Well, two exams down six to go. The first exam we had was this Monday. Housekeeping came in and evaluated our apartment. We had to reach a level of cleanliness, according to their criteria, that would allow them to NOT charge us for a cleaning service over the holidays. Well, we passed very nicely, thank you very much. The scale ran as follows: Filthy, Dirty, Okay, Clean, Very Clean. Our kitchen rated "very clean" on every count except for the floor. The floor rated "Clean". I could understand that because all I did was sweep and then rub it with a paper towel or two because it looked like the scabrous mop that housekeeping provided would spread cholera better than it would clean the floor. Every room in our apartment rated "clean" on every count except for one room, but he knows who he is. I wouldn't know how they defined 'very clean' for our rooms, but the result of this successful exam is that we don't have to pay for a cleaning service. Yay: all praise for small victories.
Following hard upon this Cleaning Exam was my guitar recital. The Irish Folk Music course I am taking has a practical tutorial. You go to lectures and learn about history and famous players and stuff, but the tutorial is practice. There was a dance group, a tin-whistle group, a bodhran group, a fiddle group, a singing group, and a guitar group. There are over 100 people in the class. This was a fantastic way to really engage the students whether they wanted to be engaged or not. And there is definitely a surly group of young men in the back who test each teacher's patience with their little reindeer games. The recital was well attended, as every member of the audience was also a performer. The singers were able to do a few ornaments and they all could hold a tune, so that was lovely. Eoin Cougohlan is an up and coming performer on the Irish folk music scene (he's backed Emmy Lou Harris!), and he is a fantastic musician as well as a great teacher. Anyway, he was given the task of creating a recital piece for no less than 20 (twenty, that's right) Bodhrans. It was too many to have any melody instruments because any fiddle or flute would be drowned out. Coughlan chose to do an 'a capella', as it were, bodhran piece. He got them to play a 'jig' and a 'reel', or rather rhythmic patterns in 6/8 and then 4/4. He had them play different styles of the rhythms, on edge, muted, rising and falling, and flat out in the middle. He has the group alternate who was playing, and then add and subtract players to create waves of sound. It was fantastic! It was really a testament to a good teacher that he got total novices to do something so cutting edge, and so on the beat. He got them to do some pretty complicated stuff.
Well, Mr. Coughlan was also the tutor for the guitars. We played a polka, The Little Diamond, the Salamanca Reel, and the hornpipe 'Off to California'. We flat picked the Little Diamond, but Coughlan convinced an accordion player and a flute player to do the melody on the reel and the hornpipe. The reel was pretty standard backing, but we did a sort of jazz progression for the hornpipe which was very cool. I wouldn't know if we sounded good or not because I was in the band, and one never knows. I heard one person in the audience say it sounded good, so it must have been okay.
The tin whistle choirs were a little lugubrious, but they were all playing by ear, and the brave accompanist on the piano did a great job of following wherever they went with the rhythm, so it was brave effort by all involved. After the recital, I could hear bits of the tunes being played on tin whistles in the parking lot, so I think some whistle players were made in that class.
The most culturally interesting part was the dancing. The girls, of course, did a great job, and they were totally focused on their dances. The boys were another story. The audience was mostly American since most of the course is full of Americans. What Irish person would take a course called "Traditional Irish Music"? They would either have no interest at all, or by the time they got to university level, be so far beyond it. So, this was, essentially, a group of Americans. No, remember that American men generally don't dance. American undergraduate men, unless they are dancers, don't dance. I believe it is regarded as totally gay. This audience that had joyfully hooted and cheered every performance so far, totally broke down for the dancing groups that included their male classmates. The surly bunch who usually sat against the wall, egged their pals on to utterly harass the men with courage enough to get up and dance. They hooted and cat called from the back throughout the performance. They tried to distract their dancing buddies by making gestures and calling out their names. It was the most powerful example of the group pulling down members trying to break out of the drunken baseball cap mode that I have seen in a long time. It was very painful. The guys dancing on the stage mostly ignored it, but one young man caved and began to cut up in his dance, turning the hand turns into high fives, and goofing around with his steps. I was sad to see how much power these frightened young men exerted in such an insulting way. It was classic mob behavior: the hecklers were all grouped tightly together trying to draw others in to harass the dancers. I'm sure if you asked them why they were so mean, they would have perceived it as joking support. One can only hope the dancers felt it that way, but there was a vicious undertone of 'the nail that sticks up gets hammered down' and these were the dudes with the hammers.
Overall, the performances were great: it was evidence of great effort and creativity by the tutors, and great effort on the part of the students. It was a very effective way to really engage them in the process.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Text and Utopia
This post is rated AR for Academic Rambling.
I was talking with Mairead Conneely, and we were discussing utopia and landscape. She is studying how people from the Aran Islands and visitors to the Aran Islands create a literary vision of the islands that sort of matches the landscape on the ground, but in creating an identity out of writing the landscape, they create a new utopian (small letter 'a') in their minds. Often this imagined utopia is based on the past, and when the writer returns from exile, because exile helps anybody see the Old Country in Kodachrome, they see that the modern world has kept moving onwards, and the Old Country has become some undiscovered new country.
