This is so Creepy

It's been catching my eyes for weeks now (maybe months) at a bus-stop.

It could be from a horror movie!

Literary Criticism

I enjoy reading literary criticism for its own sake-- especially poetry criticism. But contemporary literary criticism is almost unreadable, for one primary reason: that, instead of any real interest in what the writer is trying to say, or the inherent merits of the text, the contemporary literary critic is only interesting in projecting their own obsessions with race, gender, and other fashionable topics onto it.

Whether or not this is really their own obsession, or just something they feel obliged to obsess over, doesn't make a difference.

October

In two days I'll be forty-nine. (Just a few days ago, I discovered I share a birthday with Javier Milei, the President of Argentina.)

When I was sixteen, my family got a computer for the first time. It was a second-hand machine that my father was given by a bank, to help him with creating his community magazine. (He was great at writing begging letters, as he always admitted himself.)

I immediately started writing poetry on it. I'd written poetry before, but I started seriously writing poetry when I first had access to a computer. That's not very romantic, I know.

And I can remember my first poem. It was titled "October", so I presume we got the computer in October. Here it is:

October's chilly evenings die a painful death
Succumbing slowly to the freezing tide of night.
Gone are all the sated skies of summer now.

I've always thought this was a very good first effort. Presumably I intended to write more than three lines, but gave up on it. I think it works well as a fragment. I'm proud of "sated skies".

It came to my mind as I was looking at the sky tonight.

If I knew how much grief came along with writing poetry, and caring about it, would I have started? Probably. But with more grim resolution.

Superpower

I'm so beyond sick of hearing this word that I can't even express it. I mean this sort of usage: "It turns out that being an introvert is a superpower!" "Using Excel is my superpower!". Etc., etc., etc.

Please don't say it. Please don't write it. It's not cute, clever, smart, or...anything at all except annoying.

(Unless you happen to be writing about an actual comic book character, that is. I mean, I'm not sure any adult should be writing about such things. But I'm willing to accept I might be unduly closed-minded in this regard, given all the usual rejoinders about Greek mythology and Arthurian legend and the like.)

My Sitcom Odyssey, Episode Two: Whack-O!

I've decided to watch my way through as many old sitcoms as I can. So I went back to pretty much the beginning of British sitcom history (excluding, obviously, the early sitcoms of which no episodes survive). I watched this episode of Whack-O!, a school-themed British sitcom that ran for sixty episodes from 1956 to 1972, and also spawned the dreaded movie adaptation. (There were forty radio episodes, to boot.) I'd never heard of it before I started investigating old sitcoms.

Whack-O! was created by Frank Muir and Denis Norden. I only knew Denis Norden from blooper compliations and I only knew Frank Muir from the humour section of the public library, where his name frequently crops up in various collections of humorous writing-- none of which I ever found startlingly funny.

I have to say that Whack-O! seems to have been pretty good, judging from the single episode I watched. It completely sidesteps the cliché of the strict, buttoned-down headmaster and gives us a shameless hedonist instead. This is Professor James Edwards, played by Jimmy Edwards. (Following the same English comic convention, I suppose, by which most of Sid James's Carry On characters were also named Sid.)

The episode I sampled was called "Pools Win" and was broadcast in 1960. Its plot involves-- you guessed it-- a win on the football pools. (For those who don't know, these were a sort of lottery. There was a guy who collected money door-to-door for the football pools in my own childhood, although even that already seemed like an anachronism. I think they were much more British than Irish.)

The twist of the story is that it isn't the headmaster who's won big on the pools, it's a rather ascetic and otherwordly teacher called Mr. Pettigrew, played by Arthur Howard. (The brother of Leslie Howard, as I've just discovered.) Mr. Pettigrew wants to give the money to charity, but Professor Edwards-- who's an overbearing, blustering kind of fellow-- persuades him to have a taste of the high life before he does so. This involves booking a room in the Ritz and inviting a lot of "girls" (who seem to be hotel staff, but why are they so scantily-clad and eager to please?), consuming vast amounts of champagne and fine foods, and dancing the conga. Sure enough, Mr. Pettigrew begins to rethink his charitable intentions, ahead of the impending arrival of a clergyman to collect the money (even though it's going to an animal charity).

