Nicholas J. Higham + Martin J. Ryan's "The Anglo-Saxon World": Book Review

If you can read this sentence, you owe a debt to Anglo-Saxons. Much of our basic language, perhaps bits of our law, and likely some of your former if not present neighbors if you live in the English-speaking world perpetuated and augmented a social cohesion based upon early medieval foundations of their roots. The peoples who formed the English kingdom forged it first from the elite if intrusive identities of fifth-century Saxons, Angles, and Jutes who confronted the remnants of Romano-British culture.

Before the Angles and Saxons, Brittania did not attract much attention. Although it took a tenth of Rome's legions to occupy its contested realm, it did not supply much wealth. Career opportunities for its Celtic natives, as Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan tally them, proved limited: laborers, recruits for the military, slaves, and prostitutes. They begin their survey with an examination of Britain, as a fusion of Roman rule, adapted by native British peoples, characterized the first few centuries after its occupation in the middle of the first century C.E.  Dealing with a distant land, and increasingly beset by barbarian incursions, Rome did not sustain its dominance. Its power had faded from the island before the end of the fourth century, as the imperial legions gradually withdrew to defend the Western Empire, and the sea raiders surrounding the coasts of Britain had stormed in.

While Higham and Ryan, after paraphrasing recent research, remain hesitant to calculate how many Saxons, Angles, and Jutes left their German, Frisian, and Danish homes to settle in Britain, it appears a "high-prestige" contingent convinced or coerced the Romanized and indigenous lowland Britons to adapt Old English by the middle of the fifth century. Few words we speak in its modern descendent come from Celtic tongues, and this imbalance demonstrates the replacement of ancient languages by that new import as its popularity and status spread rapidly. A sort of "apartheid" may have accompanied this Germanic regime, so that those loyal to Celtic culture and leadership found themselves increasingly marginalized. The "wergild" or man-price value varied when restitution was sought in a violent society where invaders and resisters battled among themselves and against many occupiers: a Briton was worth half of the value of those who made the laws as Angles and Saxons.

Compounding this imposition, over the next two centuries, came Christianity. A Celtic version had endured if in a persecuted manner (as the invaders were pagan for a considerable if varying time initially) among some natives, but Saxons and Angles found that a revival of the Roman version (first introduced under later imperial occupation of Britain, intriguingly) suited martial rule and mental constructs well. Catholicism imported by missionaries from the former empire delivered clerical administration, militarized models, and continental learning. By 730, Britain had been Christianized, at least officially. As Beowulf shows, still puzzling scholars today, pagan elements lingered long.

For the Germanic peoples imposing control over fractious and divided Celtic kingdoms, the importance of family, lineage, and kindred enabled "kingship" (from the same root as "kin") to combine not only spatial advantage in territory conquered but tribal alliances negotiated to expand the dynasties of Northumbria, Mercia, Anglia, Kent, and the Saxon lands of Essex, Wessex, and Sussex. Eventually, seven kingdoms fought for dominance. Given the bloody conflicts against internal and foreign rivals, its rulers took a long time before settling on the name of England (the Latin on coinage as King Alfred craftily minted ca. 875 to call himself "rex anglorum" is an elusive phrase as it may mean king of the Angles or of the English, as they came to label themselves later). This review necessarily simplifies what "The Anglo-Saxon World" conveys in complicated chapters full of formidable names in many languages and what proves for dutiful stretches relentless strife.

This depth, compressed into density, may weigh down even a reader as fascinated by this era as this reviewer. Higham and Ryan present in nearly five hundred pages a necessarily thorough account, if one while accessibly written will be consulted more in history seminars than airport lounges. Given the scarcity of evidence for much of this period, the relative lack of social history, lively anecdotes, or everyday life as it was endured can exact demands on those looking for the past made popular, but the rather old-fashioned top-down dominant approach of names, dates, and reports does result in a trusted resource, open-ended and able to weigh and sift contested evidence.

The fact that it interprets specialist lore and scientific findings adds to its value. Its heft and generous inclusion of charts, maps, tables, and illustrations (many from archeological excavations, monuments, manuscripts, the engrossing Bayeux Tapestry, and especially coins--not sure if these depictions will be in color as I have a galley proof) will ease your learning curve; the authors supply a list of sources in a running series of endnotes, but they keep the text itself free of parenthetical citations or superscription, which lightens their academic tone.

What's admirable about this wide-ranging presentation? The asides as to how Anglo-Saxon terms and inventions echo down to us. For instance, shire-reeve incorporates the establishment of this territorial division with the man who patrolled it as a royal agent by the late tenth century, a "sheriff". And as for if not law or order, then their lack; certainly when the Vikings arrive ca. 800, the pace quickens.

The "St. Brice's Day Massacre" of November 13, 1002, may be unknown to gangland aficionados today, but it anticipates what any brutal leader who needed to crack down on his rivals and defend his turf might do. Aethelred, although denigrated in his own parlous reign as the "unready" (literally "ill-counseled" as this very term denotes linguistic shifts over a thousand years), endures as an English king determined to launch a pre-emptive strike against Danish mercenaries. After two centuries of Viking raids, then occupation, Aethelred (unlike some of his Germanic predecessors) tried to rally against the Scandinavian raiders--and their English allies, as warlords and collaborators.

When some Danes fled into St. Frideswide's Church in Oxford, the king ordered their sanctuary to be burnt down, and those within it. All over the realm, on royal command the Danes were slain, as digs over the past decade reveal. Carbon-dating and isotope analysis of skeletons now can pinpoint Scandinavian origins for the bones dug up from mass graves: many young men with multiple wounds not suffered in battle, decapitated, attacked from behind while prone, or hit in the back of the skull.

Emma, Aethelred's second wife, found herself willingly or wisely married off to his Danish successor, Cnut, who in 1016 took over England. Game of Thrones comes often to mind when reflecting on the internecine revenge and diplomatic contentions filling many paragraphs here. The hard bargain apparently driven by Emma herself hints at this sort of lively inspiration for tale tellers. 

The next year Cnut divided England among himself and three rivals, only to kill off one the same year, while eliminating three more leaders. Furthermore, consider the fate of Aethelred's sons and grandsons. "Eadwig, the son of Aethelred by his first consort Aelfgifu of York, was driven into exile in 1017 and killed soon afterwards, while Edward and Alfred, Aethelred's sons by Emma, went into exile in Normandy. Edmund Ironside's sons, Edward and Edmund, were likewise exiled to the Continent, ending up eventually in Hungary having escaped attempts by Cnut to have them murdered." One reflects upon the distance needed to flee to what was the edge of Europe, and a barbaric enclave itself, to elude vengeance of a Viking made uneasy king.

Unsurprisingly, the authors find Cnut's long reign intriguing; they trace the derivation of our meaning for "rich" to the OE "rice" which by this time melded the older meaning of "power" with the newer one of "wealth" to symbolize the fusion of the two for an ambitious set of social climbers. Among these was Cnut's favorite Godwine, who'd enter the jockeying for the throne after Cnut's death in 1035. No wonder both King Alfred and Harold II would stamp "pax" (Latin for "peace") on their coinage alongside their regal profiles: the Vikings kept pressing their advantages while the English fought or bought them off. The issue of succession defies brevity: the authors' chart of the English, Norwegian, and Danish claimants to or inheritors of the English crown, and the Norman dukes who would soon seize it, records nearly sixty progenitors, spouses, siblings, and/or descendants, with fifteen kings controlling some or all of England between the tenth and the twelfth centuries. 