Ultimately, it's okay if the literary vision doesn't match the actual landscape, but readers, insiders and outsiders, demand some kind of authenticity (which is ultimately yet another utopian vision of what reality should (but may not) be). So the Aran Islanders create 'Synge's Seat' where the great author sat to write his plays. Of course, he sat on some kind of ledge, but there is a nice little shelter with a stone seat built up so visitors can feel some kind of landscape based communion with the author. The same thing is true in Howth, Yorkshire, for the Bronte stuff. Up on the hill is supposed to be the 'Wuthering Heights' cottage and the 'Wuthering Heights Tree' and they are both well visited and well photographed and have nothing at all to do with the texts in any way. Oh, and let's not forget that there IS NO 221B Baker Street. They had to add it in because so many people came looking for it. At the Sherlock Holmes museum on 221B Baker Street (they had to request the address), they write, 'The rooms in Mr Holmes´s apartment on the first floor are maintained just as he would have left them nearly 100 years ago!' Note the utopian use of the conditional verb in this astonishing sentence.
So readers, unfamiliar with the landscape of the text, experience the text as creating a vision of the imagined landscape. when they visit the actual place, the text landscape may be more real than the actual landscape and actually become a barrier to experiencing the place because its 'smaller than I expected' or 'dirtier than I expected'. It would seem that there could be a certain amount of Landscape Shock in the same way that people experience Culture Shock. There is a convoluted desire for 'authenticity' and yet a requirement that 'authenticity' means that the landscape conform to the imagination of the reader.
Alternatively, insiders, who know the landscape first, and then read about it, require the author's imagination to match their experience. In a way, when the author and the reader overlap enough, I think this enhances the reading because it heightens the feeling of 'authenticity' but at the same time it can inhibit the reading if the author's presentation of her imagined world does not sufficiently overlap with the reader's imagined world. This is, of course, the classic problem with adapting novels to film, but I think it reaches a certain poignancy when it is applied to experience of actual landscapes on the ground, as it were.
I think about Ben Bulben. I went out to Sligo and I 'climbed Ben Bulben's back' in my more credulous days when I thought Yeats was writing about an actual place. As a fanatical reader, I thought, 'Oh, wow. So this is Yeats.' and I looked out over the sea and came over all artistic. Having read a bit more closely, I see that Yeats never was writing about Ben Bulben, but that's okay with me. I just translated the experience into a nice hike on a sunny day with a great view of the sea.
Nevertheless, I am fascinated by the interaction of reader, writer, and landscape because they all three have a kind of Ven Diagrammatic relationship. I wonder what the center intersection is? I need to draw the picture and think about that one.
Now history texts have an interesting place in my wonderment. I mean, it is actual ground on which the text happened, in one way or another. I can go to the Manassas National Battlefield Park (known to others as the Battle of Bull Run) in Virginia, and there they have little maps with circles and arrows showing what happened. I walked out on the expanse of green field, thought about the text, and felt queasy. I have to admit, it really did heighten the emotional power of the text of the battle to have the physical connection (true or not) with the story. When I was in California attending a conference in San Diego, I hiked up to the place where they filmed M*A*S*H. There is an old rotting jeep full of weeds, and the tall flat place where they landed the helicopters. Here was a real place associated with an imaginary Korean landscape portrayed in a TV show. It made me dizzy to think about it, but it was a hot day, so maybe it was really just dehydration.
And this leads me to think about Robert Frost. (Don, if you are reading this, tell me what you think about this.) Was he not criticized for being too local? Too rooted in a specific landscape? Well, for cryin' out loud: if he was able to so vividly evoke that landscape for insiders and outsiders, I think that is a pretty big artistic achievement. I think of 'Tramps in Mudtime' or 'Birches' by Frost, and I really feel the vividness of the landscapes Frost evokes, but then I realize that the landscape of 'Birches' is located in Leverett, so I took his landscape and overlaid it on my own, and it worked. I need to find someone who is from the desert and talk with that person about Robert Frost. How does that person experience Frost's landscapes? I supposed much the same way that I experience the literature of Naughib Mahfouze...I've never been to Cairo, but I feel like I have. I have a great desire to go to Cairo and walk around like Mahfouze did. I feel like it would make his writing more vivid for me.
Maybe it is better not to have a specific location associated with an author so that one can just walk around in the generative atmosphere. Not go to Dublin and trace Bloom's steps, but just go to Dublin and walk around. I want to take Ralph to the four corners area of the Southwest because he likes the Hillerman novels, but we don't have to go to Windowrock. I think it is better just to hike around Canyon de Chelly. You know: leave the specific places in the utopia of the author's mind, and participate in the glamour of the landscape but not anchored to some imagined 'real' place that doesn't exist anyway. Yeats, ultimately, wrote the best landscape poetry because it never existed and thus is accessible to everybody. You can't get to the Isle of Innisfree. You can only look at it from the shore and imagine the evening full of linnets wings. All for the best, really.
I was talking with Mairead Conneely, and we were discussing utopia and landscape. She is studying how people from the Aran Islands and visitors to the Aran Islands create a literary vision of the islands that sort of matches the landscape on the ground, but in creating an identity out of writing the landscape, they create a new utopian (small letter 'a') in their minds. Often this imagined utopia is based on the past, and when the writer returns from exile, because exile helps anybody see the Old Country in Kodachrome, they see that the modern world has kept moving onwards, and the Old Country has become some undiscovered new country.
