New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
Probably I read James Joyce's Dubliners during college or shortly thereafter. It is a compelling collection of short stories completed by Joyce during his pre-WWI residency in Trieste, and published in 1914.
For me Dubliners is a must-read, and I plan to make it a re-read during the coming weeks. Also, a re-watch; somewhere in a box secreted in our house's dusty nooks you'll find a video cassette of The Dead, John Huston's final film. The Dead is a long story, perhaps a novella, and Huston's adaptation is a short film, although no less compelling for its brevity.
The Economist's pseudonymous columnist plainly gets it, and so should we all: "The festive season has summoned every weeping ghost." So it will remain for me, always.
James Joyce’s captivating tale is one of love, loss and loneliness
ALMOST EVERYONE who watches television in Ireland will have seen a Christmas commercial for Guinness—first aired in 2004—in which snowflakes drop softly over a variety of Irish landscapes. Although the writer got no credit from the advertising agency, this panorama of longing and nostalgia draws on James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. Joyce’s tale concludes (freakishly, in purely meteorological terms) with snowfall “general all over Ireland”. His snow unites past and present, memory and desire, as it blankets “all the living and the dead”.
“The Dead” is among the finest short stories in the English language. Astonishingly, it came from the pen of an impoverished and insecure 25-year-old language teacher in Trieste. In that Italian city, ruled then like the Dublin he had left by a haughty imperial power (Austro-Hungary rather than Great Britain), the self-exiled Joyce lived and wrote. He sought for years to find a reliable publisher for the collection eventually released, in 1914, as “Dubliners”. Written in 1907, “The Dead” displays all the virtuosity of an author who can already do anything he wants in conventional fiction. Like Pablo Picasso, his near-contemporary, Joyce would soon break all the rules of the art he had so precociously mastered.
For more than a century, readers have loved “The Dead” for its bittersweet melancholy and its mingled threads of festivity and mourning. It inspired John Huston’s film of 1987, the great actor-director’s poignant swansong ...
As for Huston's adaptation, this from film critic Pauline Kael:
"Huston directed the movie, at eighty, from a wheelchair, jumping up to look through the camera, with oxygen tubes trailing from his nose to a portable generator; most of the time, he had to watch the actors on a video monitor outside the set and use a microphone to speak to the crew. Yet he went into dramatic areas that he'd never gone into before - funny, warm family scenes that might be thought completely out of his range. Huston never before blended his actors so intuitively, so musically."
Or maybe it should be renamed: "Hey, sweetheart, can I have one of those I'm a Culturally Illiterate American Cocktails?"
No, it isn't St. Patrick's Day, although it's never too late to learn something.
The Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 17 May 1974 were a series of co-ordinated bombings in Dublin and Monaghan, Ireland. Three bombs exploded in Dublin during the evening rush hour and a fourth exploded in Monaghan almost ninety minutes later. They killed 33 civilians and a full-term fetus, and injured almost 300. The bombings were the deadliest attack of the conflict known as the Troubles, and the deadliest attack in the Republic's history. Most of the victims were young women, although the ages of the dead ranged up to 80 years.
It's the equivalent of a Brit coming to America and asking for a tall glass of 9/11
I don’t always enjoy telling people they can’t have the drink they’ve asked me for, but when I do, it’s because someone ordered an Irish car bomb.
Look, I get it: It’s just a drink. But here’s the thing: Unless you crawled out from under a rock yesterday or have zero working knowledge of either 20th-century European history or the English language, you know it’s at the very least a disservice to the Irish culture you claim to be celebrating on St. Patrick’s Day, if not downright offensive.You wouldn’t order a suicide bomb on the Fourth of July, or a pulse shot during Pride, right?
So it is with the Irish car bomb: It’s an insensitive and traumatic reminder of a dark and painful period of Ireland’s national history.
Granted, I mention Luke Kelly fairly often here at this pro bono publication. Pedantry suits me, and I'm grimly determined that readers know who he was and what he stood for.
Entirely coincidental to the yearly arrival of St. Patrick's Day, the missus has been watching an Irish television series called "Striking Out."
Set in Dublin and Wicklow, it's a soap-opera about lawyers and their role in a political scandal connected to the real-world Irish property bust ten years ago, and the reason I bring it up is apart from the performers' accents, scenic drone panoramas of the local landscape and occasional pint of Guinness, there is little to set this drama apart from one situated in London, New York City or Shanghai.
I'm not necessarily objecting to any of this. After all, modernity. While my memories of Ireland 34 years ago are missing mobile phones, specialty coffee carry-out cups and nattily attired Eurofessionals, it is unreasonable to expect the planet to stop spinning while we revert to rural thatched Irish stereotypes of the sort embraced by people who don't actually live there, celebrating their St. Patrick's Days with green beer and car bombs.
Or by me, while reading this excellent account of Luke Kelly's political grounding and its musical context. This hero of mine died 35 years ago, and his country has changed quite a lot since then.
What hasn't changed is the power of ideas, or the way music can express them -- and I submit to you that this is why Luke still matters.
Luke Kelly was Ireland’s best-known folk singer — he was also a lifelong socialist.
... In this earliest phase of his musical development, he saw his socialism and his growing love for folk music to be inextricably linked. “The music of the left-wing,” he thought, “was romantic and rejuvenating.” As his talent grew Luke took to spending his weekend touring Irish pubs with the Connolly Association selling its newspaper The Irish Democrat. As one of its leading members Sean Redmond would recall to Des Geraghty, “the drill was quite simple. He would go up to the stage or music stand, sing a few songs, then announce that he was here selling the Connolly Association’s newspaper and he expected everyone to buy one.”