The "some or all" proves the sticking point. Harold Godwineson's less than ten months as ruler found him driving back Norwegian invaders--then immediately hastening south to fend off William of Normandy, to an end every student used to know if no other date in English lore. 1066 represents the "biggest land grab" in the kingdom's history. Monasteries were given over to the newcomers; castles loomed over the angry inhabitants of besieged cities and insurgent borders. Heavy cavalry had won the Norman battle at Hastings; armed might bested the resistance put up by Harold's feebler allies.

The conclusion of this sprawling narrative may be less familiar that that preceding scene. Normans decimated those they hated as Saxons. England's elite rebelled repeatedly; William imposed a scorched-earth policy over much of the restive north of his vast but hostile kingdom. The peasants and villagers had nowhere to run. Far fewer in numbers than the fifth-century Anglo-Saxon elite who had conquered what they finally called England, the "barely one percent" of Normans swept in to take over the ninety-nine percent, its mixed peoples calling themselves now the English. The island's newest (and last successful) invaders first had settled down in France and turned from Viking Northmen into Normans. Then, emboldened to rush into an England under Scandinavian attack, and embittered by what they saw as Harold's unlawful taking of the crown against William's own claim, they killed, expelled, or drove off the ruling class among their Saxon predecessors. Ironically, many from this displaced English elite joined the Vikings as they continued in their raids--if elsewhere. (A 6-25-13; PopMatters 6-7-13)

Ag dul go Londain aríst, cuid amháin

D'imigh muid go Cathair na hÁingeal go dtí Londain an chéad Dé Máirt i mí na Nollaig luath. Fhág Léna agus mé le linn na h-óiche. Bhí Léna ansuid le linn samhraidh seo caite, ach ní raibh mé ansin ach uair amháin (nó níos lú!) sa deich mbliana chomh fásta: beagán i Meitheamh-Iúil 1979, 1989 agus 2003 mar i gcéanna.

D'fhán muid i gKensington Thios ina h-Óstán de Blacam. Is áit iontach, agus fuair muid úasghrádú chun seomra mór i stíl na Fraince. Bhí maith linn a léamh dhá nó trí nuachtán (íomlán ar an bháis na Mandela agus an triail na Nigella Lawson) áitiuilaí go brea gach maidin le bricfeasta ann, fós.

Thosaigh muid ár tseachtaine seisean féin Dé Ceadaoin leis cuairt go Músaem na Londain ag an balla Rómhánach. Tá sé ag dul chun cinn ó amannaí neoiliteach go Céilteach go Rómánach go meanaoiseach go nAthbheochana. Ansin, théann tú go síos go dtí an t-úrlar thíos a fheiceáil an ré nua-aimseartha dtí an lá inniu.

Chónaic mé ar léarscáil na Músaem na Ord Naomh Eoin. D'fhóglaim muid faoi na Ord i gclós an-stairiúl air i gClerkenwell ó meanaoiseach go anois mar sheirbhis otharchairr. Ith muid dinnéar Mharocó blasta i tStráide Grégis, Soho, ag Maison Touareg.

Ar deireadh, bhreatnaigh muid drámaíocht "Mojo" ag Amharclann Harold Pinter in aice leis Cearnach Leicester, iomlán de carnabhail geal. Bhí an-tuirseach, ar ndóigh. Ní raibh mé a thuiscint go leor de.

Going to London again, part one.

We went from Los Angeles to London early in December. Layne and I left during the night. Layne had been over there during this past summer, but I had not been there but once (or less!) decade as an adult: a bit in June-July 1979, the same 1989 and 2003.

We stayed in South Kensington at Blake's Hotel. It's a wonderful place, and we got an upgrade to a big room in French style. We liked reading two or three fine local newspapers at breakfast there, too.

We started our week itself on Wednesday with a visit to the London Museum at the Roman Wall. It goes from neolithic times to Celtic to Roman to medieval to the Renaissance. Then, you go down to the first floor to see the early modern times to the present.

I saw on a map The Museum of the Order of St. John. We learned about the Order in its very historic courtyard in Clerkenwell from medieval times to now as an ambulance service. We ate a tasty Moroccan dinner in Greek Street, Soho, at Maison Touareg.

Finally, we saw the drama "Mojo" at the Harold Pinter Theatre near Leicester Square, full of a bright carnival. I was very tired, however. I didn't understand much of it. (Grianghraf/Photo: St John's Gate at night/Geata Naomh Eoin i n-óiche)

Chris West's "A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps": Book Review

When I saved up my allowance as a nine-year-old, my first purchases were the boxed Ballantine paperback set of The Lord of the Rings for $2.85 and a secondhand Scott's stamp catalogue, the latter sold cheap as it was one year outdated from a local philatelist's shop. Those two red hardcover volumes set me back $7.50, but I lost myself there in as many imagined realms as mapped in Tolkien's trilogy. Staring at the small, monochrome images of stamps, I had to create in my mind's eye the magenta, umber, or carmine hues as distinguishing issues. My favorites were from British territories and protectorates and Crown Colonies. I'd scan their chronological entries, until the kings and queens stopped. Then, I'd switch from, say, Bechuanaland to Botswana, and watch as independence triumphed, titling the first issue of the new nation.

I learned a lot about history and politics. Similar lessons Chris West incorporates into his snappy survey of three dozen British stamps. These offer a cultural tour around the United Kingdom, since 1840.

With (once-?) typical English efficiency, the Penny Post came about nearly the same moment a new queen ascended the throne. Rowland Hill, a liberal reformer eager to spread literacy and offer a cheap method of sending letters which did not rely on the fluctuating fees demanded from the recipient from the postmaster, pitched his proposal. Overhead then as now proved low compared to distance; the expense lay in overheads. These would be reduced by a standard fee, a non-negotiable surcharge.

Hill's three reasons convinced the Royal Post Office. It might lose money at first due to the loss of postmasters' income, but the cost would soon convince many more to use a fixed-rate service. In turn, businesses would save. Finally, families separated by industrialization and urbanization could stay in touch. They did. The first issue, the Penny Black with the young Victoria in profile, sold 68 million in its year of production. Its successor, the Penny Red, over the next forty years sold 20 billion; starting in 1881, the Lilac sold 33 billion. In London by 1857, twelve daily deliveries allowed rapid exchanges of letters or postcards, and that city counted for a third of British correspondence.

Most chapters, however, depart from a stamp itself to summon up its era or a dramatic event. For instance, the Irish famine pairs with a depiction of a Penny Red postmarked there. Doughty Victoria's profile alters and her inked color changes over long decades, but given the similarity of the designs for much of the period charted, there is not as much to discuss about these stolid stamps themselves. When topics emerge, as with later commemoratives, West remains chary about what he explores.

Is there a need for 75,000 words which prefer to retell modern British history more than how stamps altered key moments of it, however tacitly? Perhaps, if one prefers West's subtlety. From each selected stamp, he surveys its illustrative era. He finds in each brisk chapter a vignette or perspective which suits his broad-minded humanism. He astutely credits earlier generations when, as with Rowland Hill or Charles Dickens, they asserted the sustenance of humanity in the face of relentless mechanization. He selects (if, frustratingly, with no references to any of the anecdotes, local history, or factoids he shares so often) stories which narrate in a thoughtful tone the mindset of his forebears.

He fairly calculates the imperial balance sheet for standards of living after the seizure of Hong Kong from the Chinese. West shows how the Army Form B 104-82 sent to the family of a dead soldier (fallen officers by contrast merited telegrams) at the cost of a George V Penny Red epitomized the bureaucracy of mass slaughter. "There was a hand-stamp for 'killed in action.'" Regarding the results of a 1919 "Homes fit for Heroes" campaign to house the returning troops from the Great War, West notes how "the results can be seen in most English villages (down the road from the war memorial)." Speaking of war, his only foreign inclusion, a two million over-stamp of a 200 Deutsche Mark 1923 issue, allows him to consider the relevance of hyperinflation to what replaced the Weimar Republic.