Ultimately, it's okay if the literary vision doesn't match the actual landscape, but readers, insiders and outsiders, demand some kind of authenticity (which is ultimately yet another utopian vision of what reality should (but may not) be). So the Aran Islanders create 'Synge's Seat' where the great author sat to write his plays. Of course, he sat on some kind of ledge, but there is a nice little shelter with a stone seat built up so visitors can feel some kind of landscape based communion with the author. The same thing is true in Howth, Yorkshire, for the Bronte stuff. Up on the hill is supposed to be the 'Wuthering Heights' cottage and the 'Wuthering Heights Tree' and they are both well visited and well photographed and have nothing at all to do with the texts in any way. Oh, and let's not forget that there IS NO 221B Baker Street. They had to add it in because so many people came looking for it. At the Sherlock Holmes museum on 221B Baker Street (they had to request the address), they write, 'The rooms in Mr Holmes´s apartment on the first floor are maintained just as he would have left them nearly 100 years ago!' Note the utopian use of the conditional verb in this astonishing sentence.
So readers, unfamiliar with the landscape of the text, experience the text as creating a vision of the imagined landscape. when they visit the actual place, the text landscape may be more real than the actual landscape and actually become a barrier to experiencing the place because its 'smaller than I expected' or 'dirtier than I expected'. It would seem that there could be a certain amount of Landscape Shock in the same way that people experience Culture Shock. There is a convoluted desire for 'authenticity' and yet a requirement that 'authenticity' means that the landscape conform to the imagination of the reader.
Alternatively, insiders, who know the landscape first, and then read about it, require the author's imagination to match their experience. In a way, when the author and the reader overlap enough, I think this enhances the reading because it heightens the feeling of 'authenticity' but at the same time it can inhibit the reading if the author's presentation of her imagined world does not sufficiently overlap with the reader's imagined world. This is, of course, the classic problem with adapting novels to film, but I think it reaches a certain poignancy when it is applied to experience of actual landscapes on the ground, as it were.
I think about Ben Bulben. I went out to Sligo and I 'climbed Ben Bulben's back' in my more credulous days when I thought Yeats was writing about an actual place. As a fanatical reader, I thought, 'Oh, wow. So this is Yeats.' and I looked out over the sea and came over all artistic. Having read a bit more closely, I see that Yeats never was writing about Ben Bulben, but that's okay with me. I just translated the experience into a nice hike on a sunny day with a great view of the sea.
Nevertheless, I am fascinated by the interaction of reader, writer, and landscape because they all three have a kind of Ven Diagrammatic relationship. I wonder what the center intersection is? I need to draw the picture and think about that one.
Now history texts have an interesting place in my wonderment. I mean, it is actual ground on which the text happened, in one way or another. I can go to the Manassas National Battlefield Park (known to others as the Battle of Bull Run) in Virginia, and there they have little maps with circles and arrows showing what happened. I walked out on the expanse of green field, thought about the text, and felt queasy. I have to admit, it really did heighten the emotional power of the text of the battle to have the physical connection (true or not) with the story. When I was in California attending a conference in San Diego, I hiked up to the place where they filmed M*A*S*H. There is an old rotting jeep full of weeds, and the tall flat place where they landed the helicopters. Here was a real place associated with an imaginary Korean landscape portrayed in a TV show. It made me dizzy to think about it, but it was a hot day, so maybe it was really just dehydration.
And this leads me to think about Robert Frost. (Don, if you are reading this, tell me what you think about this.) Was he not criticized for being too local? Too rooted in a specific landscape? Well, for cryin' out loud: if he was able to so vividly evoke that landscape for insiders and outsiders, I think that is a pretty big artistic achievement. I think of 'Tramps in Mudtime' or 'Birches' by Frost, and I really feel the vividness of the landscapes Frost evokes, but then I realize that the landscape of 'Birches' is located in Leverett, so I took his landscape and overlaid it on my own, and it worked. I need to find someone who is from the desert and talk with that person about Robert Frost. How does that person experience Frost's landscapes? I supposed much the same way that I experience the literature of Naughib Mahfouze...I've never been to Cairo, but I feel like I have. I have a great desire to go to Cairo and walk around like Mahfouze did. I feel like it would make his writing more vivid for me.
Maybe it is better not to have a specific location associated with an author so that one can just walk around in the generative atmosphere. Not go to Dublin and trace Bloom's steps, but just go to Dublin and walk around. I want to take Ralph to the four corners area of the Southwest because he likes the Hillerman novels, but we don't have to go to Windowrock. I think it is better just to hike around Canyon de Chelly. You know: leave the specific places in the utopia of the author's mind, and participate in the glamour of the landscape but not anchored to some imagined 'real' place that doesn't exist anyway. Yeats, ultimately, wrote the best landscape poetry because it never existed and thus is accessible to everybody. You can't get to the Isle of Innisfree. You can only look at it from the shore and imagine the evening full of linnets wings. All for the best, really.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Digestive Biscuits
Anne, you asked about those cookies a few posts ago. Well, Digestive Biscuits are like Graham Crackers, only better. They are both food and medication. They are the only biscuits at the Dromroe Village Store that is represented by TWO rows: all the rest have only one because every student with a brain cell left will need a package quick to hand.
Here is my study aid. Sweet and crumbly, they absorb tea like little heavenly sponges.
Oh, thou treat of angles, biscuit made from manna, encompassing all the comfort of hearth, home, and love all pressed into a little floury round of ersatz joy.
