between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Remind me never ever to get a tooth pulled in order to save (potential) future hassle. This is the fifth day since the extraction, and the first day I've been able to get by with only a single painkiller. (Even if I didn't manage to make it as far as the gym.)

Before the tooth-pulling, I was having a wee bit of a nervy breakdown for about two weeks... which I rolled over and turned into a holiday, since not being able to concentrate and fretting about not being able to concentrate just makes a bad spiral worse - and it's not like I'd had two weeks off together in quite some time.

The combination of these two things, though, leaves me behind in everything. Now is a time of feeling panicked, isolated, and unable to deal with the mess of things I need to juggle to catch up.

Ah, well. Maybe someday I'll get on top of things for more than two heartbeats at a time.

This is probably the fifth day since I stopped taking my SSRIs.

I'm engaged in a wee experiment. The SSRIs were contributing to my weight-gain, and I had suspected - and today received proof - that they were contributing to my need for copious amounts of sleep (~11 hours per diem.) But today, either the fourth or fifth day since I stopped, I was able to wake up and function normally after a night's sleep of eight hours (eight broken hours, since I woke at least three times during the night).
( Read more... )

Is sad. Possibly I should not have dined only on cheese and carbohydrates and sugars today.

The only thing I managed to do successfully was the week's shopping. Sod me.

So Jim Hines has a post up about his depression. It's got me thinking about my own weird brain chemistry, and the fact that I've been extra avoidant since the social!stravaganza that was last Wednesday. (Not that a play with a friend is especially extravagant. It's just, I don't seem to be able to have fun without suffering some kind of backlash. Introvert crash.)

I've never had a diagnosis. I mean, I had some counselling for a couple months after my small nervous breakdown my first year in college, and once for three or four sessions a couple of years thereafter, when I think exam stress was getting to me. You woman up and learn some coping skills - after I got back up, it didn't seem like counselling had anything more to offer me. (Although my symptoms sound a lot like dysthymia, which is not a word I'd come across before. Except with extra added anxiety.) I've been talking escitalopram for years now, and I'm one of the lucky ones: my side effects are some extra sleepiness. That's if the escitalopram is actually to blame.

It's been years since things were so bad I couldn't function for whole weeks. That hasn't happened since the first time. But most of the time I doubt myself. (A lot of the time I dislike myself.) Most of the time, the future seems hopeless. Most of the time, I get by on not thinking too far ahead, because looking more than two or three weeks in the future is a sure route to I will never amount to anything/why shouldn't you go jump off a bridge? I have this feeling that for many people, it's easier to be hopeful. Easier to be motivated. Easier not to curl up in a corner and spend days watching videos and reading old paperbacks because who gives a fuck, right? The world's going to hell in a handbasket and you'll let everyone down - in fact, you have already, they just don't know it yet/haven't pointed it out, and why can't you have a job like everyone else, you lazy slob, research isn't REAL WORK and everyone knows it.

So, yeah. I try not to think about it too much. Otherwise it gets too hard to keep going.

Anyway. Have an entertaining link:

Thine appraisal is now due: I do Regret ye failure to demonstrate Impact of mine Experimentations in ye academic yeare. Should mine Labours on Gravity, Opticks and Fluxions fail to attract ye Approbation of ye Peasantry, I will accept ye Voluntary Redundancy to make room for an Younger and Sexier Experimenter to whom ye Tattle-Sheets, Mummer-Shows and Chap-Books shall devote Time and Space. Such as ye Fop Cox and that damn'd Simpering Worsley.

I fear that playing Mass Effect 3 has gotten a little out of hand. It is a very absorbing game, and has cost me the ability to sleep at night. Due to saving the galaxy.

I mean, the lingering arse-shots, and the overly-perky breasts, those I could do without. But damn, it's nice to play a female hero where hero is the marked state, not female. (Also, where nice male lieutenants causally mention their husbands, and one overhears conversations about wives leaving their husbands for their mistress.)

I'm a bit lost right now, to be honest. I need to get back into a habit of exercise and whatnot before I die of being a sluggish slob. Tomorrow. Tomorrow will be kinder.

