Different Meanings of the Word "Tradition"

A quick post, mostly a note to self, about different meanings of the word "tradition". As regular readers will know, I'm all about tradition, so I'm interested in its different and overlapping senses.

(Isn't that interesting in itself, that so many words have different and overlapping senses-- as though meaning is inherently plural and fuzzy?)

So here are some meaning of "tradition" that occur to me:

1) Something like a holiday, or a fair, or a celebration, that happens at regular intervals, and is self-consciously practiced as a tradition.

2) A custom or practice that occurs regularly, although not necessarily at fixed intervals-- it could be many times a day. Shaking hands, for instance.

3) A custom or practice that occurs at intervals, but not at fixed intervals. For instance, the "gun barrel" sequence at the start of a James Bond film. Or eating popcorn at the cinema. Basically, when X happens, Y traditionally also happens.

4) A highly identifiable way of life, with discipline and rules and expectations. For instance, the Carmelite tradition.

5) The traditions of a sub-culture, such as the punk or heavy metal tradition.

6) The traditions of a whole society over time, such as the English tradition or the Irish tradition, or even the Western tradition.

7) Aesthethic traditions, such as the tradition of English poetry. What T.S. Eliot was writing about in "Tradition and the Individual Talent".

8) Aesthetic traditions that are really sub-traditions, often not perceived straight away. For instance, that Harry Potter is in the tradition of Enid Blyton. 

9) Local or family stories passed orally from generation to generation. "There's a local tradition that Shakespeare once stayed at the inn."

10) Intellectual traditions, such as the Marxist tradition or the Jungian tradition.

11) A "tradition" meaning a corpus of law or interpretation; the Common Law tradition, the Westminster parliamentary tradition, the Talmudic tradition.

12) An old-fashioned or customary way of doing something, used as a simple adjective: "She was raised in a very traditional household."

I suppose there are many more. Any obvious ones I'm leaving out?

Advent

And so our Advent journey begins!

I swiped the picture above from a blog called Fr. Julian's blog. Curious to see if it was still updated, I found Fr. Julian had moved to a new blog, and its latest post is this excellent suggestion to counter "Black Friday"  with "White Friday". 

Fr. Julian isn't specific on what this would entail, but I think one good suggestion is to avoid all shopping (except groceries etc.) on that day.

Yes, I love traditions. Almost all traditions. "Black Friday" is one tradition I think we can do without.

What Was on TV in my Home Growing Up (Part One)

Note: As has fairly frequently happened on this blog, I started writing this as a standalone blog post and decided towards the end that it would have to be the first instalment in a series.

I'm a compulsive compiler of lists and records. For instance, I have a spreadsheet of all the films I can remember seeing, which I regularly update. It's probably an unhealthy habit. I don't want anything to go unchronicled.

Recently, it occurred to me to list all the TV shows which were watched in my home, growing up. Obviously this is going to be a "dynamic list", as they say these days-- or an ongoing task, as I'd be more inclined to put it myself.

I've been ashamed of watching television my entire life. I think its influence on society was catastrophic. Still, that horse has long since bolted. And, although the initial and overall effect of TV on society was bad, that's not to say everything about it was or is bad.

The TV in my own home was constantly on. My father was a TV addict. He was also perhaps the most well-read man I've ever known, which is especially impressive given that he left school aged eleven and did manual jobs for most of his working years. He could, and did, recite long passages from Shakespeare, Yeats, and a whole host of other authors. The flat was full of books (hundreds or perhaps even thousands of books) that he'd bought. But he was also a TV addict, and would fall asleep watching television every night. Not only that, but he'd instantly wake up if you switched it off! To be fair, he was also a current affairs addict, so that was a big part of his TV viewing. But he watched pretty much everything else, too.

So TV is the background to all my domestic memories. And I didn't go out much as a child, being quite timid and shy.

Although I grew up in a housing estate that was euphemistically termed "disadvantaged", we did have one advantage-- at a time when most of Ireland had only the two Irish TV channels, we always had the British channels as well. Then we got satellite TV as soon as it came along. According to Wikipedia, "The Ballymun Flats were the first homes with cable television in Ireland". When I first heard about satellite TV, I genuinely assumed the studios were in a satellite orbiting the earth (although I quickly worked out this wasn't the case and felt silly for thinking it).

