[LIMERICK] Chris Gulker, consultant to many major media and technology companies, left his base in Menlo Park, California last month and crossed the Atlantic to Ireland. His blog features some lovely photos, such as this one of two Connacht farmers in The Sailor's Bar near Kylemore Abbey, Connemara. His entry for Wednesday, 26 May featured Bernie Goldbach's essay on the "New Ireland":
"It's an Ireland chock-full of confident twentysomethings.Where its beautiful women seem to be acquiring orange tans and where natural red heads are going blonde.
It's an Ireland whose counter service is likely to be non-Irish.
It's an Ireland resisting its melting pot mandate — slipping away from being The Land of the Thousand Welcomes.
It's Rip-Off Ireland where it's cheaper to buy a pint of Kilkenny in Berlin than down the street from the brewery.
It's a land of traffic hell.
I like New Ireland, bought a house here, and feel obliged to contribute to her culture. I'm surprised at the rise of unapologetic consumerism and worried about the total demise of vocations of service. But I'm not alone in my concerns and I think that means New Ireland will emerge from this decade with a blend of confidence and creativity — characteristics that would make the Global Irish proud."
An honest and eloquent assessment of the Ireland of today, there. Oh, and check out Chris Gulker’s great photo of the Connemara sky and scenery on the same page. "70 miles of beautiful hiking last week. It didn't rain during the whole trip...!" The luck of the Californians!
[LIMERICK] Investigative journalism lives! Across the border in the neighbouring county of Tipperary, the local radio station Tipp FM has made news. "Prostitutes flee after radio exposure" was how the regional newspapers reported the matter. It appears that a person who had been attempting to book a stripogram for a stag party found a web site called "Tipp Babes", which turned out to be a business front for a call-girl service in that fine, family town of Clonmel. The distressed citizen alerted Tipp FM and an intrepid reporter was put on the job. As a result of his enquiries he was offered an hour with a 27-year-old Caribbean lady, who was "quite naturally big-busted" and had a "lovely, tanned complexion." And all for the handsome price of 260 euros!
Within hours of Tipp FM broadcasting its scoop, the police raided the premises, but the women had fled. Our learned friends in the shape of solicitors McCarthy, Looby & Co. were called in to deal with the embarrassment and issued the following statement: "Our clients were shocked and taken by surprise by the revelations on your programme… Our clients made the usual enquiries regarding the proposed tenant, and would have had no reason to suspect anything untoward in relation to the letting." Rainy Day is keeping on eye on this story.
[LIMERICK] This year marks the centenary of a shameful episode in Irish history known as the "Limerick Pogrom". On 11 January 1904, the director of the Catholic Arch-Confraternity of Limerick, Father John Creagh, delivered a sermon that sparked an outbreak of hostility against the city's tiny Jewish community. Incensed by Creagh's allegations — he called Jewish merchants "leeches" who were sucking the blood of the Irish by overcharging the poor — a mob marched on the Jewish quarter in Collooney Street, and it was only through the intervention of the Royal Irish Constabulary that the residents were saved from harm.
Creagh returned to the attack on 18 January. He told his flock that "the Jews have proved themselves to be the enemies of every country in Europe, and every nation has to defend itself against them." All Jewish businesses in the city were forced to stop trading as a result. Creagh then helped organize an economic boycott of Limerick's Jews that lasted for four months. Unable to earn a living, most of the city's Jews and their rabbi left Limerick. Many of them emigrated to the United States, which, given their particular history, was not without pathos. The majority of Limerick's Jews had originated in Russia and it is said that an unscrupulous sea captain, who had promised them passage to America, dropped them off near the Shannon estuary, saying that New York was "just up the road." From the 5 June 1998 issue of The Jewish News Weekly of Northern California, here's an overview of Jewish life in Ireland.
[LIMERICK] Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss and Dude, Where's my Country? by Michael Moore have been doing very nicely in Ireland's best-seller lists, but it's The Book of Feckin' Irish Slang by Colin Murphy and Donal O'Dea that's flying off the shelves in O'Mahoney's Bookshop in Limerick City. It's "great craic for cute hoors and bowsies" say the publishers, O'Brien Press. In standard English that means, approximately, smart asses and tough guys will find it very funny. The pages are "jammers" (filled with) "gurriers" (uncouth inner-city types) and "sleeveens" (devious rural yes men). Feck it, I think I'll buy a feckin' copy.
