How the Irish Saved Civilization, and Writing as Act of Service

How the Irish Saved Civilization is a charming valentine written by Thomas Cahill, a tribute to Ireland's history as a book-loving culture. It starts during the Roman Empire, with its heritage of Greek intellectual life and the birth of Christianity. It moves forward to Christianity's spread across Europe and the arrival of the barbarians during the Dark Ages.

There's are splendid diversions concerning St. Augustine, who Cahill claims is the first author to create a psychological self-portrait, and the Irish epic poem Tain Bo Cuailnge, The Cattle Raid of Cooley. Then we come to St. Patrick, the brave nature lover, and eventually the monastic movement with its book-loving monks.

The heart of the book is that the Irish monasteries saved civilization by copying and preserving the great intellectual manuscripts of ancient Greece and Rome while Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages. Apparently the scribes would add their own little comments into the margins:

One scribe will complain of the backbreaking work of book-copying, another of a sloppy fellow scribe: "It is easy to spot Gabrial's work here" is written in a beautiful hand at the margin of an undistinguished page. A third will grind his teeth about the difficulty of the tortured ancient Greek that he is copying: "There's an end to that -- and seven curses with it!"

I particularly liked the chapter on the Tain, as the ancient Irish epic is called, which features a warrior-queen, Medb, who tries to capture the Brown Bull of Cuailnge so that her husband's fortune won't outrank her own.

Medb is fiery and spirited, and offers Daire mac Fiachna all sorts of treasure for the Brown Bull, "and my own friendly thighs on top of that." Another of the poem's heroes is Cuchulainn, a warrior who marries Emer. On meeting her, he declares, "I see a sweet country. I could rest my weapon there."

(If you've read Angela's Ashes, Cuchulainn is the Irish hero that young Frankie idolizes after his father tells him the story by the fire.)

I might add the Tain to my Irish reading list. The public libraries don't have it, but a few of the university libraries in my area have copies.

Thoughts after reading Harry Potter (no spoilers)

Just finished the final Potter book. I don't want to post any spoilers at this point, so I'll just say it was quite good and did a remarkable job of keeping in the spirit of the whole series.
It's not giving away much to say this: I shouldn't have worried about getting enough on the early life of Albus Dumbledore. Thankfully, that was a major plot line -- hooray!

Thoughts before reading Harry Potter

About 2 and a half hours from now, I'll pick up my copy of the last Harry Potter book. I'm guessing I will finish it by Sunday night. What a wonderful trip it's been! My sister introduced me to HP right around the time Prisoner of Azkaban came out in 1999. Seven years later, these books have brought a lot of happiness to my life. There's something so fun about a series, and J.K. Rowling hit all the right notes.
My personal predictions -- no spoilers here, these are just guesses -- are that Harry lives, Voldemort dies, Snape is good, Dumbledore does not return. Harry ends up with Ginny, and Hermione ends up with Ron, and they all live happily ever after. Who will die? I hate to say it but I think it's Mrs. Weasley and Hagrid.
I'm most worried that we won't get sufficient back-story on Lily Evans and Neville Longbottum. I'd also love to know more about Dumbledore's early life, but I'm not holding my breath for it. I also wonder what will happen to Draco Malfoy.
OK, that's it! I've got to get ready ...

Dark but funny childhood memoirs

I wasn't going to read Angela's Ashes for the Irish reading project, because we're not going to Limerick, where much of it is set. But I decided to get the audio book read by the author Frank McCourt from the library, to liven up my commute. It's a pretty humorous memoir of a truly disturbing childhood. Maybe someone should write a doctoral thesis comparing it with similar memoirs The Glass Castle and Running with Scissors.

