Farmerama – sharing ideas and developments in farming

Posted on September 2, 2015 by tess

An exciting new podcast about farming and technology has just been launched. It is called Farmerama

Farmerama will be looking at interesting things people are doing in agriculture, sharing great stories from the small scale farming network, exploring ideas and research about agriculture from the UK and beyond, – soil, seeds, tools, livestock, grazing systems and more….

The first edition includes water buffalo in Hampshire, a ‘Chicken Speakeasy’ and a report from the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture Network) gathering this summer. Listen here.

If you’d like to be involved, either as a farmer or a podcaster, get in touch via the Farmerama Facebook page

Play linked to sluggish growth in infant monkeys – but should humans worry?

Posted on August 19, 2015 by tess

For more than a century, researchers have tried to pin down exactly why so many animal species play in their infancy. Now a new study in wild macaque monkeys has found that infants who play more actually boost key motor skills. However, these skills are acquired at a cost. The researchers also discovered that active infants grow more slowly.

So what are the evolutionary reasons behind this trade-off? And should human parents who want tall children sit them in front of the TV rather than letting them play in the garden?

This post, by Professor Phyllis Lee of the University of Stirling, first appeared on The Conversation website

A brief history of play

Play is extremely common in the animal kingdom, with ants, crabs, turtles, fish, cephalopods, birds and most mammals engaging in some kind of play. But we humans are one of a handful of long-lived, large brained animals that plays throughout our lives. So what do we gain from play? And what do we lose?

The fact that so many animal species play during early life stages of their lives suggests that the advantages of play are concentrated on developing the brain, muscle systems and social skills that need to be learned and practised by infants.

We have long known that animal play is more frequent when times are good – when there is plenty of food to eat and animals are not stressed. For example, we know that dairy calves stop playing during weaningwhile monkeys cease playing when food is very limited.

Some 25 years ago, a study of antelopes found that “a pronghorn fawn that eschewed play and shifted the energy savings into growth could expect to weigh 7% more than a playing fawn by post-natal week 12”, suggesting that play consumed a great deal of energy. But over the years, researchers have come to view the energetic costs of play as minimal and easily sustained under normal conditions.

Play in kittens, for example, contributed only 9% at most to the daily energy costs, which is equivalent to ~225 kcals or one chocolate bar for humans.

Instead, the scientific focus shifted to the risks of play in relation to the rewards. Seals that play in the surf are easy prey for sharks and killer whales, while infant chimpanzees have a higher risk of contracting infectious diseases such as Ebola from their play partners. If play is so risky, and potentially also energetically costly in a few cases, why do so many animals play?

The right amount of play

The new study has placed the question of energy costs back on the agenda, while also being the first to establish the causal importance of play for skill development. However, the effect on growth was substantial, with 30% slower growth directly associated with greater competence in a variety of key motor skills.

The authors used photographs to measure the young macaques as they grew from birth to six years and observed how each infant gained motor profiency over time. They could then relate time spent playing directly to growth and how competent each young monkey became.

The study also found that infant and juvenile males played more than young females did and grew more slowly especially while practising skills associated with learning to fight; in this way males increased their potential to defeat rivals later in life.

Surprisingly, the researchers found that play persisted even during seasons when less food was available to the developing macaques, suggesting that skill development takes priority over growth.

This trade-off can be likened to that seen in young human athletes, who train for high-level performance at the expense of their growth. For example, young girls who train as gymnasts or ballet dancers can lose their menstrual cycles and therefore their reproductive potential.

So play is indeed an activity with costs – growth costs, survival costs and time costs. But during play, young monkeys, seal pups and antelope fawns practice motor skills that are necessary both when they are infants and as adults for escaping from predators, for fighting, handling food items, or moving about their complex environment.

Among humans, there are suggestions that surgeons who play computer games are better at keyhole surgery, while the brain cells of play-deprived animals are less well connected. That suggests that the brains of playful individuals develop new connections, and players gain familiarity with the unpredictable. The more playful individuals among black bearsand elephants have higher survival rates.

Play has lifetime consequences. Too little play, and individuals are limited their vital experiences of the world and others. Too much play, and growth and survival are at risk.

But where does all this leave us humans? Should parents worry that their sons in particular will be short if they play a lot (macaques are after all our evolutionary cousins)? Not at all. Humans have specifically evolved marked energy-sparing mechanisms, probably to sustain our extra-large brains.

