The Twinkly Nineties Aesthetic

Sometimes it's hard to tell if something is a feature of the world or just a feature of your own mind.

About this time last year, I wrote a post about the different aesthetic associations that, in my mind, come along with different "currents" of Catholicism.

But there are "aesthetics"-- in my own mind-- associated with so many things. Sometimes they're so specific, I wonder if they can be real.

I was sitting in a café in the Ilac Centre the other week, talking to a fellow poet. I was specifically talking about my frustrated efforts to write a poem about the Ilac Centre. Specifically, the poem was about the Ilac Centre in the nineteen-eighties. I said: "Well, it had a very specific atmosphere back then. There was a fountain in the middle, and a big balloon rising up and down above the fountain, and there were windowed lifts that went up to the top of the centre, and there was a mezzanine café, and there was a mosaic of street traders there, and..." All of this came together in a definite aesthetic for me, but as I tried to describe it, it seemed evanescent to say the least.

Anyway, recently I've been thinking of a very specific aesthetic which I called the "twinkly nineties aesthetic". I think it can best be exemplified by this scene from Groundhog Day. (The bit where the music begins.)

This aesthetic had a few elements which I'll try to identify:

1) It was unabashedly sentimental and upbeat.

2) It tended to use nature imagery, either literally or metaphorically.

3) This is harder to articulate, but it seemed to assume an equilibrium of social forces. For instance, liberalism and conservatism, religion and science, masculinity and femininity, tradition and progress-- there was a certain sense of stability.

4) I somehow associate it with blue jeans, hazy blue mountains in the distance, running brooks, stepping stones, and...that kind of thing.

3) Twinkly keyboard music.

4) A spring atmosphere-- sunshine, green fields, light sparkling on rippling water, etc.

I particularly associate this atmosphere with religion class in my school in the nineties. The religious education was terrible and was mostly watching "inspirational" films, or films about moral issues. They weren't all from the nineties, but the ones that were (or close to it) tended to have this atmosphere, at least in parts. For instance: Regarding Henry (1991), Shadowlands (1993), Scrooged (1988), Alive (1993) On Golden Pond (1981). In fact, although it's the earliest (and a long way from the nineties), On Golden Pond might be the prime example.

We'd also have retreats which involved a lot of lying around (literally lying around) listening to twinkly keyboard music like the music in the Groundhog Day video. At least, that's how I remember it.

A still from The Stand (1994)

I also associate this aesthetic with The Stand (1994), which I watched on my thirtieth birthday. Despite its post-apocalyptic theme, it still had this sort of atmosphere-- partly because the survivors of the devastating virus are returning to nature, out of necessity. Cocoon (1985) also has this sort of atmosphere. So does The Bucket List (2007) and The Twilight Saga: New Man (2009) which shows that it's not necessarily confined to the nineties.

If anyone reading this video thinks I'm just talking about "hippie-ness", I'll have failed to express what I mean. It's something much more specific. Yes, it is hippie-ish, sort of. But a specific kind of hippie-ish, a long long way from gentle people wearing flowers in their hair in San Francisco.

Whether it exists outside my mind is quite another matter. I'd be interested to know if anybody else know what I'm talking about.

Spooky

 

Happy Feast of St. Oliver Plunkett

Today is the feast of St. Oliver Plunkett, as well as the date he was executed. He was the last Catholic martyr in the British Isles. He's an interesting saint and worth reading about.

In fact, you might say that the first of July is mired in blood-- St. Oliver's is the least of it. This is also the date that the Battle of the Somme began, as well as the Battle of Gettysburg, as well as the Battle of the Boyne!

Poetry by Heart

I've recently been returning to a project (for want of a better word) that I call An Tobar. An Tobar means "the well" in Gaelic, and it's basically a repertoire of poems that I've memorized.

Why did I do this? Well, I did it for various reasons, but ultimately it's a sort of visceral reaction to the way our society is going. I've often quoted the words of Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter who said: "The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint." The more our lives are lived in cyberspace and on screens, the more we drift into a world of artificial intelligence and whatnot, the stronger need I feel to have a decent amount of oral lore inside my own head. 

Having said that, I've neglected An Tobar for years at this stage, and I'm only returning to it recently. It's definitely rusty. Some of these poems I could recite at the drop of a hat (another cliché I like), word perfect or close to it.. With others, I'd struggle with a few lines here and there. And with some others, I've probably lost most of the words. I'll have to build it up again. (Or dig it again, perhaps, given my "well" metaphor?)

I've sometimes recited some of these poems at social gatherings, principally "The Raven" by Poe and "Ulysses" by Tennyson. However, I've generally been discouraged by the reception. I can see people's eyes glaze over pretty quickly.

Revisiting An Tobar again, I made the decision to drop some poems that would just never "take", for whatever reason. One was "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray. This poem is justly one of the most beloved in all of English poetry-- but, for whatever reason, it's never been one of my own favourites. And, for some reason, it wouldn't "stick" in my memory, and it took a lot of "maintenance". I memorized it because I thought that, being such a general favourite, it might be a poem people would like to hear recited. That never happened.

Other poems that kept sliding from my memory were "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas and several of Shakespeare's sonnets.

One of the reasons I started neglecting An Tobar is that I had an unhealthy "not an inch" attitude towards it. I didn't want to give up any poem once I'd committed it to memory. I've got over that now.

Some of the selections are odd, I know. I'd be astonished if anybody else had ever heard of "A Fragment" by Alfred Austin. This is a relic of a plan to memorize a poem (or passage of poetry) by every Poet Laureate of England. These are the kinds of whims that seize me. Anyway, many of the Poets Laureate are completely forgotten now and didn't leave behind anything memorable. I've dropped most of the Poet Laureate pieces, but "A Fragment" is charming.

Will this list be of any interest to anybody? I don't know. Here it is, anyway.

Death of an Irishwoman by Michael Hartnett

Snow by Louis MacNeice

The Fool by Patrick Pearse

Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon

“Our revels now are ended” by William Shakespeare

“To Helen” by Edgar Allan Poe

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by William Shakespeare

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats

“Ay, but to die…” by William Shakespeare

Lines Written on Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth

The Wayfarer by Patrick Pearse

The Kraken by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

A Birthday by Christina Rossetti

Heraclitus by William Johnson Cory

The Owl by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Planster’s Vision by John Betjeman

“My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun” by William Shakespeare

“When I Consider” by John Milton

“Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth” by Arthur Hugh Clough

“The Burning Babe” by Robert Southwell

Remember by Christina Rossetti

The Song of the Strange Ascetic by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Forget Not Yet” by Sir Thomas Wyatt

“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

“September 1913” by William Butler Yeats

The Workman’s Friend by Flann O'Brien

“If—” by Rudyard Kipling

When I was One-and-Twenty by Alfred Edward Housman

Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now by Alfred Edward Housman

Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by William Butler Yeats

How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Yonder See the Morning Blink by Alfred Edward Housman

Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Robert Louis Stevenson

Into My Heart an Air That Kills by Alfred Edward Housman

Peace by Henry Vaughan

She Walks in Beauty by George Gordon, Lord Byron

Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost

John Anderson My Jo, John by Robert Burns

When He Who Adores Thee by Thomas Moore

Golden Stockings by Oliver St. John Gogarty

Ringsend by Oliver St. John Gogarty

Shakespeare by Matthew Arnold

Adlestrop by Edward Thomas

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Fisherman by William Butler Yeats

The World’s a Stage by Hilaire Belloc

No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats

All Things Can Tempt Me by William Butler Yeats

On a House Shaken by the Land Agitation by William Butler Yeats

Aedh Tells of the Rose in His Heart by William Butler Yeats

The Song of Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats

Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland by William Butler Yeats

“Ring out, wild bells…” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“I to my perils…” by Alfred Edward Housman

Surprised by Joy by William Wordsworth

When I Set Out to Lyonesse by Thomas Hardy

Easter 1916 by William Butler Yeats

The Coat by William Butler Yeats

Song of an Old Philosopher by Walter Savage Landor

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Raglan Road by Patrick Kavanagh

Thomas MacDonagh by Francis Ledwidge

The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats

When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats

The Planter's Daughter by Austin Clarke

Advent by Patrick Kavanagh

Ode to a Grecian Urn by John Keats

“Oh friend, I know not…” by William Wordsworth

Jerusalem by William Blake

The Eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“Should fickle hands…” by Alfred Austin

“This royal throne of kings…” by William Shakespeare

“Happy the man” by John Dryden

While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Nahum Tate

The Beatitudes by St. Matthew

Everyone Suddenly Started Singing by Siegfried Sassoon

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

I Used to Think All Poets Were Byronic by Wendy Cope

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats

To My Daughter by Thomas Kettle

Epitaph on a Tyrant by Wystan Hugh Auden

Epic by Patrick Kavanagh

“The Quality of Mercy” by William Shakespeare

To Althea from Prison by Richard Lovelace

So We’ll Go No More a-Roving by George Gordon, Lord Byron

To Lucasta, Going to the Wars by Richard Lovelace

“Breathes there a man…” by Sir Walter Scott

The Daffodils by William Wordsworth

Determination by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Ecce Puer by James Joyce

Dublin by Louis MacNeice

The Rainy Day by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The distant Seychelles are not so remote…” by Osbert Lancaster

Date Stamp Mosaic

I took this picture today. I always like it when something which is purely functional turns out to have an aesthetic or decorative dimension to it.

Poems I Like: "Ringsend" by Oliver St. John Gogarty

Gogarty had a wonderful gift for polished, mellifluous verse. "Streel" is an Irish term that usually means to stagger drunkenly. I've loved this poem for at least two decades but, so far as I can remember, I'd never encountered its subtitle ("after reading Tolstoy") until now. My two favourite lines in this poem are: "Imagined, outrageous, preposterous wrongs", and the brilliant last line. (Well, strictly speaking, they are both couplets, but we don't do pedantry on this blog.)

There's a joke that Oliver St. John Gogarty was famous as a poet and a surgeon; famous as a poet to his patients, and a surgeon to his readers. He was in fact an excellent poet, and is much underrated today-- although he does have a pub named after him in Dublin's Temple Bar, which seems always to be thronged.

Ringsend by Oliver St. John Gogarty

I will live in Ringsend
With a red-headed whore,
And the fan-light gone in
Where it lights the hall-door;
And listen each night
For her querulous shout,
As at last she streels in
And the pubs empty out.
To soothe that wild breast
With my old-fangled songs,
Till she feels it redressed
From inordinate wrongs,
Imagined, outrageous,
Preposterous wrongs,
Till peace at last comes,
Shall be all I will do,
Where the little lamp blooms
Like a rose in the stew;
And up the back-garden
The sound comes to me
Of the lapsing, unsoilable,
Whispering sea.

A Phrase I Hate

I recently blogged on clichés that I love, although I also mentioned two clichés that I hate: "bucket list" and "life hack". (In this I was prompted by a blog post from Bruce Charlton.)

Here's another one, and I'll be amazed if anybody disagrees with me: "elevator pitch".

Never mind that we don't call it an elevator on this side of the Atlantic, the phrase has become a standard one anyway.

Come to think of it, "bucket list", "life hack", and "elevator pitch" all seem to share the same atmosphere, to belong to the same mental world. A world of efficiency, go-getting, and utility maximization. We all live in that world and have to play along to some extent. But we don't have to like it!

And I think we can at least resolve to avoid ever saying "bucket list", "life hack", or "elevator pitch"...

(Just compare "elevator pitch" to one of my favourite phrases, "till the cows come home"...what a world of difference!)

I can't help including this cartoon I drew some time ago, though I think I've posted it before.

Parlour Games in the Jury Room

This is an article I wrote for the magazine Leaven, which is now (as far as I know) defunct. Yes, it's an old hobby-horse of mine, so I hope regular readers don't groan. I really like the title-- it has a certain ring to it.

Six years ago, I was called for jury duty. The case was quite dramatic and dragged on for two weeks. Much of that time was spent in the jury room, as the barristers duked it out among themselves. Juries are not supposed to discuss the case until it comes to discussing the verdict. Most of my fellow jurors discussed it anyway, but we still had a lot of time to kill.

There was a whiteboard in the jury room, which was presumably intended for the serious business of sifting evidence and presenting theories. One day, the boredom became such that we decided to put it to a less civic-minded use; playing Hangman and drawing visual riddles.

After days and days of boredom, I suddenly felt energised. It had been a long, long time since I played Hangman. It brought me back to childhood, back to the eighties when the only computer in my life was my cousin's Spectrum console-- which I never actually got to use, being restricted to watching my cousin and my older brother play games like War of the Worlds and Back to Skool. (I remember the games took longer to load than they did to play.) It felt good to be back to playing games that didn’t require the mediation of a glowing screen; “making our own entertainment”, as the saying goes.

I assumed my fellow jurors were experiencing the same nostalgia, the same relief from the tyranny of the passive. Then one of them said: “They should have televisions in these jury rooms”. It felt like a kick in the teeth.

All my life, I’ve felt an anxiety about this matter. But what exactly is “this matter”?

It’s difficult to put a name to it. The decay of oral tradition? The loss of folklore? The tyranny of entertainment? The triumph of the electronic? None of those exactly seem to cover it, although all of them apply.

It seems fair to say that, since the advent of radio and television, mass media have become a bigger and bigger part of everyday life. We all live in a mental universe of pop culture. The passivity of radio and TV may have been mitigated by the arrival of the internet-- now anyone can write their own blog or start their own online forum, on any subject whatsoever. However, the mediation of the electronic screen remains, eliminating barriers of time and space in a way that surely has costs as well as benefits. Today we can send a message across the world in a moment, but what of the local legends and sayings and customs that were once protected by those very barriers?

