The Irish

is there an irish cultural touchstone youd have positive feelings toward, and i ask with absolute non-zingy interest

No

THE IRISH

Jokes, plenty. Joyce, Beckett. The closest Ireland has to a national project of vergangenheitsbewältigung. What drives me nuts is the manic effort to sentimentalise everything in Irish popular culture. Fucking butter ads. I feel optimistic about Ireland. *About the young.* But there is a national kitsch that threatens to smother almost everything. I probably hate "reeling in the years" more than anything.

I like more blackboard-fingernail trad music than most people but I'm partly hypnotised by how much I dislike it at the same time.

Edna

and the way he might look at you

xp i kinda get that about the trad

also the politics of a good ceidhlin or readoiri would blast the skin off ye

I am probably not the ideal person to respond to this given how I am guaranteed to cry at the Going Back ESB ad from the 80s

we have a thread for this iirc

Just want to put out there that I was the only person in my class in TY to write an essay opposing trad, like to think I’ve improved since then though tbf that class was traumatic

xp sorry I didn’t realise the thread police were on the case

the thread policeman

thread was rly good iirc but is now all broken links ;_;

i went out and researched every criticism of hard times i could find, learned it all off and absolutely tore dickens to shreds in the LC, finished paper 1 with full marks iirc

essays fuelled by dislike are the good stuff

They are, but my teacher was a musician and she made me play Amhrán na bhFiann on the tin whistle every single class because I was our class’s worst player.

I did Portrait of a Young Artist instead of Wuthering Heights, which I hated, and also hated that but it was a way I could work.

mar dhea, a how-do leaving cert i call it where ye had choices but

^ ilxors who have met me will attest that this is the kind of thing i say under my breath a lot

I finished both papers with full marks, but you only get the medals for useful subjects! My friend got one for one of the sciences I think?

mar dhea, a how-do leaving cert i call it where ye had choices but

Lol the nostalgic ad totally summarises the augmentation of Dev hegemony with consumerist realism, such is the shallowness of contemporary Irish culture

we'll always have the anglo-irish idiom, if its all we have

i learned about the brown cow the morning of the paper and i felt it was just the right kind of chancer bullshit that a fella could really hang some quality answers on, god bless ya austie a mhic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiirccLoVkU

xp don’t know what this is so you learned sooner than me

the lost heifer i think i mean

Oh I see. He wasn’t on my syllabus. I was hoping on one of the four poets I did know (Plath, Yeats, Heaney, Bishop) and I had a choice between two I think. High risk strategy cos fuck knows I wasn’t learning Donne or Hopkins.

When the black herds of the rain were grazing,
In the gap of the pure cold wind
And the watery hazes of the hazel
Brought her into my mind,
I thought of the last honey by the water
That no hive can find.

Brightness was drenching through the branches
When she wandered again,
Turning sliver out of dark grasses
Where the skylark had lain,
And her voice coming softly over the meadow
Was the mist becoming rain

what i remember about this:

the herd is ireland

the gap is ireland

hazels- certainly ireland

the honey: just honey

the hive, the ireland that never was, the ireland dev dreamt of and up, the ireland that irish americans think of, i-cant-believe-its-not-ireland, 33 county republic ireland

second verse: the cow came back while he wrote the first

lj otm now about Hopkins but putting him in front of 17 year olds in writing rather than read is cruelty

I'm currently enjoying a hot port which is possibly my favourite Irish cultural touchstone of all.

I've never understood Hopkins. Wished they'd put chattier gays on the LC

rip

how was hopkins not chatty, he exploded sonnets to 500 words for god's sake

Hopkins was not good

burton reading leaden/golden echo is maybe the best thing humans have done

No, I was wrong. My chosen four were Yeats/Plath/Heaney/Mahon. I think of Heaney a lot and bought several books of his, but Mahon I still know by heart <redacted> years later.

mahon cailin indeed

Gyac I suspect we did the leaving the same year

Wouldn’t be surprised. What was your core text?

I want to say Macbeth

A fine vintage

same but id imagine from an earlier cycle

Hopkins was not good

ftfy

well it's a given that one cannot simply agree with another's opinion, this is the irish thread