More on Paddy's green isle
Aug. 24th, 2014 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileIn my quest to read all of the weirdo coffee table books on Ireland that are older than I am that my family owns—this is an entire collection, by the way—I rescued a copy of Ireland: Past and Present from my mother’s To Be Thrown Away After The Realtor Is Done Using It To Stage The House pile. Edited by Brendan Kennelly, a professor of something at Trinity College, Dublin, and containing essays by him and by other professors of various things at Trinity College, this book gives an interesting peek into Ireland as it was in 1986, including the lamentable state of its typesetting technology. Seriously, the uneven bolding and spacing gave me a headache.
As it is a coffee table book, the bulk of the volume is given over to beautiful, picturesque, full-color spreads in a slightly eighties degree of fuzziness but which are nonetheless quite green and lovely. Ireland seems to be a country well-suited for making coffee table books about, because while the history itself is completely fucked up, the landscapes are breathtaking and the ancient art is gorgeous. (The obligatory section on sport is somewhat less picturesque, consisting mostly of action shots of red-faced men in awkward shorts, but it’s definitely amusing.)
One major theme in both Irish literature and Irish coffee table books that I have noticed is that any Irishman or Irishwoman intelligent enough to write a book has Opinions about the failings of the Church and the government and the stupidities of his fellow countrymen, and they all seem to be basically the same opinions. Like, 95% of twentieth century Ireland is either blowing people up in Derry and Belfast or being prudishly Catholic, and the other 5% is writing about how terrible it all is. If anyone since Eamon de Valera has written anything about how no, the political and social order is JUST FINE, THANKS, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of it. (Needless to say, inasmuch as I get to have opinions on what Ireland was doing when I was fetus, I’m on Team Writers here.) Brendan Kennelly’s article on “the closed mind” is actually quite moving, both cutting and optimistic at the same time, laying out a portrait of a proud, wounded, and contradictory people trying to develop and maintain a national identity in an increasingly globalizing world. There’s also some great commentary on the tension between the idealized Irish Mother and Ireland’s actual tradition of turning out strong-willed, intellectually badass ladies.
Different sections of the book move seamlessly between well-researched historical and sociological commentary and the personal narratives of the authors, giving a pretty decent overview of the shifts and contradictions of Irish life over the centuries. It definitely leaves the reader wanting to do further research into a lot of these subjects, or at least it does if the reader is me. ::makes mental note to track down good versions of all the Irish myth cycles:: ::and to pick up an annotated Yeats one of these days:: ::and to go to Ireland::
No joke, my biggest complaint about this book really is the typesetting. And that’s not even because the rest of the book is so good, even though it’s pretty good, it’s because the typesetting is just that awful. Partly it’s super eighties looking and partly it’s just poorly formatted. Like, I was compelled to go and Google the publisher to see if they’re still around—they are—and if they look like they’ve gotten their shit together at all in the past 28 years—which it looks like they may have. (Actually, I’m looking through their website and now I kinda want to check out their book about Tom Gilmartin.)
Anyway, I guess this book is going back in my stash until I am enough of a real grown-up to have a coffee table to put it on.
As it is a coffee table book, the bulk of the volume is given over to beautiful, picturesque, full-color spreads in a slightly eighties degree of fuzziness but which are nonetheless quite green and lovely. Ireland seems to be a country well-suited for making coffee table books about, because while the history itself is completely fucked up, the landscapes are breathtaking and the ancient art is gorgeous. (The obligatory section on sport is somewhat less picturesque, consisting mostly of action shots of red-faced men in awkward shorts, but it’s definitely amusing.)
One major theme in both Irish literature and Irish coffee table books that I have noticed is that any Irishman or Irishwoman intelligent enough to write a book has Opinions about the failings of the Church and the government and the stupidities of his fellow countrymen, and they all seem to be basically the same opinions. Like, 95% of twentieth century Ireland is either blowing people up in Derry and Belfast or being prudishly Catholic, and the other 5% is writing about how terrible it all is. If anyone since Eamon de Valera has written anything about how no, the political and social order is JUST FINE, THANKS, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of it. (Needless to say, inasmuch as I get to have opinions on what Ireland was doing when I was fetus, I’m on Team Writers here.) Brendan Kennelly’s article on “the closed mind” is actually quite moving, both cutting and optimistic at the same time, laying out a portrait of a proud, wounded, and contradictory people trying to develop and maintain a national identity in an increasingly globalizing world. There’s also some great commentary on the tension between the idealized Irish Mother and Ireland’s actual tradition of turning out strong-willed, intellectually badass ladies.
Different sections of the book move seamlessly between well-researched historical and sociological commentary and the personal narratives of the authors, giving a pretty decent overview of the shifts and contradictions of Irish life over the centuries. It definitely leaves the reader wanting to do further research into a lot of these subjects, or at least it does if the reader is me. ::makes mental note to track down good versions of all the Irish myth cycles:: ::and to pick up an annotated Yeats one of these days:: ::and to go to Ireland::
No joke, my biggest complaint about this book really is the typesetting. And that’s not even because the rest of the book is so good, even though it’s pretty good, it’s because the typesetting is just that awful. Partly it’s super eighties looking and partly it’s just poorly formatted. Like, I was compelled to go and Google the publisher to see if they’re still around—they are—and if they look like they’ve gotten their shit together at all in the past 28 years—which it looks like they may have. (Actually, I’m looking through their website and now I kinda want to check out their book about Tom Gilmartin.)
Anyway, I guess this book is going back in my stash until I am enough of a real grown-up to have a coffee table to put it on.
