hawkwing_lb: (Default)
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.
hawkwing_lb: (Default)
I used to think it was possible to have ambitions. I used to think the ambition of having a steady job - permanent and pensionable - that paid a living wage and left time over for enjoying life was a modest ambition. Maybe not achievable by everyone,* but for someone with my advantages, my - not to be falsely modest - intelligence, and ability to fake middle-class socialisation, something I shouldn't worry too much about not achieving.

Today I saw this item in the paper. "Wanted: PhD grad to work for jobseekers' benefit + E50."

Two different companies have advertised internships as part of the Government's JobBridge initiative -- but want only highly qualified staff.

A pharmaceutical plant in Cork is seeking applications under the back-to-work scheme and a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry is considered to be a "base requirement".

A spokesman from Hovione said there "hasn't been that much interest" in the role.

However, another pharmaceutical plant in west Dublin, Clarochem, had a similar requirement for a PhD intern and has just filled the role for a full 39-hour-week programme for six months.

Clarochem Ireland, a custom manufacturing plant in Mulhuddart, asked that applicants held a minimum of a PhD in synthetic chemistry, and were capable of working on solo projects in a dynamic environment.



The oligarchy has won. There is no future for any of us not born to unmortgaged assets in this country - and maybe not in any other, either. Finance Minister Michael Noonan goes to Brussels to get his plaque with "Best European Finance Minister" engraved on it for licking the boots of unelected European eminences, for selling the poor of the Republic down the river and the middle-class after them, in service to the interests of global capital.

The European project is a humanitarian and democratic - and on any measure other than that of global capital's, an economic - failure, but we're still shackled to the corpse of all its fine promises. Our budgets will go to Brussels to be amended and approved by unelected, unaccountable men and women - carrion-feeders who will continue to demand the privatisation of state assets and state bodies (assets and bodies that by right and justice belong to the people of Ireland!) and to whose dictates our spineless, treacherous, two-faced "leaders" will cravenly bow.

The Irish government will not be able to reclaim the assets it has sold at a loss to corporate interests - corporate interests that will use them to make a profit at the expense of Irish residents. Nor will our government easily recover the powers it has so cravenly surrendered.

They call this a recovery. Who has recovered?

Who was responsible for this catastrophe in the first place? Who has benefited from it?

Not the people struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Not the people seeing their real wages - if they're employed at all - go down, and the cost of food and accommodation go up. Unemployment remains above 13%. Three hundred and thirty thousand people are out of work. (That is at least 7% of our total population, for comparison purposes: 13% of people between age 18 and 65 are signed on for benefits, which approximates to 7% of all the people of any age normally resident in this country.)

And, let's reiterate: the people who are in work have seen their take-home pay decrease under the burden of wage-cuts and changes in their tax and PRSI assessment. That particular trend isn't about to reverse itself.

Conclusion? The average person at work, or looking for work, in the country is comprehensively screwed.

Barring a sustained revolutionary change in the relationship between the citizenry and our government, between the nation and the European Union and the IMF - and going forward in an age of ever-increasing automation, in how we conceive of the relationship between people, labour, and capital - we're permanently screwed.

Because under the conditions presently obtaining and likely to remain in place, there will never be enough actual work to provide full employment at non-poverty-level standards of living. So we need to change how we think about the relationship between labour and money, between people and capital - and that is a change far more revolutionary than demanding democratic accountability from the Oireachtas and the EU.

*Which is another story, and a shame and a half.
hawkwing_lb: (Default)
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... )
hawkwing_lb: (Helen Mirren Tempest)
One of the less interesting and more common side effects of the SSRI known as escitalopram is weight gain.

In the spring of this year - March, I believe - I felt like emotional hell and went to my doctor. We upped my dose of escitalopram by half again as much as I'd been taking to that point.

I whine about how hard my life is. )

This, on top of everything else. I cannot handle my shit right now. I do not know what to do. And I am in a mood lately wherein I want to say hurtful things to everyone who was ever kind to me, and then crawl off in a corner and cry until the world explodes.

