The WAG needs Carl

I've never been to Merthyr Tydfil. I've only heard about it, and nothing good. When people here say "Merthyr," they say it with a tone of defeat -- as if they are remembering the pain and frustration of being punched really hard in the stomach.

In my head, Merthyr is associated mostly with its name. Welsh for "martyr," I envision life there as a process of slow and constant suffering. The once heart of Wales gouged by the deception of industrial promise; and a moral tale of what happens when you refuse to let go of the past. Merthyr, in my head is what Wales was. Or, rather, it is what What Wales Was has become. It is that unhappy cocktail of failed dreams, and ambition deficiency. In my head, the sun never shines in Merthyr.

That's almost certainly not true. I know a girl from Merthyr and she is, in fact, an incredibly warm and genuine person; the quintessential big-chested friendly Welsh woman who complains about the price of bread.

But, even she will lilt her voice just so slightly when speaking of her hometown -- as if speaking of a relative who was fortunate enough to pass away before the police could press charges over his collection of child porn.

Then, on the train tannoy (FTYPAH: "public-address system") this morning came the cheerful song of a proper Welsh valleys accent:

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen! Welcome aboard the Arriva Trains Wales service to Merthyr Tydfil! Our next stop will be Cathays; please alight here for Cardiff University. Please have your tickets ready for the automatic ticket barriers. Those of you staying on past Cathays, again, welcome aboard! My name is Carl; I'll be taking care of you this morning, all the way up through Pontypridd and up to Merthyr! I'll be passing through the train shortly, so please have your tickets ready. OK, see you in a bit!"

Carl made Merthyr sound like a magical place. Pontypridd and Merthyr! Wow! He made them sound like places you'd want to go to. More than that, places you'd be a fool not to go to. What's that? You've never been to Merthyr? My dear boy, do you but hate life? Do you detest puppies and pretty girls and freedom? What man with even the weakest grasp on sanity would refute Merthyr Tydfil?

I wanted to stay on. I wanted to have a chat with Carl. Who can concentrate on learning Irish when Merthyr awaits? Just the enthusiasm that Carl put into saying the name was enough to make me think: "I am going to take a day trip to Merthyr in the summer. I will read up on it and go see this place with all its history. It will be great!"

Imagine how the Merthyr-bound passenger must have felt: "Hey! I'm going there! Carl's talking about me!"

Clearly, Carl needs to be employed by the Welsh Assembly Government. His happy voice should be piped into all the trains in Wales, making us all feel that the places we are going are special and important; making us eager to visit those places that are just down the road.

Yr hen ddinas

This city is only as old as the stories that are told about it.

I learned recently that Cardiff was established by the Romans 1,952 years ago. Nobody appears to have been keeping records before the Romans showed, so as far as we know Caerdydd (a) is the oldest city (b) in Wales.

You wouldn't really know that from walking around. On the surface, Cardiff often resembles St. Paul, Minn., with its relatively wide and tree-lined streets, architecture that tends not to date back more than 150 years and ample parking. It is a city that Welsh people, Welsh speakers in particular, are often eager to dismiss. This modern, always changing, historyless place; it's not the REAL Wales.

Of course, in fact, it is. Like the real Wales -- whatever the hell that's supposed to mean -- it's history is hidden.

European History courses in the United States would often be better named as courses in "Things The British Have Done," such is their focus. So, the facts and histories of this island are not too unfamiliar. Except when it comes to Wales. We learned nothing of Wales in the United States.

But then I learned the language of this place no one's heard of and it's slowly revealed a vast expanse of literature and history. It's like poking your head into the ground and discovering one of those enormous underground caverns that you could build an A380" in. It's an awareness that leaves me feeling a bit like Nada in "They Live," walking around knowing that all around me, practically coming up from the ground, and unseen to everyone else, is this different culture/history.

Cardiff is like that. Its soul is veiled.