I agree with West as to his favorite. Monarchs tend not to amuse as much once one sees them over and over as the subject on a stamp, but what he terms 1953's "Gloriana", after Benjamin Britten's opera praising the coronation of Elizabeth II, remains handsome. Elegantly, it presents the new queen facing us, her calm gaze composed, her posture proud, her ermines and orb resplendent. This final design from the talented Edmund Dulac softens even this Irish (with a small-r) republican reviewer.

Addressing a British audience, West never mentions why these stamps always show a monarch but never list their origin. Great Britain premiered the adhesive stamp, so by the International Postal Union's decision, the kingdom did not have to name itself on it. Intriguingly (West again does not account for this), the British monarch, usually unnamed, is always depicted. For many reigns, this convention meant that the stamp tended to fill up with a regal profile. Only in the later twentieth century, as that royal figure herself sought rapport with her subjects in a post-imperial era, did Queen Elizabeth find her image shrunk to a cameo. As such, on most commemoratives she remains today, he her head usually enduring as a tasteful silhouette at the margins, a presence I find symbolic. 

Tellingly, British business confidence, even on Her Majesty's stamps, weakened by the second decade of her reign. 1962's "National Productivity Year" cannot overcome its dull theme. The queen's portrait takes up the right half. Arrows rise up superimposed over an outline of the kingdom at left, and the N-P-R initials jostle for supremacy at center. The 3d version, West must admit, had "white blobs" on the map, so parts of the realm were submerged as if into inland lakes. On some printings, Kent crumbled into the sea; on still others, "the Queen has a nasty white spot on the end of her nose".

Fortunately, the Beatles boosted revenue. West's fondness for a "true Summer of Love" during 1966, when Revolver appeared, while the Kinks' "Sunny Afternoon" provided the season's theme for Swinging London, makes England's World Cup triumph proclaimed on a stamp all the more splendid.

What follows, for what West's iconic David Bowie evoked as a mood of "Life on Mars", dampened prospects post-Yoko. Unions walked out, factories groaned, prime ministers sagged. Dismayed by unemployment, Britons tried to rally. A decimal system replaced ancient pounds, shillings, and pence, so the stamps had to match the new currency. A first day cover features all decimal definitives (the standard design with a uniform image for all denominations) with its own rubber stamp below. "Posting delayed by the Post Office Strike 1971." Inflation jumped from 4% in 1972 to 25% by 1975.

Few authors may find common ground strutted by Sid Vicious and Margaret Thatcher, but West joins them by their individual ambition. Confronting a British system no longer working, both resented conformity to outmoded models: one musical, one economic, maybe both political. West carefully examines the controversial legacy of the Iron Lady, whose mark probably left a far firmer imprint on British society than the Sex Pistols and all the spiky kids united. As with the British taking of Hong Kong in light of its subsequent prosperity, West aligns Thatcher with her embrace of "Victorian values". He asks if his nation indeed can survive without a "sound currency" and a thriving support of the entrepreneurial spirit which, after all, inspired reformers such as Rowland Hill as well as Maggie.

Another high-profile woman's entry onto the national stage at precisely this very contentious time would be commemorated with its own complex iconography, behind the simplified or soon polarized media manipulation of a much younger blonde. Princess Diana's ambitions to seek not Charles' sense of inherited duty but her own personal "authenticity" in West's analysis account for her own divided legacy. As "the People's Princess" she sought to connect with causes, such as landmine eradication or AIDS patients, driven by her own wish for exposure, and self-satisfaction in a difficult role she made public, or which was made so inevitably for her. West aligns this drive with her struggle against a fairytale wedding aftermath, one that trapped her. He notes how all five issues after Diana's death feature photographs from only her last ten years. That way, no royal family had to be included, or cut. Instead, as a representative of her post-1960s generation, Diana occupies the full stamp frame, alone.

Stamps serve as a synecdoche for Great Britain's challenges and creations, if affording a small peephole more than a panorama. West's philatelic appendix explains how from the stamps featured the eager may acquire "space fillers", or experts with more money better specimens, or for "the philatelist "who thinks they have died and gone to heaven" mint condition rarities. One wants more about the lore of stamps, much more. West might have provided a more consistent ratio between the historical events and royal dynasty these stamps memorialize and the humble, if often marvelously designed (considering their artistic merit, too few commemoratives enrich his sample) stamps themselves, with their quirks and trivia. However, as a welcome reminder in our wired age of the value and charm these little stickers possess, A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps illustrates the kingdom's ambitions and the inherent modesty of its eccentric title. (PopMatters 10-17-23; altered a bit for Amazon US 10-22-13)

Roy Porter's "London: A Social History": Book Review

Although this appeared a few years before Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography, medical historian Roy Porter's social history possesses its own many merits, even if Ackroyd's book appears to have benefited more from promotion and sales. Like Ackroyd, Porter looks at the broad evolution; less so than Ackroyd, Porter concentrates on the emergence of The City in the Renaissance, as before that, the enclave remained small and separated for many centuries from its royal neighbor and purported ruler, Westminster, two miles away. Purported because Porter argues for Whitehall vs. Guildhall.

That is, the independence shown early by London for much of its dominance enabled its vibrancy, confidence, and diversity. The gravel banks under the Thames, forty miles from the sea, assured a calm waterway for trade. While the Church ruled, with a hundred parishes starting under Norman rule, one every three acres, the mercantile class settled and attracted migrants from the rest of the island and abroad. The Corporation that ran the city began to emerged by Tudor times. "London was on the road to becoming a small, highly regulated corporate city lapped by a turbulent metropolitan sea."

The distance between Westminster and the City persisted; during the Great Fire, the King and his brother did not know of the blaze until they were informed. Porter, given his expertise, provides vivid descriptions of the plague that preceded the conflagration, and the Civil War that pitted royalists against Parliament there. After the fire, guided by Christopher Wren, London began to stretch out, and by 1800 a "hierarchy of ranks was stamped upon the topography of the town." The bulk of this book takes place since that period, for after all, more London and more residents means more data and more detail as the city, already the world's largest at a million, kept booming. "Addresses assumed weight." We begin to see the separation of East from West End, and the class connotations that still mark the property of the latter expanse today. 90% already lived two centuries ago outside the City, and by 1911 seven million called Greater London home, but the ancient Corporation tended to resist reform, as the medieval guilds which had allowed so many ancestors of the London establishment to gain a steady job and a respected livelihood, turned into gentleman's clubs and privileged livery.

The tension never exploded into unrest as it did elsewhere under radicalism in modern times, but the necessity for London to adapt to its own generated, centripetal and centrifugal energy led to rail and then the Tube as methods to balance, to a degree, the influx of the masses with work demands and settlement. While London grew in population 1921-31 by 9%, the land it took up as the megapolis leaped into the outer stretches of Metroland doubled its size, Attempts for Garden Cities and a greenbelt later helped, but this type of planning led to much destruction, of nature and farms for the worse, of slums for the better. Still, London could thrive, for a good long while as the imperial center.

Do-gooders of Victorian times might be mocked, but Porter refuses easy stereotypes. He shows how Henry Mayhew's depictions of the poor and of laborers memorably evoke the East End, and he realizes that reformers helped engage all Londoners in creating out of so many peoples from so wide a series of places a common civic identity. The deprivations of the Blitz and the displacement of 40% of Londoners during WWII show how post-war London had to adapt, and how its manufacturing and docking bases soon felt the tug of outer borough relocation and foreign competition.

