Living Irish Literature

The last few days ducked in  I did to the latest Irish literature festival here in Cork and  many transporting moments were afoot. For me, the thing kicked off when the lovely Tom McCarthy, an extraorinarily gifted  and meticulous poet who doubles as a guardian angel for many Irish writers -- a friend to every person he ever met -- gave an introductory speech for the launch of Theo Dorgan's new book Greek. Dorgan is himself a celebrated Irish minstrel who is according to John Montague "a blend of street warrior and muse poet." Said to formerly sport dreadlocks, he's inhabited modern Greece in his body and ancient Greece in his soul, but the mythology he celebrates all harkens back to Ireland...

"Where every man is a walking myth" or something like that he said.

Another memorable moment was provided by Martina Evans, a rather spellbinging lady of the pen and voice, who held the audience rapt for a long time -- except for unruly elements led by the apparently eternally self-mythologizing git of Desmond O'Grady still crawling up the backside of Ezra Pound and harkening to his hayday cameo appearance as Mr. Drunken Irish Poet in La Dolce Vita. His The Wandering Celt, he informed all, was legit, because he (almost alone) was a true Celt and thus an emissary of civilization, as opposed to Americans, who he repeatedly characterized as "barbarians."

Anyway, Martina, who grew up in a pub/shop/petrol station/house outside Macroom (home of Macrumpians), mixed poems and seanachie anecdotes about her remarkable upbringing which encansupulated an Ireland gone magically -- wonderful stuff altogether.

A mention, too, to Conal Creedon. He is the A No. 1 writer of Cork, in my estimation, and absolutely should be known more broadly internationally; he has the ear for every corner conversation, every magnifient touch of endearing absurdity he encounters. He's known well enough in Ireland, but should have longer stilts by far. Find him, try him.  He went on for a half hour about his father's years' long construction of his own coffin and had every single mug laughing in stitches -- about his father's intricately planned demise.

Writer course material, what? Along those lines the Munster Literature Centre is offering a 1000 euro prize for a single poem somebody in the tribunal happens to like best, even if it's written by a barbarian American or Hun. Apparently, there must be some link to the spirit of Gregory O'Donoghue, a recently deceased Cork poet,  deceased in Rilke like fashion, who was a barmate and I would like to think friend of mine. Greg was a gentle man with a cunning eye and he would be laughing in his grave that you might grab the thousand, get sent free to Cork, and paid to drink for days in his honour, which is about the size of it.

Chalk this whole experience down to the category -- What I Love Best About Ireland.

I mean -- that you can dream about a man you never met and get paid for it. Gotta be happy here, send me 10% if you get it, 20% if I coach you.

Irish Poet, Cork Poet

Passing Strange.

Mystery Over Golf Ball Found in Dead Man’s Throat

By Cormac O’Keeffe
Tuesday, February 16, 2010

GARDAÍ ruled out claims that pathologists had failed to spot a golf ball lodged down a dead man’s throat.
Garda sources said the ball must have been put in the man’s throat following the postmortem at St James’s Hospital in Dublin’s south inner city.

The focus of the investigation is the period after the postmortem and before embalming at a nearby undertakers, where the unsettling discovery was made.

Gardaí told the Irish Examiner that ambulance staff had attempted to resuscitate the man when they initially went to his aid and there was no golf ball there at that time.

"It definitely wasn’t there at postmortem, it couldn’t have been," said a Garda source.

Gardaí said there was a couple of days between the postmortem and embalming at the funeral home.
Gardaí have spoken to all hospital staff who would have had access to the body.

"Nothing has come to light. We have almost exhausted enquiries at this time," said the Garda source.

He said they are going through CCTV footage and the investigation is ongoing. The hospital is carrying out its own investigation.

"It is a most unsavoury case and very insensitive to the family," said the garda, but he pointed out there was no crime involved.

From the Irish Examiner.

Avoid Irish Golf Balls

Any Takers?

Just in from the Evening Echo in Cork: "Lady seeks gentleman, around 6', weight 14-16 stone, looks as normal as possible"...

Friends Curious

Notice that fellow with the palm crushing the guffaw off his gob on the portal photo above, stage left. He is one of the most erudite collectors of rare books in Ireland and championed an anarchist campaign, in his impatience for common politics, to elect a toothless man of the streets  for mayor of the Second City-- Bernie Murphy, "the People's Champion!" -- and made sure the campaign won. But to get it lined up just right,  Raymondo brought Bernie to San Francisco to fall under  the auspices of the second-most anarchistic journalist in America, Warren Hinckle (Castro's confessor) with a team of boxer dogs to scout out the best set of fake teeth to be had in California at that time. The mayor Feinstein presented them with a check for $1 million, but that bounced.

Ireland Would Make You Think

Irish Senate

Above, if I can figure this thing out, they are a bunch of geniuses. The nicest  thing about each is that they know nearly everything all by themselves just by waking up, and if that isn't good enough, they enjoy a near miraculous process of osmosis that comes on in a particularly excitable and shakeable state in the most watery country on earth -- what they don't think they fully know one minute ago they will be quite certain they have exhausted every last bit of knowledge about  as they sip quietly for perhaps 30 to 60 seconds further. One of the best things about moving to Ireland in mid-life is that you are nearly assured of being surrounded by geniuses. They will come into your house for coffee when you are painting your kitchen, and watch you closely. They will notice the size of your brush and they will compliment you upon your taste in paint colour, while asking nonchalantly whether your wife maybe had a thing to do with that expert choice.

If you do not personally stir the milk and often revolting amounts of sugar into their cups promptly, they will say nothing, but perhaps begin to squint. Soon they will be out on the streets, talking with the corner boys, and eventually in the pubs. Then the wrong size of your paint brush will come to life as a "hot topic" -- because of course it reveals the deepest flaws in your judgement in moving to Ireland in mid life and daruing to say too many words about the boyos.

