Believe me, I could bore you at great length with my views about Irish and Welsh, which are inherited to a great extent (my dad was a scholar of both languages). Perhaps we could bore each other!

I wonder whether Welsh didn't benefit, in an ass-backwards way, from the fact that Wales was never realistically going to leave the UK. The Welsh language didn't get bound up with a complicated and painful form of nationalistic struggle, about which the majority of Irish people felt profoundly ambivalent. The cause of the Welsh language became the nationalist struggle, but without car bombings, proto-Gitmo internment camps, or British tanks on the streets of Aberystwyth.

My father used to say that Irish people said one thing about the English at 4 in the afternoon, and quite a different thing at 4 in the morning. I think the simplest way of summarizing the history of Irish nationalism is to say that they believed both things when they were saying them.

Irish has had a very modest comeback in recent decades, and I'm all for that. To many younger Irish people in the late 20th century, it seemed too closely aligned with a stuffy, parochial version of nationalism, hemmed in on one side by traditional music and Gaelic games, and on the other side by the smell of gunpowder.

Then there was the fact that when Ireland turned away from Britain, it inevitably turned to America, and all the cultural-demographic ties to the US only cemented the supremacy of English in Irish life. There's that jokey presentation of an Irish working-class home, circa the '80s, as in Roddy Doyle's The Commitments, where the pictures on the wall are of the Virgin Mary, Elvis and JFK. A cliche, but not that far away from reality.

The book's author sent me a nice email today, very gracious and not at all bothered by the criticism in the piece. She says she has greatly enjoyed the discussion here. Admittedly, that was before the random explosion of anti-Semitic vitriol, but whatever.

Here's what she had to say about the near-dearth of Tolkienian language discussion in her book:

The true reason for my lack of attention to Tolkien was not so much a scholarly failure as a writerly one. It's not that I wasn't aware of his importance or the culture he has spawned (though you're right about me not being a "fan"), but that I could not for the life of me figure out how to give a readerly, popular account. I never found the right "story" hook, and Tolkenian linguistics is so deep, so technical, and so serious that everything I tried came out too boring (for anyone who wasn't already interested in it) and out of place with the tone of the book. So I stuck with his own inspiring explanations for the reasons behind his art. There must be a way to do Tolkien for a general audience, but I couldn't find it. Maybe a true fan will now be inspired my omission to find it!

It's full service at this gas station: I just went in there and added links to all those sites, plus made a couple of other tiny fixes.

That's how it is sometimes on the Internet, where nothing is ever finished. We had to put the issue up and I had to put my kids to bed. Now the sprats are dozin' and the article's got its HTML, just an hour or so late.

Thanks for the note, Tideswimmer. It's precisely because there are hundreds of thousands of people like you in small towns all over the country that cable & online VOD will become a crucial element of the independent-film economy. (That's a not-so-subtle plug for the feature story I posted here on Wednesday.)

On that note, I just added a sentence to the "End of the Line" review noting that in addition to its theatrical release, the film is available as a six-part series on Babelgum, a VOD site free to the user. Not the ideal way to watch this movie, which has lots of beautiful photography and looks great on a larger screen -- but for many people the option will be not seeing it at all.

Thanks for the responses, folks.

BF, you raise a good point about piracy, which is something I've got to explore a little further. It seems inescapable that the case of Wolverine is way different from some little foreign movie where the potential audience tops out at 35,000 people or so. If a significant percentage of that audience -- and its most devoted core -- is already tech-savvy folks who know about P2P and bit-torrent sharing, I think the potential distributor of that little movie is pretty screwed.

Grady really doesn't think that's true, evidently. Maybe I can follow up with him. If he means that a manga-based movie like 20th Century Boys has the potential for a fairly large audience, if handled right, and piracy around the edges won't hurt, then maybe he's right. But as you say, a film like Love Exposure or Fish Story, which would have to be handled perfectly & get a little lucky to do anything north of $100K, just seems like a different case.

I long to buy into the libertarian meme that film piracy is no problem and maybe part of the Great Freedom [TM] bestowed on us by the Internets. But I'm not quite able to choke it down at this point.