Babies are made up of much fat (as are mums) and, unlike monkeys, finding the equivalent of a “mars bar” to meet the costs of play is easy. Human infants are fed constantly during infancy and at weaning move on to energy-dense foods. We are also buffered by the care and attention of fathers and other family members, which should allow human infants to both play and grow.

Photo: Photos Mweber

Could Shakespeare have been high when he penned his plays?

Posted on August 7, 2015 by tess

State-of-the-art forensic technology from South Africa has been used to try and unravel the mystery of what was smoked in tobacco pipes found in the Stratford-upon-Avon garden of British playwright William Shakespeare.

Residue from clay tobacco pipes more than 400 years old from the playwright’s garden were analysed in Pretoria using a sophisticated technique called gas chromatography mass spectrometry.

This post, by Professor Francis Thakeray of The University of the Witwatersrand was first published on The Conversation website on 7 August 2015

Chemicals from pipe bowls and stems which had been excavated from Shakespeare’ garden and adjacent areas were identified and quantified during the forensic study. The artefacts for the study were on loan from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

The gas technique is very sensitive to residues that can be preserved in pipes even if they had been smoked 400 years ago.

What were they smoking

There were several kinds of tobacco in the 17th century, including the North American Nicotiana (from which we get nicotine), and cocaine (Erythroxylum), which is obtained from Peruvian coca leaves.

It has been claimed that Sir Francis Drake may have brought coca leaves to England after his visit to Peru, just as Sir Walter Raleigh had brought “tobacco leaves” (Nicotiana) from Virginia in North America.

In a recent issue of a magazine called Country Life, Mark Griffiths has stimulated great interest in John Gerard’s Herbal, published in 1597 as a botanical book which includes engraved images of several people in the frontispiece. One of them (cited as “The Fourth Man”) is identified by Griffiths as William Shakespeare, but this identification is questionable.

Possibly, the engraving represents Sir Francis Drake, who knew Gerard.

Gerard’s Herbal refers to various kinds of “tobacco” introduced to Europe by Drake and Raleigh in the days of Shakespeare in Elizabethan England.

There certainly is a link between Drake and plants from the New World, notably corn, the potato and “tobacco”. Furthermore, one can associate Raleigh with the introduction of “tobacco” to Europe from North America (notably in the context of the tobacco plant called Nicotiana, from Virginia and elsewhere).

What we found

There was unquestionable evidence for the smoking of coca leaves in early 17th century England, based on chemical evidence from two pipes in the Stratford-upon-Avon area.

Neither of the pipes with cocaine came from Shakepeare’s garden. But four of the pipes with cannabis did.

Results of this study (including 24 pipe fragments) indicated cannabis in eight samples, nicotine in at least one sample, and in two samples definite evidence for Peruvian cocaine from coca leaves.

Shakespeare may have been aware of the deleterious effects of cocaine as a strange compound. Possibly, he preferred cannabis as a weed with mind-stimulating properties.

These suggestions are based on the following literary indications. In Sonnet 76, Shakespeare writes about “invention in a noted weed”. This can be interpreted to mean that Shakespeare was willing to use “weed” (cannabis as a kind of tobacco) for creative writing (”invention”).

In the same sonnet it appears that he would prefer not to be associated with “compounds strange”, which can be interpreted, at least potentially, to mean “strange drugs” (possibly cocaine).

Sonnet 76 may relate to complex wordplay relating in part to drugs (compounds and “weed”), and in part to a style of writing, associated with clothing (”weeds”) and literary compounds (words combined to form one, as in the case of the word “Philsides” from Philip Sidney).

Was Shakespeare high?

Chemical analyses of residues in early 17th-century clay “tobacco pipes” have confirmed that a diversity of plants was smoked in Europe. Literary analyses and chemical science can be mutually beneficial, bringing the arts and the sciences together in an effort to better understand Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

This has also begged the question whether the plays of Shakespeare were performed in Elizabethan England in a smoke-filled haze?

One can well imagine the scenario in which Shakespeare performed his plays in the court of Queen Elizabeth, in the company of Drake, Raleigh and others who smoked clay pipes filled with “tobacco”.

Francis Thakeray is the Phillip Tobias Chair in Palaeoanthropology, Evolutionary Studies Institute, at the University of Witwatersrand.

This piece is based on an article published in the South African Journal of Science in July 2015.