I'd give this episode six out of ten. There weren't really any surprises (other than the fact that Pettigrew does become corrupted), nor were there any hilarious lines of dialogue. The main source of humour was the comic acting of Jimmy Edwards and Arthur Howard. Professor Edwards seems like a wonderful character-- a headmaster who isn't just a bit disreputable, but is more or less a scoundrel and hardly bothers to hide it. I enjoyed the light-hearted cynicism of the show.

There were some surprisingly risqué moments. At one point Professor Edwards ogles a young woman's bottom when she bends over. It's not done subtly, either. I think TV was eroding sexual morals from the start.

Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories

Today I finished Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories. The title is a bit deceptive. Roald Dahl didn't write any of the stories. He selected them.

However, he certainly put a lot of work into that selection. According to his introduction, he read 749 ghost stories to select the fourteen he considered the best. (He was actually doing this for a TV series that never got made.) Dahl was pretty scathing about most of the stories he rejected, including those (he says) written by famous writers. However, he also candidly admits that he was never able to write a good ghost story himself.

(I think his introduction might have influenced my recent blog post about ever-receding excellence, without my even realizing it. You'd think this group of stories would be all gold, right?)

Anyway, this is what I thought of the fourteen stories, for what it's worth:

1) "W.S." by L.P. Hartley. This is one of the best of the bunch. A very efficient little tale about an author who starts getting mysterious fan letters from someone who only uses the signature W.S. The locations from which the person is writing get closer and closer... 4/5.

I really liked The Go-Between. This is only the second Hartley work I've read..

2) "Harry" by Rosemary Timperley. This was fairly good. A ghost story about a child's imaginary friend. 3/5.

3) "The Corner Shop" by Lady Cynthia Asquith. This was one of my favourite stories in the book, perhaps because I'm a sucker for tales about mysterious shops. A typical English ghost story protagonist, a young barrister, comes across a rather cosy curiosity shop run by two friendly sisters. His next experience of the shop is very different. 4/5

4) "In the Tube" by Robert Benson. This story started excellently, with one character telling another the story of a mysterious experience he had, while a storm rages outside. I love stories within stories. However, the denouement rather over-eggs the pudding. 3/5.

4) "Christmas Meeting" by Rosemary Timperley. A woman alone in a hotel over Christmas has a strange encounter with a young man. This was such a slight affair that it's hard to even call it a story. Nor was there any shudder involved, although Dahl claimed that a shudder was what he was mostly looking for in a ghost story. 2/5.

5) "Elias and the Draug" by Jonas Lie. I can't rate this story as I skipped it after a couiple of pages. It's something to do with a Norwegian fisherman trying to harpoon a seal. I'm an incredibly insular person when it comes to fiction, and especially ghost stories. Norwegian fishing stories don't really float my boat (pun intended) when I'm looking for a spooky tale.

6) "Playmates" by A.M. Burrage. Excellent and rather moving story about an intellectual who decides to adopt an acquaintance's orphaned daughter, mostly to put his theories of parenthood to the test. They move to a remote country house and she starts to play with (apparently) imaginary friends. It was too long, but excellent apart from that. 4/5

7) "Ringing the Changes" by Robert Aickman. I've always regarded Aickman with great suspicion, because he's a "literary" horror writer. However, this was a gripping tale, and the stand-out of the whole volume. A honeymooning couple visit a seaside town where all the churchbells are ringing all day long. The only other guest at their hotel warns them to leave before nightfall, but do they? Well, what do you think? 5/5.

8) "The Telephone" by Mary Treadgold. Telephones can be used to great effect in horror stories, but this isn't an example of that. A young woman gets involved with an older man who's already married. The first wife does away with herself, but then the couple start getting mysterious phone calls. It's a promising plot, but it's developed in a way that's completely devoid of tension. 1/5

9) "The Ghost of a Hand" by Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu was a master of the spooky tale, but this is a rather silly and throwaway sort of story. It's all in the title, really. 2/5.