For many years, our television was a black and white portable. My father would even watch snooker on it. It had no remote control. In fact, even the dial had come off at one stage. You had to change the channels using a pair of pliers.

Well, enough background. I've broken my list into several categories. The first is...

Shows That Were a Big Deal in my Childhood and Teens

...either because I loved them, or because several members of my family loved them.

The top spot undoubtedly goes to Star Trek: The Next Generation. I can hardly exaggerate the influence this show had on me. I wrote a whole blog post about it.

Although I can remember watching the original series, I barely understood what was happening. The only thing I really remember is the closing credits sequence. For me, The Next Generation is the gold standard of Star Trek. In fact, I've come to pretty much hate the original series, rather unfairly, because every time I mention Star Trek that's what people bring up. It's as though people started talking about Sexton Blake every time you mentioned Sherlock Holmes.

I could write reams and reams about TNG-- so I won't. I used to watch it with all three of my brothers, the only show that brought us together like that.

I also watched Deep Space Nine, which I also liked, but not as much. Much later on, in my adulthood, I watched Voyager and really liked it (possibly more than TNG, although it could never have the same impact). I was derided for this at the time but Voyager is now the most streamed Star Trek.

After TNG, Fawlty Towers was probably the biggest show in my childhood. Me, my parents, and one of my brothers would all watch it together. We not only watched it on TV but also rented it from the video shop, and each episode had the sense of an occasion. My father always treated it as the pinaccle of TV comedy, and I think he was right. My mother would often quote lines from "Waldorf Salad" (there seemed to be an unspoken consensus that this was the greatest episode, although "The Germans" was also a contender).

Only Fools and Horses was another big show, although it didn't have the same sense of event as Fawlty Towers, perhaps because it was more long-running. (Still, it might surprise you that there were only sixty-four episodes made altogether.) My father always said that the show declined when it introduced enduring romantic interests for Del and Rodney, but I disagree. I think it actually got a lot better then. It became "dramedy" rather than pure comedy, which I like.

To round off this category, there is The Late Late Show. This was like the fireside of the Irish nation; its host Gay Byrne was known as "Uncle Gaybo". I often fell asleep on Friday evenings watching it, or perhaps just sitting in the room with it on, the weekend stretching ahead of me.

Children's Shows

The Den was more a "strand" than a show. It was children's after-school programming, comprised of various different shows, all presented by a human host. It really hit its stride when the human host was joined by two puppets, aliens called Zig and Zag, who became a phenomenon in Ireland. Later there was a turkey with a broad Dublin accent called Dustin, who was even better. All three puppets were mildly subversive and therefore massively popular.

There were also "strands" of children's programming on British channels, like Fun Factory on the new Sky channel.

I can't remember which "strands" showed which programmes, except that The Den must have shown the few homegrown Irish productions.

There was one famous (or infamous) show called Bosco which centred on a puppet who lived in a box. He had red hair and a squeaky accent. I really hated Bosco but watched it anyway. It was for young children.

There was a pop-culture centred show for teenagers called Jo Maxi, which is Dublin slang for "taxi". I didn't like this much and usually didn't watch it, but it was on anyway.

The most famous Irish children's TV show of all time is Wanderley Wagon, but I only have very vague memories of watching this once or twice.

Much less famous is Anything Goes, a sort of "zany" variety show which I liked as I always aspired to be zany and eccentric. But even as a kid I could see it was pretty poor stuff. 

So much for the Irish productions.

One of my all-time favourite cartoons was Ulysses 31, a Japanese science fiction cartoon which relocated Greek myths to space. It was excellent. Ulysses and his crew were trying to get home (to Earth), and I think "the journey home" is the most powerful narrative of all. It featured a blue-faced alien girl called Yumi, who competes with Diana from V as my first crush of all time. (Another show that exposed me to Greek myth was Odysseus, the Greatest Hero of them All, presented by Tony Robinson, though I only have vague memories of this.)

Shamefully, I really loved a cartoon called Beverly Hills Teens, which was just about a bunch of rich teens in Beverly Hills.