As Porter writes this in the aftermath of Thatcher, and the abolition of the Labour-led GLC, he castigates her and the determined greed that fueled so much of what London looks like now. (I'd like to hear from Porter if the later 90s on have improved this or not...)  "The balkanization of the metropolis encouraged rotten boroughs, political localism and extremism of all stripes."

Many workers fled for cheaper and healthier suburbs, and he shows how transport allowed this. Congestion, all the same, grew worse, and pollution persisted. Crime was on the upswing, and decay and unrest followed. Immigration altered large parts of the inner ring and older neighborhoods, while others turned gentrified. Porter does not place his hopes for recovery in luring visitors; "tourists are vultures" and the low-wage, often immigrant workers are exploited.

Rebuilding in the post-Blitz, capitalist-frenzied contemporary decades, 400 of Richard Seifert's high-rise blocks of "conveyor-belt modernism" failed to beautify the London panorama as had Wren's designs. Traffic, noise, crime, high rents, low quality of life: the new Brutalism left heavy marks. Speculation, it seems, has poisoned London since John Stow lamented it in Elizabeth's era--the first Queen, that is.

It can be challenging for a non-resident to follow, but Porter doggedly shows how the urban patterns proliferated. This may be of more use to a specialist or insider or a local, but it's valuable information. Reading lists append this and a good index, but there are no endnotes so his wonderful quotes cannot be traced. The lack of good maps with enough detail to chart the intricate sprawl, moreover, precludes a one-volume understanding of its later growth as told here.

He concludes with praising his city as "a muddle that worked." But he is guarded. He doubts "that this good fortune will continue"; again, nearly two decades after this book first appeared, it's intriguing to test his case against what's transpired. (11-20-13: Amazon US 2000 paperback and 1995 cloth)

Fergal Mac Ionnrachtaigh's "Language, Resistance and Revival": Book Review

What motivates families with little money and often no upbringing in their ancestral language to send their children off to schools to be taught in it? Why would prisoners, English-speaking from birth, teach each other that challenging language, given few resources and violent retribution? What links these two communities of activists, in the context of Belfast and the Irish North?

A participant-observer from West Belfast, Dr Fergal Mac Ionnrachtaigh reports on the background, the theory, and the practice of how the Irish language movement endured and revived. A product of its first Irish-medium schools, he blends scholarship with testimony in "Language, Resistance and Revival: Republican Prisoners and the Irish Language in the North of Ireland". Former prisoners and local families have a say. The personal as the political, with bilingual transcripts of interviews, enhances the impact of this accessible--if being Pluto Press, academic--grassroots survey.

After criminologist Phil Scraton's lively introduction, the author expands from his experience to post-colonial theories of language decline, nationalism, ideology, socialism, and identity. "Language loss does not occur within communities of power, wealth and privilege." The diminution of Irish, he adds, was not by choice when that choice had been denied so many citizens under British rule.

A chapter on the language's past fate critiques any purported "advantages of cultural assimilation" asserted by revisionists and imperialist entities, whether traditional or neo-liberal. Treatment of Protestant and republican revivalists, and the Gaelic League's attempt for "cultural reconquest", while familiar to students of this topic, assist new inquirers. The "Orange State" 1922-1972 backlash follows (an epilogue documents current provincial complaints). Mac Ionnrachtaigh examines "Hidden Ulster" that managed via the Catholic-leaning Comhaltas Uladh and locally a radicalised Cumann Chluain Ard which, alienated from the official state for a generation, encouraged Shaw's Road, the start of Belfast's urban Gaeltacht. From the Civil Rights era, that self-help initiative led to today's thriving schools and centres.

Learning Irish in prison, a more intense process than in streets or schools, marks resistance. As "a practical means of power" a second language undermined authority and cemented collective labels on those who championed political rather than criminal status at Long Kesh or other British prisons. This continued a cherished means of opposition from Fenian, IRB, and "old IRA" times, as inmates chose Irish as their linguistic as well as ethnic allegiance. In "Na Cásanna" or the 1973-84 Long Kesh internment cages during 1973-84, prisoners (including the author's father) explained, however, learning it paled next to playing football. Yet his father, and many others, mastered some Irish; Bobby Sands' example motivated many.

After the hunger strikes, Irish persisted. By the end of the '70s, blanketmen had forged an identity against surveillance and brutality. Pupils became teachers in turn, strengthening solidarity. Séanna Breathnach elaborates that even if inevitably "people were learning Irish from people who had no Irish at all before they came in", this provided a incentive "of gaining mental emancipation".

Sinn Féin encouraged classes in Belfast, Derry and Armagh. This study tends to be very Belfast-focused, but this may be inevitable given Long Kesh's proximity to that city's cultural prominence. There, illegal Irish-language street signs and the newspaper Lá symbolised change. Pádraig Ó Maolchraoibhe in 1985 boasted: "Now every phrase you learn is a bullet in the freedom struggle." Schools (where the author began mid-'80s) made Irish a living language, taught often by ex-prisoners. Aodán Mac Póilin cautioned against a tight fit between republicans and the language; as with the Catholic Church, such associations weakened wider "ownership" of Irish and invited British hostility.

In conclusion, after narrating debates over the role of Irish and the risks and rewards of politicisation during the past decades, Mac Ionnrachtaigh places his research findings in context. Similar to a complementary study (uncredited as that appeared just prior to this) by another Ph.D. schooled in Irish during this same era, Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost's"Jailteacht" [Amazon + Estudios Irlandeses reviews by me], Mac Ionnrachtaigh concurs that incarceration sparked what earlier Gaelic Leaguers, for instance, had lacked: the incentive behind bars "to organise and sustain educational development in unfavourable circumstances". Finally, for Irish today as more learn it in school and try to use it in daily life, its inherent power enlivened its use beyond prison. That communal energy, harnessed through its return after long absence to more Irish homes and communities, demonstrates a renewed "space of resistance" emboldened by "highly political manifestations of decolonisation". (11/27/13 to Amazon US and Britain; slightly altered 12-20-13 for Slugger O'Toole)

Alan Jacobs' "The Book of Common Prayer": Book Review

For a book so rooted in the devotional tradition invented or revised for the English people, Alan Jacobs reminds us of its use for social and political control. A vernacular resource emphasized the unity of responses commanded by King Henry VIII for his new church. He and it demanded conformity. Beginning in 1544, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote and disseminated the first Book of Common Prayer, exactly what its title promised. 

This entry in Princeton University Press’s Lives of Great Religious Books series surveys the nearly five centuries of responses to the sonorous rhythms and insistent appeals which fill the book’s pages. Cranmer as a reformer set out to bridge the tension between traditionalists sympathetic to the old Roman ritual and the evangelists champing to bring Lutheran fervor across the English Channel. Prayers for the dead, notably, were absent from the pages he penned. “In Cranmer’s collects the saints are merely exemplary figures, as dead as the statues and windows that portrayed them.” 

What replaced the intercession of the saints was a bifurcated direction for the soul seeking salvation and avoiding damnation. The resurrection of the body assumed importance, and salvation history itself took the people through their own daily version of what supplanted the Divine Office sung by monks as their “hours”. The Book recapitulates the fall of man, the coming of the Savior, the Last Days, and the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. It also guides the believer through more stages, of life from birth to death. The day’s own rise and fall provide another backdrop, from Matins to Evensong. Finally, time itself turns more manageable, conveyed through Cranmer’s accessible and uniform prayer book.

