Everything is better with pie

My plans to observe π day by consuming a chicken pot pie at Whole Paycheck were thwarted; apparently they've "discontinued them". So I was forced to content myself with chicken salad. I got there a little later than 1:59 as I'd planned on, which might explain the heightened biddy factor: I got stuck behind a little old woman with a walker (or moving at walker-aided speed) no less than four times. The best was the little dear who didn't know how to work the card reader and turned out to have an invalid card and no cash. (In the express line, natch.)

Fortunately, I have the kind of supremely awesome coworkers who would organise a BYOP eating orgy in the staff lounge. In fact, this is why I went out for pot pie--so I wouldn't stuff my face with the sugary stuff. But I craved consolation after my failed errand and ended up taking wahfer-thin slices of sweet potato, pecan, heath bar, and key lime. Mmmm...

There were also moon pies present, so I made some reference to growing up "north of the moon pie line" to explain my indifference. The sparked a discussion of similar isopleths such as the sweet tea line and the RC cola line. I also discovered--in the course of about twenty minutes--that (a) the head of the organisation had to make her own slide rule in school and (b) a woman brought a cat with her to my workplace on Saturday and still had it when she was found sleeping here this morning.

Ni Tuigim Fein

I'm really quite pleased with how my recent reading blitz is progressing. In fact, as I told monshu earlier tonight, I'm tearing through my Irish fiction so quickly that I'm in danger of running out before the month does. He immediately offered up the Tóibín I bought him last month and I may take him up on that (despite my misgivings about reading a book you yourself got someone before they have). I do still have Joseph O'Connor's hefty Star of the Sea, but I'm now thinking I'll save that for fall.

It dismayed me that it took me a full week to get through the Edna O'Brien novel I picked up on my first (disappointing) visit to Open Books, so I compensated by polishing off her House of splendid isolation in barely two days. I'm much too lazy to give it the proper review it deserves, so instead I'm just going to carp on her spelling--her Irish spelling, that is. I don't know what her English spelling is like since obviously her editors cleaned that all up for her. But if they tried to do the same for her Irish, they only made it worse. Or did they? I mean, there's no question it's awful, but what I can't tell is whether it's meant to be awful.

One of the two protagonists is a member of the Provisional IRA operating in the South. My understanding is that there were few if any fluent speakers of Irish among the Provos. Many of them learned the language in captivity--hardly an optimal environment--often by self-instruction. So the grammatical mistakes could be there for versimilitude. But is this really something we could expect even the average Irish reader--whose command of the language tends to be shaky at best--to catch? In any case, we have two crumbs of Gaelic from him: Bhean an Tighe "Woman of the House" (vocative) and Mo Chara Sláin Go Fóill which is glossed as "My friend, health forever".

( Bring out the chíor mhín )

In other words, it's all complete nonsense and I can't figure out what it's doing there. Your man's captors can't make any sense of it either; the only one with any Irish at all says it's "something about Queen Maeve" but it's clear he's only guessing. Perhaps there's some satirical point in a Provo from the North confounding Southern gardaí with pseudo-Irish babble, but it's lost on the readers if they themselves can't tell that it's invented. Moreover, that's all out of keeping with the rest of the scene and, indeed, the overall portrayal of the Garda not to mention the tone of the work.

I'm left with no other conclusion except that, when a distinguished product of Irish schooling and one of the Republic's greatest modern prose writers is asked to produce proper Irish, this is the best she can do. And that no one whose hands the work passed through could or would gainsay her attempts. Sure, the original publishers were Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, but what I have is the Penguin paperback; surely the passages would've been fixed if they'd caused serious embarrassment. But if anyone did point out what a mess this was, then no one cared.

[*] The spellings are so completely off for Modern Irish that I'm forced to cast a wider net here on the assumption that O'Brien tried to shoehorn in a pre-modern quotation without realising it might need updated.