Why Obama doesn’t want the UK to leave Europe

Posted on July 26, 2015 by tess

The referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU might be more than a year away, but Barack Obama has already nailed his colours to the mast. Speaking to the BBC, the US president has said he would like Britain to vote to stay in the union.

This blog, by Brendan Evans, Professor of Politics at Huddersfield University was first posted on The Conversation website.

Britain’s future European role is a matter for the British government and people and it is presumptuous for a foreign leader to intervene so overtly. It is also surprising that Obama should seek to cause embarrassment for David Cameron on this issue. Although the British prime minister knows he is embarking on a risky project with the referendum, he is keen to emphasise that the decision rests with the British public alone.

But Obama’s intervention is only really surprising in that it was so forthright. He is taking the same view as all American governments since the 1950s. The US has long preferred Britain to be an integral part of the European project.

In geopolitical terms, the US considers Britain to be a part of Europe as much as Minnesota, or California or Texas are integral parts of the United States. The American governing elite would prefer a more tightly integrated European Union than currently exists. They have little time for the idea of British exceptionalism.

British prime ministers since Churchill in the 1950s have fondly imagined that there is a special relationship between Britain and the United States that guides American foreign policy. Americans don’t recognise this special relationship. They consider Europe as a whole as a single entity with which they wish to do business.

The former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger is reputed to have once asked: “Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?”. For him, it would be unduly irksome to have to deal with the leaders of a large number of separate countries.

And there is evidence that the same is true today. The US is currently negotiating a huge trade deal – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – not with a plethora of individual countries, all of which have a far smaller economy than that of the United States, but with the European Union as a group.

And the UK is not just better for the US when its part of the EU. For Obama, the EU is easier to deal with when the UK is on the inside. He, like the entire American diplomatic and political elite, thinks of Britain as being more in sympathy with an anti-statist and free market approach to political economy than many European countries.

The stronger traditions of state intervention and economic planning found in other member states is rather removed from the US approach. As a result, a European Union in which Britain wields some influence is ideologically closer to the United States and less social democratic in outlook.

By wading into the referendum debate, Obama is simply restating a fixed idea and a deeply rooted attitude among post-war American leaders – Britain belongs in Europe, and is a beneficent influence in European political structures. Yet, more negatively from a British standpoint, it is not important or rich enough as an independent state to warrant strong or distinct attention from American presidents.

Photo by Nick Knupffer

A 12 step guide to the EU crisis of political responsibility

Posted on July 8, 2015 by tess

Why are European institutions incapable of implementing values that honour fraternity, solidarity, and a dignified life, asks Donatella della Porta Professor of Sociology at the European University Institute, and Director of the Centre on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos), in this post which was first published on 8 July 2015 by Open Democracy.

Progressive social movements have long expressed support for ‘another Europe’. Their almost unanimous support for the Greek referendum’s ‘no’ vote against the Troika proposal for further austerity policies speaks volumes about the frustration of building a Europe from below. Indeed anti-austerity protests have stated that the evolution of the European institutions is in the opposite direction: more and more a Europe of the (financial) markets, in which democratically unaccountable institutions make decisions and then impose them, via blackmail and fear, to domestic governments and European citizens. Their diagnosis resonates with recent research on the European Union, which stresses how, from a democratic deficit, European institutions moved towards a crisis of political responsibility. There is a fundamental inability to implement values of fraternity, solidarity and a dignified life

The Crisis was wrongly addressed by the EU as a crisis of fiscal profligacy in all peripheral countries

In reality, only Greece had high debt at the beginning of the crisis while in the other countries at the European periphery, debt resulted from the economic shocks. Various decisions by the Troika, composed of representatives of lending institutions including the EU, seem based on a biased (if not racist) vision of peripheral countries as overspending plus cheating.

The EU choice of austerity policies reduced perspectives for growth

Broadly applied policies of internal devaluation, with the goal of reducing prices through cuts in wages and employment, have been counterproductive as not only did gains in competitiveness remain marginal but also nominal growth was depressed, with the effect of further pessimism spread by rating agencies. Similarly, labour market flexibility reduced incentives to increase productivity.