Mental illness is fucking annoying. The worst part? Right now, I can't even laugh at myself.

Sad monkey

Aug. 26th, 2013 10:03 pm
hawkwing_lb: (In Vain)
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.
hawkwing_lb: (Default)
So, coping strategies for milder form of nervous breakdown:

- self-forgiveness
- small, achievable goals
- small, achievable exercises
- thinking in small, discrete chunks of time: one day, one week
- measurable progress
- rewards for progress

Let's try to do this.
hawkwing_lb: (Helps if they think you're crazy)
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.
hawkwing_lb: (Helps if they think you're crazy)
So iTunes just cued up Mystic Lipstick (Celtic Tenors cover), a folk song written in 1989 by Jimmy McCarthy. (McCarthy wrote a number of Christy Moore's folk hits.) And it seems strangely appropriate, because I've just finished watching an episode from the fourth series of Waking the Dead that featured Irish nationalism and British politics, and I have been having thinky thoughts about Romanticism rolling around in my head since I got back from Greece.

Greece has been terribly romanticised in its turn, of course. Leaving aside its mythological status as the Cradle of European Civilisation (a construct of the European Renaissance), the 18th century saw it constructed as a Romantic destination on the Grand Tour (et in Arcadia ego), a construct which bore little relationship to reality. The 19th century and the Greek war of independence saw the construction of a (self-built, internally contradictory) national mythology, and its growth as an Interesting Place for international Classically-interested archaeologists... well, let's just say that from a certain point of view the likes of Schliemann on the mainland and Evans in Crete contributed to the erection of Whole New Interesting Mythologies.

And now the stories northern Europe tells about Greece have to do with laziness and profligacy, and you know what? No more true than ROMANCE. Fuck off, ECB in Frankfurt. Look at some context.

Ireland did not, of course, see itself lionised and mythologised during the European Renaissance - quite the opposite, since the 16th century saw it viewed as a land of barbarians ripe for colonisation and the 17th century witnessed the repurposing of martyr and atrocity stories from the Thirty Years War to give voice to the anxieties and stife arising from the Rebellion of 1642 and the English Civil War - but the 18th century saw the beginnings of an interest in Irish antiquarianism and the start of a "national" impetus towards myth-making and - as the 19th century began - lionising the Catholic Emancipation movement in messianic and nationalistic terms. Nationalism and tenants' rights are the two major themes of Ireland's politics in the 19th century, and though the lack of a Home Rule victory until the 20th century prevented the canonisation of an officially-sanctioned nationalist mythology until much later, the pantheon contains numerous unofficial and contradictory saints. Complicating matters for Ireland is that its Protestant and Anglo heritage is much less easy to disavow than the Turkish heritage of Greece. If it is to be disavowed, it must be done in subtle terms, acknowledging Exceptional Anglo-Irishmen, casting the others as West Brits, betrayers of nationalism and the Historical Imperative of Irish Nationhood.

Then you have the Romantic Irish movement at the end of the 19th century, existing alongside Gaelic revivalism and the growing European antiquarian interest not only in "Celtic" cultures, but in magic and mysticism. No overview of Irish Romanticism is complete without an understanding of how the likes of Yeats and the rest of the Celtic Twilight literati partook of an international intellectual/literary atmosphere that included members of the Theosophical Society and the Order of the Golden Dawn. (And if anyone can point me to a solid and readable academic study that discusses this, I'd be grateful - I used to have a handful of references, but that was when I was still in school.) Lady Gregory was connected with figures from this milieu, and Yeats himself was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. A misty mysticism pervades much of Yeats' writing. He positioned himself as a "national poet" of the new Ireland, even after independence, and as many of the other literary figures who entered the national pantheon (Pearse, for example) not only died in the Rising or in the War of Independence/Civil War years, but had a vested interest in portraying their relationship to Irish Nationhood in mystical, quasi-religious, at times messianic terms (it is easier to get people to die if you position dying as a salvific act), misty mysticism pervades Irish literature of the late 19th and early 20th century.

