Cassandra Voices

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  • Unforgettable Year: June 2020

    June brought criticism of Big Data censorship and the coverage of the pandemic in mainstream media, as it became clear the doomsday scenarios certain epidemiologists painted in March were wide of the mark. Frank Armstrong wrote:

    Accepting Covid-19 represents an extraordinary challenge requiring a concerted response, censorship by Big Data in such a blanket form, including of recognised academic authorities, surely only lends credence to conspiracy theories, fomented by the far-right in particular. Disregard for freedom of expression casts doubt over the integrity of scientific inquiry and inhibits rational debate.

    He found fault in particular with The Guardian’s coverage:

    The free digital site with an estimated 42 million monthly visitors devoted unrelenting rolling coverage to Covid-19, emphasising the simple moral calculus with a banner across its home page. This has been to the almost complete exclusion of all other content for the months of March, April and May.

    The Guardian’s loss of proportion, and nuance, has been particularly damaging as it is the most trusted newspaper brand in the U.K., including, importantly, among readers aged 18 to 29.[lviii] This may be traced to its position as a global news provider of free content dependent on maintaining an enormous click rate to derive a profit.

    He also interpreted the global Black Lives Matters eruption as an unconscious response to the lockdown experience: ‘The extraordinary scenes witnessed around the world could also be interpreted as a proxy for societies throwing off the heavy knee of lockdowns, containing a basic human impulse to interact.’

    Ireland witnessed a number of exuberant demonstrations, including one in Sligo covered by Fellipe Lopes.

    Image (c) Fellipe Lopes

    Justin Frewen scholarly account was to the fore in June, discussing the attendant repression and a Pandemic Shock Doctrine.

    Covid-19’s rapid spread around the world has impacted upon people living in a wide variety of political, economic, social and cultural contexts. These diverse contexts have mediated the repressive policies available to governments – facilitating, refracting or impeding the measures they have attempted to impose – the insecurity and fear caused by the pandemic have undoubtedly facilitated the imposition of repressive measures.

    By PJeganathan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89483458

    He continued:

    Repressive policies and measures can be introduced, as the ‘shock’ caused by the Covid-19 pandemic leaves the public less able to resist. In a world where lockdowns, isolation and quarantining have become the new accepted norm, coordinated, active resistance to repressive and inhibiting policies has become more complicated.

    In another article Frewen discussed whether we are really all in this together:

    Never ones to let a good crisis go to waste, the advertising industry has swiftly conceived and produced a slew of adverts to hawk their clients’ wares by tapping into the positive sentiments of this catchphrase. Praising frontline workers or highlighting our newfound unity – separated but together – they strive to manipulate the emotions and purchasing decisions of their target audiences.

     

    Moreover, Laurent Muzellac was proposing that greater attention should be given to the impact of lockdown on younger people, including children:

    governments should not only care about the lives of its citizens today, but also be concerned with the longer term health and wellbeing of the nation. To mitigate the next crisis and guide future investment, the government should first consider how many, and which, lives confinement saved, and which it destroyed.

    Justo Lapiedra (wikicommons)

    Next in an important article on The State of Irish Agriculture Eoghan Harris demonstrated the hypocrisy of the Irish agricultural authorities in claiming that Ireland was the most food secure country in the world:

     Food security in this scenario equates to commodities being traded on a global market with minimal restrictions. The evaluation is predicated on current availability, price and diversity of food consumed – regardless of productive factors or supply chain interference. It takes no account of the environmental or social consequences of this supply line, or any risks lying further down the line, whether a hard Brexit, a global pandemic, or that the global food system has eroded a quarter of all arable topsoil on the planet since the 1950s.

    He further revealed:

    Over the course of the twentieth century, the adaptation of new and increasingly expensive inputs into agriculture have been sold as ‘progress’ to farmers. Numerous chemicals and pharmaceutical companies, including SmithKline, Pfizer, Merck, Schering Plough and Roche located their manufacturing facilities in Ireland during the 1960s and 70s, availing of lax or non-existent environmental regulation and lower labour costs. They stayed because of an attractive corporate tax regimes and unrestricted interference in Ireland’s educational system. By the turn of the twenty-first century they accounted for nearly seventy percent of global pharmaceutical output.

    Also on an environmental theme, David Langwallner was drawn to the work of Arundhati Roy, who has also highlighted the trials of the dispossessed through this pandemic:

    In India and beyond, Arundhati Roy demonstrates how neo-liberalism and environmental damage go hand in glove in her Capitalism a Ghost Story (2014).  Since the publication of The God of Small Things (1997) she has channelled her energies into political activism against the growing environmental and economic calamity being perpetrated on her native land, through the depredations of neo-liberalism. It is that political conscience that is the primary interest of her new awareness.

    While on World Refugee Day Evgeny Shtorn drew attention to the importance of the storytelling medium.

    For centuries only certain people could share their stories. They were those occupying positions of power: men, for example, as opposed to women. Feminist methodologies made it very clear that having one’s voice heard is essential to having a societal impact. Since women’s voices were counted, our societies have changed. Following this logic, other communities made their voices heard through various forms of storytelling: they were LGBTQI communities, disabled people, ethnic and racial minorities, working class people and many other groups. Hearing each and every one of these stories has brought our societies closer to real equality.

    ‘When Travel Means Need’ from ‘The Timelapse’ (c) Letizia Lopreiato

    Artist of the Month Letizia Lopreiato found a sanctuary from a sense of exile in Ireland:

    For many years the sensation of exile following the death of my father truly followed me too, just like the narrator in The Plague, until I arrived home. Ireland, Dublin, its magical people, its incredible feeling of community, allowed me to be present, to slow down, to feel my own thoughts. Thoughts that I have had for so long but that I could not hold the energy to engage with, it was like I couldn’t handle the intensity of them for so long, until when It finally felt like I had no escape from the awareness of them, if I truly want to make through it and still be myself.

    Musician of the Month Richard Egan, meanwhile, brought us on a journey from noise to silence:

    In the beginning they need and want to be heard yet, at some point, silence will be required to stay sharp. They should never choose the sound of their own voice over the work. Staying quiet is not what artists are very good at but it is what needs to be done sometimes. Silence doesn’t have to last forever and invariably there will come a time when a fork in the road is reached: one way ‘stop talking’, the other ‘continue speaking’. The artist will feel in their bones when this fateful day arrives.

    Photo credit: Peter Campbell

    Also in music, Andrew Hamilton found Joy in epigrammatic quotations:

    You may ask why on earth do you find these quotes useful? I fully own up to having a tendency towards the austere myself: over the past five years I have gone at least twice a year on silent retreats in a Buddhist monastery and my biggest disappointment during this lockdown has been missing out on a cancelled ten-day silent meditation retreat at the monastery led by an amazing nun. But also reflecting on it for this article I suddenly realised that I probably need a corrective or balance to clichéd notions of what the arts exist for and the gush spewed out from the art and music worlds to continue making anything. Maybe I am very contrary (okay, I am) but when I read blanket statements about how art needs to reflect life (whatever that means and what if mine is really boring and mundane?!) I think of Martin at her fiercest: ‘art work…does not represent life because life is infinite, dimensionless. It is consciousness of itself. And that cannot be represented’.

    And Constance Hauman discovered a creativity in the silence of New York after it shut down on April 4th.

    We also received fiction from Camillus John in which ‘The real facts don’t matter. Only the goal and dream of ultimate justice.’

    Image (c) Constantino Idini

    And new poetry from Micheal O’Siadhail:

    SIDE EFFECT

    So few cars on our Manhattan street
    Pigeons leaving nests that swirl between
    Highrise ledges, fearless land to eat
    Any mid-street grain or scrap they glean.

    Told to stay at home most acquiesce.
    Now we learn how unbeknownst we spare
    Our New York as we’re emitting less
    Long-lived greenhouse gases in the air.

    Same in Paris, London, Madrid, Rome.
    If our frenzied whirl restarts, when pressed
    To create more jobs and we leave home,
    Will we foul then worse our global nest?