But by 1962 the paths of politics and music were beginning to diverge. Seeing great potential in his intellect and application, George Thompson arranged for Luke Kelly to go to university in Prague to further his political development. Availing of this opportunity would almost certainly have meant giving up his musical career—so a choice had to be made. Although still committed to socialist politics, Luke had by this time caught the folk music bug. He turned down the chance to study in Prague and packed his bags for a trip elsewhere, returning to his native Dublin as it was beginning to sway with the winds of the 1960s.
Now, get ready for some eye candy. If these pub reviews don't make you thirsty for a pint of the black stuff, I'm not sure what will. I've plucked just one example from twenty.
On the fringes of the Ring Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area), the Marine Bar has been keeping the locals watered for more than 300 years. Nowadays the pub is known across the sunny south east for its traditional music sessions, led by owner Christy O’Neill. Hunker down for some ballads (participation welcomed) after a day’s exertion on the wild Copper Coast or cycling the excellent Waterford Greenway. Friday night fireside sessions are the most popular, but there’s music throughout the week. The black stuff optional, but highly recommended.
-- Steve Kirby
The loss of storefronts in Ireland is a lamentable cultural atrocity. It isn't restricted to pubs, but of course I'm enraptured by one of the pubs pictured in the article.
The photo above accompanies the article. The one below is from 2011. The Railway Bar's actually looking a tad fresher.
The flowers are a nice touch, and the pints of Guinness ... even better. Here's a photo of a multi-purpose joint in Sligo, which I snapped in black and white back in '85.
Or this one, I believe in Cork, from 1987.
It's too bad about the disappearance of these traditional commercial features. For a revealing look into the way that Irish pub fronts (make that, entire Irish pubs) are conjured at home and installed in "shells" around the world, jump here.
Photographing the colors and typography of traditional Irish shops.
On a narrow street in the town of Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland, is B. Corcoran, a men’s clothing store. It’s been in operation since 1956, a fact which is evident from its storefront: above a painted olive green exterior, a wedge-shaped sign spells out “B. Corcoran Ltd.” in burgundy scripted lettering.
Storefronts such as this one are a visual treasure for the graphic designer Trevor Finnegan. For the past eight years, in his spare time, he’s been exploring and photographing traditional Irish stores all over the country. The ongoing project is a way to document an important part of Ireland’s visual traditions and crafts, says Finnegan. “Their unique design style and the typographic styles really appeal to me,” he explains. “They are the face of local business and the give a real sense of friendliness that you find in these types of places here in Ireland.”
There’s another reason that Finnegan wants to document the storefronts: they’re in decline. Smaller, family-run stores suffered during the recession, he says. “With many young people now living and working in the bigger cities such as Dublin, Cork, and Galway, many of these shops just simply closed down.” There is also the seemingly inexorable shift toward larger or more homogenous stores. “People’s shopping habits have changed and bigger chain stores have moved into towns across Ireland,” he says, “which has really affected local smaller businesses like these ... ”
Granted, I mention Luke Kelly fairly often here at this pro bono publication. Pedantry suits me, and I'm grimly determined that readers know who he was and what he stood for.
Entirely coincidental to the yearly arrival of St. Patrick's Day, the missus has been watching an Irish television series called "Striking Out."
Set in Dublin and Wicklow, it's a soap-opera about lawyers and their role in a political scandal connected to the real-world Irish property bust ten years ago, and the reason I bring it up is apart from the performers' accents, scenic drone panoramas of the local landscape and occasional pint of Guinness, there is little to set this drama apart from one situated in London, New York City or Shanghai.
I'm not necessarily objecting to any of this. After all, modernity. While my memories of Ireland 30 years ago are missing mobile phones, specialty coffee carry-out cups and nattily attired Eurofessionals, it is unreasonable to expect the planet to stop spinning while we revert to rural thatched Irish stereotypes of the sort embraced by people who don't actually live there, celebrating their St. Patrick's Days with green beer and car bombs.
Or by me, while reading this excellent account of Luke Kelly's political grounding and its musical context. This hero of mine died 34 years ago, and his country has changed quite a lot since then.
What hasn't changed is the power of ideas, or the way music can express them -- and I submit to you that this is why Luke still matters.
Luke Kelly was Ireland’s best-known folk singer — he was also a lifelong socialist.
... In this earliest phase of his musical development, he saw his socialism and his growing love for folk music to be inextricably linked. “The music of the left-wing,” he thought, “was romantic and rejuvenating.” As his talent grew Luke took to spending his weekend touring Irish pubs with the Connolly Association selling its newspaper The Irish Democrat. As one of its leading members Sean Redmond would recall to Des Geraghty, “the drill was quite simple. He would go up to the stage or music stand, sing a few songs, then announce that he was here selling the Connolly Association’s newspaper and he expected everyone to buy one.”
But by 1962 the paths of politics and music were beginning to diverge. Seeing great potential in his intellect and application, George Thompson arranged for Luke Kelly to go to university in Prague to further his political development. Availing of this opportunity would almost certainly have meant giving up his musical career—so a choice had to be made. Although still committed to socialist politics, Luke had by this time caught the folk music bug. He turned down the chance to study in Prague and packed his bags for a trip elsewhere, returning to his native Dublin as it was beginning to sway with the winds of the 1960s.
Father Desmond O’Donnell says the words Christmas and Easter have lost all sacred meaning
An Irish Catholic priest has called for Christians to stop using the word Christmas because it has been hijacked by “Santa and reindeer”.
Father Desmond O’Donnell said Christians of any denomination need to accept Christmas now has no sacred meaning.
O’Donnell’s comments follow calls from a rightwing pressure group for a boycott of Greggs bakery in the UK after the company replaced baby Jesus with a sausage roll in a nativity scene.
“We’ve lost Christmas, just like we lost Easter, and should abandon the word completely,” O’Donnell told the Belfast Telegraph.
“We need to let it go, it’s already been hijacked and we just need to recognise and accept that.”
They're not kidding about the sausage roll. I'm an atheist, but this one's just weird.
