Ms. Hen reviews Irish Fairy Tales

Irish Fairy Tales

James Stephens           

Fall River Press           

2008

Ms. Hen planned on reading this for St. Patrick’s Day, but she didn’t get around to it until after the holiday. She is honestly not a fan of fairy tales, but she found this book lying around her house, so she grabbed it, and decided to read it.

There is a common misconception that fairy tales are for children, but these tales are not meant for young eyes or ears. This book is dark and full of violence. Also, it contains large words that most children would not understand.

The book contains stories, which mostly surround the hero Fionn, the legendary warrior hunter, leader of the Fianna. He eats the Salmon of All Knowledge and afterward possesses knowledge of everything. When Ms. Hen read the part about him eating the salmon, it made her mouth water and she craved that type of fish.

A lot of these stories didn’t catch Ms. Hen’s attention because her mind is distracted at the moment by the problems of the world. But there was one, “The Birth of Bran,” which she liked because it is about a woman, Tuiren, who is magically turned into a dog by a jealous woman who was in love with Tuiren’s husband. Ms. Hen thinks that’s it’s charming what happens in the story, that the man who hates dogs starts to love dogs when Tuiren is in his possession.

This book does contain some charming elements, but it has more violence and degradation in it than charm. Ms. Hen has been reading and watching too many things with violence, and it has become tiresome to her. Also, the female characters in this collection are caricatures; they are either a beautiful woman or an old hag who is a witch. Ms. Hen realizes that these are old tales and have been passed down for generations, and in the times they were created women weren’t as respected or thought of as people who are complex or worthy of attention. She understands these are fairy tales, and are meant to teach a lesson, and entertain, but Ms. Hen can’t help but think what she thinks.

Some chickens appear in this book, which Ms. Hen appreciates. A stranger says to Fiachna Finn, “ 'Who could help laughing at a king hunkering on a branch and his army roosting around him like hens? ’” The stranger is trying to insult the king by saying his army is like hens. Ms. Hen doesn’t take kindly to people mocking hens, but she is a hen with a sense of humor, so she does find it funny.

Ms. Hen would have liked to read this at a different point in her life. She found it difficult to pay attention to this book because she has a lot on her mind. But even though she has problems with the characters and the stories, she believes these are a  part of her history that shouldn’t be brushed aside because she doesn’t enjoy it right now. Ms. Hen is an Irish hen, and she is proud of her heritage, because people should be proud of their history no matter where our ancestors hail from. Even though this is true, we are all inhabitants of this planet, and we live here together, and we should work to make the Earth better for everyone, not just people like ourselves.

Ms. Hen writes things

Ms. Hen was a hen in isolation, but her isolation is over.
Now she is in self-quarantine, the days she does not go to work.
Every day, she goes out for a breath of fresh air and listens to the birds and the wind.
Ms. Hen has written some things recently, which have been published, and she would like to share them with you.

"Hot Girls"
https://www.whlreview.com/no-14.4/fiction/ShannonOConnor.pdf

"Bullet Sandwich"
https://wordgathering.com/vol14/issue1/fiction/oconnor/

"Almost Forever"
https://365tomorrows.com/2020/03/07/almost-forever/

"Packing for the Post-Apocalyptic Journey"
https://365tomorrows.com/2020/03/22/packing-for-the-post-apocalyptic-journey/

Two of these stories are sci-fi stories, which Ms. Hen is excited about, since she has never published sci-fi before.

Ms. Hen says happy reading and writing and whatever you happen to be doing in the world.
Be safe.

S.O.

Ms. Hen reviews Nora Webster

Nora Webster

Colm Toibin

Scribner

2014

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because she wanted to read an Irish book for St. Patrick’s Day. She started to read this years ago, but she does not remember when. She thinks that she read a lot of it, but she didn’t read the whole thing. She doesn’t remember why she stopped reading it, she thinks it might have been because it was not what she wanted at the time.

NORA WEBSTER is about a woman whose husband has just died, who has four children, and it’s about how she deals with her grief, and tries to get her life back together. The novel takes place in 1960s Ireland in a small town. Ms. Hen has never lived in a small town, but she knows in such places everyone knows everyone else’s business. She has always thought that it would be nice to know all the people who lived near her, but after reading this she thinks differently. All Nora’s neighbors are in her space, and she’s afraid to walk down the street wearing a new dress or hairstyle without everyone noticing and commenting on it. She wants to be her own person, but she is used to having her husband make all the decisions.

