Irishness: what???

Oh, isn't nationalism such a big topic? It is a huge issue in all my classes, and it appears to be a highly conflicted one out there in the current messy world. Irish nationalism, and the question of Irishness, is, of course, a big deal because it was so uncool for awhile and now it is cool again. In my literature courses, one is looking at how the Anglo-Irish (people of English descent, generally middle to upper class, protestant) debate how Irish they are because they sure aren't English, but people whose ancestors are from Ireland (working to middle class, catholic) maintain they aren't really Irish. This debate about what makes a person Irish is fascinating. We are reading a number of novels from the the early 20th century where Anglo-Irish authors explore what makes them Irish. I highly recommend one by a person called Kate O'Brien called The Land of Spices which is about an English woman who grew up in Brussels, became a nun, and gets sent to Ireland to be the Mother Superior of a convent school in the 1920's. In this novel, you get the author setting up England vs. Ireland vs. Europe vs. Catholic Church vs. generalized patriarchy. And she does a really compelling job of it all too. And it's funny, in places. This nun is in her early 40's and has these emotional revelations about the place of emotion and control in her life. Maybe I really like the novel because I sort of identified with this character. Kendra, if you haven't already found Kate O'Brien, you might really like her stuff.

The Irish Lit Revival course is about Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Casey et alia. My paper that I will present next week is about the evocation of Landscape in Yeats' poetry. I contrast his poetry (Ango-Irish, written in English trying to evoke a new Irishness) with the native Irish poetry of 13th century monks and 17th century poets who wrote in Irish. Poor Yeats was so alienated from the land this is clear in his poetic landscapes. For example, that (in)famous poem 'Innisfree' with the 9 bean rows, the bee-loud glade, and the evening full of linnets' wings: remember that one? Well, if you go back to it, you will see that it all happens in the future tense: in fact, it never happens. The only part of the poem in the present tense that is "real" is his standing on the grey pavement in London dreaming about this place in his 'deep heart's core'. This alienation or inability to connect with nature is clear in all of his stuff. His most real landscapes are the landscapes of the mind, such as in his poignant poem (made me cry the first time I read it) called 'The Desertion of the Circus Animals'. On the other hand, the guys writing in Irish had a very different relationship with nature: intimate and personal. The contrast of Yeats trying so hard to deal with nature and these guys just swimming in it give two equally Irish approaches to evoking landscape in art, and yet such divergent perspectives. The irony is that Yeats, in the literary revival, wanted to revive these very poets, this very sensibility, this 'Celtic Twilight'. He never learned Irish, and he could never really touch the land. Bless him, he's the poet laureat of Ireland. Priscilla, you would love these 13th century poems! Ann, you would recongize what these guys were talking about! I will see if I can get a copy of this text Early Celtic Nature Poetry to bring home to you.

Now the Irish Music class also wonders, "What is Irish about Irish music?" and the conclusion is a geographical definition. They all seem to agree that if it is something that happens through social relationships here on this island, then that qualifies it to be Irish. Thus, Scottish strathspeys played for awhile in Ireland are traditional Irish music. Polkas and mazurkas, same thing. I went to a concert earlier this week where Frankie Gavan, a very famous fiddler, played the 5th Brandenburg concerto in the form of a traditional Irish jig. It was amazing, humourous, and utter technical virtuosity. All the texts I read about 'traditional Irish music' all say the guitar is utterly useless in traditional Irish music. On the other hand, every traditional session I have been to here has had a guitar backing everybody up, not to mention the occaisional bazouki. I guess they are part of the evolution of the 'tradition' (like the mazurkas, strathspeys, and polkas) such that in about 50 years they will be added to the tradition. In my guitar class, the teacher's perspective is, if you have guitar, you can play anything and a soloist of any tradition will want you to back them. He seemed to regard the guitar as the ultimate traditional instrument cuz it can adapt to anything.

So, on one of the mountain walks I went on, up Mount Mangerton in Kerry, I asked one of the Irish guys (who was dating a Polish girl, which makes him a bit of an internationalist, don't you think?) what made him Irish. He said, "Well, I guess I come from a small enough country that we haven't really pissed off a lot of other countries, and we can hang onto a friendly reputation. Yeah, we're known for our friendliness."

The Landscape of Literature

Last Sunday I went with the local outdoor club, called the "Outdoor Pursuits Club", to visit the Burren in County Clare. The Burren is the desolate area on the west coast where a limestone escarpment meets the sea. We had to drive through a town called Ennis to get there, and I realized that a reel I was learning was called "the Siege of Ennis" and there we were driving through it, so I whistled that to myself for awhile. Then we had to drive through Lindisvoorna, and there was a sign that said "Lindisvoorna 15 km" and I remembered that I know a jig called "The Road to Lindisvoorna", so I whistled that one. Once we arrived at the Burren, I remembered that there is a very mournful song called "the West Coast of Clare" and, hey, that's where we were. So I sang that to myself as I walked around. That evening, on our way home from the day out, we stopped in a town called Doolin to have a pint, and there were two accordian players, a bodhran player, and a guitar player having a bit of a session. They played the Siege of Ennis and the Road to Lindisvoorna. It was wonderful to look around and be in the very places where these tunes came from. I am more and more convinced of the power of landscape in the evocation of art. I was so excited about this idea that I proposed it for my paper this morning in the Literary Revival class. The Professor (who I think is younger than me) raised his eyebrows, looked at me from the sides of his glasses, and said, "Okay: that's an interesting idea." I guess it was off the beaten literary track, and when I went to do the research, I found that it is not the lit folks writing much about this, it is cultural geographers and tourist industry people! So, I am very interested to put together a ten minute (ha ha) presentation on the idea for the lit class on Yeat's evocation of landscape in a romantic (re)construction of Irish landscape during the 19th and early 20th century Irish Literary Revival.