10) "The Sweeper" by A.M. Burrage. This is a very effective and chilling tale, even though there's absolutely nothing original or surprising about it. A young woman in domestic service wonders why her very elderly mistress is so freaked out by the sound of someone sweeping leaves in the garden at night. 4/5

11) "Afterward" by Edith Wharton. This might be the second best story in the collection. It has a rather unpromising start, but becomes genuinely disturbing as it moves towards the climax. The central idea (as the title suggests) is that, if you do meet a ghost, you might not realize it's a ghost until long afterward. 4/5

12) "On the Brighton Road" by Richard Barnham Middleton. A very short story with a tramp as a protagonist. While I think there should be more stories featuring homeless characters, it inevitably lacks the cosy element that I generally look for in tales of the phantasmal. And really there's not much to it. 1/5

13) "The Upper Berth" by Francis Marion Crawford. Apparently Crawford was a Catholic convert, which is interesting in itself. But I gave up on this story after a few pages. The whimsical, ironic tone grated on me. Of course, humour isn't fatal to a ghost story, but I think it should be applied sparingly. No rating.

Father Knows Best

Recently, I asked several Irish people if they'd ever heard of the American sitcom Father Knows Best. Actually, I didn't even tell them if it was a sitcom, I just asked them if they got the reference. None of them did.

I was quite surprised by this. I've heard many references to Father Knows Best. For instance, the title of a book by the Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin is The Fathers Know Best. (It's about the Church Fathers.) I've also often heard it mentioned in relation to the "bumbling Dad" stereotype which is at this stage a hoary cliché in sitcoms. Apparently, this was itself a reaction against sitcoms like Father Knows Best.

(But before I get to the sitcom itself, it's very interesting to me that after about a century of immersion in American culture, Irish people still have surprising blind spots. For instance, I asked several Irish people recently if they knew who Jefferson Davis was. None of them did, except one guy who thought he might have something to do with the American Civil War. And honestly, that was about my level of knowledge also, until I happened to read about him recently. He was the President of the Confederate States. But these blind spots aren't only historical, they often have to do with pop culture or idioms.)

Anyway, I'd never actually seen Father Knows Best, so I watched an episode this afternoon. It was this one, "The Great Anderson Mystery".

It was fairly good. I laughed out loud on a couple of occasions. It was charming, and it held my interest for most of the time-- although, honestly, there were a few points where I found it a bit of a drudge. Despite the title of the series, the father figure doesn't actually know best in the episode. In fact, he gets fooled by his youngest child-- as does the rest of the family.

I've decided I'm going to try to see episodes of as many sitcoms as I can. A lot of them are on YouTube.

I've long been an admirer and defender of the sitcom format. I think they're wonderful windows onto social and cultural history, and celebrations of the ordinary.

Last Christmas I did something like this already. I found a YouTube channel that had Christmas episodes of lots of different sitcoms. But there's so many sitcoms out there that I've never seen at all.

Have you ever done anything like this? For instance, deciding to watch a film set in every American state, or to walk down every street in a city (apparently this is a fairly popular occupation), or to play as many sports as possible? I'm fascinated by such personal, self-imposed projects.

Another Thought on Hype

I recently asked the question "is hype good?". I meant "hype" in the most fundamental sense. Not just commercial publicity, but every effort to excite anybody about anything.

This has been on my mind a lot recently, especially regarding one memory in particular.

My birthday is in October. (In four days, actually.) One year, when I was perhaps eleven or twelve, my father gave me a birthday present of A Christmas Carol on audiotape. Books on tape were quite a big thing back then and I was keen on them.

I can remember him saying as he gave it to me: "This recording has been done by some of the best actors in the business". Or something like that.