Take, for instance, the case of Irish ballads. Ireland has a phenomenal heritage of ballads-- patriotic, sentimental, local, humorous, and of many other kinds. Up until very recently, as far as I can tell, most Irish people would have had a wide repertoire of these ballads, which often seeped into the written literature of our country. My own father could sing hundreds of them, or so it seemed. Now and again he would recite a verse or two from some obscure ballad, and then comment: “It must be fifty years since I last heard that”. I remember many sing-alongs, during which he and his friends would belt out song after song, from “Monto” to “James Connolly, the Irish Rebel”, never hesitating over a single line.

By the time my father died in 2019, the situation had changed. After his funeral reception, in the Brian Boru pub in Glasnevin, those who lingered over drinks made an effort at a sing-along. Now, however, the words did not come so easily. The youngsters knew no ballads at all, and even the older mourners-- who would have had innumerable ballads on the tip of their tongues twenty years ago-- struggled to get through more than a verse or two. Smartphones were produced to call up the lyrics. “Do you remember when we didn’t need phones to have a singalong?”, asked one person, gloomily.

We don’t sing songs anymore. We don’t tell stories. We don’t swap riddles. We don’t play parlour games. This may be an exaggeration, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. Even joke-telling seems to be on the decline. When is the last time you told or heard an actual joke? When did you last encounter that once-familiar trio, Paddy Englishman, Paddy Irishman, and Paddy Scotsman?

Surely you don’t have to be a galloping reactionary to regret this. You don’t have to deny the virtues of television, cinema and comic books (or even computer games and memes!) to feel that we are losing something.

Where does oral culture persist today? The only vibrant examples I can think of are terrace chants and popular devotions in religious communities. “Ooh, Ah, Paul McGrath” and “Who Ate All the Pies?” may not exactly be poetry, but at least such ditties have their own independent life, passing spontaneously from mouth to mouth without any debt to the culture industries. And it’s comforting to think of the tens of thousands of worshippers, across the face of our land, who can rattle off “Hail Glorious Saint Patrick, the Saint of our Land” or “Sweet Heart of Jesus, Fount of Love and Mercy” at the drop of a hat (or the ring of a bell).

Whether skipping chants and “haunting children’s rhymes” still exist in schoolyards is a question I’m not qualified to answer. I’m rather afraid to find out.

Surely this is something we can all address in our own ways. For my part, I have been memorizing poems for the last few years. I have about ninety of them stored in my brain now. I mentally recite them when I am washing dishes, walking to work, even (though perhaps I shouldn’t admit it) sitting in boring meetings. As long as I keep them refreshed, they’re all mine-- even on a desert island.

Poems I like: The School in August by Philip Larkin

This is a rather tongue-in-cheek poem that Larkin wrote when he was twenty-one, but it always comes to mind in the summer. I work in University College Dublin library and, as you can imagine, there's row upon row of empty desks from early May to late September.

(Anyone who's read this blog for any length of time would realize I work in UCD. But I have a bit of an allergy to people presuming others are familiar with their circumstances-- more particularly, to people who assume that I'm familiar with their circumstances. It seems so self-important.)

Anyway, I wrote an analysis of this poem for the Philip Larkin Society website, which can be read here. I wrote it twenty years ago this year! (The Philip Larkin Society used to have a forum which was one of my very first internet "haunts". I've memorialized it here.)

I'm not claiming this is a great poem, but it definitely catches an atmosphere.

The School in August by Philip Larkin

The cloakroom pegs are empty now,
And locked the classroom door,
The hollow desks are lined with dust,
And slow across the floor
A sunbeam creeps between the chairs
Till the sun shines no more.

Who did their hair before this glass?
Who scratched 'Elaine loves Jill'
One drowsy summer sewing-class
With scissors on the sill?
Who practised this piano
Whose notes are now so still?

Ah, notices are taken down,
And scorebooks stowed away,
And seniors grow tomorrow
From the juniors today,
And even swimming groups can fade,
Games mistresses turn grey.

An Extraordinarily Accurate Prediction

This passage is from an article that appeared in The Irish Press on 12th April 1966, in the midst of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. It was written by Charles McCarthy, the secretary of the Vocational Teachers' Organisation, and it's remarkably prescient:

"There was in the men on 1916 a sense of destiny. In these rather concrete and somewhat cynical times I imagine our organized commemoration this year, with its renewal of emotion and almost of sanctification, may well be followed by a period of more critical assessment, inevitable anyway as personal involvement gives way to history, and all the more inevitable as a reaction to romantic restatement.

"Both the messianic patriotism of Pearse and the socialistic patriotism of Connolly will come in for sharper intellectual examination than they have before; and both will be faulted, I have no doubt, very intelligently and quite validly. But while this will be appropriate to a lecture-room, we must remember that these were not lecture-room men..."

(Whenever someone ties a discourse or attitude or atmosphere to a particular setting, like a lecture room in this case, it gives me a thrill. I like the idea that reality shifts-- or at least, shimmers-- according to what space we're standing in.)

The reaction McCarthy was predicting was accelerated by the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland three years after he wrote. Of course, he couldn't have predicted that.

I'm always impressed when people can see past the atmosphere of the moment. For instance, St. John Paul II was by no means misled by his triumphant reception in Ireland in 1978. If you read the speeches he made on his tour, he could quite clearly see that secularism and materialism were on the rise in Ireland.

Favourite Poems: "Death of an Irishwoman" by Michael Hartnett.

This poem is a bit of an anomaly in my list of favourite poems. It was published in 1975. Other than the work of Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, I don't really bother with poetry that recent. (And, by a strange coincidence, I've just learned that Betjeman and Larkin's last collections were both published in 1974.)

I haven't read a huge amount of poetry by Michael Hartnett, either, although I can't really explain why. I've just looked at some of his other poems now, and they seem pretty good. I should give him a proper look. I guess I expected all his other poems would be typical modernist dreck, and that this one was just a moment of pure inspiration. His other most famous poem is "A Farewell to English", and I thought that one (or the excerpt I read from it) was pretty poor.

This poem, at any rate, is utterly magnificent. And heartbreaking. Some of its lines are actually unbearable-- in the moment that you read them, or think of them. Indeed, this is a poem that, whenever I find lines from it coming into my memory, has me turning my face away from other people, since I expect they'll ask: "Are you OK?". The sort of poem that doesn't just bring a tear to my eye, but makes my whole face crumple.

Lines such as: "She clenched her brittle hands around a world she could not understand."

Or the very next line: "I loved her from the day she died". (Like a kick in the stomach from a Doc Martin boot.)

Or the final line, pure perfection, a line as good as any written in the history of poetry: "She was a child's purse, full of useless things."

I know nothing about the circumstances of this poem's composition and I've read no critical analysis of it. But I very much suspect that it's not just about the death of an Irishwoman, but rather about the death of Ireland itself. The "child's purse full of useless things" being replaced by office blocks, indoor shopping centres, life coaches, play dates, world cuisine, designer labels, rap music, and...

Well, and all the rest of it. It's a familiar litany, and we're all tired of hearing it. Indeed, it seems self-indulgent at this point to even indulge in it. None of us are going to do anything about it, if we even could.