Anyway, the Burren is this limestone landscape that is sort of like the Slickrock area of Utah, only white, not red. This is where the cliffs of Moher are, which you must now pay to visit. However, just down the coast, in view of the Cliffs of Moher, it is free to climb down the cliffs and see the raging sea. It was a grey day with a stiff wind (they call it a "fresh breeze" here) and short periods of drenching horizontal rain blowing through (they call them "spotty showers"). We were rock climbing on the sea cliffs. The rock was sharp limestone cracks, and it was great good fun to climb. I got bored waiting in line for a belay, so I took some crash pads out to sort of boulder around. Some of the Gnarly Climber Dudes (Czech) joined me. One guy was very enthusiastic. He jammed his hands right into the cracks to motor right along. This was a mistake because the rock was pretty sharp, and instead of leaving a trail of chalk along the route, he left a trail of blood. When I pointed this out to him, as I was grossed out about having to follow what had become a rather slimey route, he looked at his abraded knuckles and seemed rather impressed with himself. He wandered off comtemplating, but not treating, the backs of his oozing hands.

A small group walked up further into the hills, and there were long stretches of dry-laid stone walls enclosing nothing. They were just walls stretching up the hillsides. These were left over from the 1840's during the famine time when the Whig government offered food for the poor, but they had to do work projects to earn the food since they did not want to seem to be handing out charity to starving people as that might encourage loafing or sloth or something sinful. It was stated in the government policy that the works could not have any practical purpose. If they did, then they would have had to pay wages for the work, and this was charity. No wait, it wasn't charity, but it couldn't be real work. It was a complicated and confusing time for everybody. Anyway, here were these walls, and it was clear that it took a lot of effort to make them. It was very sad to think about in the grey driving rain. The song called "the west coast of Clare" starts out: "Sorrow and Saddness/bitterness, grief/ memories I have of you/won't leave me in peace."

Being a "mature" student

At the University of Cincinnati, they would call a person like me a "non-traditional" student. Here the euphemism for person not between 18 and 22 is a "mature" student. "Mature" students are also quite rare here, or at least, there are more people like me at UC than there are at UL. There is a "mature" student group that I need to track down, but they do not seem to advertise themselves. The professors are not accustomed to having older students in class, and I have confused more than one instructor with questions that were not quite what they expected. Dad commented on my interaction with the history professor that I could argue my ideas by first acknowledging the professors idea and then extending it into my own idea, and that is a very good idea that I will try out on the history guy at the next tutorial. However, I have noticed that many people do not expect students to really have an idea so that they do not give the student enough time to formulate a full thought. This is another mental note to self: be sure to give students enough time to say something. It is hard to be on the spot and come up with a fully formed and coherent idea. Of course, a lot of students don't really have an idea to contribute, but for the ones who do, some time would be helpful.

The young man who teaches the Irish Language class is the youngest instructor, and he seems to deal best with non-traditional students as there are quite a number of them in his class. He in an inexperienced teacher, but he compensates by treating each person like a real human being with no professorial hubris. This respect is so important. Another mental note to self: no matter what, retain humility as a teacher! Some of these Senior Lecturers are so incredibly condescending that they just look right through a person. As a student, it can be pretty demoralizing. I hope I never did that: I know I will be extra careful from now on to never do that.

The guitar teacher is not like that at all. He is really a down to earth person, like the Irish language person. The music class is all 18-22, except for me, but he treats each student as an individual human being, even the jock who has no idea how to play the guitar. He is a real mensch. The teacher does play gigs, and I expect we'll hear about where he plays next week. It is a little hard for me to get to town gigs because the buses stop at 11:30, and most music doesn't get started until 9 or 10 at night. Most people take taxis home, but that is 10 Euro a pop, which is a little beyond my means. My task for Saturday is to scope the main traditional music venue, Dolan's Pub, and work out a safe way to run for the bus at 11:15 pm. I can hear my mother and husband shaking their fingers at me and saying, "Take the taxi, you jarhead!"

Mad Dog Baroque

I just went to hear Piers Adams play a bunch of baroque recorder sonatas with the Irish Chamber Orchestra. I sat waayyy back in the nosebleed seats which were 1/3 of the regular price, and it turns out that the sound at the back of the hall was fantastic. If you have not heard of this guy, he is, if you can believe it, the Bad Boy of baroque recorder. His promotional materials shows him in dark hyper-hip sunglasses holding a trio of recorders on the shoulder of his open fronted black silk shirt. The baroque is now officially Hot.

The costume of the Irish Chamber Orchestra for the gentlemen is the frock coat. They really looked quite good! The women wore the usual black dresses, but one second violinist was wearing a sparkly hip black chemise top that looked like she might go clubbing after the concert. Mr. Adams was also a frock coated dude, but it was a Bad Boy frock coat. No, really. He came out on stage to play the first four sonatas on a treble recorder wearing a black velvet frock coat with leather pockets, collar and cuffs. The leather had brass rivets in it. He was wearing a white collarless silk shirt with a purple sash tied low slung across his hips. And he was wearing leather pants. He jumped and grooved while he played, and he played those recorders like the hounds of hell were after him. I swear, if you have not heard this guy play, find his Vivaldi CD: it is jaw dropping virtuosity. And, with the costume and the incredible skill, he was also a funny show-guy. He introduced the descant recorder as "the angry stick feared by parents the world over." He also commented, "Some people say Vivaldi wrote 400 sonatas, but they maintain it was really just the same sonata 400 times. That's not really fair. I have selected four that I hope will show you that there were at least four different ones."