When dark of night descends and the reading never ends,
When my love is far from me and all I have is steaming tea
for comfort in the long cold night of reading with my failing sight,
Digestive Biscuits fill the void, and I could march, alone, on Troy.
(who's been reading a lot of Yeats and ancient Irish poetry? Me! Me!)
Here is my study aid. Sweet and crumbly, they absorb tea like little heavenly sponges.
Oh, thou treat of angles, biscuit made from manna, encompassing all the comfort of hearth, home, and love all pressed into a little floury round of ersatz joy.
When dark of night descends and the reading never ends,
When my love is far from me and all I have is steaming tea
for comfort in the long cold night of reading with my failing sight,
Digestive Biscuits fill the void, and I could march, alone, on Troy.
(who's been reading a lot of Yeats and ancient Irish poetry? Me! Me!)
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Narrative
Please excuse me while I post notes to myself. This idea has been on my mind and I have to get it down in text where I will find it again, but if my Erudite Readers might weigh in on the topic, that would be helpful, otherwise, I will have to email you to ask you about this. So, Erudite Reader, what do you think of the power of narrative?
It is clear that telling stories is how human beings make sense of the world. We create narratives to make sense of patterns and to remember important things about the world and about ourselves. So if narrative is a natural human way to learn, how can we use this powerful predisposition? It seems to me that we need to include the idea of narrative at several levels of learning. At the highest meta-level, there are the stories we tell about ourselves to create our identities as teachers and as students. Okay, we do that spontaneously anyway cuz we love to tell stories about ourselves. But at a more abstract level, curriculum is sort of a narrative of a discipline. Thus, the order in which we take a series of courses is a kind of narrative. Within a course, the order of topics is a kind of narrative about the course content, and then within each lecture there is a narrative that is the story of the lecture.
We hate it when a narrative is incoherent or boring. We hate it because it is confusing. When I go to a lecture that is jumping all over the place, I find it very very hard to learn that content because I have no way to make a pattern out of it. A good lecture has a narrative line to it that will hold all the details together for me. Because, as a novice, these are all new stories for me, it is really important that these stories make sense! The exam is a time for me to tell the story back to the professor to see if I learned the story. As a student, I realize that the order of the lecture is also a really important narrative line for me. In a few of my classes, there have been several different lecturers, and the topics have been unrelated to each other. I find it very confusing to identify themes and keep the narrative straight when on Wednesday we hear about 19 century dance traditions, Thursday we learn about the Irish harp tradition in the 18th century, and the following Wednesday we hear about the 20th century Irish piano tradition. I closed my notebook today after hearing about Ceili Bands and vamping pianos, and I thought to myself: I wish I had a narrative. This class feels like a bulleted list, and I would very much like to have a paragraph. I mean, I know bulleted lists are clear, but it seems that it predisposes one to memorize facts as discrete units. If the course had a narrative flow, then one could more easily make connections and create an analytical synthesis of the ideas that might create a coherent whole.
In my Folklore class, when the teacher is just lecturing off her bulleted list, there is a lot of background noise in the slightly disengaged room. However, all these apparently disengaged students are utterly silent, motionless, and utterly focused when stops to tell a story. The change in the room is tangible! I wonder very much, if one spoke to these students a year from now. if they will remember the stories or the content of the course? I'm betting on the stories.
I remember Robin Lightner said that there was a chapter in the pscyh text that she uses which seems like a bulleted list of topics. I think she said (correct me if I am remembering this wrong, Robin) that students had a hard time remembering the stuff from this chapter.
I think that when I do my next course design, and I will be redesigning every course I teach, you can bet on that, I will think very much about narrative at the curriculum level, the course level, and the lecture level. Of course, the next sticky question is, how do I assess if this makes a difference or not, but I will leave that for another package of Digestive Biscuits.
It is clear that telling stories is how human beings make sense of the world. We create narratives to make sense of patterns and to remember important things about the world and about ourselves. So if narrative is a natural human way to learn, how can we use this powerful predisposition? It seems to me that we need to include the idea of narrative at several levels of learning. At the highest meta-level, there are the stories we tell about ourselves to create our identities as teachers and as students. Okay, we do that spontaneously anyway cuz we love to tell stories about ourselves. But at a more abstract level, curriculum is sort of a narrative of a discipline. Thus, the order in which we take a series of courses is a kind of narrative. Within a course, the order of topics is a kind of narrative about the course content, and then within each lecture there is a narrative that is the story of the lecture.
We hate it when a narrative is incoherent or boring. We hate it because it is confusing. When I go to a lecture that is jumping all over the place, I find it very very hard to learn that content because I have no way to make a pattern out of it. A good lecture has a narrative line to it that will hold all the details together for me. Because, as a novice, these are all new stories for me, it is really important that these stories make sense! The exam is a time for me to tell the story back to the professor to see if I learned the story. As a student, I realize that the order of the lecture is also a really important narrative line for me. In a few of my classes, there have been several different lecturers, and the topics have been unrelated to each other. I find it very confusing to identify themes and keep the narrative straight when on Wednesday we hear about 19 century dance traditions, Thursday we learn about the Irish harp tradition in the 18th century, and the following Wednesday we hear about the 20th century Irish piano tradition. I closed my notebook today after hearing about Ceili Bands and vamping pianos, and I thought to myself: I wish I had a narrative. This class feels like a bulleted list, and I would very much like to have a paragraph. I mean, I know bulleted lists are clear, but it seems that it predisposes one to memorize facts as discrete units. If the course had a narrative flow, then one could more easily make connections and create an analytical synthesis of the ideas that might create a coherent whole.
