Are you a Nationalist?

Very often, I hear people talk and write about nationalism as if it's some rather extreme doctrine, like anarchism or communism or complete pacifism.

Personally, I don't think this is true of nationalism at all. I think most people have been nationalists throughout history, even if they didn't use the word.

In my view, if you can answer "Yes" to the following two questions, you're a nationalist:

1) Do you think the nation-state should be the basic unit of international politics, rather than a World Government, or supranational organizations, or empires, or some other system? Do you think nations should have fundamental sovereignty?

(People sometimes quibble about sovereignty, pointing out its inevitable limitations. Everything has limitations. I don't think this is a serious objection.)

2) Would you prefer that national cultures should persist? That the French should continue to speak French and make celebrities of bad philosophers, that the Irish should continue to play hurling and apologize every six seconds, and so on?

(Tiresome objections that "you can't preserve a culture in aspic" are often advanced here. The question is not: "Would you prefer that national cultures should never change or evolve?". The question is whether you would prefer them to substantially persist through those changes.)

I think most people would answer in the affirmative to these two questions, and that most people are therefore nationalists. 

Unseasonal

I tried to change the blog's colours to purple for Lent, but for some reason I've lost the ability to do it. At least, I can only do it partially.

Which reminds me. Here's a word that never ceases to delight me-- season. I think there's immense poetry in the word. I would write a meditation on it, similar to my meditation on the word "midnight"-- but I don't have time right now.

Poem for Shrove Tuesday

Our Blessed Lord, the Man of Sorrows,
Went to the Cross for every man's sake.
So let us start our fast tomorrow
But for today let's have some pancakes.

The Pedant's Gambit

I propose that this term should be used for that tiresome challenge one often meets in debate: "Define what you mean by x..."

(I can only find one "hit" of the term on the internet, and not in that context. So I hereby claim its invention.)

I'm very suspicious of the whole business of definition. My standard response to this is: "Define what you mean by define."

Every definition rests on terms which themselves require definition. It's a silly game.

Of course, there's a place for definition in law and other specialist contexts. But even here, things get fuzzy.

I was a member of a jury once. I remember the barrister giving us the following (apparently celebrated) example of what "reasonable doubt" entails. If a person walks into a building all wet, you can know it's raining beyond a reasonable doubt. They might be filming a movie outside and have some kind of rain machine, but that's highly unlikely.

I consider that fuzzy.

People only play the definitions game to score points and throw their opponent, anyway. We all use words every day without demanding definitions and we generally understand each other.

I suppose an exception is words and phrases that do have several different usages, such as "sanction". (I've been married to an American for thirteen years and we still occasionally hit the Shavian obstacle of "two countries divided by a common language." As in; "Why was there a buoy in the water? Why didn't someone pull him out?" But rarely.)

Yes, I've been arguing with someone on the internet. (I try not to.)

St. John Paul II speaks about Ireland, in English!

Here's an intriguing and delightful little clip that popped up on my YouTube feed. St. John Paul II, on board a plane about to land in Ireland, says that he prays for Ireland every day, and that it's been near to his heart since he was a boy. He also teases the journalist a little. His personal charm and warmth is very evident. We also learn what he had for breakfast that day. The answer will STUN you! (Well, not really, but it's interesting all the same.)

I was in that million-strong crowd for the Papal Mass in the Phoenix Park. I was still a little bit short of my second birthday so I don't remember it at all. But apparently I was a Pope fan, and had a white Lego vehicle that I dubbed the Popemobile.

I can best describe my upbringing as solidly Catholic but rather casually so. My parents were firm Catholics and loyal to all the social teachings, but my father very rarely went to Mass. He did, however, always bring me into the Pro-Cathedral, as it was then, to light a candle whenever we were in the city centre. My mother brought me to Sunday Mass, which I hated, but we didn't go every week by any means-- it was more intermittent. 

My father was very much from a left-wing republican and trade-unionist background. As he grew older, he became more outspokenly Catholic on social issues. But I think that was more a result of the increasing secularisation of Irish society, and the increasing anti-religiosity of the Irish left, than any change in him. (The Irish Labour Party were once famously described as the political wing of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. But that's a long time ago.)

I had long stopped going to Mass by my teens and I can't remember anyone ever saying a word about this. (I actually felt more awkward when I started going to Mass as an adult, though nobody said anything about that, either.) Nobody ever taught me to pray and the rosary was never said in our home. There were no holy pictures or holy statues. I wasn't baptised until I was three yeas old, when I was batch-baptised with my brother and cousins.