The crisis dynamics at the periphery were fuelled by the unbalanced architecture of the Euro

Given large differences in the competitiveness of Eurozone countries, the Euro-system, while resting on unequal national economies, remained without an instrument to buffer these differences in case of shocks. Although the currency is one and the same, the public debt is national. Those very differences have increased inequalities, given the unwillingness of member states to countenance fiscal transfers in order to control asymmetric shocks and the economic heterogeneity of the countries involved in the currency union. During the crisis, the differential in competitiveness even increased as wage compression and labour flexibility reduced incentives to invest in productivity.

The crisis has been increased by member states lacking the instruments to address economic difficulties.

They lacked the possibilities of devaluing national currencies as well as relying on their own lenders as a last resort. When, as a consequence of the restriction in liquidity, the demand diminished in peripheral countries, the trade imbalance should have been pursued through an increase in export, which is usually facilitated by exchange rate devaluation. This was not available to the EU periphery (as it had been instead for Iceland) as it went against German interests as an export country.

The Eu has become more and more top down

While these policy choices have further pushed the EU in the direction of a ‘Europe of the market’, the EU also became more and more top down. The financial crisis fuelled a democratic crisis, which I have called a crisis of responsiveness. First and foremost, in countries in the Eurozone, the EU management of the crisis increased the democratic deficit at both domestic and European levels. This happened through various mechanisms.

The crisis was addressed through the imposition of policy decision from electorally unaccountable institutions

In fact, while formally still in charge of policy making, national governments have lost the capacity to choose among alternative options and have been forced to implement unpopular austerity measures. The imposition of conditionality weakened national democracy and sovereignty. Just like the structural adjustment programmes imposed by international lenders in the global south, the economic adjustment programmes which Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus were asked to sign in exchange for loans, and Italy and Spain were pushed to adopt in order to escape sanctions, could be expected to mirror their disappointing results.

7. Deflationary policies are embedded in the eu architecture, which reduce policy choices at the domestic level

Deflationary policies resonated with a Eurozone system in which the Stability and Growth Pact has pushed towards fiscal rigour since the Maastricht Treaty. Deflationary policies indeed damaged the potential for growth in the GIIPS countries such that they not only could not devalue their currency, but also further depressed their internal markets through cuts in salaries and labour rights.

the eu has constrained the democratic dialectic between government and opposition

Politically, the EU has imposed unchallenged support for its own policies on weak economies. It often forces – in some cases formally, through conditioned lending, in some cases informally, through various forms of pressure – parties in government and in the opposition to support those policies. This happened in Spain, where the PSOE in government had addressed the crisis through investments in 2008, but was pushed towards labour market liberalization and austerity. In Portugal, both government and opposition parties were explicitly asked to sign up to three austerity packages. In Ireland, after the electoral defeat of Fianna Fail (which dropped from 77 to 20 seats) the very same policies were imposed on the new governmental coalition formed by Fine Gael and Labour. In Greece, after the socialist victory of 2009, Pasok promises to increase social protection remained unfulfilled, as its government was substituted by a so-called technical government that, with the support of a broad coalition, had to implement the austerity policies demanded by both IMF and EU.

In Italy, with a later start to the sovereign debt crisis, the centre-left first supported the emergency austerity package of the centre-right government. It then supported (together with the centre-right) a new government, which implemented the EU goals for labour market liberalization that were listed in a supposedly confidential letter, sent by both the incoming and outgoing presidents of the ECB. While political outcomes varied to a certain extent in the first part of the crisis, the common outcome of EU intervention was in eliding policy differences between left and right, and therefore the democratic dynamics of government and opposition. Even if the crisis caused governmental defeats and early elections in Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece, policy imposed from above remained unchanged. In fact, grand coalitions and (self-defined) technocratic governments were often appointed.

The EU has introduced policies aof liberalisation, increasing the power of markets over states an 9financial) capital over labout

Welfare state reform during the crisis can be seen as instances of liberalization, that is, as the spreading of a market logic in areas previously addressed through political decision-making. With the weakening of labour, in both liberal market and coordinated market capitalism, labour market deregulation and wage moderation seemed like the only options available to gain in competitiveness, given the fiscal constraints imposed by the Stability and Growth Pact.

