Grand Marshalls of the St. Patrick's Day Parade In a Yeatsian Gyre: From Violence to Peace

W.B. Yeats had a complicated/poetic view of the forces of history. Forces being the important word.  Not surprising, since he was born in 1865 into the tail end of the Protestant Ascendancy, which began in the 17th century with "the political, economic and social domination of Ireland by a minority of landowners, Protestant clergy and  all members of the Established Church (the Church of Ireland and Church of England) wiki."

Yeats experienced the shift in the declining power of his Protestant heritage as Parnell and Home Rule grew stronger in 1880s, at the same time Yeats discovered and fell in love with Irish Fenian Mythology, going back to ancient, pre-Christian mystical Ireland. That love became the basis of his earliest poems in a career that evolved and matured brilliantly and gave us some of the most distinct, bracing, extraordinary English sentences of the 20th century, including

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer"

History goes in cycles for Yeats. And that popped into my head as I experienced a small piece of history come full circle surrounding the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade.

I've been catching up with some of the details of the 255th edition of Parade. There will be less protesting, as our LGBT sisters and brothers are allowed in the line of march. Very Christian move, I say. And Pontifex just tweeted "No one can be excluded from the mercy of God. The Church is the house where everyone is welcomed and no one is rejected," so that clinches it.

And I learned that the Grand Marshall is Senator George Mitchell, one of the architects of what's known as the Good Friday Peace Agreement signed in 1998. (Like all things having to do with Irish/United Kingdom politics, it's complicated. You can read more about it on wiki.)  It hasn't been perfect, but it restored sanity to the cycle of violence that had overshadowed 20th century Irish lives for the decades known as The Troubles (in an even more active way than the centuries of British rule had done).

During this same time, it popped into my head to look back through the letters my Dad wrote to me when I was away at University in Southampton to see what he might have said about St. Patrick's Day 1983.

And lo and behold, he wrote all about the Grand Marshall that year.

From my Dad's letter to me dated March 19, 1983: 

"I was glad that you called St. Patrick's Day. We went to Mass but nothing else for festivities. We had a nice piece of corned beef and Grandma O' came down to join us. 

The Parade went well evidently, in spite of the controversy surrounding the Grand Marshall. I did not write about it because it bothered me, but a lot of dignitaries, organizations, and school bands boycotted the parade because the committee elected an IRA supporter as GM. 

His name is Michael Flannery--he is 81. He is the founder of the Noraid Society, which professes the help of families (widows, etc.) in Northern Ireland but which has been accused of supplying arms to the IRA. Flannery and several other Irish-Americans were acquitted last summer of such charges, brought by the US. Govt.

The worst part was Flannery made a comment to the effect that the Parade this year would show the Irish-American support for the IRA, which offended a lot of people, myself included.

I really feel if the Parade is going to be an expression or rallying point for political violence (last year Bobby Sands was the Honorary GM) then it should be done away with.

It is supposed to be, after all, an expression of love and honor for a man of peace--a Saint and a reflection of the Prince of Peace, Christ. 

Oh how we mortals can debase and denigrate the things that should be so dear to us."

I really never knew my father's political opinions. I had no idea he was so anti-IRA. He didn't share much when I was younger, and he died just when I was getting to be old enough to ask him about his views.

And by chance, I re-read his letter, after many years, on the year that someone he would have been proud of--a peace broker, a man who helped to heal all the destruction that the likes of Michael Flannery wrought in the name of loving Ireland--would be leading the line of march.  The gyre had turned far enough to spiral from violence, to peace.

What are the odds? Happy St. Patrick's Day to one and all (even the Irish curmudgeons who call it Amateur Irishman Day).

This video on YouTube is a real time capsule from 1983: a news report from some station, and then various functions during the week. 

Those who boycotted the parade in 1983 included Sen. Ted Kennedy, Former NY Governor Hugh Carey, Sen. Daniel Moynihan, and Congressman Tip O Neill, as well as John Cardinal O'Connor not reviewing the beginning of the parade, and various catholic school bands pulling out. 

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 Mapeel     3/17/2016     family, Ireland   

Oscars 2016: "But just remember there's a lot of bad and beware"

I don't watch many films, partly because they flood me with so many references, so many cross connections, it's actually uncomfortable.  And while I leave film criticism to my betters, I offer some thoughts on a few films before the 88th Academy Awards.

*******

There are three Best Picture nominated films that are deeply connected for me: Brooklyn; Spotlight; Room. That's the order I saw them in. They are tied together in my psyche by the two forces of nature that is Irish Catholicism.

"For on the night he was betrayed he himself took bread, and giving you thanks he said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to his disciples, saying:

Brooklyn
Brooklyn is a stylized snapshot of the emotional, inner life of the Irish who left the Emerald Isle and crossed the ocean in near steerage like "bricks for the Grand City Hall in New York. " {If you're of Irish heritage, you'll recognize that line.}

Some find it saccharine, and I can see why. That early elegiac scene with Eilis Lacey on the boat to the new world waving to her mother and sister on the dock feels contrived and cliched, and yet true. Generations of Irish parents watched as their sons and daughters left for a better life.  That took an enormous emotional toll on those people, those families. This film gives us a chance to feel some of that heartache, despair, sacrifice.

Eilis's entry to the US is sponsored by a priest from her village who left for the States long ago. He is like a fairy godmother: he gets her a place to live, and a job, the 2 most crucial needs for an immigrant. It seemed surprising to me that such an opportunity would be given to a young woman in the 1950s, and that the priest who sponsors her is not sinister. Imagine. An Irish priest from the bad old days (as opposed to the recent bad days) who is not abusing the protagonist. And I don't say that facetiously.

The film weaves its visual tale of Eilis overcoming homesickness, falling in love with an Italian American, and coming to terms with the duality of being an Irishwoman in New York. It evokes the era with the precision and beauty of Mad Men. And surprisingly, Eilis is not harmed. For some reason I kept waiting for something terrible to happen to her. I assumed Jessica Pare's shop supervisor was going to be cruel to her, and I was completely surprised by her compassion.

As a film, I think it has the most resonance for, well,  people of Irish Catholic heritage.

TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND EAT OF IT: FOR THIS IS MY BODY WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU.

Spotlight
The telling of the Boston Globe's exposure of the systemic protection of abusive priests within the Catholic Church is a superb film.

It captures the journalistic process of the sickening discovery of an evil reality with no gratuitous sensationalizing of the monstrous evilness of the criminals, both the offending priests and all of their protectors.

