What Am I Reading Wednesday - July 30

[lebateleur]

I can't believe the week is half over already. I got an indulgent amount of reading done over the weekend, so now I am writing it up.

What I Finished Reading This Week

The Beat Cop – Michael O'Malley
Being a biography of Francis O'Neill, who went from 17 year old immigrant from rural Cork to well-regarded chief of police in early 20th century Chicago. It's a generally well-written and entertaining read, in no small part because O'Neill led a fascinating life: the youngest son of a petty Irish landlord, he fled Ireland to avoid being forced into the priesthood, sailed the world from Britain to Japan to the Kingdom of Hawai'i, cut lumber in Georgia, herded livestock in the Sierras, taught in rural prairie schools, got shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, promoted the first Black policeman to the rank of desk sergeant in Chicago (and possibly the US), protected Emma Goldman(!!!) from violent interrogation after her arrest, and more. He also published O'Neill's Music of Ireland, a compilation whose influence on the modern understanding of "Irish music" would be difficult to exaggerate.

The genius of this book is how O'Malley centers all of this in the context of the times: the collusion between English colonizers and the Irish gentry that drove mass emigration to the US, the late 19th and early 20th century globalization that redefined people's sense of self from inhabitants of a town or region (Tralibane, County Kerry) to a citizens of a country or members of a race (Irish, Lithuanian), economic shifts from individual to aggregated production, and how all of that created drives to categorize, label, standardize, and define, whether in the field of policing, in grading the quality of grain or meat, or in collecting and taxonomizing heretofore hyperlocal music. O'Malley also makes a pretty convincing case that O'Neill desired to collect and categorize "pure" Irish music in part to create an "Irish" identity that sidestepped emotionally or politically fraught issues: his family's role in exacerbating the famine; his position in the graft-driven patronage networks of the Irish immigrant and Chicago political communities; his police duty to protect the interests of the politically and economically powerful, often to the detriment of fellow immigrants; his opinion on whether Ireland should be independent or not; his opinion on whether the struggle for Irish independence should be violent or not. And O'Malley is not writing a hagiography: he readily calls out the disingenuous aspects of O'Neill's memoirs, his abuses of power to collect tunes, his support for torture as an interrogation tool, his mistreatment of a mentally disabled musician.

But several elements keep this really good book from being a great one. One or more glaring typos occur in every chapter and the otherwise excellent endnotes. O'Malley gets very basic, fundamental facts wrong (boy howdy, jigs are not "usually in 3/4 time"), and his efforts at academic analysis can stray into the ridiculous: he spins an entire metaphysical theory out of Irish English speakers "having tunes" versus English or American English speakers "knowing tunes". But this is just a function of how possession (including of knowledge) works in Gaelic languages. It's a grammatical artifact, not a damning indication that O'Neill policed, colonized, and dispossessed anyone of "the community's music". Again, these are significant irritations that keep a good book from being excellent, but The Beat Cop is an entertaining and fascinating read despite them. I'm going to buy a personal copy because I will definitely read this one again.


What I Am Currently Reading

Shadow and Bone – Leigh Bardugo
Selected as a beach read and eminently suitable for that purpose.

The Story of Irish Dance – Helen Brennan
Surprisingly well-written, scholarly, and serious given the cheesy cover.

[.....] – [.....]
Being the second draft of a friend's novel, which I and many from the GeekBBQ crew are beta reading.


What I'm Reading Next

This week I picked up Caged by Joe McKean.

これで以上です。

Comments

[pauraque]

It drives me SO CRAZY when writers try to make metaphysical hay out of simple facts of grammar. Like, sure, sometimes structural aspects of language can reflect culture, but a WHOLE LOT of times they are arbitrary. You can't just cherry-pick certain constructions and assign them a profound cultural meaning without even trying to look at whether other languages share the same construction (bet you anything they do!) and whether the same alleged profound meaning attaches there as well. I hate that so many people know so little about linguistics that writers can get away with just making stuff up!

Er, sorry, I was already 99% of the way to a rant about this because of the book I am currently reading, and this sent me over the edge. Thanks for the review!

[lebateleur]

You can't just cherry-pick certain constructions and assign them a profound cultural meaning without even trying to look at whether other languages share the same construction (bet you anything they do!) and whether the same alleged profound meaning attaches there as well.

Yes, exactly! Just because some bit of grammar or linguistic element seems unusual and thus significant, does not make it objectively so. These things are, as you say, arbitrary. Claiming that specific languages or elements thereof are inherently more logical, spiritual, or [pick your attribute of choice] than others is a losing proposition (How would you even measure that? What language is the baseline? Why that one, specifically?) And yet O'Malley's even willing to go there when it comes to English:

O'Neill's Music of Ireland. The title itself expressed a confused and ambiguous sense of possession: is this O'Neill's music, or Ireland's? The apostrophe attributes possession to O'Neill, but the "of" attributes it to Ireland. If this seems a stretch, consider an alternative title, something like The Music of Ireland: Collected and Edited by Francis O'Neill. That eminently plausible title contains no such ambiguity about who "owns" the music. O'Neill's Music of Ireland calls attention to the renegotiation of ideas about personal and communal property O'Neill engaged in when he "acquired" other people's tunes.

And, wow, that's a lot of bloviating over a standard title phrased to fit on the spine of a book. I'm guessing O'Malley wouldn't argue that Henry Gray was laying claim to humanity's physical bodies with Gray's Anatomy. Nor does he have a problem with William Bradbury Ryan's Mammoth Collection, a songbook from which O'Neill cribbed 192 tunes, and which O'Malley discusses sans handwringing a mere eight pages before the above quotation. 🙄

And no worries! As you can see, I'm still feeling a bit ranty about this myself. What was the book in question?

[pauraque]

WOW, that is some high-level reading-too-much-into-grammar bullshit!! Right, of course, English doesn't have a grammaticalized distinction between genitive of ownership and genitive of relation, therefore English speakers don't understand that it's possible to relate to something without owning it. What the actual fuck.

The book I was annoyed with was Braiding Sweetgrass, but that was a very minor case compared to what you're describing here. An early chapter made some questionable assertions about Algonquian grammar uniquely reflecting aspects of Indigenous spirituality, mostly relating to different-from-English animacy categories and whether certain predicates are constructed as verbs or nouns. So yeah, stuff that is present in a LOT of language families worldwide and very much not unique. But it ended up being such a small part of the book that I didn't even mention it in my review. It just bugged me, especially in a book that emphasizes the importance of careful research and thoughtfully designed studies in her own academic field, that she'd fall into the trap of thinking it's fine to just say whatever you want about how language works without even cracking open one book or consulting one scholar to check if it's true.