The other two concerts I have attended so far have been Irish rock bands a la U2. I went with the anthropological intention of finding out what Young People These Days are really crazy about, and these two bands had tremendous hype and anticipation. One was called the Blizzards which played to a sold out crowed of skimpily dressed students, and the other was a more soulful and yet just as loud band called Director. They were carding people at the door, but they did not ask me for ID. Jeez: I wonder why? ;-) I guess wrinkles are good for something as I did not have any ID on me. They also frisked everyone for knives. Good think I left my knife at home with my ID! I cannot comment on the music of these two bands as they appeared to contain the same four chords with the same backbeat, but presented in slightly different orders. None of the guitar players had any real technique to speak of, and it seemed like it was really just about the beat. However, the dancing of the crowd seemed to limit itself to hopping up and down with one hand in the air. Nevertheless, the student paper reported both concerts to be wild successes highly praised by all. I thought the most interesting praise was from a young man quoted in the paper in reference to the lead singer of The Blizzards, "If there were a reason to turn gay, it would be for him."

Learning in the Oral Tradition

Because I am taking courses in both traditional Irish studies and regular courses, there is an interesting approach to the nature of learning. In the History course and the Literature course, the two courses in the European literary tradition, there are set texts, one goes to a lecture and listens, one goes to the tutorial and learns how to repeat back the party line that the course is teaching. At least the History lecturer frames the repetition as critical thinking, but I know it is really a game of Guess the Agenda. I know this by trial and error (my error, of course). We were talking about the concept of republic as espoused by Wolfe Tone in Ireland in the 1790's. Now, of course, the Party Line is that Wolfe Tone conceived of the republic as a goverment of the people (i.e. no monarch) in the French sense which meant parliamentary reform for Ireland. He was also in favor of Catholic emancipation. These are the Right Answers. Well, when the lecturer got to me, I had been reading about the import/export taxes and the fact that the Anglo-Irish protestants were pissed off about parliament because it was cutting into profits, and the Catholics were all about emancipation so as to have better political participation in the free market. Thus, I said there was an economic factor to Wolfe Tone's republic that was not necessarily outlined by the French idea because of this emancipation thing that would bring more people into participation in the market. The lecturer hemmed and hawed, and eventually indicated (but not in a nasty way, just in a clear way) that he did not believe that economics were an essential part of Wolfe Tone's concept of the republic for Ireland. I was annoyed, and after class, I found a reference for exactly what I said. Nevertheless, I did learn what the tutorial was for, and I will see if I play Guess the Agena better next time.

Now the folklore course, the Irish music course, and the Irish language course are firmly based in the oral tradition. There are no texts. Of course there is a bibliography of suggested readings, but the tutorials are all about Being Present. In the Folklore tutorial, we did a choral reading of a famous poem composed to keen the death of a beloved husband. We chorused the lines of the poem back to the lecturer as she said them, and the rhythm of the poem leapt out because the class was speaking. Not only that, but there were no printed words to distract so the emphasis on the spoken language was heightened. I so come from the literary tradition, that I went and found the text in the library after, but the power of the spoken poem was so much stronger than the text.

In the music class, our tutorials are expressly on doing music. I am taking a guitar tutorial. There are four other young boyz in the class and the Tutor, who I will now refer to as Eoin (/owen/). The boyz include one blues guy, one rather accomplished and tense folk player, one hard core rocker, and one clueless jock whose presence in the class is oddly fascinating due to its apparent utter randomness. Blues, Folk, and Rocker are all very interested in making sure everybody else knows They Can Play, and they make a point of doing little licks at random points such that their skill may be subtly demonstrated to each other. Eoin finally said, 'Okay, enough fancy stuff lads. Time to focus.' Eoin is the one who is truly skilled, as he should be, and I must say, he did indulge his demo licks also, but because he was alpha, I suppose it was required to get The Lads in line. As an old lady (among the 18 year olds I am a quasi Crone (in the best sense of the term, of course), I am exempt from all of these displays and can just be a highly entertained audience. Anyway, because this is a traditional music course, it is all by ear. There are no books, nothing printed. We learn the tunes by watching and hearing Eoin play them. Again, the non-text learning is so immediate and so intense. As a literary based person, it is tiring because the focus on the moment must be so complete.

The Irish language class also has no text. It is all about listening to the lecturer and repeating. There is no text because we are studying the standard European curriculum for Irish, and evidently they are still creating the written texts. I experience the same competence/performance disjunct here, as in all languages, where I am fluent inside my head but there is a static inducer somewhere between brain and mouth such that the sounds that come out of my mouth are only slightly representative of what goes on in my brain. I found the Irish language TV station and listen to the Gaeilge news in the evening. It is a strange language and with this style of learning, hard for me to get a grip on. I find that I wish there were a bit more explicit grammar. But the poor lecturer is still sorting out how to do a communicative curriculum. To his credit, he has catered to my grammar questions when I pose questions, but I can see he is a little flummoxed by how to present them. He said, "The grammar is hard." and I replied, "But all grammar is hard, but it can be fun!" Clearly he thought I was "away with the fairies" as they say.

After all this academic silliness, I went to the climbing wall and fell off the wall for 45 minutes as a break from studying and practicing guitar. The indoor climbing wall in the gym is about the size of a large living room, has two top ropes and two bouldering sections. There were a number of Europeans there looking smokey, silent, and suave as they wafted up and down the boulder routes. There was an insecure American girl talking too loudly, and two Irish lads earnestly dissecting a route. I messed around in-between the smokey guys traverses until my forearms couldn't take it, and I went home for some Toast and Tea.

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.

Not In the System

As a "Study Abroad" or "International Student," I am not "in the system." This means many things. First it means that I do not receive the adminstrative emails that help students know that there are Things that Must Be Done. Also, I won't show up on the professors' class lists for a few weeks. This also means that I don't quite know what is expected at any given time, and, because of my accent, I am exempted from a lot of expectations after the double take accompanies acknowledgement of "oh, now I am talking with a foreigner."