A new advent calendar has been released by Greggs that has left people asking if it’s appropriate to replace Jesus with a sausage roll.
Of all things!
Throughout the calendar there are festive pictures such as sweet pastries hanging from a Christmas tree and a scene from the nativity.
The son of God is nowhere to be seen in the manger, instead there is a sausage roll surrounded by three wise men who we hope are called sausage, beans and cheese melt.
In which three fascinating Anglo-Irish topics collide amid my frequent references to the adjective "elegiac."
It's the mid-1970s lineup of the Irish folk band The Dubliners, performing on a throwback British television show called The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, depicting a fictional working men's club -- a form of private pub with ale and stronger drink, in addition to indoor recreation (snooker, darts), or a haven for what Americans would refer to as blue collar workers.
The WMC’s original purpose was to provide the Victorian working man with a controlled environment in which to socialise and drink. Over time it has morphed into a lingering bastion for traditional community activities. It provides an affordable way for local people to meet, enjoy live entertainment and play games (in The Telegraph, below).
I've written about The Dubliners many times. During the band's most fabled and productive period in the 1960s and early 70s, it was the Rolling Stones of traditional Irish music.
The American roots magazine Dirty Linen, contrasting the Dubliners and the Clancy brothers who emerged around the same time, wrote: "Whereas the Clancys were well-scrubbed returned Yanks from rural Tipperary, decked out in matching white Aran sweaters, the Dubliners were hard-drinking backstreet Dublin scrappers with unkempt hair and bushy beards, whose gigs seemed to happen by accident between fistfights."
Jim McCann performed only briefly with The Dubliners, whose best known members were Luke Kelly and Ronnie Drew, but McCann committed to vinyl the definitive version of Carrickfergus, and he sings it here. For me, it produces goosebumps.
I think the frozen/mushy pea jokes are funny, and to hear an Irishman (McCann) pronounce the word "shunters" sublime.
Wheeltappers and shunters are railway workers. They were commonly employed by steam railways in Britain and elsewhere, but still are found both on British railways and in Eastern Europe.
The name of the programme thus echoes that of the many social clubs set up by railway workers in the 19th century, many of which are still in existence (known as British Rail Staff Association clubs), even if they no longer have a direct connection to the railways.
Working men's clubs still operate, though they're fast becoming archaic.
Last orders for the Working Men's Club? by Hannah Marshall (The Telegraph)
The number of working men's clubs in the country have halved in the last 30 years. Hannah Marshall investigates why these great British institutions are worth saving.
Off Barking Road in London's East Ham, just past the shops that always have their shutters down, a square, concrete building sits within a sprawling housing estate. Go inside this inconspicuous space on any Friday, Saturday or Sunday and you’ll be met by an unexpected sight: families of several generations grouped around tables —grandparents, parents, children, cousins, nieces, nephews — enjoying live music and socialising. Follow through to the sports room and a group of young local men will have congregated to play pool or darts and watch the football on the TV. This is the East Ham Working Men’s Club and it’s a place where everybody knows your name.
The Dubliners completed a 50th anniversary tour in 2012 and called it quits. The band's last surviving original member, banjoist Barney McKenna, died before the celebratory concerts even were finished. Far-off 1977 was the final year for The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club television series, and much like fraternal orders in the US, recent decades have not been kind to the prospect of the continued existence of working men's clubs.
Speaking personally, while it isn't a direct analogy with working men's clubs, my wife's cousin belongs to a private club in Plymouth, for centuries the Royal Navy's main port city. Most of the members are from working class family backgrounds as stevedores, shipyard employees, bricklayers and construction workers.
The first time we went there in 2009, there was no real ale, but by 2013, the pendulum had taken a swing. The Fort had a cask-conditioned bitter from Skinner's in Cornwall (Betty Stogs, perhaps), and it was delicious.
To be sure, if I'd have found myself in a working men's club in Sheffield or Newcastle at the age of 17, with cask ale and an Irish band playing, I wouldn't have understood any of it.
Now I do, and that's why we all fantasize about time travel. It's making me salivate just writing these words, and there's not a hand-pumped bitter in sight.
Day 102 ... Sunday, July 26
Bayeux → Cherbourg. On board Irish Continental Line 21:00 - 14:00
Day 103 ... Monday, July 27
(Arrival in) Rosslare. Mrs. O'Leary's, walk along the beach
The magic moment possibly occurred at lunch in Versailles while Bob was still traveling with us, or somewhere amid the Ottersbach/Baylor excursion to Pointe du Hoc on Saturday, but I'm thinking it likely came in Cherbourg on Sunday afternoon.
Of course, I'm referring to the time we drank deeply of the Super Valstar, or as it read on the label, "the big blonde."
To put it mildly, Valstar and Super Valstar (I'm unsure of the difference apart from alcohol content) were budget brands of a style that ratings aggregators of today tend to call "Euro Pale Lager."
The Valstars were cheaper even than Kanterbräu, or as Barrie called it, Cancerbrau. They came in gigantic liter bottles with reusable plastic caps. Barrie probably wouldn't agree, but to this day I'm prepared to argue that Cancerbrau Kanterbräu was of better quality by a razor-thin margin.
It didn't matter. Simply stated, we barely knew at all about Belgian ales, much less French bieres de garde, and even if we had known about them, the fact remained that we were supposed to be living on a budget.
Furthermore, it was a budget under siege, a fact of a bit more concern to me than Barrie. My friend came to Europe prepared to spend more money per day, spread out over fewer total days abroad, than I had.
In budgetary terms, I ran a surplus during my time alone in Eastern Europe and our pre-paid time together on the group tour of the USSR and Poland. Once we hit Munich, the surplus became a daily subsidy. The question was for how long I could maintain the balancing act, because the reality of it for me was the nature of the Visa card in my neck pouch. It was a debit card, not a credit card, and the reserves were finite.