*avoids email*

Warning: long post ahead.

History

Ireland, 1740-1741.

This isn't a famous year. Outside of a handful of historians, it's hardly ever mentioned or discussed, unlike 1798 (rebellion), 1803 (abortive rising headed by the romantic idiot Robert Emmet), 1845-1847 (Great Famine), 1916 (Easter Rising).


The context: in 1719/1720, the Dependency Act (6 Geo I, c.5) had defanged what independence the Parliament of the Kingdom of Ireland possessed.

The complete disenfranchisement of Irish Catholics had taken place in 1728. An earlier law, in the reign of Queen Anne, the Gavelkind Act, required Catholic landholders to divide their lands equally among their heirs, which contributed to the drop in Catholic ownership of land from 14% (1703) to 5% (1770s). Catholics were in addition barred from most of the professions, and barred from ownership of a lease of more than 31 years.

Bear in mind, dear friends, that Catholics made up over 70% of the population of Ireland, with Protestant Dissenters (Presbyterians, Calvinists) at perhaps another 15%: the Protestant Ascendancy comprised 15% or less of the total population, and less than 30% of the (male) population had any say whatsoever in the then-kingdom's political administration. To boot, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and the mechanism of administration was answerable not to the Irish establishment, but to the monarch (king, as it would be from the death of Queen Anne to the coronation of Queen Victoria) in England.

1739. Temperatures that winter dropped as low as -12C. The country remained frozen for weeks. Grain export was interdicted to all destinations save Britain. The established Church solicited donations from the propertied and arranged parish relief in the towns, but Catholic clergy had no such reservoir of monied interests to draw upon for their relief efforts. A dry spring followed in early 1740. Drought and cold took a toll on sheep and cattle. The summer of 1740 saw food riots in the towns. Autumn brought a poor harvest and strange temperature fluctuations: blizzards in October, followed by a warm spell, followed by November snows, and heavy rainfall in December. Disease had already been widespread: during the foul weather and starvation, it reached epidemic proportions.

For the period between the spring of 1740 and the late summer of 1741, estimates of the death toll vary. The first Irish census did not take place until the nineteenth century, so what demographic information we possess is limited, but one believable calculation places the death rate at over 30% of a total population of somewhere between 3 and 4 million souls. The impact on population is even greater when one considers the role played by migration: at least 150,000 people left for good.

As a percentage of population, this is even worse than effect of the Great Famine of 1845-1847. Of a population around eight million, something like one million died and another million emigrated.

This is part of the history we live with.

---

Culture

We're all products of our upbringing. Culture, location, history: whether we choose conformity or defiance, what ways we choose them, why. To be Irish and Anglophone, to be Irish and European, is to stand in the intertidal zone of history, subject to many conflicting currents.* On one side there's an Anglophone heritage that gave birth to Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, W.B Yeats. The same heritage gives us Punch cartoons such as:

"The British Lion and the Irish Monkey"





"The Irish Labourer as the English Labourer's Burden"




"The Irish Frankenstein"



a heritage that historically characterised the non-Anglophone or unassimilated Irish as a "rude uncivilized race, totally uneducated and without the means of acquiring instruction," (Alexander Dallas, churchman, 1840s), savage, violent, dirty, lazy, primitive: all the epithets by which a dominant set of cultural assumptions degrades an unassimilated other.

The reverse of the medal: Irish myth-making and history elides the accommodations made in and with Anglo Ireland, romanticises local or elite power-struggles as part of a history of revolutionary nationalism and neglects to mention that many of our "revolutionary" heroes were themselves part of the elite ascendancy (Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Theobald Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Charles Stewart Parnell). Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats come out of a "romantic" reclamation of "Gaelic" Irish literary culture, a movement that sought to make its influences acceptable, conformable, to Anglo literary culture. Yeats, constructing himself as a national poet in the 1910s and 20s and 30s, remained conflicted about the dirty business of revolution and independence, but himself unable to refrain from romanticising it, too.