And yet, despite this, every now and again, we get a fresh stab or grief or horror-- at least I do. Even things we assumed would always be there start to disappear. (I've noticed that the line "There won't be a Shire, Pip", from the Two Towers film, has become proverbial in certain online conservative communities.)

Today one of my colleagues-- who describes himself as centrist-- was lamenting that he goes abroad on holidays only to find that everything is now the same as at home. I made my usual Eeyorish prediction (which I fear is really true) that Ireland will be gone in twenty years. He agreed with me.

Was this the prophecy in "Death of an Irishwoman"? I don't know. But, in any case, it's a masterpiece.

("Púcas" is pronounced "pookas" and means "ghosts").

Death of an Irishwoman by Michael Hartnett

Ignorant, in the sense
she ate monotonous food
and thought the world was flat,
and pagan, in the sense
she knew the things that moved
at night were neither dogs nor cats
but púcas and darkfaced men,
she nevertheless had fierce pride.
But sentenced in the end
to eat thin diminishing porridge
in a stone-cold kitchen
she clenched her brittle hands
around a world
she could not understand.
I loved her from the day she died.
She was a summer dance at the crossroads.
She was a card game where a nose was broken.
She was a song that nobody sings.
She was a house ransacked by soldiers.
She was a language seldom spoken.
She was a child’s purse, full of useless things.

Happy St. John's Eve!

It crept up on me this year. I might make some goody later. My attempts at goody have been pretty messy and tasteless, but what the heck?

Here's a reasonable description of the tradition from RTE. It's pleasing to know that people still make St. John's Eve bonfires.

The Poetry of Cliché

I was reading a book this morning and I came across the phrase "the mists of time". As always I felt a frisson of pleasure. It's one of the many clichés that strike me as intensely poetic.

What is a cliché, anyway? We can't be entirely original with every utterance. Why is it OK to use an idiom and not a cliché? What's the difference?

There are some clichés I just hate, such as "life-hack" and "bucket list". (The critique in the link is from Professor Bruce Charlton.) But that's not so much because they're clichés. I hate them because they're so inelegant and banal.

I'm not saying we should always speak in clichés. I'm defending the use of clichés that are especially poetic.

Here's some of my favourites. I know I've mentioned many of them before, in other posts. But what the heck.

The morning after the night before.

A walk down memory lane.

The wit and wisdom of...

Till the cows come home.

The dead of night.

The back of beyond (and the middle of nowhere).

The cold light of day.

Calling a pub a "hostelry", "tavern", or other jokey name.

The last chance saloon (much loved by sports commentators).

Dreaming spires (of academia).

In at the deep end.

As old as Father Time.

The best thing since sliced bread. (What did they say before sliced bread?)

A bumpy ride.

Goes to the movies (as in the titles of innumerable books: Stephen King Goes to the Movies, Philosophy Goes to the Movies, etc. etc.)

The silver screen.

The stroke of midnight.

I'm sure I'll think of more, and add to this post 

A common feature of all these favourite clichés of mine is that they are (in my view) aesthetically pleasing, both in the sounds of the words and in the image they use. I don't like clichés that are coarse or grotesque. For instance, instead of using "the back of beyond" or "the middle of nowhere", people increasingly seem to use phrases such as "the armpit of Ireland"-- or a part of the body even less pleasant than the armpit. I think that's yukky and not at all something to be encouraged.

I also dislike venerable clichés such as "I have my eyes peeled", clichés that are not aesthetically appealing and don't conjure up a pleasing image.

The pleasure I take from clichés actually enriches my life. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think to myself: "This is the dead of night", which fills me with pleasure. And, on a lazy morning after an eventful day, I relish the phrase "the morning after the night before". (I barely drink so it doesn't really apply to me in the sense of a hangover or a night of carousing.)

Alickadoo!

I encountered this word for the first time yesterday, while reading a memoir. It describes a member of a sports club who doesn't actually play, but who helps out and hangs around the clubhouse. It comes from Irish rugby, although the guy who's memoir I'm reading used it in the context of a rowing club.

You can read a discussion of alickadoos here, from a rugby fan forum.

There's a charming theory of its origin, which seems too good to be true. It's explained in the Dictionary of Irish Biography entry for the person who supposedly first used it, William Ernie Crawford:

One of the great characters of Irish rugby, Crawford is credited with inventing the word ‘alickadoo’ (meaning a non-playing rugby aficionado): when a team-mate preferred to read his book about an oriental potentate than to play poker, Crawford, in his annoyance, exclaimed, ‘You and your bloody Ali Khadu.’

Another theory is that it comes from the phrase "it's all I can do", as spoken by overworked club hangers-on.

The memoir I was reading was written by an Irish doctor, who began his career after World War Two. He mentions that, at that time, it was customary for a doctor to give his first fee from a private client to his mother. But he didn't, both because he was too hard-up and because the banknote was too grubby.

Words and traditions! Two subjects that fascinate me endlessly. I have realized, from sad experience, that other people are less interested. But hopefully my blog readers will indulge me.

What Has the Catholic Church Been Vindicated About?

I entered this query into a search engine, and it returned the following answer. (Obviously AI-generated, which I generally avoid, but its very impersonality might be appropriate here. I'm well aware that AI tells you what you want to hear, but this is all stuff that anyone could independently verify.)

1) The Big Bang Theory: The prevailing scientific consensus is that the universe originated in a massive expansion event. This model was actually first proposed in 1927 by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest and astronomer. Initially, the scientific community resisted his theory (with Albert Einstein notably dismissing it), but decades of astrophysical data ultimately proved the church-affiliated scientist correct. (My comment: obviously this wasn't just a Belgian priest being vindicated, it was the doctrine of creation ex nihilo itself.)

2) The Origins of Early Christianity: For centuries, skeptics theorized that the divinity of Jesus and early Catholic theology were fabricated much later by medieval institutions. However, the discovery of early Christian writings (like the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch from circa 107 AD) provided historical confirmation that the earliest church possessed an explicitly Catholic structure and sacramental theology. (My comment: a little bit of research shows that these were discovered in the seventeenth century, partly as a result of the work of Archbishop James Ussher, the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh. This is the same gent who dated the creation of the world to my birth-date in 4004 BC-- a theory that I've heard defended by at least one eminent scientist as a very good guess based on the knowledge available to him at the time.)

3) Preservation of Western Civilization: Historical consensus has shifted regarding the "Dark Ages." Historians now widely credit Catholic monasteries as the intellectual repositories of antiquity. Irish and European monks diligently copied and preserved classical literature and philosophy, laying the foundational texts for the Renaissance. (I'm actually kind of sick of hearing about this one; nobody really talks about the Dark Ages anymore, and so this claim has become a bit of an Aunt Sally, and an occasion for Catholic triumphalism, which irritates me.)

