Loose Cans

First. A package. From home. Containing plane tickets and New Yorker clippings and two CD's, mixes courtesy of Jacob. And on one of them a piece I was listening to, a fifteen-minute movement from a violin concerto, and I was thinking This is pretty good. As a matter of fact I was thinking This is precisely how a violin concerto should sound. Then I look and see who wrote it. I am shocked: Sibelius. I hate Sibelius. I have had a deep-seated grudge against Sibelius ever since his "Finlandia" nearly slew me by boredom. I have hated one piece of his and therefore he is shite and must not be heard. But there he was, being good. So I listened again. And I realized, to my relief, that this was not actually Sibelius. Clearly, both the orchestra and the violinist felt the same way about Sibelius that I did, and instead of playing the music given, each, independent of the other, decided to play a personal favorite. Thus the orchestra ended up playing a Mahler symphony, while the soloist launched bravely into some Shostakovitch. I am certain of this, Jacob, because there is frankly nothing in Finland to apologize for that kind of doublestopping.

But anyway this is not really relevant. Also I have been listening to the Beethoven 7th an awful lot, and am wondering why I was never properly exposed to it hitherto.

So two nights ago, Wednesday, Caitriona's mom and little brother came to visit. Also came Gillian, Caitriona's younger sister, who's at boarding school down the road but whom we rarely see. So it was the whole Gunning family minus Papa. Exciting. Having made oodles of crepes the night before, I was off the hook, cookingwise, but Sadie and Caitriona produced a marvelous lasagna, and Sadie's whiskey cakes (version 2.0--she had accidentally destroyed the first batch in the oven the night before) were riotous successes. But this was a big deal. Caitriona had been coming home with mama-induced headaches for days now, and we of course were eager to exacerbate these same. Also Louie, the little brother, was big news. He's six years and five months and all spastic. Cute and shrieks a lot.

The major matter of the night came early, actually: the moment I walked in the door. I said, Hello, Mrs. Gunning, who said, Oh, you must be Sam!
--The very same.
--I could tell.
--How, pray?
--Oh, Caitriona told me about you. You just looked--you're the New Yorker, right?

And already I see where she was headed with this. Unfortunately this is poor transcription; I was more concerned with heading her off before she made a complete ass of herself, than recording her blundering for posterity. She turned out to be awfully determined:

--Oh, no, can't you tell from this English accent I'm not even pretending to effect, for the sake of sarcasm, that I'm from London?
--Ha ha yes, Caitriona said--you looked like--well, New York...
--It was the nose, right? She said he's proboscidally enhanced?

This was her last chance and she was determined to miss it.

--Oh no (she said happily). It's three letters.

This is where I started laughing very hard to cover up what would have otherwise been an extremely awkward, shocked moment. It was, I suppose, not quite as bad as saying, Oh, yes, I know you. You're the Jew! But it wasn't much better. Actually it was hysterical. We all broke out laughing, and Caitriona turned a lovely shade of vermilion. Mrs. Gunning was quite pleased with herself. Her tact and poise was most impressive, even for a diplomat's wife.

This could have been made funnier if it were fresher in my memory. Frankly I found it so staggering (this woman is American, by the way) that I scarcely have the skill to communicate it.

The rest of the night was hardly less eventful, but in the interests of brevity they will mostly be left up to the imagination. Except for when Duncan was playing air hockey (Sadie has a mini-table) against Louie, and refusing to let him win. He was taunting the six year-old with lines like, If you want to beat me, little man, you're going to have to work for it! Then I think someone kicked him. It was very Duncan.

Meanwhile Gillian was quietly pounding the wine. Quite a night. Afterwards Caitriona reported that her mother had called us "refined." However, her judgement was called into question when it was further reported that she had called Sadie "sweet."

