My blogs of the year

Coming towards the end of 2008 I have been thinking a lot about everything that has happened in the past year. Although this blog has been around for a few years it was only this year that I got around to posting regularly and trying to establish some kind of coherent identity for the blog. My first blog was called The Struggling Linguist and that still sums up a lot of my life and what I write about. At the same time Faoiseamh captures a number of other things. Writing does give me solace and releases me from the daily grind. Having an Irish title marks my interest in Irish and other minority languages.  Naming the blog after a poem tips a hat to my interest in poetry and literature. So I am not going to rename the blog though I have considered it.
Anyway, besides writing a lot more this year I have also started reading a number of blogs regularly. Google Reader makes that much easier, I had never used a reader before 2008. There are many blogs I subscribe to and making a selection is difficult but for what it's worth here is my Top 5 of 2008.

1. The Red Scrapbook - Making a choice for the top slot was not easy but I am selecting Red's blog because she writes consistently well with great humour and she is always coming up with new forms. Her letters to her younger self demonstrate just how good her writing can be.
   
2. Annie was a real candidate for the No.1 position. Her series of posts chronicling her journey through the Big Country have been a wonderful treat. Her writing merges perfectly with her talent for capturing the visual. If she makes a film I am looking forward to seeing it.
   
3. The Iceland Weather Report - Before the financial crisis this was already an Iceland-based blog that was worth reading. Since the fall of the Icelandic banks no other medium has captured the mood in Iceland as well as this blog. Unsurprisingly her views have been picked up by the mainstream media.
   
4. Three Thousand Versts - This is the blog that both interests and infuriates me the most. Chekov is a unionist who presents his views in an articulate and reasonable way. The fact that I disagree with many of his views makes the blog sometime 'challenging' reading but overall it's a very worthwhile read.
   
5. Corcaighist - Colm writes intelligently on many subjects with a particular focus on linguistics and culture. On this blog I have come across many new ideas and learned about areas of linguistics that I had previously known little about. It's always great to see a new Corcaighist post in my reader.

It will be interesting to look at this again next year and see what blogs I am enjoying the most in 2009. There are so many blogs out there that I am sure I will discover new gems, that's the beauty of blogging and the internet.

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Annie John

Continuing on my literature of the world season yesterday I read "Annie John" by Jamaica Kincaid (such a beautiful name) while travelling to and from Heathrow. This is the kind of novel that you find on school syllabi dealing, as it does, with the coming of a age of a bright young girl in post-colonial Antigua. I am sure that a school essay would focus on the references to the former colonial power and the buildings and sometimes anachronous symbols left behind. For me the story itself was very rewarding set in very unfamiliar surroundings but with many recognizable circumstances. As the protagonist leaves the island at the end of the book you feel as a reader as if you too are leaving a place you have gotten to know very well. This is a very short novel that can be read in a matter of hours, the hours will be well spent.  

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Tomorrow

I have read a couple of Graham Swift books before and I have never quite got what it is media reviewers find so great about his writing. "Last Orders" won a Booker Prize in 1996 but left me feeling underwhelmed. Nonetheless I was interest in reading "Tomorrow" based on some good reviews. It is narrated by a woman looking back over her life on the night before she is about to make a major revelation to her children. It reminded me of "Saturday" by Ian McEwan in terms of the chosen form .

For me the book never really got going. The 'surprises' in the plot barely would have registered if I had have been hooked up to a heartbeat monitor. The narrator tends towards the melodramatic and mawkish which made those particular sections hardgoing. All in all I was delighted to reach the finish line. I guess that Graham Swift is an acquired taste and despite my best efforts I have not been converted. His stories are based on ordinary lives which is fine but I just want more to happen in a novel.

