The Keane Edge

The fashion is to pretend British royalty and British empire are harmless things, and were only dangerous long ago. We pretend that its invocation at knighting ceremonies and public spectacles is all in good fun and not manifestation of some weird aristocratic agenda to restore a world of dynastic stability.

The showmen that go along with the "Order of the British Empire" knighthood (Bono and Jagger) and the rebels and rockers that refused/returned the medal (Bowie and John Lennon) show how the fashion is tending us back towards towards acceptance of supremacy by the inherited rich.

Bono pays no taxes, dodges Ireland when rumbles say he should pay, and uses charity as moral teflon. Charity gives the rich excuse to party, assume moral leadership, and justify wealth-hording for themselves.

A professor from Notre Dame's Department of Irish Language and Literature--Brian Ó Conchubhair--has published a book that is garnering prizes and creating a stir in how he interprets the relationship between Ireland's important late nineteenth century cultural movements and European intellectual thought in the Fin de Siècle.

(The Irish Fin de Siècle: Darwin, the Language Revival, and European Intellectual Thought)Fin de Siècle na Gaeilge: Darwin, an Athbheochan, agus smaointeoireacht na hEorpa recently won an award from the American Conference for Irish Studies. It also won first-place in Ireland’s 2009 Oireachtas na Gaeilge Literary Competition, the most prestigious Irish language literary competition.

Published by Cló Iar-Chonnachta in late 2009, “Fin de Siècle na Gaeilge” is a study of the Gaelic revival caused by events at the end of the 19th century, such as Darwinism, race extermination, cultural decline, degeneration and cultural nationalism.

The new Hebrew Language Academy in New York is a model the Irish would do well to emulate. The Jewish community have brilliantly made the case to the tax-payers of New York for the support of a dual-language school in Brooklyn to promote Hebrew language and Israeli culture while teaching academic excellence.

The Hebrew Language Academy Charter School ("HLA") was founded in 2009 and is growing from success to success. The school educates a diverse roster of children through the medium of Hebrew and English with the goal of making achievements across subjects while gaining proficiency in Israel's first language.

This parallels Irish experience with Gaelscoileanna in Ireland. The Gaelscoil or "Irish-school" is an institution found all over Ireland that offers total-immersion education to children through Irish.

As is to be expected, everyday Irish people will give queen Elizabeth "Windsor" a tear-soaked welcome when she parades about Ireland in 2011.

The good news is that this inevitable propaganda stunt will happen while Mary MacAleese is still in office. No queen compares to her.

The over-whelming theme of media reports next year in Ireland are going to be about tolerance and how the Irish are hate-free and above all that past nonsense. They'll kowtow and salute the foreign queen familiarly, and blow kisses and comment about how lovely she is.

Whatever the dangers of wealth-hording royalty, it's easy to wax poetic about the recent decision by a Japanese Princess to live and study in Dublin.

Although dispersed at the time of the Wild Geese, the Irish Gaelic Order can claim with the Japanese to be among the world’s oldest hereditary "noble" families. The descendants of the O'Neill and the O'Connor, for example, have among the longest and most extensive genealogical records of all histories.

Princess Mako is the eldest daughter of Prince Akishino and Princess Kiko and she will study English in Dublin for the month of July and the first two weeks in August. The announcement was made by the Imperial Household Agency said Tuesday.

FujiFilm has given respectful recognition to the Irish language by making its kiosks Irish-optioned, gaining what many companies are discovering to be the business advantages of using Gaelic.

Irish is a much-loved language, and its use by business is gratefully noted and discussed by Irish people of all proficiencies.

Fuji's move allows users to interface with their fun and useful machines, through Irish while exposing more people to the modern life of the language.

Sunday Bloody Sunday was one of the worst attrocities committed by any western government against Civil Rights activists on either side of the Atlantic.

Bloody Sunday was an attrocity in terms of numbers killed, and the age of the victims. It was a painful and festering insult, prolonged so that the British could have the absurdity of the victims' culpability be considered as plausible--though it was ridiculous--while truth went unheard: the victims were just unarmed kids. It is the victory of those demands that protect us all from worse Bloody Sundays. As the Irish held the murderers to account, now all governments must fear similar consequences.
Now that tribunal has declared the lies lies and the crimes crimes, the victims may be buried at last as unarmed pubescent civilians, and not as the raving Irish gunmen the British insisted with such baldness for so long.

The suppression of truth is more violent than most expressions of hate.

Lillie was certainly one in a million back home, but in New York, no one compares to her. Lillie was Ireland's Marilyn Monroe of her day, and Lillie's is New York's only authentic Irish Victorian public house.

Lillie's was literally disassembled in Ireland, shipped to Manhattan and reconstructed here, bringing the feel of old Irish urban life to the Big Apple.

What makes Lillie's so special--besides Lillie's ghost manifesting in antique mirrors after a few rounds--is the music.

Bloomsday got my summer mapped out. I perambulated New York, as though it were Dublin, reading bits of Ulysses aloud in Manhattan like Walt Whitman spouting poetry through Brooklyn, compacting the universe into one good day, like yesterday.

Leopold Bloom walks through Dublin seeing-through grand mythologies and exalting contemporary details mythologically. He stops in church and admires the spiel and razzle dazzle techniques of the priest, comfortably subsuming Catholic enormity into the integrity of his own honestly un-awed interpretation. And he finds madonnas for worship and wonders worthy of the saints that causes him to burst with the holy spirit on a Dublin beach.

The debasement of sacred things is redeemed by the exaltation of common wonders. The two meet in the paragraphs of Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus walks along Sandymount strand, blind, beholding immortal signs all about him; Leopold Bloom is walking towards him, admiring shop signs and newspaper headlines in words that will echo for all time from the 20th century to the future. When they collide everything collapses, before it is put back together.

