Irish Diaspora Studies and... The Male

 

Irish Diaspora Studies and...

Versions of this message have appeared on various platforms, in connection with other parts of my lives...

This version is a compact tidy - I hope it is coherent...

One starting point might be an aside at the end of my Introduction to Volume 4 of The Irish World Wide, p15...

O’Sullivan, P. (1995) ‘Introduction: Irish Women and Irish Migration’, in O’Sullivan, P. (ed.) Irish Women and Irish Migration. London & Washington: Leicester University Press (The Irish World Wide), pp. 1–22.

 

'Yet you cannot deconstruct only one half of the dyad, woman/man. If I

can imagine a volume on Irish Women and Irish Migration quite other than

the one you have in your hands, I can equally well imagine a volume on

Irish Men and Irish Migration which would be the companion to this one.

That volume would bring into Irish Studies and Irish Migration Studies the

critical study of men and masculinities.  Certainly we now need studies of

Irish migration which give the variable of gender its proper due.'

 

So...  That thought has been in the back of my everchanging mind, as we have tracked Irish Diaspora Studies throughout the intervening years...

We can begin with two songs.  A drinking song.  And a temperance song.

As a little music project, before Christmas 2022, we did two Stephen Foster songs:  one a drinking song, and the other a temperance song...

There are notes here and here...

http://fiddlersdog.blogspot.com/2022/12/autoharp-advent-calendar-foster-cooper.html

http://fiddlersdog.blogspot.com/2022/12/comrades-fill-no-glass-for-me-stephen.html

And little videos here and here...

Video link

https://youtu.be/kuBP6lvHSzM

Video link

https://youtu.be/55l0oSzOh5Y

Yes, I am not in good voice...  It is winter.

The drinking song, 'When the bowl goes round...', music by Stephen Foster, lyric by George Cooper, uses a strange phrase in the chorus,  'jolly fellows'.

'We'll all be jolly fellows'.  It felt like there was more to know...

I have now found a book by Richard Stott...

Stott, R. (2009) Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America. Johns Hopkins University Press (Gender Relations in the America).

...which is a study, page 1, of 

'a distinctive male comportment that consisted of not just fighting but also heavy drinking, gambling and playing pranks. Men who engaged in such behavior were called “jolly fellows.” Although the jolly fellows were a subset of the male population, whenever men, especially young men, gathered in milieus that were all male or where women were rare, such conduct could occur. Such behavior was tolerated, even condoned, by men who were not themselves drinkers, fighters, or gamblers...'

Richard Stott does not seem to have been aware of this particular Stephen Foster song when he wrote his book, and picked its title.  It seems that Stephen Foster and George Cooper, writing in the 1860s, found that phrase, 'jolly fellows', still there in the ether.  And maybe by then - Richard Stott, the cultural historian, suggests - the age of the 'jolly fellows' was over...  He maps the development of a 'civilizing process' (Norbert Elias) that will, eventually, lead to Prohibition.  A drinking song, followed by a temperance song.

I find myself putting the, 'jolly fellows', from this Foster drinking song, alongside the 'boon companions' of 'Comrades, fill no glass...', the second Foster song I prepared for Christmas 2022.

The point for Irish Diaspora Studies is that Richard Stott has absorbed, seamlessly, the research and comment on Irish male violence into his study of nineteenth century American male violence - male violence, accepted, useful, controlled, directed?  There they are, the references we would expect, Carolyn Conley, “The Agreeable Recreation of Fighting,”, Patrick O’Donnell, Irish Faction Fighters of the Nineteenth Century,  William Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry.  Edward “Ned” Harrigan and Mulligan's Guards.  And so on...

In turn, Richard Stott's book should take its place alongside all those other studies of the Irish male, and the Irish-American...

It is worth searching for Richard Stott's book - because I found it Open Access.  It is readily available.

Patrick O'Sullivan

Visiting Professor of Irish Diaspora Studies, London Metropolitan University

January 2022

 

 

Autoharp Advent Calendar: Stephen Foster, Comrades, fill no Glass for me

Comrades, fill no Glass for me - Stephen Foster

This is my contribution for Day 16 of the UK Autoharps Advent Calendar 2022...