As it happened, it's Globe's new editor, Marty Baron, the ultimate outsider-- "an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who doesn't like baseball" played with searing humorlessness by Liev Scriber--who asks the team why they haven't followed up on the case of John Geoghan, a priest who actually had been accused of molesting young boys.  The small investigative  team who write under the special section of Spotlight is then focused and slowly uncovers the systematic reassignment of priests who their superiors knew had abused children, instead of calling the cops.

And it's Baron who insists that for the investigation to be effective, it all has to tie to the highest authority, to Bernard Cardinal Law. Which the team is able to do. Michael Keaton, John Slattery, Rachel McAdams, and Mark Ruffalo are all standouts as "real" people who have to come to terms with what until then had been the unthinkable.

Many of the reporters at the Globe are the progeny of the historic kinfolk of Brooklyn's  Eilis Lacey from County Wexford.

Only today I saw a tweet of a plaque from somewhere in Boston that reads:

"In 1847 alone, 37,000 Irish refugees landed in Boston, on the edge of death and despair, impoverished and sick."

It would take the clarity of the Boston Globe's reporting, the home-team paper, to help raise the consciousness of these people whose religion and its institutions were part of their identity.

It's been hard for me, for many, to reconcile the magnitude of the evil of the institutional church alongside the power and mystery of the Mass that Christ entrusted to it.

The Globe reporting ran in January 2002, just months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The numbness of those murders slid into the numbness of this other kind of evil.

Following in the years after 2002, when so much of the abuse came to light, and the millions, or is it billions now? of dollars of collective settlements were reported, a friend told me her sister was converting to Catholicism. She had been raised Presbyterian, not practiced, and was in her 40s.  I remember thinking, how can anyone be attracted to this institution now, to this overwhelming corruption. And yet, at each Easter vigil, there are people of all ages, races, sexual orientation, taking the Rites of Christian Initiation of Adults.

Oh yes, because, the faith exists outside of the institutional church.

Spotlight affirms that smart, talented people can still investigate parts of the world that others want to keep hidden. And that there are equally talented storytellers who can bring their work into the broad cultural space that is mainstream moviegoing.

In a similar way, when supper was ended, he took the chalice, and giving you thanks he said the blessing, and gave the chalice to his disciples, saying:

Room
When I heard Room was from a novel by Emma Donoghue, I wondered if she was related to my old NYU professor Denis Donoghue, and yes,  she is his daughter.

Professor Donoghue, a leading literary scholar of Irish, English, and American literature, is one of those innately literary souls, and I enjoyed studying with him immensely. I also enjoyed his memoirs, Warrenpoint, of growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland. Denis met and married Frances Rutledge, and they had 8 children.

From an interview with Emma about her mother: "I'm her eighth child (the runt of the litter, she used to say fondly) and it's her boundless, playful and unsentimental kind of mother-love that I tried to pour into Room."

Emma was born and lived in Dublin for her first 9 years and was sent to Catholic Convent schools. I have no idea what her faith is now, but the knowledge is in her DNA.

In 2010 she published a novel about an evil and depravity of sickening proportions.  A man who kidnaps a 17 year old girl and imprisons her in a suburban shed to rape her every evening.

After 2 years a baby boy is born. The captor lets the baby live, and time moves on.

When the film begins, Jack has turned 5, and we see the routine of their lives together. Ma, as we first meet her, is doing an extraordinary job of giving Jack as happy a life as possible. He has no context for their dire situation, and so he accepts, and he laughs and plays like any other 5 year old.  We learn that Ma must be teaching Jack literary classics, as he knows the story of Alice in Wonderland very well. The egg-shell caterpillar, the toilet paper roll maze, the daily run around the tiny shed: all speak to the ingenuity, creativity, and staggering love of this mother for her son.

Brie Larson and Jack Tremblay both give luminous performances.

But the evil is so pervasive.

Like the priests who prey on children.


TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND DRINK FROM IT: FOR THIS IS THE CHALICE OF MY BLOOD, THE BLOOD OF THE NEW AND ETERNAL COVENANT; WHICH WILL BE POURED OUT FOR YOU AND FOR MANY FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. DO THIS IN MEMORY OF ME.

It's hard for anyone to reconcile evil with an all-loving God.  Satan, Original Sin, all the explanations pale in the sight of horrifically hurt people.

And with so much pain in the different worlds of these films, a song drifted up from my memory:

"I hope you make a lot of nice friends out there
But just remember there's a lot of bad and beware"

Such a simple, melodic song from the musician we knew as Cat Stevens (born Steven Demetre Georgiou), who after a spiritual journey became Yusuf Islam back in 1978.  My BFF had an older sister, which is how Tea for the Tillerman came into my life, back in the day. I didn't know it was written for Patti D'arbanville, but the "remember there's a lot of bad and beware" struck me, even at 10 years old.

I love this line from Yusuf's Wikipedia entry: "Although his father was Greek Orthodox and his mother a Swedish Baptist, Georgiou was sent to St. Joseph Roman Catholic Primary School."



* * * * *

So what do I think should win Best Picture?

The Martian.

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 Mapeel     2/27/2016     Film, Ireland, literature, Oscars   

The Irish Sense of Timing: Happy St. Patrick's Day

Today is St. Patrick's Day, which for many Irish Americans is a mixture of nostalgia and pride. This particular celebration for me is tinged with sadness, as it happens to be the 30th anniversary of the last Paddy's Day my Dad would know.

Even that sadness is very Irish in its nature, as Chesteron once noted:

For the Great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry
And all their songs are sad.
 
This post is one of the first I wrote for this blog, with some edits.

I have a bit of Irish blood in the veins, courtesy of my father. He was proud of his heritage and embodied its characteristic traits: gregarious; a talent for storytelling; a decent tenor voice exercised regularly in church; an acquaintance with barley, hops, and yeast; and a deep love of family, like all Brooklyn Irish. He married a lovely Lutheran woman of Swiss/German/Norwegian descent, but that's a story for another day.

When I was at university in Southampton, England, on a college exchange program, I became the first of the clan to visit the old country.

It was a backpacking tour with a fellow American. We had crossed from Fishguard, Wales to Rosslare, Wexford, which meant by the time we got up to Dublin, it was late and cold and dark and we were very tired. We were trying to get to our B&B by metro bus, and weren’t sure which direction to go. So we waited on one side of the street, and when the bus came, the driver said we needed to be across the street to go in the other direction.

So over we went. It was now even colder and darker, we were beyond exhausted and time was dragging horribly. So this is what purgatory feels like? After forty-five minutes of standing in the freezing Dublin air, we finally see the bus coming along. The door opens, and it’s the same bus, same driver—

Huh. Well . . . .what . . .why didn’t you let us on over there?