I first set foot in the United States in November 1984. Ronald Reagan had just been re-elected president. Coming from a Europe where Reagan was portrayed as a crazy cartoon cowboy, and taking up employment in an industry (New York publishing) dominated by East Coast intellectuals who regarded the president as a B-grade actor embarrassment, I saw no reason to alter my impressions of the man in the White House. So, when people cringed at Reaganisms such as the "Evil Empire", I cringed too. He was mad; we were rational. The only difference between 1984 and 2004 was that there was no Michael Moore to confirm our prejudices.
That was then. Now I know that I was wrong and Ronald Reagan was right. The Soviet Union was indeed an Evil Empire that murdered up to 100 million people in 70 years. His determination to name it and shame it and fight it helped to end it and resulted in freedom for a vast number of people in Europe and Asia. "Tear down this wall!" he said, and the sophisticates sniggered at his folksy naivete. Two years later the Berlin Wall was torn down.
I misunderestimated Ronald Reagan, but the upside of my error was that I vowed not to make the same mistake again about American presidents.
Nothing like a road trip for trying out new ideas, eh? This one is called Symbian Dater and it promises to turn my mobile phone into a matchmaker. By the way, this is all for research purposes. Nothing else. Trust me.
Anyway, here's how it works. The application contains my details and what I might be looking for in a mate. So, when I'm in the pub in Limerick tonight, my Symbian Dater will search for other Symbian Daters using the Bluetooth radio frequency. If our profiles match, the phones will beep madly as they contact each other. After that, we're on our own. The things one does in the cause of research!
Since the service the started last autumn, some 155,000 people in Europe have paid €5 to install it on their phones. Given the massive growth in mobile phone usage, this looks like a winner. Actually, wireless and wired dating are turning out to be big winners. According to market researchers ComScore, revenue last year from online personals was $450 million, up 50 percent from 2002. Match.com, which has 12 million members in 246 countries, is keen to add mobile mating in its online portfolio and it plans to use the E911 location-based service that the US government has required for emergency tracking purposes. This would allow mobile phones to notify their owners when potential mates come within 700 metres of each other. Meanwhile, engineers at MIT's Media Lab are working on another Bluetooth matchmaking application called Serendipity. This promises to be much more sophisticated than Symbian Dater as it automatically logs on to the web to check users' profiles, which will allow people to find out much more about potential mates. Beep! Beep! Ooops! There goes my phone. "Hi, I'm Eamonn..."
I come from a country that opted for neutrality in the existential 20th-century fight to save Europe from fascism, and I live in the country that had to be defeated in this fight, so you can be sure that on this anniversary of D-Day I have some pretty strong feelings about freedom.
First, my homeland, Ireland. Its decision to stay neutral in the Second World War was based on the memories of its war against Britain for independence, its grievances over the partition of the island and a fear of Republican insurrection. It was this domestic agenda that led Eamon de Valera, the Irish Prime Minister, to remain neutral. Churchill, in his 13 May 1945 victory speech, vented his anger at the Irish stance, when he reminded his listeners of how perilous Britain's situation was in the early phase of the war. If things had taken a turn for the worse because of Ireland's resolve, he said, "we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr. de Valera, or perish from the earth. However, with a restraint and poise to which, I venture to say, history will find few parallels, His Majesty's Government never laid a violent hand upon them, though at times it would have been quite easy and quite natural, and we left the de Valera Government to frolic with the German and later with the Japanese representatives to their heart's content."
That latter jab about frolicking was, not doubt, provoked by the 30 April decision by de Valera to visit the German embassy in Dublin and sign a book of condolences memorializing the death of Hitler. De Valera regarded his gesture as a perfunctory diplomatic act by a neutral government. However, despite his ghastly observance of diplomatic niceties, and despite Ireland's adherence to a policy that threatened Allied security, there were Irish people who had the courage to act. Some 43,000 from the south and 38,000 from the north joined the British forces and fought the good fight. Thousands more fought with the US forces.
As regards Germany, the participation of the German Chancellor in today's ceremonies is Normandy is to be welcomed as it should help put to an end any debate within Germany about whether 1945 represented Besatzung (occupation) or Befreiung (liberation). The fact is that the Allies liberated Germany from itself, and freed Europe forever from the nightmare of Germany's desire to be a superpower.
Today, we should remember and honour those who paid the ultimate price that Europe might be free. How high that price was can be measured by the numbers who died on the beaches of Normandy, but it is also transmitted to those of us who were born long after D-Day in a more accessible way, in a book, a bestseller in France, called L'Américain, by Franz-Olivier Giesbert.
