Latest / The Rooted Soul Podcast / Of Two Shores: Ireland, America, and the Stories Between

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Of Two Shores: Ireland, America, and the Stories Between · The Rooted Soul Podcast

• 0:00
  Good evening from Ireland and welcome to the Rooted Soul podcast where I'm here for a little while.
• 0:06
  TheRootedSoulBooks.com is the website where you can get my first collection,
• 0:10
  Journey from Struggle to Joy, on special offer or you can go direct to Amazon.
• 0:15
  Alan at TheRootedSoulBooks.com where I get plenty of feedback and I very much
• 0:19
  enjoy it, the interaction on the poetry.
• 0:22
  At AlanMcDonaldIRE is the Instagram handle. Thought it'd be interesting to change
• 0:28
  tack a little bit this evening.
• 0:30
  So, for some reason, and I'm very grateful for it, I'm getting more and more
• 0:37
  listenership from the US.
• 0:39
  It is fast approaching now the second most popular nation for my podcast.
• 0:46
  And I'm very grateful to it.
• 0:50
  I know some of the people, not all of them. And it got me thinking about literature
• 0:56
  and poetry and also culture in the US and in Ireland.
• 1:00
  And I find that the contrast and the parallels are fascinating.
• 1:04
  You know, there's the obvious of the US is an immigrant country, melting pot.
• 1:11
  Ireland has been known for centuries as a country that emigrate from Angorthamur,
• 1:19
  what was known as the famine.
• 1:21
  But there was no, there wasn't one. Don't worry, Phil Copas,
• 1:25
  I won't get into that one this evening.
• 1:26
  But for many reasons, and economic, social, and others, it was a country where,
• 1:34
  young people emigrated and young families emigrated to try and find a better
• 1:38
  life. And that continues to this day.
• 1:40
  I mean, I moved to London just across the water. I'm happy to be called an immigrant,
• 1:44
  a migrant, whatever, expat, whatever you want to say. But, you know,
• 1:48
  I did move away to, if not so much find my fortune, then to improve my career prospects at the time.
• 1:54
  And the US has this melting pot kind of culture, which it's a,
• 1:58
  it's a little bit of a contrast. Obviously, Ireland now has welcomed in a lot
• 2:02
  of people from different countries as it's become more prosperous, more opportunities.
• 2:08
  But historically, that's really what that is.
• 2:11
  But there are, there's a lot of similarities. I'll read some pieces about this
• 2:16
  because one of the things I think that is a similarity that I don't hear that often.
• 2:24
  Irish and American culture are two of the most celebrated cultures and the ones
• 2:30
  that are exported all around the globe.
• 2:34
  Now, you can take your view on the whole Shamrock and Shillelagh,
• 2:39
  Bagara, Irish bars around the world.
• 2:41
  I quite like them. If they have Irish music in there, you know,
• 2:45
  it makes people happy and go for it.
• 2:48
  I mean, I love the genuine culture of the country, you know,
• 2:52
  music and art and the writing poetry literature all that stuff is amazing and
• 2:56
  that stuff gets exported as well in the u.s i was talking to my friend rachel,
• 3:02
  who is a colleague and friend,
• 3:04
  who will be helping me hopefully break through a little bit in the u.s with
• 3:08
  some events and live events and performance in 2027 which i'm very much looking
• 3:13
  forward to and we were chatting about this you know i was saying it's it's,
• 3:18
  she was talking about not that it was like a in terms of a negative but when
• 3:24
  she travels to europe obviously there is surface level and what i mean is you're
• 3:30
  not going back to roman times but,
• 3:33
  there is so much history so there might be a cemetery a graveyard from like
• 3:37
  the 12th century or there's buildings like you know oxford's university in cambridge
• 3:41
  been around for a thousand years and.
• 3:44
  It's this deep rich history where america as it is now and you know this is
• 3:48
  not going to be about politics or anything else,
• 3:52
  you know this culture goes back to a few hundred years 250 years this year,
• 3:58
  and i think we were talking about it she was a no i love american culture which
• 4:02
  i do too i kind of steeped in uh u.s culture the 20th century from,
• 4:09
  hollywood and you know the advent of television where a lot of firsts happened
• 4:14
  in the US I love US radio and.