<<>><<>><<>><<>>

Today was also rather fun. A whole gaggle of American college guidance counselors came over, and the International Student Affairs people recruited some people to come and talk to them. There were four of us, three Americans and one Irish postgrad. Interestingly, four of them were from New York: Spence, Dalton, Riverdale, and Nightingale-Bamford. Then there was someone from DC and one from Minneapolis. They all knew HM, and they all knew Singer. I personally had been hoping Singer himself would show up. It was a very pleasant affair, just the sort of thing I love doing (I adore paneling. This is because I love to be listened to). Then they took us out to lunch at a really classy place called Fado (there should be an acccent over the O, so fa-DO. Not modish, just classy), which meant I had my best meal in ages. Really, really good. And free. This is important.

I like talking about this place. I find it thrilling to consider, even if it's not so thrilling in practice.

In an hour and a half, Sadie and I, the only mac users in Europe, will be attending a ridiculous but mandatory 'clinic' where they will set up our computers to receive the hot throbbing thrusts of--yes, that's right--the internet. We're going to get our wee electronic love boxes lubed up and ready to I really should stop right there.

But yes. It is apparently just over the horizon. Early March. Really. No kidding. Honest injun. We mean it this time.

Meanwhile we will believe it when we see it.

In other news, the Launderette on Rathmines road has burned down. This, aside from being sad, puts a stop to the only thing we had which resembled laundry service: tuesday through thursday, from 7:30 to 8pm, you could bring your laundry to a place at Halls, give it to the guy from the Launderette, pay through the nose (€16 once, but admittedly it was a humongulous load ("Wharda bagful!"), and he'd bring it back to you the next day. In its place, the Halls admin has scrambled to conscript Launderland, which, while considerably closer, is never used by any Halls resident onaccounta their prices being obscene. €8 for a small load. No, you can't do it yourself. So we have two options: walk over a mile to the nearest (reasonable) laundromat carrying a ton of laundry, or slit open a vein and pay those Launderland fuckers in blood. I went in there recently, carrying a very small bag: sheets, duvet cover, some sundry essentials. I asked How much? She said €9. I said No thanks. She called after me I hope it's washed as well! And I nearly replied, and now wish I had, No really I don't give a shit how well it's washed I just want it not to smell bad anymore thank you goodbye. You bitch. So yeah. "To each man his little cross."

Oh, oh, and here's the best part: we have inspection next week, and they've posted signs on all of the doors, telling us what we must and mustn't do. One of these is, Thou shalt not wash or dry thine own clothing in thy bathroom. This wash sort of stunning, in the same way that California homeowners' associations' banning the use of the clothesline was stunning. Except there, at least, you could see the reasoning, asinine though it was: clotheslines lower property value. But I cannot for the life of me see the harm in soaking my Jockeys in my sink with a little Woolite express black, and drying them on the radiator or on the showerhead. These people.

I am furious, absolutely FURIOUS, about Ralph Nader's jumping into the race. I am this much closer to believing he's on Karl Rove's payroll. At least maybe this will be the death of his career. Of course I expect the same thing to happen to Mel Gibson for the Passion, but we'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, fuck Ralph Nader. Fuck him with a knobbly stick.

Props to Nick for this link: "Tweedledee is still Tweedledee, but Tweedledum has turned into a global tyrant." Yes. Because Bush really is so bad.

It's Tuesday, just got out of the Hero (she asked me had I finished the book--Joseph Andrews--I said What? Oh, good heavens, no, are you kidding?), and while I can't drop a massive steaming heap of blog like most Tuesdays (having three Passus of the horribly, horribly unpleasant Piers Plowman to read, and a chunk of Old English to translate by 2pm), I can still satiate the hunger that I know to gnaw at your starved, shriveled stomachs. Know to gnaw. Damn. That's handy.

So. Weekend. As I last left you on Thursday, and cannot now for the life of me recall what happened on Friday, except for a brief meeting with my personal tutor, in the course of which I was informed that yes, if you use an original title (such as, oh, I don't know, say, "God Wants Your Penis") without clearing it with your tutor beforehand, you do fail. Or you should. Also, you do get penalized for running too far over word counts because, as she put it, Why should you take more of our time than anyone else? This seems to be very strange reasoning; a simple, "We're trying to teach you conciseness" would have sufficed. Anyway.