The EU has strengthened the domestic power of various growps and classes pushing for anti-labour politics

EU policies have weakened the unions, which have been manoeuvred – and let themselves be manoeuvred – in corporatist deals, from a position of weakness. When the unions could not be persuaded to accept austerity measures, the EU line has been to proceed against them. Social pacts (such as the one on pension reform in Spain in February 2011, or in Ireland, the ‘Croke Park’ agreement with public sector unions in 2010) were concessionary agreements, that further weakened unions such that, even if damages to their constituencies were sometimes limited, they got very limited concessions in terms of policy as well as commitment to collaboration in the future. When the unions disagreed with austerity measures, the pressure from the EU was to proceed unilaterally

The EU reduced electoral accountability by moving power from parliaments to executive and independent authorities.

Closed, self-sustained and unchecked decision-makers have been empowered during the crisis. These include bureaucrats in the ECB. In this respect, the EU democratic deficit is increased by the unaccountability of those formal and informal EU institutions that de facto challenge democratic governments at the domestic level. The unaccountable ECB holds an increasing amount of autonomous power to decide whether to create money and under which conditions to distribute it, with the potential for manipulating market panic and citizens’ fears in order to impose policy.

Fiscal authonomy and national sovereignty have been dramatically reduced via new EU instruments that impose fiscal probity

Recent changes in the management of the crisis have increased the democratic deficit, not only of the EU, but also of the member states, imposing pro-cyclical policies in a much more stringent way than with the previous Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). The EU institutions’ capacity to enforce unaccountable decisions has increased dramatically during the crisis.

At the EU level, increasing controls are imposed by the Six-Pack, the Fiscal Compact and the Two-Pack. Already in 1997, the SGP fuelled a process of policy coordination as the EU could impose corrective mechanisms in case of deviation from EMU prescription, with constraints especially on public expenditure. This is aggravated by the fact that the governance of the EMU is more and more devolved to economically oriented actors such as the DG ECFIN, the Council for Economic and Financial Affairs and the European Central Bank, all of which are oriented by a monetarist paradigm, calling for labour market de-regulation and cuts in pensions and health care.

The ineffectiveness of the SGP was attributed to its weak capacity for enforcement, but during the crisis new and more stringent instruments were developed. First, in December 2011, the Six-Pack increased the strength and the scope of surveillance as well as potential sanctions for all member states, and even more stringently on the Eurozone. Passed in 2012, the Fiscal Compact is even more binding for Euro-countries, as it requires that member states report on their national debt to the Commission and the Council. Finally, the Two-Pack, coming into force in May 2013, has further specified budgetary policy aims, creating higher enforcement and surveillance mechanisms, with the requirement that sovereign member states send their budget proposals for prior approval to the EU and the Eurogroup. All these instruments put unprecedented constraints on social expenditure.

These developments have not only affected social movements in times of austerity, but also risk remaining permanent challenges in the future. If the structural adjustment programs were limited in time, the turn towards EU institutions that are more and more free market oriented and less and less democratic has been structured within institutional changes that are meant to last. If until about 15 years ago, the EU presented a mix of opportunities and threats for social movements, nowadays and for the foreseeable future the EU institutions have become became unavoidable targets rather than potential allies. While at the beginning of the great recession, anti-austerity protests remained largely domestic, in the recent dramatic vicissitudes relating to the Greek crisis, and the EU role in it, what is becoming clear to progressive social movements in Europe seems to be the difficulty, but also the absolute necessity, to act beyond national borders.

Photo:Leonid Mamchenkov

One & All – a digital voyage around Britain’s coast

Posted on June 26, 2015 by tess

During July a mysterious beach hut will be travelling across the UK. Starting its journey in Seaham, County Durham, it will move on to Orford Ness, Suffolk finishing it’s journey in Porthgain, Pembrokeshire. Inside the bright blue hut you’ll experience an atmospheric soundscape and be invited to record your thoughts about what the coast means to you.

It’s all part of One and All, a new digital commission by The National Trust and SoundUK, co-produced by The Swarm, SoundUK and ArtDocs. The commission will invite three major artists to create a digital voyage through sight, sound and sea to celebrate the 50 year anniversary of The National Trust’s Neptune Project.

The Beachhut soundscape is being created by founder of the Human League / Heaven 17 and acclaimed sound artist, Martyn Ware from recordings in the British Library sound archive. Martyn will then use the recordings made in the hut to create a new work as part of One and All, available to experience online in November. Also contributing is Owen Sheers, acclaimed poet, and Tania Kovats, a visual artist who often features the sea in her work.

Come visit the beach hut and be part of this exciting project throughout July at:

1 – 6 July Noses Point Car Park, East Cliff Rd, Seaham, County Durham SR7 7PS.
8 – 14 July Orford Ness, Suffolk IP12 2NU.
15 – 21 July Village green, Porthgain, Pembrokeshire SA62 5BN.

