Media Mistakes in Irish, part two.

I link to Manchán Magan's website here and have reviewed his two travelogues in English, so his article today in my hometown paper proved a welcome reminder of his familiar (at least to me) jeremiad on his nation's "first official language," once removed. But, the graphic that went along with the brief summary of Magan's "No Béarla" filmed adventure proved his thesis, albeit unwittingly. A spectacled Manchán manque greets two people, peasantish, and they rear up in anger. "Biodh lá maith agat," he tells THEM. And that's the problem, as my letter below to the L.A. Times sent off minutes ago explains. I doubt if this one, anymore than my previous one to the paper's Sports section mine on Kareem Abdul Jabbar's misguided attribution to Pat Riley of the Boston Celtics' cognomen as Viking warriors, will be printed, however.

Randall Enos's cartoon accompanying Manchán Magan's "Gaelic-- What gall?" (March 17) illustrates, probably inadvertently, Magan's own thesis on the decline of Irish-language fluency. Both the depiction-- one man greeting two people with what's loosely translated as "Have a nice day"-- and Glen Hansard's recent thanks to the members of the Academy for his Oscar delivered in Irish make the same mistake. They both use the second-person singular form of address of "agat" rather than the correct plural form of "agaibh."

[Image: my very first self-taught scan! I did not add in efforts to fend off charges of pedantry that Bíodh was missing its accent.]

Proto Indo-European origins: a new book

I have just ordered this, a must-read for me. I'm no linguist, as my attempts in writing Irish on this blog witness. Yet, thanks to an adolescent exposure to Tolkien and a grad school reading in "The Road to Middle Earth" of T.A. Shippey's explanation of his predecessor (once early on at Leeds) in his exploration of "asterisk reality" and its basis in the *PIE etymological suppositions that lexicographers love in charting backwards the words we use today, I have harbored a lingering, if distantly understood, fascination for Proto Indo-European. Coincidentally, in talking after my stint as a guest speaker on book reviewing (thanks to my Amazon experience) to the Publisher's Association of Los Angeles last month-- during the eclipse that made the moon a glowing ashen ember-- to a woman (she never introduced herself by name) whose husband's getting a Ph.D. in Celtic & Indo-European Studies at my alma mater UCLA, I learned that she and he collaborated on a fantasy novel (under a joint pseudonym to protect his budding scholarly reputation) drawing on his academic knowledge of asterisk reality and PIE to construct their own mythical world.

When I studied for my own Ph.D. there, a few minutes walking distance from where I gave my talk, I had met a few Indo-European doctoral students in the cross-fertilization that brought a few folklorists and linguists into the seminars I took on Old and Middle English language and literature. These students appeared fearsomely more learned than we English Lit types. One student told me that the IE field never had recovered (at least twenty years ago at the time of my conversation) from Aryan taints, and that few people were encouraged to pursue their advanced work in this controversial area. I figured such came to UCLA because of Marija Gimbutas, and once I glimpsed this elderly matriarch. She propounded the argument feminists and New Age pagans loved, the Magna Mater/ Great Goddess theory. One afternoon, I caught a blur of her working in her chilly, metal-bookcased, flourescent office beyond a nondescript open door, deep in the recesses of subterranean Haines Hall.

That building's where I taught my very first meeting of my very first course, in English Comp, fall '84. If I had no need for a steady job (look where I wound up with a doctorate in English, let alone a more arcane field!), and if I had more of a perhaps mathematical bent that allowed me to control my acquisition of language more systematically, or perhaps Germanically, then I might have wandered into this region. Instead, as Spike Milligan boasted: "I'm Irish. We think sideways."

I had told that wife of such a UCLA IE wanderer-- presumably more Teutonically disciplined-- that eclipsed evening, of a work newly published. I hazily tried to remember it. I knew it had "horse" or "wheel" or "chariot" in the title, or combinations thereof. Princeton had issued it last year. I went back and located it, so if she ever stumbles on my blog, here 'tis, via Christine Kenneally's "Giddyup" from NY Times Book Review, March 2, 2008. I will, of course, post my layman's review in time on the blog and on Amazon responding to David W. Anthony's "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language." See, I got two out of three titular nouns.

That chariot logically follows, for this cause-and-effect relationship drives Anthony's argument that from the Pontic region near Ukraine, Indo-Europeans spread their domesticated technology and the elite linguistic status. We reconstruct fragments thousands of years later, no matter our own ethnicity, that attest to this legacy in what I compose and you read at this moment. We echo PIE. We faintly repeat its paeans to their male sky-god, their mounted warriors, and their whirling axles.

Giddyup
Image from the review in NYTBR, Frans Lanting (Corbis) Viz.: Ian McCulloch: "bring on the dancing horses." Cf. Siouxsie: "They turn in-- to swimming-- horses."

See my earlier blog entry on medievalist Scott Kleinman's "Mern Þonke" musings about Asterisk Reality. Asterisk Reality

Irish slang in San Francisco

Lee Templeton's e-mail on this, in a promotion also about the SF Irish Music festival for some reason held this weekend, captures the "blas" of the City. She also roused my jealousy at having had to grow up in another conurbation to the south devoid of even Irish American, let alone Hibernian, charm and lore. Although, I was asked by e-mail by a visiting Dub about the March 17 craic. I recommended O'Brien's on Wilshire in Santa Monica, down by the numbered streets, 23rd or so. The times I have darkened the door of a pub or bar seem few, but I hope you enjoy tomorrow and every other occasion for mirth and mingling duly "responsibly." Here's Lora Lee:

And now: The explanation of "Up Eddy, Down Turk"

In his essay "An Irishman Goes to San Francisco", local historian Michael Corrigan recalls an old City greeting, common in his mid-twentieth century neighborhood: "All the way out Market. Up Eddy, Down Turk." He writes:

I once asked Father the significance of this common greeting. Why were people riding all the way out Market, up Eddy, down Turk? What was down Turk?

He replied "It was an old streetcar line that ran all the way out Market Street, turned up Eddy Street and then went down Turk Street. The conductor would call out: 'All the way out Market, up Eddy, down Turk. All the way out Market." He had a nasal drone like a tinker with his horse and wagon. The line's now discontinued.

"But why do people still say that to each other? What does it mean?"

"I don't know," Father said. "It can mean anything. You hit the jackpot, lose a wife, or win the daily double, you say, 'All the way out Market, up Eddy, down Turk.' I guess it means you've gone the distance."

With this bit of local lore for his starting point, Corrigan delved into the almost forgotten slang of San Francisco's Mission District. Like the best of slang, it is rich in metaphor and word-play. Rhyming schemes as colorful as Cockney cousin variants. You "turn to," or go to work, after pulling "Oscar hocks" over "plates of meat"—that is socks over feet. A morning shave was an "ocean wave," and a breakfast of "dummy and cackles" was eggs on toast, something to fill your "jam and jelly" or belly.

Some the imagery seemed universal. A fool was a "salmon" easily hooked and a "trencherman" was a heavy eater. Other phrases were newly minted in American coinage: an eavesdropper (itself a metaphor!) listening in on your conversation was doing an "Erie Canal." And when you wanted to contact a friend across town – or indeed across the country – you picked up the "Alexander Bell" and dialed.

To make things unique (as you need to do in this town), the Mission District Irish community invented an 'infix,' not heard in any other language except Arabic. This is a syllable added in the middle of a one-syllable word. The syllable was roughly pronounced 'ee-iz' or 'ee-ah' – one example Corrigan provides is 'blonde' which would be thus rendered "bliazond."

Fan-freakin'-tastic…

So there it is: a regional dialect that crackles with 20th century American cockiness, throwing sparks on the pavement like a Muni streetcar wire. There's jazz there and burlesque and newsreels and radio serials and mugshots and cigarette machines and betting on the horses at the racetrack and the Yellow Kid and coffee and cable cars. It's 23-Skiddoo, kiddo. (That's another piece of slang coined by San Franciscan cartoonist Thomas A. Dorgan earlier in the century…)

For a full taste, here's a retelling of the old childhood story of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in the full Mission District style. When I first read this, I just delighted in its verve and local character. Only later, when reading Dance Polyhymnia, Aaron McMullan's novel in progress, and I encountered some of the same words and phrases still in use in his part of the world did it all sink in: language itself is an immigrant.

So, gather round kids and listen to the stirring tale of:

Little Red Riding Hood at Granny's Gaff

Back in the days when the trolley cost a nickel, Little Red Riding Hood went to visit her grandmother. She left behind her waspy friend, Goldilocks, the Bliazond who preferred riding around in daddy's heap. Red Riding Hood took Shank's mare through the woods. After awhile, she made a right and then a left chalk and there it was, Granny's Gaff. Little Red Riding Hood didn't suspect an off shore Benjamin, but inside, a wolf-trencherman that he was, had just eaten Granny. He pulled the old woman's dress over his pair of strides when he saw the girl through the window; holy smoke, he thought, with a second meal for the day, he'd be Indiana. Little Red Riding Hood entered the joint and saw here grandmother in the bed. She stared at Granny's chip.

