Gruff Rhys' "American Interior": Book + Music Review

At twenty-one, John Evans left his Welsh farm. Arriving in Baltimore in 1792, he set off from the Alleghany Mountains into uncharted heartland. He sought a lost tribe of Welsh Indians.

His distant descendant by a maternal uncle, Welsh musician Gruff Rhys, is best known for his singing and songwriting as a founder of Super Furry Animals, and currently as a solo artist and a member of Neon Neon. Long intrigued by his forebear, Rhys pursues Evans' path on an ambitious 2012 "investigative concert tour" up the great rivers of Mid-America into the Great Plains. It's all documented in a "psychedelic historic travelogue", an album, a film directed by Dylan Goch, and a bilingual app mingling these media from Penguin (the last not made available for this review).

"It sounds like a joke: here were a Scotsman and a Welshman employed by a Spanish king, leading a boat full of French speakers into the precarious tribal waters of the Mississippi." Furthermore, John Evans sought to rid the West of the British, reach the Pacific, capture a unicorn, grab a seashell or two as proof, and then return for a two-thousand peso reward from Spanish Louisiana's governor, at a time when British Canada threatened to sweep south into Mexico, after French Canada succumbed to the British Empire, and as the American expansion under Thomas Jefferson eyed territory which the Spanish feared losing.

Into this geopolitical arena, young Evans entered. For five years, he mapped many blank spots and tried to verify what Rhys rightly calls the "most useful invention" of Prince Madoc. Supposed to have arrived from Wales in 1170 and rumored to have spawned a clan of Welsh-speaking natives who mingled with, or were, the Mandan of the present-day Dakota states, Madoc's reputation endured. In colonial America, a few Welsh emigrants swore they had met tribesmen who answered them in their common language. Rhys labels these as "ear-witness accounts". He explains how these settlers made Madoc "a tangible hero" among those pioneers who confused, for example, Kentucky's "Padoucas" with the supposedly Welsh "Magodwys" who had perpetuated their customs in Native America. This legend had persisted from Elizabethan times. Madoc's landfall (purported at Mobile Bay, Alabama) was appropriated by the English Crown, in a concerted effort to concoct noble lineage and irrefutable prior proof that the British could lay claim to the continent their forays now forced open to conquest.

As a Welsh speaker, Rhys brings the advantage of judging not only the discredited claims for Madoc, but providing comparisons between Welsh and Native American predicaments. Both communities feature indigenous speakers of a threatened language and ancient culture. Both face a relentless pressure which shoves the natives off their homeland, erases names and memories, and which forces their political assimilation. Evans, after all, proved no friend of the British. In 1793, he had been imprisoned by the Spanish in St. Louis, who feared either an American agent or a British spy. As a patriotic Welshman, he favored American claims to the New World's frontier. But he defected on the western side of the Mississippi River to the Spanish, becoming their citizen, so as to finance a 1795 expedition. Spain wished to fend off any British takeover west of their great river border. Spain had taken vast territories from the French, and soon Spain was at war with the British again in Europe.

So, the Spanish authorities sent Evans upriver to drive off the British who infiltrated into the Midwest across a contested Canadian frontier. Evans proves in Rhys' wry telling "responsibly delusional". He charted (but did not understand the sight of) volcanoes and veered from crocodiles. He survived passing through the lands of twelve tribes of hostile reputation, and an assassination attempt by a British operative from Canada. A skilled cartographer, after nine months in the Dakotas, the diligent emigrant Evans in conscientious fashion ultimately failed to match the Mandan evidence with any Magodwys of Madoc's purported lineage. By winter of 1796, Evans turned back from near Canada when his funds ran out and weather blocked his progress westward. His luck appeared to run out, too.

Yet, his mission paid off a few years later. Evans' hosts among the Mandan and guides from the Arikara told him what he needed to draw the first map of the source of the Missouri River. He noted the presence of what we call Yellowstone, and indicated how the Rockies comprised not one but three tiers of mountain ranges. This information enabled William Clark to plot the correct course when he and Meriwether Lewis planned and carried out their own venture less than a decade after Evans.

Rhys tracks Evans on his journey, even if his firsthand manuscripts have been lost and we must rely on those who met with him, corresponded, and copied his discoveries into their own reports. In turn, Rhys largely follows Gwyn A. "Alf" Williams' similarly lively Madoc: The Making of a Myth (1979). Williams, a Marxist historian and Welsh republican, proved a masterful interpreter in print and on film of this controversial topic, debunking persistent claims by a few Celtic romantics convinced of Madoc's existence, but Rhys appears in two places I spot-checked to repeat Williams' minor errors. For example, neither the self-styled Muskogee chief, William Bowles, nor the flamboyant double- or triple-agent Brigadier General James Wilkinson were Irishmen. Both were born in colonial Maryland.

In his own account, Rhys discusses his musical interpretation of Evans' undertaking sporadically. Although Rhys is on the road as not only an adventurer and interviewer but as a working musician, a reader needs a wider sense of how this "investigative concert tour" succeeded. Mentions of appearances, scattered lyrics, and a few comments from fans gain transcription. Rhys sees the sights and relates folksy or impassioned chats. The best of these happen on the prairies with native activists, and in Louisiana among voudou haunts. But many other places blur. Some characters barely register.

Therefore, the film (to be released on DVD April 18, 2015, in the U.S.) and the album fill in what the book may allude to or skim past. Rhys' PowerPoint presentation for American audiences, his rock songs worked out on the road, and his interviews (some with English subtitles, as the documentary aired on SC/4, the Welsh-language BBC channel) enrich the experience as he retraces Evans' steps.

The concept album, appropriately homespun and often acoustic-based, but also cinematic in scope, compliments the print version. "100 Unread Messages" lists Evans' itinerary in jaunty verse. "His mind was baked just like a cake as trouble gathered 'round." It's impressive to merge Evans' accomplishments into a skiffle song, in far less than five minutes, too. The melodic "The Weather (Or Not)", "Liberty," the title track, and the spacier "The Last Conquistador" and "Lost Tribes" mix the moods familiar to Super Furry Animals' fans, spiced by varied sonic textures, sprinkled with electronics and smooth vocals. Rhys always stands out singing in his first language. "Allweddellau Allweddol" (roughly "Keyboard Key") emits childlike native, tribal chants, wrapped into an experimental tune. "The Swamp" layers keyboards and processed beats, akin to his SFA and his three past solo albums. While some of this album floats along into its plush surroundings and threatens to drift away, the storyline manages to transfer Evans' vision into digital files through Rhys' skill in multimedia. These sixteen tracks can stand apart from the book or film, but Rhys' triple telling deserves full exposure.
(The film's trailer typifies the visual presentation; so does the array of platforms on the project site and, from the album itself, the title track video.)

"Iolo" gallops along as if a string-sweetened, synthesizer-warbling soundtrack for Evans' wild flight, when he was chased away by the Lakota. An anthemic "Walk into the Wilderness" precedes the pedal-steel, country-tinged musings on "Year of the Dog" and "Tiger's Tail". These demonstrate Rhys' knack for converting pop tropes into lush arrangements that try to evade predictability or repetition. "That's Why" picks up the pace, helped by guest drummer from The Flaming Lips, Kliph Scurlock. "Sugar Insides" resembles the Lips' congenial eclecticism, in fact. "Cylchdro Amser" (roughly "Circle Time") appropriately spins beyond temporal limits Rhys measures, as Evans' life orbits away.

Nobody knows what Evans looked like. So, Rhys in typically sly fashion commissions a three-foot "John the Avatar" as a felt doll. Rhys carries it with him as he traces Evans' five-year quest into the northwest as it was known, or not known yet, to Europeans. Intriguing vignettes parallel Evans' separation from his society, as Rhys encounters contemporary folks, native and other Americans, who warn of global warming and corporate control. A few still seek solace on the river, or in a simpler existence lived off of the grid, away from the urban gridlock. At one point, so far removed in places a map had yet to fill in, Evans was the most isolated white man on the entire continent, Rhys reckons it.

Throughout, as Rhys shows in genial but earnest manner, Evans faced challenges as he tried to prove what reality showed as false. Madoc was verified as only myth, when the Mandan failed to chatter in Evans' first language of Welsh. The dream ended, Evans returned on a sixty-eight day voyage down the Missouri River, 1800 miles to St. Louis. He tried working as a surveyor, but the fractious territory bristled with Frenchmen abandoned by their nation's loss to Britain. The Spanish tried to keep their hold on a region where the Americans and the British infiltrated to assert their own imperial claims. This left Evans no opportunity for an easy occupation. Rhys tries to track down Evans' ultimate fate.

In New Orleans, where Evans was monitored by a suspicious Spanish governor uneasy to let such a skilled frontiersmen loose in dangerous times to spill his secrets to a rival power, he succumbed to delirium by 1799. Whether due to depression after his long adventure's denouement, malaria, alcohol, or more than one cause, Evans met a humble and early end. No grave remains. Most documents in his own hand probably were thrown overboard by pirates looting the ship on which the Spanish, departing after the Louisiana Purchase, had loaded up treasures to safeguard in their Florida redoubt. While Evans' tale has been scrutinized by previous scholars, Rhys admits he has found a bit to add to Evans' saga, given their common language, and thanks to Rhys' recent archival research in Seville.