For one afternoon in Cherbourg, waiting for a ship to sail, I swore fealty to my budget and opted for the supermarket beers costing less per ounce than mineral water. The only reason any of it matters is that we'd arrived in Cherbourg on Sunday morning via rail from Bayeux, and there was time to kill.
Quite literally, snacks were in the bag -- the remaining ounces of salami from Barrie's kilo purchase fully three days earlier. It wasn't rancid yet, and all we needed was bread and a few beers, and we found them in a store by the docks while waiting for the Irish ferry to sail.
When it came time to board, we were near the front of the queue, which meant probable dibs on available cabin space for the overnight journey. Our quest was successful, and we were spared an evening on the carpet.
It's possible that we had a bite to eat. I'm sure we changed money at some point, having concluded it would be wise to save our remaining French francs for the boat trip back.
I know we were standing outside the door to the bar when it finally was unlocked and the pouring began.
One night, long before (the 1985 trip), in a drunken stupor of semi-religious ecstasy, my cousin Don had uttered an astute prophecy, foretelling of delicious and creamy Guinness pints, as served by impeccable barmen on the wonderful ships carrying budget travelers from France to Ireland. Actually, we both were in our cups, and it was less of a bold vision than a recapitulation of his own previous travel experience. I was suitably enamored, and incorporated a line item for the inevitable splurge. At 24, I was a beer neophyte, and Guinness was anything but ubiquitous in Louisville and Southern Indiana. The draft version was almost unheard of locally, and mythical in proportion to its rarity. Then one of my pals returned home from college touting the bottled variety of Ireland’s national beverage, and seeing as Guinness Extra Stout could be found at better area package stores, it was a start. Even if this firmer recipe lacked the raw mystique of the elusive draft, it was a transformative introduction. The heavily roasted flavor of Guinness Extra Stout was a bit much at first, so we began by mixing it “half and half” with any and all cheap lagers, from Red, White and Blue on up to Harp (somehow Irish-on-Irish seemed to make more conceptual sense). As time passed, I began weaning myself from the lager “filler,” and learned to drink the nectar straight. Still, veteran travelers and the guidebooks agreed: Draft Guinness was best, and it never got any better than in Ireland. Why? Because it was fresh and unpasteurized, with a whole national culture revolving around it, uniting all classes in philosophy and knowledge over pints in classic pubs renowned as universities for poor men. Perhaps. It also might have been the relative absence of draft Guinness closer to home, where we might have been able to compare, and soon become jaded by proximity. As for the Irish ferry itself, the 1985 model of 1st Class Eurailpass came with three valuable seaborne options, with free deck passage on routes between Italy and Greece (I did it); Sweden and Finland (still ahead); and France and Ireland. The Eurailpass was good for passage on the boat, offering nothing more than an overnight nesting place on the exposed upper deck, or in various out-of-the-way nooks inside. Either way, the night would be spent on the floor, and the importance of those pints of Guinness loomed even more critically. There was a baggage check for storing my increasingly battered gym bag, and the quick dispatch of leftover bread and nibbles from Paris. The maritime Shamrock Bar didn’t open until the ship was a few miles out from the shore, in international waters. When the signal was given, we approached the bar and had the first of several pints ... ... coming into Rosslare Harbor late the following morning, the weather was spectacular. I found something joyous and primeval about easing into harbor on a ship, producing a feeling of landfall that trumps planes routinely landing and rail cars coming to rest by their platforms. I enjoyed it immensely. Walking from the ship, a scrubby, stubby bluff could be seen rising just behind the terminal buildings. Atop it was a billboard depicting pint glasses of Guinness, all in a line: “Welcome to Ireland.” It felt like patriotism.
---
In 1987, we awoke to a brilliant tableau of sea and sun, still hours from our destination, and in need of sustenance. The ship offered several dining options, but Barrie had a better idea. As soon as the Duty Free Shop opened, it was revealed that liters of Bailey's Irish Cream and huge packages of Irish smoked salmon were available. Ruefully, out came the plastic.
Breakfast then was carried to the highest open-air outdoor deck, which afforded sweeping vistas of the blue ocean, green coastline and the gray, huddled sleeping bags of railpass deck passage occupants.
When nearing our destination, I put in the ear buds, turned on my pocket radio, and gave the dial a spin. Coincidentally, the very first song I heard was Bananarama's "I Heard a Rumor."
It entered the Irish charts at #30 on July 19. By the 26th, it had climbed to #13, entering the Top Ten during the first week of August. It remained there for a second and final week, subsequently fading into obscurity. I'd always assumed this was a huge hit in Ireland during our visit.
Rather, it was the first song I heard, nothing more. Here it is again. Fairly lightweight, eh?
As we neared the end of the 17-hour ferry marathon, there was an announcement detailing the Irish Republic's policy on the importation of agricultural items. To summarize, we couldn't.
Day pack in hand, Barrie promptly rose and disappeared. I imagined he'd gone to relieve himself, and in a way he had.
In his artful version, he'd suddenly realized that obeying Irish law meant disposing of the remaining French salami, and so he gave it a burial at sea with honors, tossing it into the ocean -- and "saluting" as the oil slick disappeared over the horizon.
The Guinness billboard was still there on the bluff, but it was the last time I ever saw the docks at Rosslare in their bucolic and sleepy vintage 1950s-era appearance.
When I returned to Ireland in 1989, a concrete and steel, airport-like ferry boarding facility had been constructed. It was a harbinger of things to come, though of course we had no way of knowing this as we accepted Mrs. Philomena O'Leary's offer and were given a lift to her bed and breakfast a few minutes down the road.
Damned if it isn't still in business, 30 years later. The view was sweet, and there was time for a walk on the beach. She served us an inexpensive light dinner, too. It was a fine way to gently surrender to Ireland's inevitable embrace.