"My, what thick brothers and sisters you have."

"All the better to tickle you with," said the disguised wolf.

"My, my, and what a long 'I suppose' you have."

"All the better to sniff out today's wonderful lunch," answered the wolf.

"Sure but wearing that lean and fat, I can't see your long gray bonny fair."

"Then come closer," said the wolf. "Take a load off those lovely plates of meat." After a pause, the wolf said, "Those pork and beans fit you so well. Join me in a jar. Then have a loaf of dummy to fill that jam and jelly."

Little Red Riding Hood suspected Benjamin was off shore. Where did Granny get those strides? The Alexander was disconnected. Harp that she was, Granny never offered her a drop. She heard hunters shooting outside. Did they have an Erie Canal?"

"What big pearlies you have, Granny."

The wolf had lost patience. "All the better to eat you with, my dear!"

The wolf sat up but Red Riding Hood knocked the wolf on his Happy Easter. She took an Arthur Duffy outta Granny's gaff and headed for the woods calling to the hunters. The main event appeared, pulling a pistol from his sky rocket as the wolf stood in the door. With a bliazast, it was curtains for that wolf.

Photo: No "Turk & Eddy" combo--the streets run west to the Mission District, paralleling north above Market; logically no two-way black-and-white signage. This of Eddy's about as good as ten minutes of googling images gets. San Francisco: Eddy St.

An gairdín ansiud.

Is garraí beag in aice leis teach againn. Tá sé ag líonadh leis blathannaí buí bídeach. Dúisíonn siad go fíanta. Anois, tá an aimsir na h-iarrach. Chuir an baisteach nuair bhí an geimreadh. Mar sin, fásainn fionnán inniu. Tá sé an leath-cluain (pairc, geadán talún, leadhb thalún, áit oscailt!) suaimneach atá sínte le ár cluainse. Is focal difrúil as Gaeilge air spás idir dhá rud: bearna. Is ainm bhruchbhaile Chonamara Chois Fharraige na bhreac-Ghaeltacht siar na gCathair na nGaillimh freisin.

Feiceann mé féar glás. Faigheann tú brobh go ard ansin. Is seanfocal as Gaelige nuair ní chonaic tú daoine eile ar feadh go mór. Abair an fear: "imíonn tú an féar go fada ann, mo chara." Thug "Na francach bhaile na toirní" an teideal na ceirnín go luath di "Na féar fada ann."

Muise, cónaíonn crannaí éagsúla ansin. Ní fhoghlaim go leor fúthu. Níl mé ábalta insint ainmneachaí dílis díobh. Is cuimhne liom go bhfuil an crann is ard. Measaim go raibh an sean-leamhán. Smaoineamh mé go raibh go éirithe fadó. Sílím go raibh an teach ansuid go críochnaithe cúig bliana an uair úd sin. Níl sé an chéad teach eile nua. Ach, is tí againn is sean. Is idir é seasca bliana nó seachtó bliain a aoise.

Inné, chuala mé scéal go halainn. D'inis Léna chugam, bean an tí agam. Tá chomarsaí Pól agus Inge againn. Tá siad an té atá ar thaobh ár laimheanna deise. Is mian leo go laidir. Cheannaigh siad an áit oscailte. Anois, ní tosóidh duine ansin. Imreoidh éin agus cait go saor. Tá siad go sonas ar cheile.

The yard over there.

There's a little yard next to our house. It's filling with tiny yellow flowers. They rise up wildly. Now, it's the season of spring. The rain came when it was the winter. Therefore, grasses grow today. This is the undisturbed half-meadow [field, patch of land, strip of land, open space!] which stretches next to ours. There's in Irish a special word for a gap between two things: bearna. It's also the name of a Conamara Cois Fharraige suburb west of Galway city in the breaking-up Gaelic-speaking region.

I see the green grass. You find tall grass-blades there. There's a proverb in Irish when you did not see another person for a great space of time. Tell the man: "you went away into the long grass, my friend." The Boomtown Rats gave to a later album the title "In the Long Grass."

Certainly, various trees live there. I did not learn many of them. I am not able to tell the proper names of them. I remember that one's the very tall tree. I estimate that it was an old elm. I think that it was planted fifty years ago. I judge that the house over there was finished at that time. The house next door is not new. But, our house is older. It is between sixty and seventy years old in age.

Yesterday, I heard wonderful news. Layne told me, my wife. We have neighbors, Paul and Inge. They are [those] on our right-hand side. They had a strong wish. They bought the open place. Now, no people will build there. Birds and cats will play freely. We are all happy together.

Photo/grianghraf: Portadown/Port an Dúnáin ina Tuaisceart na h-Éireann/North of Ireland, Corcrain Community Project/Tionscnamh den Phobal Chórcrain.Meadows

There Are Hundreds Of Paths Up The Mountain

There are hundreds of paths up the mountain,
all leading in the same direction,
so it doesn't matter which path you take.
The only one wasting time is the one
who runs around and around the mountain,
telling everyone that his or her path is wrong.

Hindu teaching. Diolch yn fawr to Alan Jones on his wise blog (click at right from my list) "Independence Cymru" for this timely insight. He also links to a video:
Treasury of Compassion: Avalokiteshvara

In a week where, as my dear wife has expressed well today at her blog (and in the comment there I blather more-- see link below), the hypocrisy of our blinkered attitudes about claiming to be shocked, shocked (as if we're all chaste Desdemona rather than jaded Emilia in finding out that, yes, some men cheat on their wives, and vice versa) at the downfall of another publicly shamed husband (and silently glowering spouse dragged out into the camera's eye, loyal as she stands in front of the flag) caught with his pants down and his pecker up.

It's also a week when, to less coverage, we read of a quarter of all American girls 15-19 infected with STDs (and half of all African American teens), certainly our prudish, voyeuristic, shamed and smirking combination of a war on drugs and just say___? has failed. Are we better off in our hedonistic celebration of the body? Leo tells me Planned Parenthood's coming to his school perhaps in light of an outbreak of pregnancies. Inspired, he smirked, by the success of the wildly popular teen flick "Juno." I also found out that the JAMA surveyed-- some fieldwork-- lads and lasses "partying on spring break" to find an average alcohol consumption per diem of 10 per gal and 18 per guy. Speaking as somebody's whose limit's about one-fifth of even this determinedly dizzy distaff set (let alone the testosteroned cadre) I find these figures daunting. I guess today's youth build up tolerance.

So, thus flourish fauna in my native habitat. I still forget how stupid many people can be, despite a quarter-century in the classroom. My patience, however, increases for professional reasons and the need to keep a job, so I do forget how the other half lives outside of textbooks and term papers. I do find myself embarassed to be born and stuck where I am. But, my European counterparts tell me it's the same for them, although they tend to teach an elite level compared to L.A's huddled polyglot and harried commuting- texting- chattering masses. Don't know how much the professional atheist literati can take credit for blaming us for our own national stupidity this time around. Or how much the collapse of a stricter society that I can recall vividly having shaped my own youth that terrified me and all my (Catholic, as I knew practically none other) friends regarding the pleasures of the body and the fate of the soul can be mourned, but I place my confusion before you.

And, apropos of Hindu and Buddhists who appear to have spared their peoples the militant missionizing and tyranny of monotheism, I wonder about Western civ and we as victims of iconoclasm. The idols shattered, the chapels on their ruins. Even the Parthenon-- to the "virgin" Athena-- was christened Our Lady of Athens in the fifth century. I think of the jungle carvings in Khajuraho with splendidly erotic, happily serpentine copulations. Those Indian figures radiate carnal joy, and in their embraces, seek the transcendent. These sexy stones (out of many more once extant) only survived the Moghul invasions and Muslim Taliban-like destruction by their remoteness and their coverage in vines. Similar to a few sheila-na-gigs, perhaps?

I read of their erotic endurance in the pages of a discarded Sunday supplement to an English paper brought in by one of my housemates at Irish school one rainy summer night last July in Glencolmcille. There, within a few minutes' walk, other rocks mildewed. One I forgot to hike to had a tiny circle in the middle, albeit higher than the waist, deemed 'the meeting' or once the 'courting' stone. Others phallic, remnants of erect pillars and now silent rites we will never know. Such rituals nearly vanished, at least from the clerical chronicles, once austere evangelists like Colmcille spread from that valley, his birthplace. He meant well, perhaps. Wanted to save my ancestors' pagan souls and stop the clans from rutting with, and like, sheep. Certainly the intensity of the mystic, of the soul yearning for release from our messy guts drove many in the Church towards beauty and wisdom. Yet, for many others, it warped them, and we who had no choice, having never been given any other option on the small island and the narrow path but to submit or be damned.

