The Annual St. Patrick's Day Guest Blog

For the third year, Gianna has conned a chump into writing a guest blog about being Irish as our tribute to St. Patrick's Day. Gianna spends all year telling people she's Italian, and then today she claims she's half Irish. It's so sad. Anyway, today's guest blog comes from Brian Contine. When his wife heard that he was writing this blog piece, her comment was "But you're not Irish...." Take that for what it's worth. Oh, right, and Brian is an assistant editor at The University of Texas Press.

Saint Patrick’s Day is a colossal waste of time, beer, and green food coloring.  Although beer and food coloring should never be wasted, wasting time is not such a bad thing. I work in the publishing industry, so I am beholden to the choices people make when wasting their time. I’ve got only so much time on this great green earth, why not spend it on something unnecessary like Saint Patrick’s Day?

This is Brian reading to his son Oliver.

I’m Irish in that very American way of not caring about Ireland at all. My mother cares, though, and because of that, I’ll dress my two boys in green pants and shamrocks on this most drunken holiday. In honor of my Gaelic past, we’ll play showtunes, watch Ellen, and worship at the altar of Tim Gunn. (It might be time to reexamine my phonetic understanding of the word 'Gaelic.')

And just as predictable as the bad decisions made on Sixth Street, the literary blogosphere will churn out the run of the mill Irish clichés. There will be funny quotes from James Joyce, readings of Keats, and wonderfully staged photos of Dylan Thomas. Site after site will inundate us with Irishtopia. Not this site! No. We strive to go a little deeper here. To go the extra mile. On this most Irish holiday, I want to focus on what it really means to be Irish. Since I have no idea what it means to be Irish, I read the Wikipedia entry for the History of Ireland…

Holy crap. Ireland has had a tough time of it since 8000 BC. Seriously, why has the world so regularly stepped on the neck of this little green rock? From Viking invasions, to harsh English rule, to the Nationalists and the Unionists blowing stuff up, Ireland has seen a series of one bad time after another. There was also a little trouble with some potatoes between 1845 and 1852. The real essence of the Irish, it seems, is survival. They go through hell, and they endure. [Liz here: I wanted to add that this bum rap continues today. My last name is Sullivan...and I share a blog with Gianna. Hell.]

 How do we celebrate the Irish perseverance? We have two choices: we can punch ourselves in the face repeatedly throughout the day, or we can read.  We could also do both, but let's just stick to reading.  So what are the books that I feel best reflect that Irish spirit of getting kicked in the teeth and liking it?

Bright’s Passage by Josh Ritter: Henry Bright went off to war, and he brought something back. The thing about Henry and WWI is this, and I’m paraphrasing Ritter here, imagine you were living in the early nineteen hundreds, in the mountains of West Virginia, and imagine you were poor- real poor. You would have lived a solitary life, maybe you’ve seen a thousand people your whole life. You’ve seen a car, but not that many, and most people you know walk and ride horses. Now imagine you get sent to WWI, you get on a boat and cross an ocean, you get off the boat, and you see a tank. Lots of tanks. And after you wrap your head around the magnitude of the tank, and the ocean, and the world, then you watch 20,000 people die in a single day. You’re damn right you bring something back, and that thing may be horrible, it may be an angel, or it may just be a figment, but it is real to you. All that you, or all that Henry, can hope for is that this something will help.

