrible Sea-Cat that terrorizes the Gaelic Redoubt. It bugged me no end that I could not see in the outline/silhouette of the island any feline shape. This long-standing gripe exacerbated by my Glor na Gael poster back from Glencolmcille now up at the office staring back at me the past few days, "Dathanna na gContaenta," or the "colors of the counties" in their GAA finery. Only Kilkenny gets not a human fan bedecked in two bright shades, but a black cat! Diligent hunting, no less than Pangur Ban after the mice, mightily revealed none of my Sea-Cat haunting images extant on the whole of the Net. I wish I could scan it in for your edification, but in the meantime, a Google Book Search revealed Fintan O'Toole in the title essay in his "The Lie of the Land" had solved this puzzle.

"It is an outline map of Ireland on its side, the four great peninsulas of the west coast as legs, Ulster the head, Wexford the tail." (6) Of course, this terrible Sea-Cat that threatens the doughty natives is none other than Ireland herself. Too terrible to be spoken of, it can only be drawn, the lie of the lay of the land.

Corkadoragha itself, with its inversions in Myles' English-language columns, always intrigued me as a learner of Irish. I mean to delve further into this bilingual wordplay. I've been saying that for twenty-five years!

On my ride to the train in Belfast a few days ago, the genial, erudite, and half-unintelligible (it being Beal Feirste if not Bocht) cabbie Des and I chatted about in this order Foster Brooks, Spike Milligan, and Flann O'Brien! I recommended to him the Keats & Chapman episodes, those awful build-ups to horribly upended puns. For now, a passage from At Swim-Two-Birds that made me and my wife laugh out loud, which is all too rare considering my usual reading material.


Death by fire, you know, by God it’s no joke.

They tell me drowning is worse, Lamont said.

Do you know what it is, said Furriskey, you can drown me three times before you roast me. Yes, by God and six. Put your finger in a basin of water. What do you feel? Next to nothing. But put your finger in the fire!


Meanwhile, some Flann O'Brien sites. "The Poor Mouth" I found first! (Image credit interruption: no gonzo Ralph Steadman pictorial either extant except this Beckettish French version! Note double billing cover credit prominence.) At the Hellshaw URL, "No Bicycle" as a detour from the blog "Blather" has all too-brief passages from Yer Man Himself and a hipsters' post-"Lost" episode tie-in. "Jams O'Donnell" at his blog "The Poor Mouth" links not only to the N-BP but two short essays, one from Necessary Prose on "Gaelically Gaelic" by Eric Mader-Lin & "Flann O'Brien: A Post-modernist When It Was Neither Profitable Nor Popular" by Robert Looby (thanks for the At-Swim citation I lifted) via the Scriptorium site-- which in pomo fashion links to other scribes of whom techno-literati latterati are enamored. These bloggers probably have all seen at least once "Lost," but I never have.

http://thepoormouth.blogspot.com/2006/11/why-poor-mouth.html

http://www.hellshaw.com/flann/

http://www.necessaryprose.com/poormouth.htm

http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/obrien.html