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Irish Geography Lessons

There was an interesting post on Slugger On the Irish Republic’s thin grasp of Irish geography… where they picked up on the fact that RTÉ says that certain streams are available 'Only in Ireland' when they actually mean only in the Republic of Ireland.
In this case I can see why people would be annoyed at the use of Ireland to mean the territory of the 26 county state. The fact is that Belfast is in Ireland even though it's not in the Irish state. However, Article 4 of the Irish constitution does clearly say that the state is Ireland "The name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland.".
When I was growing up nobody ever used the term the Republic of Ireland. Our country was Ireland and the constitution included a territorial claim to the six counties that are part of the UK. English people called our country Éire or Southern Ireland and northern unionists and Scottish people often used the term the 'Free State' adopting a derisive tone. The widespread use of the Republic of Ireland as a designator only came into itself when the Irish soccer team started enjoying some success in the Jack Charlton years.
I can see clearly why Irish nationalists living in the north might be upset by the RTÉ descriptor given that they might actually want to pick up the streams. On the other hand I have also met many northerners who used Ireland when meaning the Republic of Ireland for the simple reason that it is the Irish state and represents Irish people whether they live in the 26 counties or not.
Unionists also get upset by the interchangeable use of Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Chekov had this to say in a post on this topic:
"There are two states within Ireland and both recognise and respect the Irish identity. Neither should (or can) exercise a monopoly on either the Irish identity or the term ‘Ireland’."
I can see where he is coming from on this but I most certainly do not believe that the northern state can be a good protector of the Irish identity. The Irish state, for all its imperfections, is still the best vehicle available to preserve Irish language, culture and traditions.
Ironically geographical confusion is certainly not monopolized by RTÉ or the Irish state. Let's consider:

• "Northern" Ireland is in fact north eastern Ireland. The most northern part of of mainland Ireland is in Donegal so perhaps a new name for the northern state is also desirable.
• The "Ulster" Unionist party wants "Ulster" to remain part of the UK. What it actually means is that the two thirds of Ulster that constitute Northern Ireland should remain in the UK. The same geographical error is repeated in countless northern institutional names BBC Radio Ulster, UTV etc.
• Northern athletes represent Team Great Britain in the Olympics though no part of Ireland is actually part of Great Britain.
• British journals like The Economist include articles on 'Ulster' under the 'Britain' section.
• Most ironically of all, in my experience many northerners say 'going to the UK' or 'in the UK' as though they were not actually in the UK.

So, yes, there may well be times when saying Ireland may not be geographically correct but the northern state is also awash with terms that are just wrong. Unfortunately this is just another consequence of partition.

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The Friday Weigh-in

This week I weigh unchanged at 77kg. I have been training every day but unfortunately I also succumbed to the lure of beer on a couple of occasions (medicinal winter comfort). Basically I am threading water and I know what I have to do to keep losing the kilos but I am just lacking that extra motivation now to deny myself some of life's pleasures.
My general apathetic mood has done little to further my language efforts so my French book has been barely read, my Spanish magazines look like coffee table accessories (sitting on top of the back issues of the Iceland Review) and my Japanese books are also staring accusingly wondering when I am going to really crack on again (especially since I am almost definitely going to Tokyo again in January).
Our baby Nadia is starting to make word like sounds. It is one of the nicest parts of how a baby develops. You suddenly start getting vocal reactions or you come in the room and you hear a yelp and, lo and behold, those big blue eyes are staring back at you. Life is great really.

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The Last Indie Kid

My earliest memories are of sitting in the back of a car driving around West Clare, going for what my father called a 'spin'. He always took the opportunity to play some of his favourite tapes so you could say that I was brought up on a diet of Country singers like Dolly Parton, Johny Cash and especially Marty Robbins. Not that I have occasion to hear "El Paso" too often these days but if I do chance to hear the lines "Out in the West Texas town of El Paso I fell in love with a Mexican girl." it does give me goosepimples. Of course children go their own way and my teenage years saw my musical taste progress from the commercial (Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Madonna) and onto the more off-beat. By the late 1980s my record collection had started to take on a darker hue, my favourite Prince song was "Sometimes it snows in April", Joy Division were gone but still very much alive, Depeche Mode were something of a template, "Somebody" from "Construction Time Again" was another one of those songs I played to escape, to withdraw, to bring myself down. Down is where I wanted to be. Whenever I bought clothes for myself they were inevitably black. "Black Celebration" had not yet been released but that would have been the album title of my life. Indie music could be uplifting at times but I nearly always preferred the slower songs (e.g. Stone Roses - "I Wanna be Adored"). Inspiral Carpets, The Real People, Furniture, Power of Dreams, Lloyd Cole ("You look so good when your depressed, even in your current state of undress").
At first everybody I knew was into Indie music but 1990-91 was the Second Summer of Love and I was in the right place at the right time. In Yorkshire there was a rave somewhere every night and many of my acquaintances started raving and taking E to beat the band. I don't know why but I just could not let go, I was fixed on being an Indie kid all in black so I just could not embrace the happiness and joy that so many people were succumbing to. Misery seemed easy. There were a few conversion attempts. I remember being offered a Manhattan gratis and the promise that my mates would look after me if I would just, for once, come down to a club night.
You get older and new music comes and goes. You can't keep up any more but still your tastes change with time. Something has happened to me, especially in the last few years. Maybe it is not about music but about me and having a wife and children that I adore. Those black days seem so alien now. When my daughters are in the car with me I put on Slam!FM. If they will remember trips in the car with me they will surely think of dance rhythms at 150 beats per minute, the smile on their father's face, the joy of R&B. I regret dismissing this music at the time it was in its infancy. There was never anything honourable about being miserable. Dance music makes me feel like I am embracing the moment, dance is a celebration of colour, of life. The last Indie kid has left the building.