Ava by Carole Maso: I love Carol Maso as much as Saint Patrick hates snakes. Maso is what most people would call “experimental." Most people use this as a derogatory term, but not me. I love the stretching and twisting of language to do something new. Ava recounts the last day of Ava Klein. It is a collection of disconnected sentences. This, more than any book I’ve ever read, is about rhythm. When you pick up the novel, start reading and don’t stop. Keep going, go numb with the sentences, and come out at the end with something that is bigger than a collection of plot points. Two things that we can’t understand: birth and death. Ava is our best approximation of what someone might be thinking on their last day, and the brilliance of the whole thing is that it is partly nostalgic, hopeful, mundane, naughty, sad, funny, regimented, impossible, and inevitable. If I could only read one book for the rest of my life, I’d read Don Quixote, but if I could only read two books for the rest of my life, Ava would be the second.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan: Egan’s award winning history of the Dust Bowl is political for me. It had to be, right? The free market drove huge numbers of people to the High Plains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The free market told them to plow through millions of years of progress in terms of dirt and grass. The strong backs of these farmers actually moved an entire region of dirt. The problem was they left “the wrong side up.” The free market turned its back on them, and then forced them to double down on their bad idea. These people who came to the High Plains were the most productive farmers in the history of humanity, and they died because of it. Big Government saw this problem early, organized relief, and built a plan to regulate the mending of the soil. This book teaches a lot of lessons, but none are more important than the idea that the things we do matter and that we are a collective, beholden to each other for everything. If we ignore our neighbor, and try to take shortcuts with nature, the sky will open up and drop the earth on our heads. It happened, and not that long ago. Burt Reynolds was alive to see it happen. It may also be important to note that Egan can write. I’ve read some critiques that he spends a bit too much time talking about the land and its people. O.k., guilty. If you are not nostalgic about farmers and land, this book is not for you. If you are human, this book is just what you’re looking for.

When Pigasso Met Mootisse by Nina Laden: This book gets me every time. The plot is as follows: Pigasso is a pig that likes to paint strange pictures, and Mootisse is a cow that also likes to paint, and in a most unusual way. They both become huge stars in the anthropomorphic art world, and they also become friends. But, as we’ve seen time and again, professional jealousies take over, and ruin their friendship. Things happen that shouldn’t have, and things that should not have been said were said. These two giants of the animal kingdom, it seems, won’t ever get back together. But just when all seems lost, they begin to miss each other. Their friendship is rekindled, and all is well. Just like bacon wrapped beef tenderloin, these two were made for each other, and the world of fake animals making childish art has never been the same. 

Colleen and Frank: An Irish Identity Story

Colleen with her favorite ginger writer, Fannie Flagg.

Colleen Devine is one of our favorite people and we are really trying not to hate her for writing our best blog so far.  She has worked in the book biz for over a decade and is currently the Publicist at the University of Texas Press. Colleen's favorite beverage is anything with Bailey's in it (but in a pinch, she has been known to drink a Guinness or three).  

Here's Colleen's rumination on her favorite Irish author.  Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Colleen, Shawn, and
Brian

My father raised us to consider ourselves “Irish.” Not Irish-American, or any hyphenated bullshit like that, but that we were direct decedents of, and cousins to, people who lived on the isle of Erie. We believed him. He started a collection, encouraging us to donate any money we had, towards a trip to the homeland (he used that word a lot.). We saved for what seems like my entire childhood.

Then the day came: The Devine family went to Ireland for the first time in 1982, when I was 11 years old. Finally, a chance to be reunited for the first time with our extended family whom we had never met!

Back then, flying internationally was like traveling by wagon train. We had to drive from Baltimore to New Jersey and stay with my Aunt Laura (also the first time we visited New Jersey), spend the night at her house, and the next day my cousin Tony drove us to JFK airport in New York.  This was one of the three airports in the US at the time from which Aer Lingus, the Irish airline, went directly to Ireland. We then flew eight hours to Shannon airport on the West coast of Ireland.  From there, we rented an economy-sized car( for five people and luggage). After not dying but coming close many times as my dad tried to get the hang on driving a stick shift and on the other side of the road (this was so long ago that it wasn’t cliché to talk about how hard it is to drive on the left side, or to say you were going ‘across the pond’), we set out for our accommodations.  Eventually we made it to the hotel in Dublin, which is literally on the other side of the country from the airport. So, door to door, traveling from Baltimore, Maryland to Dublin, Ireland, in 1982 took nearly four days. Yes, we slept in the car one night.

Smile for the camera!  The Devines:
Ed, Shawn, Colleen, Brian, and Kitty Devine (real name!)

So, we figured out pretty quickly that we weren’t Irish, we were AMERICAN and everyone in Ireland knew it; they not only had seen our kind before, they had built an entire tourism industry on us.  All the Irish kids we met who were our age were better educated, better behaved, and even knew more about the U.S. than we did(oh, Ireland is smaller than the U.S.? A lot smaller?  Are you sure?). At one place we stayed, we had to milk a cow in order to have any milk, and then skim the cream off the top for our tea.  It took maybe half a day for my brothers and me to become totally enthralled with the place, the entire country, every person we met.  Thank God they weren’t like us! Thank God they were so damned Irish! (On the God thing, we went to church many times on that trip, and it was nothing like church at home; it was more like going to a play. Thank God again!)