Nora is a woman of her time. If she lived in an era after this, she would have been a different person, but women in Ireland in this age were stuck in one place, and did not have opportunities to do much else. Nora joins a club called The Gramophone Society, where people get together to talk about music. She discovers she likes classical music, and buys a record player and several records. She also takes singing lessons, but attempts to hide these new activities from her family.

There are places in this novel where the character gets outside herself when she listens to music, and thinks about a life she could have had but didn’t. She is visiting her new friends from the Gramophone Society and they play a record of Beethoven, and Nora looks at the photo of the young woman on the cover and thinks, “As Dr. Radford put the record on, she thought how easy it might have been to have been someone else, that having the boys at home waiting for her, and the bed and the lamp beside the bed, and her work in the morning, were all sort of an accident. They were somehow less solid than the clear notes of the cello that came through the speakers.”

She thinks what everyone must think sometimes, that if the person could have lived a different life, would her life be better? Would she be happier? There’s no guarantee that she would be happier, but she doesn’t know. This is an example of the saying, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” We all think other’s lives are so much better, but we never know for sure. She also thinks that music has come to stand for her fantasy life that she does not have, an alternate existence full of music, far away from the dullness of working in an office, and trying to find privacy in a town where everyone knows everything about her.

There are some brilliant flashes in this book, and it’s well written, but Ms. Hen found it was not quite right for her to read right now, similar to what she thought the first time she tried to read it. It’s a nice book, though there is a little edginess to it, now she craves edginess, danger and fear. She wants to live someone else’s fear instead of her own. She has a finite amount of books she can read, and since the libraries are closed, and she can’t leave her house, she has to read what she has in her pile.

Ms. Hen reviews two Irish films

The Young Offenders

Directed by Peter Foott

2016

Streaming on Netflix

The Hole in the Ground

Directed by Lee Cronin

2019

Streaming for free on Amazon Prime

Ms. Hen is a hen is isolation right now. She has a lot of time on her hands to watch movies and TV shows and read books and try to write and fill time. For St. Patrick’s Day, she didn’t have any corn beef and cabbage, and didn’t have any soda bread or scones, there was no beef stew, and no Guinness, but she did listen to some Irish music and read an Irish book, (which she will review later); she wore a green sweater and some shamrock earrings that lit up, and she decided to watch two Irish films.

The first film she watched was THE YOUNG OFFENDERS. It’s a comedy, and it’s exactly what Ms. Hen needed in these dark times. The film is about two high school boys, a couple of street thugs from Cork City who decide to go on a hunt for some bales of cocaine that washed up on the shore many kilometers away so they could sell it and become rich and escape their lives of poverty. They steal some bikes and go on an adventure. Ms. Hen’s favorite scene in this film is the one with the chickens, and it made her laugh out loud.  This film has subtitles, and she needed them because it was difficult for Ms. Hen to understand what the characters say. Ms. Hen recommends this for anyone who needs a good laugh, and she believes everyone does right now.

The second film she watched was THE HOLE IN THE GROUND, a horror film. Ms. Hen is a fan of scary movies and TV shows, but she didn’t think this movie was nearly scary enough. It’s about a woman and her son, and they move into a new house. There is a hole in the ground in the woods near where they live. The boy disappears and becomes a different person. Some people might think this is scary because the mother is afraid of her son, who is the monster, but Ms. Hen thought it was boring. It seemed to her like all the other horror films, with nothing original or colorful about it. Ms. Hen likes horror that will tell a different story, or show her something she has never seen before. There was nothing in this film that did that.

Ms. Hen would like to wish everyone a belated St. Patrick’s Day. She hopes everyone is doing well, and surviving. There is an Irish blessing that says, “If God sends you down a stony path, may He give you strong shoes.” We should all consider this right now. We need strong shoes for our journey.