Three of the professors am taking courses with are very traditional. Not very approachable and very serious about their work. The History professor, Dr. John Logan, was insistent that I bring a stamped document that indicated that I was enrolled in his course. This confused the International Education Office, but I convinced them this piece of paper would make Dr. Logan very happy. I made sure two people in the office signed it with their phone numbers. When I handed Dr. Logan this piece of paper, he peered at it both through his glasses and over his classes while he bent forward for this inspection of my stamped piece of paper. I am sure it did not make sense as I am equally sure he had never seen this form before, but it DID have the stamp on it, so he allowed me to sign up for a tutorial.

His colleague in the English Department is as serious and imperious. She teaches the literature course that had the "foreigners not welcome" sign on the syllabus. She began the class by informing the students there were too many people in the room, and she hoped half of them would leave because they were probably not prepared for the material. After having said this, she then said this course used to be called "Joyce to Derrida" (read obscure and hard to understand to obscurer and harder to understand) and it would only get about seven people to attend (duh). So her department made her change the course to be a survey of 20th century Anglo Irish literature so it would be able to compete with the science fiction course which was always packed. Well, clearly, from the packed room, the change was quite successful. However, I could not get over the cognitive dissonance of her complaining that there were too many people. Of course, then she began to survey the class about who had read any Joyce before, or who recognized the other authors she was mentioning. More than half of the Irish students had no idea what she was talking about, and the one person who had read several of the authors she was mentioning was an American girl in the back of the room. I was laughing (in my mind). There she was, up on her high horse, all alone except for this really embarassing Yank who read stuff her precious little majors had no clue about. She did seem a bit disoriented by this state of affairs, to her credit, but then overcame her own cognitive dissonance and soldiered on. She had unorganized handouts for only about half the class, couldn't work the computer very well, but did make very interesting points about the general themes that would be covered in the class. I later went to her office hours to ask if I might just sit in on the lectures, and she very nicely said I could. This seems like a good arrangement to me as I would rather just enjoy the lectures and the texts and not worry about working through her expectations of student writing which seem like they would be stressful and hard to guess.

The Irish Language class is the livliest I have been to yet because it is full of people from the Irish Music and Dance program, and these are women my age. Well, you can't get more fun than that! They talk and laugh and participate like nobody's business. The poor adjunct who was running the class didn't know what times the tutorials met or anything. He read the syllabus and left it at that. He couldn't answer any questions, had no phone, and no email. He was wearing a blue faded t-shirt and brown wide-wale courdoroy pants whose cuffs were frayed at the heel. The accordian player behind me thought he was hot stuff and loudly warned all the young ladies across the room to keep their eyes on their note books and not be distracted by the hottie teacher. He turned bright red. It went well with the blue shirt and brown pants. This woman will prove to be a total hoot, I'm sure. The teacher seems inexperienced enough to be very traditional or totally unorthodox. This is supposed to be a conversation class, so it will be interesting to see where he will fall on the teaching spectrum.

Wednesday night I signed up for two student clubs: aikido and Outdoor Pursuits. The student club life here is very active and all the student clubs had turned out, in appropriate costumes, to recruit members on the basket ball courts of the university sports arena. Judo guys and Shotokan karate guys were out on some wrestling mats taking on all comers in little matches. Each club had a little booth and little registration cards. If they were really into it, they had props like boats or tents or these little wrestling matches. The skydiving club had hung a parachute over their booth, and some club had a guy dressed up like a devil (pitchfork, horns, cape, fangs) walking around putting red pieces of paper in people's hands. I don't know what he was promoting, but he really had the looming over victims act down well. The saddest booth was the chess club. It was just a booth with a chess set and a silent, motionless person sitting behind it. No decorations, nothing: just a hand-lettered sign that said "Chess Club". I did not see any one sign up for chess, probably because the pen sitting beside their sign up book had no ink cartridge in it: it was only a plastic pen shell. It was so poignant.

Starting classes

The first day of classes was highly entertaining. When I start my RWC classes that I teach, I hand out the syllabus, which outlines everything up front, and get right into the core ideas and basic concepts of what the class is about. Things are different here. In two classes, only a lecture topic outline and reading list were handed out, and the lecturer read the text of the handout. Boring presentation. However the content was great so the utterly uninvolving technique was ignorable. On the other hand, the third course was presented by a master, in great contrast to the frist two.

The folklore course is taught by an adjunct who plays the uilleann pipes. She was clearly interested in the topic and at one point told an interesting anecdote about fairy trees. Evidently they re-routed a motorway north of Dublin to avoid cutting down a fairy tree because if they did, there would be all these people dead in accidents on this stretch of motorway. Oddly enough, she told this anecdote after asserting that nobody believes in fairies anymore.

The English lit course, “The Irish Literary Revival,” is taught by an earnest, highstrung young man who wears expensive Italian shoes. He outlined his expectations for the students. The first one was that we should be “respectful of others.” When he elaborated, it turned out that respect meant silence during lectures. As if on cue, a cell phone went off. He waited in pointed silence while the young lady turned her phone off, then he icily asked if anyone else had forgotten to turn off his or her phone. The room was pretty quickly cowed. He did not hand out the course outline because “it is online.” I discovered, after a good bit of forensic studenting, that to find this outline, one must use a university lab computer because the external university address has crashed and is not available anywhere else but on a networked computer. Then one must go to the web page for the college of Humanities, go to autumn term offerings, click on “modules”, and then scroll to the bottom of a description to find a link that says “module” (again), then click there to get this outline. The directions the lecturer gave in class were as follows, verbatim: “Just click on the module.” So, I learned from this event that it is very helpful for a person new to any system if one demonstrates a procedure from the splash page (which I do in my own classes).

The history lecture I attended was taught by a real pro. He said he had been teaching for 33 years, and it looks like he has kept up with the times. He had a sense of humor about his discipline, and he communicated that he cared about his students’ success as well as that he planned on challenging his students. He handed out data on how students did in his last class and explained why each who failed did so. He said, "I do this to show you not only how easy it is to fail, but also how easy it is to pass." He discussed his perspective on why he put the syllabus together the way he did, and he reviewed the exam and essay content. Very smooth, highly engaging, and quite informative.