    Covid fear amends our habitat –
    Nature’s own backhanded caveat.

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    Unforgettable Year: March 2020

    Unforgettable Year: April 2020

    Unforgettable Year: May 2020

  • Unforgettable Year: May 2020

    By May concerns around the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of the pandemic were apparent. Rob Coffey’s though-provoking article ‘I Do Not Consent’ began:

    I didn’t particularly want to write this article.  I didn’t want to get involved in the whole online social media circus of opinion and rebuttal, triggering and offense. But I feel like I have something to say, and what I have to say is important.

    Acknowledging the loss and suffering caused by Covid-19 he continued:

    Our civil liberties and civil rights are not something that we be taken for granted. We forget now that Irish independence and the fight for freedom came at a high cost. ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’, is a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson.

    It does not matter whether you consider yourself to be politically on the left, centre, or the right, the erosion of civil liberties that has occurred in most Western democracies over the last few months is something that should concern you. If the there is one thing the history of the last century has taught us, it is that tyranny can take many forms.

    Justin Frewen also mused on the contagion of fear generating a diseased ‘other’:

    In times of plague and pestilence, fear is an omnipresent companion. This fear all too frequently translates into a desire to find someone to blame for the danger with which we are faced. The greater the threat to people’s safety and the less control they can exercise over it, the greater the risk that blame for their dilemma will be ascribed to an ‘outside’ group, generally those who are not members of one’s community or nation, no matter how transparently illogical the reasoning.

    Dr. Jonathan Quick writes:

    We are all afraid of death. We respond to the fear of epidemic disease by wanting to blame someone else. Anytime a threat arises, we want to blame the “other,” those not like “us.” At the outbreak of the 1918 Spanish flu, Americans blamed “the Hun”. AIDS was blamed on gay men.

    During the Black Death, which struck Europe in the mid-14th century, there was widespread fear and panic as this unknown disease wreaked havoc throughout Europe. Although communities around Europe often turned upon those seen as outsiders, particularly other nationalities, the Jewish community became the primary focus of this fear. This resulted in horrific instances such as the massacres of Jewish people in Frankfurt and Brussels and the extermination of the Jewish populations in Narbonne and Carcassonne.

    From the United States Christopher Parkison  was despairing at The End of American Leadership under Donald Trump, ‘cocky, bragging, dismissive of anyone who disagrees with him; demonstrating an utter disregard for the American people he governs, and unwavering focus on…himself.’

    “We have the best testing anywhere in the world, not even close … Look, we have so much testing. I don’t think you need that kind of testing or that much testing, but some people disagree with me and some people agree with me. But we have the greatest testing in the world, and we have the most testing in the world.”

    Image Arison Jardim

    In more heartening news from the Americas Fabio Pontes could report that a traditional way of life was protecting Amazonian people from Covid-19:

    The pandemic of the new coronavirus Covid-19 is forcing indigenous populations of the Amazon to self-isolate to prevent its spread within villages. In doing so they are fortified by traditional customs and the ancestral relationship with the forest. This occurs both in reverting to traditional food sources, and adopting behaviours that ensure the safety of the community in times of adversity.

    The pandemic was causing serious job losses in Ireland, and elsewhere, which brought protests from Debenhams workers that were cut short by An Garda Siochana in powerful images captured by Daniele Idini (including the featured image). Elsewhere Spaniards came out of lockdown to find touristic regions such as Mallorca seem like ghost towns.

    Meanwhile, the Hectic Fish was contemplating ‘Genolcide’, but had at least found an escape hatch out of Indonesia to Vietnam.

    Before the shit wave I had emailed a fellow environmental advocate and diplomat living in Vietnam. He replied swiftly after I mentioned the break up and the virus, and wrote that he had a safer place than Indonesia — a huge, almost deserted house where he lived with his young daughter. He said that figures in Vietnam were the lowest in the South East and that a painter friend of his would also be joining us for a while and that we would all have fun together.

    Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)

    Apart from the all-consuming pandemic, David Langwallner was weighing up the legacy of the late judge and politician Declan Costello, who endeavoured to transform a traditionally conservative Fine Gael party into a left-leaning political party through the Just Society platform in 1966.

    As a young man I was an admirer of the former President of the High Court, Attorney General and architect of Fine Gael’s Just Society, Declan Costello. I was then privileged to engage with him on an informal basis, appearing before him in court on a number of occasions. He was a complex and often divisive figure, and I disagree profoundly with many of his judgments, but there is no doubting the profundity of the intellect.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Elsewhere, environmental writer John Gibbon was drawn to Mark O’Connell’s apocalyptic premonitions:

    There are, he notes darkly, fascists in the streets and in the palaces, while around us ‘the weather has gone uncanny, volatile, malevolent’. The last remaining truth, O’Connell proposes, ‘is the supreme fiction of money, and we are up to our necks in a rising sludge of decomposing facts. For those who wish to read them, and for those who do not, the cryptic but insistent signs of apocalypse are all around’.

    May brought a first musical podcast introduced by Nicola Biggati on ‘Italian Library Music’ associated with the late Ennio Morricone.

    We also had fiction ‘Banned’ by Yona Shriyan Caffrey; as well as ‘The Ninth Rose’ by Sarah Johnson, and ‘Spent Batteries’ by Garreth Byrne.

    In poetry there were offerings from Frank Armstrong, The Musical Duel of Apollo and Pan and a number of works from Alex Winter including this below:

    PLAN FOR THE FUTURE

    I’ve worked it out and we’re going to be just fine.
    Your job will pay for mango and mine for baby wipes.
    My heart throbs dyspeptically when I think of our son.
    Where is he now? Does he wear leather and carry a scar?
    I’m less than a man.  I don’t even know how to drive.
    On the other hand I’ve worked out how to arrive on time.
    I was sobbing all morning as my heart went out –
    unlike the flames on Grenfell, which raged until lunch.
    Inside the staircases, lift shafts, flats, nothing withstood.
    Tears became gas.  Screams caught fire and burned.
    Everything that wasn’t blame became ersatz.
    It’s hard to stay focused.  Our dreams are so grotty.
    And the housekeeper creaks on the upstairs floor.
    I picture her stroking her long Hispanic body,
    which opens, closes, then empties itself completely.

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    Unforgettable Year: March 2020

    Unforgettable Year: April 2020

  • Unforgettable Year: April 2020

    April is generally associated with fresh flowers and cooling rain showers. It is also the dreaded deadline to file taxes. Whether you were enjoying the foliage or sitting down to calculate your tax refund, I think we can all agree that April was particularly cruel this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

    That month Frank Armstrong examined the underlying conditions exacerbating the pandemic in most Western countries:

    The dangers posed by this outbreak, and future ones that nature will throw at us, require a thorough reappraisal of public health priorities. Medical systems in advanced Western countries – especially those dominated by the private sector – tend to prioritise treatment of the symptoms of the main non-contagious diseases. We ‘live’ with cancer and heart disease as opposed to addressing multifarious lifestyle causes, which the virus is now preying on.

    As Boris Johnson’s predicament underlines, anyone is susceptible to Covid-19, but chances of exposure – without recklessly ignoring medical advice – are often determined by social class, which intersects with lower life expectancy already.

    NGO worker Justin Frewen drew on his experience of the Ebola epidemic in Guinea. He recognised that ‘the potential onward transmission of Covid-19 is far greater than for Ebola, as it does not require direct physical contact with the carrier of the virus.’ By that stage, however, it seems it could not ‘be transmitted through the air directly which would greatly increase its range and ease of transmission.’

    Frewen also recalled the failures of the WHO during the Ebola epidemic, and speculated as to whether the organisation had been too slow, again, in controlling the outbreak.

    Meanwhile a pandemic doctor was steeling himself to the arrival of the grim reaper:

    By recognising what death is we recognise what life is. That is maybe why this feels like such a moment of quickening. Death has come knocking at our doors and we are forced to open and acknowledge him. The door will close again, but the collective memory will remain, and when the pandemic is over this may help us to invest life with more meaning.