It is an obscurantist haze layered over a complicated reality. What makes it worse is that misty mysticism - or at least its salvific/messianic nationalist offshoots - remain common currency in certain puddles of political rhetoric, and enjoyed a much wider currency than they do now within my own lifetime. (See Northern Ireland, pre-Peace Process.)

And both the misty mysticism and the complicated historical reality inform present national politics. But because our national myths (our dialectics, even!) rely all too much on the Romantic Mirage (and its obverse, the Lazy Irish Savage: hello, ECB! Our financial woes are actually mostly your fault, since you helped provide the credit - and then mandated the socialisation of debt - that got us to this point!), it is nearly impossible to even construct an argument about history today without engaging the Mirage. (The Mirage is politically useful, in that it elides discussion of class and the historical benefits conferred thereby: many of the present prominent political figures of the Republic have several generations of political connections, and those that do not generally come from publican or professional backgrounds.)

It's impossible to ignore it, you know. It just sits there, even if you never mention it, pulling the conversation askew with all the gravity of a soul-sucking black hole.

I say this, because I am contemplating opening Kevin Hearne's Tricked, which based on previous track record, will be an entertaining pseudo-Celtic mixed mythological romp set somewhere in the continental United States. While at the same time I am still reading Ian McDonald's King of Morning, Queen of Day - which at least in its first part, juxtaposes the weird and Romantic with the utterly mundane and is the better book for it. The more painful: but McDonald understands that the layers of the rotten onion (the Matryoska dolls of Irish mythology, each one stranger than the next) have a kind of recursive complexity impossible to reduce to linear clarity. The only possible shape is the spiral. Not the line, not the circle, but a twisted helix bending around an indefinable centre.

My analogy runs away from me. Still.

*rambles along, ramblingly*
hawkwing_lb: (CM JJ What you had to do)
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*
hawkwing_lb: (Bear CM weep for the entire world)
The unemployment rate in this country is at approximately 14.2%. Latest estimates indicate that it will remain roughly stable at that level, with perhaps a .5% drop partly attributable to emmigration, through to the end of 2014. ESRI. Meanwhile, the tax burden on the ironically-named "coping classes" has increased significantly over the last couple of years, and will increase still more. Money quote:

"The biggest burden has fallen on those earning €17,542 to €20,000, who have collectively paid three times more tax in 2011 than they did in 2010 -- or a shocking 215 per cent increase.

Those earning €20,001 to €30,000 are paying 36 per cent more tax than they did in 2010 and those earning between €40,001 and €50,000 are paying 23 per cent more...

...the 118 people in the country who earn more than €2m paid 0.3 per cent less in tax in 2011 than they did in 2010; the 1,148 who earned between €400,001 and €450,000 paid just 1.1 per cent more in tax.

"If you look at the group earning between €17,543 and €20,000, the tax take tripled for that group between 2010 and 2011. But for those earning between €100,000 and €125,000, the tax take only marginally increased," [Dowds] said.


(Independent, 12 Feb 2012.)




I'm terrified, guys. I am not supposed to be this afraid about the future, to the point where I'm lying awake at night, thinking how the fuck do I make it next year if there's no funding?

Or what if I make it all the way. Become Me, PhD. And no one will hire me. And I have no money, because I have had no funding, and no work experience, because I have been doing research.




Fun fact. If you are unemployed, the government thinks you should work a 40-hr week for 238 euro, on the so-called "National Internship Scheme." Which is about 6 euro per hour. The minimum wage is 7.20 euro.

Go here and look at the listing of "internships." Now tell me. How much "internship" training do you think a salesperson, bookkeeper, or IT support person will receive? Tell me that most of them aren't real jobs, which would be better filled by real hires at a living wage. Tell me that making these positions into government-supported "internships" is better for the country than having six- or nine-month contract employees.

Go on. I dare you. Tell me.




A monthly rail ticket costs in the region of a hundred quid. That's twenty-five quid a week. Our two-person household doesn't eat extravagantly, but we can't seem to keep our food and sundries shopping much under a hundred quid. (And shopping for two is not that much more expensive, on the whole, than shopping for one.) Now add in lighting, heating, telephony. The occasional purchase of work-appropriate clothes or shoes.