• 4:18
  The writers, you know, the beat generation, which I'll talk about.
• 4:22
  So that's a lot of similarity where you can go anywhere in the world and you'll
• 4:26
  find U.S. culture. Now, you might like that, you might not. I think there's
• 4:30
  a lot to celebrate about American culture, particularly in the 20th century.
• 4:34
  It took over a lot of culture in the world.
• 4:38
  It was a global leader in that. I think the Golden Age, of which there's probably
• 4:42
  two or three of Hollywood and some amazing arts that was created.
• 4:46
  And Ireland kind of goes back a bit further.
• 4:50
  But again, we don't just export our whiskey and our Guinness and our pubs.
• 4:54
  We export Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, you know, and like WBH,
• 5:00
  there's all of these amazing literature figures.
• 5:03
  And they come from different, you know, the writing in Ireland,
• 5:07
  I find it has come from trying to break out of what was a very restrictive society,
• 5:14
  either under occupation by the British,
• 5:18
  and then they left, well, apart from six counties, which again,
• 5:23
  I won't get into politics tonight.
• 5:27
  You know, the church took over with the state for a long time.
• 5:32
  So there was a conservative, very Puritan in some ways.
• 5:38
  But as I said in a previous podcast, the society then, but in this previous
• 5:42
  podcast, there was an underbelly.
• 5:44
  When you went home, the old dubs, the Dubliners, and there was an underbelly
• 5:48
  of real society, you know, that kind of rolled their eyes at the church and stuff.
• 5:53
  But, you know, it was outwardly, that was, well, it could be a very difficult
• 5:59
  society to live in. James Joyce talked about this, the paralysis of,
• 6:03
  it was paralytic in Dublin. I'll read a piece about that later on as well.
• 6:08
  But I look at the U.S. and people talk about it, you know, it's very,
• 6:11
  CAS obviously has, it's a country of extremes.
• 6:15
  Because it's basically a continent, it's, you know, it's almost 50 nation states.
• 6:20
  I mean, no, you know, the small ones like Rhode Island, that's not like a country,
• 6:23
  but they're all these separate kind of states that come together.
• 6:27
  Some of them are like nation states, and they come together at a federal level.
• 6:31
  And you've got every extreme, right? It's a huge continent, so it's got every
• 6:36
  type of weather, it's got every type of economy, it's got every type of culture,
• 6:41
  and then you're very conservative and very liberal.
• 6:43
  But there is something about American culture of the 20th century which was
• 6:46
  seen as mostly widely liberal.
• 6:51
  But actually, where the contrast again becomes similarities is I was thinking
• 6:55
  about this with James Joyce, for example, and thinking about writers who either
• 7:00
  talk about the immigrant experience and having to go away, like even Boland.
• 7:04
  But also there's parallels with the beat generation in the fifties with Burroughs
• 7:10
  and Kerouac and Ginsburg, where they were kind of right on, man.
• 7:15
  They were kind of trying to break out from what was a very conservative norms,
• 7:20
  which was why the 1950s was still very conservative, but it was starting to
• 7:24
  creak at the seems that post-world war ii,
• 7:27
  kind of era you committed a depression in the 30s but again i'm no social commentator
• 7:33
  so take all of this but just it's just my my my take on these things.
• 7:39
  So you you had the 30s which was a very difficult era for most americans into
• 7:47
  world war ii and into the 50s, where you're still having,
• 7:53
  I think, values that were starting to creak at the seams didn't really become
• 7:58
  antiquated until the 60s and, you know, the whole...
• 8:03
  Summer of Love hippie movement. And although ironically, as I said to a friend
• 8:08
  that, you know, the hippie movement was overtaken by people who,
• 8:14
  you know, Summer of Love was, I think, 68.
• 8:17
  Am I right on that? Woodstock was 69. Maybe it was 69.