    Another pandemic doctor surveyed the chaos in Ireland’s care homes, in an article that was subsequently republished on the state broadcaster RTÉ’s website:

    Last I saw her, rendered unrecognisable behind sheets of dehumanising plastic, she clutched at my hand with her failing limbs and begged me not to leave. But in every room, each now unadorned with the usual ersatz trappings of home and identity one finds in nursing homes – photographs, homespun blankets, love letters from grandchildren – fellow residents lie awaiting their rushed assessments. Oxygen saturations, pulse and respiratory rate, a survey of existing co-morbidities, and finally resuscitation and transfer status to be revisited and revised: who might possibly be saved by hospital transfer, and whose last comfort would be the inevitable cocktail of morphine and midazolam, slipped quietly under the skin at intervals until death arrives.

    The pandemic created an enormous burden on the finances of most European States. By April according to Kyran FitzGerald the E.U. was teetering on the brink:

    Across Europe, national Governments have moved to tackle the crisis by propping up incomes. Northern European states tend to have efficient bureaucracies and reasonable resilient national balance sheets. But even in places such as prosperous Denmark, there are concerns that many businesses will not reopen after what is increasingly looking like a long shut down.

    The picture in Southern Europe is as mentioned much more bleak. In Italy and Spain, there is a real sense of let down amid the crisis, though better off nations like Germany have latterly moved to show solidarity by sending supplies and flying some patients from Eastern France and northern Italy to their hospitals for treatment.

    Lockdowns…

    Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo

    The lockdown will live long in cultural imaginations, and as an instrument of government control; its pros and cons will be debated endlessly. We published an account from China, where the policy first emerged by an anonymous correspondent, who saw it as the beginning of another Cultural Revolution.

    I had booked a hotel – but ended up alongside five families living in a large apartment for seven days. Only two of us were allowed outside to buy food – everyone else had to stay inside. Before leaving we were covered head-to-toe, in gloves, face masks and head coverings. On our return we went through elaborate cleaning procedures before re-entering the apartment. We had to remove our ‘outside’ clothing and spray everything with 75% alcohol.

    No cars with registrations from outside the capital city were allowed in. The schools were on holiday and due to return the first week in March but are still closed all over China. Only students doing important exams at the end of term will be allowed to return initially, which hasn’t happened yet.

    Leaving Beijing, I returned to my home city of ****. You are supposed to scan your phone so they can track potential carriers arriving into the city – which I hadn’t, having used a private firm for the airport collection. This meant my car registration didn’t show up on the cameras. So the next day the authorities were in touch to find out how I made it back from the airport.

    Italy was the first European country to adopt the measure, and from Piedmont Silvia Panizza observed how the confinement was diminishing her physical health:

    Our bodies, already weakened by sedentary lifestyles, are becoming weaker, muscle-mass decreasing quickly through lack of exercise. We do what we can, setting up home gyms, doing yoga in our bedrooms, a few push ups in the morning. No running, swimming, no going for walks; hardly breathing in the fresh air, panting, moving, or sweating. I do a little gardening in pots on the balcony, which I hadn’t done before. All of a sudden tomato seeds seemed the most important item on my shopping list during my weekly, stressful visit to the supermarket.

    It was a particularly challenging period for older people who were advised to cocoon in Ireland, another unwelcome neologism from this period. Fergus Armstrong reflected on the experience:

    We can have a gnawing sense that our civilisation got things wrong, that it is being, somehow, punished. A year ago I heard a retreat-giver say that we had lost the ability to read the signs of the times. We had belonged, or thought we belonged, on a planet that although under threat, and although subject to disaster more or less randomly distributed, was broadly on a path of progress, of improvement, even for under-developed regions. Nature mostly provided balance and harmony.

    Modern science reinforces this optimism at the cosmic level. We now know that the total universe that includes our Milky Way as one of nearly a hundred million galaxies has been expanding since the Big Bang. But if the rate of its expansion had been even a millionth of a percent slower, the whole thing would have collapsed, imploded in upon itself. There was fine tuning. Now trust is at issue with a particularly severe jolt for the Western world. It could be said that most of our strategies of coping are in the nature of distraction. To the extent this is so, the underlying unease remains. Call it dis-ease in fact.

    While over in Porto, Brazilian Fellipe Monteiro observed:

    What I, other immigrants, and the Portuguese hope is that we can return to the life we had before, and be able to leave this prison, without bars, that our homes have become. While we try to renew ourselves, the city is still and visibly lacking the energy and joy of the local population.

    What is most intriguing in this situation, at least for me, is that we are trying to reinvent ourselves. For example, I have started to cook a lot more during these days of confinement, learning new recipes, in addition to adapting the house for new activities we never used to do at home, like dancing and exercising.

    Despite everything I believe that together we will overcome this difficulty, which is happening on a a global scale; staying at home admiring the birds and their songs that echo along with an inaudible cry for freedom from the citizens.

    In Sweden, however, a softer approach was being taken to the pandemic, the merits of which, or otherwise, are also still being fiercely debated. A correspondent based there revealed the philosophy underpinning the policy:

    The Swedish approach to the Covid-19 pandemic is a sign of underlying differences in how they understand morality in the public sphere, and how they relate with each other: this comes from a more utilitarian perspective.

    Utilitarianism has earned a bad reputations as it has been incorrectly conflated with crude capitalism, when it is really about taking peoples’ wellbeing seriously, or ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ As Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mills understood it, utilitarianism is extremely equalitarian .

    Notably, the Swedish government has taken the advice of moral philosophers who come from a moral utilitarian perspective. The core difference between their approach and what we are seeing for the most part elsewhere is they attempt to avoid an understandable reaction to save lives immediately. They put aside an emotional response and consider the future consequences.

    Also, across the water in the United States, Bull Moose was typically bullish about opening up, in a dispatch from Atlanta:

    What the hell? Most people in the U.S. appear to be freaking out about Georgia ending its lockdown before anyone else. Even Trump weighed in, saying he disagreed with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. As we stand, restaurants here opened yesterday, as have bowling alleys, parks, nail salons and other facilities. The State also just declared its one thousandth death from COVID-19.

    On April 2nd Kemp admitted that he didn’t know that this coronavirus could spread asymptomatically, something the world knew since late January. Kemp may be an idiot, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong to re-open Georgia’s economy. With all respect to those who have lost loved ones or suffered from a bout, it’s time collectively we get back to our new normality.

    Earth Day

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    April 22nd marked the fiftieth anniversary or Earth Day, and leading environmental writer John Gibbons recalled how this had been closely followed by the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon in 1972, along with a host of other key environmental protection legislation, writing:

    Viewed through the political prism of today’s deeply dysfunctional and hyper-partisan U.S. politics, it seems almost quaint to recall a time when people, irrespective of their politics, religion or skin colour, broadly agreed that eliminating deadly toxins from the air that they breathed and the water that their children drank was a good idea.

    Fifty years later, the ideologically toxic Trump regime is busily dismantling large chunks of the progressive regulatory framework that the actions of the U.S. environmental movement ushered into being in 1970. Most sane people think it’s probably a bad idea to allow high levels of mercury, a potent and irreversible neurotoxin, to be released into the air from coal-burning plants.

    The Public Intellectual Series continued with assessment by David Langwallner of John Gray, the U.K.’s leading intellectual, and Jonathan Sumption the former U.K. Supreme Court judge who became an outspoken critic of lockdowns, and a defender of civil liberties first formulated in England in the Magna Carta (pictured above).

    Meanwhile Musician of the Month Niwel Tsumbu asserted the universality of music:

    It is very strange for me to hear people talk about pure ‘African Music’ that doesn’t exist – unless you go back thousands of years before humans started roaming around the globe. This concept is simply not true, and frankly, it drives me crazy when people, especially African musicians who use equal-tempered tuning with Western instruments, say so.