The fact that my father had gushed over the actors gave the recording a sort of glamour in my mind. It made it seem like a big deal to me. And I wasn't all that naive. I fully understood that my father was just trying to excite me about the gift. But the fact that he cared enough to try to excite me mattered.

The really interesting thing about enthusiasm (to me) is that there's no fixed quantity. It's not like everybody has, say, ten thousand units of enthusiasm (perhaps a unit could be called a "gush") and everybody assigns these units however they see fit: this much to sport, this much to work, this much to family, etc. etc.

Each person's measure of enthusiasm clearly differs. Some people are full of it and some people (or so it has always seemed to me) have very little of it. People with negligible enthusiasm used to greatly unsettle me in my childhood and teens. I called them "death worshippers" because I really believed they were indifferent as to whether they were alive or dead, or perhaps they even preferred the latter state.

Before I was a teenager myself, I really believed all teenagers were death worshippers, from the stories I heard from those who had gone before me. One teenager told me that all his schoolmates threw their weight against the side of the schoolbus when it passed the river, in order to push it in. Rubbish, no doubt, but I believed it. Teenage nihilism seemed to me the epitome of death worship. Mersault in Camus's The Outsider isn't a teenager, but I thought every teenager was like Mersault.

Of course, you can't judge somebody's enthusiasm from outside, and I was just as judgmental back then as I am now. Still, I don't think I was always completely wrong.

The other interesting thing about enthusiasm is that there's no upper limit. Beyond a certain threshold, we start using words like "wonder", "awe", "the numinous", "transcendence", "the sacred", "rapture", etc.

I think one of the purposes of poetry is to raise the roof (literally) of this capacity. I think there is, sadly, a great insight in this stanza from Coventry Patmore:

An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him; but, for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling’s jest.
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy lids, and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach,
They read with joy, then shut the book.
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme
And most forget; but, either way,
That and the Child’s unheeded dream
Is all the light of all their day.

Personally, I always want to be on the side of the hypers, of the people pushing hype. There is of course hype for bad things. It's right to be cynical about the bad hype. But to be cynical about all hype--- all romance, all idealism, all poetry, all glamour-- is about the worst thing I imagine.

Everything That is Not Anti-Woke is Woke

I'm not declaring this as a principle, I'm making it as an observation. And it makes me very sad.

With very few exceptions-- mostly those cultural spaces that trade in nostalgia-- it seems that the only entertainment, commentary, comedy etc. that doesn't reflect woke assumptions about the world are those that set out to be explicitly anti-woke or at least non-woke.

The contrast is huge. It's like passing from a coloured world to a black-and-white one. I'm not even using those terms evaluatively. Make the anti-woke subculture coloured or black-and-white as you please. The point is that it's a completely different experience, one way or the other, to the mainstream.

The difference is so huge, in fact, that I've noticed that public figures who turn against woke on one topic (usually people who have been the victim of a witch-hunt for wrong-think) nearly always pass over fully into the anti-woke camp, or at least a good deal of the way. The cynical view of this is that they're "grifters" who've lost one audience and know which side of their bread is buttered.

My less cynical view is that, once the spell is broken, it's broken. Consensus seems less trustworthy; "expert opinion" seems less objective; words like "outdated", "backward", "reactionary", or "problematic" suddenly seem like words, vapour.

That's the bright side. The less bright side is that woke is still the air we breathe, even if it has had to retreat from some of its more ambitious forays. (Excuse the mixed metaphor.)

Two Phrases I Can't Stand

"Doing nothing is not an option."

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

It seems to me that progressives have one imperative: change. Change for its own sake. The ideas that continuity and tradition are good in themselves seem alien to them.

And they never seem to entertain the idea that some "problems" might really be just permanent features of human nature and by-products of freedom.

What I really dislike about those two phrases is the air of finality with which they are pronounced. Yes, doing nothing is always an option, and sometimes it's the best option. And no, not being a part of the supposed solution (and how do you know it's the solution?) doesn't necessarily make you part of a problem. I would say it doesn't make you a part of the problem in most cases.