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Turning Point

One of the aims of this blog is to provide my own anecdotal evidence on the linguistic development of trilingual children. An issue I have posted on previously concerns language mixing and I want to come back to this now because our older children have reached what seems to be a significant turning point in their development.
In my most recent posts on this topic I mentioned that the girls had started using more and more Dutch in their mutual conversation. At the same time Polish clearly remained their first language (L1) with English and Dutch fighting an equal battle to be the L2. In the last few weeks a significant shift has occured and Dutch has started to become their L1. In the past Luna showed little or no tendency to mix languages while Daisy tended to incorporate English and Dutch onto a Polish framework. What has changed now is that the primary framework for both children is becoming Dutch.
When speaking Dutch, Polish or English uniquely they clearly seem to be thinking in that language. They speak all three languages with relatively few mistakes. However, once we have an interface situation it seems as though they are more often thinking in Dutch now than Polish so that they are introducing more and more Dutch words into their Polish. In that situation it seems as if they are thinking first in Dutch and then translating to Polish or English. The result is that they use Dutch words even when they know the Polish or English words very well. We knew that this would happen some day but it is still a bit scary because our daughters are going to a place where we have never been, a culture and language that is neither mine nor my wife's will provide their primary drivers.
We will continue to provide avenues for them to be in English only and Polish only language environments. The girls accept going to Polish school on Saturdays as a normal part of life (e.g. Luna asked her mother last night if she would go to Dutch school or Polish school tomorrow). Luna is thriving at the Irish dancing and Daisy will join her next year. In the end I expect that they will have Dutch as L1, English as L2 and Polish as L3 but for most of their childhood it will most likely be Dutch as L1, Polish as L2 and English as L3.
Nadia will be a very interesting case because she is already getting a lot more Dutch as a baby than her sisters got. She will be another story altogether.

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Chimamanda Links

Regular readers of this blog will know what a big fan I am of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun.

As I will have to wait a while for her next book to appear I decided to look up her short fiction on the web. For any fellow admirers of this fantastic writer the following links to her stories will be of interest.
http://www.all-story.com/extra/issue38/adichie.html
http://www.webdelsol.com/InPosse/adichie_anthology.htm
http://www.granta.com/Magazine/88/The-Grief-of-Strangers
http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=250
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7208
http://www.percontra.net/2timestory.htm

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Nationality - Decisions and Consequences

As I have lived in this country for the best part of ten years and I have the required language certificates I can choose to naturalize and become a Dutch citizen if I wish. That would proffer a number of advantages including the right to vote in general elections, the ability to get a new passport by just paying a visit to my local council as opposed to going to the Irish Embassy and allow my daughters to become Dutch citizens at the same time. There are also a few disadvantages; naturalizing costs quite a lot of money (about 400 Euro) and takes a long time. The biggest disadvantage is that you must give up your original nationality in order to become a Dutch citizen. Not only is Irish citizenship difficult and expensive to renounce but this would be a major emotional step for me. I just do not feel Dutch, my primary identity is Irish and I cannot see that ever changing.
In my view it is correct that you should have to give up you Irish citizenship when adopting the nationality of another country. I read recently that there are fifteen million Irish passports currently issued despite the population of the island of Ireland being about 5.5 million and a majority in Northern Ireland is unlikely to want an Irish passport. It would be fair to assume that many Australians, Americans and British people of Irish origin hold Irish passports as well as their home country passport. Certainly I have known Irish people with Australian, Canadian and American passports. People use the passport of their choice when it suits them but one has to wonder where loyalty to one country comes into the equation.
The situation becomes even murkier when one considers the number of Irish people serving in foreign armies (primarily the British and US armies). I have seen suggestions on many forums that Irish citizens should be stripped of their citizenship immediately on joining a foreign army. I think that that is too extreme given the long history of Irishmen serving in foreign forces. However, I do think that there should be a consequence for Irish people making this choice. Perhaps some kind of declaration of intent should be signed on joining a foreign army stating that the person will adopt the nationality of the foreign army should they server longer than say two or three years.
Under current rules relating to the US Army and citizenship military personnel who have been on active service can naturalize automatically. I know that the British citizenship is more restrictive but I see no reason why it could not introduce similar rules. In this way Irish men joining these armies could make an active choice to transition to their new nationality. 

