Back In Ireland lyrics

Here are the lyrics . . .more comments to come.

Back In Ireland
The champagne-cork went pop as we rode in the limo
Never two with such style into poverty I joked
For it seemed then no issue of money or country
Could keep us from where we felt destined to go

Never two to be prompt we had taken the Caddy
Through the Ted Williams tunnel to the airport on time
For our ten extra bags I thrust three hundred singles
But yer man at the counter winked, acted so fine, he said, “Keep it. You can keep it.”

CHORUS:
Soon enough, we’ll be back in Ireland again
Soon enough, we’ll be back in Ireland again
(No more No More)

Well the small flat stayed chilly, and the dryer stayed broken
And the clothes were hung over the tub on a line
And our pints of a Friday cost a week’s worth of wages
But I’m happy enough; I could dance on a dime

CHORUS:
It’s enough, to be back in Ireland again
It’s enough, to be back in Ireland again
(No more No More)

Met a military man in that bar down in Baggot Street
A belligerent boyo from Boise ya know
He had done the world over from Bangkok to Bantry
And of course for him ya know it only went to show
How great was his state, I told him, “Keep it. You can keep it.”

CHORUS:
It’s enough, to be back in Ireland again
It’s enough, to be back in Ireland again
(No more No More)

Short of more than just money, said goodbye to my heart
Left diesel-soaked Dublin like a romantic misstart
But there’s more than just romance to missing the Liffey,
The bark of the hawkers on Henry St,
The fox on the grounds of the AIB,
The beauty who brings rounds of Smithwicks in the Eden Street,
Major’s and Rothmann’s in the square room of Hynes' pub,
The morning wet vines in the gardens of Merrion Square,
Where I hurried to work in the alley beyond there,
The yelps and the squeals of Paul’s gay hunting pup,
When I landed at Logan I wondered would I ever come up
Tell me how long? How long

CHORUS:
‘Til I’m back in Ireland again
‘Til I’m back in Ireland again
(No more No More)

The World Cafe with David Dye

I love this radio show . . .

and BTW, current favorite song: London Still, by the Waifs. Dilemma: In November: Teach Friday night composition course, or cancel and go see the Waifs at the Paradise in Boston?

The evolution of song lyrics, and smugness: American and Irish

In March of 1997 my wife and I returned to Boston, after living for almost a year in Sandymount, in Dublin. We were married in May of 1996 and went off on a great adventure. I wanted more than just that, but of course realities like money and missed family got in the way. I have thought, and written, and sung so much as a result of that return and the trauma of it that by this time I feel guilty to harp on it. In fact, I don’t. But some songs that I wrote during that period after our return stick with me.

One is Back In Ireland (lyrics to follow.) Among other things, I tried to address that particular smugness of certain Americans certain that the U.S. is the “best country on earth”. I happen to agree in a general sense, but the attitude rankles in two possible ways:

1.
It comes from an American on tour, in Ireland or elsewhere, who can’t see the forest for the trees. Amidst the possibilities of a different culture, a different place, just an exciting difference, this American only finds confirmation of the deficiencies of the place: the water pressure, the beer temp, the hotel accommodations, the newspapers, etc. It’s not exactly that some of these things might be actually inferior, (certainly not by this point in time in a place like Ireland—water pressure and the like are complaints of a generation ago or more), but that they are just that: different. The height of provincialism is to travel, to encounter difference, and to find it deficient because it’s “not like that back home.”
2.
The second instance of course is much easier to rip: the good old-fashioned myopic “America’s the best, because someone said so once and I’ve been thoughtlessly repeating it for so long that I believe it without question.” This attitude you don’t need to leave the States to find, and for full ironic impact it’s better encountered “at home.” I love hearing the “we’re the best” slogan from people who have been to Orlando more times than I, for sure, but are a bit lacking in first-hand experience of anywhere else that we are “better than.”

This is the smugness, American style.
TBC

Irish slang

Thanks for the link, Art!

Sample:


H
back to top
Hames
mess

Hammererd
very drunk

Hard Neck
lack of respect

Hardchaw, Hardman
rough, tough person

Header
mad, crazy person

Head the ball
idiotic person

Heel
the first or last slice of a loaf of bread

Hickey
a love bite

High babies
senior infants' school

Holliers
holidays/vacations

Holy show
embarrassing exhibition

Hooley
party/celebration

Hoor
prostitute

Hop
playing truant from school

Horse's hoof
embellished story

Hot Press
drying cupboard

Howya
hello- salutation

Hump, the
sulking

Hump off
go away, leave me alone

(Please don't email saying all of this is obvious for a real Irishman . . . would you ever f . . .)

"How to Date a White Woman"

Okay this is funny.

Hypocricy of modern, western alienation (or the Ignorant Sophisticate)

Jim Cheney, in Tricksters (in the Shadow of Civilization) writes

In his New Science (published in 1744), Giambattista Vico offers a theory of the development and decline of human institutions “governed by the law of entropy” (as Robert Pogue Harrison puts it in his remarkable study, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, the title of which informed the title of my paper and upon which I draw freely in this section):

[O]nce the mind fully develops its powers of abstraction, critical reason becomes ironic. Reflecting on the pieties and customs of the past, irony discovers that they were based on errors and arbitrary beliefs. Thus a consciousness that has reached the stage of irony tends to repudiate the authority of tradition as lacking in either necessity or justification. An ever greater ironic distance from the past leads to skepticism about the institutions that had hitherto “preserved humanity”. . . . If such irony follows its course toward unrestrained cynicism, it can create the conditions for a new barbarism at the heart of the enlightened city of man. Vico calls it the “barbarism of reflection.” (Harrison 11)

Such peoples, Vico says, “have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride. . . . Thus . . . they live . . . in a deep solitude of spirit” (Vico §1106).[1] It is the development of this ironic sensibility and its attendant mood of alienation from both tradition and the earth that we now trace.