Here's a view of a typical pub in Cork in 1987. Luckily, we were about to find a very atypical Cork pub, the Hibernian.
Regular blog readers recently have been burdened by accounts of my 1987 summer idling on the European continent, as occasioned by the long overdue digitalization of slide film from the period. As an example, this randomly selected image never before seen on the internet.
Not exactly breathtaking, though it brings back memories of the coast near Cork.
The year 1987 marked the second time I'd spent my savings on post-graduate educational wanderings. The first came in 1985, and it is no exaggeration to say that this experience profoundly changed my life. 32 years later, I'm still trying to make sense of it.
Prior to the initial excursion in 1985, my cousin Donald Barry showed me the ropes, and we were able to meet in Italy and Germany once "over there."
In 1987, I was able to repay Don's favor with my old friends Barrie Ottersbach and Bob Gunn, introducing them to places I'd seen in 1985 -- Munich beer halls, a Rhine River cruise, Jim Morrison's grave in Paris, and the D-Day beaches on the coast of France.
Barrie and I then proceeded to from France to Ireland by ferry, replicating my 1985 route apart from a different channel port (Cherbourg, not Le Havre), and arriving on Irish soil 30 years ago today.
Ironically, it had not been my original intent to visit Ireland in 1987, but we were having such a great time that I junked the "official" itinerary and went with my gut. It was the right decision, if for no other reason than seeing U2 perform in Cork during the mid-point of the band's lengthy Joshua Tree tour.
As I sit at my desk in the year 2017, writing this account of travel in far-off 1985, roughly 4,000 compact discs surround me, arranged in shelving units of varying sizes and shapes. I’m told they’re obsolete, but then again, so were the LPs packed into my tiny bedroom back when Ronnie Raygun was President, and I was planning my first trip to Europe.
Nowadays vinyl once again is sought-after, although not cassette tapes, which also took up storage space in the cramped living quarters of my youth. At least I never bought into the ethos of the 8-track tape, a fact of which I’m inordinately proud.
At the age of 55, I’ve yet to learn how to play a musical instrument, and if I so much as tried to carry a tune across the street, the likeliest result would be two broken legs – or the wailing enmity of every dog in the neighborhood. Still, my earliest childhood memories are about music, and it is impossible to overstate the role music continues to play in my everyday world.
During the years prior to the summer of 1985, my musical consciousness was filled with the usual markers of a male in his early twenties, with rock, pop and MTV the dominant influences. Perhaps unusually, my parents had raised me on swing and jazz, and these were viable complements. Just after college, formal composition began to please me, and I was a regular listener of WUOL, the University of Louisville’s classical FM station.
As genres go, “world music” wasn’t on heavy rotation in metropolitan Louisville at the time, and this is where Don Barry’s tutelage re-enters the narrative.
My cousin always brought albums of Irish music with him whenever he’d drive back from Florida to visit his mother (my aunt). I’d copy these albums onto cassettes: The Dubliners, Wolfe Tones, Tommy Makem, Clancy Brothers and other Irish folk bands, mostly from original pressings Don had purchased during his previous journeys to Ireland.
Of course, music wasn’t the only cultural touchstone in my informal education about all things Irish. As a pedagogue in the finest of constructive senses, Don provided ample homework, with reading assignments that extended far past our summer interludes: James Joyce ("Ulysses" is one thing; "Finnegan's Wake" quite another), Seamus Heaney, John Synge, W.B. Yeats, and "The Green Flag," Robert Kee's masterful history of Ireland.
Irish music helped tell Irish history, and it all became interwoven. Don and I listened to bawdy tunes, weepy ballads and riotous calls to action. We also drank gallons of beer while doing so, and these were the best seminars ever.
My family background is almost entirely sharecropper German from the Pomeranian plains, with a smidgen of English tossed into the mix, but once I'd experienced Irish culture from these secondary sources, it always seemed there must have been at least one stray shot of Irish DNA somewhere -- a rogue, a wanderer, an outcast from the great Irish displacement, who’d contributed to the family tree and then disappeared into the mists.
Musically, Ireland felt very comfortable to me, even if discomfort was the source of so many of the more overtly political songs, given that in terms of history, Ireland hasn’t always been such a happy or peaceful place.
---
By 600 AD, the island’s original Celtic inhabitants had been converted to Catholicism. During the Dark Ages, Viking and Norman incursions were disruptive, but the visitors generally assimilated. A far more portentous invasion began in the 16th century, as launched by the bigger island to the east.
In 1534, King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church, and established his own Church of England. In 1541, he added the Irish throne to his list of royal titles, and thus commenced more than 150 years of “plantation,” a policy wherein Protestants (primarily from England and Scotland) were settled in Ireland and afforded rights disproportionate to those of the indigenous Catholics, who steadily were disenfranchised.
The area of heaviest Protestant settlement was Ulster, a cluster of six counties to the north. Today, this is Northern Ireland, which remains joined to the United Kingdom. Ireland’s other 26 counties were subject to the same Protestant favoritism, but retained Catholic majorities. These make up the contemporary Republic of Ireland.
In the early 1800s, sectarian strife grew amid the institutionalized disparities, with seemingly endless patterns of revolt and subjugation, culminating with a wild card blithely tossed by Mother Nature: A potato blight in the late 1840s, which deprived huge numbers of impoverished Irish Catholics of their sole source of sustenance.
The tragic ensuing famine either killed or caused to emigrate more than 2,000,000 people, or one of four Irish men and women, and yet throughout the crisis, farms controlled by outsiders (most of them English) continued to export food, even though people nearby were starving.
Not for the last time, London’s inept performance during the famine reignited a slow, smoldering movement for greater Irish autonomy. Through the remainder of the 1800s, this movement for “Home Rule” grew stronger, but because of its Catholic orientation, Protestant-dominated Ulster threatened counter-measures of its own to remain under British sway, and little changed.