The familiar hatred of sex and exaltation of the celibate urged Colmcille and 1500 years of Irish Catholics into inendurable renunciation of our nature. His bed, still seen today just beyond the window of my room where I learned more about Khajajuro, was also of stone, but unyielding granite rather than pliant sandstone. Trying to overcome their libido, priests forced us to reject bodily comfort. My paperback "Sex & Marriage in Ancient Ireland" by Patrick C. Power's a thin one. Much thicker tomes stand on my shelves: "Medieval Handbooks of Penance," "Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages," and the enormous, and admittedly fascinating to me (there's still my papist love of arcana, well before my Jesuit university's B.A. which I thank proudly if perversely, for it is there so many of us not that many years ago quailed at the strictures that kept us from one another's fully carnal knowledge) "Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe."

As James A. Brundage in the latter volume demonstrates so well, these medieval patterns of thinking did not fade; they influenced directly the laws we have today on many state books regarding the illegality of same-sex relationships, sodomy by its multifarious and contradictory examples that fail to explain, and our unease at sex itself. By my young adulthood, to be fair, we'd all internalized the sinfulness of our desires. And, there were far too few Jesuits around our campus to enforce pre-Conciliar chastity. The Jebbies probably did not believe much in such "occasions of sin" anymore, but we did, credulous children of devoted immigrants, the stern working class, and what the President of LMU rumor had it once labelled as our student body "the average Catholic high school graduate."

Historians now aver, following Emmet Larkin's devotional revolution thesis, that often earlier Irish displayed less piety, more "laissez-faire" let it play as it lays sort of attitude towards sex until the Famine combined with Jansenism to punish whatever hangover remained from the previous millennium and a half of a detente between priestcraft and paganism. The monks in the Glen and their successors at Jesuit colleges, enamored with an ideal human form which had ascended from the bonds of appetite rather than the atavistic urges into which we descend, made us fear our own pulse, and that reverberating in those closest to us.

I shared with Layne one night an entry in my Irish dictionary where I stumbled across "cousin." This means "col ceathar," or prohibition/ impediment to the fourth degree. It's a strong word, related meanings denoting aversion, repugnance, distaste, broken vows, and forbidden degrees of relationship. The cognate "ciorrú coil" defines incest; "An cholainn choil"= "the sinful flesh." She replied how sad it was that what could be a relationship of love turned into one of fear. You saw cousin Aidan or Aoife and all you'd think about was "warning: keep off the ass"?

By so many stages, such a shift of mentality alienated the Irish from each other. The tenuous ties back to Indo-European and indeed Indic structures of sex and family and culture eroded. The Church, dragging us away from kisses and grappling into fasts and grumbling, helped eradicate a brutal, yet frank and direct and fleshly celebration of the spiritual within the coupling and the lust and the passion that unites us all in our secret moments. Not just, as Eliot Spitzer and his wife Silda and their three nameless teenaged children and "Kristen" aka Emperor Club $1,000 a rendezvous (so Eliot paid; he's rumored to have spent $80k total) escort all testify, our sordid exposure in purportedly Christian times. Makes you long for a Buddhist counter-Reformation, or a Hindu revival. Not to mention a truly Celtic reconstruction of the fables.

Image: "To Ease the Passage of the Soul into Paradise" Ink on silk, China, 10c CE. Read more at: Avalokiteshvara as Guide of Souls

My Wife's Blog Entry Today

Alexander Waugh's "Fathers & Sons": Book Review

This collective biography spans about six generations responsible for, one from the fifth generation tells us, about 180 books-- quite an average. Alexander's narrative depicts The Brute, muttonchopped patriarch from the 1860s; Arthur, Pickwickian declaimer; Evelyn & Alec, one funny, one feckless, both novelists, bon vivants, and diligent scribblers; Auberon ("Bron"), satirist whose entries for the Daily Telegraph & Private Eye I'd always heard of but never before (given their London provenance) had the chance to sample-- in his son's excerpts here; Alexander, who never seems to have been called as such ever by Bron. "For the first eight or ten years of my life I was addressed simply as 'Fat Fool'." (422) It's that kind of relationship; the book concludes gracefully if ruefully with the newest father's glance at his next generation. Alexander, as I must call him for clarity's sake in a book with three Brons and a He-Evelyn & She-Evelyn, delves into the correspondence, rumors, anecdotes, novels, journalism, and gossip that makes up about a century and a half of alternately engrossing and trivial material.

Rather than the Delphic oracular injunction to "know thyself," Alexander avers this on the lowered level of the teenaged "I need to discover the real me." He counters: "Perhaps 'O Man, know thine ancestors' would be a more useful motto for the modern egotist to pin on his puffed lapel. For the key to his identity, if such a thing even exists, will be found to lie not where he instinctively looks for it in the mirror-glass in front, but furtively concealed all about the hedgerows and borders of the long, twisting, dusty road behind." (19)

Why focus on the fathers and sons? That's where the bulk of the literary material lies, and the reason for "Wavian" renown, envy, backlash, and retribution. Michael Dirnda's review posted on Amazon recounts the episode of Bron's Cypriot machine gun gone awry, and this could have been lifted from a novel by Evelyn, his father. Alexander's best when he shows precisely how real life overlapped with Evelyn, Alec, Arthur, and Bron's own writing, and how they all used extraordinary wit (at their best at least; all wrote so much that inevitably standards slipped) to illuminate in fiction and essays their own foibles and those of their fathers. This pattern, as the son reflects late on in this family history, presents fascination and difficulty.

"A father may have many children to add to his many concerns but a son has only one father, the 'august creator of his being', who chooses where he lives, where he goes to school, what he might find funny and, to a certain extent, what he thinks. Fathers are more important than sons, and therein lies the problem." (418) The gist of this lengthy book, filled with letters back and forth between the generations as they snipe, nudge, and snicker with each other, is that in such a chain of progenitors and offspring may not lie conventionally false notions of affection for children-- in all their boredom, annoying habits, and demands to Be Taken Seriously. Instead, refreshingly, each father W. appears to-- as documented closely here-- have detested and escaped from his snivelling progeny whenever possible, and for this, in time if decades later, the son loved the father. Such honesty, as Alexander and his father show, eviscerates sentiment. It attacks maudlin convention of how parenthood should be celebrated, and this remains the lasting message I take from this book.

But I'd be remiss to say, without giving away the best parts of this narrative, that for all the longueurs, for all the endless moaning about headmasters and contracts and affairs and alcohol that occupy so much of the content of the letters and the recollections-- that considerable learning, outrageous incidents, and genuine humor at the foibles of our fallen human condition provide the essence of this study. Evelyn and Bron sigh eloquently, in frustration at the pablum that the nanny state thinks we need for nourishment in ever more philistine times.

Not all is either stultifying correspondence, insider family lore, or dutiful corroboration or refutation of allegations whispered or thundered for decades against the Waughs. The contents are stuffed full of epistolary invective, and it's probably difficult for Alexander, having to set the record straight and add his many askew angles to what's been printed and promulgated about his family, to edit the wealth of primary sources he presents, sifts, and challenges. The book may suffer in readability for those of us not as enamored of or as intimately related to Waviana. Still, this is a forgivable fault and a welcome one, given the access Alexander offers for those who immerse themselves in his in-depth presentation of Alec, Arthur, and his own father.

By contrast, the more familiar Evelyn recedes, and we see him more as one integrating his father, Arthur, into such works as "A Handful of Dust" so memorably. Evelyn's more personally presented to us, and less of his works or public life, such as it was, gains scrutiny here. The book, for me, gains poignancy in the later years of Evelyn and the maturity of Bron; this allows Alexander more space to consider his own entry then onto this crowded dais of literary predecessors. His emphasis is on the personal side of Evelyn, his grandfather, as he signed to Bron "yours affec. E.W."

Bron comments on Evelyn after his death that "politics bored him. His interest was confined to resentment at seeing his earnings redistributed among people who were judged more worthy to spend them than he." (qtd. 424) This typifies an ethical, yet bitter, sense of withheld fairness amidst what Evelyn lamented as the "abominable difficulty of human relations." Bron credited Evelyn's removal of all his teeth without anesthetic as improving his disposition in old age; Evelyn in turn had followed Arthur's venerable example. Such relationships, then obliquely reflected by Bron with Alexander, as had Evelyn & Alec's with Arthur, sets up a hall of mirrors. The later father and son characterize themselves as "liberal anarchists," fed up with a notion of prosperity that insists only on materialism and gadgets. (Although I did marvel at Bron's ability "without gainful employment" at 24 when fathering Alexander "near Treviso in Italy at the house of a one-eared Arabist called Dame Freya Stark" to "employ a daily help, a French maid and a maternity nurse." (422-23) Money did seem to afford handsome estates, lengthy trips abroad, boarding schools and Oxford, and lots of fine wine on what appeared to me vanishingly little visible means of income. This may be my American sensibility, unaccustomed to how the other half lives.

Alexander on Bron: "He, too, used his writing to free himself from the irritations of life and the problems of human existence." (430) The whole refusal to kow-tow to the demands of children, while delighting in the pursuit of one's own selfish pursuits, certainly runs against the prevailing philosophy of our age. Somehow, the Waughs managed to produce the children they deserved, I suppose. This all reminds me of an observation by Borges: both mirrors and procreation are abominable, for they reproduce the human figure without reason.

