Ha Ha Ha

I really enjoyed our discussion today. Boland is really great, and she is certainly one of modern Ireland's most important female voices. Today's discussion about gender and beauty was really important, and I appreciate those of you who made the effort to be prepared with the reading and come to class. For some reason over half the class was missing today. Might that have had anything to do with the fact that a progress report was due? I am still expecting a progress report from the rest of you, in one form or another, sometime this evening.

For Monday, you will need to have read the first 100 or so pages of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Let's read up through the line "I didn't tell him about his underpants" on page 103. Doyle does something in this novel that other writers have tried to do but very few have pulled off authentically: he writes in the voice of a child. This is a perspective we've talked about a lot this semester but have not encountered in the literature. Paddy Clarke, age 10, is one of the most intriguing narrators in contemporary Irish fiction. Doyle won the Booker prize for this novel (which is more or less the U.K./Ireland equivalent of the Pulitzer), and I think you will quickly see why. It's a gem.

Friday's Reading List

I've really enjoyed our discussions this week about Boland's work. As usual, I wish we had more time to discuss more poems. A week just isn't enough time. Three weeks on Yeats was not nearly enough time. We're always hearing time's winged chariot.

Here is the list of poems for Friday. This is your last chance to talk about poetry in class this semester (with the exception of our review sessions of course), so bring your A-game.

Friday
"A Ballad of Beauty and Time" (122)
"The Serpent in the Garden" (125)
"The Woman Turns Herself Into a Fish" (131)
"The Muse Mother" (134)
"In the Garden" (136)

From Domestic Interior:
"Night Feeding" (139)
"Hymn" (144)
"Endings" (147)
"After a Childhood away from Ireland" (149)
"Domestic Interior" (151)

Don't forget about your progress report, and if you have the time, get started on Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

Reading for Wednesday

Wednesday
"Nights of Childhood" (55)
"Spring at the Edge of the Sonnet" (59)
"Distances" (69)

"The Oral Tradition" (75)
"Miss Eire" (78)
"Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening" (80)
"The Women" (84)
"Fever" (87)
"Envoi" (97)
"Suburban Woman: A Detail" (98)
"An Irish Childhood in England: 1951" (106)
"The Emigrant Irish" (108)
"Listen. This is the Noise of Myth" (113)

Eavan Boland Reading List

I've started your reading list for Eavan Boland. I'll finish it tomorrow, but you have your reading for Monday now. Please be aware that you are not going to be able to find most of these poems online, so if you haven't bought the book, you need to. It's a book I think you will want to keep.

Monday
"The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me" (19)
"The Rooms of Other Women Poets" (20)
"Brush-cut Irish Silver" (29)

"A False Spring" (37)
"The Making of an Irish Goddess" (38)
"White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland" (40)
"An Old Steel Engraving" (45)
"In Exile" (46)
"We Are Always Too Late" (47)
"What We Lost" (48)
"Outside History" (50)

You really should read the entire sequence from Outside History since it is, after all, a sequence. But make sure you at least read the sections I've listed. And don't forget to write about "The Haw Lantern" on the blog.

"The Haw Lantern"

Just a reminder: I would like a progress report from you by Friday (April 3), detailing how you are getting along with your term paper.

Yesterday in class we briefly discussed “The Haw Lantern,” but none of us (and we should all be embarrassed about this) had looked up the story of Diogenes, so I asked that by Monday, all of us look further into the poem and write something on the blog about it. I came home and re-read the poem several times, then looked up the reference to Diogenes, then read the poem a few more times. I won’t talk about the entire poem because I want to leave some ground for you to furrow, but I’ll get us started:

Diogenes was an Athenian beggar who championed self-sufficiency and rejected all the comforts of so-called civilization (a house, utensils, prepared food, etc.). He is most famous for walking through the streets of Athens carrying a lamp, looking for an honest man among the masses.

As I re-read “The Haw Lantern,” it became clear that the lantern in the poem is a metaphor; the “haw” is a hawthorn bush, and the “lantern” is the large red berry, or fruit, that grows on it (see pictures). The lantern-berries, the size of crab apples (“crab of the thorn”), are shining, but they are doing so in winter, bearing fruit “out of season":

The wintry haw is burning out of season,

crab of the thorn, a small light for small people

An organic process, the seasonal cycle, has become corrupted. On a literal level, this could mean that bushes don’t normally fruit in winter, so seeing them do so is atypical. But of course it is more than this. This is Ireland’s winter, its bleak season (The poem was written during the Troubles), and any lantern that shines in that season, particularly the lantern of Diogenes, looking for a “just man,” is not going to give off much light. In fact, it can’t, or doesn’t want to, give off too much light…just enough to “keep the wick of self-respect from dying out.”

But even this proves difficult. Indeed, at the end of the poem, the metaphorical Diogenes (appearing in the poem as the berry on each branch) “moves on,” signifying that no just man can be found (not even the reader). Both the light, and the people it is supposed to illuminate, are “small.” This is more than a reference to Northern Ireland being a relatively-small country in terms of its size. The implication is that its people can also be narrow-minded, near-sighted, petty, etc.