As Professor Jacobs interprets Cranmer’s mission, “one of the greatest challenges of creating a prayer book for English Christians was to find a way to enable ordinary people who had their own daily work also to pray faithfully, to keep their own way the vigil the first disciples had failed to keep.” That watch at Gethsemani had soon lagged.  Similarly, reviving passion for what proved all too familiar verses rendered by Cranmer dulled the long-range impact of the Book’s power. 

Subsequent chapters move across English history, as dissension grows between conformists and non-conformists politically and religiously. Meanwhile, the Empire expands and brings the little book to many lands, who then strive to adapt it in turn to dominions and their own cultural shifts away from the island’s polity. While the reader unfamiliar with the Book’s contents may not come away from this brisk guide thoroughly informed as to its details and organization, the pleasure remains as one discerns through famous readers the latent impact of its material, often forced upon generations far from the fervor of Cranmer’s mission.

Among these, Samuel Johnson took comfort. However Jane Austen, and William Thackeray sighed at its tiresome recital. By the First World War, the distance between the Book and reality, gauged in the trenches, led to protest, four centuries after Henry and Cranmer. The sixteenth-century diction seemed nonsense to many raised on compulsory services, full of woe, in intricate syntax.

During this shell-shocked generation, in Professor Jacobs’ summary, “the Book becomes a synecdoche for English society in time of war: civilian incomprehension of the war’s miseries illustrated through an ongoing sanctimonious recital of the Cranmerian cadences. The intrinsically repetitive character of liturgy reinforces the feeling of mindlessness, of saying without thinking, and the prayer book’s fixed place in the Establishment connects it with vast, pitiless, institutional forces—forces that blithely send young men to their deaths.” The old Book, the voice of those who sanctioned slaughter, had to go. 

Ritual dimmed and a renewal of the Book in modern language and simplified expression led to the 1928 revision. While this was passed in America, it failed to pass Parliament in Britain, again showing the endurance, if attenuated, of the old guard determined to remain faithful to the venerable standard. 

While Professor Jacobs underplays the tension over liberal Anglican and Episcopal factions with conservative ones around the 1928 book itself giving way to another revision in 1979 for the United States and 1980 for the Church of England, the drift away from the Cranmer edition continues, now to evoke the struggles as a modular, structural approach replaces the basis on language as innovations continue among restless congregations and their overseers. With the rise of technology allowing far more novelty and reshuffling of the pages, furthermore, the survival of the original prayer book itself appears threatened, as binders and electronic media, photocopies and PowerPoint, supplant the efforts of Cranmer. 

Alan Jacobs offers a handy introduction to the cultural and social effects that the presence and promotion of this book provided for centuries of English-speaking worshipers. Within its final chapters, poignancy emerges as the original text fades; the Anglican Church, full of its own debates as again traditionalists and progressives contend for control, revises and updates its core text. Whatever devotion endures for Cranmer’s original, perhaps, may persist among a few lovers of antiquarian lore and elegant rhetoric in the pews-- and a few devoted scholars. (New York Journal of Books 9-29-13)

David Gontar's "Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays": Review

Professor Gontar takes on, in his spirited introduction, the sentimentalists (as in Ophelia), the conventional readers and critics (Polonius), the concealers (Gertrude), and the technocrats (Fortinbras). I recognized intimately the last faction: "A trivialized Shakespeare is no threat. His fangs are plucked. And this is the defense mechanism taught to generations of graduate students." (22) As an alternative, holding up the texts as humanist mirrors not to nature but our own gaze, David P. Gontar asks we not avert our gaze as did Hamlet's Queen.

In eighteen chapters, concluding with the Hamlet essay, close readings follow. While an overview of this project, and how they may relate to one another, would have added cogency to the introduction aimed at students, the chapters demonstrate the range of inquiry in elevated but not inaccessible language--this is a blessing compared with many critics from that last of those four cohorts who seek to dissect--but who murder Shakespeare's soul. This book compiles Gontar's strategies to challenge inert or facile commentary.

I'll give a quick overview of each theme in order. What happens if one's tricked into love? Marital discord, and the unsettled nature of relationships, begins Hamlet Made Simple. Sonnet 116 in light of 42 follows; Juliet as tragic hero compared with Cleopatra offers a fine choice, but it ends too soon, as it gets interesting. This pattern may not be a flaw for some, as stirring up the reader's imagination shows the power of Gontar's ability to rouse attention, but it may frustrate those students wanting more follow-through. Parallels emerge, but only as ten enumerations of how to "count the ways."

"Ned Poyntz" in Henry IV shows possible ties with the real Prince Hal; "Does Prospero's story add up?" (84) That sparks a look at his hypnotic sway over Miranda, and how we perceive this control over her and Caliban in a "moral labyrinth." In Troilus and Cressida, "self-procured cuckoldry" sets up The Rape of Lucrece and Cymbeline for similar treatment. Dr. Gontar traces this to an ambivalent Troubadour culture, but I wanted more context in an essay that, again, merited more expansion.

Still, saying less can be more. The idea of the snob (a word not invented in Shakespeare's time, alas), begins a consideration of how the authorship question bears on the uppity attitude of the "orthodox Stratfordian professoriate" rather than its "rebels." I admit from my own doctoral training (if as technically a non-Shakespearean, I had enough proximity, given my medievalist diss. concluded with Hamlet) that this issue never entered any seminar or article assigned. Gontar does apply the debate thoughtfully, as the title essay will return to it-- as well as others in this anthology now and then.

Challenging contrasting readings by Marjorie Garber and Harold Bloom, Gontar "unreads" Julius Caesar as he focuses on the "Brutus/Caesar filiation"--a theme in retrospect that foreshadows another. Accretions as "indices of divinity" in All's Well adapt Boccaccio's anti-clerical tale into one employing Renaissance humanism while critiquing religion, even as post-Reformation contexts enter the play. Chastising cultural materialists, Gontar rejects any restoration of  "a creeping, subterranean Catholicism" as opposed to humanist ideals. The Tudor dramatic sketch "Woodstock" counters Bloom's claims that Shakespeare alone invents the modern human.

Gontar is not only a professor of philosophy, but a lawyer. How compliant is suicidal Lucrece in her own predicament? Gontar weighs the textual evidence for "wanton modesty" and applies it further to Thomas Seymour and Princess Elizabeth cleverly. This long chapter justifies its length as it pursues intriguing suppositions in the historical and legal record.

A footnote section on the resemblances between Shakespeare's Droeshout portrait and an anonymous oil painting of the supposed Virgin Queen precede a section on "poetically induced ardor" in five plays. Gontar locates, spinning off of Plato, the "moment of hearing" as a crucial juncture for passion.

After another legally grounded section interrogating a less sympathetic Portia than is usually assumed, it's back to discontent with a supposedly pluralist contemporary criticism which in the guise of ambiguity shoves aside conservative in favor of radically labeled approaches to texts.  Gontar scrutinizes a post-structural feminist's assertions as he takes apart her suppositions. It's lengthy, but once more, this allows him his combination of legal and critical strengths to rally his counter-claims.

Correcting an attempt to place Measure for Measure as "a reply to Machiavelli," Gontar dismantles a critic's theory and builds another based on Plato's ideal community as Shakespeare's contribution. Martin Lings' curious New Age "Islamic" endeavor, by which his own and two fellow Europeans' conversion to Sufism account for this esoteric quest, gets an unsurprising reaction.