There are former Roman sites dotted all throughout the city, but few are identified as such. The most amusing one for me is the Roman fort that lies opposite the Cardiff Bay Retail Park (FTYPAH: "strip mall"). Turn one way, you see Ford Escorts queuing at the McDonald's drive-through, turn the other way and you see the work of people who laid the foundation of Western civilisation.

Cardiff has the largest concentration of castles of any city in the world. But you'll only find two of them in any tourist literature, with one of those being a castle that was torn down and reconstructed according to Victorian interpretation. The others are crumbling, or paved over by housing estates.

There used to be dozens of canals through the city. Hundreds of miles of railway. Roads have names that reflect a history hardly anyone knows. The original Welsh name for City Road is Heol y Plwca, which refers to the fact that when it marked the boundary of Cardiff it was where heretics were hanged.

In contrast, this city welcomed Britain's first Muslims. It rioted to keep the Irish out. Its history is rich but almost wholly unknown by its inhabitants.

I was thinking about all this last Tuesday as I sat eating my lunch in what used to be a church graveyard but in the last year has been converted into a lovely little square with benches and trees. There is a straight, neat row of old tombstones on one side of the square. Having lived here a year ago, I know that they didn't used to be so perfectly aligned like that. Presumably the subjects of the tombstones are still in their original spots -- beneath the workers and shoppers and tourists eating pasties and pork sandwiches.

There's something about this city. It's a hell of an interesting place if you can find someone who knows about it.

(a) "Caer" means "fort," and "dydd" means "day." Calling the place Day Fort doesn't seem to make sense, so the theory is that "dydd" is a bastardised version of either "Taf" (the river that runs through the heart of Cardiff) or of "Didius" (a Roman bloke who was governor of a nearby province).

(b) I'm using "city" in the philosophical sense here, obviously. As a city, Cardiff is only 102 years old. FTYPAH, the British are anal in their use of words like "city" and "village" and "town." The words are not as interchangeable as they are in the United States; you're only what the Queen says you are.

The tragedy and glory of men

I've mentioned before that the Welsh love poetry. I've had a few people try to disprove me by pointing out that they don't like poetry, but that is simply because another thing that is true of the Welsh is that they are naturally contrary.

The fondness for verse was again on display this week. Where else but Wales would they have a television programme that mixes poetry and rugby?

On Tuesday, BBC 2 aired a programme called "Rugby: Poetry in Motion." Featuring poems by Phil Carradice, Gillian Clarke, Kathryn Gray, Paul Henry and Owen Sheers, it was little more than half an hour of slow-motion shots of rugby players set to dreamy voiceover.

What's strange is that it worked. It shouldn't have. When someone refers to the fullback position as "midwife and curator," and suggests that it is an allegory for Western culture, that should cause you to throw things at the TV. But I sat there watching and writing down phrases and thinking: "Ooh, I wish I had come up with that line."

The poems focused on the various field positions, the team, and the game as a whole, making it all sound as if rugby were a part of the eternal struggle. Having played rugby, I suppose that in a simplistic and ridiculous way, there is truth to that -- a lot of my personal philosophy derives from my short time of having my ass kicked on a weekly basis.

So far, I can only find two of the poems online: Sheers' "Flankers" and Gray's "Prop," which I think may be incomplete from what I remember of the broadcast. Neither of the poems have my favourite lines, one of which I used for the headline of this post.

I also like:
- The poem referring to the time in which a player stares into the sky waiting to receive a kick as "the dazzling light between birth and death."
- The poem that described the scrum as "the mud and bone." Seriously, how bad-ass is that?

But easily, the best was the poem that started with the line: "I felled a tree with my bare hands."

Fuck yeah.

I tried to imagine something similar being done in the United States; it would fail miserably. I suppose Quincy Troupe could pull it off*, but he'd be the only one and then he'd be dropped as soon as they found out he hadn't really played varsity in high school**. Troupe, by the way, is one of only three living American poets that I can name off the top of my head -- the other two being May Angelou and Henry Rollins. Unless you count Common, which you probably should, because he's the bloke who came up with "Doing all she can for her man and a baby/ Driving herself crazy like the astronaut lady."