Then I went to try to do a few errands.
I tried to get a student travel card: “No, sorry, we’re not quite up yet. Try later in the week.”
I went to see if used texts were available yet: “Right, well, you know we’ll do that later in the week, but check the web site for availability, but I don’t think it’s updated for this term yet.”
I went to the international education office to see if my immigration appointment was made yet: “We haven’t got those yet. You’ll get an email next week.”
I printed the course outline for the Joyce lit class (which has not met yet). It says, “this class is not appropriate for international students as you will not have the appropriate background assumed for this course. No allowances will be made for unfamiliarity with core texts.”
So I went back to my rooms, made tea, and ate chocolate covered digestive biscuits.

Now, the dorm is not such a bad place. It smells weird most of the time as a result of poor air circulation, but it clears up pretty well once the windows are opened. It is laid out as a short hall with five room off the hall which ends at a door leading to the sitting room and kitchen. The sitting room has two little couches and two chairs facing a TV that gets six channels: RET 1, RET 2, BBC 1, BBC2, EuroSport, and a channel that gets American sitcoms. The kitchen is reasonably equipped for basic cooking, but there are no baking things. In this little suite live Bena dn Dave who are two Irish IT guys. There is one other girl on the hall, Jana, who is a Canadian studying law. Dave has a TV in his room hooked up to the internet, so he and Ben spend most of their time in there emerging only to bake a pizza now and then (there is no microwave). Jana is a merry force of nature. She is out on the town and takes a taxi to the grocery store.

As the village began to fill with students Sunday evening, young boyz carried huge arm-loads of cases of beer into their rooms in the dorm across the street from mine. They were accompanied by girlz who were wearing low-slung jeans such that when they bent to retrieve stray cans that had fallen from the cat-in-the-hat style armloads of beer, they displayed delicate little plumber’s cracks for public view. Last month I actually went to the Gap to try on this style of pants because I wondered how uncomfortable they were. They felt pretty normal while standing, if a bit breezy around the navel. But it felt like the were about to slide right off my butt when I crouched down. Okay, I know my butt is bigger than these aforementioned chickies, but they have to know their asses are hanging out cuz it is very breezy in the aft.

King John's Castle

Before I get to the castle, I have to say, you guys are hysterical. Kendra gives me homework (I'm on it, buddy!), Mom tells me to get off my ass and go to the Sin Bin (can I just start with the concert at the Stables next week?), and Anne tells me to pay better attention to the Other World on campus (I'm lookin', I'm lookin').

Anyway, back to the castle...I went down into the city today, Saturday, to visit King John’s Castle. When I had walked into town earlier in the week, I walked on the main road, cuz that’s all I could see on the crappy tourist map I had. However, on that very trip, I bought an OS map of the city, so this time I was able to find an exquisitely beaucolic riverside path that runs almost all the way into the city and is a little shorter than the main road. This path was apparently an old tow road and has sweet little bridges over the tributary streams into the Shannon. There are benches along the way and little platforms for people to fish from. As it was a Saturday, many people were out enjoying the weather, cycling, walking, and fishing. It takes about 40 minutes to walk into town this way. However, there are two difficulties with the path. First, dog owners are not very fastidious about picking up after their dogs, and one has to keep a sharp eye out for deposits. Second, part of the path follows a canal that used to cut out an oxbow of the river when the river saw lots of traffic. It is clearly no longer in use, and weeds have grown up thickly in the canal. In some places white plastic bags of garbage bloom like lilies gone badly wrong, but swans still swim through the accumulated crud like lotuses rising up from the muck. I saw a few once they had made it back out into the Shannon, and they were highly involved with cleaning themselves up. They would stand up and flap their wings to dry them, and the sound was like airplanes going by.

Along the canal are also housing projects and the associated public alcohol consumption. All the university safety talks harped on not walking alone without a penis which, for me, is distinctly problematic. I was hoping that being on the edge of Old-Ladyhood would substitute. I walked along the canal path without incident into the town, but on the way home, there were two unshaven, tattered men hanging around a narrow section of path. I walked past them with great purpose, looked at them, and gave the all purpose “hiya” noise. They made the “hiya” noise back and all was well. Then there were the four staggeringly drunk young men tottering around the brink of the canal. As I approached, they lurched to the bank side of the path, as a heaving group, all grabbed rocks, and lurched, as a soggy unit, back to the other side of the path. They then proceeded to enthusiastically, but without much coordination, hurl the rocks into the canal. I assumed it must have been big hairy bats in the canal, and I walked through them with my “great purpose” walk but without the “hiya” noise. They were evidently preoccupied with the effect of their rocks on the water because as I monitored their location, moving quickly away down the path, they remained where they were. The rest of the walk was without incident, not that those were really incidents; they just felt like it cuz I had to brace for them.

In town, I visited the pile of rocks called “King John’s Castle”. It is actually much more complicated than just a castle funded by King John in the 12th century. In 927 the Vikings established a settlement at the mouth of the Shannon called Hymlik. This is where all the notice boards start counting. However, I betcha there were people here well before that because there are loads of Neolithic structures in the area, and the O’Brien’s and MacNamara’s were documented as well established in the area just one hundred years later, so they were probably who the Vikings had to kill in order to set up shop. Anyway, the unpopular King John (he was only 5’5”! (according to one notice board)) was made King of Ireland by his dad Henry, and he decided to do the kingly thing and set up administrative centers in easy places where you could get a boat. That would be the old Viking strongholds of Dublin, Wexford, and Limerick. Things were quiet for a while until the O’Brien’s wanted control of the river, so there was a fight. Then William of Orange wanted the location, so there was a fight. Then Cromwell wanted it, etc. So this fortification represents all the fights people had in order to control the mouth of the Shannon. Most of the unhappiness was in the 17th century, and since then there has been relative poverty stricken colonial peace. In the 1930’s they build public housing, 12 units, inside the castle curtain wall! I'm sure they just considered the castle a waste of space at that time. Suddenly in the 1990’s Limerick started to get EU cash and began to clean up. They tore down the public housing and brought in the archaeologists. They have a snazzy steel and glass interpretive center, a slide show outlining the various fights over the last thousand years, some extraordinarily ratty historical models, a melodramatic film where actors sort of re-enact the final siege of the castle, and some exposed scientifically contextualized parts of the last archaeology sites. It seems like there was a bunch of cash infused into what is supposed to be a big tourist draw, but not a lot of interpretive expertise.