At nearly forty pages, the title essay excited me. Stephen Greenblatt, according to Gontar, "goes astray" (this is hinted at earlier on p. 178 and I will tend to concur) when identifying "the nature of the ghost." (384) Gontar turns north to the "wyrd" and the uncanny pagan elements for the Prince's father's "emissary." (385)

"A little more than kin, and less than kind." Why young Hamlet calls Claudius this will ground Gontar's thesis. Hamlet "senses he is not the son of the man he loves but the man he loathes." (401) While allowing aporia, Gontar closes in on this crux to evade psychoanalytical reductionism as to why Hamlet hesitates. We don't know with "apodictic certainty" this paternity, so the play keeps its depth and its mystery. Gontar may to some dance away from the very idea he courts and wins over, but this nimble textual shifting may be truer to the play's famously debatable truth-claims, after all.

The authorship question returns in an afterword in context of Cymbeline; this points too back to Northern or Celtic progenitors for the author himself, in Gontar's suggestive inquiry. As England fought off Catholic Europe, no return to Catholicism could achieve its freedom but only an embrace of the new faith--if as a melange of pagan practices and Catholic ideas within that same emerging nation, characterized so memorably by whomever wrote all those plays, poems, and sonnets. A reader returning to those texts after Gontar's book will find welcome material to tease out for him or her self. (Amazon US 8-14-13: Prof. Gontar kindly provided a copy asking for my review.)

Nathaniel Philbrick's "Why Read Moby-Dick?": Book Review

Here's 28 brief essays, not an extended critique, taking on the relevance and verve of this challenging epic. It's very accessible, and easily perused in a couple of hours. Therefore, it provides enough insight to better an article or chapter in another, less expansive source, but it's more cogent and less daunting than a tome for specialists, certainly.

Highlights for me included Nathaniel Philbrick touching on Herman Melville's importuning a seemingly cautious Nathaniel Hawthorne early on as his conversations shifted Melville's composition and aims for the whaling yarn. Philbrick credits the New England man as "the figure that moved" Melville "to take Shakespeare's lead and dive into the darkness. Just as Ahab co-opted the 'Pequod,' Melville used Hawthorne's fiction only as it served its own purposes. Philbrick seems to regard Melville as annoying Hawthorne, manipulating him somewhat for his own ends.

Speaking of Ahab, Philbrick reminds us that the captain needs such as Fedallah as a necessary co-conspirator, and the author reminds us that no villain can act alone. In fact, he also notes how Ahab has his sensitive side, as Chapter 132. "The Symphony" shows Ahab regretting most of his adult life spent at sea, apart from his family. Meanwhile, Starbuck tries to talk him out of the pursuit, but he is rebuffed. Philbrick directs us to Fedallah, waiting in the shadow.

Philbrick makes a sensible case for the novel's weight and balance. "By the last third of the novel, we know all there is to know about the anatomy of the whale and the specifics of killing a whale; we have also come to appreciate the whale's awe-inspiring mystery and beauty. As a consequence, Melville is free to describe the final clash between Ahab and Moby-Dick with the unapologetic specificity required to make an otherwise improbable and overwrought confrontation seem astonishingly real." That's as pithy a rationale as any for Philbrick's title.

I read this immediately after finishing Nicholas Delbanco's 2005 "Melville: His World and Work" (also reviewed by me); Philbrick credits this for his own take. Both critics agree about the Fugitive Slave Act and debates over slavery as influencing the novel, and this interpretation focuses on the injustices, and the tensions, aboard the "Pequod" and its real counterparts. This may not convince all readers of either book. (By the way, Delbanco's substantial but approachable book is only a small amount more than Philbrick's which is packaged nicely as a stocking-stuffer but a fraction of that biography in length or depth.) However, the larger and more direct issue of relevance finds Nathaniel Philbrick alluding to his earlier book on another inspiration for Melville, the tragedy of the "Essex," which Philbrick integrates as logical context for "Moby-Dick."

Near the end, Philbrick recounts how Melville's family, after his death, found taped in his writing desk a motto from Schiller: "Keep fresh the dreams of thy youth." His chronicler figures this served as a reminder of Melville's stance, "neither believer nor infidel," but judging both carefully, as both a romantic and a realist. That "redemptive mixture of skepticism and hope, this genial stoicism in the face of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life, is why I read 'Moby-Dick."'' Amazon US 11-23-13

Nicholas Delbanco's "Melville: His World and Work": Book Review

Given we know much less than expected about Herman Melville's life, outside of the hints in his own fictional and poetic creations, Nicholas Delbanco's narrative offers a welcome critical biography. He shows us how the works and the man intertwined, and with it, through a life begun in 1819 and ending up in 1991, that dramatic shift from an America with family memories during the Revolutionary War into one with clattering trains and tall buildings accelerating into our own metropolitan rush and clang. A professor at Yale, Andrew Delbanco skillfully argues for Melville as balanced between Whitman's "New York bluster" and his friend Hawthorne's "New England gravity", and as in his increasingly sophisticated and erudite works, how their author learned in New York City, 1847-50, to tell tales that balanced between Romantic-tinged evocations of savagery and the wild, and those which examined the "Enlightenment emissary" sent from the West on a civilizing mission of exploitation and awe.

While naturally "Moby-Dick" is associated most with Melville, and certainly the opening colophons (echoing that novel's own appearance) and pop culture references ("The Sopranos" and Osama bin Ladin, Mad magazine and Ken Kesey, Leslie Fiedler and Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad and Albert Camus) that bring us into this study emphasize this well, Delbanco peppers these pages with citations from the whole oeuvre, so we can judge how Melville revealed himself, or hid, within. With most of his manuscripts and correspondence apparently lost, any biography needs to look beyond the standard sources, but Delbanco blends those extant smoothly into his own depiction of 19th century America.

We need reminding that as with "Huck Finn" very little we choose to perpetuate today from that era (outside the classroom) permeates wider consciousness. Melville broke through the barrier (copyright played a role in pumping up English authors instead, as Dickens found on his tour here) in his times limiting American authors who sought a wider audience. Delbanco credits him with figuring out how to "express American ideas and sentiments through European forms". He matured from the exaggerated tease of tropical delights in "Typee" and the more business-minded exchanges of Polynesian beauties in "Omoo". These were successes, but Melville grew impatient with the formula.

He used his seafaring experience, "borrowed" what needed fleshing out from his reading (Delbanco finds it increasingly lofty as he lived in lower Manhattan in the late 1840s and incorporated a "democratic imagination--both in substance and style"), and he listened, this critic avers, to the clanging tone and the typically bustling rhythm of the "oceanic city" where he (it is often forgotten) was born and died.

Delbanco notes that the preparation of "Moby-Dick" and a love-hate relation with the city lured Melville to his brother and his relatives to settle for a productive stint in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, but still, that epic began in a port and near a harbor. That novel's like browsing and walking down a city street: it's unpredictable. Delbanco compares a walker in New York to a reader, needing "high alertness" combined with "willed insouciance" to fend off sly appeals from the margins. Delbanco compares too that fantastical take on lotus-land, "Mardi" and the 135 chapters of "Moby-Dick" with a similar sprawl to the bills posted on municipal walls, one over the other, full of arresting slogans and advertising come-ons; out of a verbal melange, in "Moby"'s chapters and its clauses, that at-first straightforward whaling yarn began to warp into something odd, unanticipated.

Much of it to Delbanco "reads like a transcription of a patient under analysis moving from bravado to depletion", but the novel taps Melville's "bipolar" swing between "public jesting" and "private brooding", and reveals the untapped imagery and manic associations that consumed its composition.