Just before the outbreak of WWI, it seemed as though Home Rule might at last come to pass, but the conflict intervened. It was broadly agreed that domestic considerations would be placed on hold for the duration. Spotting an opportunity to force the issue while the British were preoccupied with the war, radical Irish nationalists struck.
On April 24, 1916 (Easter Monday), rebels seized key buildings and installations of importance in Dublin, including the post office, and declared a free Ireland. It was called the Easter Rising; however, the Irish nation did not “rise up” as the rebels expected, and the revolt was mercilessly crushed by British troops.
Yet again, London completely misread the situation, responding with calculated harshness toward a populace that for the most part had not heeded the revolutionary call. All but a handful of the rebels were executed, and the brutality managed finally to turn Irish public opinion against British rule, at least among Catholics outside Ulster. The stage was set for ugliness, which dutifully followed.
From 1916 through 1923, the contemporary configuration of Ireland was determined through a series of parliamentary maneuvers accompanied first by a triumphant war of independence against the British, and then a divisive civil war among the Irish themselves. By the early 1920s, the exhausted island was divided, and a template of periodic violence established for the ensuing decades.
It has been more than a century since the Easter Rising, and just about everything else in Ireland has changed save for the division of the island into two entities. In theory only, “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland ended with a brokered settlement in 1998.
Meanwhile, the Irish Republic has weathered a burst real estate bubble following its “Celtic Tiger” period of modernization, and a new chapter (the UK's Brexit effects, real or imagined) is being written as you read these previous ones.
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My major point with respect to this upheaval-laden travel narrative is that when I first stepped onto Irish soil in 1985, quite a few of the elderly men and women seen reposing on park benches in Dublin had active memories of the tumultuous 20th century.
They had lived through the infancy of the Free Irish State, and at the time, as I prepared to board the train from Dublin to Sligo and a planned 5-day jaunt in the countryside, emigration remained the norm almost 150 years after the famine. Their country still was reckoned among the poorer relations of the European Union.
Perhaps their experiences, and those of their kinfolk abroad, explain the powerful longing for home that surfaces in so many of the classic Irish folk songs, as in my favorite, “Carrickfergus,” as performed by my favorite group, the Dubliners, with vocals by the late Jim McCann.
These excerpted stanzas speak to the melancholy of this incredible traditional song.
I wish I was in Carrickfergus
Only for nights in Ballygran
I would swim over the deepest ocean
Only for nights in Ballygran
But the sea is wide and I can not swim over
And neither have I the wings to fly
I wish I had a handsome boatman
To ferry me over, my love and I
My childhood days bring back sad reflections
Of happy times we spent so long ago
My boyhood friends and my own relations
Have all passed on like the melting snow
And I spent my days in ceaseless roving
Soft is the grass and my bed is free
Oh to be back now in Carrickfergus
On that long winding road down to the sea
Now in Kilkenny it is recorded
On marble stones there as black as ink
With gold and silver I would support her
But I'll sing no more now till I get a drink
'Cause I'm drunk today and I'm seldom sober
A handsome rover from town to town
Ah but I'm sick now, my days are numbered
Come all you young men and lay me down
As a final note, Carrickfergus is in Northern Ireland. In terms of the Irish diaspora, it isn’t at all clear whether this fact is ironic.
It's worth remembering that the distance from Dublin to Belfast is a scant hundred miles, less than the drive from New Albany to Indianapolis.
Note also: The Brexit article (below) refers to cans and bottles, not kegs. Clarification is necessary, as I hope to return to the business of selling Guinness, sooner rather than later.
First, from January, 2017:
After a 63-year absence, Guinness Brewery will once again have a working brewery in the United States.
The Diageo-owned brand will be creating a version of its Dublin-based Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Relay, Maryland.
While the iconic Guinness Draught, Guinness Foreign Extra and Guinness Extra stouts will still be brewed in Dublin and exported to the U.S., the new brewery will focus on new Guinness beers created for the U.S. market.
IT MIGHT just be Ireland’s most famous product. And indeed, all of the Guinness that is drunk in the world is brewed at the St James’s Gate brewery in east Dublin. But the dark beer is then transported north, in tankers that have become known as “silver bullets”, to be canned and bottled in east Belfast before returning to Dublin for export. Diageo, the multinational company that owns Guinness, says that its silver bullets make some 13,000 border crossings a year. It estimates that even a short delay of 30 minutes to an hour for customs checks would add about €100 ($115) to the expense of each trip, costing the firm some €1.3m a year. If that happened, the price of Guinness might have to rise.
The imminent arrival of Faux Irish Amateur Hour, sometimes called St. Patrick's Day, offers the ideal opportunity to dispense with a fake "fact" that I've seen far too much lately.
It bears repeating that the Southern Poverty Law Center is an excellent source of bona fide information on a variety of repugnant topics (racism, discrimination, white supremacists). To make the point, I'm keeping the pull brief. However, there's much more, so click through and prepare for a bout of head shaking.
online">How the Myth of the "Irish slaves" Became a Favorite Meme of Racists Online, by Alex Amend (Southern Poverty Law Center)
Briefly stated, what are the historical claims behind the “Irish slaves” meme?
It broadly claims that indentured servitude and penal servitude can be equated with racialized perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. It proclaims that an “Irish Slave Trade” was initiated in 1612 and not abolished until 1839, and that this concurrent transatlantic slave trade of “white slaves” has been covered up by “liberal," “cultural Marxist” or “politically correct” historians.
The various memes make many claims including (but not limited to) the following; that “Irish slaves” were treated far worse than black slaves; that there were more “Irish slaves” than black slaves; that “Irish slaves” were worth less than black slaves, that enslaved Irish women were forced to breed with enslaved African men, and that the Irish were slaves for much longer than black slaves.