    We also published the lyrics of the song ‘Iguatu’ by Bartholomew Ryan:

    I sauntered up to the sertão
    in the northeast to a town called Iguatu
    to find the river
    where my cousin drowned in 1973
    the name of the river was the Jaguaribe
    they called it the dry river
    but as his sister Joan said –
    ‘there was nothing dry about it that day.’

    One surprisingly popular article explored how the Longford town of Ballinallee featured in the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s song ‘I Contain Multitudes,’ with a suggestion that it may have come about after a night Dylan spent in the company of fellow bard Shane MacGowan.

    Today and tomorrow and yesterday, too,
    The flowers are dyin’ like all things do,
    Follow me close, I’m going to Ballinalee,
    I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me.

    Uluc Ali Kilic in his studio in Istanbul. Daniele Idini

    Artist of the month was the extraordinary Uluc Ali Kilic from Turkey:

    My subject-matter is often the harm and destruction humanity inflicts on its surroundings, or other traumatic issues occurring in our time, such as the refugee crisis and homelessness. I try to make long-lasting artworks using plastic material which isn’t biodegradable in nature. Likewise, these artworks aim to last long in any viewers’ consciousness.

    In fiction there was the unmistakable style of Ilsa Monique Carter in Dumaine:

    Glacial and dark by design, her house inhaled the heat if by the gliding open of a sliding glass door, its hermetic seal was compromised. And like a large lung, the house then exhaled a quixotic draft of cooler air, which carried me with it out on to the balcony. Before she’d bolted the door behind me, no matter how briskly, and believe me she was… The sweet swelter had swallowed me whole.

    While Gary Grace brought us to the chaotic streets of Dublin to life after a night out in ‘A Slice’:

    Robbie was in what his friends referred to as “swaying tree mode”. This meant the slender greying hipster was pissed, his eyes barely open, and not engaging with anyone but moving slowly side to side, mouthing the lyrics to a song that wasn’t playing.

    There was poetry in English and his native Romanian from Radu Vancu.

    As well as a series of poems to mark Holy Week, including:

    A Corona Sonnet
    by Paul Curran

    With no less haste than the crisis deserves,
    All faces one mask of consternation,
    We’ve learnt, through conversing in spikes and curves,
    This virus respects no race or nation.
    Virgil could not have foreseen the Tiber
    Would fill so fast with the fallen of Rome,
    Hospitals built with sinew and fibre,
    Children in hiding, on their own, at home.
    His toll’s still rising, but Death, if he could,
    Would make no attempt to keep numbers down;
    Warm April predicates wearing no hood,
    His scythe keenly sharpened shines like his crown.
    Unfasten quick this dead pathogen’s trick
    Lest lists of the late outnumber the quick.

    And another from Billy O Hanluain:

    Stock Pile On Hope

    Walk down the bare,
    trembling aisles of your
    self. Everything dispensible
    is now after its Best Before.
    Pass by the Two for One indulgences
    of fear and doubt. Shelves stripped
    of the superfluous. The tattered packaging
    of novelties that amused us
    fade behind their
    spent Use By dates. Remembered now
    as infatuations bought to distract us.
    Is it time to close shop?
    Turn out the lights?
    Time for the din and dirge of shutters?
    We are open twenty four hours
    and we must never close.
    No matter the Feast Day.
    The Plague or The Hour.
    Turn toward that aisle within,
    so often passed in the hurry
    of what seemed to matter
    there you will find the plenty that
    always was and will be.
    Load your cart, fill your bags,
    weigh your trolley down.
    Stock pile on hope!

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    Unforgettable Year: March 2020

  • Unforgettable Year: March 2020

    ‘It’ had well and truly arrived by March, insidiously working its way into our lives like an unwanted guest who slips through the door unbeknownst. Editorially we were looking at the big picture, assessing the implications of what we used to call ‘the coronavirus’ – before becoming COVID-19 on February 11th – through political, legal and cultural lenses; as well as assessing the direct health impact.

    An important contribution came from Duncan Mclean  a senior researcher with the Research Unit on Humanitarian Stakes and Practices, Médecins Sans Frontières Switzerland. He looked back on the history of infectious disease outbreaks and how these can bring out the very worst prejudices, a phenomenon he described as the ‘medical scapegoat.’

    [I]f sickness has historically been portrayed as a punishment for sin, socially excluded groups and minorities have proven most vulnerable. Whether linked to mortality or fear of the unknown, context is key to understanding the long history of how those on the margins of society have been scapegoated.

    Moreover, in light of the introduction of special powers in the wake of the pandemic in Ireland, barrister and lecturer Alice Harrison examined how in Ireland infringements on civil liberties, such as the removal of jury trials in response to perceived threats to the state, have tended to ‘seep’ into ordinary usage.

    Protecting civil liberties, such as the right to jury trial, may seem less important as long as extraordinary powers are not abused. However, the existence of special powers poses the ongoing risk that they may be exploited by unscrupulous, or even tyrannical, politicians or agents of the state.

    Dr Samuel McManus was, however, able to see a ‘silver lining’ to the crisis:

    If there is a silver lining to this crisis it is the revelation of how connected we are to each other, in ways we have almost forgotten. We are a species with special concerns. We cannot afford to operate alone as individuals; to do so is to threaten us all. This realisation is putting into stark relief the way we have organised our societies over the past few decades.

    He averted to the importance of the state delivering public healthcare, as opposed to profit-driven private institutions:

    Some private health care clinics in Dublin are now putting up signs saying they will not accept patients with respiratory symptoms, directing them towards their G.P’s. This is in one way understandable as a means of limiting transmission, but while the public service is taking extra measures to distribute information and organise the response, these private clinics are under no compulsion to do so.

    Frank Armstrong also assessed Ireland’s early response to the pandemic, pointing to inherent weaknesses, and other factors likely to mitigate the worst effects:

    The pandemic has hit Ireland during a period of political instability after a February general election yielded an indecisive result, with Leo Varadkar’s government no longer commanding a Dáil majority. Notwithstanding the challenge of installing a new cabinet under emergency conditions, it sets a dangerous precedent for a caretaker government to be in power for a prolonged period.

    He was also moved to write a poem ‘Coronavirus’, while Sammy Jay dwelt on the prescription of isolation in another moving poem.

    Image Patricio Cassinoni

    Fans of music and poetry were delighted by the release that month of a first single ‘Murder Most Foul’ from Bob Dylan’s new album Rough and Rowdy Ways. It offered a pleasant distraction from the unfolding global pandemic, although it contained a stark message according to David Langwallner

    Dylan has released a new seventeen minute-long song, ostensibly about the murder of John F. Kennedy, but which is also a travelogue through American cultural history, with Prince Hamlet and the great, deranged 1960s American DJ, Wolfman Jack, as our guide.

    Also, Musician of the Month Judith Ring revealed how she transforms everyday ‘noise’ into music, while exploring the sonic possibilities of different timbres; and Brian Dillon discussed the ideas behind his new solo project The Line. His debut album Matter had been released by Bad Soup Records in February.

    Photograph by Laura Sheeran

    In other cultural coverage, we interviewed documentary filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle, and introduced his documentary ‘Patrick Kavanagh – No Man’s Fool.’

    We also published an essay by Eamon Kelly ‘The Rocky Road to a Republic’ that argued:

    You might think of the film ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ as some dated artifact, featuring Dub-a-lin in da rare auld times. But many of the cultural assumptions revealed in the film, and which later went towards hindering the film’s reception, are still very much alive in today’s Ireland. The sacred cows may have changed, but the overall cultural relationship with those things deemed sacred is still strikingly similar.