And also, you can turn the clock back.

Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, Luminous...Hopeful?

For centuries, we had the standard fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary: Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious. I remember being taught these by an old nun in Catholic school. (Most of the religious education in that school was pop psychology and inspirational feature films, so this was a real exception.)

Then, in 2002, St. John Paul II introduced the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary, and suggested they be prayed every Thursday. I follow this practice myself.

Today I learned about the Hopeful Mysteries of the Rosary, which were introduced by Bishop William Albert Wack of Pensacola–Tallahassee in 2024.

They are:

Creation
The Flood
Abraham's Sacrifice
Passover
The Immaculate Conception

I must say I'm impressed by Bishop Wack's audacity. Proposing a new set of rosary mysteries when you've been the Supreme Pontiff for over twenty years is one thing. Doing so as a relatively new and obscure bishop is another.

Still, I'm the sort of traditionalist who loves new traditions, so I'll definitely pray the Hopeful Mysteries at some stage!

My Latest Cartoon

Two Anniversaries

Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day I began working in the library of University College Dublin, where I still work today.

By a complete coincidence, it's also the fifteenth anniversary of this blog. 

Why Is Excellence Always Receding?

If you borrowed and read a hundred books at complete random from the library, I imagine you'd really enjoy a small proportion of them-- maybe ten per cent.

Now say you borrowed a hundred books by the most acclaimed authors (acclaimed by some group and criterion you more or less approve of), you'd still only enjoy a small percentage of those books.

Now if you borrowed a hundred books which had been voted the hundred best books of all time, by competent judges-- you'd probably still only enjoy a small percentage of them.

I'm fascinated by this phenomenon of constantly-receding excellence.

If you listened to an album of "greatest hits" by your favourite band, you'd still only probably really love a minority of them. At least, that's been my experience.

This principle often occurs to me when I read a book of quotations. These quotations are already a sort of digest of everything that's been written or said-- the most interesting and historical quotations in history. But I still find myself really interested in only a relatively small numbers of them.

Nearly every great author, musician, artist etc. mostly produced less-than-excellent works.

Or think about the latest blockbuster movie-- presumably, everybody working on that movie has already been "pre-selected" to be at the very top of their profession, out of the vast throngs that want to act, direct, do special effects etc. But the rate of success (lasting success) of blockbusters doesn't seem any higher than any other artistic endeavour.

I suspect it works the other way, as well. If you watched a hundred movies that were considered the worst, worst, worst of all time-- you might actually enjoy about ten of them, to some extent. But I'm less sure of that.

It's as though there's some principle that we can only really enjoy about ten per cent of anything.

Between Pollyanna and Eeyore

Have you heard the term "glurge"? It's used mostly for the sort of uplifting or inspirational stories that proliferate on social media, and become strangely depressing after a while-- perhaps because they seem so contrived or manipulative. God knows, I'm not taking a potshot at uplift, inspiration, or even sentimentality-- I think all those things are necessary and desirable features of human discourse. But too concentrated a dose of any of them provokes an irritable reaction in me, and-- I think-- in others. Humans of New York really got my goat, back when I was on social media.

On the opposite extreme to glurge is the sort of relentless negativity that is often perpetrated by conservatives like myself. When every social or cultural development is claimed to be a sign of decline, they rather cancel each other out. For instance, there seems to be a contradiction in complaining about shortening attention spans while also complaining about binge-watching of streamed content, and seeing them both as signs of cultural decline. Or in complaining about areas in Britain and Ireland where English is supposedly hardly spoken any more, while also deploring the destruction of languages and dialects left behind by the relentless spread of English. I could probably get a whole blog post out of other examples.

Yes, twin and opposing evils can both be evidence of one underlying problem-- but it seems unlikely that this would always be the case, or even generally.

So surely we should strive to avoid falling into either ditch. That is, we should try to affirm life without developing a fixed grin and glassy eyes; but we should also freely criticize those things that deserve to be criticized, without seeing the world through jaundiced glasses. I think the second ditch is the most likely danger for anyone even vaguely on the right.

Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, Indeed

As of 10:04 today, the lead story on the BBC website is the announcement that Pope Leo has lung cancer.

On the RTE website, it's the third story.

May God watch over our Holy Father and give him many years of life to come.

My Golden Rule for Conversation

My golden rule for conversation has become: don't volunteer conversation about anything I find interesting. It's a near-infallible rule that the other person will not be interested.

Instead, I just let the other person lead the conversation, and try to induce or feign interest in that. If I do volunteer conversation, it's always on a topic I don't find interesting. That seems the safest option.

There's a handful of people to whom this policy doesn't apply. But only a handful.

I wonder how many people are in the same boat?

Local Should Be Local

Here's possibly the most niche complaint I've ever made, one that I'm confident (fairly confident) nobody else has ever made and that doesn't map onto any kind of ideological conflict.

I really dislike it when the term "local" is used to mean "regional".

For instance, when people talk about "local tensions" in the Korean peninsula, or Christianity being adapted to "local conditions" in the United States of America.

If a whole continent can be "local", then what's regional or continental or national?

And what about the dignity of the local itself-- as in, your local post office? (If you still have one.)

I get that "local" is being used in a relative sense here-- simply in opposition to "global" or "general". Similar to "local anaesthetic", for instance.

But I still think the usage should be resisted. I think it's mostly used to make the speaker or writer sound clever or globally-minded or something like that. Down with it!

A Cure for (Some) Literary Posturing

I've just encountered yet another allusion to "the owl of Minerva flying at dusk", which comes from the philosopher Hegel.

I wonder how often the person making this allusion has actually read Hegel?

I've never read Hegel myself. Well, I did read about five or ten pages of one of his books once, and then gave it up a hopeless cause. (Or perhaps I gave up on myself as a hopeless case?)

I think we should start promoting this principle: you shouldn't make a literary allusion unless you've read the actual work it's taken from.

So no more "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" unless you've read Dante's Inferno. And no more "Midway upon the journey of life...", either.

No more "Fail again. Fail better", unless you've read the actual work by Samuel Beckett from which this flogged-to-death line taken. (I don't know which this is and I'm pretty sure I haven't read it, whatever it is.)

No more "rosy-fingered dawn" unless you've read Homer.

No more "Kafkaesque" unless you've read at least one novel or short story by Kafka.

Lest it should be thought that I'm conferring a privilege on the well-read, I think all these quotations are pretentious and corny at this stage, and are best avoided by everybody anyway. If you're going to make a literary reference, make an original literary reference. Don't go with the tried and tested. Whether it comes from Yeats or Barbara Cartland, it would at least be original. (I hope you're not thinking: "A poor thing but mine own.")

Films About Mentors

Today I finished watching The Wonder Boys, a film made in the year 2000, which stars Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, and Robert Downey Jr. It's a comedy-drama about a professor of creative writing who is also a novelist, one who has been writing his second novel for the past seven years. (People think he has writer's block, but it's quite the opposite; the novel has grown to gargantuan proportions.) It's one of those "one crazy weekend" sort of stories.

It's the first non-horror film I've watched in months, as far as I can remember.

I watched it for two main reasons:

1) It's set in a university, and I'm very drawn to university stories right now.

2) It involves a mentor-student relationship, and I'm especially interested in those right now. In fact, this is why I sought it out (although it had been on my radar for quite a while).

I'm looking for mentor films right now. When I say "student-mentor", I'm not especially talking about formal education. And I'm definitely not talking about the flogged-to-death storyline of an unconventional teacher come to a tough, inner-city school and changing the kids' lives around. To Sir, with Love should have been the last of those. I'm more talking about a mentor relationship between an old master and a young prodigy-- that kind of thing.

I love hearing people talk about their teachers, mentors and inspirations. I find it very inspiring when someone mentions one of their old teacher's sayings, or when they say something like: "I come from the school of such-and-such."