Out of his thin family tie, on a search for origins, Rhys connects with Evans poignantly. It's in an eerie, prescient form left for the reader, listener, or viewer to witness. (Here, I prefer the book to the film, as it evokes more sensitively Rhys' epiphany as he seeks Evans' final destination, if he rests near the site of New Orleans' notorious Storyville.) Beforehand, in a meeting conveyed well on both page and screen, Rhys visits Keith Bear, a Mandan flute player. Bear envisions the fabled dragon of the Welsh flag as combining mythic with real, out of a creature half-earth and half-air. Truths conjured from fables create their own power, spurring Evans and Rhys on to cross paths with native tribes, once hoped for as evidence of a utopian, hybrid heritage. The Welsh imagined a few natives in America had forged a congenial community and that they had lived as inheritors of Welsh customs, for hundreds of years. Out of such suppositions, the true and the imaginary create a kind of "common" sense, even if this conceit fails as commonsense. This expresses an elusive awareness beyond mere fact. In American Interior's multimedia endeavor, as innovative as an app, as venerable as an old map inspiring an epic, Gruff Rhys honors his ancestor, Ieuan ab Ifan (renamed John Evans by the English), as natives do. Rhys and Evans share, two centuries apart, a tribal Welsh vision quest.
Project's website
Artist's website
(This appeared on PopMatters 12-18-14 as "A Multimedia Tale of a Welsh Vision Quest")

Merton, Tolkien, Buddhism & Second Languages

Alongside Tolkien (Merton College, Oxford), at twelve I found Thomas Merton. "The Seven Storey Mountain" beckoned me into a realm nearly as remote as Middle-Earth: the last ties to the Western Middle Ages-- as its Dantesque purgatorial title hinted. Evelyn Waugh excised "Eternal Silence" as its British edition, a rare reversal of the usual assumption Americans won't grasp an allusion. But I doubt if they did.) By the time I'd read SSM, as with LotR, publishers had long promoted a proto-countercultural bestseller. Merton, like Tolkien, found his search turned a guidebook into exotic, romanticized, and misunderstood representations by the rest of us, who still yearned as they did for escape, facing modern tensions of withdrawal from the secular world into the more austere, yet wondrous and even mystical, terrain of the imagination.

"Merton & Buddhism," not only as a scholarly anthology I reviewed recently (I warn you: lots of self-referentiality today), but as ideological intersection, intrigues me. Merton battled his cravings for fame, the world's most famous hermit; I think now of the Dalai Lama as the globe's celebrity monk. It's hard to recall a time when Merton's fame outshone the Dalai Lama's, but this was true when Merton in his "Asian Journal" wrote "Our real journey is interior," three months before his sudden death.

Many argue over this complicated man's legacy, the Cistercian recluse who vowed to start Tibetan ritual homage during his final months of life. Yet, charity and a reading of "Merton & Buddhism" reveal a more nuanced picture of how Merton sought to reconcile his excitement with dharma against his commitment as a priest. Perhaps his death came at a merciful time, exactly half the span spent as a Trappist as he had before he entered the cloister. He returned outside to a part of the globe, however, unimaginable in 1941. Halfway across the world, he'd depart from it unpredictably.

"Not all who wander are lost," mused Tolkien. "The Monsters & the Critics," reviewed by me last March 2nd, reminded me on re-reading it about Tolkien's power to retrieve from "asterisk reality" the glimpsed sense of the intangible. As with Merton, Tolkien tapped a Catholic energy that stimulated his soul to write and dream and dazzle the rest of us. Even when Merton writes of Zen or Tolkien of elves, you glimpse the mystic within the shroud. They believed sacramental power charged our ordinary currents.

As I wrote last March:

[JRRT called this] "star-spangled grammar." (237) As his son and editor Christopher explains: "the reference is to enquiry into the forms of words before the earliest records; in those studies the conventional practice is to place an asterisk before hypothetical, deduced forms." (n. 3, 240)

Upon this structure he built his magnificent mythology. (He left lots of fragments for Christopher's excavation with a patience similar to the reassemblers of Dead Sea scrolls; Tolkienia perhaps often about as interesting as those outside the Essene circle would find shards and scraps among shredded drafts).

This accretion, so many pursuing and adding to a core text and a coherent narrative, reminds me now of Buddhism, as well as Catholicism. Christian recovery by tale-telling rooted in etymology fits what Tolkien argued, as I've summarized: it "liberates us and even provides glimpses of the 'eucatastrophe' of the Gospels, the happy ending of the Resurrection Story that men wish so much to be truly true." How can this be? Many scholars pursued this essay's conclusion back through Tolkien's stories and into vast theological legacies. By not contrast so much as progress, or academic need to find fresh excavation, a few have considered "Buddhist Tolkien"; medievalists and Christian literary critics who dominate Tolkien scholarship may have considered the underlying point Tolkien makes within the context of Buddhism and its lack of essentialism. This perspective's out of my ken, as a non-obsessed polite admirer of LotR, so I appended a few URLs for the curious.

Similarly, as Donald S. López in his 2008 book "Buddhism & Science" labors to prove, both our understanding of physics and that of the dharma rest on ground where we, unlike Dead Sea archaeologists or Tolkien dissertators, cannot burrow. We tend towards facile claims of "dancing Wu-Li masters," "Zen & the Art of---" phrases to equate sub-atomic particles with "shunyata," yet we forget the Buddha's warning that we cannot express the inexpressible, nor must we cling to such dual non-dualities. Maybe as with waves and particles, we need the binary life-death, on-off switch to power systems, mental or networked, electrical both, while the energy itself hums and Oms/ Ohms in a unnameable and inaccessible dimension beyond even the kabbalistic "ein sof" of "no limits." (See another unacknowledged influence on the account I discuss below by Jeffery Paine. Rodger Kamenetz explored the Ju-Bu junction in "The Jew in the Lotus," also reviewed by me on this blog and on Amazon US recently.)

It's the lack of this foundation, the ultimate changeability, impermanence, and evanescence beyond even terms such as "shunyata" or "emptiness" or waves of light on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays and particles on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that leaves us investigators, trained in asserting the empirical, the documented, the repeatable in a lab or the retrieved in an archive, silent. (Not sure what happens to light on the Lord's Day, but if He made it, He should know.)

Tolkien's gift of invention grounded him yet allowed him to take flight. He was able to be the tenured linguist by day and the fervent creator by night, scribbling on the back of those blue book exams he graded for extra money. I find that he ruined me for other modern fantasy. For me, C.S. Lewis falls far short in Narnia of the genius his fellow coalbiter and Inkling who drank beside him at the Eagle & Child. Still, both men as with peers such as Charles Williams and Dorothy Sayers shared in true love of the sources "Tollers" used as the inspiration around which to create his Middle Earth. Yet, he knew as a devout Catholic that he could only make a Secondary World, and bowed to His Maker in homage.

For Merton, bowing and meditating for twenty-seven years before he made his pilgrimage to Asia in search of Buddhist dialogue, the substitution of prostrations before a statue or icon may not have smacked of the idolatry that, say, a Quaker or a beatnik might have attributed to such a posture, physically or spiritually. I've written about Merton on my blog here in scattered fashion. I realize how much SSM at twelve alongside LotR formed me.

So, without gallivanting into previously contemplated matters, but in search of lively comparisons, I'll return to the passage that started me thinking again about Merton, Buddhism, Catholicism, Tolkien, language, medievalism, and me. I reviewed Jeffery Paine's "Re-Enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West" on Amazon US and this blog. Many previous reviewers of Paine uncritically praised this popular account. Although I found woeful typos and underdocumented discussions discouraging me despite the blurbs by breathless admirers on book jacket and as posted on Amazon, I did admire the metaphors Paine often employed.

He opens his narrative reminding us: in 1968, the Dalai Lama was still so relatively obscure that Merton initially dismissed even meeting with a man he regarded as the equivalent of a curial flunky, a Vatican puppet. His liaison, Harold Talbott, whose own story rivals Merton's or His Holiness (the lama not the pope this time around) for sheer surprise, was with Robert Thurman at that time probably the only American seeker who'd been initiated into Tibetan monastic practice. Paine stresses appropriately even as of late '68, despite Maharashis and Beatles, how comparatively isolated continued Tibetan teachings, remote from even the counterculture who'd taken Merton to heart and, for a while in postwar America, filled Trappist novitiates with eager dropouts frustrated with war, nukes, Frigidaire, and Ford.

He then segues into the vast difference fifty-odd years later. Merton's insight that he could stay a Catholic while becoming a Buddhist-- as Talbott's own testimony quoted in "Merton & Buddhism" insists he was intent on doing in these crucial months before his eerie electrocution in Bangkok not long after he'd received suddenly advanced "phowa" teachings on death from the lamas he met and immediately connected with beyond the limits of language-- sparked others to similar boldness.

Thomas A. Tweed, in an essay "Night-Stand Buddhists and Other Creatures" ("Westward Dharma," eds. Charles S. Prebish & Martin Baumann, U Cal P, 2002: 17-33), classifies on page 21 the titular varietal apart from converts or adherents but also separate from dabblers or posers. (Yes, I reviewed it too on Amazon and will on this blog.) Bookish sympathizers at a discreet distance hearken back to the Theosophists and New Age pioneers of a century ago; see Rick Fields' "When the Swans Came to the Lake" for much more on how America imports Buddhism's productions exporting the ineffable and impermeable in packaged, labelled, commodified fashion. Inevitably.

Paine makes an helpful analogy on pg. 15 to second-language learning here. (He does not mention Fields, Tweed, Baumann, or Prebish: leading historians on Buddhism's dissemination; such omissions or lacunae Paine defends for the general reader's ease, but I restore references however pedantic for any unenlightened reader stumbling upon my lonely blog post.) Paine discusses how we know language's workings better if we speak more than one. If we speak just one language, we tend not to think about this; it seems our "natural" voice. Yet, if we learn another language, "you likely won't consider it the only tongue God speaks." (Me on more of this: "Kissing Through A Veil? Prayer in Another Language.") My wife, writing to Jewish prisoners, told me that one of her correspondents heard from a Chabad chaplain that "G-d only hears Hebrew for prayers."

Elaborating this metaphor, and echoing Merton's ecumenical quest in Asia, a believer may find that he or she can benefit from the other religion without converting or making obesiance to statues or burning incense. That rabbi may disagree with such translation skills on behalf of Adonai, but worldlier readers, myself included, turn to "spirituality" beyond that denomination into which we were born (or baptized as me) for instruction. This may be a form of "practice," Paine suggests, even as one persists in being a native speaker-- or adherent or skeptic or shopper. A second language speaker may lack a monolinguist's (or monologist's?) conviction that he or she boasts a better language than any other; but this learner gains by openness.