 

1.

Jan Brodie asked me if I had a second song for the Advent Calendar - I said that I was working on a song that might fit...

But...  That first song was a Stephen Foster drinking song,

When the Bowl goes round, Stephen Foster and George Cooper

Video link

https://youtu.be/kuBP6lvHSzM

...and this second song is a Stephen Foster temperance song.

Comrades, fill no Glass for me - Stephen Foster

Video link

https://youtu.be/55l0oSzOh5Y

Compare and contrast...

But Jan thinks that nothing is more Chrismassy than temperance and good intentions...

 

2.

A second song from Stephen Foster.  A second song from the University of Pittsburgh and the Library of Congress online archives.

The sheet music says, proudly, Poetry and Music by Stephen Foster.

Pittsburgh Stephen Foster Collection

Has 3 copies.  Here is one...

Comrades, fill no glass for me

https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735061827113#page/1/mode/2up

Library of Congress

Comrades, fill no glass for me

Music for a nation: American sheet music, 1820-1860

https://www.loc.gov/item/sm1855.590420/

A web search will find that the sheet music has spread widely - and a number of people have had a go at singing the song....

 

3.

The lyric does show Foster's workmanlike skill, three 8 line verses each building to the couplet, which is sung twice, for emphasis...

Still, boon companions may ye be,

But, comrades, fill no glass for me.

With little variants on the later repeats.  There is the oddity that Verse 1 has 'boon companions may ye be',

But Verse 2 and Verse 3 have 'boon companions ye may be'.  Can we find a subtle reason for this?

You can sometimes hear performers puzzling over that difference.  And Copy & Paste web sites do not care.

There is a lot going on in the lyric - back and forth rumination.  Certainly a love of whisky, mixed feelings about the boon companions, and that, oft repeated, desired conclusion.

Basic lyric skills on show - like, when we plan rhyme schemes, if we are going to rhyme on an unusual word get that word in place early, so that the later, more expected, rhyme cements it in place.

'Liquid flame', meaning whisky, is a good example.  Foster knows then that he has the standard rhymes available.  He could explore the drinker's shame, the boon companions' blame.  And, of course, we do explore them.

For the actual rhyme Foster chooses 'blighted fame...'

See also Verse 3, 'aspirations undefiled' leads to the rhyme with 'child'...

And when we hear 'fill no glass for me', do we not also hear 'blasphemy...'?

Part of the fun of making the little illustrated videos for YouTube is seeing if - without getting bogged down - we can visually mark such detail.

 

4.

The melody is also workmanlike - but has enough Foster subtlety to make it worthwhile. 

The sheet music gives no time signature - I don't think that that is unusual?  There are little irregularities, which can confuse.  In this performance, we try to skate over.

And the second part of the melody has, for me, an unexpected twist - for line 6, in the key of G, we have gone with A7 and D7.

The real musicians will have more to say. 

We should say Thank You to the University of Pittsburgh and the Library of Congress for the online archives - this is the web working as it was meant to work.

Patrick O'Sullivan

December 2022

Christmas Guest: Carol for Drums and Choir, sung by Shannon Marie Harney

Christmas Guest:  Carol for Drums and Choir

Helleborus Niger - The Christmas Rose

Anyone active in music in England is aware of that extraordinary network of choirs, a subset of the ecosystems studied by Ruth Finnegan in her important book, The Hidden Musicians.

1.  I have just noticed that Ruth Finnegan now has her own web site, which can now be a starting point.

https://www.ruthhfinnegan.com/the-hidden-musicians

I am re-reading her sections on choirs... 

The possibility of my writing songs for choirs has been around, but has never quite come together - I am sad.  But I am aware that I would need to spend much more time understanding the repertoire and the ecosystems...

2.  As a case study...

A while back I was asked if I had a Christmas song for a choir.  And, why not?

Thinking about Christmas songs, recurring themes, and talking and listening to people, as they remember Christmas, and value Christmas, and worry about Christmas...

I developed an idea about that extra plate on the table, the last minute guest - a person with nowhere else to go, because of tragedy or disaster, personal, political.  On the receiving end of rough kindness.