Castle Matrix (possibly made
up name) in Limerick,
Ireland

This is a lot of background to introduce my favorite Irish writer.  I just want you to understand where I’m coming from when I say that I’m excited to have the chance to talk about Frank McCourt. Yes, a writer born in New York City, who lived the majority of his life there, is one of my favorite Irish writers. Write your own article if you want something on Joyce or Synge (and guess what, it’s already been said).

Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes was published in 1996. It was the tale of a wrenchingly poor Irish family who had traveled to New York to find the American dream, but when the father drinks the dream away they return to Ireland in 1934.  Their lives were many years of hunger, exposure, grief, and abuse, that somehow endured and created a close and loving family in the end (there’s much more, like kids dying and priests behaving badly, read it if you aren’t familiar). Maybe you remember 1996 – if so, you might also remember that Angela’s Ashes took the U.S. by storm.  It was as if every person who identified as themselves as Irish-American took McCourt’s story as their own history: it became the collective memory of 40 million(or more? Or less?  It’s too late for me to look up the real number) people in a very short time.   Angela became Irish-America’s mother, and we all wanted to give her something savory to eat and some peat for the fire.  Frank became a member of all of our families.  Then we found out that his brother Malachy was a soap actor and been in many of our living rooms for years, but we still liked Frank better.

 

The next year Angela’s Ashes went on the win the Pulitzer Prize, was a bestseller(in hardcover! Never going to happen again unless James Patterson ‘writes’ Alex Cross’s memoir) for another two years, and was also made into a film, which was possibly more depressing and horrific than the book.  Movie theaters were packed for weeks. It was our time; we had a national identity and it was hungry and in need of a bath. There was the small issue of both Angela and Malachy publicly disagreeing with Frank’s version of this classic Irish tale of woe and bare feet in winter, but we politely ignored the controversy for the sake of the family. My own family embraced the McCourts fervently, and came to love Frank more than some of our actual relatives (still accurate to this day).

Frank McCourt

I believe that Frank McCourt, who was truly a lovely man and lived a life that I find to be both admirable and inspiring (not enough room to go into his own struggles to become educated, his 30+ years of teaching kids to write, etc., just trust me, he was very cool) actually wrote the catharsis of the Irish-American story. We no longer needed to band together for an identity; most of us were not all that Irish anyway, maybe a great-great grandparent on one of our parents’ side, but no one we ever knew. And we realized what they had left long ago, and what they hoped to find in America.  Guess what?  Many of us found it; and not only did we have the American dream, but we had inherited the dream from the previous generations in our families. Frank McCourt would remind us that we have done it, left poverty and unimaginable hardships behind, but that these oppressive conditions still exist for others who may identify themselves as Americans, people who live in Detroit, or Memphis, or New York City, not in Ireland.  He might say we’re all Irish when it comes to hardships.  I don’t really know, he’s the guy with the Pulitzer. 

Why You Should Read Flann O'Brien (and Give James Joyce the Finger)

Victoria in Dublin pretending
to break up with the statue of writer
Patrick Kavanagh. They are, however,
still seeing each other.

Official Bio: Victoria Davis holds a PhD in Irish Literature and is a manuscript editor at the University of Texas Press. "Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues is her karaoke jam. Clearly she is Irish.

What we dug up: Victoria Davis is a member in good standing with the Covenant Of Copy Editors. They worship the Chicago Manual of Style (they read it backwards over the graves of writers in order to raise them from the dead to spread the word on the proper use of the semi-colon). 

Oh, and THIS is actually her karaoke jam:

Continuing our Irish focus, here's a guest piece from Victoria Davis.

Why You Should Read Flann O'Brien (and Give James Joyce the Finger)

“We are not making any Ireland. We just live here... some of us even work here.”

--Flann O'Brien

Victoria after her covenant meeting.