So here's my favorite part so far. A school master is chastising his students for making fun of the narrator Frank, who has to wear shoddily patched shoes to school, because he's so poor:

He says, There are boys here who have to mend their shoes whatever way they can. There are boys in this class with no shoes at all. It's not their fault and it's no shame. Our Lord had no shoes. Our Lord died shoeless. Do you see Him hanging on the cross sporting shoes? Do you, boys?
No, sir.
What don't you see him doing?
Hanging on the cross sporting shoes, sir.

Then the teacher threatens to wallop them all with a switch.

Librarians in the Press

The New York Times snaps to the fact that librarians are way cool. Here's the nutgraf:

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?

Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”

Harry Potter Reading Project Update

Since June 1, I have re-read two of the six Harry Potter books -- Book 1 (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) and Book 6 (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince). I am currently re-reading Book 5 (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). I'm not sure if I will have re-read all six before the final book comes out on July 21, but I'm going to try! (I also have other non-HP books I'm reading, too.)
I'm re-reading for the following reasons:

• 1. for fun!
• 2. to mine for clues to the final ending.

Years ago, I read an opinion piece on an HP fan web site -- sadly I can't remember where. It said we current Harry Potter fans are blessed to be able to read the books as they come out, to be able to savor the anticipation between books. Future readers will probably come at the series differently, reading them in sequence much faster. Some children will no doubt spend a long weekend reading all seven books in one big gulp. And their experience will be quite different from the years we current readers -- we few, we happy few (relatively speaking)-- have invested in looking for clues, contemplating themes and teasing out meaning.
That sentiment hangs on whether you believe the Harry Potter books will be read for generations to come. I think they will -- they are that good, embracing enduring themes, like what it means to live a good life in the face of inevitable death. Time will tell.

Wallace on YouTube

A YouTube user called dazzlecomm has posted a bunch of video on YouTube from a writers conference held last year in Italy called Le Conversazioni. The attendees last year included my favorite David Foster Wallace along with Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, and others. (I vow to finally read Eugenides' Middlesex now that it's Oprah's pic.)

Check out the above clip from David Foster Wallace. I transcribed what he's saying, it's just a short couple of sentences. It seems to be a response to a question about whether he belongs to a school of writers, though we don't get the question. So I'll notate it Wallace-style:

Q.
A. One symptom of what you could call the American disease, is that I don't know any writers who think of themselves as like other writers. Critics often group writers together more than writers do.
I would say that there's a group of American writers who tend to use more the techniques of postmodernism and experimentation, and then there's a group of traditional, sort of more realistic writers. Many of the writers I admire, and (unintelligible) whether I'm one of them, are interested in using postmodern techniques, postmodern aesthetic, but using that to discuss or represent very old, traditional human veritities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community, ideas that the avant-garde would consider very old-fashioned. So that there's a kind of melding -- It's using postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends.
If there is a group -- and some of whom I think are here this week with me -- If there is such a group, that's the group I want to belong to.

I think that description is right on the money as far as Infinite Jest goes. (Have I mentioned lately that I love that book?) Some of his other writing, I'm not so sure about. The book that continues to vex me is his short story collection "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" -- I just don't know what to make of it. And they're making it into a movie, can you believe that? I think I need to read that book again. I read it at a point in my life when I was very melancholic, and I have often wondered if I saw it through a dark lens, so to speak.
On another issue, in light of the recent New Yorker article on the Ransom Center's literary archive, how does a library preserve video like this? The reason I transcribed the quote is because the video could go away for any number of reasons (not least of which would be complaints from conference organizers or DFW himself). I think it's valuable from a literary-historical point of view to hear what writers have to say about their own writing, and the fledgling librarian in my instinctively says such video should be preserved for research purposes. I wonder if the Ransom center has multimedia archivists? Hmmm ...
On a related note, the spouse is always hassling me to archive this blog is some way, but I'm lazy, and I have confidence that the Google servers will keep chugging along. From an archival point of view, I should print it out though, on acid-free paper and store it in a fire-proof box somewhere. (The difficulties inherent in digital archives are a post for another day; I'll put it on my list of future posts.)