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Irish Immigant Ship ~ Mid 1800’s 

I posted this a year ago,  and since I’m awfully busy this week, I’ve decided to be lazy and repost it.  Our Irishness must be acknowledged and celebrated every St. Patrick’s day, or an auld mean beastie may come after us while we sleep.  So, have a glass of chartreuse on me, and remember to keep it green!

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In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I’d conduct a little research into the Irish diaspora.  Here’s what I found out: 

If all Irish emigrants and their descendants are counted as part of the diaspora, the total Irish (or part-Irish) population living throughout the world consists of over 80 million people.  The Irish didn’t suddenly start abandoning their homeland during the potato famine–they had been moving to other countries for centuries before that.  Much of the time, they were forced to leave by you-know-who and sent to places like Bermuda and Australia as prisoners or indentured servants.

There are Irish descendants everywhere.  In addition to making the short move to England and Scotland, Irish people settled all over Europe.  They also moved to the Carribbean, Canada, Argentina, Mexico and South Africa.  80% of the population of Newfoundland is of Irish descent.  Even Cuba had its share of Irish settlers–Che Guevara was half Irish.

Of course, the United States had a huge influx of Irish immigrants, especially during the mid-1800’s.  I’ve always been ashamed of this chapter in American history because we treated the Irish worse than dogs.  Irish indentured servants were often physically abused and forced to work way past the time they were supposed to be set free.  Those who settled in New York or Boston ended up living in filthy tenements and working dangerous jobs for next to nothing.  Young men were often hoodwinked or forced into joining the Army right as they stepped off the boat.  They were immediately placed on the front lines (during The Civil War) as cannon fodder.  Some Irish immigrants settled in the mountains of Tennessee and West Virginia, where they became known as “hillbillies” and “rednecks.” Irish immigrants flowed across our entire nation, from sea to shining sea.  They also helped build our nation:  our railroads, our canals, our roads, our National Parks.  The Irish were tough people; they were survivors and they, more than almost any other culture, left an indelible mark on American history. 

So, it is with great pride that I celebrate my Irish (along with Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, French, Martian and Wookie) heritage today.  Like President Obama, I’m very pleased to say I’ve got Irish blood running through my veins!

In keeping with the readin’ & writin’ purpose of this blog, here’s a poem I found at this site:

NO IRISH NEED APPLY. Written by JOHN F. POOLE, and sung,
with immense success, by the great Comic-Vocalist of the age,
TONY PASTOR.

I’m a dacint boy, just landed from the town of Ballyfad;
I want a situation: yis, I want it mighty bad.
I saw a place advartised. It’s the thing for me, says I;
But the dirty spalpeen ended with: No Irish need apply.
Whoo! says I; but that’s an insult — though to get the place I’ll try.
So, I wint to see the blaggar with: No Irish need apply.

I started off to find the house, I got it mighty soon;
There I found the ould chap saited: he was reading the TRIBUNE.
I tould him what I came for, whin he in a rage did fly:
No! says he, you are a Paddy, and no Irish need apply!
Thin I felt my dandher rising, and I’d like to black his eye–
To tell an Irish Gintleman: No Irish need apply!

I couldn’t stand it longer: so, a hoult of him I took,
And I gave him such a welting as he’d get at Donnybrook.
He hollered: Millia murther! and to get away did try,
And swore he’d never write again: No Irish need apply.
He made a big apology; I bid him thin good-bye,
Saying: Whin next you want a bating, add: No Irish need apply!

Sure, I’ve heard that in America it always is the plan
That an Irishman is just as good as any other man;
A home and hospitality they never will deny
The stranger here, or ever say: No Irish need apply.
But some black sheep are in the flock: a dirty lot, say I;
A dacint man will never write: No Irish need apply!

Sure, Paddy’s heart is in his hand, as all the world does know,
His praties and his whiskey he will share with friend or foe;
His door is always open to the stranger passing by;
He never thinks of saying: None but Irish may apply.
And, in Columbia’s history, his name is ranking high;
Thin, the Divil take the knaves that write: No Irish need apply!