Troubles followed for Melville, as Delbanco gives a lot of space (and we can argue over how much is needed for the psychoanalytical approach he and others take for "Pierre" in light or shadow of its author's purported sexual preferences). "Bartleby" found Melville recovered, finally able to record how ordinary Manhattanites sounded, and that story's appeal to the confounding tension of a radical protest against a rapacious capitalist system and a conservative acknowledgment that in tradition, stability, and intimacy lay hope, kept its own ambiguities vivid. But, stung by criticism, Melville seems to have by the early 1850s started what Delbanco discerns as Melville's uneasy transformation of his "genius" into touches of his "madness".

Weariness dominated his sensibility. In his mid-thirties, he seemed worn-out. "And then the darkness closed in."

Delbanco handles this period with as much attention as the height of Melville's fame, carefully analyzing the writings and other contexts to provide as full a picture as a relatively brisk single volume aimed at a general audience can contain. He keeps the narrative over 330 pages of text vivid, but he avoids moralizing or sentimentality.

Despite the best bits Delbanco gleans, "Clarel" as Holy Land epic is not Melville's return to form. That return did come sporadically: the tension between radical challenge to the social order and conservative compassion and traditional stability in "Bartleby" finds Melville integrating how real people talk. "Benito Cereno" improves on "White-Jacket" by using a naval setting to deepen a moral dilemma, and widening the scope to take on the issue of racism and slavery.

Concluding, "Billy Budd" shows in the late 1880s his steady, if by now streamlined and simplified, style. It emerged slowly, Delbanco tells, "as if he could not bear to let it go". As a "eulogy for the hopes of his youth", it returns to the youthful outlook of "Redburn" and "White-Jacket". But, as labor unrest contended against corporate brutality in Melville's final years, that novella proves the fragility of culture, pitted against the pressures of the law allied with political control. Delbanco judges that Melville shows himself in this last story a "reformed, if not repentant, Romantic".

This fine study fits a necessary niche. It's neither too brief nor too detailed for the curious reader who, perhaps having read some Melville or coming for the first time to him, wants an overview of his life and times. While some earnest Freudian analysis cited or concocted within may stretch the bounds of credulity when it comes to certain critics trying to discern hints of Melville's sexual preferences, and while the treatment of the congressional disputes over slavery digresses a bit, generally this is well-documented without wallowing in professorial jargon or score-settling, Delbanco's 2005 book, for me, proved the companion I needed when I wanted an accessible introduction to why Melville endures nearly two centuries after his birth in the early decades of this vexed United States. (11-23-13 Amazon US)

I mBostún agus Nua Bedford

D'imigh muid go Maine ar bealach an sean-bóthar Cheanada go dtí ag dul ar ais an Nua Eabhrac, nó chun imeacht in aice láimhe ó Nua Geirsí. Mar sin, thiomáint Léna agus mé triu Maine oirdheisceart (bhí maith liom dha tstraidbhaile ó tSolon agus ag timpeall Jackman go speisealta), le beágan de Nua Hampshire, Massachusetts níos mó, cuid is Oileán na Rhode, agus ansin Connecticut is mó. Ar dtús, chuaigh muid go mBostún, ár chéad uair. 

Ith muid lón im bPortsmouth (NH) gnótach ina teach tábhairne agus bialann mór leis beoir úr seagal. Tháinig i mBostún leis trácht agus thiománaithe feargach. Bhí an bua na Stocaí Deargaí an Sraith Domhan an tseachtaine seo caite, mar sin féin; bhí an cathair go h-áthas ann--ar feadh seal.

Shiúl muid go an Taobh an Thuaidh atá iomlán den saol na hIodáile; ith muid dhá dhinnéar ansin. Thóg muid turas Rian Shaoráil go an Comóntaigh triu áiteannai stairiúl, Reilig nGrainseach, An Óstan Teach Parker, Cuimhneacháin Gorta (suas) go dtí An Sean-Teach Stáit go dtí Halla Faneuil.
Bhí treior turas "Éireannach na Bostún" briomhar agus cliste againn.

Is maith liom Músaem na n-Ealain Fineáil ann, leis uiscedhathannaí iontach le John Singer Sargent. Is é sé mo is fearr leat péintéail: "Luí na gréine ar an móinear" le Robert Trost Williams. Bhreatnaigh muid an Ghleann Hudson le déanaí, an ionad chéanna, b'fhéidir.

Seo chugainn, chuir cuairt go port iascaireachta na New Bedford; thosaigh Moby-Dick ann. Ar raibh tusa ag léamh an t-úrsceal mór, deacair ach tráthúil, agus aisteach le Herman Melville?  A bheith cinnte, molaim chuair fíoriúl agus fíor anseo. Iarraim ag dul ar ais ansuid chéana féin. B'fhéidir, an bliana seo chugainn...?

In Boston and New Bedford

We left Maine by the Old Canada Highway to go back to New York, or to depart from nearby New Jersey. Therefore, Layne and I drove through southeastern Maine (I liked the villages of Solon and around Jackman especially), a bit of New Hampshire, more of Massachusetts, some of Rhode Island, and then a lot of Connecticut. To start, we went to Boston, our first time.

We ate lunch in busy Portsmouth (NH) in a big tavern and restaurant with fresh rye beer. We arrived in Boston with traffic and angry drivers. The Red Sox had won the World Series the week before, nevertheless; the city was happy--for a while.

We walked to the North End which is full of Italian life; we ate two dinners there. We took a Freedom Trail tour from the Commons through historic sites, the Granary Cemetery, the Parker House Hotel, the Famine Memorial (above) to the Old State House and Faneuil Hall. We had a smart and lively "Boston Irish" tour guide.

I liked the Museum of Fine Arts there, with wonderful watercolors by John Singer Sargent. This is my favorite painting: "Sunset on the Meadow" by Robert Trost Williams. We had seen the Hudson Valley recently, a similar place, perhaps.

Next, we paid a visit to the fishing port of New Bedford;  Moby-Dick begins there. Have you read the big, difficult but relevant, strange novel by Herman Melville? To be convinced, I recommend a virtual and real visit here. I want to go back there already. Maybe next year?

Boston Irish Famine Memorial / Cuimhneacháin Gorta (Grianghraf le/photo by Lane Turner, Boston Globe, 11-9-13)

Altan: "Gleann Nimhe/ The Poison Glen": Music Review

This venerable band from Donegal presents its newest recording. Shifting somewhat away from its Narada-label leanings of a decade back into New Age-inflected stylings, this Compass Records release offers a more traditional delivery of tunes, reliable in their familiar conjuring of their Northwestern Irish heritage. At its best, this recalls their standout albums originally released in America on the Green Linnet label.

This is also the first of their many albums since they began around thirty years ago to feature an Irish-language title. It's taken from a place near vocalist-fiddler Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh's home. She explains it as a mistranslation of "heavenly" glen, in fact, but that so many legends have sprung up to account for its more devilish connotation that it's been kept in its darker emanation. The band is photographed by Edain O'Donnell, or Photoshopped, among the technicolor of that glen, in a nod to the imagination which improves upon nature. This sly nod to enchantment and misdirection in the singer's native tongue represents a clever turn for this ensemble back to the roots music it plays best.

As the first studio album in seven years (I reviewed their collaboration with the RTÉ orchestra celebrating the band's twenty-fifth anniversary for PopMatters two years ago), this features skilled players. Ciaran Tourish supports on fiddle and whistle, Dermot Byrne on accordion, Mark Kelly on guitar and bouzouki, Ciarán Curran on bouzouki and mandolin, and Dáithí Sproule on guitar and vocals. Jim Higgins guests with percussion that shakes up the rhythm now and then, as on the ballad "The Lily of the West". The line-up may obscure the fact that Donegal's known for fiddlers. Tourish and Ní Mhaonaigh compliment each other with the sprightly, fluid sound of their home turf. Stringed instruments back up the fiddling with propulsive energy and shifting melodies that emerge handsomely in this production.