The "night-stand" accidental Buddhist defines a Princeton lit-crit feminist post-deconstructionist who did not want her real name used in Paine's account for fear of her reputation. She sets aside, probably by her own bed, her Buddhist reading for the morning, to sample slowly, as opposed to the novels she devours nightly. She remains hesitant from asserting any public form of identification. Meditating as learned from books, Paine opines, "may be like learning to swim while in a desert by reading a manual," but it does ease her irascible nature. I reckon this trait may be endemic to anyone today in hectic academia; however, I lack "Christine's" Ivy League tenure. Meanwhile, she wonders if it's a passing fad or an ultimate, life-shattering transformation that even if it takes a million lives to ripen, is worth her wait.

It gives her, Paine interprets, a jolt that commentaries upon critiques about texts after authors over centuries in the well-trodden path of humanist academia can no longer provide. She recalls, as an English professor, C.S. Lewis' warning: "A Christian should not manufacture hypothetical tragedies and then imagine his faith insufficient to withstand them." (240) Lewis, as Oxford's other renowned medievalist, might have welcomed her acknowledgment. For, in the West, Tibetan teaching's the last medieval, so to speak, transmission of an entirely preserved and intact line of thinking isolated for a millennium or more. Perhaps, Tolkien could liken this time-travel ("from the Abbey of St. Denis to downtown Manhattan" [Paine, 13]) to hearing Caedmon, or Merton to listening to Bernard of Clairvaux. I add that not even "Christine"'s favored mentors, Camille Paglia for all her charm or Michel Foucault for all his transgressions, might convey such a marvelous frisson as the lysergic revelations dharma may hold for Tibet's adepts.

Can the adoption, gently and cautiously, of this dharma survive the shock of the move? Does its tragic fate at the hands of Communist China and its necessary flight beyond the Himalayas now fulfill the prophecy of its introducer into Tibet, Padmasambhava, who predicted in his own early Middle Ages that "when horses run of wheels" that his teaching would enter the West? I wondered in my review of "Re-Enchantment" if this would really happen, or like the more austere discipline of Zen (or the Trappists for that matter), it would after an initial splash of boho novelty settle, as I suppose Merton's readers of SSM in a post-Vatican II era must have found, into a mundane series of compromises.

For, as Sam found when returning to the Shire, the machines had entered Middle-Earth. No less than the trains to Lhasa today, full of Han Chinese immigrants brought to overwhelm the natives, where Tibetan cannot be taught in schools after 1500 years of the dharma and a nation where its people legendarily at least lived as peacefully as hobbits. Sauron or Mao, Wal-Mart or celibacy, "Zen" as the label on my wife's room freshener and Trader Joe's coffee or "Frodo Lives!" buttons: ideals always meet commerce in a world where consumers look for enlightenment's coy wink.

URLs: I typed in "Buddhism" & "Tolkien"; the best I found: "A Buddhist Reading of J.R.R. Tolkien" as a brief essay from Arrow River Forest Hermitage. Wisdom Publisher's page on David Loy & Linda Goodhew's "The Dharma of Dragons & Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy." David Loy's printed version of a 2004 talk: "The Dharma of the Rings: A Myth for Engaged Buddhism?". Finally, "Dark Zen" muses on his own meditation practice and refers to sensory overstimulation while lauding LotR's incorporation, if unwittingly, of accidental dharma even as such entertainment also adds to the problem of too much to see and do, too little time spent "just sitting" and asking why we must see so much, do it-- and I guess then to read about it!

Photo of Merton & the Dalai Lama via "Against the Grain" blogpost on same. I had written this three months ago but let it sit. I figured it's ripened now after my own "Kissing the Veil" and this entry by "Bo" on "The Expvlsion of the Blatant Beast" (a closed blog; sample his open counterpart of sorts, "The Cantos of Mvtabilitie"). In his "Chanting the Arwen" (27 Sept. '09) "Bo" discusses Sindarin, based on Welsh, and the power of language and myth to captivate and inspire literary creation by medievalists today.

Aneurin Gareth Thomas' "Luggage from Elsewhere": Book Review

This coming-of-age story spans 1966-82, narrated by a Welsh lad embittered by poverty, colonialism, nuclear threats, sex, drugs, overdoses, murder, and rain. While familiar ingredients in a standard recipe, Thomas does add sobering, poetic observations that enrich the tale. For readers interested in Wales in the "nuclear age", the hippie and punk movements, Thatcherism, and activism, this may prove a worthwhile selection.

In a society where females have only two choices: girl or mother, the narrator's maudlin Mam takes until menopause to become a woman. Her husband, a militantly and comically atheistic womanizer, with his mates down the pub "talked about the future as if there wasn't going to be one." (41) Welsh men later will earn pithy definition: machines converting beer into sperm.

The chapters of the tale told by the nameless narrator unfold out of order. Throughout, it's nearly always dreary. "Greyness wasn't only a colour in those days but a transparent substance that wafted day and night around our streets, a Passover curse that came calling through the keyhole, wandered about the house looking for grey matter, and on entering the brain, turned thoughts and feelings grey." (231)

Nature offers scant escape. One must conjure up one's dreams out of the daily grind. "Below an oil tanker stationed in the distance looked like a castle on a flat blue horizon. Seaweed washed up and dried under the sun as snakeskins. Foam met the grey-green of the sea. I walked along the shore among the sea's bones, passing boys my age playing at being younger with a plastic beach ball carried over the heads of a young family. A woman alone hoping for a lifeguard to stroke oil over her back, whisk her glasses and scarf away and take her back to when she was twenty. Men playing cards and holding in their stomachs, thinking if only the scarf would ask." (138)

The narrator thunders against complacency, the resignation of his people. As a teenager, he's threatened by English gentry for poaching trout in the river of a nation where he thought he could walk freely. As a young adult, he wanders to a hippie camp, but there he finds lassitude as the campers wait for mushrooms to grow under the torrential clouds. Idealism inspires him, desperately. "Our first act was to write on a wall next to the bank on High Street Gorseinon the slogan 'Nid Yw Cymru Ar Werth'. Wales Is Not For Sale." (189) However, they "only got as far as writing NID YW CYMRU before being interrupted and we ran off." The partial slogan stands a few months as testimony to their bravery: it's rendered in English as "WALES IS NOT."

Wales under Thatcher drives the narrator and three friends to lash out. As Bore Coch ("Red Morning"), they issue a manifesto written in English, laboriously translated into Welsh, and back to English. "The last thing we wanted was to sound like an amateurish group that represented nobody and faked the Welsh, which was precisely what we were." (202-3) Nobody prints it.

Later, he will try another slogan which will wind him up in jail. He reflects there on his town, and the Welsh promise of his youth: "Where the children played, the next generation numbed the brain with pinpricks before the comedown of bus shelters covered in porn." (286) While the narrative for my tastes closed far too suddenly, perhaps the new novel by Thomas, titled "Excess Baggage," will continue the story.
(Posted to Amazon U.S. and Britain 9-25-09)

Grahame Davies' "Everything Must Change": Book Review

"She was sick of living like a character in a morality play." Simone Weil's story of her strange self-martyrdom for her mystical ideal of a community she felt exiled from by her very existence, during WWII, has been often told. Grahame Davies expands his Welsh novel, based on his study of Weil, to dramatize her own abnegation alongside that of Meinwen Jones, a contemporary Welsh-language activist, who like Weil feels the tug of rootedness and the agony as one of "Capitalism's sulky runaway children." (214)

Novels of ideas that engage you with convincing characters, realistic events, and a touch of sharp satire along with humanist compassion: very rare. Davies never loses grasp of his complicated narrative juggling as he shows you with wit and insight the costs of sacrificing your life for an ideal. This book flows: every sentence fits.

Neither preachy nor pat, Davies brings a vividly rendered eye and a sharp ear to how we delude ourselves as we compromise youthful ideals so as to survive. As Meinwen's told late on, charm can better challenge, and promotion can triumph where protest may fail. She's let in on this by a Tory politician-- who gains as fair a treatment as does she-- similarly a Fascist student and a German cabbie who voted for Hitler emerge as human as a Dominican priest and a right-wing Christian leader will for Simone. Davies even-handedly observes among a cast of compellingly drawn characters the tensions between giving in and holding out that-- to a limit-- Simone and Meinwen share, while as a storyteller he filters their own strong convictions through those around them who cannot sacrifice themselves for a rarified ideology.

Simone works at a Renault factory but sees it more as if her laboring guide's a Virgil to her Dante; on a farm she marvels at a Van Gogh-like Provencal landscape that her hosts certainly have never seen in any museum. She's always at a remove from her world. She loves it, but she feels the scenes she savors would be fresher if removed from her taint, her sight, her presence. The same dissatisfaction with the body-mind problem, the surrender to the ordinary, the duty to be sensible drives Meinwen to political resistance. Her deep unhappiness stems from the same idealism, but she lacks Simone's curiously unorthodox Catholic vision. As the daughter of two Jews who rejected their faith, her father an atheist and her mother a Catholic convert, Simone's labeled as one of a "race" she tries to reject. Yet, she cannot enter the Church. She stands apart from all she admires. Fittingly, she will be buried on the border of a cemetery, between the Christian and Jewish sections.

Meinwen once hung with other activists in the Welsh Language Movement; for a while in the '80s they tried to separate and live against capitalism by supporting local businesses. Yet, flyblown shops run by old women vanish; inferior products in village stores lure customers to slick global chains; few can afford to live off the land as real estate skyrockets and only the English can buy up the family farms.