Bron emerges as a match for Evelyn when it comes to insight beyond the family's eccentricities and social shenanigans. As Evelyn became discouraged by the post-Vatican II Church, so did his son. After attending services that Bron realized "would be completely unrecognisable to him, that the new religion had nothing whatever to do with the church to which he had pledged his loyalty," Bron "felt I could distance myself." Wisdom follows: "Whatever central trut survives lies outside the modern church, buried in the historical awareness of individual members. Or so it seems to me. But whenever I have doubts, it is my father's fury rather than divine retribution which I dread." (435)

Bron's son follows suit. He titles a recent book "God," yet asserts that the loss of a True Faith (as Evelyn famously displayed) may be simply proof that the zeal of the convert's rarely hereditary. Decline & Fall repeats each generation on the Waugh's domestic stage. "The English show their hatred for children by dressing them in anoraks and romper suits, stuffing them with sweets, refusing to talk to them and sending them out of doors whenever possible in the pathetic hope that someone will murder them." (qtd. 437) The clumsy love of father for son, and the half-shameful, half-affectionate fumble of emotions, moves through many letters quoted here, if to often unintentionally comic rather than the usually desired risible or denunciatory effects.

A couple of examples must suffice. Arthur wrote to teenaged Alec off at school, in May, 1914 about the sin of self-abuse. "It is an awful thought that someday you might take to a poor girl's arms a body that will avenge its own indulgences upon children yet unborn." The letter goes on, by the way, for probably over fifteen hundred words, and is printed in its entirety. I do doubt the assertions in one footnote Alexander adds, however, so I must append it too for the sake of transparency: "Masturbation was not considered unhealthy until 1710 when John Martens, a quack doctor and pornographer, proclaimed it as such in a book called Onania. Marten's fortune derived from the medicine sold in conjunction with his book. The Church did not consider masturbation a sin, or indeed link it to Onan's behaviour in Genesis, until after the publication of Onania." (63) Certainly a topic needing hands-on research?

There's much of this sort of skewed erudition here from all Wavian contributors. I leave to you to burrow out the derivation of Crutwellism, to hearsay regarding Oxonian "dog sodomy," Evelyn's providing rabbits with a deadly glass of Christmas cheer, and his wife Laura's fate when she fails to get rid of rotten fruit. You'll find which Waugh died with a turd near his corpse, which one provided inspiration for both Island Records and the cocktail party, which one became Colonel Gaddafi's favorite author, and which one was depicted in a moralizing portrait, "Dr Waugh and the Perverse Pupil." Not to forget such sentences as this, concerning "an ethnic guitar" which Alexander's brother Nat brings back from South America "as a present for his mother-in-law" that "contained chagas larvae, which hatched unto beetles, crawled out of the instrument, killed the dog and rendered his mother-in-law insane." (443)

(Posted to Amazon US today.)

Carlsberg, Gaeilge, Cats, Nymphs:

Anthony Munnelly, who blogs as An Spailpin Fánach, contributed this article to the Irish Times....I guess the ad speaks for itself unseen. Why Irish lads'd prefer Carlsberg, on the other hand, remains an unaddressed and nearly as grave a problem for 21st century cultural heritage and pearls before swine.

Contradictory view on native tongue leaves a sour taste

The Carlsberg ad with Irish-speaking lads in a foreign bar neatly captures the essence of our attitude towards the language

The 2006 census tells us that there are 53,471 people who speak Irish daily, outside the education system, 97,089 who do so weekly, and a rather stunning 581,574 who do so sometimes. Only 412,846 said they never speak Irish out of the 1,656,790 surveyed, which means we have a population of one million Irish speakers.

One million! Odd that even though the Polish population here is smaller than 100,000, it is not at all uncommon to hear Polish spoken on the streets, while hearing Irish spoken in public remains a rarity.

It's reasonably clear that most people who claim to be Irish speakers in the census are talking through their hats, and doing so in English. In a review in Foinse, the Irish language newspaper, of the recently published A New View of the Irish Language, edited by Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín and Seán Ó Cearnaigh, Seán Tadhg Ó Gairbhí makes the point that if that 100,000 Irish speakers existed, there would be no point in discussing views of the Irish language in a language other than Irish. His point is well made.

David McWilliams made the point in The Pope's Children that the Gaelscoil movement was indicative of the new role that the language will lead in the Ireland of the 21st Century, that paradise run by Hiberno-whatsits, where the Budland of today is but a distressing memory. One of the signature moments of the TV show of the book of the newspaper column was McWilliams breaking into Irish himself while interviewing a rather startled Gaelscoil principal.

I have grave doubts about the whole Gaelscoil movement, especially in the capital; I note simply how many columns McWilliams himself writes in Irish, and I move on.

The search for the true status of Irish in the nation in 2008 is a little like the search for Schrödinger's cat. You may remember that, in creating his famous metaphor illustrating the sometimes counter-intuitive nature of quantum physics, Schrödinger posited of a certain cat that may or may not be in a certain box, and the nature of the box is such that we can only tell by opening the box whether or not the cat is inside.

Only thing is, opening the box kills off the moggy. How then do we open the box without killing kitty? So it is with Irish; once we start asking the question people start lying to the questioner. It's simple human nature.

Therefore, to find out the true status of the language in Ireland we have to surprise the nymph while bathing. We need to take a snapshot of the nation and the language while the nation isn't looking, and thus find out how we really feel about the language.

And Carlsberg have done just that, with their Irish-in-the-nightclub ad that's currently on the telly. It isn't so much the ad, but the reaction to it, which seems - anecdotally - to be quite positive. We throw the shoulders back when we see it, and bask in a certain glow.

The ad, for those that haven't see it, goes like this. Three young Irishmen are on holidays in some foreign city. They go into a nightclub, and shout three Carlsberg. The barman asks them where they are from, and they reply Ireland.

The three boys are then asked to do something Irish. Our three heroes put their heads together and they decide to speak Irish. So the leader turns around and says falteringly 'An bhfuil cead agam dul amach go dtí an leithreas?' His confidence builds then and he begins orating wildly to an eager crowd. 'Agus madra rua. Is maith liom caca milis. Agus Sharon Ní Bheoláin! Tá geansaí orm. Tá scamall sa spéir. Tabhair dom an caca milis!'

The scene ends with our hero cutting a rug with the local talent. 'Speak more Irish,' she asks him. 'Ciúnas bóthar cailín bainne' he tells her, dancing away. She laughs seductively. Fade to black.

And that ad sums up everything the nation as a whole thinks about the first language right now. We like the idea of Irish, the idea of it being there, but it has no semantic meaning for us. It means nothing.

Such words we have are only those we remember from school, in brief incoherent snatches. We like the language, in the same way we like that old fool of a dog that always chases parked cars, but fundamentally it's a joke, not something to be taken seriously.

'Ciúnas bóthar cailín bainne.' 'Quiet road girl milk.'

Gibberish.

We think Irish is gibberish, and its only purpose is to give us another reason to look down on foreigners, something we love doing all the time.

Somehow, 87 years after independence, it doesn't seem that much to be proud of.

Anthony Munnelly runs an Irish language blog, An Spailpín Fánach, which may be read at http://spailpin.blogspot.com/ This is a slightly edited version of a recent blog.
www.ireland.com

Irish Times - Lthch: Anthony Munnelly. 12ú Márta 2008.
(posted by me via Gaelport.com)

10 Stages of a Punk Band's Career

Lee Templeton forwarded this from The Guireans' correspondence to her from their sun-challenged corner of the Isles off of but part of Scotland. I figured for those of us of a certain age, younger than Hilary, older than Chelsea, it'd ring true. With Obama but five weeks younger than me, I don't know if he was into the new wave craze when attending (for two years before he decamped for Columbia) Occidental-- the little Stanford, and as dappled with the liberal arts PC rainbow-hued hue-- with all those sweatshop-free clad preppies and deserving youth of color from usually privileged backgrounds nonetheless who mingle on that very pricy campus only a few miles away from my house.

[Aside about Barack: I'd been wondering about the absent father, and why nobody in the popular press, at least in the common run-of-the-mill coverage I peruse, details what happened. I found out from John Spain's column in the Irish Voice (to save money, to which I am about to let expire!) what I had not learned in the American puff pieces.

Obama's father married his mother at 18, left her at 20, fathered eight more children, married three more times (without divorcing any of them), lost his legs due to a drunk driving accident, and died when Barack was 21 in another such crash. Obama Sr. left his first child, a baby, along with his first wife when she was 18. He went to Hawaii, where he married Obama's mother. He left her not to due to racism as his son intimates in writing so much as the fact Ann discovered Obama senior already was married. So, back to wife #1; he sired two more children with her before other women beckoned. Even after his legs were amputated, he produced child #8. He died before he could marry that baby's mama. (Thanks to the March 1, 2007 entry on the now presumably defunct website "Evangelicals for Mitt" that helpfully if ironically points out another case of a candidate with a polygamist in the family tree! Apparently paternal hijinks became bowdlerized or omitted from Obama's own autobiographies, unsurprisingly. These have raked in $1.6 million so far for him.)