Ould Ireland on the battle-field a lasting fame has made;
We all have heard of Meagher’s men, and Corcoran’s brigade.
Though fools may flout and bigots rave, and fanatics may cry,
Yet when they want good fighting-men, the Irish may apply,
And when for freedom and the right they raise the battle-cry,
Then the Rebel ranks begin to think: No Irish need apply.

         (c)1862, H. DE MARSAN, Publisher,
         54 Chatham Street, New York.

About a month ago, Chris over at Stuff as Dreams are Made On wrote a great post about his favorite books from his personal collection.  I’m still envious about the Mirrormask script that was sent to him in a “grab bag” from Subterranean Press.  I never get lucky like that!

I have a very special favorite book.  It’s a first edition Arkham House copy of The Outsider and Others by H. P. Lovecraft.  It was published in 1939, and it’s quite rare.

It doesn’t have a dust jacket anymore and it’s pretty worn out, but it’s still worth about $1,500.00.  If it were in excellent condition, like the above example, it would be worth around $10,000!  I don’t collect books, but if I had known the value of this little gem, I wouldn’t have stolen it out of my father’s collection and toted it around with me during my high school days.  This was another of my “show off” books, which, along with getting loaded, I was sure added to my “coolness” factor.  What a total doof I was!  Oooh, I read dark and scary fiction!  I wanted to die!  Oooh, oooh!  Good God!

Lovecraft helped me graduate from college (well, not really, but it sounds good).  Actually, he did in a way.  I was so knowledgeable about ol’ Howard Phillips that I gave several speeches about him in various English classes, and I wrote my graduation essay about him.  I’ve always thought that if I were to study any writer extensively for publication, it would be Lovecraft.  I still enjoy his stories, even though the last time I read “The Dunwich Horror,” it seemed kind of silly.  Maybe I was just in a bad mood.

Lovecraft is still a presence in my life.  I have this bumpersticker on the rear window of my car:

I love it so much, I don’t think I’ll ever remove it!
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Addendum:

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, and was reminded of it yesterday when I was trolling the net searching for an out-of-print management book for my boss and a few of his cronies.  The book was published in 2004 and it’s really dumb, but the upper crusters here in the workplace seem to love it.  The price for a pristine hardback copy of this tiny little book now hovers around $130.00. I bought three used paperback copies for around $80.00.  Unbelievable!  This made me wonder what other 1st edition books are super valuable.  Here are a few of them (all are approximations because they continually increase in value):

• Ulysses — James Joyce (Shakespeare & Company, 1922) $200,000

• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner’s, 1925) $100,000

• The Maltese Falcon — Dashell Hammett (Knopf, 1930) $50,000
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Bloomsbury, 1997)  $50,000 and rising rapidly!

It’s pretty unbelievable, don’t you agree? 

Mother’s Day is coming up.  I’ve never liked Mother’s Day (or any Hallmark holiday), and when I was a young teen I told my Mom that I thought it was just another bogus excuse for greedy retailers to suck money from brainwashed consumers and I didn’t want to be part of that hypocrisy anymore.  Well, Mom wasn’t buying this.  Declaring that “every day should be Mother’s Day,” she told me to go hit my Dad up for some cash so that I could buy her something nice for once.  That was the only time I ever brought up my true feelings about Mother’s Day to my Mom, and every year at around this time, I’d swallow my resentment and go shopping for a good Mother’s Day gift for her.  Now that she’s gone, I wish I could buy her a gift  — the cheesiest, most sloppily sentimental, “I Love You Mom” gushing mug or card or teddy bear that I could find.  I’d wrap it in a big red bow and present it to her with a huge grin and hug her and we’d sit there with tears in our eyes, enjoying the maudlin moment we were sharing.  I wouldn’t feel one iota of resentment, not for a single second. 

What a selfish little shit I was!   

I used to think about who I’d choose as a substitute for my Mom.  It would have to be someone really special — kind and generous and super fun to goof around with.  After a great deal of deliberation, I finally made my choice:  Julie Andrews.  She would be the ideal mother: pretty and vivacious and a terrific singer.  She would be the type of mother who would join the PTA and participate in every bake sale and comfort me when I was down.

The other day, while trolling through Amazon’s website, I noticed that Julie has published a new memoir: It talks about her childhood and teen years leading up to her starring role in “Mary Poppins.”  I’ll probably never read it, but seeing the book prompted me to explore some Julie Andrews clips on You Tube.  Here’s a remix of the “Mary Poppins” trailer which is quite inventive. 

