Time disjunct: end of week 1

My schedule is now set, which is a relief. Change and flux are always energy consuming and tiring. I caught a cold earlier in the week, and it is just now settling out. Despite my anxious desire to Go Do Something, I have been sitting still and reading, and there is a lot of reading to do! I am taking five courses and auditing one. I would do more if I could! I feel like I want to squeeze every moment of learning out of the short time I am here. I am so focused on Learning Everything that time feels out of joint. It is like I have stepped out of the normal time I inhabit into this parallel universe where Ohio and Massachusetts do not exist as real places. Being by myself contributes to the utter focus on study. At home I hang out, play with the dogs, lie on the couch and enjoy a cat or two, go out to dinner with my honey and talk about Stuff, but here it is all about going to class, preparing for class, or doing an activity. Contributing to this constant prompt to action is the fact that this campus does not cater to sitting outside. There are few benches in the common areas, and there are few places to sit in the wide windowed hallways of the buildings. Each building has some kind of cafe, and there are lots of places to sit there, but outside of an eating place, there are few places to just sit. It would seem that the only reason a person would sit (outside of the library) would be to consume something. This arrangement does not promote much outdoor gathering, which would make sense in a rainy, cold place. They say there were 69 straight days of rain this summer. It has not rained once since I have arrived.

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Today I had Literary Revival and Irsh Language. In the Revival course, Dr. Aidan talked about how Irish nationalism was most important to the British people who had moved to Ireland earlier in the colonial period, had a few generations under their familial belts, and now sort of identified with the Irish. The people who were reviving the Irish language were monolingual English speakers looking for some kind of romantic, spiritual identity by construction some kind of cultural nationalism for themselves. The "peasants" were seen as some kind of authentic Irish who needed to be told that they were the "real Irish". It seems that there was some kind of feeling of the "noble savage" going on. In the 20th century lit class, we are reading a novel about these people in 1920 which asserts that these "Anglo Irish" or "The Protestant Ascendancy" thought they were Irish, or rather knew they weren't as British as the people from England were, but still had no idea what it was to be Irish from the point of view of the people who had always lived in Ireland. So it seems that early 20th century Irish national identity was created by out-of-touch upper-class romantics, but further honed, later on, by people who belonged to other classes, religions, and cultural backgrounds. Rather messy, which makes it all the more interesting.

The Irish language class remains a hoot. The teacher, Padraigh, has a masters in Irish but not in pedagogy. He's a nice guy, but I think he is not very organized in a communicative classroom although he does make an effort to run a communicative classroom. It's just that he has a hard time organizing the students to faciliate beginner speaking. We did a basic dialog of "hi how are you, fine thanks, what's your name, where are you from, what is your phone number, I have to go now, bye." I thought of the basic ALM dialogs like "ou est Anne, a la piscine, avec qui, avec Claude" or the beginning Latin "Puer in via laborat" stories. It would be really funny to create screen plays or short stories based on these surreal basic language encounters. Like the basic Irish dialog where you meet someone, ask their name, country of origin, and then go striaght to asking for a phone number: it sounds like a sleazy bar encounter. Or the French dialog could be a soap opera encounter where Claude and Anne are having an illicit affair. Thomas and Granny! Get a video camera: we'll start shooting next spring.
Padraigh said he was optimistic that by 2010, Irish would be firmly re-rooted in ireland. Then he told an anecdote about how he was on the bus, and all the people around him were on their cell phone talking in Polish and Czech and English. His phone rang, and he started talking in Irish to one of his colleagues, and he says people on the bus stopped and stared at someone speaking Irish. I am highly entertained by these lectureres who make an assertion and then immediately tell an anecdote that contradicts the assertion. The folklore lecturer did that too. At the end of Irish class, he said, "Go home and practice." "How?" we asked. "You know," he said, apparently puzzled by our question, "Make little cards. Learn the phrases." I had to laugh (in my mind). No text, no exercises: go home and memorize the words I said to you today. Very interesting.