Brian O'Nolan, aka Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, was a civil servant, journalist, novelist, and playwright who wrote about Ireland during the decidedly unromantic period of the 1930s–1960s. This was not the Ireland of Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, lousy with noble bards speaking the pure Gaelic, hotly chaste warrior queens, and wacky cattle raids. Instead, it was an economically depressed and socially repressed fledgling nation trying to navigate problems both inside and outside its borders while wearing the heavy mantle of revolutionary ideals. In short, it was the kind of place that writers left. Writers like Joyce and Beckett. The guys who couldn't stand the heat, and yet get all of the attention. Wankers.

Flann O'Brien

Yes…yes... Yeats and his ilk inspired a revolution with their creation of a glorious, yet pretty dang fictional past for Ireland. Joyce made the map of Dublin synonymous with modernism. Beckett replaced the city with an existential crisis. Revivalist, modernist, postmodernist…literary critics call O'Brien a "failed" dabbler in each of these movements. Why? Well, I could go on and on about all of that, but I think the short answer hinges on the long shadows cast by these other figures and that troubling word, "parody." O'Brien did indeed parody all three movements (and writers), but with a highly sophisticated grasp of their structures and tropes. And, he used these structures and tropes to critique the Ireland in which he lived and worked. AND he did it living under state censorship and the restrictions imposed upon him as a civil servant.

So, that's much of why you need to read Flann O'Brien… Now here's what you need to read:

1. An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), 1941. An Béal Bocht is widely considered one of the greatest Irish-language novels of the twentieth century. (For those of us who don't read Irish, an English translation by Patrick C. Power, with illustrations by Ralph Steadman, was published in 1996.) This darker-than-dark comic novel parodies the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area) autobiographies that were used in the Irish school system to teach the Irish language and which were known for their depictions of unrelenting misery.

2. At Swim-Two Birds, 1939. At Swim-Two Birds is O'Brien's best-known work, and it is regarded as one of the most sophisticated examples of metafiction. (If the word "metafiction" hasn't gotten you all excited, Dylan Thomas famously said that At Swim-Two-Birds was "just the book to give your sister--if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl.") The book is narrated by a college student who sets out to write a book with three beginnings--one involves a very urbane devil, the Pooka MacPhellimey; another involves John Furrisky, the fictional "son" of a disreputable and equally fictional writer of Westerns, Dermot Trellis; and the last involves the resurrection of Irish legendary figures, particularly Finn Mac Cool and Sweeney. Eventually the three main threads interrupt each other and become hilariously, sometimes violently, intertwined.

3. The Third Policeman, 1967. The Third Policeman was written between 1939 and 1940, but it wasn't published until after O'Brien's death. To put it simply, The Third Policeman is a vision of hell set in the rural Irish midlands and peopled with a narrator (an amateur scholar of a questionable scientist named DeSelby), three mysterious policemen who bend the rules of physics, a one-legged bandit, and "Joe," the narrator's soul. There is, seemingly, one storyline, but that soon becomes engulfed by footnotes explaining DeSelby's theories on various phenomena. Again, a very dark and hilarious book… and, it was featured in a 2005 episode of Lost!

Enjoy, and happy St. Patrick's Day! 

Victoria's threat to us all.

Generally Horrible Questions: Seamus McGraw (Irish Guy)

It’s that time of year where we get all Irish on your asses. For the next several days we will be all Irish all the time. That’s full time, full throttle Irish! Liz will also be using a fake Irish accent just like James Joyce did for all those years.

Seamus McGraw is an award-winning journalist published in Radar, The Forward, Readers Digest, and Playboy among others. We had the great fortune of selling The End of Country (which was on Gianna’s best of 2011 list) for Random House. The End of Country is a incredible book about what happened when the natural gas industry landed in McGraw’s hometown in 2007.

1.    What are you reading?

My wife, who exclusively reads thrillers, went to the library the other day and I asked her to surprise me. She came back with David Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed In Flames because she figured he had enough syllables in his last name for me to take him seriously. I'm enjoying it. The other stuff I'm reading are various threads online that might help explain why my MacBook turned on me, and ate the last two years of my notes. [Guess who isn’t going to get a free MacBook from Apple?]

2.    Is  “The Halliburton Loophole” as fun as it seems? 

Oh, yes. But then again, I find naked displays of corporate arrogance strangely arousing. [When we read what the Halliburton Loophole was … we were turned on too.]