An activist's car sums up the hopes of a Celtic, leftist, anarchic Welsh scheme. "The only thing holding it up seemed to be the stickers: Kernow; Breizh; Nuclear Energy? No Thanks; Stop the War; Not in My Name. Words like 'No', 'Not', 'Stop' and 'Never' were prominent on these fading signs of adherence, recording, as they did, a series of attempts, most of them failed, to prevent things from happening. The back of Mei's car was a social history of Welsh radicalism." (204)

The larger tale of how Wales under siege by anglicization is a long one; what's new now is the rate of deracination of the Welsh-speaking heartlands as English home-buyers flood in to pay as the highest bidders for affordable rural splendor. Farms wither, locals emigrate to towns, and their children leave for cities. New Age Celts, patronizing settlers, and Celt-aping crusties fill the valleys. Meinwen lives in the old manse next to a closed chapel, which is bought by spiritual healers from Cheshire playing a didgeridoo. They erase, literally, the signs of the old Nonconformist church's communal and ancestral markers.

Cardiff grows in Welsh speakers, yet without a rural base for culture, can urbane Cymru replace what closed chapels, resentful natives, and displaced incomers call the rest of Wales as it turns a weekend retreat, a bedroom suburb of Merseyside or Bristol? Around an affluent Welsh-speaking cafe, the old landscapes hang as pictures. The customers thrive on media ties, grant money, and investment schemes meant to rescue Wales, but how much success the ordinary people gain's rather suspect. The yuppies boast of Thai holidays, pitches, goods, money. The abandoned vistas of their grandparents hang silently: "All safely preserved under glass."

The relevance of Christian pacifism, the difficulty of protecting land values while allowing for a free market, the longing for roots, and the yearning for fulfillment: these in tangential and direct ways join Simone's campaigns with Meinwen's. Simone's words are recalled by Meinwen: "Whoever is uprooted uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself does not uproot others." (196) Davies does not overdo their many parallels. He frees his plot from a slavish capitulation of one woman's determination as yoked to the other. This eases the heady quality of much of this readable and engrossing presentation of two women's prickly, combative, yet appealingly lofty and admirably noble mindsets. They may be crackpots in the eyes of society, but from such visionaries, legacies endure that may better those who follow. Or, they may warp and crush their weakened standard bearers.

Weil late on left a message worth hearing. Her brilliance confused her confidantes. It shows her mix of earnest evangelism and otherworldly concern. She sought a French-Hellenic-Christian purging of capitalism. Influenced by anarcho-syndicalism, Simone envisioned an intellectual's utopia where ennobled workers could share wisdom, not merely to be worn out by fatigue into foolish drinking or brainless games. This goal may reflect her worldly detachment, but she did try in her adult life to care for, as well as identify, with those less fortunate. Speaking eight languages, she could have been a professor. She chose rather a single woman's mission, in the service of an organic yet ethereal philosophy reified as a tireless if enigmatic vocation.

Here's a typical expression of Simone's mature thought. "No human being should be deprived of what the Greeks named the metaxu, things seen as bridges between the temporal world and the timeless: those relative and mixed blessings, such as home, nation, traditions, culture, which provide warmth and nourishment for the soul and without which, unless one is a saint, human life is impossible..." (250) Simone did strive for sainthood, outside a Christian baptism, estranged from her attenuated Judaism. Meinwen searches daily to recover a Welsh-speaking culture that will sustain her native land and enrich those who live in it, by a language older than English.

The deftness with which Davies evokes the clash of high motives with mundane demands makes the novel lighter, for Simone can be abrupt, abrasive, and lacking in nearly all social graces; Meinwen wonders if she can learn to temper her own isolated devotion. Whether or not she can ease up, or whether she will eerily follow Simone's own self-starvation in a confused attempt to become more saintly in her purified commitment remains for you to discover. (Posted 9-24-09 to British and U.S. Amazon, speaking of global chains...) [Author's website]

David Greenslade's "Celtic Hot-Tub": Book Review

Mock Keltic Magickal Artes vs. "the language issue" creates tension in this Welsh poet's first novel. Allegorically tinged, it's more fun than Charles Williams. (Or Raymond.) After a creaky start, characters whir and rant fitfully, under Greenslade's jaundiced eye and pitiless manipulation.

Hugh Cadarn, of course not Welsh but a Brighton-born wizard (nee Clifford Wryneck), fancies himself a Merlinesque oracle: "Channel for the Divinity of these Islands/ with a Timely Message for the Whole Totality of Men." So, he recruits Gomer from Anglesey, a crustie but a native speaker, as an "ovate" to "translate" his "bardic utterances" from the nonsense they are into cod-Cymric. They huddle at "Galatia Home Farm," yet another Englishman's rural retreat in the hills of Gwent. Hugh peddles Galatia's dubious charms at "Celtic Wrestling" fairs and psychic conventions as "a Retreat beyond the Din. Oaks where Seekers can Absorb Teachings of the Great Vates in Sweet Silence." He tries in vain to cash in on the New Age Pagan craze. Runaway Sheena, with her own secrets, joins them in an uneasy menage-a-trois as they try to conjure up venerable earth-spirits.

Meanwhile, Terri Ayre (pronounce the name) with a Ph.D. thesis on "Self-Affirmation" movements in America, freelances gathering antiquarian tracts in the public domain to chop up and publish as pamphlets, books, and website fodder to sell antiquarian "Seltica," as her boss Stone pronounces it, lore to crystal-chanting, moon-worshipping gullible Yanks. She's a hard woman to figure out, as many in this story will learn. Her path into Wales' cultural battleground intersects first with Sieffre, a Welsh-language tutor, and Annie, her host, who paints over English-only signs as a linguistic rebel. He resents "pseudo-Celtic obsession" as "remote" and about as applicable to modern Wales' discontent as is Cleopatra to Cairo today.

Terri argues that if there wasn't some authenticity, nobody'd buy what she's selling. Sieffre finds that what Terri thinks is thriving he sees as collapsing. "At the soggy end of our hard work we get this hijacking. Just when our schools are crap and the population isn't strong enough to promote dreamweavers of its own. We're snuffed out by these myth-snatchers." Sieffre despises the "Awesome Mystery Dish" but Terri contemplates exporting a whole new Celtic Mystery Tradition back to the South, were as Greenslade appears to sketch, many eager customers await "Seltica."

His chapters can be uneven as the broad plot begins in a Southern U.S. setting that appears too familiarly satirized. While Terri's immersion into Welsh seems surprisingly rapid even for a scholar with a doctorate, it lacks the detail that for a non-Welsh reader might have explained necessary details along the way of her mastery of Cymraeg. However, this book's printed by a Welsh-oriented press, and I assume the author expects a more insular audience for his musings on how outsiders bash around the inflated ideal of Wales while ignoring obliviously or insulting patronizingly its less romanticized reality. Gomer vs. Hugh: the conflict endures.

Then, Greenslade begins moving the characters towards Galatia. Joined by a Gullah-speaking black librarian from the Carolinas, Claude, who like other men in this novel will long for Terri's embraces, the story gathers energy as the clever manufacture of a Celtic hot-tub at the rural farm in all its scrap-heaped dereliction fuels a memorable showdown among those who invade Wales in search of wisdom, profit, and exploitation.

Greenslade, although a poet, prefers here with the exception of a wonderful sentence or two (e.g. "Larks pattered like a chorus of tambourines") to dissect mystification in a hard-edged, acerbic, and often pitiless manner. His sex scenes can be more scary than seductive. He gains in pacing and confidence as the novel progresses, and you start to wonder about the inner thoughts of those who he sketches on the outside. Some of the supporting characters feel underwritten, but this may be intentional to highlight what at the heart of everyone in this story pulses as a mystery: you sense unrest and unhappiness shrouds everyone in these pages. The few glimpses of the animal kingdom, as opposed to their masters, hint at the writer's compassion for the weakest trapped among us.

Greenslade lets you in to his figures enough to intrigue, as with Hugh, but not enough to answer all your questions. This may frustrate some readers, but this deft detachment pleased me by its ultimately mythical gloss upon contemporary pilgrims and profiteers. Reliably. falsity's sold as hallowed insight relayed from ages so long past none of us have much of an idea who the Celts were or what they meant. In this ambiguity, scholars, hacks, and posers all come together to bicker over Celtic identity. At Galatia "alchemical" charlatans and "folkloric" adepts both, for Greenslade's purposes, abuse the Welsh natives for their own ill-gotten plunder. It's a sobering lesson for all those enamored of what's sold as Celtic wisdom.

(Posted to Amazon in the U.S. and Britain 9-23-09) Link to brief biography & works: "David Greenslade"

Coirnis: an teanga Ceilteach beo aríst

Tá Coirnis beo slán aríst. Léigh mé an alt fúithi. Tá sé anseo: "Cornish Coming Back from the Brink" le Henry Chu ina 'Amanna na gCathair na hÁingeal' inniu.

Is cuimhne liom chomh ag léite fúithi agam go bhfuil dúshlán de réir aistriú ceart. Mar sin ní raibh comhcheangal ag rá Coirnis, níl leagan sin in úsaid gach uile duine anois. Tá tri modhannaí: Coiteann, Aontaithe, agus Nua-aoiseach i An Corn.

Ar scor ar bith, insíonn Chu go raibh aontaithe anuraidh faoi caighdéan ag scriofa sí faoi dheireadh. Mar sin féin, tá trí chéad duine Coirnise ag labhairt go líofa an teanga seo anallach Ceilteach is cosúil as Breatnais agus . Tá duine leath-mhillúin i gcónaí i gCornach.

Is iníon deiféar bhean a tí agam. Tá an nheacht seo i a chónaí ina Ghleann Féir i gCalifoirnea Thuaidh. Tá sa cheantar go raibh áitriú leis mianadóirí Cornach ar feadh an "Ruathar Ór."

B'fhéidir, tá foghlameoirí fásta ina bhaile sin féin ag éisteacht a podcraobhannaí "Miotas Ceilteach" gach seachtaine leis An Corn as Coirnise. Cuireann Maitiú Ó Clerigh Kernewegbva amach bealach naisc sin fós. Ní bheireann mé an podchraobhanna eile as Coirnise ansiúd air triu iTunes i Meiriceá, os a choinne sin.

