Random Writing Nonense

I was reading my Sunday paper this past Sunday and when I opened up to the book review section, a face was staring back at me:

The review was for Sally Rooney's newest book, but I am/was mostly unfamiliar with her work. The article writer mentioned that the galleys of Ms. Rooney's breakout work, Conversations with Friends, was well-worn when given to her, and it was suggested that as another young-millennial-lady, she'd likely enjoy it.

She did not at the time do so, and I was reminded of a Matt Groening "Life in Hell" comic strip about modern artistic types, with a category titled "How to Annoy Them" that I loved:

The one I usually think about is the Poet, and how to annoy a poet? Well:

Anyway, while reading this article, the idea of a 24 year old writer shooting to stardom caused mixed feelings in me: part envy, obviously, but then again I'd have to finish something worthy of attention, so...; and excitement, since non-genre writing can be a viable art-form for making a living (and maybe because it means people still read..?).

But I was looking at the picture of Ms. Sally Rooney, and I aid to myself: This girl isn't an American. I had a feeling, based on how she looked in the article's portrait, that I knew from which country she came. I made a guess, and then I looked it up.

And I was correct. She's from Ireland. Once that info hit me, whatever envy I had went away (for some reason) because to me that just made sense. I'm reading a novel right now written by an Irish lady, and Irish writers have figured prominently in English language literature for, eh, ever?

But I started to think back to this meme I sent my dad, in reference to a conversation we had once:

My dad and I talk about many things, but a few themes will usually emerge: the Simpsons; the Yankees; and literature. He had a contention one (and still may hold it) that if you were to rank countries or nationalities by how much they loved---or felt like they defined themselves through---their literature, that Russia would be in first place, while America would be whatever place last was.

The accuracy of that statement isn't the focus here, because, well, my dad is usually right about these kinds of thing and I haven't read enough Russian or French lit to make a sound judgement.

What I want to say is: where's the Irish literature joke in that meme? I mean, those aren't really jokes as much as generalizations, albeit silly ones. But like, it would be hard to discuss the Western canon of literature without the Irish contingent mentioned. (Also, is Russian really "Western canon" and not somehow an amalgam of Western and Eastern? Is that something inherently different about the content?) 

I even started to think about a bracket-type setup, but I didn't want to go into too many details.

But just going off the top of my head:

Irish:

• Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Beckett, Yeats, Flann O'Brian, Anna Burns

English:

• Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Orwell, Woolf, Jane freaking Austen, Shelley

French:

• Voltaire, Baudelaire, Hugo, Flaubert, Dumas, Sartre, Camus (he counts, right?)

American:

• Melville, Twain, Whitman, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Pynchon

Russian:

• Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn

One major problem here is that the list above is almost entirely cis-gendered white men. Yikes. Literature must do better. That's another reason I didn't want to dive too deep here: it shows off some flaws in the historical record of an artform I feel I'm umbrellaed under.

Now that I've typed this nonsense up, maybe I can go back to going about my day, able to see different writers names up under national identities, all the while asking myself, where do the Bronte sisters go? They're Irish by birth, but grew up in and wrote mainly about, England...