Reels and jigs alternate, as on all their albums and performances, with songs. Ní Mhaonaigh's confident, yet gentle voice commands attention. "An Ghealóg" laments the death of a bunting on a winter's night; I believe (given all I have is a downloaded file) that Harry Bradley's flute is featured here to deepen the sad mood. The massed backing vocals hint back to fellow Donegal natives Clannad and Enya's approach, but these touches enter sensitively and sparingly.

The next song "Caitlín Triall" narrates an all-too-often tale of unrequited love; while again the vocal arrangement recalls their top-charting Donegal neighbors, Altan prefers to base its material upon simpler studio settings. Instrumental tracks do this efficiently, as on "Eddie Curran's Monaghan Twig" or "The Lancer's Jig" imitating their concert medleys which allow the band to show off its balance of lushness with drive.

The last five tracks, whether instrumentals or songs, slow down the pace markedly. The concentration of a more burnished, less frenetic set into the final third of the album may indicate the band's wish to return to the composed, dignified feel of its Narada-label recordings, but I prefer the entries which move the band into overdrive in playing, as well as those vocal opportunities allowing Ní Mhaonaigh to display her sensitive lyrical delivery within the deftly arranged tunes that show off Altan at its finest as Ireland's leading interpreters of its musical tradition. (Amazon US 3-5-12; PopMatters 4-23-12)

"Rough Guide to Ireland": Music Review

This features both big names and newcomers. From Waterford to Belfast, Kerry to Donegal, despite the recession which has closed down many pubs and forced many young people to emigrate, Irish music persists. As a symbol of defiance, celebration, and endurance, this compilation from Compass Records artists along with other releases introduces listeners to current styles.

Opening with a jaw harp and autoharp, Sligo trio The Unwanted hint at Appalachian roots, with a sly, slippery mood for “The Duke of Leinster/Gardiner’s/John Stenson’s #2”. Solas, a familiar New York City ensemble, offers a sauntering, relaxed (if still briskly sung by Máiréad Phelan) take on the traditional “A Sailor’s Life”, popularized by Judy Collins, Martin Carthy, and Fairport Convention.

The veteran Donegal band Altan reliably delivers “Tommy Potts’ Slip Jig” which complements Solas’ style. Former Solas members vocalist Karan Casey and guitarist John Doyle join for “Bay of Biscay” by the late County Clare singer Nora Cleary. It’s a poignant tale of a ghostly swain visiting his separated lover, and the spare form Casey and Doyle adapt recalls Pentangle’s somber fusion of space and tone.

From County Antrim, flute player Brendan Mulholland’s three jigs “The King of the Pipers/Behind the Haystack/The Maid on the Green” follow to lighten the mood. Jack Talty and Cormac Begley join Clare with Kerry, two lilting traditions blending for the concertina slides “Paddy Cronin’s/If I Had a Wife”.

Andy Irvine, from Sweeney’s Men and Planxty, for nearly fifty years has championed this music, more recently with Patrick Street and Mozaik. He sings a merry tale of a close encounter, “The Close Shave” by New Zealander Bob Bickerton; Irvine’s confident, cocky delivery accompanies his trademark bouzouki.

Athlone accordionist Paul Brock and Sligo fiddler Manus McGuire combine with American country musicians in their eponymous band. Their reel “Moving Cloud” steps along in lively form, with banjo too. Another type of fusion arrives from Iarla Ó Lionáird (Afro-Celt Sound System) who updates with atmospheric production and world music innovations his native Irish-language sean-nós (old style) unaccompanied vocal tradition. His “The Heart of the World” sustains this elegant, dignified blend.

Another popular collaborator, Sharon Shannon (The Waterboys) on “Neckbelly” demonstrates her button accordion skills. These slickly mingle with a hipper, MOR-type of mass appeal backbeat, not to all tastes admittedly, but like Ó Lionáird, this direction indicates the contemporary influences which—as Irvine’s bouzouki illustrates—enter into the Irish repertoire and attest to its continuing relevance.

Fidil, logically the Gaelic name for fiddle, pluck and tap their instrument. This Donegal trio (with a nephew of Altan’s singer-fiddler) features a local style of “bassing” a fiddle at a lower octave than another. This echoes the uilleann pipes of one of that region’s talented players, Joe Doherty. “Kiss the Maid Behind the Byre/Tá Do Mhargadh Déanta” show off this home-turf choice well.

Gráinne Holland, from the urban Gaeltacht of West Belfast, on “Dónal Na Gréine” pulls off a tongue-twisting tale of fittingly a feckless drunk in sean-nós (with the percussive drum, the bodhrán) impressively. It’s back to Altan’s Dermot Byrne on fiddle who with Parisian harper Floriane Blancke join for “Sore Point” which despite its name from a Chris Newman composition flows nimbly.

As well as Donegal, Clare continues to appear in the pedigree of many musicians; Hugh Healy’s concertina (a feature of that county) and uilleann piper Michael “Blackie” O’Connell offer a welcome listen to the latter instrument in the sprightly “The Hut on Staten Island”—-originally for banjo—-and “The De’il Among the Tailors” from Packie Russell, one of Clare’s Doolin trio of famous musical brothers.

Brian Finnegan’s flute and tin-whistle may be familiar from Flook; here he calls three songs after Belfast: “Back to Belfast/Anne Lacey/Eroticon VI”. Given the latter title’s hint of sexiness, they all sound jittery, excited, and impatient. Like Ó Lionáird’s approach, Flanagan’s integrates world music textures into a more accessible version of Irish music which may dismay purists but which probably broadens appeal.

Belfast continues its representation with John McSherry on pipes and whistles, Dónal O’Connor on fiddle, and Francis McIlduff on percussion, pipes, whistles. (McSherry, O’Connor, and slide guitarist Bob Brozman feature on a similarly eclectic, worthwhile bonus disc, Six Days in Down.) A trio titled At First Light, they pair their new “The Pipers of Roguery” with a tune appearing in print first in 1756, “The Hag at the Spinning Wheel”. These both mix the more traditional sounds, given the pipes, with an expanded ensemble’s guitars, for a pleasing depth. It recalls the efforts of The Bothy Band from the 1970s in this layered, sequentially structured mode.

What would a compilation be without a supergroup? Donegal’s vocalist Moya Brennan (Clannad), Altan’s fiddler-singer Máiréad Ní Mhaonaigh, and multi-talented sisters Tríona (The Bothy Band, Touchstone, Relativity, Nightnoise) and Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill (Skara Brae) combine with Manus Lunny for “Wedding Dress”. Recorded by Pentangle in 1971, this concludes this album with a chorus of voices in gentle but firm style, as listeners to Clannad and the bands in this paragraph will recognize.

Recommended for its fair nods to the various types of Irish music now in vogue, this might please experienced listeners who may (as did I) find fresh entries. Despite the promotional material touting the session and live atmosphere of such inclusions, I aver this displays better the sheen that warm production and studio time can give to gloss these tunes. It's not as rough as its title in this series lets on. So, it’s a good buy for beginners who want to explore less raw, more fluid deliveries via the Irish styles found in many releases on the Compass and related labels, which continue to provide distribution for this enjoyable music throughout the world. (PopMatters 5-9-13 + Amazon US)