Deighilte ag comhtheanga

Looks like I'm sliding back into the study of Irish again. A little earlier than most years, but that's all to the good, since I have my work cut out for me trying to make it through the book of Irish short stories monshu gifted me with at Christmas. Half an hour on the first page of the first one and I think I understand that there is a small child playing on the carpet.

To make it all a bit more interesting, I'm playing around with a recent (2003) edition of Teach Yourself Gaelic I picked up sometime over the past year or so. It never ceases to surprise me how different idiomatic expressions can be in the two languages despite their closeness. For instance, the way Robertson and Taylor teach you to say, "What is your name?" is Dè 'n t-ainm a tha ort? Literally, this is "What be the name that is on you?" An equally literal Munster Irish equivalent would be Cad í an ainm a tá ort?. Now, I'm only guessing, since I'm not a fluent speaker, but I suspect this might be interpreted as "What's your reputation?" since overall Munster is pretty clear about the is/tá distinction (parallel to the ser/estar distinction of Ibero-Romance).

The actual native Munster idiom for "What is your name?" is Cad is ainm duit? ("What be [a] name to you?"). But travel north to Ulster and the idiom there is the equivalent of the Gaelic, i.e. Cad é an t-ainm atá ort? But there are other equally striking examples. For "A person can get used to anything", Dillon and Ó Cróinín give Téitear i dtaithí ar gach rud [leis an aimsir] (the bracketed phrase means "with time"), using an autonomous form of the verb téigh "come" that I reckon would strike a lot of speakers as literary. In TY Gaelic, this is given as Fàsaidh duine cleachdte ri rud am bith (lit. "A person grows accustomed to anything"); only rud "thing" is common to both versions. Again, I suspect an Ulster equivalent would be closer, since cleachta exists in Irish as well.

Days of Aw shucks!

Normally I avoid book readings like the plague because...I'm not really sure why. After all, all the ones I can remember now I really enjoyed. But be that as it may, what got me to Gerber Hart last night was the promise that my friend Dale would be reading. Seeing as he never showed (he said all his friends cancelled because of the storm--which even didn't start for another fourteen hours!--so he did, too), I might've had reason to be annoyed. But, fortunately, this nice nursing instructor I met last Bear Night was going, too, so we met for dinner at his local Thai place (Thai Grill, right across the street and perfectly serviceable) and then headed over together.

Take away Dale and we still had three readers--or four if you include the editor, who read from her slightly overwrought preface. It's an anthology of queer Chicago writing and, judging from who was present, they seem to have done well in terms of gender/identity diversity, but not so much in terms on race of economics. (The preface, for instance, singles out for a shout-out Cubs fandom--the whitest, most North-Side kind of Chicago sports fandom. I wanted to wave my Cardinals scarf in protest.)

I liked the first piece the best. It was a very direct and unsentimental poem called "Survivor" about a lesbian woman visiting her sister's grave west of the city. The second excerpt was in a voice I like to call "first-person justificational"--one that should be familiar to anyone who reads many blog entries for its portrayal of a clash between two characters narrowly from the viewpoint of one of these who--SURPRISE!--bears far more than a passing resemblance to the author. (In this case, a middle-aged M-to-F.) I actually rather liked the description of waiting in a godforsaken stripmall coffee shop for someone to arrive, but once it became clear this was all just a set-up for a blast of the narrator's self-righteousness, I lost all interest. (I had to confirm afterwards that, yes, it was intended as fiction and not first-person essay.)

The last reading was an exuberant nostalgia piece about a long-gone dance palace called Dugan's Bistro. Charming enough as far as it went, but it seemed to get a lot of its charge from old-timers' gauzy recognition of a litany of song titles (songs I first heard on a shitty transistor radio or years later at Bear Pride dances, so the effect wasn't quite so powerful on me). In the end, I wasn't in the least tempted to buy the collection, but my companion did so I guess I may find out from him how worthwhile it is. The doyenne of the library ended the evening by plugging a disco exhibit at the History Museum and we made tentative plans to take that in.

Of course, it wasn't possible for me to leave a room containing that many books without buying one (a $4 copy of Days of awe by Chicago's own Achy Obejas, someone I've always meant to read). Amusingly, we ended up sitting next to a Northwestern journalism student who I recognised by her library drawstring bag. She asked if we could interview us afterwards, but then apparently forgot all about that, since she popped up from her seat to buttonhole the editor of the volume instead. Not a bad evening, even if I didn't take full advantage of the Choco-Leibniz on the table in back.