John Spain, in his typically iconoclastic manner, proposed an intriguing argument, that not Black America but "white" or at least Hawaiian multicultural America truly fathered Obama, who unlike his wife, say, is not a product of the African-American (hyphen intentional) milieu. Only at Columbia did he choose to identify more with it. Or, as a black student explained to us in a class discussion, it's not so much that Barack wants to be seen as black; it's the African-American establishment that will not let him be seen any other way. Intriguing perspective. I wonder what Obama senior would have made of all this, son himself in turn of a goat farmer, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Ivy League.]

Back to raucous stereo speakers the size of packing crates. Headphones bulbous. Turntables crackling. Heavy boxes of vinyl. Such were college days for some of us-- if not for the unmatriculated bands who served as our soundtrack. At least 1980 Obama, if not 1970 Hilary, had "access to proper drugs, probably." Leave Bill out of this. He only inhaled, as shrewd then as Barack now, I bet. See below for context.

On 09/03/2008, The Guireans wrote:
Huidh huidh, wait a minute...

What's this nonsense about The Guireans not being the originators of Gaelic Punk???

>a) this '79 video gives the lie to their current claim as inventors of
>Gaelic punk as that Sheep Purple cover is full-on stadium rock

As any fool knows, this video actually dates from 1980. By which time we had "progressed" from our earlier punk roots and sold out, man. This was a fairly typical career arc for top bands of the period - The Jam, The Undertones, The Clash, SLF et al. The key points were:

1) Formation of a band characterised by musical ineptitude but fired with
inspirational punk enthusiasm, originality and a "year zero" attitude to previous groups.
2) Critical acclaim
3) Major label involvement and massive chart success
4) Artistic disorientation caused by pressure of 3) + access to proper drugs, probably.
5) Inability to write any more good songs.
6) Seizure of creative control by producer/manager/record company,
7) Increasingly gratuitous overproduction (usually involving brass sections),
8) Total collapse in creativity and a final ignominious split. Then some crap solo projects, typically poor 80s imitations of material by the earlier bands rubbished at Step 1
9) A gap of many years, during which the band members discover they're no good at anything else.
10) Reformation for the money. Usually about 20 years later.

The genius of the Guireans and our intimidating manager Coinneach "Peat(er) Grant" Livingstone was that we optimised this classic late 70s Punk/New Wave business model by proceeding directly from Step 1 to Step 8. What's more we made the whole process even more efficient by removing the "enthusiasm", "originality" and "money" bits of the remaining steps.

Why don't more bands do it the Guireans' way?

Chearaidh an dradhars
The Guireans

Image I found by googling "punk sell out": CoolZOr, a Marketing Trends blog. 21 Aug. 2005. "The Poor Work Harder & other leads." A London initiative pays off.

Scríobh Pól Ó Muirí faoí "Thar Sáile"

Chuir Ciara orm post nua le Pól Ó Muirí, "Thar Sáile." Deir sé faoí go bhfuil muid ag mairigh thar lear agus ag foghlaim Gaeilge. Chuir iontas air.

Bhí sé ag scríofa leabhair éagsúla. Cheannaigh mé dhá úrscéal don fhoglaimeoir fásta, "Paloma" agus "Dlíthe an Nádúir." Insíonn an drom ar na leabhair seo orainn: "Is é eagathóir Gaeilge an Irish Times é Pól Ó Muirí." Measaim go raibh an triu faoi Paloma Pettigrew faoi lathair, an ban-garda, an cigire. Tá sí ag cónai faoin tuaith, ach níl sí sásta! Déannann rudaí dífrúil agus go dona a bhuaileann uirthi. Ní faigheann sísean féin siochain.

Tá sé ag seoladh altannaí ar an "El Blogador" (le duine eile) faoi polaitiocht na tíre agus leasaitheoireacht sóisialta na hÉireann. Tá an dream na Yahoo "Úrscéalta." Bhí sé ag obríos ag aistriú as Béarla an chéad scéal Mhuíreadh anuraidh. Nuair bhí mé ag imeacht go Ghleann Cholm Cille an samhraidh seo caite ina hOideas Gael, d'fhan le Brian, agus eile, in aice leis an scoil go "An Teach Mór." Tá sé ag tógáil an leagan Béarla na leabhair i nGaeilge shimplí-- bhuel, tá siad furasta dó séisean féin!

Rugadh é agus tógadh é Londáin ann. Anois, tá sé i gcónaí i Bergen. Tá sé cathair na Ioruaidh. Labhair Brian an teanga Ioruais. Tá sé bean a tí agam; tá sí Ioruchaigh freisin. Tá sé cliste. Tuigeann sé Gaeilge go maith. Sílím go bhfuil ag foghlaim ar feadh trí nó a ceithre de bhlianta. Déanfaidh Brian ag fáil scrudái go ard as Foras na Gaeilge. Tá sé duine dea-shamplach leis mac léinn is cosuil sin ag plé Pól Ó Muirí. Maith thú, a Bhrian! Is cuimhne liom go raibh maith leis "Paloma" go mór!

Pól Ó Muirí writes about (Learning) Irish Abroad

Carrie sent me a new post by Pól Ó Muirí, "[Irish] Abroad." He talks about those of us who are living overseas and studying Irish. He wonders why.

He's a writer of various books. I bought two of his novellas for adult learners, "Paloma" and "The Law of Nature." The back of these books tells us: "Pól Ó Muirí's Irish-language editor for the Irish Times." I reckon there's a third book recently about Paloma Pettigrew, the policewoman, the detective. She's living in the countryside, but she's not happy! There's different things going on badly to knock her about. She can find no peace for herself.

He sends articles to "El Blogador," (with others) about national politics and social reform in Ireland. There's a Yahoo group, "Úrscéalta." They worked on translating into English the first Ó Muirí story last year. When I went off to Glencolmcille last summer at Oideas Gael, I stayed with Brian and others in "The Big House" next to the school. He's building up translations into English from the books in simple Irish-- well, they're easy for him!

He was born and raised in London. Now, he's living in Bergen. It's a city in Norway. Brian speaks the Norwegian language. He has a wife; she's Norwegian too. He's smart. He understands Irish well. I think he's been learning for the space of three or four years. He's getting ready to take the advanced examinations from the Irish-language agency. He's a prime example of a student like Pól Ó Muirí discusses. Good for you, Brian! He liked "Paloma" a lot, I remember.
Irish Abroad

Janet Davies' "A Pocket Guide to the Welsh Language": Book Review

This little guide's only 125 pages of text, but packs an impressive amount of material into its compact size. Part of the U. of Wales Press series, it introduces you to the history of the language more than its features. The first chapter on its origins takes but ten pages, while "The Changing Fortunes of the Language" narrates its growth, flourishing, and shifting into modern times over sixty pages. The state of the current (as of 1999) language takes about the same space, and a short chapter comparing Welsh with 'other Non-state Languages in Europe" densely gives lots of facts in less than ten pages. Finally, "A Note on the Characteristics of Welsh" in a few pages gives only a hint of what I would have wished much more about: how the language works, not as a grammatical overview but a look at its distinguishing features.

Still, given the editorial constraints which undoubtably kept this a pocket guide, Davies manages to express her interest in this ancient language with erudition, insight, and control. Illustrations and charts break up the text; I found many of the latter helpful in visualizing the linguistic points. Maps also assist understanding of dialectal features and where speakers lived yesterday and at present.

A couple of examples of her comments demonstrate Davies' ability to transcend a dutiful recital of statistics, names, and locations. In the 1920s, for example, bus routes linked far-off places to tourists, and cars also began to enable Anglophones to enter where none may have gone so distantly before. "Remote villages where no language but Welsh had been heard for fifteen centuries, now resounded in summer for English visitors." (62)

As for Plaid Cymru's campaign to conserve Welsh Wales, she sees contradictions in preserving Welsh-speaking communities that need "economic infrastructure" to survive. If Plaid (judging from her perspective ten years ago) appeals more to the minority constituency, this may strengthen the language at the expense of the party's contraction from a wider national influence, so "it will be unable to become the party of Wales as a whole." (110) Davies guardedly holds optimism in the language's holding pattern, and its growth in schools, but fairly indicates its decline as a communal language in many places where it once dominated. On the other hand, unique to Celtic languages, Cardiff represents an urban enclave of speakers, and in such developments Davies sees hope for the future.

Finally, as her preface and afterword eloquently if briefly describe, Davies knows what it's like to be curious about the language while remaining on the outside looking, or hearing, in. As no book seemed to give an overview for such curious readers, she wrote one. "Wanting to read a book is the best reason for writing one." (viii) As an adult learner of Cymraeg, Davies convinces you of what she concludes is its characteristic as a "life-enhancing" emblem of culture and knowledge.