As an English teacher, unfortunate terms like metacognition and metalinguistic awareness come up. :-

In classes at some point I like to discuss the purpose of education, and especially liberal education at the college level. Most of my students are headed toward this liberal education. I want them to be explicitly aware about what it is they are supposedly pursuing. Meta-awareness: to think about the process itself.

I suggest the liberal education seeks to create a well-rounded individual capable of discerning, critical thinking. (Camille Paglia would suggest our schools are dried up job factories, and have abandoned this goal-maybe she's right.)

I have thought that the particular ignorance of the modern man is his failure to achieve this goal: that modern Americans, for example, have no real grasp of the past, either explicitly of history, and the humanities more generally. YET, at the same time, we experience that sensation of exhausted possibilities. That is, we feel like we know so much more than the people of any past era. We feel like we are at the end of history. We've got most of it figured out. We are the smug post-modern sophisticates. It's what as a society as a whole, we tell ourselves, even though at an individual level we are actually probably quite ignorant of our vast cultural past. Being told about Kant, or Nietzche, isn't the same as reading them. Being soaked by the various media with generalized allusions and cultural and historical references isn't the same as actually aquiring knowledge, much less wisdom.

The point of this post: Ignorance breeds folly, and the particular folly of hubris. The general disregard for the er, wisdom, of the past (I'm not being ironic here), allows for "the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests," and doing so confidently, I might add. The biggest irony is:

The pursuit of reason and learning have led to this ironic alienation, this "barbarism of reflection", gutting belief and tradition.

YET education is actually not producing these deeply informed critical thinkers.

So what are we? Superficial self-deceivers who experience the sensation of ironic skepticism of tradition, belief, institution, without actually having arrived there through the heavy lifting of real, informed, abstract and critical thought.

Have a nice day.

Teada this past Monday

Well,
the night was a bit slow. After all, the Blackthorne is in the sticks, and it was a Monday night.

I'm divided between knowing that I should make a push for people to come out for the show, and knowing that I'm opening, and playing for only 25 minutes. Hard to drag people out on a Monday for that.

The best part of the night was how easy it came. The songs are there, ready. No nerves, even when the soundman is freaking. That is a good feeling! :)

Amy nailed the fiddle as usual, and we added bass to a few songs, last minute. All good.

Teada is very good in an understated way, soft-spoken songs and lovely tunes. They were great.

I was listening to globaldust.com . . .

radio, and I heard a great song by Martha Redbone. She's a little bit NYC, and a little bit Kentucky. Check out her site for some great music.

Liminality

Liminality

Funny, circular, weird:

Liminality describes a state of being in-between. Often it describes a transitional period in the process of spiritual growth or change in social status. Liminality is also related to "outsiderness", although it is not the same as it.

"Liminality" is a term given currency in twentieth century anthropology by Victor Turner of the University of Chicago. Limen in Latin means threshold, and anthropologists like Turner have become interested in a certain state experienced by persons as they pass over the threshold from one stage of life to another. For instance, Turner notes that the rite of passage at puberty has three phases: separation from one's status as child in a household, then a liminal stage, and finally reintegration into society as a full and independent member with rights and responsibilities that the initiate did not have before. During the liminal stage, the between stage, one's status becomes ambiguous; one is "neither here nor there," one is "betwixt and between all fixed points of classification,"2 and thus the form and rules of both his earlier state and his state-to-come are suspended. For the moment, one is an outsider; one is on the margins, in an indeterminate state. Turner is fascinated by this marginality, this zone of indeterminacy. He argues that it is from the standpoint of this marginal zone that the great artists, writers, and social critics have been able to look past the social forms in order to see society from the outside and to bring in a message from beyond it.

Robert bringhurst
Myth, language

Also, lots of folk lore and myth describe liminal places or creatures: crossroads, boundaries, tricksters; places that represent a crossing point, and character types that subvert the order of things, perhaps to provide perspective or reveal truth, or bring about change.

I was Googling all this stuff recently, late at night, and I began to get that creepy, FIAT (Fundamental Inter-connectedness of All Things), sensation in my gut and at the back of my scalp, in that the more I read, the more it applied to my experience.

I should say first here that bi- or trans-cultural people, 1st and 2nd generationals, are of course potentially both outsiders and liminal, because of their in-between existence.

Silly reflection on the fact as a teen, I used to read a magazine called Shaman's Drum. Why? How would an average suburban white kid pick up that habit?

Moreover, I have always been fascinated by Tricksters. Specifically, I cannot explain them. I can't express a satisfactory understanding of them, despite my reading, and yet I am always drawn to that type. They are so expansive in their function. In their portrayals. I wanted to know the psychology; the social psychology, that they inhabit.

I once intended to try a research PhD comparing Native American Trickster portrayal to the Irish Amadon na Briona (sic?), or Fool of the Forth, that roams the roads on a certain night and makes simpletons of those it encounters. Of course, the "simpletons" are credited with otherworldly insight in folk understanding.

How eerie to discover, at age 36, an understanding of "liminality", "outsiderness", and "bi-culturalism" that in one fell swoop so accurately explains your undirected habits for the last 20 years?

Creepy doesn't describe the sensation of almost immediately discovering your own name (sake)appear as a thinker concerned with some of these exact issues!

Opening for Teada!

I will be opening for Teada, the great Irish trad group, at the Blackthorne Tavern in S. Easton, MA, on Monday, 13 September.

8pm.
Turnpike St (Rt 138)
S. Easton, MA 02375
508-238-4068