Go iontach, bhí eipeasód de "Na Siommainach" leis "Sibeal" ag liú as Coirnise: "Rydhsys rag Kernow lemmyn!" {"Saoirse dó An Corn anois!"} Deir Chu go raibh cúis is déanaí uirthi. Ar ndóigh, níl ábalta muid ag féiceáil an eipeasód seo amuigh An Bhreatain Mhór ach oiread.

Cornish: A Celtic tongue alive again.

Cornish is alive and well again. I read an article about it. Here it is: "Cornish Coming Back from the Brink" by Henry Chu in the "Los Angeles Times" today.

I recall while I was reading about it that there was a struggle concerning a correct version. Since there was no continuity in speaking Cornish, there is no rendering that's in use by every person now. There are three styles: Common, United, and Modern in Cornwall.

However, Chu tells that there's unity last year about the standard in writing it, at last. All the same, there's only three hundred Cornish people fluently speaking this ancient Celtic tongue, similar to Breton and Welsh. There's a half-million people living in Cornwall.

There's a daughter of [the] sister of my woman of [the] house {="my wife's niece"}. This niece is residing in Grass Valley in Northern California. This district was settled with Cornish miners during the "Gold Rush."

Perhaps, there's adult learners in that same town listening to "Celtic Myth" podcasts every week from Cornwall in Cornish. Matthew Clarke sends out "Kernewegva" by way of that site too. I cannot catch the other Cornish podcast from over there through iTunes in America, on the other hand.

Wonderfully, there was an episode of "The Simpsons" with "Lisa" {"Lizzie" is closest in Irish} yelling in Cornish: "Rydhsys rag Kernow lemmyn!". {"Freedom for Cornwall now!"} Chu says it was her latest cause. Naturally, we weren't able to see this episode either, outside Great Britain.

Ghriangraf/ Photo: "Bheith móralach as Cornach/ Kernow bys vykken/ Proud to be Cornish" cap from/caipín ó/"Cornish Heritage Shop/ An Siopa Dúchas Cornaigh".

Simone Weil: Chain-Smoking, Self-Starving, Self-Exiled Jewish Mystical Malcontent?

That title reminds me of Phranc, "your average Jewish lesbian folksinger," who once graced our home to hawk Tupperware. Weil in my vague recall was a formidable ethicist, a prickly Jewish convert to Catholicism who died during the German occupation of France. Well, Weil according to Benjamin Ivry's "Simone Weil's Rediscovered Jewish Inspiration" in the April 10, 2009 "Forward" revises the hagiographical litany.

The centennial of her birth and the usual flurry of academic attention this time follows a Finnish oratorio, and accompanies a "performance event" in Manhattan's East Village. Ivry reports: "And the tributes continue. One of them comes from Darrell Katz, who recently composed 'The Death of Simone Weil,' a voice and jazz ensemble suite. Darrell sums it up: 'Mystic visionary comes to life with a big band behind her.'" I cannot improve upon or detract from this transformation of an social agitator into a presumably Off-Off Broadway extravaganza. One more reason for me why to hate jazz. Black-clad Gothamites who shelled out for "The Producers" (or "Life is Beautiful"?) might be waiting in line for the rush tix as I type.

To my surprise, Ivry notes that her niece's new biography reveals that Simone never wrote "anything against the Nazi persecution." DeGaulle, intriguingly given the recent film about Hannah Senesh from Palestine infiltrating occupied Hungary, called Weil "completely insane" for a similar wish to parachute into France during the war. While often treated as a martyr manque for her beliefs, Ivry counters with her letter to Georges Bernanos, the famed Catholic exponent, in "an often quoted 1938 letter: 'I am not Catholic, even though-- what I am going to say will doubtless seem presumptuous to any Catholic, coming from a non-Catholic, but I cannot say it any other way-- even though nothing Catholic or Christian has even seemed foreign to me."

What Weil believed instead of formal religions and their "historical tyrannies" eludes easy summary. She felt others' pain. She pushed herself into identification with the poor, devoted herself to workers' movements and the Spanish Republicans, and as an "absolutist woman" eventually starved herself-- in 1943 England-- to death, a tubercular patient dying of a combination of cardiac arrest and a refusal to eat. She sounds like a pill, as old folks used to mutter.

Still, this uncompromising stance in solidarity, this sacrifice for occupied France, won her admirers. Most people, myself included along with the professoriate, classify her usually among leftist, existentialist Christian philosophers. Relentless, exasperating, uncompromising, Weil came from a family tenuously Jewish. Most critics "cite her visceral distaste for organized religions, particularly Judaism, and define her as a Christian mystic, although she never converted from Judaism."

Her niece Sylvie's book tries to restore a Jewish dimension, although the evidence for such an assimilated generation as her aunt's appears rather risible! Ivry sums up:

Sylvie herself is scrupulous in explaining how almost all of Simone’s biographers have understated the degree to which the Weil family retained elements of the Jewish tradition. She ridicules the notion that, as one writer claims, her aunt was unaware — until she was 12 years old — that her family was Jewish. Describing a family that is Jewish both culturally and in terms of quirky personalities, Sylvie alludes to what she calls the family “chutzpah,” a habit of talking takhles (in a brutally frank way) regardless of who might be offended. This was characteristic of both Simone and André Weil, who were socially cumbersome houseguests, if in diametrically opposite ways. While Simone insisted on bedding down on the floor in a sleeping bag while visiting, and starving herself (while nevertheless chain-smoking) to identify with the poor, André would demand entitlement to the room with the best view and criticize the food if it was not up to snuff. Neither Simone nor André would accept less than emes (the truth) from others, and in this, Sylvie clearly shares in the exigent family personality.

To me, that chain-smoking socialist-- graduate from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure-- in sympathy with the doubtlessly puffing proles will be an indelible image of a fragile figure many have idolized. Trés proto-beatnik French, too! It does make her more human, even if I doubt if I'd have gotten along with her any more than most people may have. It's hard to imagine her letting her hair down.

Like many fierce lovers of their fellow men and women in principle, perhaps she could not bend her principles flexibly enough to align her punished body with her preoccupied mind. I wrote this past Easter about "Pax Christi" and Francis of Assisi's own road to willing torment. In this, Weil and Francis sought radical humanity with the Crucified One as the supreme inspiration for their own devoted asceticism that hastened their untimely deaths in their fourth decade.

Yesterday, I ordered from the Wales Book Council's half-price sale despite my own financial abnegation of late a title by Grahame Davies, "Everything Must Change." It juxtaposes Weil's relentless life with that of a Cymraeg-language activist of similarly recalcitrant ideals. Certainly a "novel" parallel that I will look forward to reviewing here, once the surface mail, at a pace that will probably outrun the time it took to breach the Maginot Line, arrives. (Update: I reviewed it on my blog and on Amazon US and Britain 9-25-09, very favorably.)

Was Weil insane? Suicidal? A "holy anorexic"? Kafka's hunger artist, mystical Christians and Buddhists who crave the "emptiness of form" by self-surrender, and the recent film about Bobby Sands by Steve McQueen, "Hunger": these raise uncomfortable questions. We hesitate to delve into the mindset of those whom society classifies as crazy or canonized, exemplars for our imitation or warnings for our conformity.

It's a squirmy debate that places holiness next to madness, self-preservation against self-surrender. Who controls our bodies, and how can we free our souls? I wonder if after all, another ENS graduate, Michel Foucault (despite his own unwise perambulations and my distance from facile theorizing) hit the target: in prisons, monasteries, hospitals, factories and schools we follow the science of precise scrutiny and oppressive measurement. Our individuality, once the prerogative of nobles, now marks each one of us in the carceral society.

This scrutiny, as tactics once the Gestapo only may have demonstrated, now opens up as we put our selves into the electronic Panopticon, where we all look at each other, none of us knowing when or whom, always on display, never sure when we're watched, so we always act on best behavior. Weil: what reward did she seek by her refusal? Such resistance to Big Brother may lure more of us in our surveilled cells into thinkers who dash into the electrified fence, over the Big Wall into annihilation, willingly, for a cause.

Photo: Not sure of pictorial provenance, but it may be from her ill-fated 1938 stint in the Renault plant at Boulogne-Billancourt. The source of it? My first hit on Google Images, a "Ground of Eternity" entry in summer 2007, was penned by none other than "Bo" of present "Cantos of Mvtabilitie" & "The Expvlsion of the Blatant Beast" blog-renown.

John McWhorter's "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue": Book Review

Creoles: not only in the tropics do they permeate English. Since Celtic times, and perhaps Proto-Germanic via the Phoenicians, our native language's warped like any other. "While the Vikings were mangling English, Welsh and Cornish people were seasoning it." (xxii) An authority on creolization, McWhorter brings to this little study lots of learning. As with "The Power of Babel" (also reviewed by me), he packs an irrepressible irreverence into a scholarly package. His gifts as a former professor and explicator of linguistics combine into a thoughtful, if rather scattered, series of reflections on how we speak a language that can never be frozen by scolding grammarians into fossilized rules. English no less than sex appeals to whomever wanders by! People may try to hold out, but if in proximity, never for long.

Our hybrid language exists in mongrel form not only due to words imported, but its syntactical bent. Bent because it's been altered from its foundations by those straining to learn it as grown-ups, and who pass along their ESL version to their bastard children-- until the written form catches up with the traditionally unwritten, slangier, less regimented oral mode. This process never stops.

McWhorter's dismissive not only of schoolmarms but those who amass etymological examples of multicultural English while ignoring an explanation of why English adapts such a wealth of disparate forms that tore apart its grammar far more rapidly than its Germanic cousins over a thousand-plus years. It never "just happens" that English took on or discarded unique or rare features that its Germanic cousins did not parallel in their growth and transmission. English creolized early on-- oddly, he never defines this term-- but a creole needs at least three languages to work.

Celtic, Norse, and Anglo-Saxon fought and bought and slept with each other, so they spawned a bastard: English. The Vikings weakened it so much early on, that this combined with the Celtic underlay that infiltrated quirks such as the supposedly forbidden "Billy and me went to the store." Our reversion to such "errors" reflects our recognition of patterns that in fact make sense to McWhorter.