For those of you in Wales who missed it, "Rugby: Poetry in Motion" airs again on BBC 2 Wales, Wednesday 12 September at 10 p.m.

*The camera work here makes me want to kill. Just close your eyes and listen to the poem.

** I doubt anyone will get that reference without a Google search.

Rambling

I walked today from Barry to East Aberthaw and decided to turn the experience into an audio/visual blogging extravaganza. Well, perhaps "extravaganza" is a bit much. It's really no more than a slideshow with commentary.

I apologise for the quality of the audio in some of these clips. It's blustery on the coast. Adding to the poor quality is the fact that in most of the clips I was walking. My goal was to do things quickly and give it a sort of "instant" feel, but arguably this still could have been achieved while standing still and out of the wind.

The audio has the added factor of displaying my present hodgepodge accent. It's generally the old Minnesota-with-Texas-twang sound, but occasionally you pick up South Wales phrasing. It's most notable, I think, when I'm talking about mini-golf in the clip from Porthkerry Park.


The journey begins. I took the train from Sweet Home Radyr Way down to Barry. In the audio clip below, I misspell the Welsh name.


Angular waterway-thingy in Barry's The Knap area.


Lake in Barry's The Knap area.


This looks like a building site, but it is, in fact, a historical site. These are the remains of a Roman building that stood here in 45 AD. It's quintessential Britain that you have ancient sites sandwiched into everything else. Those are peoples' homes in the background. Just behind me was an ice cream shop. I was very obviously the only person interested in the site.


Above The Knap. The large body of water, of course, is the Bristol Channel. Off in the haze you can see Flatholm Island.

Audio from Barry:





The viaduct at Porthkerry Park.


Mini golf course in Porthkerry Park.

Audio from Porthkerry:



I don't know what a bulwark is, but this camp of theirs is mighty old.


In the haze, across the water, you can see England.


Phallic stone circle at Rhoose Point.


Giant compass made of rock. Impressively, the markings on the compass are in Welsh. In this picture you are looking to the dwyrain (east).


These stones were very clearly in a specific formation, but I couldn't make sense of it.


The golf course between life and death.

Audio from Rhoose Point:



According to a BBC cameraman I know, you can go down to the beach and see dinosaur footprints somewhere around here.




A ship heading out to sea.


Trailer park.

Audio from the trailer park:



That is a massive sign. Sadly, the sailboat hit it and sank. Two people died. Very sad.


Wetlands near East Aberthaw.


This is a family crabbing in the wetlands near East Aberthaw. I really wanted to take a picture of what they had caught, but I couldn't figure out a non-embarrassing way to say: "Can I take a picture of your crabs?"


Interesting-looking abandoned building.



Audio from the woods near East Aberthaw:





Even the garages are made of stone in East Aberthaw.


The Blue Anchor pub has been around since 1380.


A look at the inviting front side of The Blue Anchor, and its thatched roof.


Heaven.

Audio from The Blue Anchor:



And that's about it. I walked home the same way. I left my house at 10 a.m. and was back just before 6 p.m. If you ever come to visit me and want to see The Blue Anchor, I promise that we will just drive there.

Aesthetically pleasing, or, in other words, fly

If, like me, you feel obligated to watch every television programme featuring a poncy British guy yammering on about whatever subject it is that he thinks is so delightfully interesting it deserves an hour of your attention, you know that the modern Olympics aren't quite the Olympics as they used to be. In the good ol' days, of course, the chaps ran around naked and killed each other. Ah, good times.

Somewhat similarly, the Eisteddfod dreamed up by Iolo "Forgery is Fun" Morgannwg isn't exactly the same sort of thing that was going on back in the 12th century. It is an opium-induced Edwardian romantic vision of Welsh culture. That's an element that I wish they would play up a little more: "Welcome to Eisteddfod: kooky pseudo-druidism from the mind of a nutjob."