“Well, you’d been going in the wrong direction, now, wouldn’t you?”

There is some funny logic there (and some toying with the young Americans).

When I told my father that story he laughed and laughed. He had never been to Ireland, but it struck a deep chord with him, reminding him of some of the distinctly Irish quirkiness of his own father and uncles.

Of course I learned what it is to be Irish American from him. Some things just happened organically in daily life,  like the Irish Coffee ritual and the tip that it's the brown sugar that separates the real from the faux.  Other lessons were very deliberate: like the year he hand wrote the words to important Irish songs for me: The Wild Colonial Boy, MacNamara's Band, The Irish Soldier Boy, and the most important, The Wearing of the Green. An important history lesson in itself, as a teenager the last line "For they're hanging men an' women there for the wearin' o' the Green," haunted me. It seems around the 1789 Irish Rebellion, the Brits so feared the nationalism of a color that wearing green was high treason, punishable by hanging. More about that here


"O Paddy dear, an' did ye hear the news that's goin' round?
The shamrock is by law forbid to grow on Irish ground;
St. Patrick's Day no more we'll keep, his colour can't be seen,
For there's a cruel law agin the wearin' o' the Green.

I met with Napper Tandy and he took me by the hand,
And he said, "How's dear old Ireland, and how does she stand?"
She's the most distressful country that ever yet was seen,
For they're hanging men an' women there for the wearin' o' the Green."


The Gift of a Trip to Ireland
After college I got a job as a copywriter for a travel company, writing the itineraries for the brochures of deluxe escorted tours. An idea popped into my head: I wanted to buy an escorted tour for my parents to see Ireland. Travel had never been part of their lives together. Money was usually tight, and 8 years of college bills was quite a strain. My father never talked about a desire to go to Ireland, but you knew it was there.

With help from my older brother, I found that we could buy my parents an escorted American Express trip. I became giddy at the idea. We would give it to them for Christmas, and the tour we picked was in May. Just perfect.

I bought a Fodor’s Guide to Ireland to wrap-up, and made a HUGE oak tag card. On the cover I put a big paper clock, with hands just before 12, and the words IT’S TIME . . . . (Inside): For you to go to Ireland ! surrounded by photos from the tour brochure. Everything was set.

On Christmas morning we gave the Fodor’s book to Mom to open, and the card to Dad. He seemed quite stunned. He became very quiet as it sunk in that his children had the means and the desire to give him this trip, a desire of a lifetime. Such moments are deeply vivid, and very rare.

And then . . .
And then, everything turned. My father was diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer in January, just after New Years. He died in April. The tour went on without him in May.

How cruel. How could God have denied him this trip ? How macabre and eerie my Christmas card: IT’S TIME. Yes, a phrase often associated with your time being up, but not here—-not on a happy Christmas morning, not about a great trip, not coming from me.

To make this all even more heart-wrenching, I had planned a trip myself to Ireland back in December, to go in March. I would be visiting a college friend who was doing post graduate work in Galway.

By March Dad was pretty ill, but it would have been too much of a shock to him if I canceled my trip, and so I went with the heaviest of hearts.  I remember spending a good part of one day crying in a church in Gort, the town nearest to Lady Gregory's Coole Park, where I had made a pilgrimage to visit Yeats's Wild Swans at Coole.

I got home on March 17, and we had the usual family gathering with my uncles/aunts/godparents. My dad was frail, but rallied to get dressed and join the gang. The photo above shows my Uncle John, his best friend of 30 years, at his side.

Dad died almost an exact month later, on April 16, which happened to be Easter Monday.  That was pretty cosmic.

It is only now, 20 years later, [now 30 years later!] that I can see what an Irish end my dad had. It was sad and tragic, yet imbued with that particular Irish sense of death we know from the great plays and poems of O’Casey and Synge, and Yeats: because life is so precious, death comes with irony, some irreverence, a tinge of comedy, and ultimately, hope.

I’ve been to Ireland several times since he died. I’ve got some new great stories to tell, the next time I see him.

The Irish Coffee ritual was not limited to St. Patrick's Day. And though Crosby sang about a "belt of Bushmills," it's from Northern Ireland & these were the days when that mattered. No money to the IRA. So Dublin Jameson it was.

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 Mapeel     3/17/2015     Christmas, family, Ireland, Steed   

“Three Irishmen Walk into a Ferry Waiting Room . . . Again“

 If they had walked into a bar, Kevin, Dermot, and Joe would have been no more than an obscure trio in the long tradition of Irish jokes.

But instead, they are part of the memorable fictional world of Conor McPherson’s 2002 play Port Authority, which I saw in 2008 at the Atlantic Theater Company, and again today in the closing performance at the Irish Repertory Theatre, under the direction of Ciaran O'Reilly. It is one of the joys of theatergoing, to see different stagings of the same play.

Our characters are in a ferry dock waiting room in Dublin harbor, erroneously referred to as bus station by many critics back in 2008, I guess because New York's Port Authority is a bus terminal. But that was the jetty of Dublin harbor on the Playbill cover. The set at the Irish Rep was more successful in conveying the time/place, with the blue sky over a horizon of water.


Each of our trio is a million miles away in his own thoughts, which he gives voice to as we all raptly listen in.  It is a tour de force of monologue writing and acting across three stages of man: the senior (Jim Norton/Peter Maloney), the middle aged (Brian D’Arcy/Billy Carter), and the twentysomething (John Gallagher/James Russell). They speak of life from the perspective of their age, and of love, which knows no such boundary.

With the barest of sets and the absence of any action, it is the sheer power of language and tale-spinning that pulls you in. Each is able to give you a sense of the entire life of that man, just from these revealed thoughts. That's what makes this such a special, powerful play. That primacy of the spoken word reminded me of HBO’s In Treatment, where another Irishman, Gabriel Byrne, absolutely commanded our attention, all the while sitting in a chair.

A line in Terry Teachout’s rave review of the play back in 2008 surprised me. He described it as a “series of interwoven monologues by three unhappy Irishmen.”

Unhappy Irishman. It never occurred to me that these men were unhappy. From my own experience, there is something about the Celtic soul that doesn’t think in happy/unhappy terms. Life is. There are highs and lows, joys and disappointments. So be it.

I saw Martin Sheen back in 2008 on The Graham Norton Show. Graham asked him what the secret was to having such a long and happy marriage. Sheen answered, it’s not really about happiness. What makes a loving marriage work is if your partner helps you to experience joy. It’s a subtle, important distinction which McPherson understands.