Martyn will be at the beach hut at 11am each Wednesday. More info here plus watch a trailer and find out more about One and All here

One and All is a co-commission by Trust New Art, the National Trust’ contemporary arts programme, and sounduk. Produced in collaboration with Artdocs and The Swarm.

Caffeine may reduce stress – but it won’t solve your problems

Posted on June 10, 2015 by tess

Coffee addicts have been saying it for years – now an experiment on mice has found that caffeine does indeed help one stay cool in stressful situations – and has pinpointed the neurochemical pathways involved in the process. The researchers even suggest that the study may one day lead to medical therapies for stress-related illnesses in humans.

But while the research itself is important, we must not forget that stress is a normal human reaction to events rather than brain chemistry. The last thing we need is another psychiatric drug that ignores the root of the problem.This blog by Peter Kinderman, Professor of Clinical Psychology at University of Liverpool was first posted on The Conversation website.

Previous research has shown a number of positive effects of caffeine, for instance on preventing depression. This study is the first to uncover the neurochemical pathways that enable caffeine to prevent some of the negative effects of stress on the brain.

Caffeine is known to inhibit receptors in the brain for the chemical adenosine. The researchers found that these receptors also control the negative effects of chronic stress and that stress-induced behaviour can be reversed by blocking the receptors.

The results are important, as we do indeed know that chronic stress affects people very badly. In mice, the (rather unpleasant) stressful situations in this experiment included as damp bedding, sharing living space with others, food and water deprivation, cold baths and cages tilted at 45°. And these poor mice unsurprisingly showed the behavioural and neurological consequences of this stress.

In humans, chronic stress can also have disastrous consequences. For example, my colleagues have shown that the economic crisis in the years between 2008 and 2010 can be blamed for as many as 1,000 people in the UK taking their own lives. We do, absolutely, need to understand how stress affects us. And we definitely need to find ways to help people (and mice) affected by stress.

Handle with care

But I do have a nagging concern. The paper suggests that a drug blocking this particular receptor could be used to treat illnesses stemming from chronic stress such as depression or anxiety.

It’s this that I question. While I don’t doubt that the study has revealed something fascinating about how the brain responds to chronic stress, it’s a little less certain that the research tells us anything about “disorders”. The mice seemed to respond normally to an abnormal – stressful – situation. It would be unfortunate to extrapolate that understanding to infer that such a response is a sign of abnormality, especially in humans.

Stressful events make us stressed, emotionally and physically; they have negative cognitive, emotional, physical and behavioural consequences. Given that we process information in the brain using neurotransmitters, it’s obvious that there will be a neurological route or pathway behind stress-induced behaviour. It’s great to know more about that pathway – and maybe that will even help us become more resilient or recover faster from stressful life events.

Swerves and steering wheels

An analogy might help. If a driver swerves and crashes a car, we don’t usually regard the steering wheel as the “cause” of the crash. The steering wheel was absolutely necessary (almost certainly the steering wheel was a necessary part of the causal chain), but it didn’t “cause” the crash. OK, we can imagine a weird scenario where a fault in the steering wheel (grease on the grip, perhaps) might be to blame. But such scenarios are vanishingly rare. Essentially, the wheel is a part of a mechanism whereby the cause (the driver’s swerve) translates into the crash.

It’s fantastic that this research has been conducted. It’s genuinely important – and potentially useful. As a scientist and I believe passionately that knowledge (and depth of knowledge) can help us understand the full implications of the embodied human experience. That includes understanding how the brain works and the neurochemical pathways of our response to stress. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that these molecular pathways are the “cause” of psychological distress. It’s probably better to think of them as enabling our normal human responses, not causing them.

This is important. The unfortunate tendency to label undesirable emotions as “symptoms” of “illness” may well cause us to treat people with less empathy than we should, to ignore the root causes of distress and to turn to inappropriate medical treatments. I’m all in favour of understanding how our brains work. I’m slightly less keen on mistaking mechanisms for causes.

Photo: Marcelo Cesar Augusto Romeo

László Krasznahorkai – winner of International Man Booker Prize 2015

Posted on May 23, 2015 by tess

László Krasznahorkai has won the 2015 International Man Booker prize for “achievement in fiction on the world stage”. Described as “the Hungarian master of the apocalypse” by Susan Sontag, he has a preoccupation with societies which spiral into self-destruction and debauchery.