Of course, dreamed-up cultural traditions are perfectly fine with me. Made-up stuff provides the foundation of American culture. Thanksgiving was dreamed up to sell cookbooks. I simply bring it up because romanticism is the thing that struck me most about my second Eisteddfod experience.

For those of you playing along at home, an eisteddfod (roughly pronounced: "ay-STETH-vode") is a cultural event/series of competitions that encompasses pretty much anything you've got time for: singing, literature, dancing, arts, crafts, etc. It's a bit like a county fair, minus the baking competition and those kitschy endearing elements that British filmmakers like to feature when trying to demonstrate that all Americans are slack-jawed yokels. There is no eisteddfod leek-eating contest (and more's the pity for that, I say).

The eisteddfodau (more than one eisteddfod) are based on a tradition of poets strutting their stuff for one another, which took place as late as the 12th century and as early as some time that I failed to note when I had a lecture on Eisteddfod several months ago. These events are held all throughout Wales, all throughout the year and they are generally about as exciting as you would expect a bunch of people gathered in a church hall reading poetry to be. Actually, it's more fun than that, thanks to sock-rocking elements like cerdd dant and côr llefaru.

Cerdd dant is a competition that in its essence involves singing to harp accompaniment. But for wacky fun, every competitor has to sing the same song. Or, at least, the same words. I think they are allowed to make up a different tune if they are so inclined, but to be honest I've never been able to sit through a cerdd dant competition long enough to say one way or the other. Here's a clip of a bloke who won £150 for his performance.

The utterly baffling côr llefaru, meanwhile is something that our man Iolo almost certainly would have seen in his opium fits. Like some kind of low-tech Lydia Lunch spoken word performance*, it involves several people reciting poetry in dramatic unison. You should probably be sitting down to watch this clip (although, it's worth it for the hottie flutist).

Easily the most hilarious competitions, though, are those for dancing. They are funny in a surreal way -- the whole thing of performing what should be life-affirming folk dance on a vast, empty stage before an utterly silent audience. It's like attempting to do Def Comedy Jam on Sunday morning at an old folk's home.

Once a year, there is a national Eisteddfod (note the big "E"), the big-money eisteddfod. This is the thing that all the Welsh Bob Dylan wannabes** sing about. Last week's Eisteddfod events pulled just shy of 155,000 visitors, which is about half of what St. Paul's Grand Old Day pulls in a single day, or 1.5 million people short of Minnesota State Fair attendance. But don't let the numbers fool you; Eisteddfod is televised live across the country and the focus of all conversation for the week before, during and after the actual affair.

Well, the focus of conversation in Welsh-speaking circles, at least. The bus driver who took me from Chester to Mold (where Eisteddfod was held this year) had no idea it was going on.

People attending Eisteddfod are probably happy to have it that way. It plays more into the sense of isolation that Welsh people often seek to create for themselves. And minimal numbers of English speakers assist in the romanticism of the event. It meant that in the instant village that was the caravan park one heard only Welsh. Hundreds of people, across acres of land, yammering away in y Gymraeg. It was Welshie utopia.

FTYPAH: "caravan" here means "camping trailer." Imagine my disappointment when I first figured that out. In all the times I had heard about people going caravanning, I had envisioned them bouncing about the British countryside like Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof."

In that vein, I had bundled my tent along with me to Mold and set up with a few friends on the periphery of the rows of caravans. Camping at festivals is an established British summer tradition -- pitching a tent in the mud and stomping around on two hours' sleep is part of the experience. Or, at least, that is the way that it is portrayed. In fact, what I found was that everyone had a tent that was at least three times the size of mine. Mari had a six-man tent all to herself. Rhodri and Elin's tent was so large and equipped with so many guy wires that it reminded me of the tent used by Hawkeye, Hunnicutt and Winchester in M*A*S*H. I kept asking them when they were going to set up the still (a reference that I think was lost on them).