I started with the line, 'He brings nothing to the feast...'

And began to structure a lyric.

3.  And then Lyric Madness took over.  I looked at my opening, and thought, Why am I adding words to add meaning?  Could I not add meaning by taking words away?

And that is what I did, hewing the opening quatrain, 'He brings nothing to the feast...' so that each of the four lines could be halved.

To make a new more compact four line verse. 

And then halved again.  And then halved again.

So that I had created four quatrains.  Each one clearly developed from the quatrain before, but each one with a different meaning.  And a different line length.

And the last one, the most compact, lists the things that the Christmas Guest did bring to the feast.

 

4.  So, four very different quatrains, with four different line lengths - difficult to set as one song.  Maybe it is really a sequence of four songs?  Four different songs, with four different moods.

How to impose unity?  Because there is unity, unity of thought and unity of narrative.

At this point we might just call in The Lone Arranger.  But those days are gone, or, at least, disrupted.

And I already had a vision, partly based on those conversations with choirs - see above.  It was a theatrical vision - what I wanted to see on the stage.

So, this became...

Christmas Guest:  Carol for Drums and Choir

I created the four melodies for the four songs, and, with the help of Danny Yates and Shannon Marie Harney, created an arrangement.

Some details we had to return to, when first thoughts did not work.  For example, to clarify the story, I created more theatre - including the Jovial Man (God, he is annoying!), and the white phone.  With that distinctive sound.

Every choir has its Jovial Man.  Or Woman.

The keyboard signals the ways in which the choir might 'vocalise' its interludes, and the drums impose drive, unity and structure.

There will be other ways of doing all this - for example, I did think of developing the four 'songs' further, by giving one song each to the four voices of the choir.

If someone lends us a choir...

But the result now is 'Christmas Guest' - perhaps the bleakest Christmas song ever written...

In some theologies of Christmas there is that sense of foreboding.  See also, Matthew 25:31-46, Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.

 

5.

'Christmas Guest' on YouTube...

https://youtu.be/WbDv7PBYRNw

 

This is Christmas Guest on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/track/41l1sHcY1yOBcuqqJLu3L6

It is worth listening on one of the better platforms - to hear the uncompressed audio...

When I shared these thoughts, above, with Shannon Marie Harney - she understood perfectly...

 

Patrick O'Sullivan

December 2022

Christmas Guest:  Carol for Drums and Choir

He brings nothing to the feast but fears and woes.

His hollow eyes say everything that can be said.

His broken hands reach out to touch the Christmas Rose.

His hunger knows to sing, and waiting to be fed.

He brings nothing to the feast.

His hollow eyes say everything.

His broken hands reach out.

His hunger knows to sing. 

He brings nothing but

His hollow eyes,

His broken hands.

His hunger knows. 

He brings

His eyes,

His hands,

His hunger. 

© Patrick O'Sullivan 2022

 

 

 

A new song called 'Darkness', sung by Shannon Marie Harney

 

Well, yes, since you ask - with this song, I do know where the ideas came from...

 

1.  I was listening to singer, Shannon Marie Harney, and thinking about writing a new song that would respond to her strengths.

So, reaching into the song bag, I found and wrote 'Darkness'.

And this time, for a number of reasons...  Setting the text to music...  I did it myself - I heard, emerging from the text, a waltz...

At this point this note on my blog becomes over-complicated - I will leave the complications in place, below, for people who like that sort of thing...

Others can waltz...

 

2.  Certainly we had been thinking about the Great American Songbook - and those songs which, when you analyse them and sing them, have a tiny, pared down, lyric.  Like a nursery rhyme.

A thimbleful.  Dark matter, compacted by gravity.

The heavy lifting is left to the performer, to the performance, to the music and the arrangement.

Also interesting is the power of repetition, and reprise.  On the page my lyric, 'Darkness', looks like 3 identical stanzas, times 2.  It would be easy to end up with the same melody times 6.

That is not what the lyric wanted.  Lines are repeated, yes, but at each repeat the meaning of the words change.  Choreograph that, in waltz time.