"Was it for this Edward Fitzgerald died/And Robert Emmet, and Wolfe Tone/All that delirium of the brave?"

The urge to romanticise nationalism, to not look closely at its accommodations with power, remains part of Ireland today, in its relationship with modern Britain, with Catholicism, with Europe, with America. It's a dangerous tendency, but an understandable one: if we're the plucky underdogs, the survivors, the beacon of learning in the soi-disant Dark Ages, the baptismal font of a pan-European Celtic heritage (we're not), we don't have to think about the real consequences and compromises of our history.

The fact that I am writing this in English, and couldn't write a similar blogpost in Irish, is one of those consequent compromises. (Ní feidir liom Gaeilge a labhairt go líofach. Níl a fhios agam conas a bheith ag abair ná ag léibh ná ag scríobh an teanga seo.) But that puts me in an interesting position vis-a-vis modern Anglophone literary and popular culture, which is dominated on one side by the United States and on the other side by the United Kingdom.

(For the moment, let's leave aside Canada and Australia, both still Commonwealth nations, both with their own colonial histories and modern infelicities. While they're still larger presences than any of the other Anglophone nations/places, they're not as dominant as the US and the UK.)

The UK (probably I should say England and Scotland and Wales and the Channel Islands and Northern Ireland and up to 1921 all of Ireland, because hi regional differences!) has its place thanks to history, a history which means a fair proportion of writing in English before the last two centuries took place there, and up until the end of the nineteenth century, probably more than a strictly fair proportion. America has more native English speakers than any other nation, these days, and owes its present Anglophone popular culture hegemony to the fact that it produces - and exports - a hell of a lot of the stuff.

The UK has had (still does have, I suppose), and the US still has, a disproportionate amount of military and political influence on a global scale. Colonial powers, with internal and external divisions, inequalities, injustices. Happy to believe their own myths (see Doctor Who's episodes set in wartime London, or pretty much any piece of American popular culture dealing with the military).

But what about we few, we Anglophone few caught on the horns of history, who cannot see ourselves either in the literature of these cultural megaliths or in the internal critique thereof? Me, I suppose I'm saying. Me, me, me. I don't see my experience reflected in Anglophone or Irish literary or popular culture, either. There is so little of it, in comparison, and what there is rings to me false or narrow, smugly self-congratulatory or overly-romanticised, complacently middle-class or far too cynical.

On one side I'm the child of colonisers, of middle-class norms and easy romanticised answers: on the other, child of a single-parent with a struggling-class experience of the world of work and politics, radically suspicious of binary choices, deeply unnerved at the interplay of language, culture and politics, heir to literature and myth that's been borrowed and bowdlerised, tamed on occasion, sometimes turned back to reinforce narratives of dominance.

---

Location

There's a third side, a fourth side, a tetrahedon of sides.

At least one of them is where I've chosen to locate myself. A reader of fantasy and science fiction: an opinionated reader, moving in a milieu dominated by American assumptions, American voices, American experiences: sometimes - more rarely - English voices, UK experiences. The product of one of history's many intertidal zones, I love a literature to which I'm largely invisible.

My inheritance is the farmer starving in the fields, the revolutionary on the barricade shot dead by his cousin, the artisan family shunned by a converted sister, the thousand secret shames and compromises, the slow dying of a native tongue, the awkward accommodations and corruptions born of "going along to get along" and of being a nation of nepotism and cute hoors.

Lost heirs here became potboys, died as mercenaries in exile, accepted resettlement and loss of three-quarters of their lands in order to keep their lives, converted, resisted, accommodated. Women preserved family histories, brought the children of convert marriages up as secret Catholics, hid unregistered priests. The Irish Home Rule struggle wasn't a war that was ever won. It was as much civil war as revolutionary struggle, as much legislative process and centuries-slow changing of minds as it was tension between local "terroristical" violence between landlord and tenant, state and mob.

My inheritance is also instruments of state violence, the appropriators of peasant property: knights and soldiers and servants of the Crown, relationships riven with tension and faction and division and compromise. People who loved and hated and swallowed misgivings and struggled with doubts and bureaucracies, who were (some of them) convinced of their god-given rightness or arrogant in their humility.