People came equipped with full-size air mattresses, camping stoves, radios, televisions and countless other amenities. The field itself was equipped with proper working toilets, showers, a chippy (FTYPAH: "burger stand"), a convenience store and a bar. This is what I mean by "instant village;" it wasn't camping at all.

At dusk, smoke from barbecues would lift up against the sunset and hills, and from every corner you could hear the constant patter of Radio Cymru or families and friends all speaking in this ancient language. It reminded me of my first impression of Cymru Gymraeg (Welsh-speaking Wales) more than 10 years ago: that I had somehow stumbled into a different country within a different country. That's the romantic vision, the romantic hope of many Welsh speakers, I suppose. It's the thing that makes Eisteddfod worthwhile, which is also what makes it hard to appreciate.

Welsh-language culture is wrapped almost entirely in the language. It has traditional dance and music, but for whatever reason these elements are seemingly shunned within the culture. Its modern music is awful more often than not, and almost all other modern cultural aspects are indistinguishable from those found in England. This results in a culture that doesn't really have an entry level for appreciation. There is no bodhrán or tartan to Welsh culture.

On the most recent episode of "Mountain," Griff Rhys Jones was talking about a British attempt to wipe out Highland sentiment by killing a load of people. He noted that tartan (FTYPAH: "plaid") was at one time banned and people were cleared off their land and killed, and yet in modern times all these Highlandy things can be found pretty much anywhere on the British islands and they are easily recognized worldwide. He suggested that these things have become more widespread than they ever would have been if the British had simply left the Highlanders alone. He then darkly quipped: "Perhaps if there had been a few massacres in Wales, people would know who we are."

There's a certain truth to that. Whatever the reason, it's difficult for outsiders to really grasp the differentness of Welsh culture. If you are an English speaker or person from outside the British islands, there is little to pique your interest because the language is so tightly woven into the culture -- if you don't know the language, you are not likely to see what's so fucking special about this place.

All of this is at the heart of why I was so disappointed by my first Eisteddfod experience. Last year, when the child bride and I went to Eisteddfod in Swansea, I was hoping for a sort of cultural event/celebration that would in some way vindicate all the time and money and trouble of moving here. I wanted to be able to say to my wife: "Yes, I know that I have failed you as a husband by dragging you on some ridiculous dream, but look at what we get in return."

I had long had difficulty answering the question that I am so often asked -- "Why Welsh?" -- and hoped that Eisteddfod would finally provide that answer.

It didn't. Cripes almighty, it didn't. It was a bunch of rocks and white information booths. A third-rate county fair trying to win legitimacy by mimicking the "Ode to a Grecian Urn" scene in "Music Man"***.

But then this year, I was sitting around a barbecue with friends -- beer in hand, smoke rising into the summer sunset -- and it hit me. It hit me again the next day, when I was chatting with people who were spread out on the grass near a beer stand, listening to the caterwauling of yet another Dylan wannabe. The language stupid.

So often in Welsh-speaking situations there is an element of something -- defiance, academia, back-room dealing -- that runs through the experience. But in Eisteddfod, with everyone speaking the language simply because it is a language and language is how you tell your friends about funny things, the simple act of talking rubbish in the sun feels slightly otherworldly. It's romanticism, of course. In this world there is only one radio station, one TV station, no newspaper and the 1990s have yet to occur musically. But with the language clicking in my brain, I was finally able to see the appeal of Eisteddfod.

I don't like saying this, but I actually enjoyed it.

*Whoa, in the great game of obscurity baseball, I have just knocked one out of the park with that reference.

**For some inexplicable reason, one of the most-respected Welsh-language pop artists is a dude who blatantly stole his style from Bob Dylan ( here's proof). Even more confusing is that there are legions of younger performers who are blatantly stealing their style from him.

***I couldn't find that scene on You Tube, but I did find my favourite scene from the musical. His producing a marshmallow (7:25) is one of the greatest bits of random comedy ever. I also wish that I had had the guts to use "It's alright, I know everything and it doesn't make any difference," as an opening line when meeting a girl.

