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.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Hard Times
The news lately has remained so bad you could laugh for crying. As tax revenues have dried up, the country's most ambitious schemes for the future have shut down one-by-one. Manufacturing plants keep closing; urban redevelopment schemes and support for the arts, road works, and soaring bridges all dematerializing. The six public libraries in my ancestral County Monaghan were told they could buy no new books in 2009, none. In the more prosperous county of Galway, the book budget was cut by only 85 percent. Our local butcher began selling trays of hearts and tongues. Porridge reappeared on breakfast menus.
In February, the police raided Anglo Irish Bank, where a "Golden Circle" of directors had helped themselves to millions of euros in sneaky interest-free "loans" in order to purchase a huge chunk of the bank for their own delectation. Not that this bunch were good at maths: they had also extended loans of more than 500 million euros each to fifteen property developers who now had virtually nothing left between them. The day of the bank raid, February 24, 2009, the Irish stock market fell for the eleventh straight session. The Irish Examiner reported:
Dealers said investors at home and abroad were selling Ireland across the board. "We get on our clients in the US and we are trying to sell stocks in Kerry Group or Paddy Power and they are just blanking you," one Dublin based trader said. "They are saying 'Irish? We don't want to know.'" Another trader said: "It's as if the Celtic Tiger never happened."
By the next morning, the entire appreciation of Irish equities over the fourteen years of the boom disappeared into thin air. Everyone could feel the sky falling, and the populace retreated into their well-honed art of doom-saying. An international survey suddenly ranked the Irish, crowned the happiest people on earth in 2004, the most pessimistic of all Western nationalities.
With the coming of summer, the national mood grew more puzzling. As if by some unspoken agreement, people suddenly seemed to stop talking about the appalling economic news -- which remained more relentlessly dire than that of almost any country in the developed world. You'd pick up the newspaper and hear another dozen reports as to how the sky was falling in. Housing Prices in New Collapse! Foreign Travel Down 40 Percent as Tour Operators Die! Ireland's Debt Worst in EU!
"Flights Over Island Twisting Upside Down, Passengers Falling Out Into Mid-Sky and Saying They Will Never Come Back. Radioactive Gaels Gone Mad on Ground," my friend Ray Lloyd presented his own headlines in the pub the other day. Then he scoffed: "Fuck, we've been here before."
Tourists who come to Ireland marvel at the culture's ceaseless talking. But to understand the place more deeply you have to understand its silences and they can be almost fathomless, creepy doors leading to almost a national cavern of the unsaid. Changing the subject without warning, exiting a conversation for an unexplained walk, going vacant or dreamy or latching into song in the middle of someone else's sentences, these are all ancient Irish tricks. That people have stopped discussing the news meant something, make no mistake. Perhaps the collective psyche has retreated into older habits of stoicism and detachment or perhaps what the romantic poet John Keats described as Negative Capability. "That," he explained, "is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." I dunno -- today's headlines bring more dreary tidings: fees for every time you turn on the water tap, a new property tax, end to the celebrated Artists' Tax Exemption that has brought so many writers and artists to live (or remain) in Ireland... Is this canoe going backwards?
In February, the police raided Anglo Irish Bank, where a "Golden Circle" of directors had helped themselves to millions of euros in sneaky interest-free "loans" in order to purchase a huge chunk of the bank for their own delectation. Not that this bunch were good at maths: they had also extended loans of more than 500 million euros each to fifteen property developers who now had virtually nothing left between them. The day of the bank raid, February 24, 2009, the Irish stock market fell for the eleventh straight session. The Irish Examiner reported:
Dealers said investors at home and abroad were selling Ireland across the board. "We get on our clients in the US and we are trying to sell stocks in Kerry Group or Paddy Power and they are just blanking you," one Dublin based trader said. "They are saying 'Irish? We don't want to know.'" Another trader said: "It's as if the Celtic Tiger never happened."
By the next morning, the entire appreciation of Irish equities over the fourteen years of the boom disappeared into thin air. Everyone could feel the sky falling, and the populace retreated into their well-honed art of doom-saying. An international survey suddenly ranked the Irish, crowned the happiest people on earth in 2004, the most pessimistic of all Western nationalities.
With the coming of summer, the national mood grew more puzzling. As if by some unspoken agreement, people suddenly seemed to stop talking about the appalling economic news -- which remained more relentlessly dire than that of almost any country in the developed world. You'd pick up the newspaper and hear another dozen reports as to how the sky was falling in. Housing Prices in New Collapse! Foreign Travel Down 40 Percent as Tour Operators Die! Ireland's Debt Worst in EU!
"Flights Over Island Twisting Upside Down, Passengers Falling Out Into Mid-Sky and Saying They Will Never Come Back. Radioactive Gaels Gone Mad on Ground," my friend Ray Lloyd presented his own headlines in the pub the other day. Then he scoffed: "Fuck, we've been here before."
Tourists who come to Ireland marvel at the culture's ceaseless talking. But to understand the place more deeply you have to understand its silences and they can be almost fathomless, creepy doors leading to almost a national cavern of the unsaid. Changing the subject without warning, exiting a conversation for an unexplained walk, going vacant or dreamy or latching into song in the middle of someone else's sentences, these are all ancient Irish tricks. That people have stopped discussing the news meant something, make no mistake. Perhaps the collective psyche has retreated into older habits of stoicism and detachment or perhaps what the romantic poet John Keats described as Negative Capability. "That," he explained, "is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." I dunno -- today's headlines bring more dreary tidings: fees for every time you turn on the water tap, a new property tax, end to the celebrated Artists' Tax Exemption that has brought so many writers and artists to live (or remain) in Ireland... Is this canoe going backwards?
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