4) Societal Predictions on the Family: In 1968, Pope Paul VI released the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which controversially banned artificial contraception. It famously predicted that widespread contraceptive use would lead to a general lowering of moral standards, a rise in marital infidelity, and governments coercing citizens' reproductive rights. Today, Reddit discussions among conservative theologians and cultural critics highlight how societal shifts and subsequent demographic crises have led some to view these specific socio-cultural predictions as vindicated. (OK, Reddit is hardly an authority, but anyone who's being honest can observe that Pope Paul was abundantly vindicated about this-- even when the report of the Pontifical Commission that preceded the encyclical famously supported artificial birth control. A source of hope in our synodal times.)

And Google left one out: the widespread predictions of global overpopulation, which even the UN now admits were unfounded. This uncanny ability of the Catholic Church to be right when all the clever, well-spoken, throat-clearing types are completely convinced it's wrong is part of why I believe it's the true Church.

Excerpts from Idylls of the King (I)

As when we dwell upon a word we know,
Repeating, till the word we know so well
Becomes a wonder, and we know not why,
So dwelt the father on her face, and thought
'Is this Elaine?'

That's from the few pages of Tennyson's Idylls of the King that I read tonight. It describes a phenomenon that I think we've all experienced: saying a familiar word over and over until it seems strange.

I've been reading a few pages of Idylls of the King every day, as far as I can manage it. Poetry should be a part of daily life, in my view. And yet I'm not great at living up to this. The truth is that it's easier to read ten pages of prose than one page of poetry, because poetry is more demanding.

But it's much more rewarding, when it's good poetry. And, in my view, Idylls of the King is wonderful poetry. People don't read it because it doesn't have the same reputation as Paradise Lost or The Canterbury Tales, but it deserves to be one of the great landmarks of English poetry.

I especially like it because it speaks to my priggishness. Idylls of the King is the highest of high romance, all valiant knights and courtly ladies and coats of arms and lofty ideals. Nothing about it is ironic or self-parodic or subversive. Here is its idealism at its most lyrical:

I made them lay their hands in mine, and swear
To reverence the King as if he were
Their conscience, and their conscience as their King,
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honor his own word as if his God’s,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds
Until they won her; for indeed I knew
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.

Not that the poem is sugar-coated at all. In fact, it's quite dark and pessimistic. Tennyson seems to have been a depressive and the suggestion in Idylls of the Kings is that Camelot was too good for this world. Nearly all of Arthur's knights, noble as they are, fail to live up to his high standards for them, leading to the final battle where everybody except Arthur and Sir Bedivere are slaughtered (and King Arthur has to be carried to the island of Avalon by the Lady of the Lake, to recover from his wounds).

My plan is for this to be the first in a series of excerpts I take from the poem.

That's How the Digestive Disintegrates

I just used this phrase, as a humorous substitute for "that's how the cookie crumbles". I did a quick check of the internet and nobody else seems to have used it. I hereby claim it.

If you don't know, digestives are a plain biscuit (cookie). Barely worth eating unless they have chocolate on one side (but pretty good in that case).

Seriously, who eats plain biscuits? Plain digestives, Rich Tea (the worst of the worst), ginger nuts, Lincoln greens, Nice...the sort of biscuits that you might eat if they're available, sure, but who goes into a shop and buys them?

In recent years, I've been gluten free by choice (to coin a phrase), so there haven't been a whole lot of biscuits in my life anyway. But I don't miss any of the above.

(A nice Scottish shortbread is the exception, I'll allow.)

Tell Me Your Traditions

I have an endless appetite for traditions. So...tell me your traditions.

I'm interested in personal traditions, family traditions, school traditions, university traditions, local traditions, parish traditions, tertiary 

They can be anything at all. Go on. Tell me! (No facetious answers, please.)

All This Has Happened Before

I'm always hearing Traditionalist Catholics complain that Vatican II actually called for the continued use of Latin, and that this was ignored in the liturgical reforms. And when I mean "always", I really do mean "always". I could retreat to a cave in the Himalayas, I could shun all computers and radios and telephones, and I think some young chap in a blazer and a St. Christopher's medal would still clamber into my hideaway to complain about St. Paul VI.

So I was intrigued in this passage from a book about an Irish-American priest who died in the nineteen-twenties:

The liturgy had once been a great educational force and he believed that it should retain this function. He pointed out that in the early days of Christianity the liturgy, even more than schools, had been the great instructor in Christian doctrine. The educational function of the liturgy had declined largely due to the loss of the vernacular. And when the Council of Trent reformed so much, it failed here because the use of the vernacular was associated in the minds of the Council Fathers with the Protestant denial of the Sacrament of Holy Orders and the Sacrament of the Mass. Even so the decree which ordered the retention of Latin insisted on proper instruction of the things that are read in the Mass. Fr. Slattery dryly remarked that this injunction is honoured more in the breach than the observance.

Interesting, eh? Eh? The pendulum swings from age to age.

Attempt at an Aphorism

A surprise is only a surprise if it's a surprise that it's a surprise.

Bring Back Donnybrook!

I'm reading a book published in 1973 that includes the line: "He had no need to be on the faculty to join in the donnybrooks which plagued the early history of the Catholic University of America..."

Have you ever heard the word "donnybrook"? It means a fight, of one kind or another, and it's derived from Donnybrook in Dublin. This area was once the location of Donnybrook Fair, an annual event which became infamous for drunkenness and fighting. Hence the word.

Today Donnybrook is a very gentrified area, the home of Ireland's national broadcaster. It's in the postcode Dublin 4, which has been a metonym for snooty Irish liberalism for decades. 

I'd never heard the term "donnybrook" until I encountered it in the writings of G.K. Chesterton. I certainly never hear it in Irish discourse. It's somewhat surprising to meet it in a book written in 1973, although the fact that it's an American book written about an Irish-American might have influenced that.

I think we should revive the word! In fact, I want to revive almost every archaic word I come across. I might set up an Association for the Revival of Words That Have Fallen Into Desuetude. Membership is free and open to everybody. All you need to do is repeat the phrase "brown study" three times with your hand over your heart.

Favourite Poems: My Own John Poynz by Sir Thomas Wyatt

A while back I posted a list of my fifty favourite poems, and this was one of them. It's one of the more obscure poems on the list (most of them are not obscure at all). And even this isn't all that obscure, because I encountered it in the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Still, it's not a poem you ever hear quoted.

I have a strange kink whereby I don't want to know too much about the context of my favourite poems. I've read about Sir Thomas Wyatt before, but I don't remember many of the details. I think he was in love with Anne Boleyn, and wrote an excellent sonnet about her. Or was that his son, also called Thomas Wyatt? Or his father, also called Thomas Wyatt? I don't know. I'm pretty sure there were at least two Thomas Wyatts. One of them was involved in a rebellion and executed, or maybe both. You may be itching to enlighten me on this score. If you do, I promise you I'll have forgotten your clarification within hours.

Anyway, I think this is a very fine poem. It's similar to "The Fisherman" by W.B. Yeats. It has the same resounding and scornful invective against degenerate cultural tendencies, the same proud insistence on standing apart rather than running with the mob. I love the way it slowly but steadily gains pace, as example follows example and image follows image.