• 8:22
  But by the time Reagan beat Mondale in the presidential election,
• 8:26
  49 states to one in 84, the vast majority of those hippies will have grown up
• 8:32
  and had families and voted Republican. Right.
• 8:35
  So not vast majority, but quite a number of the will have. And it's a very,
• 8:37
  that's what makes America a very interesting system and country, I think.
• 8:42
  But in the fifties, Carowack in particular, on the road and the Dharma bums,
• 8:46
  and he was, I wasn't a fan of him as a person. When you see the interviews,
• 8:50
  he comes across as quite belligerent, particularly when he was drunk.
• 8:53
  And he was obviously an alcoholic, but there was a trying to break out from the norms.
• 8:58
  You know, they were interesting parallels to Orwell down and out in Paris and London.
• 9:03
  But if you've not read that book, do. On the Road is an excellent read, by the way.
• 9:08
  I remember I was living in London in 2001. I couldn't really get into it.
• 9:11
  And when I got back from London and back to live in Dublin, I picked it up again
• 9:16
  and I read it cover to cover twice.
• 9:19
  And it is that kind of, they're not living a normal life. They're kind of on,
• 9:23
  the railroad cars and going from place to place and kind of,
• 9:28
  you know, eking out an existence, but it's an existence of hedonism.
• 9:33
  And a lot of that is 1950s.
• 9:35
  And in Ireland as well, it's kind of trying to break out from that conservative
• 9:40
  kind of thing. So I think American Ireland has more than just the Irish-American element.
• 9:45
  There are a lot of parallels, but they're slightly different, you know.
• 9:48
  So I wanted to read a couple of poems, actually, that just, I was thinking about
• 9:55
  these, you know, even Boland, called the Emigrant Irish.
• 10:00
  Like oil lamps, we put them out the back of our houses, of our mines.
• 10:05
  We had lights better than newer then and then.
• 10:09
  A time came, this time and now we need them.
• 10:12
  Their dread makeshift example. They would have thrived on our necessities.
• 10:17
  What they survived we could not even live by their lights now it is time to
• 10:21
  imagine how they stood there,
• 10:23
  what they stood with that their possessions may become our power cardboard iron,
• 10:29
  their hardships parceled in them patience fortitude,
• 10:33
  long suffering in the bruised colored dusk of the new world and all the old
• 10:37
  songs and nothing to lose,
• 10:40
  i love that last line and all the old songs and nothing to lose it's absolutely
• 10:44
  beautiful now emma lazarus the new colossus us poet and writer.
• 10:51
  That's contrast. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs
• 10:57
  astride from land to land.
• 11:00
  Here at her sea-washed sunset gates she'll stand, a mighty woman with a torch
• 11:04
  whose flame is the imprisoned lightning and her name mother of exiles.
• 11:10
  From her beacon hand glows worldwide welcome her mild eyes command.
• 11:15
  The air-bridged harbour that twin cities frame.
• 11:19
  Keep ancient lands your storied pump cries the she with silent lips,
• 11:25
  give me your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe free the
• 11:29
  wretched refuse of your teeming shore send these the homeless tempest tossed
• 11:34
  to me i lift my lamp beside the golden door,
• 11:38
  lamp used in very different ways there but that is that emigrant and immigrant
• 11:45
  experience and obviously there is such a huge Irish-American connection, as we know, which,
• 11:51
  you know, is also part of, part of all of us.
• 11:55
  But America has a, as we see it now, right, a resurgent of a conservative movement.
• 12:03
  I do think the difference, and I'm happy to be proven wrong,
• 12:07
  is now it's kind of surface level.
• 12:09
  You know, these were intrinsic embedded values, and I take no view on it.
• 12:15
  I prefer to have an open society where people can live as they want but it seems
• 12:19
  to me that these days it's more surface level but you know it came from embedded values back then.
• 12:27
  And i think you know joyce when he talks when i talk about the beat generation
• 12:32
  and trying to break out you know and this is a passage from dubliners which,
• 12:38
  i've always very much liked.
• 12:41
  In the dark of my room, I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey face of the paralytic.
• 12:46
  I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas.
• 12:50
  But the grey face still followed me.