Giesbert's father was a former GI who never recovered from the trauma of D-Day. "He remained all his life in a state of shock, scarcely able to smile, his soul wounded to the core, for having survived by leaving behind him the dying carcasses of so many friends." As the young GI Giesbert and his comrades advanced along the beach, forming "floods of fresh flesh," they experienced a horror we can scarce comprehend. "Behind them, the beach was filled with remorse that would never cease to torment my father." The result was that the GI who survived beat the author and his mother mercilessly throughout his childhood.
It's easy to say that the best things in life are free. Well, freedom isn't one of them. It has to be defended. And, at times, fought for. We owe an outstanding and permanent debt to those who fought and suffered and died for our freedom on 6 June 1944.
Today, to mark the 60th anniversary of D-Day and the liberation of Europe from fascism, Rainy Day presents the final part of Martha Gellhorn's eyewitness account of the Allied landings at Normandy. Her original D-Day reportage was published in Collier's Weekly in August 1944:
American ambulance companies were waiting on the pier, the same efficient, swift troops I had seen on the piers and landing ramps before we left. There were conferences on the quay between important shore personages and our captain and chief medical officer; and a few of us, old-timers by now, leaned over the rail and joked about being back in the paperwork department again. Everyone felt very happy and fine, and you could see it in their faces. The head nurse, smiling though grey with weariness, said, "We'll do it better next time," which seemed to me to be a very elegant thing to say.
As the first wounded were carried from the ship, the chief medical officer watching them said, ‘Made it.’ That was the great thing. Now they would restock their supplies, clean the ship, cover the beds with fresh blankets, sleep whatever hours they could, and then they would go back to France. But this trip was done; this much was to the good; they had made it."
Despite the passing of the decades, D-Day lives on. It's a beacon and a reminder to us all that freedom comes with a price tag. On 6 June 1944, waves of young men crashed onto the Normandy beaches codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword vomiting with sea-sickness and terror. By nightfall, more than 9,000 of them were dead: 2,500 Americans at Omaha alone, another 2,500 among the US airborne divisions, almost 1,100 Canadians and some 3,000 British. An estimated 3,000 Germans died on that long day as well. What makes Martha Gellhorn's account of the D-Day landings so moving is that it puts a human face on the suffering and the sacrifice; what makes her account so readable, apart from the quality of the writing, is that it is honest. In 1959, Gellhorn stated a principle that all reporters should bear in mind: "Serious, careful, honest journalism is essential, not because it is a guiding light but because it is a form of honorable behavior, involving the reporter and the reader."
Although it's raining outside, summer must be approaching because the New York Times has just published its Vacation Reading special. If I had the time to do more reading, here's the five that I'd pick. First, from the "Fiction & Poetry" section:
EVERY TIME I TALK TO LISTON. "By Brian DeVido. (Bloomsbury, $22.95.) A novel set deep in the world of professional boxing, by a sportswriter and former Golden Gloves fighter; in it, a heavyweight sparring partner, Amos (Scrap Iron) Fletcher, is betrayed in Las Vegas, crosses the continent to recuperate and returns, musing throughout on Sonny Liston, a fighter some fans consider a supremely gifted all-time great who has never received due recognition."
As a boxing fan, I'm delighted to see another book about the ring in the NYT list:
MY FATHER'S FIGHTER. "By Ronald K. Fried. (Permanent Press, $24.) This boxing novel explores character rather than fistology through a private-school English teacher, Vincent Rosen, a twerp who inherits the management of a hypochondriacal light heavyweight. Eventually, proximity to menace proves good for Rosen's mental health, though the novel is surprisingly pitiless beneath a therapeutic gloss."
That's fiction taken care of, now non-fiction. First up:
WATERFRONT: A Journey Around Manhattan. By Phillip Lopate. (Crown, $25.95.) A noted essayist is here a walker in the city — or, more precisely, along its outer edges — ruminating as he goes on the history, architecture and inhabitants of a water-ringed metropolis that until very lately was a bustling port."
There is a connection between that book and the next:
EVIL: An Investigation. "By Lance Morrow. (Basic Books, $24.) Morrow's thoughtful consideration of an age-old concept is organized around the events of Sept. 11, 2001, recognizing the need to understand those acts as evil, but ultimately insisting that the word belongs to a new ''metaphysics'' that affects not just individual fanatics but great nations, too."
For my fifth and final pick, I'm raiding the Children's section:
MISS BRIDIE CHOSE A SHOVEL. "By Leslie Connor. Illustrated by Mary Azarian. (Houghton Mifflin, $16.) (Ages 4 to 8) The story of an Irish immigrant who brought a shovel to America and used it in many ways throughout her long and productive life; well told and thoughtfully illustrated."
All I need now is some vacation. And some sun.