Perhaps she wouldn’t be such a good mom after all!  I should’ve chosen Carol Brady instead.  No, she was even scarier!

It’s difficult to find a good literary humorist.  Mark Twain was a great humorist, and James Thurber was funny too.  Some people think Garrison Keillor is an amusing fella.  Others go for Bill Bryson, athough he seems to have branched out quite a bit and become like a librarian—he knows a little something about nearly everything, so he isn’t writing his snarky travelogues as much anymore (more’s the pity).

I always thought that if I became a writer, I’d try to be humorous like Douglas Coupland or maybe Carl Hiaasen, who is the master at writing subtly hilarious satire.  (Boy, do I love me some Carl)!  The problem with writing funny material is it’s really hard.  You may think you’re funny, but believe me, hardly anybody else will.  Being a humor writer has to be more difficult than being a stand-up comedian because you can’t use anything but written words to amuse readers. Nobody can hear your spoken voice or watch your facial and body expressions.  I have what I call my “fuzzy blanket” voice that I use to make people laugh.  It has helped me out of several rather sticky situations, and I think it’s probably my only real talent.  I can’t write in my “fuzzy blanket” voice though!  It would be awesome if I could because I might be rich and famous by now!

So, now that I’ve rambled on long enough, it’s time to introduce my favorite humorist of the writerly persuasion: Jean Shepherd (1921-1999).  Actually, Jean Shepherd wasn’t just a writer—he was a personality.  Mr. Shepherd hosted several midwestern radio talk shows before heading to New York City where he was a late night host for many years.  He wrote and recorded other radio shows for other stations, i.e., “Shepherd’s Pie” for a New Jersey and some midwestern affiliates.  Marshall McLuhan called him “the first radio novelist,” and Time Magazine proclaimed that he “…pretty much invented talk radio.”  He wrote short stories too, with many of his stories published in Playboy magazine in the ‘60’s.   He wrote the screenplay for “A Christmas Story” and narrated it as well.  If you want to find out more about Jean Shepherd, go to this website: www.flicklives.com.  It’s one of the best tribute sites I have ever seen. You can read some of his stories and essays there.  You can also listen to a bunch of his radio broadcasts.  It’s quite amazing, and I need to write to the host and thank him for creating such a brilliant space.

I just reread Shepherd’s In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash (1966, 264 p.), and I also read A Fistful of Fig Newtons (1981, 265 p.) for the first time.  They are short story collections, and In God We Trust…is the better of the two, but both are well worth reading.  Interspersed throughout the pages of In God We Trust… are many of the scenarios from which Shepherd based his screenplay for “A Christmas Story.”  It’s all there: the “you’ll shoot your eye out” phrase, the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring disappointment, and the leg-shaped lamp battle between Ralphie’s parents.  More “Christmas Story” vignettes can be found in Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters, published in 1982.

Jean Shepherd’s greatest strength was his writing style.  He wasn’t a very sophisticated writer, but he was an exceptional describer of people, places and events.  He started off most of his semi-autobiographical stories with long-winded lead-ins to the meat ‘n potatoes of the plot.  You’d think this would be annoying, but it isn’t.  It’s mesmerizing. It envelops you and immerses you in the time and space Shepherd was describing.  You become an active participant in his world.  Here’s an example from In God We Trust…, entitled “Hairy Gertz and the Forty-Seven Crappies” (p. 71-72):

“And in the middle of the lake, several yards away, are 17,000 fishermen, in wooden rowboats rented at a buck and a half an hour.  It is 2 a.m.  The temperature is 175, with humidity to match.  And the smell of decayed toads, the dumps at the far end of the lake, and an occasional soupcon of Standard Oil, whose refinery is a couple of miles away, is enough to put hair on the back of a mud turtle.  Seventeen thousand guys clumped together in the middle, fishing for the known sixty-four crappies in the lake.”

Now Shepherd goes on to describe the crappies in an amusing way (p. 72):

“Crappies are a special breed of Midwestern fish, created by God for the express purpose of surviving in waters that would kill a bubonic plague bacillus.  They have never been known to fight, or even faintly struggle.  I guess when you’re a crappie, you figure it’s no use anyway.  One thing is as bad as another.  They’re just down there in the soup.  No one quite knows what they eat, if anything, but everybody’s fishing for them.  At two o’clock in the morning.”