• 12:52
  It murmured and I understood that it desired to confess something.
• 12:56
  I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region.
• 13:01
  And there again I found it waiting for me.
• 13:05
  There's another piece here, which is earlier, I think, in the book.
• 13:08
  He'd often said to me, I'm not long for this world, and I thought his words
• 13:12
  idle. Now I knew they were true.
• 13:15
  Every night as I gazed up at the window, I said softly to myself the word paralysis.
• 13:20
  It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word nomen in the Euclid
• 13:24
  and the word simony in the catechism.
• 13:27
  Now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficient and sinful being.
• 13:33
  There's a talk of sin and religion and this gray face the following wanting
• 13:38
  to confess and it's a very repressed sort of writing you know you can understand
• 13:45
  why joyce went to the likes of paris and trieste to,
• 13:49
  you know where he kind of and i could be wrong on this so i've not researched
• 13:53
  it in a long time that's where he wrote a lot about dublin it was almost reimagined,
• 13:59
  with a love from afar, you know?
• 14:03
  Whereas America is different, you know, in Americans. A lot of them,
• 14:07
  when they come, go away, they don't yearn for home.
• 14:10
  They don't look for the Irish bar.
• 14:15
  You know, they look for the experience of the country that they're in.
• 14:20
  Not that the Irish don't, by the way. I just mean that.
• 14:24
  I've been at Huer for that over the years where checking out,
• 14:27
  where are we going? Where's the Irish bar?
• 14:29
  Because I love them I don't care whether it is the most deep sophisticated of
• 14:35
  Irish art and culture or singing the Rattlin' Bog with a pint of Guinness in
• 14:40
  your hand and Magaluf well,
• 14:42
  Santa Ponza was more the Irish side Magaluf was the English side in in New Yorker.
• 14:49
  But I think it's, I wanted to have something here to celebrate my new American
• 14:54
  audience. And there'll be more, you know.
• 14:56
  I wanted to read a couple of more, actually. And I was pulling some stuff out
• 15:00
  to try and, from what I remember, you know, this is Ginsberg,
• 15:04
  probably his famous piece, Howl.
• 15:06
  He, again, was that beat generation, you know, of writers that were the troublemakers, the rabble-rousers.
• 15:14
  I always find it hilarious, you know. When you go back and you look at it,
• 15:17
  it's like, and then we all get old or some of them didn't but and some of them
• 15:23
  ended up being rebels so till they died you know.
• 15:27
  I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness,
• 15:31
  starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at
• 15:36
  dawn looking at an angry fix,
• 15:39
  angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry
• 15:43
  dynamo and the machinery of night,
• 15:46
  who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat-up smoking in the supernatural
• 15:51
  darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities, contemplating jazz,
• 15:57
  who buried their brains to heaven under the L and saw Mohammed and angels staggering
• 16:03
  in tenement roofs illuminated,
• 16:05
  who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas
• 16:10
  and Blakely tragedy among the scholars of war who were expelled from the academies
• 16:15
  for crazy and publishing obscene oaths on the windows of the school.
• 16:20
  Who carried in unshaven rooms and underwear burning their money in wastebaskets
• 16:24
  and listening to the terror truth through the wall,
• 16:27
  who got busted in their public beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
• 16:33
  who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley,
• 16:37
  death or purgatory at their torsos, night after night with dreams,
• 16:41
  with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock, and endless balls,
• 16:46
  incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping
• 16:51
  towards poles of Canada and Patterson, illuminating all the motionless world of time between.
• 16:57
  Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns.
• 17:02
  Wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront burrows of tea-head joyride neon
• 17:07
  blinking traffic lights, sun and moon, and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn.
• 17:14
  Ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind.
• 17:18
  Who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to Holy
• 17:22
  Bronx on Benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down,
• 17:27
  shuddering, mouth-wracked and battered, bleak of brain,
• 17:31
  all drained of brilliance in the drear light of zoo,
• 17:35
  who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through
• 17:39
  the stale beer afternoon and desolate fugazis,
• 17:43
  listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talk continuously,
• 17:48
  70 hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge.