[Review posted to Amazon US today.]

Image (reproduced on cover): "Y Wyddor" (The Alphabet) ca. 1900, T.C. Evans."Y Wyddor"

Meacaim éagsúla/ Different roots

D'ith mé rís agus meacain dearga anois. Ach, níl siad dearg. Tuigim buí. Is meacain oraiste. Cad chuige sin? Níl fhios agam conas tugann muid glasra sin dath seo as Gaeilge. Silím faoí an ciall le 'glas'. Níl dath sin an radharc go congarach go bhfuil chomh as Béarla.

Measaim go bhfuil chialla éagsúla orthu an focal 'meacain' as Gaeilge. Mar shampla, is míniú 'meacan bán' le 'parsnip' as Béarla. Is ciall 'meacan bistais' le 'beetroot'. Is brí 'meacan ráibe' le 'radish'. Is dhá rudái leis meacain difriúil, mar sin. Is brí 'meacan mara' le 'sea-radish' agus is brí 'meacan ragaim' le 'horse-radish'. Is maith bean a tí an dara seo. Níor caitheann mé ag ithe sin.

Is ciall 'meacan an leonta' le 'fennel.' Is ciall 'leonta' is cosuil 'leon'. Fasaionn sé go fiáin in aice leis teach agam nuair tosaigh an earraigh. Ábalta tú boladh ar an maidín go luath. Mura thagann an grian. Nuair d'éirigh sé, níl tú ag bolú 'meacan an leonta'. Tá sula an breacadh an lae, caitheann tú ag fáil an cumhraíonn seo go gear. Is cuimhne liom aige liocoris. Ní maith liom na blasanna mheacain an leonta nó liocoris, mar sin féin! Níor itheann siad.

Different roots

I ate rice and carrots [literally "red roots"] tonight. But, they're not red. Yellow, I understand. Carrots are orange. Why is that? I don't know how we give in Irish this vegetable that color. I think about the meaning of "glas" [green]. That color does not have the narrow range of vision as it does in English.

I figure that there are different meanings from the word "meacain" in Irish. For example, there's the word-meaning "meacan bán" for "parsnip" in English. There's the meaning "meacan bistais" for "beetroot." There's the meaning "meacan ráibe" for "radish." There's two things for differences in "meacain," however. There's "meacan mara" for "sea-radish" and for "meacan ragaim" the meaning "horse-radish." The wife likes this second one. I cannot eat that.

There's for "meacan an leonta" the meaning of "fennel." The meaning of "leonta" is "lion-like." It grows wild near the my house when spring starts. You are able to smell it early in the morning. Unless the sun comes. When it rises, you couldn't smell "meacan an leonta." Before the break of day, you can find the sharp scent. It reminds me of licorice. I don't like the taste of fennel or licorice, nevertheless. I don't eat them.

Photo/ grianghraf: meacan an leonta agus Loch Tahoe. Fennel & Lake Tahoe.

Hari Kunzru's "My Revolution": Book Review

"The State installs the cop in your head." (188) So goes one memorable line from a leaflet in this fictional account conjuring up days and years of real rage. Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent," a century ago, plotted the machinations of a cruel alliance of anarchists in London, and how they used idealists and malcontents to further, and then botch, and later eliminate, their mistakes as their act of violence consumed innocents and guilty. Kunzru's new novel explores the English radical underground, with similar ties to internationalist factions and increasing violence, in the early 70s. It's inspired, he explains in an afterword, by the Angry Brigade which had operated then; "countercultural support for terrorist tactics" (279) lost its allure for Britain, unlike parts of Western Europe still enthralled by radical chic, when England was hit by a mainland bombing campaign by the Provisional IRA which killed forty-four people in 1974.

"Human being or pig. You make your choice." (245) So the narrator, Chris Carter who's gone underground as Mike Frame since the time of the bombings by his August 14th collective, recalls as what the dreams of the Sixties had dissolved into during the slow descent into violence in the Seventies by remnants of an outraged, impotent, and bitter minority of hippies who found they could not change the world by love, peace, or dope. A cadre ruthlessly purges the wavering among them and learns to take up arms against a sea of troubles. Backed by a Palestinian cell, the English radicals are given a mission. Assigned as a class enemy a London Jewish merchant who the Palestinians target as a "Zionist," Chris chooses his own fate.

He spends the rest of the decade incognito on the trail through Europe to Asia so many other backpacking tramps followed. He spends years in a Buddhist monastery detoxing and decompressing, but curses the chants and sickens from the oppression that religion fosters. He comes back to small-town England, finds a partner who starts a sort of faux-The Body Shop line pitched at his own demographic, and settles down uneasily with a concocted past identity and a present rootless banality. The novel spins through the decades since, back and forth, to 1968 when he was first jailed after an antiwar march at Grosvenor Square, to his rejection of the State and his attempts to rally the working classes to rise up against the Establishment.

Beaten by police, sentenced for protesting, imprisoned for his principles, he wonders-- how did he authorize the British government to "distribute violence on my behalf," when he never gave his consent? "The state claimed it was an expression of the democratic will of the people. But what if it wasn't? What if it was just a parasite, a vampire sustaining itself on our collective life, on my life in particular?" (79) The alternative, in the eyes of the leaders of the collective (the term is deliberate on my part), is "I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires." (110)

Hating the war in Vietnam, the war in Ireland, the defeat of the French strikers, and hailing Palestinians, Viet Cong, and squatters, the collective tries its best to overthrow the system. Kunzru channels through Mike/Chris' first person narration a stream of phrases and slogans from this past. The author deftly mixes the decades, although this may throw off a casual reader. The book's layered, and juxtaposes events and recollections constantly. This kaleidoscopic effect mirrors the protagonist's attempts to come to terms with the unmasking of his underground persona as 1998 finds a disturbing comrade from his past life showing up to haunt him for political dirty-tricks as he tracks Mike/Chris during his efforts to flee yuppie domestic stagnation in Chichester.

The problem remains for the radicals the same as it ever was. "We were in a church hall and somehow that made everything we were doing absurd, just a bunch of people pushing each other around, like a Scout troop. How could we even think of making something new for ourselves when there were metal-framed chairs stacked at the sides of the room and a piano under a canvas chair in the corner?" (131) This solidity, this forever England, frustrates those who long to follow Mao's dictum that to give up the gun, one must take up the gun; to bring an end to war, one must make war. Kunzru seems to me to fudge or blur, perhaps deliberately to reflect his narrator's worried state, the decision to go underground after the collective bombs the Post Office Tower. (Kunzru's endnote informs us that this was in fact done on October 31, 1971; no claim of responsibility was ever made.) I was not sure why Chris cut his hair, and donned a suit precisely then, but the general necessity emerges: those truly devoted to their cause had to blend in, to vanish into plain sight.

Mike/Chris, faced with his past colleague who threatens to blackmail him if he does not cooperate with his Blair-era dirty-tricks scheme, defines his philosophy. His nemesis "could live in the world as it is, which (depending on your point of view) is either pragmatism, coarseness, or a particular kind of heroism. Whatever it is, I've never been able to do it. The world has always seemed unbearable to me." (168)
This combination of concern and detachment unsettles him and the few with whom he stays, as the Seventies dim the bright visions of the Sixties, to struggle on. But, after the Post Office Tower, Mike/Chris cannot find an easy solution. Had their fight, now that an economic target, a symbol of Britain, had been bombed, turned real?

"We were already floating free, as removed from the experience of the average worker as the diners of the restaurant at the top of the tower. After that, the insidious message of the spectacle-- that nothing takes place, even for the participants, unless it's electronically witnessed and played back-- took us over. We thought we were striking a blow against it, the hypnotic dream show of f[---]able bodies and consumable goods. Instead we fell into the screen. Our world became television." (202)

This trail of exposure, literally and symbolically, traps the collective. The man who pops up from his past to rip off Mike's mask to reveal Chris rationalizes his move. His New Labour-type of service, he intimates, is "grown-up politics, not the kind that starts out by carving out a Utopia and then hammering at the world, trying to make it fit." (207) Later, his pursuer elaborates his dream for an Age of Y2K rather than of Aquarius. The triumph of Das Kapital, but the end of history. "In a couple of years, it'll be a new millennium, and, with luck, nothing will bloody happen anywhere, nothing at all. That's what a good society looks like, Chris. Not perfect. Not filled with radiant angelic figures loving each other. Just mildly bored people, getting by." (259) At least, his handler counters, his pragmatism occupies no less a moral high ground than does a former member of the collective.