The gift shop has jewelry, post cards, books, shot glasses, key chains, and mead from the other better preserved castle called Bunratty castle. Bunratty castle is way more tourist oriented with private funding. They hold “medieval dinners” and have live interpretive shows and all. According to the lady at the gift shop, “The mead sort of sells itself, but most people buy post cards.” The gift shop did not really capitalize on selling anything that would relate to or emphasize the specific historical context of the castle. Of course, the main historical event people remember is that the Treaty of Limerick in 1649 was where the Irish finally surrendered completely to English rule. What do you sell for that? Commemorative handcuffs?

I checked in with the young man who was supposed to demonstrating coin minting. He was deadly bored. He was working at the castle as a summer job until his enlistment in the army came up. He didn't know what he would specialize in cuz they tell you once your're in. He claimed it was the best paying job he could find "once yer done with the fockin' skool". I wondered to him if other jobs might kill him like the army might, but he shrugged and said, "Ye go one way or another."

Brain Glazing Orientation

I have not yet gotten a wired connection to my dorm room, so each morning I go to the Library courtyard and sit on the freezing marble benches to access the wireless signal that leaks out of the library. It is quite pleasant, if a bit chilly. This is not an early rising campus, so the only people out in the moring are foreigners. It is extremely well advertised that there is a bus from The Stables to a venue called the Sin Bin (in town, I think) which leaves at 10:00 pm and delivers you back to campus at 2:00 am. Evidently, the Sin Bin has no cover until midnight, but if one is slacker enough to arrive after midnight, the cover is 5 euro to encourage you never to do THAT again. I am sorry to say that I will not extent my ethnographic activities to include the Sin Bin unless it really seems anthropologically necessary. However, if I hear of bansidhs or other supernatural beings there, I will hop right on the bus at 10:00 sharp!

So Friday was the *second* day of orientation. I definitely felt all glazed over by day-two of info overload. Lecture is still the major mode of expression here, and it was six more hours of lecture. I am not averse to lecture, but more than three hours of lecture and even I glaze over. Note to program organizers: the audience *really* likes to have some kind of break-em-up activities, and day two of huge amounts of information *really* needs an alternative delivery system if anything is going to be learned, even think-pair-share would have been welcome. They stress here that learning is independent and up to you, but I think that is a load of crap. If it were up to me, then why are they sticking me to this seat, not allowing me to talk, and yammering for hours on end? These last two days really heightens my conviction that a lot of what we think is "teaching" is actually some kind of egotistical fantasy on the part of the teacher. Of course, my own innovative colleagues and my exceptional care-giver family members (i.e. the readers of this blog), are totally exempt from my discontent. To all of you, I say, "Keep up the good work! You are more valuable than you know!" Although I am working hard at practicing patience and loving-kindness, I got a lot of good practice trying not to grind my teeth and roll my eyes when these Lecturers would say, "Are there any questions," and so totally not mean it.

Out of this day, however, I got my classes and my gym pass. Yay! I will be taking Irish language, Irish music (practicum tutorial in guitar), the Irish Literary Revival, James Joyce to Maeve Brennan (modern Irish lit), Folklore Studies, and Irish history from 1740-1920 (lecture only). I'm so excited! Oh, and at the gym, yoga and aerobics. Can you believe it? There is yoga only once a week, and the only soy product available in the grocery stores is soy beverage: no tofu, no tempeh. I guess even though American media and fashions have crossed the pond, hippy culture has not had the same influence. Oddly enough, peanut butter has made the jump, but only in very small jars.

In the last week I have not spoken with a single human being who has not been obligated to speak to me by duty or service position. After spending the summer hanging out with family, friends, and Best Buddy Ralph, it is kind of odd not have anyone regard me as an individual human being. As a result, the comments you guys leave on the blog have been more sustaining than you know!

Campus Dog Park

It would appear that the University of Limerick is an unofficial dogpark for the town in which it resides, Castletroy. Over the last few days, I have seen more than 10 dogs trotting alongside ambling people carrying leashes. I have never seen a dog attached to a leash. These are very well behaved creatures! They don’t run around like insane creatures (like my dogs), and they trot happily along in the near vicinity of the person holding the leash. Many of these dogs are quite damp, so I think they are walked for the enjoyment of the river that flows behind the campus. Water features rather prominently here. There are two streams that flow through the campus, two huge fountains, several smaller fountains, and there is a big-assed river running enthusiastically behind the campus. One is never very far from the sound of running water.

Thursday and Friday are the big orientation days, and there have been tours running all around the campus. We had our welcome and Lecture on Everything, and then a two hour tour of the campus finding the ins and outs of computer labs, the student union, the sports arena, and classrooms. The “finale” was a “welcome dinner” at the student watering hole called “the Stables.” The Stables is a bar with a small area that sells food. It is located in a warren of stone coves in what used to be the actual stabling area from when the campus was a grand country manor at the turn of the century. The smell of horses has been replaced by the smell of stale beer. The student bar is long and dim with tiny tables and stools strewn all about. Guinness and Harp are on tap, and Harp seems to be the favored choice. The floor has a slightly tacky feel to it as if a good bit of beer has spilled on it and soaked into the tile. There are wooden pillars and an open wood beam ceiling to give one the Olde Tyme feel of a place where horses used to live. I was surprised to hear slow traditional ballads being played as the bar muzak.