• 17:54
  A lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off,
• 17:58
  fire escapes off, windowsills off, Empire State out of the moon.
• 18:02
  Yakety-yacking, screaming, vomiting, whispering facts and memories and anecdotes
• 18:06
  and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars whose intellects
• 18:10
  disgores in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes.
• 18:14
  Meet for the synagogue cast on the pavement. Who vanished into nowhere.
• 18:19
  Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall.
• 18:23
  Suffering eastern sweats and Tangierian bone grindings and migraines of China
• 18:28
  under junk withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room.
• 18:33
  Who wandered around and around at midnight in a railroad yard. There's the railroads.
• 18:39
  Wondering where to go and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes
• 18:42
  and boxcars, boxcars, racketing through snow toward lonesome farms and grandfather
• 18:49
  night who studied plot in this post, St.
• 18:51
  John of the Cross telepathy and Bob Cabala,
• 18:56
  because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
• 19:00
  who loaned it through the streets of Idaho, seeking visionary Indian angels
• 19:04
  were visionary Indian angels who thought that they were mad when Baltimore gleaned
• 19:08
  in supernatural ecstasy.
• 19:10
  Now that goes on and on and on.
• 19:15
  And it's really, I don't know what you take from, it's a tough style.
• 19:19
  I should have read that and reminded myself of it because it's hard not to stumble.
• 19:25
  But it's almost stream of consciousness.
• 19:28
  It's like somebody talking on speed or coke, you know?
• 19:31
  And it just blathers out. But you think of his generation and that conservative
• 19:36
  white picket fence, the 2.4 children and.
• 19:42
  The Chevy in the driveway, that picture-perfect middle-American,
• 19:47
  middle-class America that rose up after the Second World War.
• 19:52
  And then you have this, which is, reminds me of a book I'll talk about in a
• 19:56
  moment, which is incredible, recommended by James Spader, the actor on a chat
• 20:01
  show and I couldn't put it down.
• 20:04
  But underneath this picture-perfect suburban adil is Ginsberg and Kerouac at the time and Burroughs.
• 20:14
  It's very, there's a griminess to what he's writing there, what he's talking
• 20:20
  about. It is the underbelly of a city, you know, and more than one city that
• 20:24
  he's talking about. But God, doesn't it sound like fun?
• 20:30
  It reminds me of a book. It's a bit of a, well, I'm told it's maybe a little exaggerated.
• 20:36
  Joseph Mitchell is a journalist and a writer in the US, and he was the most
• 20:41
  famously known case of writer's block. They said it was like 30 years. He didn't write a word.
• 20:46
  He would come into the publication he worked for, which as you can tell,
• 20:50
  this case on my mind right now, and wouldn't write a thing.
• 20:53
  Now, apparently he did write a little bit, but he wrote a book called Up in
• 20:57
  the Old Hotel, and it is old New York, late 19th century, early 20th century.
• 21:04
  And these characters are fascinating.
• 21:06
  And it's broken out into different stories of different individuals he's talking about.
• 21:10
  And it is that underbelly that I talk about.
• 21:13
  That makes the US so wonderful. It's one of the things I love about New York.
• 21:16
  There's still an underbelly to New York that is wonderful.
• 21:20
  There's still those diapers that are hidden away, little hidden gems.
• 21:24
  It's not all glass and steel and money and, you know, that very much has taken
• 21:30
  over. Although New York was always known for it.
• 21:32
  But that undercurrent of America, it's like a subculture that's existed,
• 21:37
  that still exists today.
• 21:39
  And again, in Ireland, it was the same.
• 21:42
  You know, it was this wonderful kind of.
• 21:46
  If you knew the right places to go and the right people, you know,
• 21:49
  all of a sudden, conservative Catholic Ireland was nowhere to be found.
• 21:53
  And it was the same with suburban, you know, middle class, middle of the road,
• 21:59
  Perry Como, Frank Sinatra.
• 22:02
  Well, Sinatra may not be the best example, but he probably was in the 40s and
• 22:06
  50s, you know, before pre kind of Rat Pack era.