Each of our waiting-room Irishmen speaks of specific moments of joy within his tale. There is also deep disappointment all around, and they all wish many things were different.

But they are Irish. Their wit and wisdom and whisky will sustain them, until the final Ferryman comes to take them across that other river.

(photo, Doug Hamilton)

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 Mapeel     11/16/2014     Ireland, theater   

Bloomsday 2014: The Polyphony of James Joyce's Dubliners

This year's Bloomsday, Monday, June 16,  is seeing a worldwide salute to Jame Joyce's more accessible work, Dubliners, which was published 100 years ago on  June 15, 1914, just months before The Great War would ignite. It is a sobering thought that Joyce finished writing the stories when he was just 25.

I once felt a great connection to this collection of short stories, and was greatly encouraged to do more writing about it by my Irish Lit professor at Rutgers, Julian Moynahan. The centenary made me think of Prof. Moynahan, and I was saddened to learn he died just a few months ago.

Professor, this post is for you.

***********

Here's why Dubliners is a masterpiece. Each story captures a place and time and people with astonishing depths of understanding of human nature, and each story can be deeply savored as such.

But Joyce is a master composer of literary polyphony: while each story, or line, is independent, these stories stack vertically: the a capella voices complement each other, echo each other and create startling chords when you listen to the collection as whole. And the theme that emerges the loudest for me from this exquisite sonority is the age old thing about men and women: just how are the sexes getting along?


Let's start with ARABY, the first story where the main character interacts with the opposite sex. Joyce captures the first throbs of sexual passion as a young man describes seeing Mangan's sister, "My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."  She occupies his mind "I hardly had any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me an my desire, seemed to me child's play."  He decides to buy her something at the exotic Araby bazaar, because she can't get there herself. Surprise, surprise, it doesn't go well at all, and the story ends with "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."

In terms of the relation between the sexes, this young man's desire for a girl has become self-loathing and calling himself a creature. See, that's not good.  Whether he does it consciously or not, he will hold that girl, and probably other females along the way, responsible for this self-loathing.

Next we have EVELINE, who decided that "she wouldn't be treated as her mother had been." Her father was a violent man who went after her brothers and her mom. Eveline is engaged to a kind man, and on her way to starting a life together in Buenos Ayres, when we find her on the dock, completely frozen, unable to get on the boat.

"She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition."

My take: her fear of men will not let her choose to trust one--even a kind loving man--after seeing how her father treated her mother. All she can do is to passively remain in her situation. So now it's a young woman negatively affected by the opposite sex.

Next Joyce gives us AFTER THE RACE,  a story free from the problems of the sexes interacting because it's only men.  This is a man's story filled with Hemingway initiates who are striving for the vibrance of Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan: "What jovial fellows! What good company!" "flinging themselves boldly into the adventure" of a card game.

The great thing about this story is Joyce's attitude to his four musketeers: it's one of ridicule, draped in terrible writing:

"The journey laid a magical finger on the genuine pulse of life and gallantly the machinery of human nerves strove to answer the bounding courses of the swift blues animal."

"The resonant voice of the Hungarian was about to prevail in ridicule of the spurious lutes of the romantic painters when Segouin shepherded this party into politics."

Joyce's condescending attitude toward this type of male bonding may be because he sees testosterone-fueled exclusion of women as a bad thing for the sexes getting along.

This passages leads us to THE TWO GALLANTS, a title that invokes the gents above.  Lenehan, with "his adroitness and eloquence," "vast stock of stories, limericks, and riddles," and his sack "slung over one shoulder in toreador fashion," should be in the back seat of the racing car. But because of his poverty he is forced to leech off of Corely, and their life is very different from the life of the initiates. Corely has seduced a woman who steals for him, and pays his tram fare. "You're what I call a gay Lothario," said Lenehan."  Yeah, these charmers are getting whatever they can from the woman, who is not heard from directly. Again, not so good for the disposition of the sexes.

 "She's on the turf now. I saw her driving down Earl Street one night with two fellows with her on a car."
"I suppose that's your doing," said Lenehan.
"There was others at her before me," said Corley philosophically.


The Two Gallants is then in counterpoint to THE BOARDING HOUSE. Polly, the daughter of Mrs. Mooney, who runs a boarding house, initiates an affair with lodger Mr. Doran.  Mrs. Mooney lets it go a bit until she's ready to declare to Mr. Doran that "there must be reparation made," leading to an upwardly mobile marriage for her daughter.

Mr. Doran: "He could not make up his mind whether to like her or despise her for what she had done. Of course he had done it too. His instinct urged him to remain free, not to marry. Once you are married you are done for, it said."

Here the women are doing the manipulation. It's as if a choral motif started by The Two Gallants (tenors and basses) has been passed to the altos and sopranos. And the theme continues to build: men and women use each other.

The Boarding House leads to resonance in A LITTLE CLOUD, which fully plays out the theoretical trapped feelings of Mr. Doran, and combines them with the frustrated feelings of wanting to be a wild and crazy guy in a racing car.

Little Chandler's problem is his dream of wanting to be like Gallagher in the literary world, but being trapped by his own incapacitating timidity.  Chandler is married with a child, with the domesticated burdens of buying new furniture that must be paid for, all of which frustrates his dreams further. "Why had he married the eyes in the photograph?"  In the last sentence of the story Joyce sums up the man's life and pain: "He listened while the paroxysm of the child's sobbing grew less and less; and tears of remorse started to his eyes."

Newflash: Men don't particularly want to be domesticated.


COUNTERPARTS amplifies the stifled anger of A Little Cloud, in another example of male bonding. Farrington is a man wrought of anger and rage who frequently indulges his violent nature. He has no sense of duty, no maturity, and little common sense, yet he has a wife and five children. At work he his humiliated because he does such a bad job, and with his friends he is humiliated because he loses an arm wrestling match. And that leads to the violence against his son: "O, pa!" he cried. "Don't beat me, pa! And I'll... I'll say a Hail Mary for you....

Farrington feels the same anger and anguish that the young man felt in Araby; we see he is the same brute as Eveline's father; he has the same need for male camaraderie as the men in After the Race; he looks at women in the same way as The Two Gallants, infrequently, and only to get something from them; he knows too well the foreboding feelings of suffocation by marriage which are but shadows of a thought to Mr. Doran in The Boarding House; and he acts out all the violence that Little Chandler in A Little Cloud is too afraid to do.

This is the polyphony of Dubliners. 