There are only one or two natural virtues that I've had all my life, but one of them is the sort of disdain for wealthy and powerful elites that Wyatt expresses here. I'm not talking about envy or resentment, but rather a complete lack of interest. I'm not one of those conservatives who delights in all the trappings of royalty and aristocracy. I'm all for a ceremonial monarchy, but all the splendour and majesty leaves me cold. Plutocracy has the same effect on me.

I love the savage irony of:

None of these points would ever frame in me;

My wit is naught; I cannot learn the way.

Being an anglophile, I also love the tirade against decadent continentals, compared to the yeomanly virtue of a true Englishman. And I also like the Catholic-bashing. Religious and national allegiances shouldn't come into our enjoyment of poetry. (Yes, there's a bit of a contradiction in that paragraph.)

My favourite line in the whole poem is: But here I am in Kent and Christendom. For years that's the line that's come to me when I'm enjoying the sensation, or imagining the sensation, of feeling safely ensconced on home ground, in some way or other.

There is a whole genre of poems like this, in which a poet appeals to a friend to enjoy simple joys, far from the madding crowd. There's Milton's "Lawrence, Of Virtuous Father Virtuous Son" and Tennyson's "To The Rev. F.D. Maurice". And probably others, although I can't think of them.

Mine own John Poynz by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Mine own John Poynz, since ye delight to know
The cause why that homeward I me draw,
And flee the press of courts, whereso they go,
Rather than to live thrall under the awe
Of lordly looks, wrappèd within my cloak,
To will and lust learning to set a law:
It is not for because I scorn or mock
The power of them, to whom fortune hath lent
Charge over us, of right, to strike the stroke.
But true it is that I have always meant
Less to esteem them than the common sort,
Of outward things that judge in their intent
Without regard what doth inward resort.
I grant sometime that of glory the fire
Doth twyche my heart. Me list not to report
Blame by honour, and honour to desire.
But how may I this honour now attain,
That cannot dye the colour black a liar?
My Poynz, I cannot from me tune to feign,
To cloak the truth for praise without desert
Of them that list all vice for to retain.
I cannot honour them that sets their part
With Venus and Bacchus all their life long;
Nor hold my peace of them although I smart
I cannot crouch nor kneel to do so great a wrong,
To worship them, like God on earth alone,
That are as wolves these sely lambs among.
I cannot with my word complain and moan,
And suffer nought, nor smart without complaint,
Nor turn the word that from my mouth is gone.
I cannot speak and look like a saint,
Use willes for wit, and make deceit a pleasure,
And call craft counsel, for profit still to paint.
I cannot wrest the law to fill the coffer
With innocent blood to feed myself fat,
And do most hurt where most help I offer.
I am not he that can allow the state
Of him Caesar, and damn Cato to die,
That with his death did scape out of the gate
From Caesar's hands (if Livy do not lie)
And would not live where liberty was lost;
So did his heart the common weal apply.
I am not he such eloquence to boast
To make the crow singing as the swan;
Nor call the liond of cowardes beasts the most
That cannot take a mouse as the cat can;
And he that dieth for hunger of the gold
Call him Alexander; and say that Pan
Passeth Apollo in music many fold;
Praise Sir Thopias for a noble tale,
And scorn the story that the Knight told;
Praise him for counsel that is drunk of ale;
Grin when he laugheth that beareth all the sway,
Frown when he frowneth and groan when is pale;
On others' lust to hang both night and day:
None of these points would ever frame in me.
My wit is nought—I cannot learn the way.
And much the less of things that greater be,
That asken help of colours of device
To join the mean with each extremity,
With the nearest virtue to cloak alway the vice;
And as to purpose, likewise it shall fall
To press the virtue that it may not rise;
As drunkenness good fellowship to call;
The friendly foe with his double face
Say he is gentle and courteous therewithal;
And say that favel hath a goodly grace
In eloquence; and cruelty to name
Zeal of justice and change in time and place;
And he that suffer'th offence without blame
Call him pitiful; and him true and plain
That raileth reckless to every man's shame.
Say he is rude that cannot lie and feign;
The lecher a lover; and tyranny
To be the right of a prince's reign.
I cannot, I; no, no, it will not be!
This is the cause that I could never yet
Hang on their sleeves that way, as thou mayst see,
A chip of chance more than a pound of wit.
This maketh me at home to hunt and to hawk,
And in foul weather at my book to sit;
In frost and snow then with my bow to stalk;
No man doth mark whereso I ride or go:
In lusty leas at liberty I walk.
And of these news I feel nor weal nor woe,
Save that a clog doth hang yet at my heel.
No force for that, for it is ordered so,
That I may leap both hedge and dyke full well.
I am not now in France to judge the wine,
With saffry sauce the delicates to feel;
Nor yet in Spain, where one must him incline
Rather than to be, outwardly to seem:
I meddle not with wits that be so fine.
Nor Flanders' cheer letteth not my sight to deem
Of black and white; nor taketh my wit away
With beastliness; they beasts do so esteem.
Nor I am not where Christ is given in prey
For money, poison, and treason at Rome—
A common practice used night and day:
But here I am in Kent and Christendom
Among the Muses where I read and rhyme;
Where if thou list, my Poinz, for to come,
Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my time.

One Word That Makes Me Shun Any Video, Blog Post, etc. (When it's the First Word in the Title.)

"How..."

Especially when the word doesn't really apply and it's just an attemptedly cute appeal to self-improvement. ("How C.S. Lewis changed my life", that kind of thing.)

Exceptionally Exciting-- a Repeat

(This blog post is less than a year old, but I'm repeating it because its topic has been much on my mind today. Hey, it's blog, I can do that.)

As I've mentioned before, I browse the website TV Tropes a lot. A lotta lot. It might be my favourite way of relaxing, decompressing, kicking back, and so forth. And it has been for at least a decade.

Today, I came across this sentence on TV Tropes: "A San Francisco youth made national news when saw the movie Rocky eighty-one times (and possibly more) during its first-run release in 1976 and 1977. After the twenty-seventh viewing, the theatre started letting him in for free."

I don't know why, but this sort of thing makes the Christmas tree of my imagination light up, flash, and play holiday tunes.

What sort of thing do I mean? Well, anything to do with an exception, an irregular situation, a freebie, an informal arrangement, or an anomaly.

For instance: I once read that the Abbey National Building Society, having a branch very close to the (only ever fictional) address of 221B Baker Street, employed a full-time secretary to answer Sherlock Holmes's mail. And this is true!

For instance: one year in secondary school, when I was about sixteen, a quirk of the timetable meant that we had an English class sandwiched between two physical education classes. So the teacher let us stay in our gym clothes for that class.

For instance: I once went to a takeaway and bought some garlic sauce. Just that. The guy behind the counter threw in a good amount of chips, free of charge and unasked.

For instance: on Liechtenstein's national day, all the citizens are invited to a party in the Prince's castle.

For instance: once, when I was a kid, my school organised a treasure hunt. I remember me and my brothers going into the vegetable shop in the shopping centre to ask about a particular clue. The shopkeeper gave us a mysterious, knowing look, reached under the counter, and handed us an envelope. This completely floored me.