Saturday was Ultimate, a mini-pickup at Alex, and then Sunday was the Slab of Beer tournament, a hat tourney where teams are randomly picked and compete for a slab (flat case) of really dodgy beer (Dutch Gold). The problem was, it was not only freezing, but terrifically windy, making playing highly unpleasant. We were all more than ready to go home after the first round. Sunday evening was largely boring.

Monday was not. After rising reasonably early (for a Monday) to finish Godot and crunch some Yeats poems we were to have prepared, I headed into college. I had a 1pm theatre tutorial (Godot). As I headed upstairs, I ran into my class going the opposite direction. Come on, says Chris, We're going to Doyle's. Doyle's being the pub just off campus. Damn, says I, And I just after buying a cup of tea. (The use of such queer vernacular will be explained shortly). It's Mark's last class with us, says Chris, Your man's being thrown out of the country.

So we go to Doyle's, and our tutor, Mark Chapman, comes in behind us. Some of us order pints, some of them order tea. We sit and discuss Godot. Mark is from Bunghole, AK, three hours away from Little Rock. He's been here since '95, when he came for the last year of his B.A. He got his Master's and Ph. D., here, too, and has been for the past few years been working as a part-time tutor, eight hours a week. He makes €30 an hour. €9000 a year. Not only is that not nearly a Living Wage, it's not even enough to stay in the country. Here's the thing: you cannot get citizenship while a student. Period. See, your student years are worth bollocks to the gummint. But when you start working, then they care. You need a yearly-renewed work visa, authorized by your place of employment. After five consecutive years of residency, you get citizenship. But you can't leave the country and work elsewhere during those five. Mark did. He did a year on loan to Durham, in England, thus completely screwing up his citizenship hopes. Furthermore, as long as you are on a work visa, you must make a minimum of €12 000 a year. Mark, appallingly, is way below this (€30 an hour? They pay fucking paralegals more). So they're making him leave. He can stay to finish out the term, then he's got to pack his bags and get out. He's 30, broke, on the brink of deportation, and not happy. Very unfortunate. He's a lovely guy. So we sit and drink and talk about Godot. It's a surprise, really. He had said two weeks ago that he wasn't sure whether he'd still be around the following week (last week), because he might be "called back to the states for something." Didn't expect deportation. But Godot was a good talk, as good as a discussion of Godot can be. I kind of began and ended it at once, though, by mentioning Beckett's comment on Joyce (and it is of course a hard and fast rule that the only one a writer is ever commenting on is himself), "The danger is in the neatness of identifications." This is unfortunately essential. But then you end up talking about what a total bastard he is, and how the mere thought of studying Beckett is enough to send me screaming from the room, and I think maybe we need another round now.

Won't bore you with the details any more, but 2pm rolled around and all but four of us got up to go to the Writing Ireland lecture, which everyone hates but for some reason rarely misses, but I was feeling this was more important. Mark wanted to talk. We wanted to talk. So it was the four of us, two Americans, an Irishman from Mayo, I think it is, Andy, and a Swiss guy whose name I think is Christian, but I wouldn't swear to it. We didn't talk much about Beckett. We just had a long conversation. Very long. Christian, I think, abandoned ship in the third hour; Andy, Mark and I stayed on until 5:45, having missed the Writing Ireland tutorial as well. Too bad. We'd just kept buying rounds for ourselves (first time I'd bought a teacher a drink), and by the fourth or fifth, were rather staggering along. It was pretty clear Mark was having a rough patch, and wanted people to talk to . So we just got him talking. He didn't want to go back to Arkansas and face the family, who didn't like the fact that he was here in the first place, but the thing is, he's thirty, about to be unemployed, flat broke (a few cent in the bank account), he doesn't see himself as having much of a career (he did his M.A. in Medieval studies because it was all he could get), and frankly, when you're in that situation, there's only one thing to do. Go home.