 

3.  The first line of the song comes from a play by Samuel Beckett.

This is not 'Godot, the Musical' - though there is a moment in the 'Godot' play where we expect Didi and Gogo to launch into 'The Trail of the Lonesome Pine'.

No, different play.

For reasons which I will not go into here, we are interested in translation - we are in an age of translation.  We are interested in the work of translators and interpreters.  I have written about this elsewhere, and can return to that theme at a later date.

Academic 'Translation Studies' has become very complex - and now includes a special category, 'self-translators'...  Writers who translate their own work from one language to another.  Amongst the list of famous names - a surprising number of them are Nobel Prize winners - we always find Samuel Beckett.

The first line of my lyric comes from the Beckett play that is called, in French, 'Fin de partie', and in English - Beckett's translation - 'Endgame'.  So, has the meaning changed?  The French, end of a game, becomes the English, endgame, the much analysed part of the game of chess that comes before the end?

Towards the end of 'Fin de partie'/ 'Endgame' the main character, Hamm, remembers a poem.  He half-remembers a poem, and then corrects himself.  He half-remembers a very famous French poem...

Now we have a section where text talks to text, soul to soul.

 

4.  Fin de partie/Endgame

Fin de partie Samuel Beckett

Hamm:

Un peu de poésie .

( Un temps )

Tu appelais

( Un temps.)

(Il se corrige) ...

TU RECLAMAIS le soir;  il vient

( Un temps.)

(Il se corrige) ...

IL DESCEND:  le voici

( Un temps.)

Joli ca.

 

Endgame Samuel Beckett

 

Hamm:

A little poetry.

 (Pause.)

 You prayed—

(Pause. He corrects himself.)

 You CRIED for night; it comes—

 (Pause. He corrects himself.)

 It FALLS: now cry in darkness.

 (He repeats, chanting.)

 You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness.

 (Pause.)

 Nicely put, that.

 (Pause.)

 And now?

 (Pause.)

 

(Note:  the French text here is from a secondary source.  I need to check it.)

 

5.  The half-remembered poem is by Charles Baudelaire, from Flowers of Evil, 1857.  It is called Recueillement, and these are the first 4 lines...

 

Recueillement

Sois sage, ô ma Douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille.

Tu réclamais le Soir; il descend; le voici:

Une atmosphère obscure enveloppe la ville,

Aux uns portant la paix, aux autres le souci.

You will find tons of comment online, in many languages - and I have excised from this note most of my own comment.  In English the title is usually translated as 'Meditation'.

We can explore the suggestion that the language of the poem hints that the poet is talking to 'Douleur', Sorrow, Sadness, as if she were a lover.  Or a recalcitrant child. 

The poem takes us on a walk, from 'Soir' to 'Nuit' - and one issue in translation is how to translate 'Soir' in line 2.  Be still, my O Level French...

Roy Campbell, 1952, goes with 'Dusk.  'Evening', Robert Lowell, 1963.  'Night', Cyril Scott, 1909.

Beckett - or is it Hamm? - has 'Soir' in his French text.  And 'Night' in his English.

You CRIED for night - what are you going to do with it?  'Now cry in darkness'.

 

6.  And my lyric begins:  'You can cry, in the darkness...'

Dark matter, compacted by gravity...

 

See also....

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

(English Standard Version)

For everything there is a season...

...a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn, and a time to dance...

and Brecht in exile...

In den finsteren Zeiten

Wird da auch gesungen werden?

Da wird auch gesungen werden. Von den finsteren Zeiten. 

(From the Svendborg Poems, published in 1939)

[In the days of darkness

Will there be singing then too?

There will be singing then too. About the days of darkness.

(Translation by Sheila Taylor)]

 

7.

Now, for goodness sake, do not tell any of this to Shannon Marie Harney... 

Just let her sing...

Darkness, Shannon Marie Harney

On Spotify 

https://open.spotify.com/album/1397tL51SiVvwZvOzFHJvj

On YouTube 

https://youtu.be/BCKkbPYCzmg

And on every other platform...