For instance: in the film Wayne's World 2, the protagonist says: "Everybody in the world has Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs, you were issued with it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide."

Please note, the appeal I'm talking about doesn't just apply to freebies or special privileges. It can go the opposite way, too. It pleases me when someone has a special power or obligation.

I've just discovered, from a quick internet search, that barmen don't really have the right to confiscate someone's car keys. But apparently, businesses did once have the right to cut up your declined credit card. Both ideas appeal to me.

When I was a kid, and I went a long time between haircuts (as I always did), I'd regularly get this taunt from other kids: "The barber has a warrant for your arrest." The idea always charmed me.

In 2003, Coke was banned from being sold in UCD Student's Union shops because of controversies about their operations in Colombia. That was lifted more recently, but now it's banned because the sugar content is too high. It's a bummer that you can't get a Coke in UCD when you want one, but I enjoy the anomaly.

Speaking of Coke, for many years it was forbidden to use the name Pepsi in their corporate headquarters in Atlanta. You had to say "the imitator" instead. (For real. Look it up, if you don't believe me.)

In New Jersey, you can't operate petrol pump yourself-- you have to get a petrol station attendant to do it.

And then there are the anomalies of convention. If children were to knock on your door and demand sweets on 364 days of the year, you'd send them packing. But on Halloween night, it's almost mandatory to indulge them. (Or, as the carol puts it about another season, "Once in a year it is not thought amiss to visit our neighbours and sing out like this...")

Then there are some interesting rules and arrangements in the history of cinema, often done as publicity stunts. For instance, Alfred Hitchcock's rule that nobody would be admitted into Psycho after the film had begun. (Back then, films played on a loop.)

Then there are William Castle's various gimmicks, such as "fright insurance" for the audience.

In the 1967 film Wait Until Dark, the gimmick was that cinemas turned off all their lights (except the EXIT signs) in the final scene, which is set in complete darkness.

Anyway, you either get what I mean now, or you don't. Does anyone share this fascination, or this pleasure? I'd be interested to know that.

Obviously, this goes a long way towards explaining this blog post!

Do you think this is a stupid blog post? It might be, but I bet there's none other like it out there...

Why Do Words Fall Out of Use?

I've just been reading a book from 1900, and it contains this sentence: "Vivid memories of those days survive, coloured by Bible stories, conned and repeated, and the prints and the chromos which were a part of the familiar apparatus."

Let's put aside the interesting word "chromo", which presumably means colour illustration. I'm interested in the phrase "conned and repeated".

You probably know the archaic meaning of 'con', in this context. It meant to learn by rote, to swot up on, to cram. But why has it ceased to be use in this sense? Why does any word or term cease to be used?

I mean, think about it. Hundreds of millions of people are speaking English every day, and using it to describe any number of ideas and activities and events. Shouldn't every possible resource be drawn upon repeatedly, in that great babble? Isn't that what you'd expect?

Was it perhaps the pejorative meaning of con, as in "to swindle, to trick", that made people back away from using it in the other sense?

But how does that explain all the other archaic terms that just disappear? (I think the one I lament the most might be "brown study": "I fell into a brown study", that is, a reverie.)

A little further on in the book, I came across another word that has fallen out of use: "collegian". There seems no earthly reason why that one should have disappeared, or all but disappeared.

Every time you open your mouth you are shaping the language. Think about that! (Unless, of course, you are opening it to put a doughnut inside, an operation of which I heartily approve.)

Look Thy Last

This stanza regularly intrudes itself upon my thoughts:

Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
In other days.

For years, I've thought it was Thomas Hardy, but it's actually Walter de la Mare-- as I've just discovered.

More recently I've been thinking: why just "lovely"? Look thy last on all things seems better advice, and something I'm increasingly trying to do. Even though I have no reason not to expect two or three more decades on this earth, or perhaps even more.

Beidh Lá Eile ag an bPaorach

This is one of my favourite Irish proverbs. 

The literal translation is "Power will have another day". "Power" is an Irish surname, so it's basically an assertion that you're not finished yet, or that you'll bounce back.

God knows who the original Power was or what he was bouncing back from.

Poems I Like: The Fascination of What's Difficult by W.B. Yeats

I gave a library tour today and a student (actually a prospective student) asked me my favourite poet. Nobody ever asks me great questions like this. People ask me the same kind of questions they ask you, I'm sure: how long does it take you to get into work, what did you do at the weekend, do you have any holidays booked, etc? I hadn't even mentioned poetry. (Incidentally, the student told me his own favourite poet was Rudyard Kipling, a choice I wholeheartedly praised.)

Anyway, there is only one answer for me: W.B. YEATS.

Yeats seems to me to be so much the greatest English language poet that I wonder why everyone doesn't agree with me. Nearly everything he wrote was brilliant.

"The Fascination of What's Difficult" is one of his lesser poems, but it's still a great poem. Presumably we've all experienced this fascination; doing something the hard way rather than the easy way, just for the sake of it. And feeling no choice in the matter!

There's something about Yeats poems that I can best describe by the term "contour". I have this notion that you could replace the words of a Yeats poem with almost any other words, as long as you preserved the sentence structure and rhyme scheme, and you'd still have a good poem-- the "bones" are that strong. (I've even thought of doing this myself). Very often he had a long, sinuous, tentative line followed by a short, punchy line. But that's just one example in his box of tricks.

The Fascination of What's Difficult

The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

"Give Me Just Sixty Seconds..."

Does someone believe that beginning a YouTube ad like this is really going to get me to listen? It makes me even likelier to skip them. (Oh, and telling me not to skip is guaranteeing that I will skip.)

Honestly, I don't see why ads can't evolve to get their essential message into five seconds.

And I wonder why they don't just have someone tell a joke. I'd probably stay for the punchline.

I'm sure they know their business, though.

Me, Frank and Stan

 

Some Lines on Corpus Christi by John Bradburne

I encountered them in an email from the John Bradburne Society today.

If you don't know about John Bradburne, I encourage you to make his acquaintance. Apparently he is the most prolific poet in English

I wouldn't call any of his poetry great, although of course, I've only read a tiny fraction of his huge outpout. He has an unfortunate tendency towards incongruity and bathos. However, I really like these four lines:

Jesus of Nazareth is in each tent
Where rests with us The Blessed Sacrament:
Worship the God of nature and do well,
Do better and adore Emmanuel.

Is Modern Life Banal, or Is It Just Me?

That's the question I keep asking myself, especially recently.

Don't people who consider themselves "sensitive", "soulful", "deep", "poetic", etc. etc. say this about every era?

Wasn't Wordsworth lambasting England in 1802 because "plain living and high thinking are no more"?

Didn't G.K. Chesterton deride his era of "frock-coats" and "stovepipe hats" (both of which now seem impossibly elegant to us), though he also complained about a "dwarfish contempt for the present?"

Didn't William Morris thunder against the utilitarianism and ugliness of his era?