He then writes more about the lake; how it’s filled up with sludge from chemical plants and sewage spilloff to the point where it makes a “gruel composed of decayed garter snakes, deceased toads, fermenting crappies, and a strange, unidentifiable liquid that holds it all together.” (p.72)

These descriptions effectively prepare the reader for the rest of the story.  By the time the (still-living) crappies rise up from their mythical underground cavern to jump into Ralphie’s boat, you’re in the zone.  You sit there grinning from ear-to-ear as you read the conclusion.  Shepherd has caught you; hook, bobber and sinker, and this happens with practically every story he writes.

I’m going to have to quit interlibrary loaning these books to myself.  It would be nice to have copies of these so that I can open one when I’m kind of bummed and enjoy sharing Ralphie’s thoughts on the beauty of brown gravy, or learn to appreciate the finer points of setting off huge deadly fireworks displays before home fireworks celebrations were sanitized and the big rockets became illegal.

Those were the days! 

“The only journey is the one within”
~Rilke

Alrighty then, you know you’re a total geek when you’re unable to decide whether you’d rather write a post about Heine or Rilke.  I mean, Heine and Rilke are just so exciting, aren’t they?  They’re right up there with winning the lottery on the excite-o-meter.  I guess I must be pretty low-maintenance or maybe just low in general.

I’ve chosen Rilke for now because I know more about him.  In fact, I went through a “Rilke phase” for a couple of months in the early ‘90’s when I would read some of his poems almost every night.  His words seemed to fit into what I was feeling at the time.  Looking at what I’ve been reading and writing about lately, I think he’ll fit just perfectly again.

His mother wanted (and dressed him as) a girl until he was around five years old, and this is why one of his six middle names is Maria.  Why didn’t he choose one of his more masculine middle names, like Josef, to be part of his moniker?  I guess we’ll never know.

Rilke was an early existentialist, although if he were here speaking to me today, I’m pretty sure he’d deny it.  He was often depressed, but he often embraced his depression.  He was often lonely, but he often reveled in his loneliness.  He was a complete, yet very flawed person.  He loved art and sculpture and was Auguste Rodin’s secretary in Paris for awhile.  He fought in WWI for the Austrian army.  Rilke was 51 years old when he died.  He had leukemia, and pricked his finger on a rose thorn which led to sepsis and death.  How apropos for a poet to experience such a poetic demise, especially Rilke!  In his poems, he often imbued inanmimate objects with a kind of innate, living cruelty.

Rilke was one of the lucky few poets to become at least moderately famous during his lifetime, but he was still poor.  It didn’t seem to bother him too much if the next poem is any indication:

Among so many people cozy in their homes,
I am like a man who explores far-off oceans.
Days with full stomachs stand on their tables;
I see a distant land full of images.

I sense another world close to me,
Perhaps no more lived in than the moon;
They, however, never let a feeling alone,
And all the words they use are so worn.

The living things I brought back with me
Hardly peep out, compared with all they own.
In their native country they were wild;
Here they hold their breath from shame.

I think the title says it all in this poem.  Rilke is aware of his individuality and separateness.  Other people can’t stand to be alone; they eat together gluttonously and they emote and they babble and they live in their “cozy homes.”  Rilke is above all this.  Even though he is just a poor poet, the “living things” in his mind’s eye must “hold their breath from shame” for they are far superior to the superficiality and acquisitiveness of the common man.  He sees beyond the trivial and reaches for the sublime.

How would Rilke feel about our current consumer-driven culture?  If he were to see how we’re destroying so much that is precious due to greed and corruption, how would he react?  I’m pretty sure he’d snicker and say something akin to “I told you so!”

The inscription is Rilke’s own.  It says:
“Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one’s sleep, under so
many lids.”

Ironic isn’t it?  Did he choose this epitaph before or after he was infected by the thorn?  Maybe he had a strong pre-death premonition.  Whatever the case, the words of the inscription are lovely, and they perfectly describe the multi-layered persona of Rainer Maria Rilke.