3.    I’ve never read _______ and I am so ashamed. 

I've never made it all the way through Finnegan's Wake, but if I admit that to my mother, she'll have the family bust me all the way down to a Welshman. [My God, this dude is Irish.]

4.    Seriously…do you read Playboy for the articles?

Seamus McGraw

I really do, but that's because I kind of prefer women who look vaguely like real women. I mean most of the women in my past have barely been touched by a hair brush let alone an airbrush. Actually, when I first started writing for them from time to time, my youngest daughter was still an infant. When the first issue came in the mail, my wife hid it. I asked her why and she explained that she didn't want Seneca to be exposed to it because it would lead her to body image issues. I told her I agreed with the sentiment, but I pointed out that Seneca was still breast feeding and that as far as she was concerned Playboy might just as well be a menu.

5.    What book are you always trying to get people to read?

Seriously, for the past four years, I've been trying to get everyone I know to read or re-read The Grapes of Wrath.   [We love this answer!]

6.    Phillies or Pirates? 

My wife was the first female baseball columnist for the New York Post. I, on the other hand, have very little interest in watching fat juicers chase little balls around a fake grass field in their pajamas, no matter what city they visit for home games. There's a great scene from an old movie from the seventies called The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, in which Cole Younger, played by Cliff Robertson, watches his first baseball game. A fly ball soars through the air, and a character turns to Younger and says, "It's the great American past time." Younger takers aim with his rifle and blows the fly ball out of the air. "Shootin's still the great American past time," he says. That pretty much sums up my attitude about baseball.. [We hate this answer. Go Cubs!] [Liz: I hate Gianna's comment. Go 'Stros!]

7.    I have read ____ and I am so ashamed (don’t say Playboy) 

My father in law left one of Glenn Beck's books here once…..Give me a minute to compose myself…. [Talk about arousing…Helloooooooooo Mr. Beck!]

8.    Liz or Gianna? 

That depends entirely on which one of you is going to be reading these answers first. [Ahem.  The correct answer is now and forever-more LIZ.]

9.    We think "Men in Granny Panties: A Love Story" (available exclusively for the Kindle at a steal by the way) is one of the best titles ever. Did you sort of predict Rick Santorum? Why would you do that? 

Liz has never heard of this band.

It was an accident. What I did was take a number of Santorum quotes from the last two decades. I cobbled them together, and tried to fashion a totally fictitious character who would be so culturally tone deaf, so dull witted and yet megalomaniacal that he would strain credulity. How was I to know that Santorum himself would come back from the political dead and top me? 

10. U2, Sinead O’Connor, Enya, Van Morrison, The Pogues, The Frames, or Thin Lizzy? 

Black 47. Neither of you are Irish, are you? [Awkward.  Liz's last name is "Sullivan."]

A Semi-True Conversation between Gianna and Liz

This really happened.

Gianna: We should do a few blog posts about Irish writing for St. Patrick’s Day.

Liz: …Okay.  I am drawing a blank though.  I’m not sure that I can think of many Irish writers.

Gianna:  Sheesh.  Of course you can.  Everyone knows at least a few.

Liz: What about Larry McMurtry?

Gianna: Is he Irish?

Liz: MCMurtry—gotta be Irish.  And in Lonesome Dove Captain Call was born in Ireland, and there were the two Irishman—the one bitten by the snakes and the other one who went to the brothel with Newt.  And Gus’s last name is McCrae.  MC-Crae.  And McMurtry is from the Dublin of Texas, Archer City.

Gianna: That sounds about right.  (Sarcasm?)

Liz: Okay, then there’s Cormac McCarthy. 

Joyce is Irish.

Gianna, reading from the internet:  “He renamed himself ‘Cormac’ after the Irish king.”

Liz: Heh.  There are you kings in Ireland.  Queen Liz rules all.

Gianna: You’re going to get us in trouble.

Liz: What about Joyce?

Gianna: Definitely Irish.

Liz: ….Carol Oates.  Upstate New York is just like Ireland.  Tim O'Brien?  Dr. Phil McGraw?

Gianna: You’re getting pale people confused with Irish people.

Liz: I think I hate you.