In my Folklore class, when the teacher is just lecturing off her bulleted list, there is a lot of background noise in the slightly disengaged room. However, all these apparently disengaged students are utterly silent, motionless, and utterly focused when stops to tell a story. The change in the room is tangible! I wonder very much, if one spoke to these students a year from now. if they will remember the stories or the content of the course? I'm betting on the stories.
I remember Robin Lightner said that there was a chapter in the pscyh text that she uses which seems like a bulleted list of topics. I think she said (correct me if I am remembering this wrong, Robin) that students had a hard time remembering the stuff from this chapter.
I think that when I do my next course design, and I will be redesigning every course I teach, you can bet on that, I will think very much about narrative at the curriculum level, the course level, and the lecture level. Of course, the next sticky question is, how do I assess if this makes a difference or not, but I will leave that for another package of Digestive Biscuits.
Libraries
First of all, Gentle Reader, I love libraries. It's like a hardware store for the mind. I like the quiet bustle of people being interested in books. I love to walk along a row of books reading the titles and wade through all the possibilities of the content. I feel no time in a library, it is such a place of being wholly present and yet transported to another place. Even the most humble library is a place of transcendence and possibility.
I will go and find the local library just to get a sense of what is going on in a particular town. Thirty something years ago, I toured Wales by myself, and part of my quest was to visit the local library in each village I stayed in: small grey slate buildings full of the entire mix of the town. I suppose, in a way, a library is like a pub that you visit in the daytime, while one might save the pub for the evening. Both are full of stories, escape, and entertainment, its just that there are more children, in a physical sense only, at the library. As an undergraduate at the Colorado College, the library was also a central meeting spot. There was a large balcony around the circulation open space which people called the Fishbowl because it a place to window shop for good looking individuals...so they say. I was there for the good looking books, but we have previously established my geekitude. The University of Pennsylvania library did not have that kind of large open space: it was much more compartmentalized, and thus, I think, less social. It didn't really feel like a social center, but that memory is oddly more hazy for me than the Colorado College library. The University of Cincinnati big campus library has a huge spread out social space upon entering, which does circulate with people, but there is a large student center nearby with huge open light spaces that seems to have replaced the library as a social center. Raymond Walters College has a kind of open space in the lobbies of the two central buildings which generate social contact, but the library, alas, is 'hidden' (if you can 'hide' a library) down a hall. There is a lighted open space which is nice, but it is a lonely library.
The City Library of Limerick is in an old warehouse, and it is wide open and full of light in some places, with a cozy section on the side which maintains the old warehouse brickwork. It was full of people from Ireland, Poland, Africa, and India, when I went for my obligatory tour. The Language Tapes section was front and center! For my American Readers, just so you know, at this library, you have to pay a euro to use the internet for a 1/2 hour. Then they make you get off the computer. The hours were a bit limited at this library, but the space was lovely, full of local events posters, and full of families getting books.
The University of Limerick Library is a positively Hopping Joint. It is most certainly the center of student activity, even though there is a student union up the street. The cynic who ran the student orientation said the library is attended only by foreign students during the first 2/3 of the term, but then it fills with Irish students at the end of the term. I'm not sure that was an accurate assessment. The library has been pretty full up to now (two weeks out from exams) and now it is certainly very full of very focused people. There are those few who earnestly text on their phones as well. Some of the policies feel a little confining to me: undergraduates can only check out four books at a time! Another interesting part of this library is the traditional music collection. Evidently, there was a visiting ethnomusicologist here a few years ago who created two substantial CD cabinets full of traditional music CDs. This library also houses a large portion of the public computers and has two public printers, so that contributes to the intense social circulation. Only one floor is wireless, but there are direct connections at many of the study carrels. There is a lot of glass, and this afternoon, I got a seat in the sun next to the literature section. Pure joy. Sun and books. The only thing missing was tea.
I will go and find the local library just to get a sense of what is going on in a particular town. Thirty something years ago, I toured Wales by myself, and part of my quest was to visit the local library in each village I stayed in: small grey slate buildings full of the entire mix of the town. I suppose, in a way, a library is like a pub that you visit in the daytime, while one might save the pub for the evening. Both are full of stories, escape, and entertainment, its just that there are more children, in a physical sense only, at the library. As an undergraduate at the Colorado College, the library was also a central meeting spot. There was a large balcony around the circulation open space which people called the Fishbowl because it a place to window shop for good looking individuals...so they say. I was there for the good looking books, but we have previously established my geekitude. The University of Pennsylvania library did not have that kind of large open space: it was much more compartmentalized, and thus, I think, less social. It didn't really feel like a social center, but that memory is oddly more hazy for me than the Colorado College library. The University of Cincinnati big campus library has a huge spread out social space upon entering, which does circulate with people, but there is a large student center nearby with huge open light spaces that seems to have replaced the library as a social center. Raymond Walters College has a kind of open space in the lobbies of the two central buildings which generate social contact, but the library, alas, is 'hidden' (if you can 'hide' a library) down a hall. There is a lighted open space which is nice, but it is a lonely library.