I say this for the purposes of information. But the difference between 238 euro per week (NIS) and 288 euro per week (minumum wage) is rather large, in perspective. Fifty euro is a fortune if you don't have it.

You can live with dignity on minimum wage if you're not responsible for anyone other than yourself. If you can share a bedsit rental, you might even be able to save - but most people in Ireland, even most unemployed people, have responsibilities and families. Debts taken on while they were in employment and had every expectation of remaining employed.

So this?

This is not fucking good enough, dear government. Fail better, assholes.
hawkwing_lb: (DA 2 scaring the piss)
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.
hawkwing_lb: (Bear CM weep for the entire world)
It turns out that things can always get worse.

Apparently - the relevent article is behind a paywall at the Sunday Business Post (.ie), but the general outlines are clear enough - the present government intend to remove all postgraduate support in the next budget. That means no fees contribution and no maintenance grant.

Aside from the Logic Fail inherent in this - Government! It costs you less to pay postgraduate fees at the EU rate for research students than it does to maintain those same students on the jobseekers' allowance over the course of a year! And have you seen the unemployment rate? - there's a large degree of cruelty involved in yanking the rug out from under the feet of people who were counting on remaining in education (or chose to return to education) until the jobs market picks up an eensy-weensy bit.

Because, people? Let's not forget that Ireland has no system of student loans comparable to the UK, Canada, or even the US. For the people whose education will be cut short by such a measure, there is nowhere to apply. Do you imagine AIB or Bank of Ireland will give an unsecured loan to a student?

There might be work-arounds. I have (based on last year's numbers) a one in nine or ten shot at a scholarship whose applications open in January. Otherwise, I don't know. I might be fucked. I hope I'm not, but I might be.

In which case, I'm going to have a nice, messy nervous breakdown. The rage and despair has to go somewhere - and right now, I'm holding off on putting my fist through a wall only because a)there is still a chance that this will apply only to new postgraduates and b)I'd only have to pay to fix the wall.

And my fist, but what the hell do I need that for, anyway? Maybe I should put it through my own face.
hawkwing_lb: (It can't get any worse... today)
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.
hawkwing_lb: (Bear CM weep for the entire world)
Greece: austerity cannot prevent depression.

Krugman: "ECB suggests that it’s quite likely that the confidence fairy will make everything OK."

Indications suggest holders of Greek bonds will take a 60% cut. Downside: indications suggest that the Right-Thinking People consider Greece a special case - which demonstrates rigid and limited thinking.

Oh, and everyone wants to smack Berlusconi.

Meanwhile, in the UK, a Guardian poll suggests that almost half of British voters would support a withdrawal from the EU, rising fees bring about a 12% drop in university applications, and St. Paul's cathedral claims Occupy! protestors are costing it £20,000/day in lost revenue.

Back home, our presidential frontrunners include a smugly forgettable septegenarian leprechaun, an even smugger Old Boys' Clubber with a shiny bullet for a head, and the smuggest of the lot, a self-aggrandising former terrorist with the face of an alcoholic tomato.

Yah, I no can has respect for really bad election posters.

The candidates. (Unfair to Norris, and over-generous to Davis, but otherwise a decent assessment.)

And "That's a lot of piss": new ways to cut costs.

Oh, and the Irish Times has launched a new section of its website called, "Generation Emigration."

Fun times, my friends. Fun times.
hawkwing_lb: (Default)
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.
hawkwing_lb: (Bear CM weep for the entire world)
Seven dead in the Oslo bomb. At least another eighty-five, mostly teenagers, dead in the mass shooting at the youth camp at Utoeya, 35km northwest of Oslo.

The gunman arrested, one Anders Bering Breivik, is a Norwegian believed to be a rightwing Christian with Islamophobic views. The Guardian has more coverage.

There are no words to describe this. Outrage, massacre, atrocity: they've been so often on people's lips in recent that they don't have any meaning for me anymore. Horror, barbarism, abomination: they're empty sounds, compared to the reality of eighty-five young people dead.

Dear Norway: I'm sorry.