The Haw Lantern was published in 1987, during a time when Sinn Fein was actively seeking to negotiate an end to the Northern Ireland conflicts, but those conflicts were still bloody and ongoing, if less frequent than they had been in the 70s. Thus, there is definitely a political undercurrent to the poem that we can’t ignore. But like so many of Heaney’s poems, the politics are not addressed head-on; that is, he is not going to take a determined political stance here. Indeed, the fact that there is no honest man to be found is a denunciation of everyone involved. Heaney's stance is that no one is blameless (think of the story we discussed from his Nobel Lecture). He is more concerned with the wrong-ness of a climate that creates and allows bloodshed, taking Ireland "out of season." In fact, if the hawthorn, like Yeats’s laurel tree, or his rose, can be seen as a symbol of Ireland, then the reference to a “blood-prick” is much more than a haw-thorn pricking you. It may also be the realization, as you look at its blood-red fruit, that the fruit of wrong-seasoned, present-day Northern Ireland is bloody. This should indeed prick us. The prick is a blood test (whenever I’ve had my blood checked, it requires a pricking of the finger), a test that stands in for Diogenes with his lantern, asking you if you are honest, if you are just, if you are honest enough to allow yourself, your conscience, to be pricked. You want that prick to "clear you," much like a clean blood test can tell you you don't have an infection, or a disease. But you are found wanting. You are not cleared. Heaney’s use of the second person is telling:

But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost
it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes

This has several implications, one of which is that the test, the introspective look, comes from within us. If we let ourselves be pricked, we will be honest enough to admit that we are by no means blameless.

I’ve said enough to get us going. Calling all critics…

Seamus Heaney "Punishment" on YouTube/South Park episode about "The Lottery"

Here is the link to the animated version of "Punishment" that we discussed in class today.

Here is a link to the South Park episode about it; it's incredibly insightful. Fair warning: it's pretty offensive (which should come as no surprise), but the point of the episode is profoundly moral and, despite the initial sensationalism in the first few minutes, there's a compassion to that cannot be overlooked.

Northern Ireland - Belfast- Jeph

These are just a handful of photo's I took from Belfast when I was there. I have a lot more but I don't think everyone wants to see all of them. I think this gives you a good idea of what it looks like there. Forgive me if things are out of order or messed up. I'm not exactly keen on how blogger works.

Also, I have some other pretty interesting photos from Derry, where Bloody Sunday occurred, if anyone is interested. It gives another perspective of the politics of Northern Ireland.

This is a large "H" (obviously) in remembrance of the H-block prison hunger strikers that died in the early 80's.
The H-Block prison is a very fascinating and tragic story. Basically these men died because they refused to be referred to as criminals. They wanted to be called "Prisoners of War" and thus given basic rights of a P.O.W. because to them, they were fighting what they considered an illegally occupying government.
Margaret Thatcher let ten of them die of hunger strikes (the two in the middle died in the h-blocks at an earlier time but I'm not sure of what but they weren't hunger strikers).

Another mural dedicated to the ten who died of hunger strikes.
At the top..."SAOIRSE"...Irish for "Freedom"

A mural condemning the H-Block prison. The wanted poster shows portrait of Margaret Thatcher.
The following sign says "Welcome to Falls Road" in Irish Gaelic.
It must be noted that painting murals is illegal in Belfast. There are far less murals in the Catholic neighborhoods than in the Protestant Neighborhoods and that could be due to the fact that until recent times, the police and the government was over 90% protestant.
Notice the high steel fence.

I thought this was interesting. There were a lot of murals on Falls Road that had nothing to do with the politics of Belfast but this one, I thought, was very interesting.

This is the most famous mural on the side of the Sinn Fein building. It is a quote from Bobby Sands, the first of the ten hunger strike victims to die. He was elected to office while he was in prison and while he was on his hunger strike, which showed the political power of this movement.


Sinn Fein headquarters on Falls Road. I wasn't lucky enough to go inside because they just closed. I am definitely a supporter of Sinn Fein, which is Irish Gaelic for "Ourselves." Thus, denoting that they wished to be separate and independent from Great Britain.
Sinn Fein Headquarters. Notice the Irish Flag. It's illegal to fly the Irish flag in Northern Ireland but they get away with it here.

These are some of the Shankill Road Murals, a Protestant Neighborhood. Note the emphasis on hooded paramilitary. We so often see the IRA as hooded terrorist by the media and we don't often see the other side. People don't realize that there is another side. This is that other side.




UVF - Ulster Volunteer Force. The UVF would be the Protestant equivalent of the IRA.
Here are some up close views of the steel walls and fences that separate the neighborhoods.


Some graffiti. Taigs = durogatory term for Catholic.
"Up the pope smokers"
This is me standing in front of the steel gate that kept us from getting to our car. Our car was just on the other side of this gate. We had to walk five miles to find a way out of the Shankill road area and back to Falls Road.

I thought this was a little sad and ironic. A Registered Day Nursery surrounded by the steel walls and metal fences. I'm not sure I would want my child staying there.

This is the other side of the gate where our car was parked. The gate was open when we left.