    Image William Murphy

    On a similar theme, David Langwallner called for A Renewed Deal:

    It is clear that we require a Renewed Deal, bringing Keynesian stabilisation measures, including support for small businesses, social safety nets and the shutting down of corporate tax avoidance. The E.U. must desist from imposing austerity under the guise of the Growth and Stability Pact, and reinforce regulatory protection of labour rights and the environment, resisting the lobbying of giant corporations. Courts in Ireland should also recognise a basic human right to housing, including prohibition against arbitrary eviction, as well as healthcare. So let us organise a petition then for an umbrella organisation to bring a Renewed Deal to the world.

    Langwallner also explored the influence of Slavoj Zizek in his Public Intellectual Series.

    ©Basso CANNARSA Opale/Alamy Stock Photo

    Meanwhile in international coverage Elliot Moriarty argued for more nuanced treatment of Rojava, the autonomous administration of north and east Syria:.

    Coverage of the region in the Western media tends to refer to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and ‘the Kurds’ interchangeably. This reinforces a reductive narrative of the SDF as being comprised of fearless but naive nationalists, apparently content to sacrifice themselves in the pursuit of a Kurdish statehood aligned to U.S. interests in the region.

    Image: Alexis Daloumis

    Even further afield in Indonesia, the Hectic Fish was discovering the dubious pleasures of ex-pat life on the island:

    f I end up in prison again, I will enjoy it as much as I did twenty years ago. There is justice at the end of shadows. And there is poetry behind bars. It is bad, but you are worse.

    Another anonymous writer The Man in the Black Pyjamas was bemoaning the impact of the housing crisis on the young people of his generation living in Dublin in ‘Gone’:

    “The country’s changed,” my friend said as we sat in our small, dawn-lit kitchen at half-five in the morning having toast and tea. A month later the landlord raised our rent by 30%, and four years on now we’re all gone from Dublin. Me and my friends, and probably most of the people out drinking in the sun that day. We celebrated equality and left a day or a month or a year later. Off to London or South America or Asia or the Middle East or back down the country or onto friends’ couches or back in with our parents or into homelessness. I wish I could go back to those days, but it’s all gone now: that Dublin, those people, that hope.

    We also had Sarah Hamilton discussing the challenges for aspiring female writers in an interview with Sarah Savitt of Vertigo who said:

    Don’t get too carried away, wasting time on followers and trying to build up clout. You need to know the ecosystem. Spend your time instead learning about how to get an agent, which publishers would suit you, reading work related to them. Follow the submission guidelines that are listed on an agent/publisher’s page. It gives you a better running. Most importantly, keep writing. After all this time, it still really is about the words.

    Furthermore, there was an extraordinary memoir ‘A Rat on the Wall’ from Stephen Mc Randal recalling the ill-treatment of a schoolboy in 1960’s Belfast.

    Illustration by Malina | Artsyfartsy.

    Further poetry came from the irrepressible Kevin Higgins who pointed to enduring fascistic tendencies in Ireland with ‘The Continuing Story of Óglaigh na hÉireann’

    On a more celestial note Kathleen Scott Goldinway brought us ‘The Lamps of the Virgins’

    Finally, the third hard copy edition of Cassandra Voices was launched at the end of March, and featured the introduction by Frank Armstrong,

    That new edition contained a memorable essay by Irish human rights campaigner, educator, film-maker and therapist, Caoimhe Butterly on the theme of Displacement:

    I knew that I should be there, in whatever capacity was useful – to witness, accompany and respond, to platform and archive journeys that were defined by such profound and often overwhelming displacement, external and internal.

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

  • Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    By February 15th there was a scent of danger in Bull Moose’s nostrils. Discussing which Democrat candidate would take on Donald Trump – would Mike Bloomberg have beaten Trump? – he brought our attention to coronavirus, a new viral danger emanating from China, which seemed quite exotic at that point.

    Coronavirus might be the trigger to collapse this deck of cards. How soon? Probably by April, maybe May. The virus is expected to peak around April, but by then the quarterly earnings will have been impacted.

    Should most of us in the U.S. be afraid of Coronavirus? It depends. If you’re healthy and don’t work in healthcare you’ve little to worry about. Based on the limited information we can glean from the Chinese news bubble, people with an otherwise healthy immune system, who are not regularly exposed to the virus, can rest easy. Apparently it is doctors, the elderly and other vulnerable categories who are susceptible to infection.

    But that won’t stop many of us from cancelling cruise ship vacations, holidays to Asia, and even overseas trips to trade fairs. It will also impact global supply chains, which rely heavily on China. All this means lost revenue, which will hit the markets once results first show up on balance sheets in April.

    The length of this market downturn will ultimately decide November’s election result.

    Meanwhile in Ireland, Frank Armstrong was contemplating a ‘political earthquake’ in advance of February’s Irish General Election, with Sinn Féin predicted to become the largest party in the Dáil chamber for the first time. He also charted the emergence of the far right in Ireland.

    For the moment opposition to the centre-right mainstream of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil is coming from the left, responding in particular to an ongoing Housing Crisis. But Ireland is not immune from the wave of identity politics sweeping far-right Populists into power elsewhere.

    Another recession might easily trigger far-right Populism within the existing framework, bringing together an unholy trinity, seen elsewhere, of xenophobia – including opposition to E.U. membership – climate change denial and opposition to abortion services.

    Elsewhere, Caroline Flack’s untimely death in February prompted consideration by Sarah Hamilton of the shocking grief caused by someone taking their own life.

    Caroline Flack.

    It is a natural reaction for us to want to cast blame somewhere. We point the finger at nameless, faceless entities manifesting greater evil than we would ever be capable of – whether trolls, social media or the tabloids. We assure ourselves these remote actors are the true killers.

    The hardest thing I have ever had to learn – one I am still struggling to get my head around – is that with suicide, we never fully know.

    February was a major month in our music coverage. First, we had renowned fiddler Musician of the Month, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh discussing his forthcoming duo album with Dan Trueman called ‘the Fate of Bones’, that would feature his 10-string hardanger d’amore fiddle and a fascinating collaboration with graphic designer Rossi McAuley.

    Then Vincent Dermody clairvoyantly discussed the huge challenges facing musicians in Ireland in a piece entitled: Almost Nobody Speaks For Musicians Anymore.

    Centuries of suffering and persecution of people on this island become a footnote to the realignment of power structures, our identity shrouded in myth and broad sweeps, as bit-part actors in nearly a millennium of recent existence. And I think, an internal struggle between our natural impulses as sardonic inhabitants of a dark, wet and green North Atlantic island.

    The coming wave can be extrapolated to a similar battle in the area of artistic self-expression that has been raging for most of our history. What do we value about ourselves and how should we express that in the public sphere? Is society thriving? If not, then am I hearing this reality represented in the everyday art that I encounter?

    Live Music in Dame Street, Dublin, October 2019. Pic Daniele Idini

    Paul Gilgunn was also contemplating the challenges involved in creation in the digital era. Thus:

    In an attention economy devised to distract and occupy consciousness, the exponential flow of information generates continual flux in its wake.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    There was also an essay by electro-acoustic composer Roger Doyle who charted his journey into experimental music in A Composer’s Story.

    Young peoples’ lives become filled with music on records, video, in films, on radio and TV, during Saturday nights, in supermarkets, in amusement arcades, on the streets and in concerts. Culturally exploded thus, they sit down to Mr. Beethoven and wonder what on earth this glaring composer from the distant past has to do with the rhythms they feel and the harmonies they hear.

    In his Public Intellectual Series in February David Langwallner’s explored the legacy of Christopher Hitchens, who he once encountered:

    I had a brief encounter with the man himself one enchanting and admittedly drunken evening. Being then youthful I was somewhat dazzled by his presence, yet more so when the bill for the wine and cognac arrived.

    I found Christopher Hitchens almost preternaturally eloquent, even when plastered. Industrial quantities of booze only seemed to inspire him to new heights, as it does many artists. Nonetheless, he was fortunate to have the constitution of an ox – a unique case and liver to boot. Predictably, it was the cigarettes that killed him in the end.

