Month: February 2018

Tuesday’s NY Times had an article with this bracing title: “School Shootings Put Teachers in New Role as Human Shields.” When I got into this profession, my parents worried about what they thought were its limited job prospects and low salaries. In those tense conversations, none of us factored in the prospect of a premeditated attack with automatic weapons on my future school, college, university, office, or classroom. But that, unfortunately, was a long time ago, and, back then, there was really no good reason to imagine students wandering the halls firing automatic weapons at their classmates and teachers. To some younger readers this might sound strange, but that sort of thing did not used to happen back in the old days, i.e., not so very long ago really. Somewhere out there in the US, there are probably parents talking to those of their children who are interested in teaching now and asking them whether they are sure they want to combine a low teacher’s salary with the prospect of having to step in front of a gun. Let me be clear: it is not something I anticipated doing when I embarked on this career, nor is it something I want to do going forward.

I am a teacher, and I am teaching talented young people, who are, among other things, potential future teachers. I doubt I am alone in preferring not having to worry about on-the-job or in-the-classroom mass murders or how to run with one’s arms above one’s head. Now, my university, like so many others, has upgraded the deadbolts inside every classroom door in the building, and, like so many others, offers “active shooter training” to its faculty. These are both sensible responses to the world that we—Americans—live in, but I propose we do all we can to make it so that people—usually white males—don’t collect guns and train them on their fellow humans. I wonder whether Americans can imagine how much positive human potential might be unleashed if we were not all living with the constant threat of violence, mechanized violence. If so, then I wonder why we prefer the current, repeated losses of that great human potential, precisely what we teachers strive to develop. If I understand the current discussion correctly, people who have these sorts of questions today are considered “liberal.” But I do not think that anything could be more conservative than believing that young people in a country at peace should be able to develop their abilities without the threats of dying in, being injured in, witnessing, or running from an attempt to murder them, their classmates, and their teachers.

Kevin Barry is, as Roddy Doyle (author most famously of The Commitments) claims, “unique, a one-man school. His work is hilarious.” In Ireland, Kevin is both a popular and an award-winning author, of short stories, of novels, and most recently of a play, Autumn Royal. For the last three years, he and his partner Olivia Smith have edited an Irish arts anthology, Winter Papers, which has published and advocated for a new generation of Irish authors and artists, including, among others, Lisa McInerney. In the US, Kevin has published in The New Yorker, and has published novels such as The City of Bohane and Beatlebone. Kevin has been a Burns fellow at Boston College, where he described his role as having been their “resident Celt.”

It’s simplifying things, but we could say that there are two modern literary traditions in Ireland—one urbane mode focused on and derived from the country’s capital Dublin, and those who head to the Continent from it (e.g., Joyce, Behan, Beckett, and Doyle), and another rural, maritime one focused on the west coast, its islands, and transatlantic migrations (e.g., Michael O’Sullivan, Colum McGann, Richard Murphy, Joseph O’Connor, and Colm Toibin). The famous exceptions to this pairing are in explorations of the Irish-language stories and lives of the western isles. From Synge in the Aran Islands to Maurice O’Sullivan and Peig Sayers in the Blaskets, the west coast of Ireland offered an alternative, famously oblivious to Dublin; and in Dublin, Flann O’Brien, who also wrote as Myles na gCopaleen, engages this rural tradition, most famously in An Béal Bocht, translated into English as The Poor Mouth. While the urbane tradition of Joyce and Beckett expected readers to know Latin, French, Greek, English, sometimes Irish, and other languages as well, the works of the islanders are usually translated out of the Irish, and not always written by the story tellers themselves. In short, the island literature records an oral Irish-language culture.

Kevin’s work is connected to this westward movement. A 2010 story published in the New Yorker titled “Fjord of Killary” our narrator buys a ramshackle hotel in the west of Ireland, and as it happens is there as a lashing rain leads to a flood which lifts and floats the hotel away, while its drunken patrons continue to debate the finer points of a good coastal storm.