These quirks eventually surface after long illiteracy into the literary form of Middle English that represented centuries later how the spoken vernacular in medieval Britain had been battered into simpler expression by "adult learners screwing things up." (124) The lag into the written representation of how English sounded can be linked to the scriptural bias of recorded English. He's great at using Shakespeare to document such changes later on. The literary register of our earlier language did not bother to capture the changing vernacular any more than, as he says, Time magazine issues its articles through the style of today's rappers.

McWhorter does perhaps overemphasize the "meaningless do and the verb-noun present" progressive as proof of the Celtic impact, but he's convincing that such structures, more than words that failed to enter English from Celtic, built up an overlooked scaffolding that few linguists have accounted for. I've reviewed myself (in short form on Amazon and longer form elsewhere in print) Stephen Oppenheimer's "The Origins of the British" which draws on genetics to reconsider the Saxon incursion upon Britain. McWhorter draws upon this book. Yet, McWhorter, in reverting on pages 11 and 32 to the usual recital that the first contact of British Celts with Anglo-Saxon speakers was 449 AD, does seem to muddle a more nuanced study. Oppenheimer admits that pressures exerted upon the earliest English may have begun before the language moved from Germania into England; he and others also concur that Saxon settlers had already been moving into Romanized Britain. Still, McWhorter's point on the whole stands if implicitly, since earlier Saxon settlers would likely have had little impact on the evolution of English within a Romanized territory.

As an adult learner who screws up Irish and has started to do so in Welsh, I liked his reasoning for the oversight that relegates Celtic influences to a few words at best or worst. After all, few who study English know a Celtic language. I did notice the "Billy and me went" effect in even my toddler Welsh lessons, but had no idea it could be echoed in "bad" English. For McWhorter, what I had sensed in my struggle was a dim echo of a culture clash fifteen hundred years ago. "Celtic was English's deistic God-- it set things spinning and then left them to develop on their own." (9)

He cites and corrects popularizers as David Crystal and the PBS "Story of English" trio who diminish the force of that Celtic impact. He incorporates among his many more recondite sources two other books that will appeal to the same audience. These I have reviewed-- Mark Abley ("Spoken Here" gets a good-natured but well-shaken comeuppance) and Guy Deutscher ("The Evolution of Language"). McWhorter, however, is less clear here than he was in "Power of Babel" or Deutscher is in explaining why grammar gets less rather than more complicated as time passes. It's explained, but the point deserved elaboration for non-specialists. His book compresses so much academic debate and arcane contention that it may, despite its brevity, overwhelm readers less attuned to morphological nicety and etymological controversy.

Basically, we get lazy in speaking our own language, and we begin to clip its endings and elide its sounds. Others who learn our language tend towards interference with their native tongue; their bilingual children move towards an equilibrium that does not have the speakers simplifying their new language, but seasoning it with constructions from their ancestral language. This "stewing" rather than "boiling down" for McWhorter demonstrates how "soon the language they are learning looks like their native one." (119) He confronts those who wonder why Celtic casts so faint a shadow on English vocabulary. He then shifts to spirited attack on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that a culture can be conditioned by the limits of its linguistic capacities of articulating not only its vocabulary but its mindset.

I've always had a weakness for Whorf, so this chapter had to work hard against what McWhorter might blame as my weakness for the "noble savage" romanticization. He castigates Whorf's ignorance of Hopi's temporal markers, and relentlessly ridicules the theory's defenders. I wish he endnoted the source for this deadpan observation: "One sometimes hears how Iran is home to a uniquely vigorous homosexual subculture because its third person pronoun is the same for men and women." (137)

He in the final section tells of Theo Vennemann's fascinating speculations about how early Germanic, before any English had percolated, may have been wrenched from its harder sounds by Semitic speakers into hissier fricatives! Foreigners with heavy accents tend to drag their acquired language through heavy changes, and in time these may leave distortions in the way we all-- natives mixing with learners-- will come to speak the older language.

I wish McWhorter could have applied Vennemann's theory to other IE languages, and Basque, to suggest how a residual substrata may be glimpsed beneath what non-English speakers may preserve in verbal pockets across the continent. But this stretches the scope of a short, engaging, if slightly tendentious and oddly repetitious overview. It carries the pace of a restlessly brilliant lecturer's presentation, it channels the energy of a youngish author with nine other creole-related, sub-cultural studies to his name, and it always conveys a witty tone-- or a stubborn debater's repartee.

He seeks fresh imagery. "Modern English is the current stage of what began as a very different grammar, much like Celtic's. Over a millennium-and-a-half, this grammar had grammatical features from Celtic plugged into it Botox-style, while also being radically shorn of its complexities liposuction-style by adults learning it as a second language." (144) He knows how to make esoteric professorial shoptalk vivid and clever for us, an ignorant audience. A scholar of Black English and creoles, he finds a new entry into the intricacies of medieval English's formation from Celtic-Norse-Saxon collisions via a fresh perspective for how we generated globalized English. He informs us of its twists and turns-- as a German-speaking African American proponent of possibly Phoenician pulls upon Proto-Germanic!

P.S. "Bo" & "Vilges Suola" may love this; they might toss it. They might know of Welsh influence on the Northern Subject Rule or diagnose "linguistic equilibrium" for Old Norse's standoff with Northumbrian dative plurals. But I-- despite my medievalist training once and hapless Celtic grappling now-- had no idea. If you want to learn why these topics effect how we communicate today, read OMBT.

(Posted without postscript to Amazon US today.)

John Davies' "A History of Wales": Book Review

Just over seven-hundred pages in paperback, this updated narrative spans it all, from prehistory to devolution. Its bulk belies its often remarkable readability. Translated in 1993 by the author from the 1990 Welsh-language edition, with an eleventh chapter added to the 2007 revision, Davies' coverage keeps energy and verve despite an inevitable recital of lots of names, dates, statistics, and data.

This makes it a challenge, naturally, to read straight through-- if with many breaks! Still, as a reference, my copy's filled with notations now. While the lack of footnotes or a bibliography (due to the length of the body of the text already) may discourage researchers slightly, the value of a one-volume, thorough, and accessible work remains inestimable to scholars and a wider audience both.

Davies keeps a winningly low-key presence. As a skilled interpreter, he presents heaps of evidence through which he's sifted the wheat from the chaff. The labor must have been immense. He gives you material, and then steps back to sum it up in a striking phrase now and then, as an experienced lecturer may do. "The nation of the Welsh was conceived on the death-bed of the Roman Empire; it was born in the excitement of the 'Age of Saints' but its infancy was meagre and lonely. Yet, as shall be seen, it would have an exhilarating adolescence." (77) So ends the chapter on the early medieval period-- one of the most difficult to explain based on the least evidence, but a section I found captivating.

Although Davies never explains this directly, he organizes each chapter around the rhetorical device of a triad-- commonly used in old Welsh as a memory aid for bards. While this remains rather subtle, it's a clever nod to the past legacy that sustains the present exploration of what it means to be Welsh, always defined as both the oldest British and, as the terms warp, a "foreigner" in one's own homeland. This challenge remains. The last chapter looks at incomers and how they've transformed "y Gymru Gymraeg"-- the formerly Welsh-speaking heartland. "Pont," a "bridge" program aimed at newcomers to teach them about local culture, rests on a shaky metaphor: "the essence of a bridge is that the piers on either side are of equal strength; that was hardly true of the pier of Englishness and the pier of Welshness." (689)

Speaking of architecture, many tourists today, along with the "heritage industry," romanticize old fortifications. Davies, typically, balances his judgment.

"The castles can be considered to be shameful memorials to the subjugation of the Welsh-- 'the magnificent badges of our subjection' as Thomas Pennant put it. Yet, when it is considered that the medieval military architect's science and art at the height of their development were necessary to ensure that subjection, the castles may be seen as a tribute to the tenacity of the resistance of the Welsh, as eloquent testimony to the immensity of the task of uprooting from Wales the rule of the Welsh." (167)

This exemplifies the depth of this study. Davies cites a telling phrase from a venerable scholar two hundred years previous to him. He acknowledges its truth, while circling around it for a fresh perspective that confirms its necessity while directing our attention to its opposite, or complimentary in more peaceful times, corollary. And, he strives for fair-mindedness rather than jingoism or revisionism.

For such legends and identities last long in Wales. Treating a period of tranquility within an often fractious later medieval period of increasingly English-inflicted domination, Davies notes how myths played a dual role in exacerbating wrath and reconciling defeat. Myths "were a cry against the extinction of identity and against the tyranny of fact." (180)

Later, Davies relates the gradual capitulation to imperial rule, and the often enthusiastic participation by the Welsh in the colonial enterprises at home and abroad. Imbued with Non-Conformist and even pacifist Christian tendencies, the Welsh proved rather an anomaly in more recent centuries. Their literacy rates soared as the Bible was translated into the people's native tongue, and this education prepared them better than other Celts, perhaps, to face the assaults of modernity and industrialization that kept many Welsh at home rather than forcing them to emigrate. So many that at one point about half of all the workers in Wales directly or indirectly depended on King Coal. He sums up the change: "In Merthyr, even a labourer owned a watch." (340)

The century of mining domination is introduced by a particularly masterful seventh chapter that ties together dozens of threads into a rich tapestry of rebellion, technology, language, worship, and politics in the early 1800s. While I found myself a bit glazed by the subsequent treatment of Gladstone and Liberals-- the book here as in sections closer to our times does get heavily weighed down by parliamentarian election results and inter-party contentions-- I was roused by the chapter on the early 20th century. Davies seems to revive and his pace quickens.

Radicalism and Christian values contended and co-existed in complex fashions in modern times. Conservatism influenced the nature of the language movement, as advocates sometimes argued that Cymraeg shielded its speakers from harmful foreign ideas. Others urged anglicization as a remedy for poverty and a charm for wealth. Unlike Ireland, the factions for independence by violent means were few, and generally the Welsh have accepted their position, Davies charts, within a kingdom as a principality, rather than as a polity demanding separation by language or ideology. Here, Davies seems to align with Gwyn A. Williams, whose "When Was Wales?" (1983; reviewed by me here and on Amazon US last month) sets out a similar understanding.