And in all this human weakness, human fear, there is not much hope nor happiness between men, and women.

However.  The composition ends in a glorious tour de force of language and emotion in The Dead, with a husband's epiphany about his wife's early lover.

“While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.”

Oh Gabriel—all that self doubt, all that horrible self criticism because you think that Gretta is comparing you to another. It’s not about YOU. She’s simply filled with a memory of her own past. Please let her have that part of her life, and don’t punish her for it.

And then, Gabriel does just that.

“Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully. . . So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life.

“He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

“Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.”

From that realization, Gabriel’s soul is opened, and once that happens, anything is possible.

Joyce leaves us in silver shadows, in the peace of falling snow that unites the living and the dead. Critics disagree as to whether Gabriel is spiritually dead at the end, or if now that he realizes he has never fully lived, something more is possible.

At each year’s reading, I like to think that Garbriel and Gretta go on to happier, more deeply conscious lives with each other.

It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight... It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

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 Mapeel     6/15/2014     current events, Ireland, James Joyce, literature   

Yeats, the Gaol, and Thin Lizzy: Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride  
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:  
A terrible beauty is born.

These words from Yeats's masterful poem "Easter, 1916" rumbled through my head last month when I visited Dublin, and Kilmainham Gaol, because of the strange beauty of its architecture.

The gaol was a place of unmitigated suffering from its opening in 1796 through to the
famine year 1845–1852, when the poor were truly incarcerated for stealing bread, to the early 20th century when the leaders and followers of the 1916 uprising—fourteen at least— were shot by firing squad on the grounds.

Here's the thing about being an American visiting Ireland: We were a colony of England, and when that no longer felt tenable, we had a Revolution. It was bloody, and lasted 8 long years, April 19, 1775  until the surrender at Yorktown, September 3, 1783. Then it was over and we were free of British Crown Rule.

The Irish tried the same, and ended up with 800 years of bloodshed, and a third of their country still under the crown. Such different fates for two countries with the same goals.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English. Winston Churchill

Since the Good Friday Agreement, signed 10 April 1998, sanity returned to the two isles, and the daily/monthly killing of the 1970s was finally over. Economic prosperity has come and gone in the Celtic Tiger and the banking collapses.

Dubin Today: Irish Is Spoken & the English Like to Visit
What struck me most last month were the cultural things. For instance, the amazing resurrection of Irish, the Gaelic language.  The English language is so associated with Ireland through the brilliance of Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, Cavanaugh, etc., that it's easy to forget that it is the language of the conqueror. Forty years ago or so Ireland made a conscious effort to revive their native language. Today: official signs are in Irish first, then English; there are Irish language soap operas, sports shows, and talk shows, as well as columns in print and online; and you hear the Elven-sounding language spoken casually on cell phones.

I was also suprised how many young English guys and girls were visiting. At the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, at the dinner/show with traditional Irish music, there were lots of and lots of Englishmen. One couple was on their honeymoon. Seems that the progeny of the conquerors are lucky to be able to enjoy the extensive charms of the vanquished, who were never entirely done in.

And in fact, are the coolest, quirkiest bunch of people on the planet. Case in point: outside of my hotel was a statue of Phil Lynott, late of Thin Lizzy, Ireland's first great rock band to go international. He was born in England to an Afro-Guyanese father and an Irish mother, and went to live with an uncle in Dublin when he was 4. Friends said that he insisted on being called Irish and wiki lists his "origin" as Ireland. Below a smoking performance of "Whiskey in the Jar."


Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh

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 Mapeel     3/17/2014     Ireland   

The Rocky Road to Dublin

Not really rocky--I just love the song, here with the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem-- although Thursday's maybe huge storm is sending me out a day earlier than planned. I'm going to capital of Eire, for you crossword fans, for President's Day Weekend to sing a service at St. Patrick's Cathedral, founded in 1191. Whoa.

Unlike New York, this cathedral, named for the uber Catholic patron saint of an uber Catholic country in its capital, is Protestant (to Americans), Church of England, there called Church of Ireland, summing up the whole difficult history of that Emerald Isle beside the Scepter'd Isle. I love that the wikipedia page for the cathedral lists "previous denomination" as Roman Catholic, because of course it started as a Roman Catholic Cathedral, until the Reformation. OMG, such a succinct description of centuries of bloodshed.

From Wiki
After the English Reformation (an uneven process between 1536 and 1564 but at St. Patrick's, effective from about 1537), St. Patrick's became an Anglican Church of Ireland Cathedral, although most of the population of the surrounding Pale remained Roman Catholic. During the confiscation process, some images within the cathedral were defaced by soldiers under Thomas Cromwell, and neglect led to collapse of the nave in 1544.

 Jonathon Swift was the dean of St. Patrick's from 1713 to 1745, which is why in my very first visit to Ireland while studying in Southampton, England, I made a literary pilgrimage there.

The other big, medieval cathedral, down the Dublin block is Christ Church . It is also "previous denomination" Roman Catholic, but actually Protestant/Church of England/Ireland for the rest of Europe. Even more interesting, for those who follow such things, is that technically, Christ Church is the cathedral that the Vatican recognizes as the rightful seat of the Roman Catholic archbishop. But he's over in St Mary's,  known as a "pro-cathedral"in acknowledgement of the former statement.

Welcome to Irish/English history. Is it a wonder that Queen Elizabeth II made the supreme effort to visit while she could, and put some sense into this difficult past. The Penal Laws and the Troubles are not to be taken lightly, but the world has moved on.

I'm singing in a service in St. Patrick's because of a wonderful community that Ghislaine Morgan has formed.  She is a professional soprano who runs a week-long choral workshop in Sintra, Portugal, which I attended. And she has devoted students who run reunions in their own cities, like Berlin and Bologna. It's much easier for the Europeans to go to a weekend reunion than the isolated Americans, but when I heard it was Dublin, and on a 3-day weekend, I signed up.

St. Valentine's Day
And, as fate would have it, I will be in  ancestor's land on February 14. It feels like a cosmic Celtic embrace of the the land of my forefathers.

I had read that the relics of the actual martyred St. Valentinus were given to an Irish Carmelite priest in the 19th century, and he interred them at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel.

They are brought to the high altar on the feast day. I thought it would be interesting to see, if it wasn't too far out of my way. Turns out the church is literally between my hotel and St. Patrick's Cathedral, by complete chance. Lots of background about how the saint ended up in Dublin here.