I went to an Irish language school which was one of the relatively few non-Catholic schools at that time. My parents had helped to get it set up, which was a considerable battle. (Be it understood, their battle was to have an Irish-language school in the area, not a secular school.) The fact that it was non-denominational was rather academic, however. All the religious instruction was Catholic, and we were prepared for sacraments there.

I'm actually rather grateful my parents were not very insistent about practicing the faith. Being something of a contrarian, it might have made me rebel against it. 

I didn't intend that digression. Anyway, here's the clip, which I'd never seen before. Apologies if it's old hat to anyone else.

Favourite Movie Scenes #4: Gandalf and Saruman at Isengard, from The Two Towers

For this post, I'm almost at a loss what to say. 

I have a strange feeling that any commentary I can make on this scene will almost be an insult to my readers. The camera angles, the set, the blue filter, the acting performances, the dialogue, the moment where Gandalf sees the Eye of Sauron...every moment is pure movie magnificence, concentrated and compressed and triple-filtered.

As with everything else, one can make objections. To be honest, I never particularly liked the choice of Ian McKellen for Gandalf. My reason for this, I'll freely agree, is rather stupid: I don't want an outspoken progressive atheist playing a character who is more or less God's emissary. But acting is acting. That probably shouldn't matter.

I've also always felt that McKellan had the wrong face for Gandalf, but that's even sillier.

Christopher Lee, of course, might havea been born to play Saruman.

The Lord of the Rings occupies a strange place in my life. I "read" the books when I was about seven, but I barely took most of the story in. After finishing them, for all the rest of my juvenile years, I only had continuing access to an incomplete copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. Still, Middle Earth made such an impression on my mind that it would be difficult to quantify it. (I can remember being told, at the time, that it would be impossible to make a film of the book.)

I'll try to explain the significance of Lord of the Rings in my childhood with a metaphor. Imagine some early Christian missionary had found himself on some island that was cut off from the rest of fhe world. The missionary himself only has the basic knowledge of Christianity, and perhaps a few pages from one of the Gospels. Then he dies of a fever. The islanders embrace the faith with great gusto, it pervades all their lives, and they weave all sorts of devotions and folklore around it. But they still only have a shaky knowledge of it. That was me and Lord of the Rings.

Funnily enough, this scene-- Gandalf and Saruman's concentration at Isengard-- wildly excited me as a child, more so than almost any other literary scene I can remember. (Sherlock Holmes's description of Moriarty in "The Final Problem", which has obvious similarities, excited me in the same way.)

This passage especially:

'For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colors!'

I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colors, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

'I liked white better,' I said.

'White!' he sneered. 'It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.'

'In which case it is no longer white,' said I. 'And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.'

But even now, after I've read the trilogy all the way through three times or so (as an adult), I'm still not equipped to enter a conversation with Tolkien afficionados who can name every character's horse, sword, and grandmother. (I did push myself to read The Silmarillion when I was seventeen but remember next to nothing about it.)

Then the films came out just as I'd started my career in UCD. Everything seemed new and exciting. I loved all the coffee-break conversations about the movies-- not just among movie buffs, but among everybody. It was one of those films, like The Exorcist or Star Wars, that became a pop cultural landmark, and indeed a cultural landmark. I had never lived through such a moment in cinema history myself, so I relished it. (The release of the Director's Cut DVDs, a year after each film, were also a part of this cultural moment.)

Of course, a lot of people who loved the books hated the movies. There were things I hated about them myself. I hated all the laboured hobbit humour, which actually made me cringe-- even though you could say, fairly enough, that these scenes were in the spirit of Tolkien's book. I hated Cate Blanchett's ham-acting, as I saw it. There were other things I didn't like.

On the whole, though, I think the trilogy is a triumph that deserves all the plaudits heaped upon it. There are a few other scenes that I expect will feature in this series.

Friday the Thirteenth

Today is Friday the Thirteenth. Some months ago, I wrote a blog post about Friday the Thirteenth for my other blog, Traditions Traditions Traditions! That blog is probably the loneliest and least-frequented spot on the whole internet, so almost nobody read it. I thought it was a pretty good post, and put considerable effort into it, so here it is.

Is Friday the thirteenth a tradition, or a superstition? It's mostly a superstition, I'd say. But surely a superstition is, to some extent, a tradition in itself.

Friday the thirteenth is interesting because it's somewhat below the radar of popular consciousness. It's not a holiday. It's not a memorial. It's not an occasion in any meaningful sense. Mostly it creeps up on us without us noticing (rather appropriately) and exists in a kind of netherworld (also appropriately). If it's remarked upon at all, it's usually jokingly.