Saint Patricks Day (March 17) is to the Spring Equinox, what Leopold Bloomsday's (June 16) Day is to the Summer Solstice.

When James Joyce wrote his epic Ulysses, he was doing so on behalf of the people of Dublin, whom he wanted to exalt. He wanted the people of Dublin to be immortalized, and that they assume a significance as the Seventh City, the center of the universe, the fount whence all things can come.

No one in modern literature had ever before infused a place with so much mythological and literary resonance as Joyce has done with the streets of Dublin. In that way, Dublin has become the universal city, where ancient-minded dinshenchas is refreshed in modern literature, where it is the model for how that is done.

Going through some pictures from events I've attended so far in 2010, I'm realizing how strong the Irish language sector of NYC Irish culture has become. Below are some pictures of the people who make up the Irish language community.

Séamus Blake calls it the meitheal of NYC rather than a community as such. The Meiṫeal goes back to old-old Irish community life where neighbors helped neighbors get stuff done from decorating the house for a big region-wide party to getting big jobs done quickly, like the construction of a culturlann. Below are pictures from just a few of the Irish language events--open to all--that took place this year so far.

Breandán Ó Caollaí has served his country as one of Ireland's most active consulate representatives in New York. He has been in attendance at nearly every event the Irish community has organized here, giving encouragement from Ireland to those in New York. This is a picture of him singing a fine song in both Irish and English at the Greenwich Village Gaelic Festival, which began this year.

The Greenwich Village Gaelic Festival of New York was started by these two men: Dr. Art Hughes, and NYU's Irish language lecturer, Pádraig Ó Cearúill. They performed sean-nós songs and read excerpts from The Big Drum, Dr.Hughes translation of the MacGrianna classic. Dr. Hughes has since returned to Belfast, but it is in the works to have him come back for the Second Annual Greenwich Gaelic Festival. The venue on w4th was plódaithe, blocked with people who came specifically to celebrate Ireland's Gaelic heritage in New York.

The Israeli and the Irish governments are wrestling on the international stage, and it's not good for the Irish.

The media drama between the nations was set on the high seas when the Irish arm of the Free Gaza Movement stocked a harmless cargo boat with food supplies and famous Irish Civil Rights activists, including Nobel Peace prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire and set sail.

The purpose was to bring relief and attention to a civilian population enduring collective punishment in order that they "be persuaded" to "change their minds" as New York Senator Chuck Schumer recently put it so chillingly.

The sacred tree of our old Celtic traditions lived magnificently in the mind of Alexei Kondratiev whose death last week has sent shudders across the endangered planet. He was a respectful student and teacher of some of the world's most precious and marginalized ways of musing. He was a beloved and learned scholar who understood old-mind cultures with the intimacy and respect of a sachem. His death is like the loss of a rare species. He nurtured languages, as many as 64, in real life, with acquisitional powers more believably attributed to mythological beings, but his wide array of friendships across language groups bespeaks how special a man he was. He will be remembered with a sense of magic conjured in the cauldrons of many cultures.

Alexei and I have talked in Gaeilge briste about how he was to me the mythological poet Fénius Farsaid who worked with his son Gaelic Glas and a team of other poets, to collect the languages of the earth when the Tower of Babel was knocked down. I idolized him in such bursts of association, and he carefully knew just the corrections or encouragements to respond with. As my Irish got better, he respected me more, and my confidence to debate him grew. He was a Chief motivator to me in New York and a person of genius whom I could talk to, who did one better than respect Irish Gaelic civilization, he understood it, and sincerely wanted Irish Americans to learn to respect with scholarship their rich--no joke--culture, starting with the language.

Alexei lived in an apocalyptic world replete with tumbling towers, but also spiritually threatening, because he saw and felt personally the death of ancient-minded cultures, dying by language-shift in terribly false reasoning. He assumed the Olympic race across the ages, and helped to carry Celtic consciousness and Algonquin consciousness and so many alternative thought modes into the modern age. He never did it for blood. He did it for mind. Celtic languages live in the mind of anyone who can take up the claiḋeaṁ soluis, the burning sword, and pierce through neurons like brain electricity to make those new connections that become the tree of fluent language in a good student's mind.

Going through some pictures from events I've attended so far in 2010, I'm realizing how strong the Irish language sector of NYC Irish culture has become. Below are some pictures of the people who make up the Irish language community.

Séamus Blake calls it the meitheal of NYC rather than a community as such. The Meiṫeal goes back to old-old Irish community life where neighbors helped neighbors get stuff done from decorating the house for a big region-wide party to getting big jobs done quickly, like the construction of a culturlann. Below are pictures from just a few of the Irish language events--open to all--that took place this year so far.

Breandán Ó Caollaí has served his country as one of Ireland's most active consulate representatives in New York. He has been in attendance at nearly every event the Irish community has organized here, giving encouragement from Ireland to those in New York. This is a picture of him singing a fine song in both Irish and English at the Greenwich Village Gaelic Festival, which began this year.

The Greenwich Village Gaelic Festival of New York was started by these two men: Dr. Art Hughes, and NYU's Irish language lecturer, Pádraig Ó Cearúill. They performed sean-nós songs and read excerpts from The Big Drum, Dr.Hughes translation of the MacGrianna classic. Dr. Hughes has since returned to Belfast, but it is in the works to have him come back for the Second Annual Greenwich Gaelic Festival. The venue on w4th was plódaithe, blocked with people who came specifically to celebrate Ireland's Gaelic heritage in New York.