There is very little in SFF that reflects my experience of history. Mary Gentle, Elizabeth Bear, Amanda Downum, Marie Brennan, Alma Alexander, Charles Stross, Daniel Fox/Chaz Brenchley: in fantasy they come close. In SF I can think of fewer: something of Samuel R. Delany, perhaps, or Roger Zelazny; Bear and Stross again, that one adult SF book by Scott Westerfeld, what I've read of Walter Jon Williams' futuristic SF.

---

I've spent the evening writing this (I write it out in a verse -/MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connolly and Pearse). It's less a thesis than a meditation, I suppose. Like Eavan Boland's poem, "That The Science of Cartography is Limited," these aren't thoughts that lend themselves to easy synthesis, or to cut-and-dried argument. "That The Science of Cartography is Limited," Boland wrote:


-and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of

the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon

will not be there.

---

*This may only be true for me. It may true for more than just an Irishperson. I don't know: I'm only speaking from my own experience.

November is an evil month.

So are January and February - and December, although December can usually be relied upon to have presents in the middle of it* - but November is where the evil starts, so I resent it all the more.

The cool, damp mist of November afternoons can be beautiful. Trees shedding the last of their leaves, yellow and brown, and standing stark against hedgerows. The smell of woodsmoke and rain, and how everything turns purple and twilight-blue at the edges on a clear day. The way the moon rides up in the daylight sky.

But the dark. The damp. It gets inside my head and bones and lives there, the soft whispery darkness of depression, the quiet turning towards hibernation, the desire to be shot of all the goddamn people who fill the buildings and the streets, the dreary greyness of days that never really brighten, the ache in my wrists and ankles when it rains - which is often.

Right now? I hate all human beings. I hate my thesis. I want to get away from Dublin somewhere there are hills and mountains and clear my fucking head.

Much as I hate the heat? It turns out I love sunlight. I guess I'm going to have to figure out how to go live somewhere there's more of it than here.

*Although not this year, because of the brokeness.

O honourable friends, I bring you some facts and some figures.

As of September, the percentage of persons signing on to the Live Register stands at 14.3%, down 0.1% from August. Let's round up and call it 15% of adult persons, or approximately 440,000 people from a nation of just over 4.5 million. (Statistics from the Central Statistics Office.)

That means 15% of people are unemployment or underemployed. Just under 42% of these people - that is, approximately 6% of all adult persons - are long-term claimants on the Live Register. That is, they have been signing on for over a year. This percentage has risen - from approximately 34% to approximate 42% of claimants, or from approximately 5% to approximately 6% of all adult persons - within the space of a year.

The Consumer Price Index records average inflation of 2.6% to date this year. As of July 2011, almost 9% of households with mortgages are ninety days in arrears. According to figures from the Central Bank of Ireland, approximately 30.6% (or c. 145,400 out of 475,000) of mortgaged properties were in negative equity as of 2010, a figure representing 47% of outstanding mortgage balances. I have no data for 2011, but I suspect this figure has, if anything, dis-improved.

The minimum wage has been cut from E8.40 to E7.20. Social security has been cut. All earned income over approximately E. 3,000 per annum is subject to the Income Levy. Tax brackets have not been adjusted for inflation. The government is introducing a property tax for all households from January, and unmetered water charges are also in the works.

Meanwhile, GDP has risen 1.6% and GNP 1.1% in the second quarter of 2011. Companies such an C&C show pre-tax profits of over 64 million euro, up from 58 million last year. No one has been prosecuted for the financial shenanagins that led to the 2008 crash. Bankers, politicians, and senior television analysts still form a cosy circle-jerk. The National Asset Management Agency has turned into yet another government quango, whereby we reward the incompentents who fucked us over in the first place and provide jobs for their friends and relatives.

Government policy is set by elected hacks and sell-outs (yes, Labour, I'm talking to you: no, I will never vote Labour again) - at least, when it's not being set by unelected Financial Policy Wonks from the IMF and the ECB, who are far more concerned with protecting bondholders and the French and German banks who exposed themselves by lending to banks whose balance sheets are now composed mainly of toxic assets and government bailout funds than with protecting the most vulnerable citizens of our society.

