Cognitive Dissonance
Remember in the late 80's when Van Morrison got all boozy and sludgy and hard to understand? He went from "Bright Side of the Road" and "St. Dominic's Preview" to a kind of morose and bloated "Jesus Smiles on Ireland but Not on My Miserable Self." I attended a memorable for some not me because Good Lord what happens when old high school friends reunite in San Francisco and attend a Van the Man Concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley? One minute I was there the next I was somewhere completely else concert in which Morrison seemed to be spiraling ever downward before my very eyes and ears had they been functioning unimpaired and as they should have been into a pit of despair.
Before:
After:
But then, lucky for all of us and probably not least of all for Van Morrison, he got his act, literally and figuratively, together again and made beautiful music that didn't make us all want to kill ourselves.
After After:
Half of my ancestors are Irish. I look it. My daughter looks it. Dark hair, pale skin, light eyes. But the Irish is a long way back. We can't claim "Irish" like "Kiss Me, I'm Irish!" People would look at us as though we were insane. We present old timey-English. We've had some drinkers on that side of the family, but they mostly drank martinis. Certainly there are some gorgeous "Dark Irish" men lurking in the branches of our family tree, and they could sling the blarney with the best of them...except that they also passed for more of the Dean-o and Sinatra set than the Danny Kaye and Mickey Rooney crowd. I've read Irish literature, I've studied a smidgen of Irish history, I've been to Ireland, some of my best friends are Irish. But I could not claim to have any biological or primal connection to that particular brand of Irish angst and tragedy that seems...stop me if I'm being shockingly stereotypical here, I'm not trying to be, I'm really struggling with the limitations of my feeble vocabulary...to be part of the blood and sinew of the Irish. The tradition of political "troubles," the famine, the church...I don't know where it all comes from. History? Genetics? Cultural inheritance? The weather? The nostril-singeing olfactory memory of burning turf?
On the other hand, I've never met an Irish person who wasn't completely welcoming, friendly, fun, interesting, interested, imaginative, and joyful. Not to mention funny as hell. I don't know how to reconcile these opposing perceptions. It might be that my sense of the Irish sturm und drang is derived only from literature.
My mother recently gave me her copy of Anne Enright's The Gathering, a recent Man Booker prize winner. I tend to like the selections for the Booker prize: The Bone People, by Keri Hulme, is a long time favorite, I loved The English Patient, Life of Pi, The God of Small Things. I should have been more cautious, however, given the fact that she's also once given me a Booker prize award winner, The Sea, by John Banfield, that made me want to immediately drink myself into a stupor and jump off a building. I hated it. But maybe you already picked up on that.
The Gathering is the story of an Irish family of about seventy children, or maybe 10, their early-stage dementia mother, the miscarriages, the abuse, the complicated love affairs, the alcoholism, the death, and the suffering they endured. Or didn't. The occasional spurt of unusual and effective prose did not keep me from having to flip back and forth between pages because I kept feeling as though I SURELY must have missed a page somewhere. Stream of Consciousness + WRH = Not a Good Situation. One review I read mentioned "dreamy prose" and a "dream-like" narrative structure in which events and characters surface, dive deep, then resurface again later. Once they'd gone under, I couldn't help but wish that they'd stayed under. It was exhausting.
Though I resisted the urge to drink myself into a stupor and jump off a bridge, which actually might be what happened to the protagonist's brother, OOPS after the fact SPOILER ALERT, I did eat more than my fair share of my kids' Halloween candy when I'd finished. And actually, my fair share of their Halloween candy is ZERO, because it's theirs, but never mind. The temporary sugar high helped lift me out of my Gathering-induced funk, but then I felt slightly queasy. Live and learn.
To be fair. Girlfriend can write. If you are smarter than the average WRH, you probably have more of a tolerance for abstraction and nonlinear structure. Given that the Man Booker people are not known to be chumps, there is obviously something to the book. It just didn't do anything for me.Except add five pounds of mini Snickers bars to my backside.
Before:
After:
But then, lucky for all of us and probably not least of all for Van Morrison, he got his act, literally and figuratively, together again and made beautiful music that didn't make us all want to kill ourselves.