Of course, whereas Williams concluded in the first term of Thatcher, Davies continues the saga through the collapse of mining, the rise to nearly half (as of 2003) of all births being out of wedlock, and the increasing visibility of Welsh-language media and English-language usage. He contrasts in the last chapter many ramifications of the narrow decision to accept in 1997 a degree of limited self-rule that was trounced in 1979. He leaves us with a survey of a more diverse, less Welsh-Wales-centered constituency in this region. One where the areas nearest the borders hold most of its people, often in defiance of stereotypes peddled by the Welsh themselves, it's an intriguingly perplexing realm. It's the oldest remaining bastion of Britishness, one marginalized, determined, and always, it seems, somehow declining while reviving.

J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Monsters & the Critics & Other Essays": Book Review

Finding out at the age of twelve from the back covers of "The Lord of the Rings" that there were medievalists and that Tolkien was one, I vowed to study what he did. While unlike "Tollers" my doctorate did not lead me to a donnish tenure on an ivy-draped quad, I always admired the humanity and grace not only of his famed fiction but his patient letters and insistent essays. Re-reading his collected criticism twenty-five years after it first appeared, its engrossing paths through scholarly debates make occasional detours permissible and often worthwhile. As with Tolkien's "Secondary World" of Middle Earth, as a "sub-creator" not only of probably our greatest modern mythology but as a rigorous (if rambling in his donnish digressions) scholar, you find in "Monsters" much evidence that without his deep understanding of language, that he'd never have been able to convince you of the essential reality of his imagined realms.

This knack, as T.A. Shippey, his successor in his position at Oxford, has argued in "The Road to Middle Earth," depends on "asterisk reality," or what JRRT calls here more delightfully "star-spangled grammar." (237) As his son and editor Christopher explains: "the reference is to enquiry into the forms of words before the earliest records; in those studies the conventional practice is to place an asterisk before hypothetical, deduced forms." (n. 3, 240) This may seem dry to non-academics or those lacking a fascination with philology. But for Tolkien and his audience, the invention of sustainable elements of his myth depended on the languages he concocted-- and vice versa.

In his "A Secret Vice" (1931) Tolkien elaborates-- if a bit unevenly in this essay never published-- how assembling "art-language" relates to crafting mythology: "to give your language an individual flavor, it must have woven into it the threads of an individual mythology, individual while working within the scheme of natural human mythopoeia, as your word-form may be individual while working within the hackneyed limits of human, even European, phonetics. The converse indeed is true, your language construction will breed a mythology." (210-11) This is why Tolkien outlasted so many of his predecessors, peers, and imitators. He knows the deep structures of the language and from the combination of creativity and limitation inherent in how what we speak conveys what we conjure; he built Middle-Earth upon this rich foundation, half-excavated, half-hidden.

This trove, as his best-known essays here on "The Monsters & the Critics" and "On Translating Beowulf" show, depended on perceiving that Old English poem as such, more than merely a word-hoard to be ransacked by historians and professors for linguistic traces of Geats and thanes. It pivots on a balance between what its Christian author could reach back from, into the recently-departed pagan past, and forward into, the fatalistic yet salvific quality of heroism infused by morality. The codes of the Saxons meshed with those of their Catholic evangelists, and Tolkien in these early critiques moved the study of the poem away from archeology into poetics.

He did the same for "Sir Gawain & the Green Knight." He corrects earlier scholars who mined the verse only for traces of earlier legends; he reminds us of its inescapably Christian morality, which (as in Beowulf) moves the reader as its maker towards a value system based on belief in the Sacraments rather than one relying only upon a code of honor or "a game with rules" such as his host expects him to play. The tension between an earthly pursuit and a heavenly mandate enters the drama. In Beowulf, the monsters occupy the center, with youth and old age, victory and defeat, on each end for the hero to face. For Gawain, the confession-- in Tolkien's perceptive reading-- turns the narrative away from pagan-pursuing or Pentagram chasing into a decision to follow a more "real and permanent" world of what's worthwhile rather than the frivolous folly of "an unreal and passing" court.

His "Valedictory Address" gently attacks "the workings of the B.Litt. sausage-machine" at Oxford precisely fifty years ago. I'm glad he was spared what the academy's been turned into now. My dissertation chair had studied under Tolkien around the time this address was given. Tolkien had the reputation as a nearly incomprehensible lecturer, so I am unsure if his auditors learned his lesson!

Tolkien does offer advice for those of us who made it through later expansions of the slaughterhouse that is the Research University today, Oxford or its lesser factories. Perhaps we may find wry if wise counsel as independent scholars and freeway faculty who labor on with few financial or institutional rewards:

"There is no need, therefore, to despise, no need even to feel pity for months or years of life sacrificed in some minimal enquiry: say, the study of some uninspired medieval text and its fumbling dialect; or of some miserable 'modern' poetaster and his life (nasty, dreary, and fortunately short)-- NOT IF the sacrifice is voluntary, and IF it is inspired by a genuine curiosity, spontaneous or personally felt." (226-27)

The trouble is, then and so much more now, that so many in academia follow the leader into an au courant theory, some adviser's own project, producing but the tired labor dutifully repeated.

To his credit, Tolkien convinced us in his fiction and warned us in his criticism of how language deserved respect, whether we were schooled in the Lit. or the Lang. His lecture on "English & Welsh," delivered the day after publication of "The Return of the King," also encourages us. Language, as "a natural product of our humanity," is native in a profound sense transcending the first one we learned in our cradle. "Linguistically we all wear ready-made clothes, and our native language comes seldom to expression, save perhaps by pulling at the ready-made until it sits a little easier. But though it may be buried, it is never wholly extinguished, and contact with other languages may stir it deeply." (190) Welsh, for Tolkien, did this along with Gothic, Finnish, Latin and Greek-- among others. He concludes with evoking the sheer pleasure of Welsh. Maybe dormant for many "who today live in Lloegr and speak Saesnag," yet there, as with so much he mixed from real languages into his mythological vision's purview, for us to find enchantment and satisfaction.

More than once, Tolkien offers his vision of how words can capture a deeper meaning. "You may say green sun or dead life and set the imagination leaping." (219) The power of the adjective to transform the noun, the freshness of nouns coupled in vivid pairs: the structure of the Old English line finds its echo eleven-hundred years later in Tolkien's inheritance, his conception of a linguistic design that, as "On Fairy-Stories" delves-- if after byways, detours, and asides-- into deepest, liberates us and even provides glimpses of the "eucatastrophe" of the Gospels, the happy ending of the Resurrection Story that men wish so much to be truly true.

(Posted to Amazon US today.)

De ghlór an bháis?

Scríobh Caitríona Ní Dhonghaile ina nuachtan "Eireannach Neamhspléach" 20 Feabhra faoi tuarascáil nua le UNESCO. Duirt siad go bhfuil Gaeilge "ag cur i gcontúirt go cinnte" é. Mar sin, ní fhoghlaimíonn sé mar príomhteanga ina bhaile leis duine ar bith.

Ar scor ar bith, insíonn UNESCO go raibh ag cur "i mbaol" mar Baisceis, Gaeilge na hAlban, agus Breatnais. Níl é seo chomh olc. Faigheann an triú na teangachaí bás atá ag druidim leis anois. Chuala mé go imeacht leathan na teangachaí ar fud an domhan sa céad againn féin.

Ar ndóigh, tá bron ormsa féin go leor faoi an tuarisc seo. Ar feadh an seachtain seo caite, léigh mé freagra ó Nigel Ó Ceallacháin orm. Is foghlaimeoir fásta é na Gaeilge (Oideas Gael chomh mise!) agus Breatnais níos formhór. Chonaic mé alt go scríofa leis Nigel ina leabhar go léamh mé anois, "Breatnais sa Bhliain" leis Jen Llewelyn.

D'fhoglaim sé Breatnais go foirfe. Tá sé i gcónaí ina An Bhreatain Beag anois. Oibríonn sé leis ducháis Breatnaise gach lá. Is é leathanach baile anseo. Tá Nigel go bhfuil duine dea-shamplach go raibh muineadh dúil ar aghaidh againnsa eigin.

Bhí seanathair Breatnais airsean féin ina bhaile. Bhí seantuismeitheoraí Gaeilge acu mise féin. Ní déanfaidh duine níos mo i bhfad ó láthair nó de chóir baile fiú amháin an dushlan mór a foghlaim teangachaí Ceilteach amárach. Níl deireadh dúile bainte de agam fós. Tagann muid briathra deireanacha.

In a dying voice?

Katharine Donnelly wrote in the newspaper "Irish Independent" 20 February about a new report by UNESCO. They say that the Irish language's "definitely endangered" [="put into danger surely"]. That is, it is not learned at home as a primary language by anybody.

However, UNESCO tells that Basque, Scots Gaelic, and Welsh are put in the "unsafe" category. This is not as bad. A third of languages find death approaching now. I heard half of languages all over the world will go away in our own century.

Of course, I myself was very sad about this report. During the past week, I read a reply to me from Nigel Callaghan. He's an adult learner of Irish (Oideas Gael like me!) and moreover Welsh. I saw an essay that was written by Nigel in a book I am reading now, "Welsh in a Year," by Jen Llewelyn.

He learned Welsh perfectly. He lives in Wales now. He works in the Welsh-language homeland every day. Here is his homepage. Nigel is a fine example of a person who may inspire an expectation to progress within some of us.

He had a grandfather with Welsh himself in the home. I myself had grandparents with Irish. Fewer people from afar or even close at home will make the great struggle to learn Celtic tongues tomorrow. I have not yet given up hope of it. We revive dying words.