    David Langwallner clearly got around as evidenced by another treatment of Samuel Beckett, who he also encountered:

    I had the good fortune to encounter in the flesh arguably the last in the line of towering figures, Samuel Beckett, in a café in Montparnasse, Paris in 1982.

    Ireland had just won rugby’s Triple Crown in what was then called the Five Nations, before succumbing to the French team at the Parc de Princes, and Beckett was primarily inclined to banter about rugby and cricket with his countrymen. It must be stressed that he was a charmingly convivial person, and while austere, decidedly good company; even when pressed to do so he sedulously avoided discussion of his own work, preferring to muse on the artistic contributions of others.

    That slightly detached dignity, captured in John Minehan’s award-winning photograph was exactly as I found him. A kind and decent man, who concealed a madness arising out of intense creativity. A burning gaze alone revealed the creative fire that raged inside.

    Ronan Sheehan also drew on personal recollections in his review of Frank Connolly’s novel A Conspiracy of Lies based around the events of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings in 1974.

    Dublin and Monaghan people remember where they were on the 17th May 1974, the day three bombs exploded in Dublin and one in Monaghan. A UCD undergraduate at the time, I was in the library in Belfield when news of the bombs in Parnell Street, Talbot Street and South Leinster Street came through.

    We were shocked. Some rushed from the library. Others, myself included, obeyed a caution from the librarian to stay put. My father’s office at 1 Clare Street faced onto South Leinster Street. When eventually I reached my mother by telephone, I learned he was OK. The blast had smashed all the windows in his office and knocked him over. Otherwise, he was unhurt.

    Image courtesy of Dublin City Public Libraries.

    One of the most amusing articles we have ever published came from Bob Quinn that month in his account of how one summer night in 1956 Gene Shepherd invited his listeners to conspire with him in inventing a book which actually did not exist.

    We also began to cover unfolding events in Lebanon through our correspondent there Luke FitzHerbert as protestors took to the streets to block a key parliamentary vote and bank ceased to issue dollars.

    There was also coverage of rugby from Frank Armstrong, who looked forward to the guilty pleasure of the Four Provinces of Ireland coming together to form the national team:

    I yearn for Six Nations matches at this time of year. Despite my worthier self, I cannot take my eyes off a psychological drama and physical spectacle offering respite from interminable winter.

    The violence is terrible, but it seems life-affirming that these specimens can, for the most part, withstand the battering. At its best, it conveys life-in-action, a primal dance and irrepressible human spirit.

    In what was a frenetic month for Cassandra Voices there also fiction form Daniel Wade, whose Heart of the City evokes the unmistakable atmosphere of Dublin city:

    On O’ Connell Street, rush-hour crowds pitch and roll at traffic lights. She ignores seagulls screeching from the boardwalk, convoys of buses and LUAS clangs, Deliveroo cyclists dodging cycle-lanes, bouncers invigilating in doorways, the fluorescent glare from Supermac’s, haggard junkies lurching between double-yellows and taxi ranks. Under the GPO’s bullet-bejewelled portico, she spots a young girl huddled in a sleeping bag, forlornly holding out a styrofoam cup like an offering. Homeless in her hometown. She leans and drops a few coins in the cup, then keeps on walking, barely hearing the weary “Ah, thanks, Love” the girl murmurs after her. Two guards turn to watch her pass. They notice her scar, but she ignores them. Their high-vis jackets sting her eyes.

    And from Gary Grace, whose Synapse Fire contemplates the excesses of a misspent youth.

    One of the main things I characterize my misspent youth by, is a knack for exploiting the trust my middle-class parents misplaced in me. At seventeen, I was too old to be dragged along with them on what seemed like monthly getaways, but too young to exercise any degree of responsibility or restraint. My folks had a mobile home near Ballymoney beach, which had hosted many a night of debauchery for my older brother and his cronies. He was away in Amsterdam, so I’d decided it was my turn. That bank holiday weekend, I had access to a car, three malleable mates and in the palm of my hand, an assortment of different colored pills.

    There was also poetry from Lynn Caldwell, ‘Holding Velum to the Light’

    And from Brendan McCormack ‘omeros is unforgivable’, and ‘midnight in the soupcans of desire.’

    As well ‘Poem Written in Old Age’ by David Hillman:

    The light that streams across the universe
    Brings evidence of other worlds than ours
    Where midst the flux of fields and particles
    Eternal wisdom older than the stars
    Unweaves her web of possibilities
    The patterner experiments and plays.

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

  • Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Here begins our journey back through the #unforgettableyear of 2020…

    The drone-strike assassination of Qassem Soleimani on January 3rd, 2020 seems a long time ago now, but to our U.S. columnist Bull Moose it suggested a new phase in U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Who knows what would have happened in that region during an election year, if a certain respiratory pathogen hadn’t risen to such prominence.

    Paul Hennessy/Alamy

    January’s Musician of the Month Hilary Woods also appears to be speaking of a different age, when live music was still to be found in Ireland.

    In October last, I was at a Russian Circles gig in Galway. It gave me a much needed stark reminder of the power of live sound: washing over me, enveloping, reverberating my insides, shaking me out of an internal slumber. Requiring a medium to travel, the body is a conductor for sound. Filtering vibrations moving through it. Sound percolating in time through tissue and sinew, connecting, evading, resonating, confronting, decoding, making pliable.

    I emerged from the show a renewed being: sensorially realigned, perceiving things afresh, and happy I made the effort to go. As Rumi says, ‘whatever purifies you is the right path’.

    Hilary Woods, by the photographer Joshua James Wright.

    Elsewhere Billy O’Hanluain seemed to have been preparing us for the joys of working from home, surrounding by unfinished tasks. ‘Procrastination is a very cunning mistress.’ he wrote, ‘She masquerades so expertly at being a muse; seducing me with an ever expanding array of tantalizing tasks that acquire greater urgency with her every whisper and sensual suggestion.’

    On Procrastination

    And if it was a form of escapism you were after last January, Desmond O’Brien’s account of his psilocybin treatment for depression and anxiety would have been the best medicine. During the trip he had the unmistakable feeling that love is the glue holding us together.

    On a less optimistic note, Frank Armstrong explored how increasing news fatigue had been orchestrated by the likes of Steve Bannon, who targeted followers of Jordan Peterson, who has earned the dubious distinction of being the first internet intellectual.

    Image by Gage Skidmore.

    Among the most important stories we published last year was Fellipe Lopes’s heart-rending account of the rapidly deteriorating conditions for refugees in Camp Moria, Lesbos in Greece. He described murder and rape, but also a strong sense of community.

    The-Smokescreen-of-Moira-Lesbos-December-2020
    The Smokescreen of Moria, Lesbos, December 2020

    Meanwhile, featured artist Keshet Zur aspired to be a photographer but felt heartbrake in the digital era, now she engages with nature and social inclusion through Expressive Art Therapy.

    Keshet Zur

    Bob Quinn’s memoir continued with an account from the 1950s of teaching English in Pforzheim, Germany, where a student Trudie falls for his teaching charms

    David Langwallner also continued his public intellectual series with an account of the life and times of Noam Chomsky, with reference to his works Manufacturing Consent, Public Intellectual, Media Control, Henry Kissinger, George Orwell.

    Next there was Frank Armstrong’s Late Risers’ Manifesto 2020, in which he quoted the late great David Graeber to the effect that ‘The real question is how to ratchet down a bit more toward a society where people can live more by working less.’ Graeber further opined that the non-working poor may be ‘pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one’s penchant for self-annihilation.’

    In fiction, Siberian Blue by Mick Sobyanin includes childhood memories of Prokopyevsk, Siberia inside the Soviet Union, dating from 1974, including insights into prevailing Russian attitudes towards Volga Germans.

    Lastly we had a satirical poem from the irrepressible Kevin Higgins irreverently portraying the grant application process.

     

  • Our Environmental Future Depends on Tiny Circuit Boards

    When we think about the challenges we face regarding our environment, and how we’re going to address them, we tend to focus on big, ambitious concepts. One recent article on the subject referred to these as  ‘bold engineering ideas that go beyond simple recycling’ — highlighting possibilities like beaming electricity in from Space, or harnessing energy given off by people’s body heat, or even pulling harmful gas straight out of the air.