After After:
Half of my ancestors are Irish. I look it. My daughter looks it. Dark hair, pale skin, light eyes. But the Irish is a long way back. We can't claim "Irish" like "Kiss Me, I'm Irish!" People would look at us as though we were insane. We present old timey-English. We've had some drinkers on that side of the family, but they mostly drank martinis. Certainly there are some gorgeous "Dark Irish" men lurking in the branches of our family tree, and they could sling the blarney with the best of them...except that they also passed for more of the Dean-o and Sinatra set than the Danny Kaye and Mickey Rooney crowd. I've read Irish literature, I've studied a smidgen of Irish history, I've been to Ireland, some of my best friends are Irish. But I could not claim to have any biological or primal connection to that particular brand of Irish angst and tragedy that seems...stop me if I'm being shockingly stereotypical here, I'm not trying to be, I'm really struggling with the limitations of my feeble vocabulary...to be part of the blood and sinew of the Irish. The tradition of political "troubles," the famine, the church...I don't know where it all comes from. History? Genetics? Cultural inheritance? The weather? The nostril-singeing olfactory memory of burning turf?
On the other hand, I've never met an Irish person who wasn't completely welcoming, friendly, fun, interesting, interested, imaginative, and joyful. Not to mention funny as hell. I don't know how to reconcile these opposing perceptions. It might be that my sense of the Irish sturm und drang is derived only from literature.
My mother recently gave me her copy of Anne Enright's The Gathering, a recent Man Booker prize winner. I tend to like the selections for the Booker prize: The Bone People, by Keri Hulme, is a long time favorite, I loved The English Patient, Life of Pi, The God of Small Things. I should have been more cautious, however, given the fact that she's also once given me a Booker prize award winner, The Sea, by John Banfield, that made me want to immediately drink myself into a stupor and jump off a building. I hated it. But maybe you already picked up on that.
The Gathering is the story of an Irish family of about seventy children, or maybe 10, their early-stage dementia mother, the miscarriages, the abuse, the complicated love affairs, the alcoholism, the death, and the suffering they endured. Or didn't. The occasional spurt of unusual and effective prose did not keep me from having to flip back and forth between pages because I kept feeling as though I SURELY must have missed a page somewhere. Stream of Consciousness + WRH = Not a Good Situation. One review I read mentioned "dreamy prose" and a "dream-like" narrative structure in which events and characters surface, dive deep, then resurface again later. Once they'd gone under, I couldn't help but wish that they'd stayed under. It was exhausting.
Though I resisted the urge to drink myself into a stupor and jump off a bridge, which actually might be what happened to the protagonist's brother, OOPS after the fact SPOILER ALERT, I did eat more than my fair share of my kids' Halloween candy when I'd finished. And actually, my fair share of their Halloween candy is ZERO, because it's theirs, but never mind. The temporary sugar high helped lift me out of my Gathering-induced funk, but then I felt slightly queasy. Live and learn.
To be fair. Girlfriend can write. If you are smarter than the average WRH, you probably have more of a tolerance for abstraction and nonlinear structure. Given that the Man Booker people are not known to be chumps, there is obviously something to the book. It just didn't do anything for me.
Happy Belated Birthday WRH!!! By the way, Danny Kaye was Jewish, not Irish.
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Geez! I totally succumbed to stereotype! I pictures red hair and immediately went to "Irish." Sorry about that. Who else could I use? One of those brothers MacMullen?
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Sounds fascinating. When my brain's working a little better, I'll check it out.
Happy birthday, by the way.
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Happy birthday! In commemoration, I took your post title and used it in my next post.
(Because truthfully, I thought you had it wrong. Like Alanis Morisette and Ironic. Turned out "conspicuous consumption" doesn't mean anything even close to "cognitive dissonance". And unless you were buying Van Morrison and showing off your purchase to all your friends, it made absolutely no sense in the context of this post. Stupid republicans.)
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1. Astral Weeks is the finest album ever recorded.
2. Irish are great and all, but if I can speak with first hand experience of Irish Irish. They're not so much fun as in laws.
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OMGUH GURL we just studied cognitive dissy in PSYCH 115!!! It's like we are never apart...<3...even though that idea is probably disturbing to you.
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