But examine this photo closely, and you will see what the world loves about the Irish. They are spontaneous and they can warm almost faster than they can chill. There are lovely men hunkered in around this table -- Shocks (in teeth) who is just called "Shocks" for no reason I know, Tom the ancient mariner (in blue) who has sailed every sea as a first mate on giant merchant marine vessels but also as a bo'sun on three-masted schooners, Hugh McPhillips, the property auctioneer friend of mine who introduced the gala, and is friends with "Champagne Gerry" who made a killing off the boom and generously celebrated the launch of Jaywalking with the Irish in his Boqueria, Barcelona-styled pub this night. My friend Peter Harding was standing on top of the bar snapping pictures wildly. Brother Karl was responding as if he was demeneted. Oh what a night.

You don't get these nights in Waterbury, Connecticut, USA, where I am from.  And even if I "wind them up," I love these people, and that's the truth.

Dangerous Indeed

Enchanted Ireland

Living in Ireland is always an adventure for sure. They should issue hard hats, worry beads, and ear plugs at the every airport. Just when everybody has been fretting to death about the economy, the next pint, and maybe global warming if they are good at the long face, we have had weeks of unprecedented freeze alternating with sudden thaws topped by torrential rain and then the shakey-bakey with  soggy oozing from the motherland of bogs toppling whatever annoyed it up above and chewing roads to pot-hole journeys to hell. We had our car flooded here in Cork on a road with a roiling two feet of water and no warning signs or Gardai to wave you away -- but that was small change compared to the havoc played throughout the city when the electric monopoly of ESB decided to open their damn dam floodgates in the middle of the night without telling nearly a soul beforehand.

Then it was back to the deep freeze and two nights later the pipes burst in our Waterford cottage in Ballyduff and what a mess. The winds whipped up the next day and twisted the TV dish around on our roof so that it wouldn't stop broadcasting pictures of people I was trying to avoid. Then it thawed, and with renovations going on next door in Cork beside our 130 year-old garden wall, it fell the day after. I got talking to an insurance guy, and his take was unique: "This could be the stimulus we need to jump start the economy."

Holy Mother of Johannes, and Mary and all the saints, it is indeed dangerous to "travel beyond this point" -- and such a step is not advised lightly. But oh yes, life remains interesting on the enchanted isle.

Posted by David Monagan.

A Century of Silence: Echoes from a Massachusetts Landscape

At once emblematic and ultimately shocking, A Century of Silence: Echoes from a Massachusetts Landscape is the poignant story of the vanishing of an Irish family abroad decades after the Famine. Such severance of course affected nearly every household on this island, and encounters with fresh travails on "the other side" were scarcely rare. In fact, a great many immigrants suffered from such heartbreaks and failures, alcoholism and family schisms that they stopped all communication home. In author Norman Mongan's case, an entire family line disappeared.

Feeling a deepening void after his parents died, the Mullingar-native -- a former advertising exec in Paris and only child -- became obsessed with a kind of epic ghost-hunting quest, in the opposite direction of the typical Irish roots story. What, he wanted to know, had happened to all his great uncles and aunts (and their offspring) after fleeing to Boston at the end of the nineteenth century? Mongan had no letters, addresses, or pictures of any living American relatives to connect with. His memoir concerns his passionate twenty-year digging through distant clues and revelations.

A relentless researcher, Mongan soon discovered that it was the daughters of Erin who often led each family's exodus: 60 percent of the late 19th century emigrants to Massachusetts were women. A great number became live-in maids, which meant they were nuns in new stripes, too shut-in to court, marry or reproduce. The Colleens withered on the vine, as did two of the author's grand-aunts. Or they worked in shoe factories, like his aunts Catherine and Maria-Theresa, and took to fanatical Catholicism.

But the center of A Century of Silence concerns the more shocking tale of the author's grand-uncle Michael Mongan's spiralling out of control in the promised land. A former Mullingar railway worker, he contracted syphilis in Dublin's Monto, and then, in shame and hope, fled for America where he married another Irish immigrant. What fascinated Mongan was that the man's name was never mentioned in Mullingar again for the next hundred years. Why?

Mongan, author of The History of the Guitar in Jazz and The Menapia Quest, dug through distant archives, government records and old newspaper accounts fraught with dead ends before ultimately discovering that his family's Odysseus cracked under the strain of emigration and ultimately hanged himself in a Worchester, Massachusetts lunatic asylum. That dire institution had become a kind of collection point for no-hope Irish emigrants. Though a stolid worker on Boston's initially horse-drawn mass transportation system and clever, the man developed a serious drink problem, aggravated by the death of his first child from cholera.

Michael Mongan's next fell off the side of a transport carriage, suffering sufficient brain trauma to induce seizures and bring out the haunted face of the struggling emigrant in South Boston. When bingeing, he grew abusive and deluded, and occasionally started threatening his growing family with a gun, and put his dead daughter's coffin plate over the family's meagre flat's door. So began a pattern of confinements and escapes from the loony bin.

Bravery and compelling sociological analysis, with aching personal details, come with this part of Mongan's telling -- which reads like a window into a side of Irish emigration that has been rarely exorcized with such immediacy. Letting a skeleton out of a closet produces shock waves

Ultimately, A Century of Silence takes uplifting turns as Mongan rejoices in meeting living relatives who welcome him into their lives -- his spiritual journey paid off. The book is not seamless, as some sections suffer from excess detail and structural imperfections, but this book is a rare fish and an eye-opener. Along the way, one meets a curious cast, including the ghost of a clairvoyant aunt with a direct line to the Virgin Mary. The streets of immigration were paved with longing, not gold.

"Bring us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free" indeed.

Review by David Monagan.