Patrick O'Sullivan

December 2022

Autoharp Advent Calendar: Foster & Cooper, When the Bowl goes round

 UK Autoharps have invented a new tradition, the Autoharp Advent Calendar...

1.  During the winter lockdown of 2021-2022 our collective organised our first long distance Autoharp Advent Calendar - a number of us sent in a songs, with video, for display, one a day, on the run-up to Christmas 2021.

I was then in a struggle with health, but was determined to contribute.  My video from Christmas 2021 is still there - you can see me, lashed to my horse, like Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, defending Valencia...

...singing Stephen Foster 'Hard Times'...

Video link

https://youtu.be/55Rw7Da_lYc

 

2.  It helped that I knew the song.  I knew the song from Cathy Britell's 2012, lovely long distance, project...  I participated in that project in 2012, alongside Jan Brodie and Stephanie Hladowski, and the autoharp world...

Cathy Brittell wrote...  'In the winter of 2012, a group of friends (many of whom have never met) who share membership on an international autoharp mailing list, cyberpluckers, decided to reach across cyberspace and play and sing a song together.  There is nothing quite as wonderful as making music with others, whether in person or in the ether.'

And her 2012 video is still visible...

Hard Times Come Again No More - The Cyberpluckerpotluck

Catherine Britell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jof-4H-tY-U&t=10s

 

3.  My thanks to Danny Yates, who propped me up, and pointed a camera in 2021

This year Danny has helped me get another Stephen Foster number ready.  Back on the horse.

I suppose that there is here the makings of a further tradition.  There is a relationship between the autoharp communities and the work of Stephen Foster - I won't go into all the detail here, but it can be a problematic relationship...

Foster's work is autoharp friendly - and the autoharp and Stephen Foster, at one time, shared an ecological niche, the nineteenth century parlour...

In our own time, studying and playing the works of Stephen Foster has become just...  easy...

First, there is the Stephen Foster Collection at the University of Pittsburgh, much of it digitised and free to download...

'Sheet music, broadsides, songsters, music manuscripts, correspondence, business records, photographs, newspaper clippings, maps, iconography, Foster’s sketchbook, and other ephemera related to Stephen Foster and his family...'

https://digital.library.pitt.edu/collection/stephen-foster-collection

There is also the Library of Congress - again much material is free to download...

Stephen Collins Foster: A Guide to Resources

'Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1864) was the most famous American song composer of the 19th century. This guide provides links to resources at the Library of Congress, including a large collection of published first editions.'

https://guides.loc.gov/stephen-foster

The availability of the sheet music at Pittsburgh and LOC means that you can check other online versions of Foster's works, and correct the texts, if need be...

 

4.  For the UK Autoharps Advent Calendar 2022 I have offered, from the Stephen Foster archives, the justly neglected 'When the bowl goes round'.

The Lyric is by George Cooper, Stephen Foster's collaborator - Cooper is not as good a lyricist as Stephen Foster.  Melody is by Stephen Foster.

The song is Christmassy, I think - the bowl must be the Wassail bowl.  Cooper and Foster wrote drinking songs and temperance songs, as the market demanded.  In this song they seem to have confused the two categories - as a drinking song it demands, from the singer, extreme sobriety.  The lyric is chewy, and full of the archaisms that nineteenth century lyricists and audiences loved - it describes itself as 'the jocund song'.  I had a few goes at singing it - then Danny Yates and I decided that, try as I might, my version was never going to be more than adequate...

As for correcting the text...  You can see that the title page has 'When the bowl goes round' - while the verses as published have 'While the bowl goes round'...

https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735061838425#page/1/mode/2up

I think that 'When' is better than 'While', and that is what I sing throughout. 

(There is the oddity that in some regional varieties of English the word 'While' can mean 'Until'.  Which...

'...reminds me of the possibly apocryphal tale about the first automatic level crossings in the Midlands - where the sign "Wait here while the lights are flashing" supposedly caused a string of near-fatalities...'

https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-5498,00.html

But I digress...)

So, here is, 'When the Bowl goes round', Stephen Foster and George Cooper

Video link

https://youtu.be/kuBP6lvHSzM

My contribution to the UK Autoharps Advent Calendar 2022...