    These are exciting ideas, and in many cases they may actually be feasible too. Rest assured that brilliant minds in numerous fields relating to environmental conservation (and rehabilitation) are working on all sorts of audacious projects. In another ten years, wind and solar power may be the norm; in another twenty, pulling gas out of the air might be common practice; in another twenty-five, we may rely on Space in various ways to power our world. Just because there are some promising big ideas doesn’t mean there aren’t equally important small ones though. And to that point, it’s fair to say that the foundation we’re laying for environmental protection depends as much on tiny circuit boards as anything else.

    If that sounds like a bizarre or abstract notion, it’s actually one that’s fairly easy to explain. Putting it simply, IoT is saving the environment, at least to the extent the technology currently available to us is able to do so. Loosely defined as the network established by connected devices that can communicate with one another, the IoT is essentially producing a global system of environmental monitoring. It’s being used to track endangered species for purposes of research and protection; it’s helping to reduce e-waste by giving devices the ability to alert us when they need to be repaired, replaced, or recycled; it’s fighting deforestation, keeping tabs on ocean environments, conserving energy in homes and cities, and limiting water waste in farming and irrigation. And undoubtedly, this list only scratches the surface of the IoT’s broad, emerging environmental impact.

    All of these functions, however — indeed, the very concept of an ‘internet of things’ — depends upon the functionality of the devices that are connected. And this functionality is driven by nothing more than the circuits and chips housed within everything from sprinkler system monitors, to electronic ocean buoys, to our very own smartphones.

    To be clear about the matter, we should note that printed circuit boards have already progressed meaningfully over the years. This is not so much a result of improving technology, but rather a foundation for it.

    An interesting article looking at the evolution of Protel PCB design — one of the first major design software, in use since the ‘80s — shows that there has been a direct, continual evolution of design. Protel specifically has survived and been adapted to some of the more modern design systems that are still in use today, and which produce the very PCBs we use in our everyday devices (and throughout the IoT). In this sense, circuit design is one of the longest-running modern industries in tech, and something that has consistently driven both consumer and industrial electronics forward.

    Now, however, we need that evolution to continue. As Eoin Tierney wrote when exploring why software is so complicated ‘our demand for greater ‘power’ impose constraints that can only be met with greater complexity.’ Such is the case with the ever-expanding IoT as relates to environmental conservation. In the coming years, we will develop better understanding of how we can put connected sensors to use to monitor our environment. We’ll learn more about how these sensors should communicate with each other, and what that communication should lead to in terms of direct protective action. More processes relating to all of this will be automated, and our dependency on tiny devices and the tiny circuit boards inside of them will deepen.

    The more successfully those circuit boards advance, the more capable our devices will be of meeting our “demand for greater power” as relates to saving our environment. As exciting as the bigger and bolder ideas associated with climate change can be, it is advancement in this space that is capable of setting up non-stop, worldwide systems that can move us in the right direction.

  • Plagues, Autos-da-fé, and Music

    I was looking for an excuse to sing with some of my favourite musicians: Nick Roth, Francesco Turrisi and my sister Deirdre O’Leary. I’d had the pleasure of working extensively with all of them in the past, but never all together at once. Since we all come from and inhabit different musical worlds I had to find a place where those worlds could overlap harmoniously. Nick plays saxophones and percussion in mostly jazz and contemporary realms. Francesco plays keyboards and percussion in mostly early music and jazz domains. Deirdre is a classical and contemporary-classical clarinettist and I sing mostly early music and traditional songs. We all delight in improvising.

    I’ve long been drawn to the fabulously intricate music of the fourteenth century Ars Nova and Ars Subtilior, an even more sophisticated sub-genre of the Ars Nova that developed in the last quarter of that century especially at the court of the anti-pope in Avignon. This music features rhythmically and contrapuntally complex lines that remind me of avant-garde jazz, lines of notated ornamentation playing against each other like wild improvisations.

    I wanted a story that could be spun into a musical project and, having a penchant for all things gothic (especially of the fourteenth century kind), started researching the Black Death. While I was studying the effects of the plague in Ireland I came across a remarkable story of colliding cultures in medieval Kilkenny, a story so grimly enthralling that it could have come straight out of Hollywood (I wish it could have been directed by Stanley Kubrick!).

    The story took place in Ireland at a turbulent time, a time of invasions, war, lawlessness, famine and plague. A time of fear, violence and almost unimaginable mutability.

    In 1317 Richard de Ledrede – an English Franciscan of the Order of Friars Minor – arrived in Kilkenny, appointed by the papal court in Avignon as the new Bishop of Ossory (1317–1361) and immediately set about challenging the secular authorities and making a name for himself as a zealous moraliser and “scourge of heresy”.  In 1324 he arraigned Dame Alice Kyteler, a wealthy businesswoman and serial espouser (she married four times) on the charge of being a witch. He alleged that she denied Christ, enchanted the citizens of Kilkenny with magic potions – made from entrails of cocks which had been sacrificed to demons, dead men’s nails, hair and brains of boys who had been buried unbaptised – all cooked up in the skull of a decapitated thief, that she had an incubus named Artisson with whom she had sex and who manifested as either a cat, a shaggy black dog or a black man, and that she murdered her first three husbands and was poisoning her fourth.

    Dame Alice, however, had powerful allies who protected her and facilitated her flight to England where she vanished from history. The notorious inquisition that ensued was peppered with political intrigue, excommunication, charges of heresy and counter-charges of heresy with the bishop himself being imprisoned in Kilkenny castle for seventeen days during which time he placed the entire diocese under interdict (no masses, baptisms, marriages or burials could take place). When released, he refused to leave quietly, but had his full episcopal regalia brought to him and, with his clergy and parishioners, made a solemn procession to St Canice’s Cathedral where a Te Deum mass was celebrated.

    Though Dame Alice escaped with her life, her servant Petronilla de Meath was not so fortunate. She was captured, flogged through six parishes and a confession of sorcery was extracted. She was burned alive at the stake for the heresy of witchcraft, the first person in history to be thus charged and immolated.

    Dame Alice’s son William Outlaw was charged with heresy for defending his mother. He was forced to recant, hear at least three masses a day for three years, feed the poor and to pay for the roof of St Canice’s Cathedral to be covered with lead. The roof subsequently collapsed under the weight.

    This became the backdrop to our music.  

    The Red Book of Ossory is a fourteenth century medieval manuscript compiled in Kilkenny. Pre-eminent among the manuscript’s texts are sixty remarkable Latin poems by Bishop Richard de Ledrede. The same fertile imagination (Ledrede’s) that composed the phantasmagoric sorcery charges also composed beautiful, esoteric and richly imagistic poetry. The bishop instructed that these verses be sung by the priests, clerks and choristers of St. Canice’s “on the important holidays and at celebrations in order that their throats and mouths, consecrated to God, may not be polluted by songs which are lewd, secular, and associated with revelry, and, since they are trained singers, let them provide themselves with suitable tunes according to what these sets of words require”.

    “Well,” I thought, “I’m a trained singer!”. So I set to work finding suitable tunes. I spent countless (happy) hours wandering through various medieval music sources (Chansonnier du Roi, Llibre Vermell de Montserrat, Codices Chantilly, Modena, Squarcialupi, etc.) and made speculative reconstructions of many of the bishop’s hymns.

    Then, together with my fellow band members, in what was a charmed and wondrous process, we deconstructed those reconstructions. It was a true joy to make music with Nick, Deirdre and Francesco, a very happy and collaborative collision of cultures both in our rehearsals and onstage. And when we came together to make a record of our project, the synergetic spirit lived on as we made an essentially live recording, making music together in the same space and time.