As this blog post is already too long, I'm just going to close it off with a list of children's shows I remember from my childhood, and move onto other categories in a future post.

Cities of Gold. From the people who made Ulysses 31, but on this occasion followed a bunch of kids in pre-Columbian America, at the time of its discovery. Had magical elements.

Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. A very strange science-fiction show which involved motorcycling heroes fighting plant people.

Danger Mouse. Not really my thing, though the London backdrop appealed to my anglophilia.

Batman (Adam West version). I honestly didn't realize this was tongue-in-cheek and got frustrated that the villains escaped from the State Penitentiary every week. What was the point?

You Can't Do That on Television: Mildly subversive Canadian TV show which I enjoyed.

Chockablock: a British educational show for young children, where a presenter drove around a room full of machines in a vehicle like a go-kart. This is so obscure that, until the internet came along, I thought I'd imagined it or misremembered some other show-- even though I had a very accurate memory, as it turned out. But nobody else seemed to remember it!

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I remember He-Man's backstory really bothered me, as it seemed full of contradictions, so I came up with my own alternative version once, in the school playground.

Transformers. I loved the toys and the comics, but the cartoon was never as good, though I wanted to like it.

The Trap Door was a rather witty and self-aware British animated series involving monsters that emerged from the titular trap-door. Loving anything to do with mysterious doors or portals, I gobbled it up.

A list of kids' shows which I watched, but I don't really have much to say about: Thundercats, Top Cat, Alvin and the Chipmunks (I hated it, but still watched it), Count Duckula, Dogtanian and the Three Muskahounds, The Flintstones, the Jetsons, MASK, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Dungeons and Dragons, Fraggle Rock, The Amazing Adventures of Morph (which disturbed me), Bananaman, Rainbow, Sports Billy, Button Moon, Wacky Races.

Wow, compiling that list makes me realize I watched a lot of trash. And there's probably many more titles to add. The only thing that consoles me is that, going through a list of 1980's children's programmes on Wikipedia, there are many more that I never saw.

One peculiar footnote: for someone who was to become such a reactionary, I had absolutely no interest in the vintage black-and-white TV shows that were shown as part of kid's programming. I mean shows like The Beverly Hillbillies or Get Smart or (bizarrely) Mrs Muir and the Ghost. I can remember the title credits, but never watched more than a few minutes of any of them. There was one show called Comedy Capers, which was a compilation of supposedly funny scenes from old black-and-white slapstick films. I felt complete and utter withering contempt for this. I regarded it as the bottom of the bottom of the barrel, and wondered if anybody actually watched it!

Favourite Poems: The Man from God Knows Where by Florence Wilson

The Irish nationalist tradition has given rise to a great wealth of poetry and ballad-- untold thousands of ballads and poems. Many (perhaps most) are indifferent, or even doggerel. Of the rest, their literary value is on a continuum-- many have the charming crudity appropriate to ballads, many have flashes of brilliance in this or that line or verse, and some of them are gems.

Here is a gem: "The Man from God Knows Where" by Florence Wilson, first published in 1918.

This poem featured in an anthology entitled Rich and Rare, which I read again and again in my teens. Yes, it's a long poem, and it's in dialect (though easily understood dialect), but I think it's worth reading. It's astonishingly accomplished, subtle, and even polished (despite the homespun register it's written in). One thing that lifts it above most patriotic poetry is the repeated shift in mood and atmosphere which occurs throughout the poem. This also makes the last, rousing verse all the more powerful.

Another thing that lifts this poem above most patriotic poetry is the rhyme pattern-- not the usual ABAB or AABB. Judge for yourself, but I think it gives the last line of every stanza a note of anticipation, which works very well given the subject matter.

It's about Thomas Russell, a leader of the 1798 rebellion.

Calling this one of my "favourite poems" is a bit of a stretch, but it's one that I greatly admire, so I include it in the series. It fuifils one of the criteria for poems I really love: that lines from it often come into my head unbidden. For instance, when some project or plan is foiled, I often find myself thinking of these lines:

But no French ships sailed in Cloughey bay
And we heard the black news on a harvest day

That the Cause was lost again

Although, to be honest, I always remembered the first line of that quotation as "But no ships sailed into Botany bay". Apparently Botany Bay is in Australia. I didn't know that. It might as well have been in Ireland for all I knew. My ignorance of geography is colossal, despite many efforts to Improve it.