Let us pretend, O honourable friends, that our European Financial Policy Wonks have heard of John Maynard Keynes. Let us pretend, O friends and fellow citizens, that they possess at least a modicum of logic; let us grant them adequate reading comprehension, and the ability to follow historical evidence. Have they not read The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money? Have they failed to grasp its essential points?

Let the record show that classical economics, balance-sheet economics, supply-side economics - all this, when faced with a market recession, significantly fails. It fails to improve matters for any but the richest of the rich, and it actively makes things worse for anyone in the middle class on down. (And let us not be sidetracked into defining that amorphous beast, the "middle class".)

Why, then, are we faced with failed policies, toxic policies, when Keynesian economics demonstrably works? Why is the cry of "Balance the Budget!" raised when the chattering classes - yes, even they, even the Policy Wonks and the Political Hacks, for they stand or fall as we do - should be clamouring "Provide Employment!" "Build Infrastructure!" "Invest!"?

We cannot have democracy without hope. We cannot have hope without economic improvement - for who can hope for the future when the vast majority of us are entirely focused on surviving the now? And we cannot have economic improvement without government action, without government investment.

Now is the winter of our discontent, and I see no summer sun ahead of us.

I've never desired wealth for wealth's sake: the sum total of my life's financial ambitions has always been a tolerable, secure position with a pension. A position wherein one could afford a house, a dog, a foreign holiday once every couple of years; a position where one could hope to be treated as a being worthy of dignity.

(It's odd to admit to always having wanted to work in the civil service. But there you go. Civil service functionaries perform useful and necessary functions to the running of the country, and at least in the civil service, one is not solely serving the aggrandisement of private profit.)

But it seems as though our country is to be reduced down to the bare apparatus necessary to qualify as a functioning nation. I don't have hope anymore. Hope, like anger, is a distraction. If I focus on just the things in front of me - on just trying to spend less every week on food, on not fucking up and needing an extra tenner at an inconvenient time, on not thinking more than a month or two in advance - maybe I can avoid dwelling on the fact that my country views me as just one more fungible resource - and one surplus to requirements, at that.

I received this email today. It made me feel rather ill.

( Read more... )


So, basically, "We are delighted to give you this opportunity for you to tell us how best your contributions to arts, humanities, and science, might be co-opted by the profiteering arseholes whose screw-ups have resulted in major cuts to all your funding. Oh, and we won't even offer you enough of a prizefund to pay for a month's rent."

I feel strongly about this. Strongly enough that I have written a sarcastic abstract which I intend to send them. I have no skills with poster design, so that will fall by the wayside. But it makes me feel better to say this:

---

My name is Liz. I'm a student in the Dept. of Classics, Trinity College Dublin. My Ph.D. research concentrates on the experience of healing and medicine in ancient Greece between 400BCE and 200CE, and it is my intent to demonstrate to you in this brief abstract just how my research will enable national recovery.

I'm not going to lie to you. Historical research produces few easily quantifiable benefits. Its fruit is knowledge and the joy of discovery: the exhilaration of chasing the logic of a hypothesis until one can pin evidence underneath it and turn it from suggestion into theory; the challenge of confronting established theory and suggesting new ways of looking and seeing, new paths into which to direct our thoughts; the honour and duty of teaching, sharing knowledge, and challenge, and honest intellectual argument.

A laboratory scientist or an engineer can design a widget; a business graduate can make a marketing plan to maximise your profit from selling it; an economist can tell you (truly or falsely) that the market is too full or not full enough of widget-production. What can historians do?

Well, frankly, we can tell you that it is not research which will enable national recovery. We can tell you that in cases where there is economic and political tension between the centre and the periphery, the periphery never comes out better than it began.

We can tell you, in the words of L. Annaeus Seneca, that it is not what you endure, but how you endure, that is important.