• 22:11
  But, you know, I was again thinking about some of the poems I've written,
• 22:16
  you know, about the L-dubs, Crack is the Colour of Christy Moore.
• 22:20
  US culture in the 20th century was all about the open road.
• 22:24
  It was jazz and, you know, Harley Davison's and Route 66, open hearts and open minds and open road.
• 22:34
  And Ireland was very much about the open heart of the fire.
• 22:38
  Irish music was, as I've said before, there was a melancholy to it,
• 22:43
  you know. Even the love songs are sad.
• 22:47
  And it yearning for freedom and independence that America had in abundance,
• 22:51
  or that was what the culture was. The culture was, you know,
• 22:54
  free birds, you know, and the Eagles.
• 22:59
  Hotel California, which I said is a wonderful poem, never mind a song.
• 23:04
  And this free open road in front of you, and fuck it hop on the motorbike and
• 23:08
  fuck off hop in the car and you know the cadillac with the top down route 66 go coast to coast,
• 23:15
  and and live your life the way you want to and it's all culture and some of
• 23:19
  it's myth you know some of it's real.
• 23:24
  But i do love american culture and as i say those contrasts and similarities are,
• 23:32
  are very fascinating to me because you can't help it it's like growing up beside
• 23:37
  England, you know, given the history,
• 23:40
  you can't help, but it seeps into you in terms of the culture that's there,
• 23:44
  at least knowing it and what it's about.
• 23:46
  And obviously I lived there and America was no different.
• 23:50
  It permeated our lives growing up,
• 23:54
  television and radio and literature and my house and the news,
• 23:59
  you know, I did journalism in college and I remember I had to do a piece on,
• 24:06
  Irish versus British news.
• 24:08
  So RTE versus BBC. This is about 30 years ago.
• 24:12
  And over the course of a month, what I had noticed, which is understandable,
• 24:16
  when you think about it, and it's the same in America, in British news, I think it was,
• 24:24
  I think it was something along the lines of 28 times out of the 30 days,
• 24:30
  28, you know, evening news on the BBC at the time of the top three news stories, two of them were.
• 24:39
  Local, national stories rather than international.
• 24:43
  And it was the other way around for RTE, our Irish media.
• 24:48
  So it was, the RTE in Ireland led much more with international news in their
• 24:54
  top three, or at least two of the top three stories.
• 24:59
  And really it reflects the culture and it reflects the history.
• 25:03
  The Irish, much as we were known for the conservative Catholic values,
• 25:07
  and they're the people at the top, you know, We're a very outward-looking people
• 25:12
  in the main, globally, I think.
• 25:15
  So that's reflected in the media. Of course, at the time, we're going to have
• 25:18
  a story about Bill Clinton.
• 25:20
  Of course, we're going to have a story about what's going on elsewhere in the
• 25:23
  world, or we might leave with a story about British politics, for example.
• 25:28
  Whereas the BBC was much more, was more Britain-centric, and then America was
• 25:34
  completely American-centric.
• 25:36
  They're not they're you know they're never having a story about what's going
• 25:40
  on in Ireland and it's understandable but it's very interesting I think those
• 25:44
  kind of um you know differences when,
• 25:47
  I have found all three of those cultures obviously Irish is it's indigenous
• 25:53
  to me but British and American culture seeped in it's it's it's very close to
• 25:58
  me feels very close to me I'm sure it feels very close to most, a lot of people.
• 26:03
  Whereas I think in America, I mean, maybe when Trump or somebody gives out about,
• 26:08
  the British prime minister or the mayor of London or whatever,
• 26:11
  it feels like it's closer, but it's still very far away.
• 26:14
  There's still a complete lack of understanding. And as I was saying to my friend,
• 26:17
  Rachel, I said, it's not a criticism.
• 26:22
  America is 50 nation states, coast to coast.
• 26:26
  You can live any life you want there. You can have any kind of job,
• 26:30
  any kind of life. It's just, you know, if I want to go skiing,
• 26:34
  I can do that in America. If I want to go scorching hot beach, I can do that in America.