It wasn't morose, it wasn't bitter and doleful, it was just a little sad. But we did have to go, eventually. After four and a half hours in a pub, I had to go meet some friends at another: Sinnott's. We were going to see Playboy of the Western World. I was a little drunk.

I found them at Sinnott's, which is the pub across from the Gaiety theatre off Grafton street. I drank water. We met up at 6, but the house wasn't opening till 7:30, though, which was fortunate as it gave me a good long while to try and restore my vision to its regular calibration. This finally happened somewhere in the Act II. Anyhow it was a decent production of what turns out to be a rather god-awful play. Basically the characters are all squalling or shouting at one another the entire time, whether in anger, sadness, or jest (one is often not sure which emotion they are trying to emote), and being dead center in the front row, we could clearly see the spray of spit that accompanied every line. I won't go too much into the details here, either, just suffice it to say that the primary witticism I was left with at the end (because this seems to me sometimes the point of theatregoing: to emerge from the house with an arsenal of witty zingers with which to amuse one's friends. This is why one should go alone) was, "The actors chewed so much scenery it was a wonder there was any of it left at the end." This is true, though. But I can't much fault them for it: the play is frankly unactable. That weird construction I usd earlier, "And I just after buying a cup of tea?" That's how they talk in Mayo. So already the actors (and of course the audience) have to deal with an arcane and convoluted vernacular. But Synge doesn't stop there. For some bizarre reason, perhaps to the end of making his characters, whom he, paradoxically, wishes to render with the utmost naturalism, seem highly stylized, he has dyed his language in steaming vats of purest Indian indigo. That is to say, the prose is so purple in the face that one begins to worry that it might be asphyxiating. The actors are overacting because the writer was overwriting. And trust me, I know from overwriting. When the play was in its first rehearsals, back in 1907, even then, the actors mutinied on the grounds that there was simply no way they could read this. And furthermore, these people are peasants. At the same time as he's vilifying the Irish peasantry (and this is what caused the riots at the premiere), he's given the lie (whatever that means; I hope it means Validated, I've been wondering for weeks) to Bon Jovi's comment on the Irish, "Every gas-station attendant is a poet." Of course, their poetry is atrocious, and I do hope Mister Synge is taking the piss, there, because otherwise there's just no excuse whatever.

The best part is, it doesn't stop there. This is the first play I have ever seen which I found completely and utterly irrelevant ("it's not irrelevant! It's a hippopotamus!"). It's so stultifyingly parochial that it makes our dear friend Wendy Wasserstein look accessible as my library records. It's hopelessly mired in its original context, though in fairness that isn't entirely the fault of the play; it's so fixed in the national consciousness for the embarrassment of the rioting which accompanied it that it can never be considered as extratemporal. It's a little like the Rite of Spring that way, only the difference there is, the Rite of Spring is genius, and can and does stand happily on its own, while the Playboy is not, and does not. So on the one hand, it's the baby of the New Historicists, who proudly pimp it every chance they get, but on the other, it's concerned so exclusively with its original context that it bears little relevance for those of us living in this modern world, where the delights of hero-crushing far surpass those of hero-worship.

That makes no sense to anyone who's never seen the play. Also it's awful and sententious. But I'm keeping it in. Maybe because I'm hungry. Today is Pancake tuesday. don't ask me why. We had wimpy pancakes this morning, but tonight I'm'a make a whole mess o' crepes for the whole family.

Speaking of pancakes, I think that if I have a girl and a boy, I'm naming the girl Jemima and the boy Ben. That way, they'll be Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, because hey, if I'm going to be Uncle Sam someday, I see no reason why I should be the only one to suffer.

BELATED UPDATE: Sadie, irked by my confusing Arkansas (AR) and her beloved Alaska (AK--which is what I thought Arkansas was), has demanded that I correct this error. Mark Chapman is from Bung Hole, AR, not Bung Hole, AK. I apologize for any confusion.