Subsequently, Kevin published The City of Bohane, which merges an Irish town with the generic expectations of an American western. Since The City of Bohane, Kevin has published a novel, Beatlebone, which takes as its inspiration the actual “trip”–a word I use advisedly—that John Lennon undertook to visit the island that he had purchased in Clew Bay, Co. Mayo, Ireland. The novel combines imagining Lennon’s experience upon arriving in rural western Ireland, his desperation to be alone on his island, and a first-person narrator who emerges late in the story talking about investigating this story, and the purported lost tape–the Beatlebone album–supposedly recorded by John Lennon after his return from the field trip to Clew Bay. With its focus on a west-coast island, its nearly-entire reliance on dialogue, and its claiming to offer a recording of the voice of John Lennon, Beatlebone is a twenty-first century entry into a century-long discovery of the oral traditions of rural, western islands Ireland. At the same time, the figure of John Lennon bridges both sides of the Irish emigration experience—born in Liverpool to Irish immigrants, Lennon visits his own island from the island on which he was then living, Manhattan, NYC, in the US, and thus transcends the Atlantic.

Born in Limerick, Kevin Barry lives in Sligo, County Sligo, on the west coast of Ireland, in a former police barracks, in the county seat of the very county that is at the center of Yeats country. And while he might say that he spent his teenage years haunting the cemeteries of his native Limerick (or haunting its libraries), Kevin has also lived in the US and has as a result seen Ireland from this side of the Atlantic, too.

Kevin will be reading at Clemson on February 19th at 5:30 in Daniel Hall room 100B.

Now in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that… technically and professionally… Drew is a professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University.  However, I have read Drew Lanham’s memoir, The Home Place, and I know, as a result, that his writing—even his thinking—is threaded with poetry.

Consider these lines from The Home Place: “There is the brown of spring floods rushing over a Savannah river shoal. There is the gold of ripening tobacco drying in the heat of summer’s last breath. There are endless rows of cotton’s cloudy white. My plumage is a kaleidoscopic rainbow of an eternal hope and the deepest despair and darkness. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. . . . I am the rare bird, the oddity: appreciated by some for my different perspective and discounted by others as an unnecessary nuisance, an unusually colored fish out of water.”

One chapter, “Birding While Black,” begins with this _paragraph_: “It’s only 9:06 AM but I think I might get hanged today.”

Another, “Jawbone” starts ”Killing is a dying art. In a shrink-wrapped prepackaged world, most people don’t consider or want to know where their meat comes from.”

These are the timings of a poet, and the descriptions of a poet.

While the Humanities Hub is happy to host poets and other kinds of writers, with Drew we have someone whose poetry raises important questions about the humanities, Including, through attention to birds, how we think about animals, and, because we are animals, how we think about ourselves as humans, as human animals. That is, because we are animals, and have long known that we are animals–after all, it’s been more than two millennia since Aristotle said “man is a rational animal”–what we think about animals means what we think about ourselves.

Moreover, how we treat animals, and the environments that host animals, show us how we are treating ourselves. In this, then, Drew’s interest in the history of the landscape and the lives that both made the landscape possible and are possible only in certain landscapes matches nicely with the humanities interest in preservation, in historical awareness, and in hoping that neither birds nor human suffer the devastations associated with monocultures. Or conversely, we can hope that we might all share in the benefits of ecological diversity, be it biological diversity or cultural diversity, if we can make such a distinction among what are after all just varieties of animals’ lives. Wildlife ecology, that is, meets cultural ecology.

Drew Lanham will be speaking at 5PM on February 14 in Academic Success Center, 118, as part of Black History Month, and on the topic of “Reclaiming our Ecology: A Personal Picture of a Land Ethic.” Those last two words, a poetic phrase in themselves, also come from his memoir, The Home Place.