For, as Mike/Chris recounts, the August 14th group, splintering inevitably into a harder and tougher core, enters the frontier where ideals shadow into fanaticism. "'The revolutionary is a doomed man,' wrote Nechayev. 'He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no belongings, nor even a name.'"'(219) This, in turn, compares to Mike/Chris' later retreat to the monastery. The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, he reminds us, urge us to see suffering, recognize its cause in greed and craving, and to realize its potential to come to an end. Then the problem emerges. "But what's the right way to end suffering? The revolution, giving yourself up to history? Or Nibbana, giving yourself up to transcendence?" (219)

Those vowed to the former path learn to shoot on the desolate Holstein marshes, mudflats on the Danish-German border. One of their PFLP trainers teaches comrade Anna how to use a Skorpian machine pistol. "Khaled stood beside her, nodding approvingly, his eyes fading from view behind his Polaroid sunglasses whenever the sun emerged from behind a cloud." (229) Not for the first time in this novel, Mike/Chris finds himself spooning bland vegetable soup, debating ideas "in a patchwork of languages. Plans were formed. People spoke of a strategy for victory. They spoke about the end of Imperialism. They could have been talking about anything. Road resurfacing. Water disposal. Out in the marshes, I thought. We're out in the marshes at the edge of the sea, miles from the nearest other human beings, talking about who we're going to kill to demonstrate our organic connection to the masses. I'd light my way back to my tent with a little pocket flashlight, a bright speck in the enormous darkness." (230)

Caught in a campaign to expose another former radical, and seeking to expose another himself, Mike unravels back into Chris. The conclusion arrives with tension. Without giving it away, here's an excerpt a few lines from the end. "Because legality is just the name for everything that's not dangerous for the ruling order, because the poor starve while the rich play, because the flickering system of signs is enticing us to give up our precious interiority and join the dance and because in the corner an insect world is waiting, so saying we must love one another or die isn't enough, not by a long way, because there'll come a time when any amount of love will be too late." (276-77)

This dense, intricately organized, intellectually rewarding story -- while it revives the sentiment of the counterculture perhaps more vividly and effectively by comparison with the duller decades that followed, and while the characters dim by comparison with the evocation of fiery rhetoric and urban uprisings-- represents a considerable achievement. It'll reward a thoughtful reader seeking a nuanced valediction and sharp dissection of a radical's rise and fall as seen from 1998 projected back upon '68.

[Posted to Amazon US today.]

Tuesday Night Yoga Club

I've only met my birth mother twice so far, since finding her last year. She had asked, I have known all my life, via the adoption agency that I be placed with a Catholic family, and I was. Obviously I was raised Catholic. So, when she questioned me as I was driving along the 134 Freeway-- in her typically frank manner-- "when was it that you abandoned your faith," I replied calmly and respectfully, even if unable to pinpoint a date for that dramatic departure that had happened gradually, years ago, after a youth of fervor, hope, and trust had led towards by my late twenties considerable erosion, silt, and stagnation.

Today on the Blue Line my gaze met a woman who I have seen before. She got on at the Green Line junction with her backpack worn oddly like a baby carrier on her breast. I had pegged her for who I thought she was a few seconds after she sat across from me only to rise up when the train left the station. She and another Latina woman I had seen before, around my age both, sell glass necklaces as they display them to the passengers down the aisles. The jewelry's not very pretty. I noticed this afternoon, however, that she also had rosaries.

This led me to think about my own First Communion rosary, a gift from my great-aunt-- the kind of devout Irish Catholic who after getting a scandalous divorce from one Dempsey in the Depression never married again, or even dated. Such was the pattern for the very few (at least among my parent's small circle of friends; another such woman in this state of supposed spinstership was my godmother) who dared to get a civil divorce. It's quite a time warp compared to today. I can recall even in grade school in a considerably less-than-hip downscale neighborhood-- north of collegiate hippie Claremont-- on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius noting how in my class of two dozen there were-- gasp-- a couple of kids with divorced parents, and another one or two down the corner. This stood out subtly in my childhood terrain, and not only for me the cradle Catholic. We did live in a more inhibited mindset among many other religious families, and the geographical distance of a mile from the sylvan Colleges and their preppy scions proved less than the class distinctions that had endured even into the Aquarian Age. "Out of wedlock" and "broken family" were the hushed terms then, not proud claims of "single mother" or "blended" household. Let alone the advent later in the decade of the phenomenon of "living together" or the evolution, perhaps as a result of such relaxed mores, into the waning century's iconic "baby mom." Now millions this Oscar season for their pre-pubescent androgynously named Logans and Taylors praise the lessons of "Juno."

Back to Aunt Olive (again that dated name-- along with the Mabels and Henriettas, later morphed into the likes of Doris and Ethel, then Janet and Nancy, later Amber and Crystal, then Jessica and Jasmine, that mark the past. Caitlyn and Meghan mature. Soon will Genesis, Skyler, and Destiny follow. Four score years hence: wretched monikers for name tags in future old folks' homes) and her rosary. I realize that I do not know where it is. That toy-box I wrote about bilingually ten days ago I thought contained it, but it's not there. I feel guilty about this.

While I keep my past creed nearly as close to my guarded self as my present syncretism, and that'll be a point beyond the scope of today's post, I do find myself feeling disloyal. Not for not professing fidelity to the One Holy and Apostolic Church, but for letting that cocoa-bead and silver, worn and chained, rosary slip away. It is a symbol of my childhood, one of the few I had from so long ago. Perhaps, like Niall's iPod Shuffle which I wish I could find to keep me happy on that Blue Line, it's been a victim of our downsized detritus, our frenzied remodeling. Also, I was off in Oregon or Donegal the past year or two when my spouse coincidentally determined to flush out my packrat burrow and dismantle my magpie heaps. I figure collatoral if not intentional damage resulted. Inside and out, a remake-remodel that finds me stripping down slightly more to essentials as I age.

I do wonder how I'd classify myself in any census of believers. Jewish, agnostic, Celtic Reconstructionist, and residual culturally but no longer professingly Catholic all contend and share a place in my restless soul. Speaking of such an enumeration, scholars suspect far more unbelievers, post-denominational seekers, or those who have outgrown religious categories exist, but, as with surveys on sexual prowess as noted by the respondents themselves, or political preferences, we love to lie to pollsters. John David Paulos (who recently reduced Occam's Razor in his book on unbelief to ask why not place Nature as the Unmoved Mover rather than God and leave it at that for rationalizing creation "ex nihilo")opined in yesterday's L.A. Times how few men would admit to 'erectile disfunction' in any canvassing, but how millions suddenly bought Viagra once it came on the market. I thought of a substantial gay market, legions of pill-poppers, and gag gift givers as alternative clientele to the Bob Dole-Hugh Hefner demographic, but Paulos, the expert on innumeracy and how we're all mislead by numbers and rankings, may sniff at my disrespect for his august mathematical dexterity.

Paulos' main point was not ED but how underestimated he estimates the presence of un-and non-believers in our nation. Christians have declined to 79%. A poll last month tracked only half of my fellow Americans as Protestant, and among Catholics it's only immense immigration that keeps their ranks a quarter of all residents. A third of the U.S. has been or is Catholic, but in that gap falls the lapsed Catholic. I number among a tenth of all Americans. Thirty million raised in the Church but no longer darkening its doors. A fourth of the nation is Catholic, but a third of the nation could have been. Got it? This translates into a tremendous loss of Catholics into that slumpish state. I'd guess many of those I know who grew up with rosaries currently share this same limbo, bardo, or slough.

Last night, Layne felt ill and withdrew from yoga; Niall had been feverish and preferred the Laker game in his despondency. Given we've been at yoga for nearly a year now, and only the past few weeks have I been able for the first time in my life to touch my toes without bending my knees, I'm not exactly an adept. I was left in the room with Rick, the teacher, for the first time in session with nobody else. Reminded me of the Raymond Carver story "Cathedral" which my students like (or pretend to) as much as I do, and my wife's favorite writer too! A grumpy, dissatisfied, opinionated to the point of prejudice middle-aged guy, in the doldrums not for days but decades (sounds familiar), finds in a blind man's unwanted visit-- a friend of his wife-- a revelation. He too comes to terms with this epiphany, which I won't reveal, only after his wife's asleep and the stubborn man must dutifully and uncomfortably begin to entertain his blind guest.

Rick got me, with his help, to lean up against the closed bedroom door on my head, at least for a millisecond or two. Never having been put in this position reminded me of a novel physical sensation, sort of like, to put it delicately, inebriation or intercourse for the first time. It does upend your body in that same consciousness-altering, awkwardly quiet, intensely intimate, and mentally alert manner. But, it did not last as long as what's optimistically labelled "the act of love" at least for most people I hope, nor was it as extended as a swaying night in what the Brits call "out on the tiles." Still, it did make me aware of my blood, my neck, and my arms in novel fashion.

Later, in lieu of my favorite yoga position, "corpse" (although a prim if plump teacher on a video briefly on our cheap on demand cable channel euphemized this to be "full body relaxation" or some New Age nostrum), Rick asked if I was up for a breathing exercise. Feeling like Carver's unnamed narrator dealing with the gnomic guest, I met the challenge of the novel choice. He explained cogently what when repeated verbally (as with many insights) appears banal. But, he told me to breathe in and then let it out gradually, feeling the sensations, letting the pleasure of my exhalation comfort me as I sat upright, legs not quite in lotus position (can't do this due to my bad knee), and quiet. The other day I'd mentioned to Leo that "inner peace" was what I had always longed for and wished the same for him; I recognize in my son my own inability to-- as Pascal lamented was the bane of human existence-- sit alone content in one's own room. At least spiritually-- or metaphorically in our post-Christian Left Coast post-modern milieu-- speaking.