A pretty place

I am safely again among the soggy throng of Caerdydd after spending a week in Nant Gwrtheyrn. I have been assured that the stitches from the Welsh Appreciation Assistance implant will heal quickly and I won't even notice it's there unless I support England in rugby -- in which case I will experience a "steady and unpleasant burning sensation in the head."

I'm sure it's nothing to worry about.

For those of you just arriving to this blog but still keen to tell me how to run my life or make snap judgments about what I do or don't know, I've spent the last week in the North Wales village of Nant Gwrtheyrn, an isolated patch of land that was set up as a place for learners to live a sort of immersion experience. The fact that this immersion experience doesn't seem to be able to make ends meet without also hosting self-involved English-speaking creative writing exchange students from CUNY kind of makes one wonder why he spent six hours in a minibus to go there, but it was at least pretty. Surrounded on three sides by mountain, the village rests just a few hundred yards from the Irish Sea. On a clear day one can see north to Anglesey, which is one of those pieces of information that really isn't all that interesting if you don't know the geography of Wales.

Here is a map of Wales. If you look at the top left corner of said map, you will see a little isolated bit of land -- that is Anglesey, known in Welsh as Ynys Môn. Just below that you'll see a small peninsula, known as the Llŷn Peninsula and therein is located Nant Gwrtheyrn, close to the village of Llanaelhaiarn. Not on the map, but some 60 odd miles to the west, is a place called "Ireland." You might have heard of it. On a really good day, one can see all the way from Nant Gwrtheyrn to the Wicklow Mountains, which is where the water for Guinness comes from.

The village gets its name from a king who reportedly moved there in an effort to get as far away from Saxons as possible. Gwrtheyrn lived in a castle on a mountain on the village's north side. Legend has it that he got all in a huff about something, ran all the way to the mountain on the village's south side, and flung himself into the sea. Why he couldn't have jumped from the mountain he was already on is anyone's guess, but it certainly puts into doubt those studies that say exercise helps to ease depression. The village was at one time cursed by grumpy monks, which resulted in a girl getting stuck in a tree, but it's most notable period in history was the time spent churning out rock for Queen Victoria's empire. Granite from Nant Gwrtheyrn was used to pave roads all across Britain. Tons and tons of the stuff was shipped to Liverpool, which, as Mary alluded to, meant that the village was more closely tied to an English city a few hundred miles away than any of those villages resting behind the mountains.

Nant Gwrtheyrn's quarry legacy lives on through Coronation Street. A cobblestone road in the soap was built with granite from the village. But for the most part, things came to a stop when Britain started using tarmac. The village fell into disrepair, was occupied by a hippie commune, and then sold to a load of idealists in the 1970s. If I remember correctly, they bought the whole massive area -- land, houses and all -- for around £35,000.

The village consists of six buildings: a main office, a chapel, a small cafe, a learning centre, and two rows of houses. All of these buildings are built of granite, most of them dating back to the mid 1800s (I'm not sure about the cafe). There are 12 houses in each row (FTYPAH, a "house" in Britain is pretty much any dwelling; an American would refer to them as "town homes"), each house about the size of the house that the child bride and I live in (two-floor, two-bedroom home of about 1,200 square feet).

The rows of houses are catty-corner to one another. Actually, I don't know if they are catty-corner, because I don't actually know what "catty-corner" means. I think it means that they make a sort of "L" shape. I heard my friend Paul use "catty-corner" once and so decided that it must be something intelligent people say (Paul is earning a PhD at MIT -- if smart were money, he would be the U.S. military budget). I am always eager to use the phrase, even though I don't know how to use it. Whatever the terminology, the rows of houses border two sides of a walled field where I played soccer for the first time in my life. From my window I could look out over the field and then beyond to the Irish Sea.

The air was fresh and in the mornings, sheep and wild mountain goats would mingle about eating the grass and heather and leaving all kinds of stuff for you to step in. It's a very pretty place, which means that it will almost certainly be spoiled within my lifetime.