Refused permission to join the Allied forces sailing to France, Martha Gellhorn, who had covered nearly every theatre of the Second World War, tricked an official into letting her board a hospital ship. She then locked herself in the vessel's toilet until it set off for Normandy. What she saw on the D-Day beaches and how she reported it remains compelling journalism:
...If anyone had come fresh to that ship in the night, someone unwounded, not attached to the ship, he would probably have been appalled. It began to look very Black Hole of Calcutta, because it was airless and ill-lit. Piles of bloody clothing had been cut off and dumped out of the way in corners; coffee cups and cigarette stubs littered the decks, plasma bottles hung from cords, and all the fearful surgical apparatus for holding broken bones made shadows on the walls.
There were wounded who groaned in their sleep or called out, and there was the soft, steady hum of conversation among the wounded who could not sleep. That is the way it would have looked to anyone seeing it fresh; a ship carrying a load of pain, with everyone waiting for daylight, everyone longing for England.
It was that, but it was something else, too; it was a safe ship, no matter what happened to it. We were together and we counted on one another. We knew that from the British captain to the pink-cheeked London messboy, every one of the ship's company did his job tirelessly and well. The wounded knew that the doctors and nurses and orderlies belonged to them utterly and would not fail them. And all of us knew that our wounded men were good men, and with their amazing help, their selflessness and self-control, we would get through all right."
A. Alvarez, reviewing Caroline Moorehead's biography of Martha Gellhorn — Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life — in the 8 April New York Review of Books, quotes this lovely snippet from a youthful letter of hers: "The great temptation is to do what I call 'fine writing,' the beautiful mellow phrases and the carefully chosen words. That I must avoid like the plague; only the simple words; only the straight clear sentences. I am terribly frightened of 'style.' " Tomorrow: the final part of Martha Gellhorn's eyewitness account of the D-Day landings at Normandy, "There is very little more to write."
Splendid deconstruction by Daniel Mendelsohn of Troy, a film directed by Wolfgang Petersen, in the June 24 issue of The New York Review of Books. A Little Iliad is the title of Mendelsohn's piece. Here's an excerpt:
Along with wit, Mendelsohn displays great erudition and philosophical strength in his analysis of Petersen's work and how the critics have received and perceived it:
Quite.
Martha Gellhorn wrote in a letter to a friend that Ponce de León was wrong — the fountain of youth was not a spurt of water but a spurt of travel. The fact that she lived to the age of 89, suggests that she was right. She certainly saw a great deal of the world in her lifetime. It was war that afforded Gellhorn the opportunity to travel, but no matter where she was she never lost the ability to capture what she called "the face of war" with all its human suffering. She saw that suffering first-hand on D-Day:
They spoke of the snipers, and there was endless talk about the women snipers, none of the talk very clear, but everyone believed it. There had been no French officers with these boys, who could have interpreted, and the Americans never knew what the villagers were saying.
Two men who thought they were being invited into an old woman's house to eat dinner were actually being warned of snipers in the attic; they somehow caught on to this fact in time. They were all baffled by the French and surprised by how much food there was in Normandy, forgetting that Normandy is one of the great food-producing areas of France. They thought the girls in the villages were amazingly well dressed. Everything was confused and astounding: first, there were the deadly bleak beaches, and then the villages where they were greeted with flowers and cookies — and often by snipers and booby traps.
A French boy of 17 lay in one of the bunks; he had been wounded in the back by a shell fragment. He lived and worked on his father's land, but he said the Germans had burned their chateau as they left. Two of the American boys in bunks alongside were worried about him. They were afraid he would be scared, a civilian kid all alone and in pain and not knowing any English and going to a strange country. But the French boy was very much a man and very tight-lipped. He kept his anxiety inside himself, though it showed in his eyes. His family was still there in the battle zone, and he did not know what had happened to them or how he would ever get back. The American soldiers said, 'You tell that kid he's a better soldier than that Boche in the bunk next to him.'
We did not like this Boche, who was 18 and blond and the most demanding of the "master" race aboard. Finally there was a crisp little scene when he told the orderly to move him, as he was uncomfortable, and the orderly said no, he would bleed if moved.
When I explained, the German said angrily, 'How long, then, am I to lie here in pain in this miserable position?'
I asked the orderly what to say, and the orderly answered, 'Tell him there are a lot of fine boys on this ship lying in worse pain in worse positions.' "
Martha Gellhorn contributed to The Atlantic Monthly for more than three decades. Reporting on the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in "Eichmann and the Private Conscience" (February, 1962), she grappled with the questions of good and evil that the trial inevitably brought to mind. Tomorrow: "Suddenly our flak started going up at the far end of the beach, and it was very beautiful."