The superstition regarding Friday the thirteenth is a recent one, dating to Victorian times.  So (most surprisingly) is the superstition regarding the number thirteen itself. Interestingly, the idea that Friday is unlucky is much older.

Snopes.com says of the Friday superstition: "The reasons why Friday came to be regarded as a day of bad luck have been obscured by the mists of time — some of the more common theories link it to a significant event in Christian tradition said to have taken place on Friday, such as the Crucifixion, Eve's offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden, the beginning of the Great Flood, or the confusion at the Tower of Babel."

Surely the Crucifixion is the stand-out there, and all the more because it definitely happened on a Friday.

Similarly (as most people know) the most common explanation of the superstition regarding thirteen is that Christ and his disciples numbered thirteen at the Last Supper. It's the most satisfying explanation, too, especially since it links both elements of the Friday the thirteenth superstition.

Not long ago there was a specific superstition against thirteen people sitting down together, and especially against being the first person to get up from such a gathering (presumably because Judas was the first person to rise at the Last Supper). This is alluded to in one of my favourite novels, Diary of a Nobody by George and Weldon Grossmith (1892): “I hate a family gathering at Christmas. What does it mean? Why someone says: ‘Ah! we miss poor Uncle James, who was here last year,’ and we all begin to snivel. Someone else says: ‘It’s two years since poor Aunt Liz used to sit in that corner.’ Then we all begin to snivel again. Then another gloomy relation says ‘Ah! I wonder whose turn it will be next?’ Then we all snivel again, and proceed to eat and drink too much; and they don’t discover until I get up that we have been seated thirteen at dinner.”

(Perhaps this superstition has become more obscure today because, as a result of social atomization, it's uncommon to have thirteen people sitting together at a table.)

On the specific superstition of Friday the thirteenth, The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland has this to say: "The belief that Friday 13th is an especially unlucky day is one of the widest known superstitions in Britain today, and is erroneously assumed to be of great antiquity. The only one of the superstitions regarding the number thirteen which can be traced back further than Victorian times is that it is very unlikely to have thirteen at table, which first appears in the 1690s. The notion that thirteen is a generally unlucky number has not been found earlier than 1852. Fridays, however, have been regarded as unlucky since medieval times."

According to this NPR article (and other sources), the first printed mention of Friday the thirteenth comes from a French play in 1834, when a character says: "I was born on a Friday, December 13th, 1813 from which come all of my misfortunes."

Returning to the Penguin Guide, the article continues: "The idea that Friday 13th is an ancient superstition is so engrained that the assertion that it is no older than Victorian times is frequently met with disbelief, even anger, but the evidence is overwhelming." I found myself wondering if the writer is appealing to personal experience here. Did he enrage somebody by mentioning the recent origins of Friday the thirteenth?

There are plenty of articles online about real-life tragedies and disasters that occurred on Friday the thirteenth. None of these are terrible interesting (in my opinion); you could surely find as many horror stories for any date of the year. The only one that intrigued me is the 1972 plane crash in the Andes which formed the basis of the movie Alive. Not only did this occur on Friday the thirteenth, but the deadliest civil aviation crash up to that time occurred on the same day in Russia, killing all 164 passengers. That's a bit freaky.

(We were shown Alive in religion class in school. This puzzled me at the time and has puzzled me ever since. What life lesson was it supposed to be teaching us? That it's OK to eat your dead fellow passengers if you get captured in the Andes after a plane crash?)

Interestingly, Samuel Beckett, that most pessimistic of authors, was born on Friday the thirteenth in 1906. In some biographies, doubt is cast on this fact, because his birth certificate has it as May the thirteenth. Some writers even assumed Beckett was engaging in some creative misremembering. But his biographer James Knowlson says: "The truth is less dramatic. A mistake was clearly made. Everyone who knew Beckett as a child thought of his birthday as being on 13 April. This never changed. But fortunately, and surely conclusively, even for those who believe in Beckett's propensity for myth-making, the birth was announced in the Births and Deaths column of the Irish Times of 16 April 1906, that is, a month before he was officially recorded as having been born."

Is this truth less dramatic, or more dramatic? The fact that this darkest of playwrights was born on the most ill-omened of days seems too good to be true, but it is.

The year after Beckett was born, a novel titled Friday the Thirteenth was published by an American financial speculator called Thomas Lawson. It centres on a stock market panic that occurs on the titular date. (Interestingly, a stock market crash did occur on the infamous date in 1989.)