    With the name Anakronos I feel we are allowed (if not obliged) to take certain liberties with traditional notions of proper chronology. So, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone and Nord synthesizer breathe electric life into music that was written at least five centuries before electricity was harnessed, music that was written before and after the bishop’s poems, but that could have been sung to his words in his lifetime. And music that I wrote and we improvised.

    But why sing the words of a witch-burner? Because they’re beautiful and I find it interesting to contemplate the contradictions that exist within people. As Stanley Kubrick said when asked if his characters were good or evil, “They are good AND evil!”.

     

    For more about Caitríona O’Leary’s work see her official website. Anakronos ‘The Red Book of Ossory’ is now available via Heresy Records as a CD and high-quality download (available here) and streaming across online platforms.

    Caitríona O’Leary (photograph by Laelia Milleri)

  • An Introduction to Cassandra Voices III Print Edition

    Introduction – To Boldly Go

    IN A PERIOD OF PROFOUND DISLOCATION WE ASSERT THE IMPORTANCE OF INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM.

    Last December two Cassandra Voices editors gathered for a think-in with an external advisor. What followed was, for us, an excruciating exercise defining the mission of our publication. Formulating a so-called ‘elevator pitch’ does not come easily to a writer and a photographer more accustomed to asking the questions and framing subjects. Now we were the ones squirming in the crosshairs. After mild coaxing, followed by sterner rebukes, the existential crisis lifted sufficiently for us to work out: we provide a home for independent voices to inspire new thinking.

    So what have these highfalutin words to do with the title of Cassandra Voices, featuring a legendary Trojan prophetess renowned for not having her warnings heeded? Well, we believe this space – in print and online – offers autonomous spirits an opportunity to give an unvarnished account of reality, subject to claims being properly referenced or corroborated. As such, this is a determination of relevant facts – often obscured in a mainstream media beholden to vested interests – on which moral evaluation depends. For example, unless we are exposed to the wretched of the earth – such as those confined to refugee camps within Europe’s borders – we are unlikely to consider what is happening to them to be wrong. Out of sight, out of mind.

    Prompted in particular by Fellipe Lopes’s self-determined journey to Camp Mória on the island of Lesbos island in Greece, we chose the theme of Displacement for this the third edition. It also encompasses the ongoing impact of the global financial crisis, beginning in 2007, which, in particular, has generated an unresolved housing crisis and widened existing health inequalities. Moreover, we are in the midst of an Internet Revolution profoundly altering the careers of musicians and writers, while social media corrodes our personal space in an age of ‘Surveillance Capitalism’. And we do not forget the environmental challenges of an accelerating and unprecedented Extinction and Climate Crisis, and now a sinister global pandemic.

    Finally, we remain committed to conveying a variety of forms through our publication – including photography, poetry, fiction, cultural criticism as well as more conventional journalism – bringing many lenses to understand the challenges we face.

    With contributions from: Ben Keatinge, Duncan Mclean, Caoimhe Butterly, Samuel McManus, Navlika Ramjee, David Langwallner, Sarah Hamilton, Bob Quinn, Mark Burrows, Fellipe Lopes, Vincent Dermody, Paul Gilgunn, Daniele Idini, Kevin Higgins, Daniel Wade, Stephen Mc Randal, Ilsa Monique Carter, Alberto Moreno, Alberto Marcos and Bartholomew Ryan.

    Design and Layout: Distinctive Repetition.

    PURCHASE YOUR COPY NOW

    The picture on the left, of the newly built Covid-19 Test facility on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay in Dublin, was taken by Daniele Idini on March 23rd, 2020. The photograph on the cover is from reportage by Fellipe Lopes on the Mória refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece in January, 2020. Graphic design and layout is by Distinctive Repetition.

  • Musician of the Month: Judith Ring

    Listening is a powerful skill. It’s one of the most important things you can learn in life. There are many different ways to listen and many different things to listen to, such as music, thoughts, emotions, facts, and opinions. For as long as I can remember I’ve always been trying to listen just that little bit closer.

    I developed a hyper-awareness of sound in particular during my first years of piano tuition. One of my teachers was always playing random pieces of music off the top of her head as I arrived for my lesson. I loved to hear her play like this and longed to be able to do the same. I quickly realised that it was possible to play all the popular songs of the day just by sitting down and listening. The most important lesson I ever learnt and have never forgotten was when I was about 11 years old.

    I brought a piece of music on cassette tape to my lesson for the same teacher to listen to and teach me. It may have been Bohemian Rhapsody or some other song with an epic piano part. She had a quick listen and told me to go home and figure it out for myself. This baffled me at first but I thought I’d give it a try. I went home and listened, and then really listened, and I figured out how to play the piece… note for note. What a revelation! From then on I took on everything from Billy Joel to Guns and Roses and became obsessed with learning these piano parts exactly as they were played on the recording. I didn’t just play something similar, I had to have every note correct.

    As a teenager I had a deep attachment to the piano and had a pact with myself that I had to play every day or the spell would be broken. Even playing just a few notes would suffice. I generally practiced for a couple of hours every day and even more once I got to university. Piano was a massive part of my life. I also drew a lot and developed a love of black and white photography, so between art, photography and music I didn’t have much time for anything else. I was lucky that I went to a school that somehow allowed me to focus on all three subjects. All this has continued to feed into my compositional life, which only began in my early twenties when I did a Master’s in Music and Media Technologies at Trinity College Dublin (graduating class of 2000).

    Having broken the piano spell and replaced it with electronic music I quickly turned my attention to found sounds and musique concrète. Using sounds from everyday life to create vast soundscapes further broadened and deepened my listening experience. Every sound around me became music! Sounds that other people tried to block out while going about their daily business became the building blocks of my compositions. Being able to transform them even further through various electronic processes was mind-blowing to me and incredibly exciting.

    For many years I travelled around with a portable minidisc recorder and a small microphone recording anything and everything of interest. Machinery and transport fascinated me the most, especially when I started to pull these sounds apart to see what they would reveal. Electronic music opened my ears to so many incredible compositional possibilities during that time. The idea of sculpting and shaping sounds that had never been heard before was infinitely satisfying.

    In a world where there are so many types of music and ways of approaching the arrangement of sonic elements in time, it has always been a challenge to come up with fresh ideas. Classical music was built on a very specific musical language. Composers who understood the power of this language and how to manipulate it most effectively managed to develop their own voice and have stood the test of time. These rules began to be broken down and abandoned at the beginning of the twentieth century. The strict rules of harmony and counterpoint were challenged and new ideas and concepts were introduced. From then on it was a free-for-all to some extent and now you can literally write whatever you want.

    This makes things more challenging in many ways as you have nothing to hold on to. You can derive ideas from other works of course but creating a unique soundworld is very ambitious.

    Delving into the world of musique concrète gave me a very important and lifelong obsession with timbre. Through working with found sounds I started to explore acoustic instruments for their sonic possibilities. Over the years I have collaborated very closely with professional musicians to explore their instruments and listen deeply to the intricacies of timbre that can be drawn from them.

    Through the use of microphones I have built large libraries of sounds from every instrumentalist I have worked with and have explored their timbre even more by layering recordings of certain sounds together to make delicious textures. By using recordings you can enhance even the tiniest sound just by amplifying it within the mix to give you almost a macro-engagement with sound. This process became the basis of a PhD in composition that I completed at the University of York in 2009.

    The endless combinations of sonic possibilities in this world will continue to inspire my life and work. Although living the life of an artist has lead me down quite an unconventional path, and can be a struggle at times, I wouldn’t change it for anything. I will continue to listen deeply and I encourage you to do the same.

     

    For more of Judith’s work see her:

    Official website: www.judithring.com

    Soundcloud: www.soundcloud.com/judith-ring

    YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1vVA69QkacFPkOPLdiILOQ?disable_polymer=true

    Judith is currently writing pieces for flautist Lina Andonovska and drummer Matthew Jacobson’s duo
    SlapBang and a piece for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra as part of The Contemporary Music
    Centre’s composer lab.