I've always wanted a mentor but I've never had one. I'm forty-nine years old in twelve days so it would be rather ridiculous to have a mentor at my age. But I've always craved a Gandalf or Van Helsing figure look up to.

(Writing this, it occurs to me that I very much did have a mentor in my own father. His influence on me can hardly be overstated and I often quote the things he said. But...a mentor is different from a father.)

I'm even rather envious when I hear people describe their relationship with their spiritual director, their old family doctor, their old teacher, their solicitor, etc. the groundskeeper of their old school or college, etc., when that professional relationship has become a friendship or quasi-friendship. I've never had that.

The Nature of Tradition

I've pretty much stopped commenting on contemporary controversies on this blog. Looking back, I think I probably stopped doing so around the abortion referendum in 2018. It seemed such a definitive defeat that it made engagement with current affairs in Ireland seem rather pointless. (I have kept critiquing political correctness and woke, but that's more socio-politics than current affairs.)

I realize that many of my readers are international, so I don't know how much you've been keeping up with the controversy about the Orange Order and the Garvaghy Road in Northern Ireland. The Protestant (and, let's face it, historically anti-Catholic) Orange Order were given permission to march down a road with a mostly "nationalist" population (whatever that means these days), for the first time in years. In the past, the march had led to huge stand-offs, which once resulted in the utterly horrific murder of three young brothers. This year, once it was announced the parade would go ahead, the nationalists immediately blocked the road, along with many sympathizers. Today the nationalists won the day and the parade was banned again.

As I said, I've stopped commenting on contemporary controversies. I especially avoid doing so in the case of Northern Ireland. As far as I can see, both the "Catholic" and "Protestant", "Irish" and "British" communities are now for the most part secularized and globalized, leaving nothing but a tribal conflict based upon historical grievances. Large-scale immigration is transforming everything anyway, as in the Republic. That's as far as I can see. I might be wrong.

(If there's any exception to the picture I've painted here, it's that the Democratic Unionist Party seems to be the only major party in Ireland with socially conservative positions on anything. How long they will maintain these is another matter. Both of the major nationalist parties have enthusiastically embraced social progressivism, and the Ulster Unionist Party seems to have gone down the same road, albeit with less gusto.)

Regardless of the controversy, and regardless of your stance on the controversy, I think this passage from a tweet posted by Emma Little-Pengelly (the Deputy First Minister, a unionist) is very profound, as regards the point that she is making (the grammar is a bit off, but who cares?): 

All of our traditions come from particular aspects or “sects”. By its very nature, they are “of “something and not “of” something else. They are exclusionary by the very nature of it pertaining to the particular tradition, beliefs or views of some, but it is not exclusionary by experience or engagement. Every religious order or community is exclusionary by doctrine, but not by outreach.

I think is a hugely important point, setting aside its application to the current controversy. Do we want a society with vibrant traditions? If we do, we have to accept that traditions are inherently exclusionary, sectarian and even divisive. Of course, we could have a society without traditions, or where traditions are relegated to private life. But that will be a pretty colourless, rootless, impersonal, atomised sort of society. It seems to me we are travelling in the latter direction.

(I always appreciate comments. But if you're leaving one on this post, please avoid anything inflammatory.)

Everybody Has Some Idea What's Going On

Today I loaned a book about tapestries to a library patron. We had this brief exchange:

Him: My wife is going to see the Bayeux Tapestry so she wants to know a bit more about it.

Me: Oh, is it here?

Him: No, it's on loan to London.

Or words to that effect.

I've been mulling on the exchange since. Think of the assumed shared knowledge it reflects:

1) He assumed I'd heard of the Bayeux Tapestry. (Correct.)

2) He possibly assumed I'd heard that the Bayeux Tapestry was on exhibition in London. (I had actually heard this, but I'd forgotten the details.)

3) I assumed that, when I said "Oh, is it here?", he'd know I didn't mean that it was always here-- in Ireland, or in Dublin.

Everybody has some idea what's going on. The truth of this often strikes me and surprises me.