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Londynczycy (Londoners)

For the last few weeks we have been watching the new Polish soap opera Londynczycy (Londoners) set in the eponymous city and following the lives of various Poles as they try to make their way in London. You can
watch a clip here with English dialogue.

It is quite different to any other Polish soap opera I have ever seen and reminds me a lot of films like Trainspotting and Lost in Translation as the pace is furious. I find it quite disturbing because it reminds me so much of my time in London and the modern Polish experience there is not so far removed from the 1980s and 1990s Irish experience.
English characters are shown in a very favourable light, the bad guys are other foreigners and especially other Poles. The fact that your own are the first to stab you in the back is an upsetting message but many of the cons pulled by supposedly friendly fellow Poles reminded me of stories I heard from various Irish people who arrived in London off the boat back in the dark 80s.
The soap opera shows immigrant life as it is. There are chances galore but countless traps and the newly arrived need time to read the signals. The overall picture of London is very realistic, a city souped up travelling at 200 km/h and not taking any passengers. Tired of London, tired of Life.

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The Friday Weigh-in

After a week of eating and drinking merrily this week I got back to serious business in the gym. Thankfully my excesses in Japan led to no weight gain and today I weigh in at just over 76kg. I normally plateau at 75kg so we will see what happens this time. The fact that we have booked the holiday in Fuerteventura in February is a really big motivator to keep in shape.
The suits I ordered on Wehkamp arrived yesterday evening and I was delighted that they fit very well. I ordered size 48 rather than 50, again telling myself that the real me is not the big guy. I was buying a suit in Poland a few years back during a portly phase. The assisistant asked me what size I wanted to try on and I said that 48 would do and she started smirking at my wife. They had a little chat about me in rapid-fire Polish that I was obviously not meant to comprehend. In the end the assistant came back to me with some understandable Polish 'Czy pan rozumie że nie jest już student ale mężczyzna? 48 jest dla chłopakow, dla studentow!' (Does Sir not understand that he is a man now and not a student? 48 is for youngsters, for students!). I was mortified and horrified, stupefied and debased. How dare she! As you might imagine the size 48 suit remains a powerful symbol of youth and vitality for me.

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In Praise of Web-shopping

I have always detested traipsing around shops looking for some item of clothing or other. Others may regard clothes shopping as a leisure activity but for me it is nothing short of torture. I never really believed that the web could deliver a sales model to help me avoid ever going to town but Wehkamp has finally answered my prayers.
Their on-line store grew out of a catalogue business so they obviously have experience in this game but what they are offering now is as pain-free as it gets. Here is how they converted me:
1) The website is brilliantly designed, nothing is hard to find.
2) The FAQ/Help function invariably gives me the answer I want immediately.
3) When I zoom in on clothes items the zoom actually works and brings up a high-definition close-up.
4) There are several payment options which are easy to choose from.
5) They deliver either to my door or (very importantly) a drop-off point at a hardware store just up the road.
6) They either pick up your returns at home or you can drop them off at the hardware store. They don't question returns
7) Any contact I have had with their customer service has been universally positive.

I started off buying t-shirts then it moved on to shirts and jeans and last night I ordered two suits. Ordering shoes from them would not scare me. Congratulations Wehkamp, you're hired!