The “welcome dinner” for Study Abroad students consisted of a paper ticket for a free dinner from the food corner of The Stables. One was supposed to meet people. I’m not sure how successful this bid for socializing was. My call? Unsuccessful. Of course people sat with who they already knew, and the pub seating limited most groups to about four people. However, the free dinner seemed like a good idea at the time. I got the fish-n-chips and concluded that free was a good price cuz the 3 Euro they would have charged would have been way too much for my Fried Fish Puck. I have been making myself some tasty rice-n-vegetables with a bit of sausage for protein, and I have found it to be a very satisfying dinner. I am reassured that I am not missing much by doing my own cooking.

During orientation, there has been much talk of “the Drink.” Of course the International Office people were trying to discourage binge drinking, but their tack was not to say it is bad for your health. They know that bid would fall on deaf ears as anyone under 30 is immortal. Instead, one clever person said, “Look up the price of a ticket with Ryan Air from Shannon to Paris for a weekend. Compare that to what a night of drinking costs. Which way do you think is a better way to spend your money?” I think that is a very smart approach because it is true that a few pints will really put a person back a few Euros, and with the dollar’s value falling like a rock into a black hole, a pint of beer becomes the price of a good dinner. But for the sake of my brother, who would be LUCKY to have been found in a basket at the free beach at Lake Wyola, I will indeed research, in the most geeeeeky way (what other way is there?), the drinking habits of Irish youth. However, that will have to happen next week when I join a Society. I doubt I will be having a pint with the people who live in my dorm as they seem to be totally nocturnal and only come out between midnight and 3 a.m. I deduce this from the door slamming noises and the huge amount of crumbs all over the common room that I find the next morning.

Uneasy Metamorphosis

So I walked down into Limerick city on Wednesday. I just walked around, found bookstores (chains), the train station (small), the tourist information shop (pathetic), and the river (big and fast). But mostly I looked at people. You know how at American catholic schools the skirts are almost scandalously short? Well, Ireland seems to have noticed that, too. As school let out at 3:00, I noticed hordes of young girls in ankle length pleated skirts. And the Irish nuns (surely the priests would not have mentioned it) must also have noticed that the pleats on the short skirts emphasize the sway of young girls’ hips in a most noticeable way. These long skirts are also pleated, but the pleats do are sewed down until after the gluteal curve so that there is no sway in the skirt at all. They have kept the sweater and tie combo, so I must say that it is the most unattractive ensemble. That must have been the intent, I’m sure.

The city of Limerick is working desperately to overcome a rather bleak history of poverty and violence. There are pedestrian zones and smart shops, the fashions in the boutiques are, well, fashionable, and there are little parks dotted all around. But the pedestrian zones are grimy and small, the fashions, while fashionable, are not apparently worn by anybody in the street outside the shops, and the parks are full of litter and sad people. Of course, the same could be said for any urban area. EU sponsored building is all around, too, so there are cranes everywhere putting up modern glass and steel multi-storey office buildings. But it’s not so easy to modernize in a place that hangs onto history, good or bad. Downtown is mostly two, maybe three stories high. The Glass-n-Steel is mostly in the suburban ring area. Even though big shopping centers are coming into vogue, there is still a certain separation of goods that requires a person to go to more than one shop for items. For example, pharmacies hang onto all the drug business, even over the counter stuff and first aid items. In the down town area, there were many more specialty shops like in Europe where you get vegetables here, meat here, and dry goods here. There were also a number of Indian and West African specialty shops. One car repair shop had all the signs in Czech. The word “pump” in Czech is “pompy”. I thought that was funny.

The treatment of Irish language here is very interesting. The University student who picked us up at the airport said, “I’m not bilingual. I just know English and Irish.” I’m still thinking about what that meant to her. Of course, on the surface it meant that she didn’t speak any other European languages, but somehow it also links English and Irish in an interesting way. I heard many people greet each other in Irish, and then converse in English, which was also true at the University as well as downtown. Thus, so far is seems that Irish is used for social formulas while content is left to English. I’ll ask about this when my Irish language class starts next week.

Limerick is also known as the literary location of Angela’s Ashes. This was the very first book that Ralph recommended to me that I read! At the very small and utter stereotyped Tourist Information center, they advertised literary tours where you go see the locations detailed in the book, which is a litany of poverty and violence, by the way. I suppose, for my liberal arts education, I should go. When we took students in Dublin on the literary pub crawl, our group won most of the prizes they were giving away! I doubt I’ll have as much luck here.

Thomas, my brother, told me stories of his trip to Venezuela where nothing dried. Well, Thomas, the same is true of Ireland. Nothing dries. I had to turn on my little, tiny room heater to dry my towel so it would be dry for the first time since I arrived. I’m pleased to report that my little stratagem worked perfectly. To do a load of wash and one dry costs 4.80 Euro, and the washers are tiny. Gadzooks!

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

The above phrase is found engraved over the door of the University of Limerick's library. Now, as I recall, over the library at my undergraduate alma mater is carved, "The truth shall make you free." This particulat quote is from John 8:31 where Jesus says to the Jews: "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." The Colorado College was originally a Methodist seminary before it went all secular, but this injunction tells people that you are a slave if you do not follow a particular belief system, and the truth taught by the Son of God is the particular truth that will set you free from your life of defacto sin. So this is an interesting twist on what one learns in college where learning seems to become an act of faith.

In very interesting contrast is the University of Limerick's library injunction. The line is taken from Tennyson's Ulysses where he writes:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Well, if this does not express a particular take on Irish learning, I certainly do not know what else does. In this case going to the library is an act of patriotism rather than faith.