Of course, the most famous work of fiction with the title Friday the Thirteenth is the slasher film that came out in 1980, and that spawned eleven sequels (so far). The original movie features a group of young employees of a summer camp in New Jersey, who are bumped off one by one by a mystery killer. Although I'm a huge fan of the horror genre, I've never actually seen Friday the Thirteenth, though I've seen one of its sequels: Freddy vs. Jason (2003), a cross-over with the Nightmare on Elm Series franchise. (It was dreadful.)

The central villain of the franchise is Jason Vorhees, he of the iconic hockey mask (though apparently this is first donned in the third film).

But to return to the first instalment...

The title Friday the Thirteenth was considered so important by its writer/producer Sean Cunningham that he published an advertisement in Variety magazine before the script was even finished-- partly to make sure nobody else would grab it. The ad was simply the title (in 3D letters) smashing through glass, with the slogan: "The most terrifying film ever made." It created enormous industry anticipation.

What's really interesting is that Friday the Thirteenth was a cash-in on another hugely successful slasher film, Halloween, which was released in 1978. The producer of that movie, Irvin Yablanz, was astonished that nobody had used the word Halloween in a title before. And it is quite astonishing. So two of the most lucrative slasher franchises came from very inexpensive movies, released within a few years of each other, each trading on the associations of a calendar day that nobody else had exploited.

How much did the titles contribute to the success of these films? In the book Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle (2011), the sales manager of New World Pictures is quoted as saying: "Sixty to seventy per cent of an exploiter's initial [ticket sales] lies in the promotion and the title."

Bizarrely, another horror film had used the title the very previous year: The Orphan, otherwise known as Friday 13th: The Orphan. But this is completely forgotten today, proving that a killer title isn't everything. 

Setting a horror story on an ominous date seems to give it a definite edge. The addictive website TV Tropes has a list of these (with the amusing title "Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesdays"), although funnily enough Friday the thirteenth isn't one of them.

As for traditions, Friday the thirteenth doesn't seem to have gathered any well-known traditions (so far), although it has given rise to some lesser-known ones, as we'll see.

I found the following delightful story on the Facebook page of the Lawrence History Center (from the city of Lawrence in Massachussets), posted by a Deborah D'Elia Beaudoin: "I thought you might be interested in a social club that was founded in 1935 by Stanley Mazzota.  A group of high school friends who didn’t want to lose touch after graduation decided to form a club that flaunted superstition and walked under ladders, spilt salt, and broke mirrors. Of course they celebrated every Friday the Thirteenth in style!  They also belonged to a bowling league and raised money for charity. 

"My dad, Joseph D’Elia, was one of the original members and served as treasurer and  later as president. The club disbanded when the members began enlisting to serve in World War 2." (Presumably this was in Laurence, Massachusetts.)

Jumping back into the present, New York City (where else?) has a sort of informal Friday the Thirteenth Tattoo Festival; "An all-day marathon of affordable work for anyone with a few extra dollars, time to wait in line, and the boldness to permanently memorialise our unluckiest date", according to this recent article. The tradition began in 1995. On Friday the thirteenth, participating tattoo parlours don't do appointments (only walk-ins), they stay open late, and they offer bargain tattoos...but you have to choose from a menu of designs, rather than a custom tattoo. (I've never understood why anybody would want a tattoo. But aside from that, I'm greatly tickled by this story.)

Last Friday the thirteenth (which was this June), the Frida cinema in Santa Ana, California, played ten Friday the Thirteenth films over two nights. There were fifteen minutes between showings and a total running time of 540 minutes. Sounds fun. (I've never been to a cinema movie marathon. I'd love to go to one.)

In the "unincorporated community" of Port Dover in Norfolk county, Ontario, Canada, there is a motorcycle rally every Friday the thirteenth. The tradition began with twenty-five friends in 1981 and has now become a candidate for the biggest motorcycle rally in the world, attracting about a hundred thousand bikers when Friday the thirteenth falls in the summer.

So it seems like North Americans embrace the quirkiness of Friday the thirteenth to a much greater extent than us dour Europeans.

The last thing I'll mention is a television drama where the motif of Friday the thirteenth is a recurring one. It's "Rude Awakening", the third episode of Hammer House of Horror, which originally aired in 1980 (on September 27th!). This is my all-time favourite made-for-TV horror production, featuring Denholm Elliott (the butler in Trading Places) as a somewhat sleazy estate agent who finds himself trapped in a series of nightmares, each one giving way to the next. (I love anything about dreams within dreams, nested realities, and so on.) It's available to watch on YouTube at the time of writing, and has been for several years now. Check it out.