A few minutes later, nearing the end of weekly yoga night's endurance test, I reversed, and then enjoyed the inhalation. Then, logically, I joined the two and followed the course of my calmed breathing, in and out together. This calmed me, and I liked it. He suggested I try it for ten minutes daily and tell him next week how it went. I responded by describing my daily dose of mass transit as an opportunity. He told me that when he lived in NYC, he wasn''t into meditation, but now when he goes back, he can spend his whole journey on the subway in a trance, despite the bums, the vendors, and the congestion-- no mean feat.

He goes on a Zen retreat where this meditation may take up most of the waking day. Monks, he said, in Japan may do this nine days without moving. I asked him if this was the meaning of "Zazen," but he answered that this word is a Japanese rendering of a Chinese "chen" type of sound that in turn comes from Sanskrit "jhana" more or less (I have no dictionary with me) and I then wondered if this was related, in the idea of "concentration" at its core, to our "tenere" in Latin, the "holding on"...

So, I tried trying it today, and lasted a while, I think. This followed the rosary thoughts a half-hour or so later, on a different line, closer to home, as I readied the last few minutes of my itinerary to align with the chance to simply-- breathe. And I close this remembering that Rick-- also a former Catholic, East Coast Italian varietal, also married to a Jewish woman-- the past few classes has brought his Buddhist 108-bead "rosary" ("mala") along, that he fingers while we his students play dead at the close of the weekly workout. So, it all circles back.

I leave the last word to our Pontiff, on where doubt and faith meet. In his book, "Introduction to Christianity, " then Cardinal Ratzinger provides interesting insights:"...both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their
being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other," [faith is present] "through doubt and in the form of doubt" (47).

"Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth. It is not until belief is rejected that its unrejectability becomes evident" (45).

And, from "God and Man" the future Benedict XIV advised: (36-7): "Faith is always a path. As long as we live we are on the way, and on that account faith is always under pressure and under threat. And it is healthy that it can never turn into a convenient ideology. That it does not make me hardened and unable to follow the thoughts of my doubting brother and to sympathize with him. Faith can only mature by suffering anew, at every stage of life, the oppression and powers of unbelief, by admitting its reality and then finally going right through it, so that it again finds the path opening ahead for a while."

(Ratzinger quotes edited from IFSB posts March 4 & 5 under "Christian Doubt" thread.)
Paulos article: How Many Nonbelievers?

My Irish Ears are Smiling

Me, a clumsy beginner, vs. Glen Hansard's dozen years of school Irish as revealed at the Oscars. Whose command of "thank you" is better in the country's (if not ours or precious few of its millions of residents, as we all know) "first official" language? I had remarked on the Come Back Horslips guestbook in a thread run by Lee Templeton about the Oscars as she watched it, I guess, laptop in lap, on 25 February: I add that Glen spoke in Irish. He may have used the singular rather than plural 2nd person-- the two pronouns do sound similar to my narrowback ears-- but he did distinctly also add in his speech: "go raibh mile maith agat [agaibh?].


I wondered which it was. If it was "agat," I wondered, why address thousands at the Kodak Theatre and millions-- despite declining ratings-- worldwide, in the singular?
Shouldn't he have used "agaibh," the proper plural form of address? I deferred to the Irish-born as customary in such matters, figuring he must have known best. But, in the March 3, 2008, New York Times, buried in the business & media section, to my surprise, Orla O'Sullivan's "An Irish Salute at the Oscars Pains Some Ears" on the Frame's faux-pas that I excerpt here. Turns out I'm right, he's wrong after all.

For some Irish people who watched the Oscars last week, pride was tinged with shame when their countryman won the Academy Award for best song — and promptly botched an attempt to say “thank you” in his nation’s native tongue.

Glen Hansard, a native of Dublin who won for the song “Falling Slowly” from the Irish independent movie “Once,” tried in his acceptance speech to say “thanks a million” in Irish, the ancient Celtic language known to Americans as Gaelic.

But, in addressing the thousands of Academy members who had voted for him and the many millions of people worldwide watching on TV, Mr. Hansard said “thank you” using the singular form. That would be similar to addressing the French with “merci à toi,” rather than “merci à vous.”

Considering that Irish schoolchildren must take at least 12 years of Gaelic, it’s not as if he never had the chance to learn.

“He said, ‘Go raibh míle, míle, maith agat,’ but he should have said ‘agaibh’ ” as the final word, said Mary Haslam, a native of Limerick who teaches French at New York University. “I was cringing a bit because I’m a language teacher, but nobody seems to have picked up on that.”

(The phrase is pronounced — roughly — “guh rev meela meela maw uh-got,” or, in the plural, “uh-gwiv.”)
[...The Irish Film Board/ Bord Scannán na hÉireann didn't care, as they funded "Once."...]

An effort to poll readers about the incident on irishgaelictranslator.com drew few responses, suggesting that many viewers hadn’t perceived a gaffe. In a discussion group, one visitor argued that Mr. Hansard “was talking to the academy, which is singular.”

Given how bewildering Gaelic words can look to people raised exclusively on English, many Irish people are willing to award points for effort. “I wouldn’t be too hard on him.” said Ms. Haslam. Several people who left comments on the Gaelic translator site invoked a popular Irish saying that translates roughly to: “Better broken Irish than perfect English.”

An Irish Salute at the Oscars Pains Some Ears

"The Green Bridge: Stories from Wales": Book Review

John Davies edited-- if sparingly given but a five-paragraph introduction, a few sentences appended about each contributor, and a few sentences of acknowledgments-- this collection of twenty-five short stories written in English by Welsh authors over the 20th c. Appearing in 1988, it spans the century. I'll briefly comment on the ten I found most worthwhile.

Ifan Pughe, a pseudonymous author, gives a biblically-infused dreamlike "The Wild Horses and Fair Maidens of Llanganoch." As with the better-known Caradoc Evans here in his "Three Men from Horeb," this type of tale conveys what Davies characterizes as "mythopoetic, lighting our dream life, its longings, fears. Our mythology is our lasting consensus, an alternative and often buoyant reality. And a means perhaps of reconciling the irreconciliable." (7) Evans, however, remains much grimmer, the darker side of Pughe's more Lawrentian consciousness. This aura infuses also one of the two longer stories that I especially liked: "The Chosen One" by Rhys Davies. The tension between an atavistic throwback and a powdered dowager unfolds dramatically, and the denouement provides an appropriate, if not predictable, conclusion to the climactic, psychosexual tension.

Such tension, as seen from the view of a little boy, enters Dylan Thomas' "Patricia, Edith and Arnold." The boy witnesses two-timing Arnold get his comeuppance, and the clash of a youthful innocence with adult sin makes for a satisfying, and less schematic than I'd feared, entry. Thomas, by contrast with many of his bilingual peers, controls his language markedly. Many of the writers who also wrote in Welsh tend to charge their stories selected by Davies in English with an undercurrent of less controlled prose. This is not to their detriment in the better stories, but some that I have left unmentioned do mope, prance, or fumble along.

The best of these, the other long story: Gwyn Jones' "The Pit." Like Thomas, a love triangle sets up the plot, but the drama of a protagonist trapped in a mine, fearing his rival's out to destroy him from afar and above, makes for a truly exciting narrative. It's old-fashioned in the best sense of a gripping read. Same with Glyn Jones' "Jordan." This recalls Arthur Machen in its uncanny juxtaposition of the supernatural with the mundane, a half-mythical tale of wrongs righted wrongly if evenly for the sake of righteousness, done by an evildoer to another of his kind.

Emyr Humphreys' "The Arrest" brings the selections closer to present-day concerns, or at least those of modern Wales. It's a simple tale of a preacher preparing for incarceration for his symbolic stand not to pay the television licence until a Welsh-language service was implemented. Many did go to jail for such a decision, and Humphreys carefully shows the idealism and the folly of such a violation of the law. While Alun Lewis' "The Raid" takes place in India immediately pre-Partition, and while Wales never enters into the story, the parallel with another fanatic defying the Empire for his patriotism makes for both a stirring adventure and a thoughtful take on dying for one's country. And, how the imperial forces judge such a stance.

A skewed slant on this issue, in an unnamed African nation under apartheid, pushes another story with no overt Welsh content, Duncan Bush's "Boss," into a symbolic, politically charged interpretation. It's a sign of Bush's skill that he gives a tale full of latent colonial critique as well as potent power without falling into didacticism. Dannie Abse takes this same sense of warped identity into "My Father's Red Indian," which again from an oblique angle appears to become a meditation on the need to assimilate a foreign consciousness within one's domestic predictability.

(Posted today to Amazon US)