• 26:39
  If I want to go mountain climbing, I can do all of it there.
• 26:44
  So when you've got a nation that's that large and that large of an imprint on the world,
• 26:51
  well probably if you're not going to travel much outside of america and whether
• 26:55
  you can think that's good or bad i don't really take a view on it unless you're
• 26:58
  narrow-minded as well then maybe it is more important to know what's going in
• 27:03
  you know florida than france,
• 27:06
  and that's why i always used to defend americans for like all these they don't
• 27:10
  know anything what goes on in the world and it's like well it's a huge place,
• 27:15
  with a lot going on at the state and the national level and,
• 27:20
  And so, yeah, they're going to probably lead with, you know,
• 27:23
  the largest economy in the world.
• 27:24
  They're going to lead with what's going on in their own nation.
• 27:29
  And, you know, a lot of Americans are steeped in American history, which is fascinating.
• 27:34
  You know, the American Civil War fascinates me. It's a great example of,
• 27:38
  like the Irish Civil War, brother against brother and family against family
• 27:42
  and neighbors against neighbors.
• 27:44
  All of this kind of thing of Civil War is grimly fascinating.
• 27:48
  I don't mean that it's amazing to, you know, because it can actually,
• 27:54
  it can turn much more inhumane, actually, than other wars.
• 27:58
  And I don't mean, you know, in totality, the Second World War,
• 28:01
  atrocities are committed in every war and it's horrendous.
• 28:04
  But there is something about that, your neighbor who you're friendly with,
• 28:09
  and all of a sudden the civil war breaks out and you're trying to kill each other.
• 28:13
  And America has a history of that. And Ireland certainly has a history of that as well.
• 28:19
  I didn't really want to, I don't want to end. Do you know, I'm not going to
• 28:22
  end on a negative note here. There's another piece I want to read.
• 28:26
  I don't know if it's good or bad, guys, but there'll be none of my poems this
• 28:29
  evening. So you can decide whether that's right or wrong.
• 28:33
  But I want to, so I've read this before, but it's beautiful.
• 28:38
  So I'm going to, I'm going to read this. I'm just going to pull it up here.
• 28:42
  A little bit of dead air there. I was going to sing you a little bit of a song, you know.
• 28:46
  Black is the colour. I won't.
• 28:49
  Here we go. The Isle of Inishfree.
• 28:52
  I will arise and go now, and go to Inishfree, and a small cabin build there,
• 28:58
  of clay and wattles made.
• 29:00
  Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, and live alone in the bee-loud glade.
• 29:07
  And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
• 29:10
  dropping from the veils of the morning, to where the cricket sings.
• 29:15
  Their midnights all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, an evening full of the limit's wings.
• 29:20
  I will arise and go now, for always night and day. I hear lake water lapping
• 29:25
  with low sounds by the shore.
• 29:27
  While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement's grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
• 29:33
  Beautiful. So with that, guys, there's a live show, NYX Hotel,
• 29:39
  Christchurch, Dublin, 26th of February, 2027. It's a Friday.
• 29:43
  TheRootedSoulBooks.com. It's all on there, folks. It's getting revamped soon as well.
• 29:47
  So it'll be a lot more dynamic, which I hope. I don't know what that means.
• 29:52
  But there'll be more live performance from me on there and filming of that show in February.
• 29:58
  And we'll be on that website and alan at the rooted soulbooks.com is the email
• 30:04
  and at alan mcdonald i re is the instagram handle sorry guys i have the last
• 30:08
  two days i have been up since uh two o'clock in the morning,
• 30:11
  one for study and then one for a flight,
• 30:14
  so i hope everyone's well i hope my american audience enjoyed that come back
• 30:19
  guys and tell me and let me know if i'm talking a shite or if you agree with
• 30:22
  some of it but there's so many parallels with that,
• 30:26
  two wonderful nations of people, culture, heart,
• 30:30
  and both nations becoming somewhat of a melting pot, which I don't know about
• 30:33
  anyone else. I very much like.
• 30:36
  All right, guys, better living within.