 I don't know how much sightseeing I will get in in between jet lag, rehearsals, and the reunion activities. But I'll be tweeting from the Old Country. You can follow along here
https://twitter.com/MaPeel

The lyrics to the great "Rocky Road to Dublin"

In the merry month of June, From me home I started,
Left the girls of Toom, Nearly broken hearted,
Saluted father dear, Kissed my darlin' mother,
Drank a pint of beer, My grief and tears to smother,
Then off to reap the corn, leave where I was born,
with a stout blackthorn, To banish ghost and goblin,
In a brand new pair of brogues, I rattled o'er the bogs,
And frightened all the dogs, On the rocky road to Dublin.

One, two, three, four five,
Hunt the hare and turn her
Down the rocky road
And all the ways to Dublin,
Whack-fol-lol-de-ra.

In Mullingar that night, I rested limbs so weary,
Started by daylight, My spirts light and airy,
Took a drop of the pure, To keep my heart from sinkin',
That's the paddie's cure, Whene'er he's on for drinking.
To see the lasses smile, Laughing all the while,
At my curious style, 'Twould set your heart a-bubblin'.
They ax'd if I was hired, The wages I required,
Till I was nearly tired, Of the rocky road to Dublin.

In Dublin next arrived, I thought it such a pity,
To be so soon deprived, A view of that fine city.
Then I took a stroll, All among the quality,
Bundle it was stole, In a neat locality;
Something crossed my mind, Then I looked behind;
No bundle could I find, Upon my stick a wobblin'.
Enquirin' for the rogue, They said my Connacht brogue,
Wasn't much in vogue, On the rocky road to Dublin.

One, two, three, four five,
Hunt the hare and turn her
Down the rocky road
And all the ways to Dublin,
Whack-fol-lol-de-ra.

From there I got away, My spirits never failin'
Landed on the quay As the ship was sailin';
Captain at me roared, Said that no room had he,
When I jumped aboard, A cabin found for Paddy,
Down among the pigs I played some funny rigs,
Danced some hearty jigs, The water round me bubblin',
When off Holyhead, I wished myself was dead,
Or better far instead, On the rocky road to Dublin.

One, two, three, four five,
Hunt the hare and turn her
Down the rocky road
And all the ways to Dublin,
Whack-fol-lol-de-ra.

The boys of Liverpool, When we safely landed,
Called myself a fool; I could no longer stand it;
Blood began to boil, Temper I was losin',
Poor ould Erin's isle They began abusin',
Hurrah my soul, sez I, My shillelagh I let fly;
Some Galway boys were by, Saw I was a hobble in,
Then with a loud hurray, They joined in the affray.
We quickly cleared the way, For the rocky road to Dublin.

One, two, three, four five,
Hunt the hare and turn her
Down the rocky road
And all the ways to Dublin,
Whack-fol-lol-de-ra.

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 Mapeel     2/11/2014     Ireland, music, Travel   

"Melancholia, Nostalgia, and Il Penseroso walk into a bar. . . "

Ok, it's not a bar. It's closer to home during these final days of this summer that are grey and sticky. I hate humidity. It's soul-sapping.

So I wasn't entirely surprised when Melancholia moved into the apartment last week along with the humidity, leaving crumbs on the couch, glasses in the sink, and knocking the small objets d’arts over with those honking wings. It’s a small apartment, and we fell in to a barely tolerable, functional choreography around the place.

While she’s here, nearly every thought is tinged by her cousin, Nostalgia. That's who led me to think about my schooner days on The Appledore the other day and post some pictures.

I thought Melly was finally going to disappear when L’Allegro unexpectedly popped out of the classic Hughes edition of Milton that had been languishing on the bookshelf since college,  banishing “loathed Melancholy,” and avowing

 “These delights if thou canst give, Mirth, with thee I mean to live.”

Oh yeah.

But when I went to the garbage shoot, Il Penseroso, who had been sulking out in the hall,  slipped through the door with his contrarian “vain deluding joys,” and tribute to “divinest Melancholy.” And so the supreme sad-sack was summoned to stay.

Now the three of them are rattling around here. Melly has taken hold of the remote, and Pensive has a lock on the DVDs.

He keeps playing this one over and over, Thomas Moore's classic poem, “The Last Rose of Summer” set to a sad Irish tune.

’TIS the last rose of summer

Left blooming alone;

All her lovely companions

Are faded and gone;

No flower of her kindred,

No rosebud is nigh,

To reflect back her blushes,

To give sigh for sigh.

I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one!

To pine on the stem;

Since the lovely are sleeping,

Go, sleep thou with them.

Thus kindly I scatter

Thy leaves o’er the bed,

Where thy mates of the garden

Lie scentless and dead.

So soon may I follow,

When friendships decay,

And from Love’s shining circle

The gems drop away.

When true hearts lie withered

And fond ones are flown,

Oh! who would inhabit

This bleak world alone?

I need to leave these three and go shopping.

(Top image: Albrecht Duerer's woodcut, Melancholia.  "The Last Rose of Summer" sung by Laura Wright, who released an album of same name in the UK 2011)

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 Mapeel     8/31/2013     Ireland, literature, poetry   

Bloomsday Meets Father's Day: Very Special Year for the Das

Bloomsday—June 16, the date on which the whole of James Joyce's Ulysses is set—and Father's Day intersect every decade or so, making it a special day of remembering and honoring those Irish dads out there, which would include my clan: Grandpa, Dad, and bro.

Grandpa O'Neill:
He would come to visit our house in Massapequa in the summer fairly often. We had a lovely backyard patio where we would sit together before dinner during the stillest part of the day, early evening. The sun had gone done a bit and it was cool but the breezes had stopped (memorialized by Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer as “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening"). He would inevitably look out on the grounds and say, “This is the best time to put down fertilizer.”

Grandpa didn’t have an easy life. A second generation Brooklyn Irish, he had to leave school after the 6th grade to work to help support the family. He got a job in the mailroom of Con Edison, when the Irish ruled it straight out, and he worked there for 50 years. He had an excellent memory, and it allowed him to advance unhindered by his lack of formal education.

That his sons went to college and got advanced degrees---a lawyer and a CPA—was an enormous accomplishment, something which my dad always thought he didn't entirely appreciate, it was so beyond his experience. Grandpa was absolutely no saint—few Irishmen are—but that doesn’t diminish the sweat and pain and heartache of raising 5 children through the Depression and World War II and all that followed, along with a first son who died a tragic death in infancy, and a foster child who was taken away by the agency to go to a richer family even as he was trying to adopt her.

And so I found it poignant that in his last years, he was freed to worry about the best time to use the “spreader” to put down Scots Turf Builder, sitting on his son’s patio.