This is then invariably followed up by overtly racist statements, e.g. “yet, when is the last time you heard an Irishman bitching and moaning about how the world owes them a living?” The “Irish slaves” meme is a subset of the “white slavery” contemporary discourse which emphasizes class over race and is fueled by a potent cocktail of bad history, false equivalence, conspiracy theories, and reductionist fallacies.
The band Altan played a concert at IU Southeast last night.
Chancellor Ray Wallace, now a naturalized US citizen but a born and bred native of Northern Ireland, particularly seemed to be enjoying himself. Undoubtedly I join him in lamenting the absence of Guinness from the numerous jigs and reels. There'd have been more dancing in the aisles with Irish elixir than without it.
Most of us immediately recognize Altan's music as Irish, although throughout the band's 30-year career, its members always have reminded audiences that their aim is to play music from where they were born and raised, in County Donegal.
Let's undertake a video digression to better understand what this specific reference means, but first, a map of Ireland.
County Donegal is shaded dark green in northwestern corner of the island, bordering Northern Ireland. Going all the way back to when I first visited Ireland in 1985, rugged Donegal was described with reverence as offering the Republic's most spectacular natural setting, as well as being the region where Gaelic was spoken by the greatest number of inhabitants.
In the context of native Irish Catholic history, English-speaking Protestantism was a colonial enterprise on the part of the British. The process of assimilation began on the island's eastern side, and over time, pushed "traditional" Ireland to more isolated western coastal areas.
This is why Declan Ganley makes a direct association between Irish poverty and emigration, and the situation in these regions. In many cases what's beautiful to behold as a visitor tells us little about the difficulty of life there.
Ganley speaks standard British English, with little trace of an Irish accent. For a taste of Gaelic, there's this.
The Gaelic tongue brings us full circle to Altan, the band from County Donegal. Group co-founder Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh plays fiddle and sings; sadly, her husband and bandmate Frankie Kennedy died in 1994.
The other fiddler is Ciarán Tourish, whose cousin Martin Tourish plays accordion. The guitarist is Dáithí Sproule, and Ciarán Curran plays bouzouki, which is a Greek instrument not usually found in Irish music. If there is such a thing as "rhythm bouzouki," then that's what Curran does.
In this clip from a few years back, Mark Kelly is the guitarist and former band member Dermot Byrne is on accordion. It seems that Kelly is the recording guitarist but doesn't tour outside Ireland.
Finally, a short film details the depth of Altan's commitment to the music scene in County Donegal.
As Chancellor Wallace noted, in 2017 there was a special St. Patrick's Day in the state of Indiana. It was celebrated more authentically than most of the ones about to occur on the 17th, and in this authenticity is enough historic, linguistic and cultural nuance to engender much thinking between drinks of life-giving Stout ... which I'm now craving at 11:00 a.m. on a Friday morning.
The news story is overly breathless in the telling, but clicking though yields the trailer, and while there is something almost criminal about colorization in the sense of the process altering history, to our eyes it also indisputably makes history come alive.
Exclusive to British Pathé TV and narrated by Allen Leech, of Downton Abbey fame, “Revolution in Colour” has been more than 80 years in the making by the world-famous newsreel archive, British Pathé.
The epic feature-length documentary charts the entire course of Irish independence from Home Rule to Civil War
The project had been quashed by the Irish government when it was first attempted in 1935 (British Pathé’s film reels were even confiscated) but now finally sees the light of day as the result of a major collaboration between the Pathe archive and Zampano Productions, the acclaimed producers of Seven Women, TK Whitaker – Seirbhíseach an Stáit and The People’s Tenor.
Many decades ago my cousin the university professor suggested a book called The Uses of the Past, by Herbert Muller.
It proved to be seminal reading for me in the run-up to my 1980s-era travel phase, and while perhaps a bit dated now, the book remains an invaluable rumination about why we should care about history's lessons.
The central conundrum about history is that its uses are so often discarded, leaving only "The Glibness of the Past." Ireland is a fine example of this traipsing through the foggy dew, although we indulge far too often in America, too.
The 1916 uprising against British rule was a first step to independence, but the violence that followed led to its marginalisation – until now
... But many people agree that the executed leaders of 1916 would turn in their graves at the sight of modern Ireland and this carnival. One could take any line of the Proclamation with which to measure the present, and at this moment some people inevitably do.
Those in the west of the country – whence the Rising really came – who have for a decade been trying to combat a vast gas project by Shell, refer to the proclaimed “right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland”, in a country known for its generosity towards multinational companies. Maura Harrington of the Shell to Sea group talks about “people not having the same awareness of colonisation by the multinationals now as they had 100 years ago of colonisation by the British empire. Different imperium.”
Coogan wonders what 1916’s founding fathers would have thought about “the way the banks have looted this country with the consent and connivance of the political establishment. More people have committed suicide during this period of austerity than were killed during the Troubles. Thousands lose their homes every week, or else remain courtesy of vulture-capital mortgages.”
Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive – which is why it is not always politically prudent to wield the past as a moral cudgel with which to beat and berate a people for its past sins. But history does need to be learned and periodically re-learned. In a popular Soviet-era joke, a listener calls up ‘Armenian Radio’ with a question: ‘Is it possible’, he asks, ‘to foretell the future?’ Answer: ‘Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing.’
-- Tony Judt
Soon it will be the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, which began on April 24, and as briefly summarized in this excerpt from the television documentary series The Story of Ireland (aired in 2011).
As for the series, the intensity of the comments on YouTube suggests that in the end, it's a generally fair and balanced presentation for those non-natives interested in an overview of Irish history. I recommend it as such.
Age of Invasions
1/5 Fergal Keane presents a landmark series charting the history of Ireland and her people. The Age of Conquest
2/5 Fergal Keane charts Ireland's progress during the upheavals of the Middle Ages.