The City Library of Limerick is in an old warehouse, and it is wide open and full of light in some places, with a cozy section on the side which maintains the old warehouse brickwork. It was full of people from Ireland, Poland, Africa, and India, when I went for my obligatory tour. The Language Tapes section was front and center! For my American Readers, just so you know, at this library, you have to pay a euro to use the internet for a 1/2 hour. Then they make you get off the computer. The hours were a bit limited at this library, but the space was lovely, full of local events posters, and full of families getting books.
The University of Limerick Library is a positively Hopping Joint. It is most certainly the center of student activity, even though there is a student union up the street. The cynic who ran the student orientation said the library is attended only by foreign students during the first 2/3 of the term, but then it fills with Irish students at the end of the term. I'm not sure that was an accurate assessment. The library has been pretty full up to now (two weeks out from exams) and now it is certainly very full of very focused people. There are those few who earnestly text on their phones as well. Some of the policies feel a little confining to me: undergraduates can only check out four books at a time! Another interesting part of this library is the traditional music collection. Evidently, there was a visiting ethnomusicologist here a few years ago who created two substantial CD cabinets full of traditional music CDs. This library also houses a large portion of the public computers and has two public printers, so that contributes to the intense social circulation. Only one floor is wireless, but there are direct connections at many of the study carrels. There is a lot of glass, and this afternoon, I got a seat in the sun next to the literature section. Pure joy. Sun and books. The only thing missing was tea.
Monday, November 19, 2007
What is Irish?
Isn't this the question of the hour? One American in my traditional music class observed, "Everybody wants to be Irish except the Irish." According to my music teacher, a professional guitar player of both traditional and art rock music, an Irish musician can't get a gig in Ireland, but he or she can tour as much as they want to packed houses in any other country, especially America. He was relating how people won't get radio play in Ireland if they sound "too Irish". And this in the town where U2 came from...Of course, they didn't make it in Ireland, they just came back. As I am studying the Irish music revival, it turns out that some of the most influential Irish music compendiums were written by Irish emigres in Chicago and New York. Some of the most early influential recordings of Irish fiddle music were recorded in Chicago, and then brought back. Many of Ireland's most famous authors were banned in Ireland and had to publish in England, France, and America. How interesting! Here is an emblematic image of the problem. See? Here is a Guinness tap, but you can only get Heineken out of it:
What brings this topic to mind is that I just got back from a weekend in Munich to visit my very good friend from graduate school.
Being in Germany for the weekend and then coming back to Ireland was a great way to freshen up my ethnographic eyes, especially after spending a weekend using American sociolinguistic rules and then returning to Irish sociolinguistic rules.
In Ireland there is still a strong tradition of hospitality. I have YET to pay for a cup of coffee and have really struggled to be able to buy other people pints. I'm just not socially quick enough to do it consistently. Actually, today I was finally quick enough and I am proud to say I was able to buy someone else a cup of coffee. (on a tangent, a cup of coffee, no refill, small cup, is two euro. that's about half a Starbucks grande for a third more the price and half the quality: but I digress). So, strong tradition of hospitality, but very very strong personal boundaries. There is certainly more personal restraint, and more verbal games before really communicating. There seems to be a certain insecurity maybe that expresses itself in a careful guarding of boundaries, not giving too much away. There is a restraint in performance and a value of community such that you shouldn't really be too good, or at least, not admit to being very good, so that you don't jeopardize the community feeling of the group. Good 'craic' seems to be good community cheer. Alcohol seems to help the strong boundaries issue, which means that when those boundaries go down, look out! Then you start to get the 'too much information' syndrome. There also seems to be a certain dissatisfaction with external pressures and controls that seems to express itself in the 'carnival' of alcohol. But even without alcohol, there seems to be a sort of passive aggressive challenge to authority what with parking wherever one can, ignoring inconvenient rules, and passively not cooperating.
There seems to be a huge generation gap between people born after 1985 and people born before that. The economic boom of the 90's brought huge culture change. People who remember the recession of the 80's and downright poverty of the 60s and 70s still have a more backwards looking idea about tradition as a vehicle for cultural identity with older generations just recovering from barely healed early 20th century cultural wounds of the beginnings of the free state. But there also appears to be a desperate need to innovate through personal expression. This is sort of a catch-22 for some people who might feel caught in the middle of the ideas that Innovation is a sort of treason, but tradition can be suffocating. Traditional music is an interesting case of this cultural conflict. On the one hand people are trying to "preserve" traditional music, which is music not associated with a particular composer, passed on by oral tradition, and played by the community on a regular basis. On the other hand, one is encouraged to add one's own style and mark to the playing such that you get jazzy type chords on guitars that are backing 'traditional' tunes, reggae beats for hornpipes, or chromatic runs being added as ornaments to reels.