 

Patrick O'Sullivan

December 2022

Further Note January 2023

Thinking further about this song, Foster & Cooper, 'When the Bowl goes round...'  And that strange phrase 'jolly fellows' in the chorus...  I have come across a book by Richard Stott...

Stott, R. (2009) Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America. Johns Hopkins University Press (Gender Relations in the America). 

...which is a study, page 1, of 'a distinctive male comportment that consisted of not just fighting but also heavy drinking, gambling and playing pranks. Men who engaged in such behavior were called “jolly fellows.” Although the jolly fellows were a subset of the male population, whenever men, especially young men, gathered in milieus that were all male or where women were rare, such conduct could occur. Such behavior was tolerated, even condoned, by men who were not themselves drinkers, fighters, or gamblers...'

It is worth searching for Richard Stott's book - because I found it Open Access.  It is readily available.

Richard Stott does not seem to have been aware of this particular Stephen Foster song when he wrote his book, and picked its title.  It seems that Stephen Foster and George Cooper, writing in the 1860s, found that phrase still there in the ether.  And maybe by then - Richard Stott, the cultural historian, suggests - the age of the 'jolly fellows' was over...

I find myself putting the, 'jolly fellows', from this Foster song, alongside the 'boon companions' of 'Comrades, fill no glass...', the second Foster song I prepared for Christmas 2022.  See my note on 'Comrades', further up/later in this blog.

P.O'S.

 

New Yorker magazine and the 'Irish short story'

In my note on the BBC at 100 Symposium - in an aside - I suggested a possible study of the influence of New Yorker magazine on the 'Irish short story' in the twentieth century...

http://fiddlersdog.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-bbc-at-100-symposium.html

See now an article by Nora Shaalan, in the online journal Public Books, a digital humanities approach.  This New Yorker interest in short stories from Ireland/of Ireland has already been noted by, for example,  Ben Yagoda...

Yagoda, B. (2001) About Town: The New Yorker and The World It Made. Da Capo Press.

Nora Shaalan puts some figures on that.

My suggestion is that New Yorker magazine also shaped, from a distance, stories that did NOT make it into the magazine...

P.O'S.

 

The View from the Fiction of the “New Yorker”

10.13.2022

Digital Humanities

By Nora Shaalan

https://www.publicbooks.org/geography-fiction-the-new-yorker/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

... At the magazine’s inception, in 1925, the fiction section was a hybrid of different genres, including miscellaneous pieces that straddle the line between prose, verse, and visual art. The section only began to cohere circa 1945. Around the same time, the magazine began to regularly publish fiction by a small subset of authors. Between 1945 and 2019, the magazine published 7,451 stories by 1,493 different authors, but 4,398 of these stories (more than 66 percent of them) were written by just 149 authors (less than 10 percent of the total pool).4 Many of these 149 authors have become synonymous with the magazine, and their work has come to define a dynamic New Yorker fiction tone and style, characterized by ironic detachment and a meticulous, if somewhat overbearing, attention to facticity...

... Many of the countries that score relatively high in both metrics are the usual suspects—the United Kingdom, France, Italy—with one exception. There is an outlier that has a relatively high diversity score and that outperforms the United States in the granularity measure: Ireland. A former colony, whose landmass and population are significantly smaller than those of the United States, Ireland boasts a granularity score of 1.875. The country is mentioned using 77 unique locations, placing it in the top five most diverse countries in the corpus. There are many plausible reasons why evocations of Ireland are both diverse and granular, but one striking detail stands out. Of the 176 stories that mention Ireland, 135 are by Irish writers—the likes of Edna O’Brien, Roddy Doyle, and William Trevor.

The BBC at 100 Symposium

The BBC at 100 Symposium

Date / time:  13 September - 15 September, 2022

Location:  National Science & Media Museum (and online)

We have, here next week, in Bradford, Yorkshire, not far from my home, The BBC at 100 Symposium...