I know nothing about Florence Wilsdon except that she wrote at least one magnificent poem. (And it's not at all what one might think of as a "girly" poem, which is neither a bad nor a good thing in itself-- but it's impressive for a poem written so convinciningly from such a masculine perspective to be written by a woman.)

The Man from God Knows Where by Florence Wilsdon

Into our townlan' on a night of snow

Rode a man from God knows where;

None of us bade him stay or go,

nor deemed him friend, nor damned him foe,

But we stabled his big roan mare;

For in our townlan' we're decent folk,

And if he didn't speak, why none of us spoke,

And we sat till the fire burned low.

We're a civil sort in our wee place

So we made the circle wide

Round Andy Lemon's cheerful blaze,

And wished the man his length of days

And a good end to his ride.

He smiled in under his slouchy hat,

Says he: 'There's a bit of a joke in that,

fFor we ride different ways.'

The whiles we smoked we watched him stare

From his seat fornenst the glow.

I nudged Joe Moore: 'You wouldn't dare

To ask him who he's for meeting there,

And how far he has got to go?'

And Joe wouldn't dare, nor Wully Scott,

And he took no drink - neither cold nor hot,

This man from God knows where.

It was closing time, and late forbye,

When us ones braved the air.

I never saw worse (may I live or die)

Than the sleet that night, an' I says, says I:

'You'll find he's for stopping there.'

But at screek o'day, through the gable pane

I watched him spur in the peltin' rain,

An' I juked from his rovin' eye.

Two winters more, then the Trouble year,

When the best that a man could feel

Was the pike that he kept in hidin's near,

Till the blood o' hate an' the blood o' fear

Would be redder nor rust on the steel.

Us ones quet from mindin' the farms

Let them take what we gave wi' the weight o' our arms

From Saintfield to Kilkeel.

In the time o' the Hurry, we had no lead

We all of us fought with the rest

An' if e'er a one shook like a tremblin' reed,

None of us gave neither hint nor heed,

Nor ever even'd we'd guessed.

We men of the North had a word to say,

An'we said it then, in our own dour way,

An' we spoke as we thought was best.

All Ulster over, the weemin cried

For the stan'in' crops on the lan'.

Many's the sweetheart and many's the bride

Would liefer ha' gone to where he died,

aAd ha' mourned her lone by her man.

But us ones weathered the thick of it

And we used to dander along and sit

In Andy's, side by side.

What with discourse goin' to and fro,

the night would be wearin' thin,

yet never so late when we rose to go

but someone would say: 'do ye min' thon' snow,

an 'the man who came wanderin'in?'

and we be to fall to the talk again,

if by any chance he was one o' them

The man who went like the win'.

Well 'twas gettin' on past the heat o' the year

When I rode to Newtown fair;

I sold as I could (the dealers were near

Only three pounds eight for the Innish steer,

An' nothin' at all for the mare!)

I met M'Kee in the throng o' the street,

Says he: 'The grass has grown under our feet

Since they hanged young Warwick here.',

And he told me that Boney had promised help

To a man in Dublin town.

Says he: 'If you've laid the pike on the shelf,

You'd better go home hot-fut by yourself,

An' once more take it down.'

So by Comber road I trotted the grey

And never cut corn until Killyleagh

Stood plain on the risin' groun'.

For a wheen o' days we sat waitin' the word

To rise and go at it like men,

But no French ships sailed into Cloughey Bay

And we heard the black news on a harvest day

That the cause was lost again;

And Joey and me, and Wully Boy Scott,

We agreed to ourselves we'd as lief as not

Ha' been found in the thick o' the slain.

By Downpatrick goal I was bound to fare

On a day I'll remember, feth;

For when I came to the prison square

The people were waitin' in hundreds there

An' you wouldn't hear stir nor breath!

For the sodgers were standing, grim an' tall,

Round a scaffold built there foment the wall,

An' a man stepped out for death!