And there is a simmering violence underneath it all. We didn't get out of the gym fast enough one night, and the guy who sits in the entry booth of the gym verbally abused our group all the way out the door. A bus driver, on whose bus I was sitting, messed with almost every passenger by moving the bus about three feet forward when they tried to get on, or not stopping at a bus stop until being several yards away to make the people at the bus stop run for the bus. Two young men got into a verbally abusive shouting match on the bridge outside my building, but they were shouting too incoherently for the nature of the conflict to be clear. I'm not saying anybody comes to blows, or at least I haven't been around when that's happened, but anger seems near the surface such that the careful social restraint seems very useful. One person put it that you can't give anything away because you don't know who will use it against you. She said it was important not to let on that you aspire to anything because everybody will just laugh at you if you don't get it, and never let you forget that you tried and failed. The professors here also do not believe in praise, only telling you how poorly you've done. Other people have said that you can't compliment people because it will just bring bad luck. You should call a beautiful person 'dogface' because it's just asking for trouble to say they are good looking. In my folklore class, the professor talked about how in 'the old days' (whatever that was or whenever that was), you never compliment people or cute children because then you would call the fairies attention to them and the Good Folk would take the complimented person or child away.
But doesn't this all sound familiar? Isn't it just like this in America also? The more I am in different places, the more people seem the same. Except for listening strategies. In Japan, when you listen, you have to keep up running 'listening noise', in America you have to do consistent but spaced out 'listening noise', but in Ireland, you should keep quiet until you know the other person is done talking. It took me a month to figure this one out. An Irish person commented to me recently that I wasn't like all the other Americans who are constantly interrupting.
What brings this topic to mind is that I just got back from a weekend in Munich to visit my very good friend from graduate school.
Being in Germany for the weekend and then coming back to Ireland was a great way to freshen up my ethnographic eyes, especially after spending a weekend using American sociolinguistic rules and then returning to Irish sociolinguistic rules.
In Ireland there is still a strong tradition of hospitality. I have YET to pay for a cup of coffee and have really struggled to be able to buy other people pints. I'm just not socially quick enough to do it consistently. Actually, today I was finally quick enough and I am proud to say I was able to buy someone else a cup of coffee. (on a tangent, a cup of coffee, no refill, small cup, is two euro. that's about half a Starbucks grande for a third more the price and half the quality: but I digress). So, strong tradition of hospitality, but very very strong personal boundaries. There is certainly more personal restraint, and more verbal games before really communicating. There seems to be a certain insecurity maybe that expresses itself in a careful guarding of boundaries, not giving too much away. There is a restraint in performance and a value of community such that you shouldn't really be too good, or at least, not admit to being very good, so that you don't jeopardize the community feeling of the group. Good 'craic' seems to be good community cheer. Alcohol seems to help the strong boundaries issue, which means that when those boundaries go down, look out! Then you start to get the 'too much information' syndrome. There also seems to be a certain dissatisfaction with external pressures and controls that seems to express itself in the 'carnival' of alcohol. But even without alcohol, there seems to be a sort of passive aggressive challenge to authority what with parking wherever one can, ignoring inconvenient rules, and passively not cooperating.
There seems to be a huge generation gap between people born after 1985 and people born before that. The economic boom of the 90's brought huge culture change. People who remember the recession of the 80's and downright poverty of the 60s and 70s still have a more backwards looking idea about tradition as a vehicle for cultural identity with older generations just recovering from barely healed early 20th century cultural wounds of the beginnings of the free state. But there also appears to be a desperate need to innovate through personal expression. This is sort of a catch-22 for some people who might feel caught in the middle of the ideas that Innovation is a sort of treason, but tradition can be suffocating. Traditional music is an interesting case of this cultural conflict. On the one hand people are trying to "preserve" traditional music, which is music not associated with a particular composer, passed on by oral tradition, and played by the community on a regular basis. On the other hand, one is encouraged to add one's own style and mark to the playing such that you get jazzy type chords on guitars that are backing 'traditional' tunes, reggae beats for hornpipes, or chromatic runs being added as ornaments to reels.
And there is a simmering violence underneath it all. We didn't get out of the gym fast enough one night, and the guy who sits in the entry booth of the gym verbally abused our group all the way out the door. A bus driver, on whose bus I was sitting, messed with almost every passenger by moving the bus about three feet forward when they tried to get on, or not stopping at a bus stop until being several yards away to make the people at the bus stop run for the bus. Two young men got into a verbally abusive shouting match on the bridge outside my building, but they were shouting too incoherently for the nature of the conflict to be clear. I'm not saying anybody comes to blows, or at least I haven't been around when that's happened, but anger seems near the surface such that the careful social restraint seems very useful. One person put it that you can't give anything away because you don't know who will use it against you. She said it was important not to let on that you aspire to anything because everybody will just laugh at you if you don't get it, and never let you forget that you tried and failed. The professors here also do not believe in praise, only telling you how poorly you've done. Other people have said that you can't compliment people because it will just bring bad luck. You should call a beautiful person 'dogface' because it's just asking for trouble to say they are good looking. In my folklore class, the professor talked about how in 'the old days' (whatever that was or whenever that was), you never compliment people or cute children because then you would call the fairies attention to them and the Good Folk would take the complimented person or child away.
But doesn't this all sound familiar? Isn't it just like this in America also? The more I am in different places, the more people seem the same. Except for listening strategies. In Japan, when you listen, you have to keep up running 'listening noise', in America you have to do consistent but spaced out 'listening noise', but in Ireland, you should keep quiet until you know the other person is done talking. It took me a month to figure this one out. An Irish person commented to me recently that I wasn't like all the other Americans who are constantly interrupting.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Banka: African funk in Limerick
Hey, boyz n grrlz. We're here blogging live from the music studios of the University of limerick. I just discovered that I have wireless access in this room. Once each week, the World Music Academy here gives free concerts of traditional music, or whatever master class guest lecturers are around for the day. Every week it has been an astonishing hour of virtuoso performances of all kinds, but today is the freakin' weirdest and most wonderful so far.