I am presenting a paper at the Symposium on a Diaspora Studies approach to the history of the BBC (that is already there in the research literature) - I think that the approach has to be fairly broad brush, but I want to zoom in on the life and work of Denis Johnston, whose 1953 memoir, Nine Rivers from Jordan, about his years as a BBC War Correspondent, is his ungainly masterpiece.  But the book only really makes sense with the sideways look of diaspora studies.

I also want to start a discussion about the short story for radio - which is part of the study of the study of technologies and art forms, including technologies of the word.  And the ways that markets shape art forms - the BBC radio market for Irish short stories can be compared with, for example, the New Yorker magazine market for Irish short stories.  Very different markets, different technologies - how do they shape that Irish short story tradition?

And I am chairing a session on the BBC and the Northern Ireland 'Troubles'.  It turns out that one way to track the research literature through my database is to search for just one word:  'oxygen'. 

https://royalhistsoc.org/calendar/the-bbc-at-100-symposium-2/

https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/see-and-do/bbc-100

 

BRIEF REPORT September 20

See background...

https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/crcc/events/eventslist/220913---the-bbc-at-100-symposium.html

https://royalhistsoc.org/calendar/the-bbc-at-100-symposium-2/

etc...

A quick report might help put things on the agenda...

Marcus Collins, the organiser, stressed that it was a Symposium, not a Conference - and that it was 'a gathering of the tribes'.

So, the full weight of the BBC history community was there, and - as we know - these things can be clannish, and indeed tribal.  But I am already known to the community, have been to events (Before Covid), know the vocabulary and the preoccupations...  It was a hybrid event, was affected by illnesses - the technology mostly worked.  There had to be a lot of thinking on feet.  Not sure that the Symposium idea worked - a lot of sharing of truisms.  But I can see what was aimed at...

Certainly the gathering of the tribes worked - I think that everyone appreciated the opportunity to have, at last, face to face informal conversations.  We moved things forward.

1.  On Wednesday, 14th, I gave a presentation on Denis Johnston, a Diaspora Studies approach, focussing on his time as War Correspondent for the BBC, and his memoir...

Johnston, D. (1953) Nine Rivers from Jordan: The Chronicle of a Journey and a Search. London: Derek Verschoyle.

Johnston, D. (1955) Nine Rivers from Jordan: The Chronicle of a Journey and a Search. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

You may know the background, but, in essence, all debate, about neutrality, balance, guns, ends when he reaches Buchenwald concentration camp - and, just the way the session panned out, I was able to cover most of the ground and give a reading from the book...

It worked with the audience.  For example, the detail that the American edition differs from the first British edition.  Different ending.  The international audience could see a bear trap avoided.

2.  On Thursday, 15th, I chaired a session on the BBC and Northern Ireland.  I had Robert Savage and Mark Devenport as talking heads, on the big screen above me, and Jean Seaton, Craig Murray and Ella Roberts on the stage beside me.

The names that will be new here are Craig Murray, Imperial War Museum - who is curator of the looming Northern Ireland exhibition - and Ella Roberts - who is a phd student looking at BBC series about Ireland.

(I have shared my notes about the Irish Empire tv series with Ella Roberts.)

3.  I repeatedly flagged my relationship with London Metropolitan University - I think the video recordings of the Symposium will be made available in due course, so we can all critique my performance.

Thinking about the short story...  Let me leave a note here.  As I say - looking at the market forces shaping the 'Irish short story'...  Two major forces are BBC radio and New Yorker magazine - pulling in different directions, of course.  With the work that has been done on the New Yorker online, we could do something quantifiable.  Similar, but more difficult, with the BBC - bit of a gap there.

At the Symposium I was able to develop the notion of a Diaspora Studies approach to the history of the BBC - the Denis Johnston presentation laid some of the ground rules.  I liaised with people studying Jews, Italians, Germans + BBC, and so on.  A  lot on the BBC World Service, which will be of interest to colleagues at London Metropolitan University.  In the background, there is some work on Irish + BBC, which is complex but not over-complex, different but not that different.

It would not be great task to write the bibliographic discussion paper, a Diaspora Studies approach to the history of the BBC, what has been done so far, integrating strands, rewards and fairies.  As I say, complex, but not over-complex.

Patrick O'Sullivan