I mean, there's so much to know. Think of everything that happens in the world in a minute, in an hour, in a day, in a week...all those events piling up, and all the ages of history coming before them. And yet we can have a working assumption that people know what we're talking about when we talk about almost anything.

The Bayeux Tapestry is interesting in this regard. What other tapestry do you know about? I remember, when I was learning about it in school, thinking: "Why are we learning about a tapestry? This is history class." Probably the teacher did explain its importance as a historical source but I just wasn't listening.

Or maybe I'm being too harsh on myself. Maybe I did understand it's importance as a historical source but wondered why we were being taught about the thing itself in such detail.

The depiction of Halley's Comet on the Tapestry has always interested me as well. It seems so unusual and exceptional.

I can remember, in 1986 (when I was nine years old) being confused as to why people were getting so excited about the comet. Weren't there lots of comets? Now I'm very pleased that a pub in Dublin is named the Comet because it was built that year. (Or so I've heard.)

From the Wikipedia Page on Pope Nicholas the Great

In 866, the Bulgar Khan St Boris the Baptiser wrote to Pope Nicholas asking a wide range of questions, one of which being whether or not it was sinful for Christians to wear pants. In response, Nicholas wrote, "For whether you or your women wear or do not wear pants neither impedes your salvation nor leads to any increase of your virtue." The Pope then proceeded with a discussion on the virtue of wearing the "spiritual pants" of a temperate life while restraining disordered passions.

Personally I think I would support the abolition of trousers for both sexes. Women could wear skirts and dresses and men could wear kilts, or maybe robes. I'd love to go about in a robe.

Ivy Day 2026

Yesterday was the one-hundredth and thirty-fifth Ivy Day commemoration in Glasnevin cemetery. I was present, which made it my fourth Ivy Day commemoration.

The ceremony is held to remember Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish political leader who died in 1891.

I'm not particularly a devotee of Parnell. I'm a devotee of traditions. Ivy Day is the sort of low-key, long-lived tradition I find especially appealing. (It's never been interrupted, even during the Covid lockdowns.)

It's very simple. A small group gathers around the tomb, led by a piper who plays a few tunes. There's an introduction from the President of the Parnell Society, and then a dignitary of some kind lays a wreath on the grave. After that, the dignitary makes a short speech, the piper plays the National Anthem (one of the few occasions when I ever hear it played), and everybody troops out. It lasts less than an hour and I don't think I've ever seen more than fifty people present.

I was amazed when someone recently mentioned Ivy Day in a comment on this blog, apparently independent of my mentions of it in the past. Nobody knows about it. I was only alerted to it by the fact that it features in a James Joyce story, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." (As you can imagine, it was a much bigger deal in the decade after Parnell's death. But even in the story, set in 1902, it's a fading tradition. The story reflects Joyce's usual cynicism towards any ideal other than the celebration of his own supposed genius.)

Yesterday, the dignitary was the leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Claire Hanna. The speech was the usual boilerplate about pluralism and change, although there were some references to recent events in the North.

Ivy Day itself is tomorrow, being the anniversary of Parnell's death. The commemoration is held on the Sunday nearest to the anniversary.

Every year, on the day before the commemoration, there's a Parnell Symposium in his country house of Avondale. I've been working up the courage to go for the last few years. The speeches are fine but the inevitable tea-breaks are daunting. I might go next year...

My Idea for a New Word

For my entire life, I've had the ambition of inventing a new word and getting it into general usage.

Today, I found myself thinking about a particular class of words: drink (as in alcohol), sale (as in special promotion), product (as in hair gel), view (as in picturesque vista).

All these words are special (but common) senses of a more generic use of the word. Everybody knows what someone means when they say: "I don't drink". 

My suggestion for a rhetorical term to cover this is: "extrageneric". ("Extra" used in the sense of "extragalactic" or "extra-sensory.")

Update: Sadly, and quite surprisingly, there's already a word for this. It's actually autohyponym. Those linguists, you wouldn't be up to them.