Bran Nicol, Professor of English at University of Surrey gives us the lowdown on Krasznahorkai and his writing in this post that first appeared on The Conversation website.

Why you should read the Hungarian master of the apocalypse

Like league tables in education, the danger of literary prizes is that something with value beyond the all-consuming capitalist pursuit of excellence becomes reduced to a kind of sporting event.

This is one effect of the often-quoted puff copy by Susan Sontag which first aroused my curiosity in the work of the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, who has just won the sixth International Man Booker Prize.

Sontag described him as the “contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse”. My first thought was to wonder whether every country had its own reigning literary Master of the Apocalypse who would compete for a global prize (a fight to the death, obviously).

Global vision

The International Booker Prize is awarded “for an achievement in fiction on the world stage” and the appeal and ambition of Krasznahorkai is certainly global. His work mixes timelessness with the unmistakably now. Details about the villages in his novels Satantango (1985) and The Melancholy of Resistance(1989), for example, are in short supply, giving the stories they tell a timeless air. They are like the fables or philosophical allegories of other writers in the European existentialist tradition who might be regarded as Krasznahorkai’s forebears: Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Kafka and Beckett.

At the same time, his preoccupation with societies which spiral into self-destruction and debauchery, with the spectre of apocalypse, and with charismatic but menacing quasi-poitical leaders, make Krasznahorkai’s writing unmistakably the product of the late 20th century, an age beset by fears of social breakdown, environmental catastrophe, the end of the species (or the species as we know it), global economic meltdown and so on. Anxiety is hard-wired into the modern sensibility, and the mood of Krasznahorkai’s fiction is its perfect complement.

One of the allegorical contexts his work invites is, inevitably, that of totalitarianism and the Cold War. Reading Krasznahorkai in 2015 transports the UK reader into a temporal vaccuum. The Melancholy of Resistance was published in a landmark year – 1989 marked the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the restoration of Hungary to a democratic parliamentary republic. That year ushered in what turned out to be a brief moment of political hope – until 9/11 triggered a return of the apocalyptic imagination.

To read the novel in 2015 means its tale about a travelling exhibition of “The Biggest Whale in the World”, which leads not to carnival and wonder but a descent into chaos and violence, eventually requiring the army to move in and restore order, becomes at once a historical allegory of totalitarian Hungary and a cautionary tale about the dangers of social breakdown in the face of the collapse of religion and politics.

‘In and out of cellars’

Krasznahorkai’s writing tends to be described as “difficult” or “innovative”. What this means is that he does not conform to the norm in contemporary literary fiction and write accessible narrative-driven realist or historical fiction. Instead, he experiments with literary form and language. The most recent of his novels to be translated, his 2008 novel Seiobo There Below, is an exercise in “constrained writing” (where an arbitrary rule dictates the structure) in which the chapters are numbered according to the Fibonacci sequence in mathematics.

And then there are the sentences. One of the most striking features of Krasznahorkai’s writing is the sheer length of its sentences and paragraphs. It is not uncommon for a paragraph to comprise a single sentence and that sentence to last for a page or more, punctuated by commas and semi-colons. The effect, as Szirtes has said, is that readers feel guided into “loops and dark alleyways – like wandering in and out of cellars”. But the rhythm of the clauses produces a lyrical beauty which conveys the sense that the world is endlessly fascinating and beyond our comprehension.

Its relevance to the contemporary mood and its sense of being beyond the norm is why Krasznahorkai’s fiction demands to be read. In a year marked in Britain by the rise of crude anti-European – especially anti-Eastern European – xenophobia, I find it a comfort to regard the International Booker Prize not as a reward for excellence but as a reminder of an enriching cultural perspective beyond the narrowly British. In the case of this particular winner, it offers a welcome insight into a global but distinctively Eastern European perspective on the modern world.

Irish Referendum on Gay Marriage

Posted on May 22, 2015 by tess

Today, the Irish people vote in a referendum on gay marriage. Is a plebiscite the right way to take such a decision, should the majority have the right to deny basic human rights to a minority?

In case you missed it, we are republishing this post from an Irish student at Cambridge University.