It is a grey day here in the WessofIreland, and today's concert by Banka is a blast of funky sunshine in all the grey. To appreciate the contrast of west African funk in this place, you have to know that up to now, almost none of the musicians who have performed here have been amplified. These guys are TOTALLY wired and the amps are turned UP. The floor is shaking, and I can feel the bass in my chest. This is traditional music like this room has never felt before. I have mentioned before the fact that Irish audiences listen with their feet, and, indeed, while Banka positively grooves up on the little stage, the feet are going but so are the shoulders, nay the whole row of connected seats is moving.
On stage are four guys: electric piano, full drum set, a bass and an electric guitar (did I already mention they were all, like, way amplified?). They are playing pretty traditional African pop, which has a really distinctive rhythmic groove with deep resonant harmonies. It is quite a trip to hear the djembe rhythmns on a drum set. These poor guys must be freezing cuz they are all wearing big sweaters, and the singer has not taken his scarf off yet.
They are here to teach a master class in singing, and some of their students were still practicing when I came in to set up. It was quite a picture of translation. Here was this group of Irish, European-Americans, and Chinese people sort of grooving in a circle, singing these deep harmony songs from West Africa. On stage, in the middle of the singing, the lead singer gets up to dance, and he gets the audience (who have been practicing the song he is singing) to join in the call and response of "ummama me" as he sings. How not Irish is this, or what? In his huge sweater and scarf, there is the lead singer grooving all over the little stage to the whoops of the Irish crowd. Whatta trip to planet earth.
The bass player comes out to thank us and bless us, as the audience that has come to listen to him. He then invites the students up onto the stage to sing with him, and there they all are, this buncha northern Europeans and Asians, ready to participate in the sub-Saharan rhythms. They try, rather self-consciously and stiff kneed, to dance while the microphone shrieks, and they sing their new song to us. It is sweet. They forget the words and consult their pieces of paper with the phonetic transcriptions with this full full sound blasting out from behind them. Oh, wait, they have remembered the words and gotten some confidence and now we can hear them singing over the music. The lead singer and piano player, grins as he pounds out the melody: now he is actively laughing, and he comes out to join the novice students to teach them how to dance more than just shift from one foot to another. He ties his scarf around the hips of the woman nearest him, and the drummer pounds out a better rhythm for them to shift from one foot to another. The guitar player just quits playing and pulls out a video camera to video this line of melanin challenged students making a heroic effort at this brand new world they have just entered.
I love my planet. This is the part of globalization this is good, great fun. This ain't World Bank globalism: this is international craic.
It is a grey day here in the WessofIreland, and today's concert by Banka is a blast of funky sunshine in all the grey. To appreciate the contrast of west African funk in this place, you have to know that up to now, almost none of the musicians who have performed here have been amplified. These guys are TOTALLY wired and the amps are turned UP. The floor is shaking, and I can feel the bass in my chest. This is traditional music like this room has never felt before. I have mentioned before the fact that Irish audiences listen with their feet, and, indeed, while Banka positively grooves up on the little stage, the feet are going but so are the shoulders, nay the whole row of connected seats is moving.
On stage are four guys: electric piano, full drum set, a bass and an electric guitar (did I already mention they were all, like, way amplified?). They are playing pretty traditional African pop, which has a really distinctive rhythmic groove with deep resonant harmonies. It is quite a trip to hear the djembe rhythmns on a drum set. These poor guys must be freezing cuz they are all wearing big sweaters, and the singer has not taken his scarf off yet.
They are here to teach a master class in singing, and some of their students were still practicing when I came in to set up. It was quite a picture of translation. Here was this group of Irish, European-Americans, and Chinese people sort of grooving in a circle, singing these deep harmony songs from West Africa. On stage, in the middle of the singing, the lead singer gets up to dance, and he gets the audience (who have been practicing the song he is singing) to join in the call and response of "ummama me" as he sings. How not Irish is this, or what? In his huge sweater and scarf, there is the lead singer grooving all over the little stage to the whoops of the Irish crowd. Whatta trip to planet earth.
The bass player comes out to thank us and bless us, as the audience that has come to listen to him. He then invites the students up onto the stage to sing with him, and there they all are, this buncha northern Europeans and Asians, ready to participate in the sub-Saharan rhythms. They try, rather self-consciously and stiff kneed, to dance while the microphone shrieks, and they sing their new song to us. It is sweet. They forget the words and consult their pieces of paper with the phonetic transcriptions with this full full sound blasting out from behind them. Oh, wait, they have remembered the words and gotten some confidence and now we can hear them singing over the music. The lead singer and piano player, grins as he pounds out the melody: now he is actively laughing, and he comes out to join the novice students to teach them how to dance more than just shift from one foot to another. He ties his scarf around the hips of the woman nearest him, and the drummer pounds out a better rhythm for them to shift from one foot to another. The guitar player just quits playing and pulls out a video camera to video this line of melanin challenged students making a heroic effort at this brand new world they have just entered.
I love my planet. This is the part of globalization this is good, great fun. This ain't World Bank globalism: this is international craic.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