Photo/ Griangraf: "Stair, Láthair, agus Todhchaí Athbheochan na Gaeilge i mBéal Feirste" le/ "Past, Present, and Future Revival of Irish in Belfast" by Harry Holland, Glór na Móna, (="Voice of the Turf"= lost in translation?) 2007. Tá muid ag plé faoi Gaeilge as Béarla. Tosaíonn muid go mall. Caitheann muid cloí leis an bhfírinne. We discuss Irish in English. We start slowly. We must stick to reality.

Pangur Bán, Breatnais & naisc focail leis Gaeilge

Chuir mé dhá nóta ar ais go Barra Tóibín ó Caerdydd ina Bhreatain Bheag faoi naisc focail idir Gaeilge agus Breatnais. Scríobh mé ortsa féin ar ais mar sin go raibh ag feicthe mise leathanach baile leis iris "Dragún Glas" ina trí teangachaí, Béarla, Gaeilge agus Breatnais aige! Is cosúil é go cruinnithe ar an leithead ormsa.

Bheul, fhragairt sé litírín agam. Cóipím seo leis buíochas ort. Gabh mo leithscéal mar sin leagan bocht agam. Ni raibh mé a leagan an liosta séadsan féin. Tá sé anseo:

Tá sé tábhachtach a thuiscint, mar a dúirt mé cheana, nach ionann brí an fhocail sa Ghaeilge agus brí an fhocail sa Bhreatnais gach uile uair. Ach bíonn ionannas nó cosúlacht éigin i gceist i ngach aon phéire acu.

Marr bharr ar sin, tá cuid de na focail sa Bhreatnais seanda as dáta fileata, ach is fearr iad sin a chur san áireamh chomh maith maraon leis na cinn atá beo sa lá atá inniu ann...

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Máthair = modryb ('aintín' sa Bhreatnais, 'mam' an focal Breatnaise do 'máthair'); athair = ewythyr ('uncail' sa Bhreatnais, 'dad' an focal Breatnaise do 'athair'); carraig = carreg; mór = mawr; beag = bach; glaoch = galw: garbh = garw; tarbh = tarw; marbh = marw; capall = ceffyl; marc = march; dreoilín = dryw; fear = gŵr ('g' in áit 'f'); bean = benyw; fíon = gwin; fíor = gwir; fiú = gwiw; faoileann = gwylan; feamainn = gwymon; trá = traeth; muir = môr; feo = gwyw; doras = drws; críon = crin; uisce = dŵr ( cf: 'dobhareach'); roth = rhod (focal fileata); eaglais = eglwys (Laidin); Aifreann = Offeren (Laidin); scadán = sgadan; abhainn = afon; much = mochyn; lao = llo; cumar = cymer; inis = ynys; úr = ir; glas = glas; glan = glan; drom = drum; tulach = tyla; leitir = llethr; cnoc = cnwc; féar = gwair; cailc = calc; diseart = dyserth; cibeal = cybalfa; manach = mynach; pobal = pobl; deich = deg; dó = dau, trí = tri; minic = mynych; ór = aur; coróin = coron; airgead = arian; cos = coes; láimh = llaw; craiceann = croen; bó = buwch; néal = niwl, coinín = cwningen; scamall = cwmwl (Laidin); tír = tir; cú = ci; coileán = colwyn; buachaill = bugail ('aoire' cf: 'buachaill bó'); mín = mwyn; caoin = cu; mí = mis, bliain = blwyddyn; Luan = Llun; Máirt = Mawrth; Satharn = Sadwrn; bord = bord; long = llong; claíomh = cleddyf; bráthair = brawd; neamh = nef; caol = cul; leathan = llydan; Ruairí = Rhodri; Siobhan = Siwan; Seán = Sion; Máire = Mair.
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Dán (tallann) = dawn; bard = bardd; marcaíocht = marchogaeth; dealbh = delw; dílis = dilys; Lúgh (an dia Ceilteach) = Llew; loingeas = llynges; slad = lladd; Máire (Muire) = Mair; coll = collen; eiscir = esgair; dair = derwen; doire = deri; práis = pres; airgead = arian; iarann = haearn; oidhear = eira; cathair = caer; príomh = prif; scoil = ysgol; eascair = esgor; lios = llys; cruit = crwth; lann = llafn; -lann (cf: 'leabharlann')= llan; cill = cil; aer = awyr; moladh = moliant; bán = pan ('Pangur Bán'); túr = tŵr; trasna = traws; canadh = canu; im = ymenyn; cailc = calch; cam = cam; léim = llam; lár (cf: 'urlár') = llawr; lán= llawn; do = dy; mac = mab; bradach, bradaí = brad; aimsir = amser; bolg = bol; coileach = ceiliog; éan = edn ('dofednod' = éanlaith chlós na feirme); teine = tân; cluain = llwyn, sean = hen; síon = hin;
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Nóta: 'Pangur Bán'.

Is dócha gur 'pan-gŵr' ('bán-fear') atá i gceist anseo. Sin é an míniú is fearr liomsa air mar scéal.

D'imigh an manach ainaithnid a scríobh an dán álainn sin as Eirinn go dtí Caergybi ('Holyhead') chun dul ar aghaidh go dti an Eoraip.

Ar a shlí ó dheas dó is cosúil gur chuir sé aithne ar an gcat bán seo sa Bhreatain Bheag. Bhí an t-ainm 'Pan-gŵr' ar an ainmhí ionúin cheana. Ghlac an manach leis mar chompánach bóthair agus ghlac sé leis an t-ainm Breatnaise chomh maith.

Éireannach dílis ab ea é, áfach, agus do bhain sé feidhm as an aidiacht 'bán' chun cruth na Gaeilge a chur ar 'Pan-gŵr' mar ainm!

Pangur Bán, Welsh & Word Links with Irish.

I got two notes back from Barry Tobin of Cardiff in Wales about word links between Irish and Welsh. I had written to him myself as I had seen his "Green Dragon" site in three languages, English, Irish and Welsh! It seems designed for the likes of me.

Well, he answered my little letter. I copy this with thanks to him. Excuse my poor rendering. I did not translate the list itself. Here it is: (see above)

It's important to understand, as I said already, not to liken a meaning of a word in Irish and a meaning of a word in Welsh every time the same. But there can (usually) be some likeness or similarity in question in every pair of them.

It's foremost considering that there's a share of the words in Old Welsh from poetic material, but they are regarded as good examples of including the best of whatever's surviving daily there today...

Note: Pangur Bán.

Probably it's "'pan-gŵr' ('bán-fear')" [="white-man"] that's in question here. That's the best meaning for me according to its story.

An unknown monk went out to write that beautiful poetry from Ireland towards Caergybi/ Holyhead from where he set out towards Europe.

On the way to the south it seems that he got knowledge of this white cat in Wales. The name "'pan-gŵr'" was from the dear animal already known. The monk called for companion for the road and he called it by the Welsh name as well.

He was a loyal Irishman, nonetheless, and he found no problem from the adjective "bán" ("white") to fit the Irish that's "Pan-gŵr" for a name!

image/íomhá (?!). Feic dán anseo/ See poem here: "Pangur Bán" poem/dán

Líonra Soisealta Breatnaigh-Meiricéanaigh

Cheangail mé an líonra soisealta Breatneach agus Meiricéanach faoi deireanach. Tá sé ar an idirlion anseo. Bhí mian agamsa a foghlaim faoi línte comhchumrachaí idir Breatnais agus Gaeilge.

Fuair mé amach faoi an ionad nuair go raibh ag cuardach le tuairiscí le bogearra (nó earraí boga) le "Rosetta Stone." D'iarr mé ag léamh léirmheasannaí le úsáideoirí Breatnaise. Bhuel, d'fhoglaim mé mír i dtaobh sé leis gasra fhoglaimeoiri ann.

Tá rud eile de suíomh seo ann. D'aimstrigh mé faisnéis mar gheall ar eolas a chur ar gníomharthaí cultúir Breatnaigh ina Stáit Aontaithe Mheiriceá. Ní raibh fhios agamsa féin ar chor ar bith fúthu. Anois, insíonn agaibh beagán faoi an áit sin.

Níl sé furasta a cuardaigh ann. Dhearc mé nascannaí go leor ar dtús. Ba mhaith liom amharc de dheas dom a fháil air. Tá blogannái ann; tá seomra cainte fós; tá nuacht freisin. Tá siadsan féin go bhfuil óstachaigh de "Eisteddfod ar chois an taobh clé"!. Tá stiúrthórí i gcónaí ina Stát Bhéabhar (=Oregon).

Tá líonra iontrálachaí líonmharaí a chur ina idirlíon a bhreacadh acu ann. Coinnigh scór siad an cuntas seo. Tá duine den lucht soisealta: 828; tá grianghrafaí: 3606; tá amhráin: 153; físeanaí: 198; comhráite: 227; imeachtaí: 248; agus altannaí bhlogannaí (leis alt nua agamsa) anois. Tá dream acusan féin bídeach go cuí ag caint faoi an finscéal Mhadoc! Scríobhfaidh mé faoi seo amarach as Béarla.

Welsh-American Social Network.

I joined a social network of Welsh and Americans recently. It's on the internet here. I had a need to learn about concurrent ties between Welsh and Irish (languages).

I found out about the location when I was looking for accounts of software by "Rosetta Stone." I wanted to read reviews by users of Welsh. Well, I learned a bit concerning it from a group of learners there.

There's another thing about this site. I discovered information regarding data out about Welsh cultural activity in the United States. Now, I tell you all a little about that site.

It's not easy to search there. I observed many links at the start. I'd like to get a closer view of it. There's blogs there; there's a chat room also; there's news too. They themselves are hosts of a "Left Coast Eisteddfod"! The directors are living in the Beaver State (=Oregon).

Their network has entered numerous entries put on the internet to post. Today, they tally ("=keep score") this count. There's 828 members; 3606 photos; 153 songs; 198 videos; 227 discussions; 248 events; and 330 blog posts (with a new one from me) there now. They even have a tiny group fittingly chatting about the legend of Madoc! I will write about this tomorrow in English.

Íomhá: "Do you have power to speak Welsh?"/ "An bhfuil cumhacht ag rá Gaeilge agaibh?"