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Havoc In Its Third Year

It is always a pleasure to read another Ronan Bennett novel. Similar to Colum McCann and Colm Tóibín he is an Irish writer who never seems afraid of adopting a totally different setting and writing style. In this novel from 2004 he does something very interesting indeed, he sets a parable for all times in 1630's England at a time when the country is descending into chaos. Enemies are all about, suspicion abounds and nobody is safe from persecution. The central character Brigge is an endearing and engaging character who is born of the wrong faith in the wrong time.

The novel is written in an affected, archaic language which is very readable but filled with quaint words and long disused idioms. The language he adopts adds wonderfully to the historical setting of the novel. Parts of the novel reminded me of John McGahern's last work where episodes of magic realism are injected into the story.

Overall I was very pleased to read such a different type of novel. I already have his next book, "Zugzwang", waiting on my bookshelf to be read but perhaps I shall wait awhile before succumbing to the sweet joy of reading another Ronan Bennett novel.

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Remembering

Yesterday I had an interesting interaction with an English acquaintance. He started talking to me about it being November 11, Armistice Day, as though he expected that the date would mean a lot to me. I told him that Ireland did not directly take part in World War I so that the date does not have great significance for me. In Ireland there is no great remembrance tradition for World War I due to the fact that the events that happened in Ireland itself at that time had a far greater bearing on our history.
The acquaintance pointed to the Irish blood that was spilt on Flanders' fields and that November 11 was all about remembering those that gave their lives in World War I. It is not the first time that I have had this lecture because I was regularly scolded when I lived in the UK for not wearing a poppy.
As far as I am concerned people should be free to remember historical events if they wish but I do object to being told that I should remember something that does not mean a lot to me. Yes it was an awful war but Irish people have fought in countless wars historically including hundreds of thousands who fought on both sides in the American Civil War. In my own family a number of people fought for the British Army in World War II. Other people I know have been in the US Army, the French Foreign Legion and the Irish Army. I don't feel any compulsion to remember all of the Irish people that ever fought in any war.
Moreover, I don't see why British people want to push their version of history on to Irish people. We can all read history in our own ways and glorify our own nation's role but that does nothing to alter the present. From my viewpoint Ireland's experience as part of the UK was a disaster that led to a collapse in the country's population, the decline of our native language and to the partition of the country. I prefer to look forward rather than backwards with selective memory. It is not for nothing that they say "if the English could only remember, if the Irish could only forget".

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A Sort of Homecoming

I got back from Japan on Saturday evening after a very interesting trip indeed. I was surprised at how familiar Tokyo was as a city and I didn't experience the major culture shock that I expected. The architecture of Tokyo is not so different to that of an American city so I guess that that explains it. I know that there are many more traditional buildings in Tokyo and all over Japan but my snapshot of Japanese life did not include them.
As I was in Tokyo for my work I spent much of the time with my colleagues at meetings and then eating together in the evenings. I tried a lot of new foods because I just ate what was put in front of me. Sushi and the other fish dishes tasted better than I expected but I have to say that deep fried tuna was my favourite so I wasn't drawn automatically to the healthiest options. One thing I really enjoyed was the sherbet sorbets that they serve for dessert. In the restaurants I was generally served by my neighbours at the table as I think that the Japanese do that as a matter of course anyway but also because I had no clue as to what was going on a lot of the time.
I got to use my limited Japanese quite a bit but I have to say that many people I met could speak some English. Most people assumed I had been in Japan before because of what I knew about the language and culture so they were surprised to hear that it was my first time. I was taken aback that nobody knew anything about Ireland at all. When I think of all the Japanese influence on Europe like manga, anime, karaoke, haiku, ninja, samurais, sumo, origami etc. it was a bit disheartening that Ireland barely registered on the consciousness of those with whom I spoke.
The main thing that I was continually disturbed by was the Japanese script all around me. The Hiragana and Katakana I knew has faded into disuse so it was annoying that I could not remember many sounds when I finally had a context in which to apply them. The Kanji were suddenly far less intimidating because I could see their daily use, I could see the same Kanji being repeated but invariably I still had no clue as to their meaning. Now I know that I will be going back to Japan next year I am planning to restart my efforts to learn to read Japanese. In parallel I am going to try to master some more functional Japanese so that I can actually start to have short conversations the next time.
The Japanese people I met were all extremely kind and courteous. They made every effort to make me feel welcome in their country and to make a country that I have often dreamt of seem a like a sort of second home. I am missing Japan already.

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