The Age of Revolution
3/5 Fergal Keane charts the changes wrought by the Plantation of Ulster in the 17th century. The Age of Union
4/5 Fergal Keane reveals how Ireland became part of the UK following the 1801 Act of Union.
Age of Nations
5/5 Fergal Keane looks at the dramatic history of Ireland through the 20th century.
Artist's impression of the executions: "There can be no doubt that the response of the British government to the Rising contributed measurably to the further alienation of Irish public opinion."
Ireland isn't my most visited European locale, and there'll be times when the country fades from view for a little while, though never for very long. I'm not sure how to explain the lingering attachment apart from sheer empathy.
Seeking to live a life of the mind in New Albany implies daily oppression from the doltish ruling caste, and there is a certain lifting of the eyebrow when compared to the Irish experience. Not the same particulars, mind you, but a similar feeling of despair and alcohol envy.
I wrote about the band Lynched less than a month ago after seeing an article in The Guardian. Since then, my love affair with the Dubliners has been vividly renewed (stay tuned), and I've found myself binge-watching documentaries about Irish history. It's been a month and a half since the Lynched CD was ordered from somewhere in the UK, and there have been e-mails reassuring me there'll be new copies soon. At some point, I'll get one.
Until then, there is YouTube. Praise modernity -- and pray that some sweet day it comes to New Albany.
The band Lynched bears a self-description as "Dublin Folk Miscreants." The resonance is striking.
We always sing, even when we're losing
'Cos Dublin's drone is hard enough especially when you're down and you're boozing
We sing the Oul' Triangle and then the Tommy Ryan
'Cos all the world's a jail and we can't remember why
Why we agreed to live and lie in embers of a cold old fire nobody remembers
They hand the ashes back to me down the button factory, we're cattle at the stall
We look for signs that Dublin's heart's still beating,
That concrete and glass and peelers and mass, they haven't stopped the people from screaming,
Being trapped by all the cameras you're inclined to stay at home,
And forget some songs were written to remind you you weren't born
Born to live and lie and die in embers of a cold old fire nobody remembers
They hand the ashes back to me down the button factory, we're cattle at the stall
We see the cracks under the foundation,
Smoldering on the faces of the people on the drip of isolation,
We hear the sounds come streaming across the crackling air,
The broken words of swine who would tell us that we were
Born to live and lie and die in embers of a cold old fire nobody remembers
They hand the ashes back to me down the button factory, we're cattle at the stall
And when did we agree to live and lie and die in embers of a cold old fire nobody remembers?
They hand the ashes back to me down the button factory, we're cattle at the stall.
On the Dubliners, of whom I remain a tremendous fan these many years later ...
The American roots magazine Dirty Linen, contrasting the Dubliners and the Clancy brothers who emerged around the same time, wrote: "Whereas the Clancys were well-scrubbed returned Yanks from rural Tipperary, decked out in matching white Aran sweaters, the Dubliners were hard-drinking backstreet Dublin scrappers with unkempt hair and bushy beards, whose gigs seemed to happen by accident between fistfights."
As an entity and institution, the Dubliners lasted a half-century, finally disbanding in 2012 after the banjoist and last original band member Barney McKenna died. Lineups changed, and the entertainment value never wavered, but in musical and cultural contexts, the salad days were 1962 - 1984.
During the first two decades of the band's existence, Ronnie Drew and Luke Kelly were its Lennon/McCartney or Jagger/Richards -- not in a songwriting sense, as the group performed the songs of others, but in terms of central focus.
Drew died in 2008, and the Irish Times explained his unique contribution to the Dubliners in its eulogy. Thirty years after Kelly's premature death, the Irish Postpublished a remembrance,explaining the significance of the phrase I've chosen to title this posting.
A balladeer, musician and political activist, Kelly’s ability to sing ‘his heart out’ with ‘perfect diction’ in the words of Bono and the late Ronnie Drew bear testimony to the gift of his irreplaceable voice to stir and move the most hardened of souls with song and sentiment ...
... Luke often sang of the poor, the oppressed, the worker, the lover or the rebel – the realities of his own life and upbringing enlivened and gave weight to his songs and the emotional way in which he sang them. And his own childhood and youth was anything but privileged.
In this clip, Kelly sings one of his signature songs.
The documentary embedded and linked in this post was produced in 1999, but I only became aware of it earlier in the week. It is highly recommended.
We always sing, even when we're losing
'Cos Dublin's drone is hard enough especially when you're down and you're boozing
We sing the Oul' Triangle and then the Tommy Ryan
'Cos all the world's a jail and we can't remember why
Why we agreed to live and lie in embers of a cold old fire nobody remembers
They hand the ashes back to me down the button factory, we're cattle at the stall
We look for signs that Dublin's heart's still beating,
That concrete and glass and peelers and mass, they haven't stopped the people from screaming,
Being trapped by all the cameras you're inclined to stay at home,
And forget some songs were written to remind you you weren't born
Born to live and lie and die in embers of a cold old fire nobody remembers
They hand the ashes back to me down the button factory, we're cattle at the stall
We see the cracks under the foundation,
Smoldering on the faces of the people on the drip of isolation,
We hear the sounds come streaming across the crackling air,
The broken words of swine who would tell us that we were
Born to live and lie and die in embers of a cold old fire nobody remembers
They hand the ashes back to me down the button factory, we're cattle at the stall
And when did we agree to live and lie and die in embers of a cold old fire nobody remembers?
They hand the ashes back to me down the button factory, we're cattle at the stall.
The news wire is filled with gratifying reports from Ireland, as here: "Ireland becomes first country to legalise gay marriage by popular vote."
Meanwhile, I cannot find any local news coverage of last Thursday's city council meeting, when Coffey sought to ratify his new part-time job as invocation coordinator.
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