Dad O'Neill: I’ve written about his untimely death and my discovery of his teen bonding with the French language. He has been gone for so long that I don't have any more memories of his actual presence, which I guess is what happens.

I love this picture of him at the family farm in Merrick, Long Island. My grandmother had tired of Brooklyn and thought she wanted life in the country, and so they went. (They didn't stay long.) I think dad looks like a James Cagney tot here, or the character Peck's bad boy. He may be dressed in shorts, but don't cross him, 'cos he'll punch you.


So today my memory is of one of his catchphrases.

When there was a situation that happened that he didn't agree with, he would say, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” in the most sardonic way. Yes, Dad invoked the opening lines of Keats’s Endymion as social comment. (And see, he didn't hold being English against Keats.) He was a very special man. Also no saint.

Bro O'Neill: A dad himself. I imagine he tried to correct mistakes that our dad made with us. And I imagine he's made a slew of new ones with his own kids. So goes the cycle of life.

(Updated post from 2010).

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 Mapeel     6/16/2013     family, Ireland, James Joyce   

Connecting the Dots for St. Patrick's Day, Starting in Rome

Start Here:

Being in a hereditary frame of mine, when I was in Rome last summer I made a pilgrimage to the resting place of Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone (known as the Great Earl). He is the royal chieftain—from the royal Gaelic houses who had ruled Ireland since the days of Tara— who led the resistance against the English during the Nine Years War. 

Along with O'Donnell, they fought until they were defeated at the battle of Kinsale. They were under threat of arrest, and fled to Europe, the idea was to go to Spain and raise a new army and go back and root the English out once and for all.

This was called the Flight of the Earls, and it ended royal Gaelic rule in Ireland (clearly not their intention). The English took their lands to complete the Plantation of Ireland, bringing English Protestants over to live, and thereby planting the seeds of centuries of oppression. 

The harshest were the years of the Penal Laws. You don't hear many references to that collective atrocity, except the commentator of the parade yesterday explained that for Irish the traditional meal is not corned beef and cabbage, but bacon and cabbage. The cabbage came about because Catholics were not allowed to own livestock. So when they did procure a pig to celebrate their saint's day, they covered it with cabbage in the cart not to be found out. And so it went on, up through the Troubles of the 20th century, to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. 

O'Neill died in Rome of malaria on July 20, 1616, and with him the last hope for getting England out of Ireland. The Spanish buried them in their church, San Pietro di Montorio. The inscription: Dedicated to God, the Best & Greatest. The bones of Prince Hugh O'Neill. Because of the number of weddings in the church, the stone is usually covered by carpets. Most people have no idea they are walking on top of Ireland's bloody fate sealed by the fact of those bones. I found it very moving, touching this place of my ancient relative. 

The Next Dot

The Great Hunger Museum in Hamden, CT. If the English had not completed their domination of Ireland with the Plantation of Ulster, when the potato crops failed two hundred years later in 1847, the Irish might have rallied. But instead, because of the gross psychological hatred the English power class felt for the Irish, they perversely saw to it that food that could have fed the starving was exported to England and the continent. (Burying the Child, Lilian Lucy Davison. Photo Frank Poole).

Which Lead To . . .

Two million people leaving Ireland, many of whom landed and stayed in New York. And that led to the building of St. Patrick's Cathedral, started in 1858, haulted during the Civil War, continued in 1865 and completed in 1878.

Wiki tells us: "Most cathedrals and great churches have a cruciform groundplan. In churches of Western European tradition, the plan is usually longitudinal, in the form of the so-called Latin Cross with a long nave crossed by a transept."

It's a detail of architecture you don't see from the street. A guy I work with took this picture in 1979 when he worked on another building in midtown. Fifth Avenue is toward the bottom of the picture, Madison Ave is at the top, where the Lady Chapel juts out to the sidewalk. The Irish immigrants, who had not yet ascended to power in New York, built it out of pennies. It's a remarkable accomplishment.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all with some Irish in their soul.

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 Mapeel     3/17/2013     Ireland, Italy   

“Lamh Dearg Eirinn”: On Every Street Corner in the Great City of New York!

Somewhere in the late 1970s there was a commercial on Channel 11, WPIX, with Penn & Teller. They were running around New York looking for some way to announce a new identity for WPIX, but nothing was big enough. Then they come up from a subway somewhat uptown from the still-new World Trade Center. And that was it! The enormous twin towers were an enormous 11. Mission accomplished.

I had a similar "aha" moment yesterday when I was thinking about what could I write about for St. Patrick's Day.

I was walking from the subway to my office on 52 Street, still feeling jazzed by 30 Rock's St. Patrick's Day episode, with all its loony specific details, and the use of the parade (which was a real inside baseball stroke, because not only has WNBC been televising it for many years, but this year the Grand Marshal is none other than Francis X. Comerford, the Chief Revenue Officer and President of Commercial Operations for the NBC Owned Television Stations).

As I was walking I was thinking . . . thinking . . . what can I talk about, what's big enough to talk about this year, when I looked up to cross the street and . . .







THERE IT WAS, the Bloody Red Hand of O'Neill. On every street corner.*

How had I never realized this before?

I hail from clan O'Neill, and our crest---the elements of which predate formal heraldry--- has a bloody hand that became the symbol of Ulster because my ancestors where kings of ancient Ireland. No hype. No kidding.

There are many stories about why the crest has the hand. The one my dad told me was: One of our ancestors had a kingdom and two sons. He took them out in a boat, and said whichever one touched the land first he would make the next king. The two brothers started swimming, and the one son realized he was losing, so he took his knife, cut off his had and threw it so he would "touch" the land first. As a kid that was deliciously creepy. We had the crest on a wall along the stairs to the living room, and I stared at that fish for years.

We Have a Very Storied Heritage

Here are bits and pieces from name and crest sites:

The name is the same in Irish as it is in English and for 1,000 years O'Neill has been one of the most prestigious of Irish families. Niall means ‘champion’ and was first used by Domhall, grandson of Nial Glun Dubh (black knee), King of Ireland, killed in 890 by the Norsemen. The O'Neills go further back, claiming descent from the legendary Niall of the Nine Hostages. They were very strong in Ulster and to curb their power Queen Elizabeth had their Tullahogue inauguration stone broken up.

The O'Neills were so powerful that they were targeted by the English for extermination with special zeal in the sixteenth century. Despite the best efforts of the crown under their agent Essex, the O'Neills continued to thrive in Ulster right up until the 'Flight of the Earls' in 1607 (more about that later).