And Thomas Carlyle?

And John Ruskin?

And W.B. Yeats?

And everybody?

And yet...I can't help it. I feel crushed under the banality of the twenty-first century all the time-- the supermarkets, the office blocks, the identikit suburbs, the moronic patter on the radio, the omnipresent political correctness, the all-pervasive irony and "self-awareness", the general lack of seriousness and solemnity and sublimity.

Well, maybe I don't feel like this all the time. But a lot of the time. I have a positive craving for "re-enchantment", whatever that means, and feel an urgent duty to be an agent of this however I can.

And yet, I can't help feeling that someone who wandered into the twenty-first century from the Middle Ages, or perhaps even any other time, might consider it a paradise beyond imagining, and want to kick me for my ingratitude.

Did You Ever Want to Read a Blog Post on the Scripture Knowledge of P.G. Wodehouse?

Well, here it is! Courtesy of the Gospel Coalition, who seem like a spiffing bunch of coves.

Mention of P.G. Wodehouse and the Bible inevitably reminds me of the legendary prize-giving scene in Right-Ho Jeeves, when a completely hammered Gussie Fink-Nottle distributes prizes to schoolboys-- not realizing that three different people have spiked his orange juice with whiskey, in an effort to give him some Dutch courage. His examination of one of the prize-winners is hilarious:

"Well, G.G. Simmons."

"Sir, yes, sir."

"What do you mean--sir, yes, sir? Dashed silly thing to say. So you've won the Scripture-knowledge prize, have you?"

"Sir, yes, sir."

"Yes," said Gussie, "you look just the sort of little tick who would. And yet," he said, pausing and eyeing the child keenly, "how are we to know that this has all been open and above board? Let me test you, G.G. Simmons. What was What's-His-Name--the chap who begat Thingummy? Can you answer me that, Simmons?"

"Sir, no, sir."

Gussie turned to the bearded bloke.

"Fishy," he said. "Very fishy. This boy appears to be totally lacking in Scripture knowledge."

The bearded bloke passed a hand across his forehead.

"I can assure you, Mr. Fink-Nottle, that every care was taken to ensure a correct marking and that Simmons outdistanced his competitors by a wide margin."

"Well, if you say so," said Gussie doubtfully. "All right, G.G. Simmons, take your prize."

(This scene is sometimes described as the funniest in all English literature, and I can't think of one which deserves that title better. Of course, there's a lot more to it than just the passage above.)

Poems I Like: "The Woman of Three Cows" by James Clarence Mangan

Some lines from this poem came into my head just now, so I've decided to include it in my series.

James Clarence Mangan is fairly well-known in Ireland, but I would be surprised if anybody (other than people interested in Ireland) know him abroad. He died in 1849. He was the archetypal romantic poet, known for his cloak, poverty, doomed love affair, and addictions.

Mangan wrote some very moving and lyrical poems, but this isn't one of them. This is a sparkling piece of satire or social commentary, translated from an Irish original.

The main thing I love about this poem is simply its virtuosity. It hops, skips, leaps, and jumps. Mangan is in complete command of the format. He comes up with rhyme after rhyme for the refrain "woman of three cows", with an impression of sheer effortlessness. Its emphatic metre is a pleasure in itself.

I also like the gusto of the poem. Somehow I imagine Mangan greatly enjoyed writing it. He was truly a Byronic figure in both senses; he had Byron's romantic melancholy, but also Byron's mordant comic glee, when the mood took him.

The Woman of Three Cows is the sort of person who, until recently, had a stock description in the Irish vernacular: "Tuppence-ha'penny looking down on tuppence."

Mangan was an Irish nationalist, and it's wonderful how he's stitched allusions to Irish history through the whole length of the poem. You'd expect this in a patriotic lyric, but somehow it's even more powerful in a piece of invective like this, where the Irish historical references (many of which are lost on me) simply form the background, the world of the poem. I'm constantly sad and ashamed that Irish writers just dropped the Gaelic Revival, or the Celtic Dawn, or whatever you want to call it, a few decades after independence. It had room for infinite variation.

I've said above that this isn't a moving and lyrical poem. That's not quite true. Although it's basically a satire, there are some loftier strains in it, such as this one:

O, think of Donnell of the Ships, the Chief whom nothing daunted --
See how he fell in distant Spain, unchronicled, unchanted!

It had never occurred to me before, but this poem is quite reminiscent of Tennyson's "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" (the poem from which the film Kind Hearts and Coronets takes its title), although Tennyson's poem is not comical.

Mangan throws Irish dialect words in liberally enough. "Agraw" means "my dear"; "Movrone" means "alas!", and "inagh"...to be honest, I don't know what that one means.

Trigger warning: the last verse contains an endorsement of violence towards women. We must remember Mangan never attended a sensitivity training course.

The Woman of Three Cows by James Clarence Mangan

O, Woman of Three Cows, agraw, don't let your tongue thus rattle!
O, don't be saucy, don't be stiff, because you may have cattle.
I've seen -- and, here's my hand to you, I only say what's true --
A many a one with twice your stock not half so proud as you.

Good luck to you, don't scorn the poor, and don't be their despiser,
For worldly wealth soon melts away, and cheats the very miser,
And Death soon strips the proudest wreath from haughty human brows;
Then don't be stiff, and don't be proud, good Woman of Three Cows!

See where Momonia's heroes lie, proud Owen More's descendants,
'Tis they that won the glorious name, and had the grand attendants!
If they were forced to bow to Fate, as every mortal bows,
Can you be proud, can you be stiff, my Woman of Three Cows!

The brave sons of the Lord of Clare, they left the land to mourning;
Movrone! for they were banished, with no hope of their returning --
Who knows in what abodes of want those youths were driven to house?
Yet you can give yourself these airs, O, Woman of Three Cows!

O, think of Donnell of the Ships, the Chief whom nothing daunted --
See how he fell in distant Spain, unchronicled, unchanted!
He sleeps, the great O'Sullivan, where thunder cannot rouse --
Then, ask yourself, should you be proud, good Woman of Three Cows!

O'Ruark, Maguire, those souls of fire, whose names are shrined in story --
Think how their high achievements once made Erin's greatest glory--
Yet now their bones lie mouldering under weeds and cypress boughs,
And so, for all your pride, will yours, O, Woman of Three Cows!

The O'Carrolls also, famed when Fame was only for the boldest,
Rest in forgotten sepulchres with Erin's best and oldest;
Yet who so great as they of yore in battle or carouse?
Just think of that, and hide your head, good Woman of Three Cows!

Your neighbour's poor, and you, it seems, are big with vain ideas,
Because, inagh! you've got three cows, one more, I see, than she has.
That tongue of yours wags more at times than Charity allows,
But, if you're strong, be merciful, great Woman of Three Cows!

Now, there you go! You still, of course, keep up your scornful bearing,
And I'm too poor to hinder you; but, by the cloak I'm wearing,
If I had but four cows myself, even though you were my spouse,
I'd thwack you well to cure your pride, my Woman of Three Cows!