And we can tell you that 500 euro and an iPad will not enable economic recovery, either. Because no, there isn't an app for that. There isn't an app for acting with decency and fairness, in defence of human dignity. There isn't an easy fix for hard problems, and what looks like the obvious action to take can all-too-frequently make the problems worse.

I can tell you about my research. About the sanctuaries of the healing god Asklepios at Kos and Epidauros; about the great festivals in honour of the god: about the fear and hope, suffering and relief, of suppliants who came to those sanctuaries seeking miraculous healing. I can tell you about medicine, and an ancient physician's tools, and how people in other times and other places looked at the world through different eyes.

Ask me what good that is. Ask me how it specifically enables national recovery. Go ahead: I know you want to.

I'll tell you.

You're thinking too small.

My research contributes to the nation. It contributes to the sum of human knowledge. It is not immediately tangible, nor is it easily fungible: it is akin to Socrates' search for the knowledge of "what excellence is." [Plato, Meno, 86d] I seek knowledge of history because the search makes us better people. Because without art, and joy, and history, and knowledge, one doesn't live. One merely survives.

And if we're going to create a national recovery, all of us together, the merely surviving is not nearly good enough. We have to have dignity and joy. We have to live.

I don't want your iPad. I don't want your money. I want you to believe in art. I want you to believe in history. I want you to believe in humanity.

In all the humanities, and in a future worth living for.

"Not In So Many Words A Manifesto"

Have you heard the voices on the radio?
Have you seen the Sunday headlines?
They say tomorrow will be worse than today
They say the golden age is dead.

So heave, boys, and haul away
cut another hole in your belt and buckle tight
leave your dreams and book your flights
for China and America, London and Bombay
for freedom and choices have all gone far away.
The rich have all your money in their shiny fashion bags
And they're not sharing with your tattered rags.

Cut another hole in your belt and buckle tight:
that old record playing late into the night
tired and scratched and broken and sore
and we can repeat it all, word for word,
because we've heard every line a thousand times before:
Be grateful for what you have.
Don't ever dare to ask for more.

So heave, girls, and haul away
(sell your souls forget your dreams default your lease)
The world won't let you speak, or give you peace -
and in the end you'll go a bridge too high, a pill too far
dying in quiet desperation at midnight on your bathroom floor.
Because speaking Truth to Power only keeps the lights on
inside your aching head. And the golden age is dead.

Sell your souls. Forget your dreams - The politicians sigh,
We're all in this together, and you know it for a lie
tired and stupid and ancient and sore
but we can all repeat it, every line:
we've heard it word for word so many times before:
Be grateful for what you have.
Don't ever dare to ask for more.

What I have is a belly full of rage
and fire, and spite: I refuse
to be caged by Capital and the nonsense
theories of an age where no god lives but Mammon,
no virtue but avarice. Workers, unite!
The Invisible Hand is giving you the finger:
It's not going to ever make nice.

What I'm asking for is empathy, reason, common sense:
it's not treason to acknowledge
humanity in poverty, justice in anger,
the future in an open hand.
I'm not a company woman: I won't chant your refrain.
I want a future free from chains, from too big to fail;
free from desperate towns in a haunted, frightened land

What I have is a belly full of rage.
What I have is a stomach full of dread,
and it's too late to turn away
and it's too late to pretend
that our day is coming, our hour -
The golden age has always been dead
and speaking truth to power
won't keep the lights on. Not even in your head.

---

Yes, I'm a bad poet. And yes, I'm a socialist.

I believe that a government has a moral duty to guard the best interests of all their citizens. I believe that moral duty includes a duty of care which begins with the most vulnerable: the poor, the very young, the very old, the disabled, the discriminated-against. I believe that the vast majority of governments are consistently and willfully negligent in this duty.

I believe that a more just society is possible. I believe the path to achieving a more just society is to stop valourising capital, to refrain from using GDP as a measurement of a society's success, and to reinstute public liturgies for persons of significant private wealth.

That would make a fine start.

Normally I post my poems under f-lock, but right now? I'm an angry socialist. And, dammit, I want to be heard.

(I am not resigned.)