The Long Memory of History

In the states, the name O'Neill used to be known for the playwright Eugene and the politician Tip. Both are fading from collective memory.

But I got a whole new perspective on the clan when I traveled around Ireland in college with a fellow American, Carol Delahunty. She wanted to visit her county, Kilkenny. So we made our way there, via Dublin, then Galway, Clare, Dingle, Limerick, Cork, Waterford. All along the way, when I said my name, people would say, "Oh, the fighting O'Neills" or "Ah, the kings of Ireland." Which surprised me. No one said anything about Delahunty.

Then we got to Kilkenny Castle, the seat of her family name, and ticket taker is reading a book, a biography on Owen Roe O'Neill!!

I had to ask him, why do people feel the need to exclaim when I say my name?

He said that it's because the Irish feel very close to their history, and the O'Neills were great fighters against the English and are cherished for it to this day.

And that history? Hugh O'Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone, was known as The Great O'Neill and recognized as the King of Ireland as late as 1598 - 1600, gaining power and renown through the Nine Years War, hammering against the English.

But here's the rub. The English rallied at the Battle of Kinsale, the Catholic Spanish, who had come to help, surrendered, and the English took the city. O'Neill went back to Ulster, and then left for Spain to try to raise a new army and re-conqueror, along with O'Donnell and ninety of their followers. This exile became known as "The Flight of the Earls" in 1607.

Because O'Neill and the others fled, no one left was strong enough to fight the English, and the Plantation of Ulster began, which was the root of all evil on that green isle. Direct cause and effect. O'Neill and O'Donnell left, King James 1 confiscated their lands, their entire realms, and gave them to Protestants from England and Scotland. That's how the mess all started.

Now, you might think that history and the Irish would hold O'Neill responsible for that terrible fate of their country. But they don't. Exactly the opposite: they embrace O'Neill as the greatest of the fighters who stood firm against the English, well, until he fled. (As we've said repeatedly, the Irish are a unique breed.)


And today, this ancient symbol of the fighting kings of Ireland is on every street corner in the 5 boroughs of the great city of New York.

That's big enough to call out on Saint Patrick's Day and say: Erin Go Bragh!

Slainte.











*(This one has the extra benefit of the pun on the street sign. Who W. C. Handys is and why we care is for another day.)

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 Mapeel     3/17/2012     Ireland   

Twas the Night Before Bloomsday . . .

It’s not too late. You can still make your plans for the day that most honors the depth and complexity of the poetic Irish soul, June 16, the day on which James Joyce set his epic novel of daily life shrouded in inner dialogue.

So not late, but that sentence was far too linear. To honor Joyce it needs to be more like:

Anno domini 1904, boy & girl enact simple primitive ritual, tortured soul steps out with Nora of the Barnacle. A connection to cosmos: Praise then of the labyrinth mindmotif of polyglot auteur, AVE Hibernia, for a day cada ano during Solstice less the golden rings. Annuit coeptis NYC’s myriad activities gathered on Bloomsdaynyc:

BLOOMSDAY BREAKFAST IN BRYANT PARK (I’m going to attend)

IABANY BLOOMSDAY CELEBRATION: With the Irish American Bar Association, down at 60 Centre Street. You’ve got to love these guys, celebrating the landmark First Amendment ruling over obscenity laws to publish Ulysses. Keynote speech by Kathleen Sullivan, followed by re-enactment of the 1933 court case, USA vs. One Book Called Ulysses.

RADIO BLOOMSDAY 2011: A 30th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION.
On WBAI 99.5 FM and online Readers include Alec Baldwin, John Lithgow, Jerry Stiller, Garrison Keillor, Wallace Shawn, Kate Valk, Paul Dooley,

ULYSSES MEETS TWITTER 2011
Follow @11ysses. Starting 8:00 a,m, Dublin time (that’s 3:00 a.m. for NewYorker) you’ll get a stream of programmed tweets following the journey of the novel. Interesting assembly of “tweaders”

BLOOMSDAY ON BROADWAY XXX
Isaish Sheffer's yearly valentine to his favorite novel. Will also live stream


I'm a sucker for this creative activity by Joyce’s fans. I don’t pretend to be a true fan or much of a student of the work. The closest I got was one tutorial with Maud Ellmann, the daughter of one of Joyce’s great biographers Richard Ellmann, at Southampton University. As we were discussing part of the novel Maud would say, “Let’s see what dad had to say about that” and break open the biography.

But I understand the desire of the fan to gather, to bring what is an internal experience into the external world, the better to experience it anew in a communal

yes I said yes I will Yes

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 Mapeel     6/15/2011     Ireland, literature   

Cead Mile Failte, QEII

I think the Queen’s visit to the Republic of Ireland for a 4-day state visit beginning May 17 is just brilliant. She welcomed the pope last year.—-from her role as head of the Church of England—and now she attends to the most symbolic gesture possible from her role as figurehead of the state of that sceptered isle.

No other living ruler is such a nexus for history, with that capital H. And she is deeply self aware of this role. I believe that’s why she’s making this trip as an 85 year old, with the 91 year old Prince Philip, while she still can.

The history of England’s obscene rule over Ireland for centuries should not be forgotten. If anyone needs a refresher on how harsh the Penal Laws were, or how people could be hanged for high treason for wearing the color green, you can read an old St. Patrick’s Day post.

And of course the 20th century saw decades and decades of the bloodiest, most soul-crushing violence between these two Christian countries as Britain became a paramilitary and military presence amongst the general public, thus feeding the fires of the IRA. But in the 21st century, it’s time to get beyond all that. And the Queen coming for a visit and sleeping 3 nights on Irish soil-—trusting her very safety to the good people of Ireland--is a significant, encouraging statement about the future.


It’s the Economy, Stupid
Ireland has a more immediate problems at the moment than the contemplation of its bloody family history with Great Britain. Their bank collapse and debt crises is terrifying everyone.

And so with the usual Irish dry wit, Eoghan Harris writes in The Observer:

"The country is so preoccupied with the financial crisis. I don't know anyone who isn't suffering," he said. "There's no passion about the Queen's visit, but there's a benign affability. She is regarded like an eccentric aunt who should have called in a long time ago but didn't because of a family row, the origins of which have been long forgotten."

I believe that the Anglo-Saxon soul and the Celtic soul are deeply different in sensibility: it’s the difference between Shakespeare and Joyce. Between Milton and Yeats. And each should retain its own, fierce identity. But the killing. That has to be over, for good.



(Photo: a pub in Dublin)

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 Mapeel     5/17/2011     current events, Ireland