Michael Angland, welcomes the referendum as a ‘national conversation’. Writing on the Get Real website, a termly University of Cambridge student publication written, edited and produced by the LGBT+ community in Cambridge and its allies, he argues that this is about building a fairer society, and despite the risks, a referendum is better than top down legal reform.

Here we republish his article, Yes to a national conversation……..

My civil liberties are being put to a popular vote

It seems unjust that the mainly heterosexual population of Ireland will have the power to choose whether the love I experience and the relationships I engage in are to be considered valid in the eyes of the state. The unjust anachronism of marriage inequality should have been quickly and quietly righted by the Irish parliament, as its British counterpart did two years ago. In a way, the Irish referendum should highlight the fact that Britain’s closest neighbour is still catching up, shaking off the shackles of a constitution which enshrines the conservative patriarchal values of a bygone age, written under the watchful eye of the future Archbishop of Dublin.

The problem is, the mood among LGBT+ people and social liberals on the other side of the Irish Sea is much more complicated than this. Some relish the chance to become the first nation to enshrine an LGBT+ right by popular plebiscite. The last four months have given better exposure to queer issues in the media and on the streets than a thousand LGBT History Months could hope to provide, and the nation has heard many heartwarming and sobering stories of Irish gay men and women’s experiences. From Colin Farrell’s beautifully written tribute to his gay brother, who bravely dealt with ignorance, hatred and violence when he was in school, to a courageous Dublin priest revealing his sexuality to his parishioners during mass and calling for a ‘Yes’ vote. From Gaelic footballer and Cork legend Valerie Mulcahy sharing the difficult and often overlooked experience of being a gay woman in rural Ireland, to the Minister of Health coming out and taking a stand on the referendum – becoming the first openly gay Irish cabinet minister.

These personal stories from across the spectrum of Irish society may seem unremarkable to some young people, but they have brought the reality of LGBT+ people’s existence and struggles to the homes of people like my grandparents, whose generation in rural County Cork was largely undisturbed by the existence of openly gay people.

The fact that marriage equality has to even go the electorate, and that voters could conceivably reject it, is not at all ‘right’. But many things enshrined by law are neither right nor just, and as Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias recently reminded us, for those who strive for equality and justice, politics has nothing to do with being right, it is about being effective in creating a fairer society.

There is a tendency in the modern left to wall ourselves off in a secluded chamber of dogmatic correctness, backed up by Trotsky and Butler and Said, and to wait for the misguided masses to come grovelling to us, renouncing the error of their former ways. The recent history of the SWP tells us all we need to know about the efficacy of that tactic. Bypassing all of the hard work and getting same-sex marriage quickly legislated from on high might seem attractive, but I would prefer to take the risk of having a national conversation, which has the potential to fundamentally transform society for the better. Even should the worst happen and the referendum fail, the silences shattered and truths confronted in living rooms all over Ireland during the last few months bear testament to the value of the latter road.

Were I a libertarian, I would logically question why the state should have any say in who I could marry, and probably challenge whether there should be a state sanctioned institution of marriage at all. But as a believer in a shared society and a shared future, I see a special value in my home country validating and protecting me in law, especially if it results from a popular vote.

Prejudice will still thrive, even if the people in power make the right noises. The only way to minimise it is not through a quick-fix parliamentary vote but through the arduous path of meeting hatred with love, ignorance with education, anger with patience, and darkness with light. The referendum has put it up to each and every Irish person to do just that, and imagine how much sweeter justice will feel when it has been vindicated by our families, neighbours and friends, not by a detached bunch of political opportunists on Kildare Street.

Yes Equality /Tá Comhionannas

Michael Angland (GR. Features Editor)

Picture: David Goehring

You may also be interested to read Chris Creegan’s blog, Enniscorthy, equal marriage and the ’embrace of love’, drawing on novelist Colm Toibin’s contribution to the referendum debate:

Get Real also carried an article by Ronan Marron putting the counter argument – that the majority should not vote on minority rights.

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Pod Academy podcasts:

Don’t say Gay! About introducing children to different sexualities

Me, myself, I: Changing gay male identity – a discussion between Andrew Cooper and Jeffrey Weeks.

“GET REAL.,” is a termly University of Cambridge student publication written, edited and produced by the LGBT+ community in Cambridge and its allies for students of the University, Cambridge and the outside, “bigger,” world. It aims, through the coverage of important news stories and through its comment and features pieces to create a safe space for debate and discussion of LGBT+ related issues.

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