Caed Mile Failte

The flight was happily uneventful except that they served only tiny little thimblefuls of coffee. It was terrible coffee, and so little of it! I arrived at Shannon airport at 7:30, and it took an hour to go through immigration for a set of bizarre reasons. I had heard that I would need to show a whole series of documents (as outlined in my previous entry), and I was prepared with said documents in my hand as I stood in line at the immigration booths. Suddenly, a sharp looking woman stands up in her booth and shouts into the crowd, “All students go sit against the wall. It takes 10 minutes to process you!” So a group of about ten of us go sit next to the wall while everybody else is essentially waved through. The Lady Sharp took the first girl and began to grill her mercilessly. A more laid back gentleman saw the next person and appeared to not be interested in any of her documents at all. He took another photo of her, stamped her passport, and waved her through. He processed two more of us pesky students while Lady Sharp began to apply thumb screws to that original unfortunate student. Just as I thought I would be able to breeze through Mr. Laid-Back’s booth, another immigration guy called over, “Give me a hand with this lot,” and I continued to wait while passengers from another plane showed their library cards, and were cheerfully welcomed to Ireland. Just as Lady Sharp was making that very first student start to cry, Mr. Laid-Back decided he would process another student, and I got my turn. He looked at my passport, asked me my name (I got that question right), asked me if I had been to China (as he was looking at my passport record on his computer that indicated I had a Chinese visa) so I knew the correct answer was “yes,” he took a new photo of me, and that was it. I guess I am saving my highly organized set of papers for my immigration interview next week. As I went to pick up my pack, Lady Sharp appeared to be tying her student to a stake and looking around for kindling. Guess she didn’t have the right paperwork…

I only had to pick up my pack from checked luggage because Delta (as of six months ago) will allow guitars on board. On the domestic flight from Cincinnati to New York, I was on a plane that had “extended over-head bins” into which my guitar fit! The international flight had regular sized bins, but the very nice flight attendants put it into the front closet of the plane. It was great!

Having collected my baggage, I went outside into the arrivals hall and met a person holding a University of Limerick sign. She directed me to a group of very young people (my new colleagues!) to wait for the final victims of Lady Sharp to stagger out of their arrival grilling. We got on the bus and drove out to the University. It was cool and grey with spells of heavy mist that were almost, but not quite, rain-like. The students were talkative and sweetly inexperienced. They marveled at the traffic on the “wrong side of the road,” the price of gas, and the narrowness of the roads. The world weary 22 year old who was sent to collect us from the Office of Study Abroad and get us to the dorms patiently answered questions and taught a quick vocabulary lesson about dual-carriageways, petrol, telling time (half nine means nine thirty), and how Irish is the language and Gaelic is the sports. She was very patient.

At the dorms, the reception people processed us very quickly, and they gave us keys (electronic plastic), a handbook (sample advice: you are responsible if you burn down your dorm), and a “welcome bag.” I would rather have a metal key, but the plastic is okay. I think the don’t-burn-down-the-dorm thing is related to smoking. The “welcome bag” contained two tea bags, four little milks, four packs of sugar, ginger biscuits, vanilla biscuits, and Cadbury chocolate biscuits. It was fantastic! I was feeling like a bit of refreshment by about this point, and a little cup of tea with some biscuits was totally civilized. I promptly made myself at home in this new kitchen by making said tea. The dorm has a teapot!

Now, on the internet info about the dorm, it had said, a “hob” was provided. If you look that word up, the first three definitions deal with little supernatural creatures of the goblin variety, so Debbie Page (who discovered this) suggested that they provided a House Elf. However, she also pointed out that a further definition is that a hob is something that warms something else. So she suggested that it might mean there is a heater in the kitchen. My pal Kendra, who did her study abroad in London, said the “hob” she knew of was a hotplate. Well, it turns out that when you get a “hob” in Ireland, you are getting an electric kettle for tea. I was so happy to discover this, although I must admit, a house elf would have been nice. On the other hand, there is no microwave. The stove is electric (yuck), and the fridges are small. There is, however, a lot of cupboard space, which is nice. Evidently the cupboards are called “presses”. The kitchen window looks out on the pedestrian mall that is in the center of this dorm area. The “living room” area looks out on a wooded creek, as does my personal room’s window. It is pretty quiet and pleasant, except that when the toilet is flushed by anyone in the rooms above me, the water rushing through the pipes sounds like someone shaking marbles in a can.

After my refreshing little snack, I went to find the library and email Ralph. He had already emailed me! Whatta sweetie. ☺ As part of our welcome package, they gave us immediately usable guest accounts with passwords. This was really nice because I could log on immediately to the university computers. Then I went shopping. I walked along the N7, which is the main road from Dublin to Limerick. It was busy and noisy, but it lead to a large Dunne’s store (sort of like a Meiers). I found most of the foods I wanted, but apples were really expensive (so I got Spanish pears instead), there was no cottage style cheese (but there was crème fraiche), and I could not find any soy based protein foods (neither tofu nor tempeh) anywhere. On the whole, I was able to find what I needed for modest eating habits. I also had to get a duvet cover and a fitted sheet. Near the Dunnes Store was a “T.K. Max” store. I guess international branding required the substitution of the “K” for the American “J”, but they had what I wanted. However, the T.K. Max had a much more old-style Filene’s basement atmosphere. All the clerks were from South East Asia. The manager was a northern European.

I slogged home with all my stuff, made lovely frozen vegetables and rice, with a little three inch sausage for my protein, and put my newly acquired sheets on the bed. It is rather homey in what is otherwise a rather bare room. So, Immigration was easy, the welcome was efficient, the guest passwords were fantastic, and I have food and a bed. The “No-Jet-Lag” is the best. It is just getting dark, and I’m just getting tired