I find it ironic, in one of the universe's most cruelly pointed ironies, that in the hours immediately after the Oslo bombing and the first reports of the Utoeya shooting, all the English-language sources I had access to were practically eager to speculate that some extremist Muslim group must be responsible. The pointed irony is that a domestic rightwing Islamophobe has been arrested.

Not a Muslim, but a Muslim-hater.

Such speculation as appeared in those early hours can only encourage Islamophobia, xenophobia, mistrust and hate: all things, which, it appears now, go in to the makeup of people like the man actually responsible.




Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.


-- from "Dirge Without Music," Edna St. Vincent Millay.
hawkwing_lb: (Aveline is not amused)
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.
hawkwing_lb: (Bear CM weep for the entire world)
A person can be excused a certain amount of stupidity when they're young.

Shallowness of thought and over-simplification in analysis is a necessary corollary of lack of experience. If you're lucky, you live to acquire the experience and the tools to understand that the world is full of depth, breadth and complexity. If you're lucky, you get to keep learning.

I'm twenty-five years old this month. I can't use youth as an excuse anymore. Relative youth, maybe, but by anyone's standards, I'm all grown up now. And what you do, as an adult in the community, is step up. What you do is take responsibility.

I've spent a long time being bitter and cynical, convinced that no deed of mine can so much as scratch the surface of the indifference of politics, of Big Money, of the smug and the comfortable classes. The world is hard and cruel and cold and very large, and I am breakable, lonely.

Very small.

Well, I am tired of being bitter and cynical. I am tired of listening to the world when it tells me that I am small, flat, stale and unprofitable: tired of listening to all the voices that tell me my voice will never matter, because I am a woman/working class/a poet/a historian/not old enough/not profitable enough/not responsible enough/too educated/not educated enough -

I'm done with listening to those voices. Now I'm going to talk.

Maybe no deed of mine can change the world. That's okay. I'm better at words, anyway.

I can't change the world all at once. Maybe I can't change it at all.

But maybe, just maybe, I can change some minds.

Imagine what the world would be like if we placed people before profit. If we centred our lives around human decency, rather than the maximisation of capital. If we strove to be charitable and open-handed, rather than to be fair and even-handed; to be accepting, instead of tolerant.

To be merciful, instead of just.

I am a socialist. I want a world where social and economic relations are co-operative rather than competitive; where the least no less than the greatest has food enough to live, shelter from extremes of the elements, access to adequate medical care, and time and space enough for joy.

I will be bitter again, and cynical. I will be reminded that I don't really like most people; that I think many of them are utter fools who deserve the fruits of their folly.

And I will be wrong.

Because it doesn't matter if I like people or not. It doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong when I think they're fools. Every human being is a person worth valuing.

I have to step up. I have to do what I can to build the world I want to live in. All I have is my hands and my voice and my (copious) spare time. And I have to step up and use them, though it curdles my stomach with anxiety and all the demons of my self-esteem, because who am I to speak, to act, to dare?

Someone who has to breathe through the fear. Because human decency is worth defending.

Because the world I want to see is worth speaking for.

And I am tired of my cynicism. I am done with folding my hands. I have had it up to here with sitting quietly and minding my own business.

I might not change anything. But goddammit all to hell, I want to fucking try.
hawkwing_lb: (It can't get any worse... today)
"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.)
hawkwing_lb: (It can't get any worse... today)
With regard to the triumphalist celebrations of death being carried on in all the new outlets I've bothered to check today:

That's disgusting, people. Have some sense of shame. Killing someone, regardless of what he has or has not done, should never being an occasion for celebration. Killing someone in an act of political theatre, on the soil of another sovereign nation -

I know what that was called when the IRA did that, and the fact that it's governments doing it now as well doesn't make it any more right.

Maybe it's a necessary evil. But if this is justice, then there are several thousands of civilians killed in the last decade - tens of thousands, actually, and hundreds of thousands if one includes those whose death or displacement took place as an indirect consequence of military action - who also deserve justice.

The scales don't balance. They never will.

I'd like to resign from the human race now. Where do I hand in the forms?

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