Ms. Hen reviews War and Peace Volume Two

War and Peace Volume Two

Leo Tolstoy

Wordsworth Editions Limited

First published 1869

Translated from the Russian by Louise and Aylmer Maude 1993

Ms. Hen decided to read this because she wanted to read an epic novel for St. Patrick’s Day. She intended to read FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce, but she read four pages, and thought it was the worst book she had ever read. She decided to pick up WAR AND PEACE because she had read volume one when she was an undergrad hen, and loved it. She realizes that this novel has nothing to do with St. Patrick’s Day, but it’s worth reading.

This novel is about love and war, and the anguish of love and war. Prince Andrew meets a young woman, Natasha, and they fall in love. His father thinks she is too young for him, and forbids him from marrying her for a year. He doesn’t want to go away, but tells Natasha that he will marry her when he comes back. She suffers while he is away, and thinks that she is getting older (Though she is just seventeen! Those were different days.) She gets embroiled with another man, and she becomes ill.

The war is coming to Moscow, and the inhabitants are getting anxious. The people speak French in everyday speech, because it is the language of the educated, but while the French are attacking them, they chastise each other for it. Members of Natasha’s family, her brother and cousin, and parents, move from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

Napoleon is a character in this novel. Ms. Hen does not know a lot about him, but from reading this, and the things she has learned, he was unstable and a tyrant, much like our current president. There have been several comparisons to Napoleon and Hitler, and some of Hitler and our current president, but not a lot of Napoleon and the president. Ms. Hen does not know if they have much in common, but learning about Napoleon briefly from this novel made her consider this idea. She imagines Napoleon might have been more intelligent than D.T., but she is not definite on this.

Ms. Hen had an out-of-body experience while she was reading this novel. She was at work on Wednesday, and she works at a hospital. Her office was in a state of bedlam because of the corona virus, and everyone was under stress, fearing the future. When she was on the train home, reading WAR AND PEACE, a passage struck her that related to her day. The Russians were waiting for the French to attack them:

At the approach of danger, there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonable tells the man the nature of danger and the means of escaping it, the other, still more unreasonably says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is better to disregard what is painful until it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.

Ms. Hen completely relates to this passage right now in her life. She does not want to think about danger, so she spends her free time reading and writing and watching TV. She doesn’t want to think about what could happen in the future. In this novel, the characters felt the same way. Not much has changed in the way humanity reacts to danger in two hundred years, except this time, we are not being attacked in a war (in the United States) we are being attacked by a virus. A war might be faster than a virus, but either way, while in the moment, the characters in the novel, and also currently, the people involved do not know what the outcome will be.

Ms. Hen understands why this is considered one of the greatest novels ever written. The characters are realistic, and their pain is sensory. The reader can understand why their lives are so terrible. Russians look at the world differently from everyone else, it might be a more realistic way; they always look at the dark side of everything. But for every dark side, there is a bright side, the hope that things could get better. Maybe they will be better some day.  

Ms. Hen reviews Beyond Infinity at the ICA

Beyond Infinity

Yayoi Kusama

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Through February 2021

Ms. Hen does not usually write about art, because it is not her specialty.

But she wants to attempt to write about this exhibit, because she thinks

there’s a lot to say about it.

She really didn’t know what it was before she went.

She saw the pictures of the polka dots, and the mirrors.

Ms. Hen didn’t know how intense it would be.

She got an email the day before that said she could not bring bags

into the exhibit. She was sad she could not go in

but she learned about it vicariously.

The viewers are only allowed two minutes in a room that’s a small box

in a bigger room.

Only four people went in at a time.

They were not allowed to touch anything.

The room is small with tentacles covered in polka dots

coming off the floor and mirrors

on the floor and ceiling and walls. The artist recites a Japanese love poem in the room

on a loop. Ms. Hen tried to take as many pictures as she could,

but she realized that she was taking pictures and not experiencing the art.

She came to think that was the point of the exhibit.

To be Instagram worthy.

She doesn’t think it’s right that art should be meant for later,

but that’s what it is.

two minutes in the Infinity Room goes by fast.

After she left, she read the translation of the poem in English.

She thought the exhibition strange,

but she understands why people like it.

To be in a different world for a short time,

someone else’s dreamscape,

an escape from reality

into weirdness.

People need release from boring lives.

This exhibit is anything but boring.