What I've Been Reading Lately

It strikes me as odd that I've never written a "what I've been reading lately" post, that I can remember. It seems a very obvious subject for a blog post. Anyway, here goes.

The first is Down Down Deeper and Down: Ireland in the 70s & 80s by Eamonn Sweeney.

In the last few years, the books I've most enjoyed have been "bird's eye" views of a particular period (in a particular country). The two titles that really impressed me were  A Classless Society? Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn Turner and (most of all) State of Emergency: The Way We Were, Britain, 1970-1974, by Dominic Sandbrook.

I have enjoyed both especially-- and I hope this doesn't shock anybody-- while sitting at an upstairs table in Burger King in Dublin's O'Connell Street, drinking a Coke, and looking down at the people walking in the street below. Pondering time, space, the currents of history, and the human drama.

I can also recommend Down, Down, although it's not quite as good as the two British books. (A minor irritation that I only became conscious of now; why couldn't Sweeney find an Irish song to use as a title, rather than a Status Quo song?)

The book is a lot more sober than I expected from the title (although far from dull). Sweeney announces from the start that he's going to try to be objective, and he does make an obvious effort. It's clear where he stands on the culture wars, though, and he doesn't have much good to say about the Catholic Church, aside from individual activist priests.

I actually learned a lot about the seventies in Ireland from this book. There were a lot more kidnappings (mostly by the IRA) than I had realized. Nor did I realize that there was a brief mood of euphoria during 1978, when Ireland's economy seemed to be about to boom. Sadly, it was a flash in the pan.

Or is it so sad after all? I grew up in a time of unemployment, emigration, hardship, and I'm quite nostalgic for it. It was certainly better than the crass Celtic Tiger years.

It was more than hardship. There was a pervasive sense of mediocrity in the Ireland of my youth. We didn't really expect Ireland to do particularly well: economically, culturally, athletically, or in any other way. (In spite of U2's global success; I actually didn't realize U2 were a big deal outside Ireland, at the time.) I find something endearing about this, in retrospect. I remember how much fuss there was when My Left Foot, a biopic about an Irish painter and writer with cerebral palsy, did well at the Oscars.

Then the 1990 World Cup, Riverdance, Father Ted, and the Celtic Tiger came along and it was all about winning and being the best and all that jazz.

Well, enough about Sweeney. After that, I read a couple of Catholic pastoral documents: On the Vocation and Mission of the Lay Faithful by St. John Paul II and The Role of the Laity in Church by Archbishop Kevin McNamara. Both were inspiring, although I'm not sure I learned anything new from them. It was rather sad to compare Archbishop McNamara's often strident tone with that of our episcopate today; but then, the times have changed.

That can't be said of the next book I read: Bernadette of Lourdes: Her Life, Death and Visions by Therese Taylor. It's hard to imagine a better biographer of Bernadette than this: anything more comprehensive would become heavy going. This isn't heavy going, but it's certainly thorough. It announces itself as the first academic biography in the introduction, and the tone is scholarly throughout.

I find this refreshing. Personally, I don't often find devotional writing inspiring. I find factual writing inspiring (if the facts themselves are inspiring), even when it comes to devotional subjects. "Gushing" alienates me more than anything else.

There isn't any gushing in this biography, but it's not a hatchet-job, either. Taylor is scrupulously fair and open-minded. She never declares for the supernatural nature of the visions, or against them. There's no discernible agenda, either way.

Although Taylor shows Bernadette in all her humanity, it doesn't detract from the image I had of her previously. Is it unsaintly to hide a bottle of white wine in your locker, as a religious novice? Is it unsaintly to do comical impressions of the convent's doctor? Was it unsaintly of Bernadette to refuse to pick up a rosary that a bishop had deliberately dropped, hoping to create a second-class relic by having the visionary hand it back to him? Hardly. Bernadette emerges as more human, but no less holy.

I learned a lot about the Pyrenean culture from which Bernadette originated from this book. It was a culture in which women were accorded a lot of authority, it had a strong anti-authoritarian streak (the people of Lourdes boasted about giving the Cathars sanctuary), and sexual morality was relatively relaxed. (Having a child outside wedlock was not scandalous, as long as the parents got married eventually.)

From this book, I also learned the extraordinary story of Anglese de Sagazan, a Marian visionary of the sixteenth century whose life prefigures Bernadette's remarkably.

The book I'm currently reading is Happy Days: Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America by Benjamin L. Alpers.

When I was a kid, I assumed that Happy Days was actually made in the fifties, just as I assumed that Dad's Army was made during World War Two!

As you can probably guess, and as I've mentioned before, I'm very keen on the seventies. I was born in the seventies and I feel "at home" there.

In recent years, quite a few people have pointed out that decades no longer seem to be distinct periods as we've come to think of them, at least since the 1930s (but especially since the 1960s). When I've talked about this, I've sometimes got the response: "Well, you only really see these things in retrospect." ("The owl of Minerva spreads her wings only with the falling of the dusk", to quote a fancier way someone put it once.)

But that clearly wasn't the case with the seventies. As this book shows, commentators were analysing the "spirit" of the seventies from a very early stage. (In fact, a writer called Joan Didion wrote an essay called "On the Morning after the Sixties" literally on the first day of the seventies.)

When American Graffiti was released in 1973, Roger Ebert said in his review: "When I went to see [the film] that whole world -- a world that now seems incomparably distant and innocent -- was brought back with a rush of feeling that wasn’t so much nostalgia as culture shock."

The big divide in cultural history still seems to be pre- and post-sixties. It's interesting that the two candidates in this year's Presidential election in America came of age in the sixties. The decade casts a long shadow indeed.

Social and cultural history is fascinating. Surely it's exciting to think that everything that happens to you in a single day-- the words you use, the foods you eat, the music you listen to (or just overhear), the clothes you wear, the technology you use-- are all part of a huge drama that is being played around us (and, indeed, inside us) at every moment?