I was brave an' near to the edge of the throng,

Yet I knowed the face again,

An' I knowed the set, an' I knowed the walk

An' the sound of his strange up-country talk,

For he spoke out right an' plain.

Then he bowed his head to the swinging rope,

Whiles I said 'Please God' to his dying hope

And 'Amen' to his dying prayer

That the wrong would cease and the right prevail,

For the man that they hanged at Downpatrick gaol

Was the Man from God knows where!

Brave New World Dystopianism and 1984 Dystopianism

I'm reading a dystopian novel right now, and it's got me thinking of two different sorts of dystopianism; Brave New World dystopianism and 1984 dystopianism. 

Both novels are masterpieces, of course. I read Brave New World when I was very young (maybe even pre-teen). Although I've never re-read it, many aspects of it have stuck with me. I didn't read 1984 until my twenties, but I've read it several times since. In purely literary terms, I think it's a much better work-- perhaps even the novel of the century after Lord of the Rings, in my view. And I've seen the Peter Cushing film version (also a classic) at least twice.

1984 is, of course, a self-conscious response to Brave New World, and they could be contrasted in many ways. But right now I'm thinking of a particular contrast: the contrast between a dystopia that works all too well, and is horrifying for that reason, and a dsytopia that doesn't work at all, and is horrifying for that reason.

My contrast could be argued with. You could say, rightly enough, that the dsytopia in 1984 does indeed work; that it works perfectly in the way the Party intends it. I concede that. But still, the Party is lying to its people, while the World State of Brave New World doesn't lie to its people (as far as I can remember). It delivers a degrading happiness and a techno-utopia, while the society of 1984 is decaying in every way, including scientifically.

In other words, it's a society that's gone horribly right, and a society that's gone horribly wrong-- to borrow terms from the website TV Tropes.

Although I prefer 1984 to Brave New World, I've always been braced for a Brave New World dystopia rather than an Orwellian one.

For instance, opponents of the European Union often say that the project is doomed to failure because you can't yoke so many different cultures and economies together. But my fear is that the EU will work, that it will go horribly right; that the free movement of peoples and all the other homogenizing tendencies within the EU will indeed erode the languages, cultures, and customs of the individual nations.

Similarly, my fear with artificial intelligence is that it will achieve all the things its champions predict it will. (Although my fear of this has rather diminished recently, since there seems to be widespread acceptance that it's already plateaud-- for now. My fear of the this long predated the current surge of AI, when I read an article by Alan Turing insisting that machines could become intelligent. He should know, I thought.)

I realize this is a difference of temperament rather than an intellectual one.

As a bit of a postcript, Brave New World was actually my very first encounter with the magic of Shakespeare's language. A few Shakespearean quotations used in it captivated me. I've wondered since whether this is because of their inherent beauty of because they came with Shakespeare's prestige, or both.

The first and most powerful is from King Lear: "The wheel has come full circle; I am here". The drama of that still fires my imagination. (Except I remembered it as "the wheel has turned full circle", and I actually prefer that.)

And then there are these lines, quoted from The Tempest: "Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will play about my ears, and sometimes voices."

And of course, the line from The Tempest which gives it its title: "Oh brave new world, that has such people in't!".

I've always said The Tempest is my favourite Shakespeare play, although I feel a bit pretentious saying it, since I've never even seen a film version, and I've only read it a few times. It's the atmosphere as much as anything else-- and the idea that has grown up that Prospero is Shakespeare achieving a serenity in his final years, as evoked by Louis MacNeice:

When hardly bothering
To be a dramatist, the Master turned away

From his taut plots and complex characters
To tapestried romances, conjuring
With rainbow names and handfuls of sea-spray
And from then turned out happy ever-afters.

Another Bad Joke

Who was the most popular comedian in Anglo-Saxon England?

Woady Allen!

An Entry from Tony Benn's Diary

Monday, 21st February 2005

"Got up at 6:45 because I wanted to be the first man in the Notting Hill supermarket in Notting Hill Gate. There was nobody hanging about, but I put myself in front of the door, and when the door was unlocked, I got in first. There were a lot of managers all clapping. They had these cup-a-soups, which I love. They also had ice cream. They had little pizzas. They had vegetarian burgers. I was really pleased."

Even radical leftists have their endearing side.