Sheep, Finland, & Gay Nietzsche
It would appear that the future of understanding and perhaps thwarting mental decline lies with the help of Sheep. (Proper noun henceforth due their services to humans) This is contrary to the conventional wisdom that sheep are passive creatures of no exceptional use beyond mutton & knitting. Pas vrai!
This study in BRAIN A Journal of Neurology points out that:
“With their large brains and long lives, sheep offer significant advantages for translational studies of human disease. Here we used normal and CLN5 Batten disease affected sheep to demonstrate the use of the species for studying neurological function in a model of human disease. We show that electroencephalography can be used in sheep, and that longitudinal recordings spanning many months are possible.”
Scroll down the section marked Surgery for truly great sheep-head surgical descriptions.
The sheep, New Zealand sheep, were shipped in by air. Electrodes were fitted into their brains and necks (?) and they were fitted with a jacket “that carried a paediatric ambulatory EEG amplifier” to record data.
Note: Unlike grouchy, post-op humans who require pain meds, tea and toast: “Sheep recovered well from surgery. Within a few minutes from the end of anaesthesia sheep were eating and within an hour they were standing up.”
They were studied for a number of things one of which was sleep deficit. They were discovered to have five states of vigilance.
This was my favourite sentence (bolded below) in this, obscure but none the less riveting study: “Sheep are ruminants and so spend a significant amount of time chewing previously ingested and regurgitated food. They ruminate when free from threat and almost exclusively while seated.”
You are very welcome. I know your day is made having read this news about SHEEP.
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FINLAND.
Want to get sober: go to Finland not AA perhaps (or both if unable to get there by tomorrow). This Atlantic piece raises engaging questions.
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And finally for varied reading from 2002 New York Times:
Is there a gay basis to Nietzsche’s ideas? by Edward Rothstein can be read here
Recent writings/articles: LRB and Irish Times
Over at the LRB I penned a piece “Who are the women who join Daesh (Isis Isil)?”
“There isn’t much primary source material on the foreign women who have gone voluntarily to Syria and Iraq and chosen to live under the Islamic State, alongside the thousands of women Isis have kidnapped, beaten, raped, forced to convert and sold into sexual slavery. We know the places the volunteers have left but can only speculate as to why.”
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For the Irish Times I was proud to celebrate the work of Dervla Murphy on International Women’s Day.
You can read the piece here on their website or the text is below.
IN PRAISE OF DERVLA MURPHY.
Dervla Murphy is synonymous with passion, pertinacity and peregrination. Also, bicycle wheels. As a very young woman I first read Murphy’s In Ethiopia With a Mule (1966) and credit it with dispelling the idea at 18 that if I was to travel alone as a woman, everyone would instantly want to kill me. Strange as it may sound: she put me in my body. I did travel alone and lived.
I have given her books to many people in my life, such that each Christmas the refrain from one Canadian relative was “You can get me another of that Dervla’s books”. See, she’s not just any random Dervla. She’s a very specific Dervla. I don’t think there’s many in Ireland that wouldn’t facially ignite or animate upon mention of her work because for forty years we have been fortunate to travel on the page with her.
Murphy, 83, more a roaming, recording Promethean witness than mere travel writer, collages history, politics, topography, place and people into the present moment of what she sees, hears, bikes, walks and experiences wherever she goes. Her prose has a practical, muscular texture redolent of her cross-continent physical traverse. All weather, every weather, whatever the weather, her transport is low tech. Donkey, (sometimes) gearless bike, local transport or her feet. She has had to contend with injuries and danger, but is indefatigable in the face of what presents. Her 20 books have taken readers to Afghanistan, Baltistan, the Balkans, Cameroon, Coorg, Cuba, Gaza, Iran, Kenya, Laos, Madagascar, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Siberia, Transylvania, Tibet, Zimbabwe and more.
The idea that generations of girls and young, middling and old women will yet discover and read her extensive body of work, become captivated and catapulted to adventure (whether imaginatively or physically) is most invigorating.
Another advantage to Murphy’s adventures is that if you’re disinclined to wet feet, heat exhaustion, fevers, altitude sickness, tick bites, dodging snakes, or all manner of inconvenience there’s no need to leave the couch. Murphy’s work also encourages readers to delve into deeper reading on a country’s history and discover its fiction and poetry. Big road taken by short woman for many long years gives way to endless reading boreens. At 83, she’s not stopping anytime soon.
Anakana Schofield is the author of Malarky, which won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the 2013 Debut-Litzer Prize for Fiction in the United States and was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
I also love this video interview with Dervla:
And this clip from a documentary about how impervious she is to discomfort.
Feb weather-strange
Strange February. Strange Feb weather. East they have been sunk by snow piles while West, here we are, today anyway, sunny while leaning towards gloves. It has been worryingly mild. Today il fait du soleil. There have been plentiful and visible stars and a visit from Mars and Venus last Friday evening.
Two women with binoculars strapped to their eyes alerted me to the crescent moon with Mars and Venus on a visible day release. I’m grateful to them. It was bleary though my bi-focals, but Venus seemed pyramid shaped. The two women naturally insisted when complimented “We are only out here because we saw it on the news” but I fear they were too modest given they had binoculars and were easily able to identify the planets.
Sometimes your unknown neighbours can be so very favourable.
The Walk Robert Walser
I am greatly appreciating a reread of Robert Walser’s novel (novella) The Walk (translated by the wunderbar Susan Bernofsky and it really is an extraordinary translation).
Some snips from it:
“An unassuming pedestrian should not remain unrecorded”
The above particularly pertinent for psychotic Vancouver cyclists who refute any notion of stop signs, traffic lights and act like they are in fact operating a version of light transit rail that responds only to and unto themselves. A transit rail that drives only in a straight line to where it is they desire to get to, never mind the humans, cats and dogs that have to nervously go exist with the bicycle barons. Were matters not already intrepid for the plain pedestrian from the threat of the car, now they’ve an additional road runner to join it.
P21 “Often I wandered, to be sure, perplexed in a mist and in a thousand dilemmas, seeing myself vacillating and often wretchedly forsaken. Yet I believe that struggling for life can only be a fine thing. It is not with pleasures and with joys that an honest man might grow proud. Rather in the roots of his soul it can only be through trial bravely undergone, deprivation patiently endured, that he becomes proud and gay.”
How to vaccinate a badger
“BBC Inside Out follows the badger vaccination team in west Cornwall as they test whether vaccination could be an effective alternative to culling.”
I actually thought badgers were more silken looking than furry. I have been misled by the Wind in the Willows illustrations.
Harry Browne: Lawful Excuse
Here is a riveting essay Harry Browne wrote and published back in 2006 on peace protestors at Shannon airport and the Irish media’s coverage of the trial of “five people associated with the Catholic Worker movement (who) had been arrested for damaging a US military plane”.
First though, read this news report on Ireland’s disgraceful permitted use of its airspace and airport for what we know now to have included the transit of CIA rendition flights. We know from the recent US Senate report precisely the despicable and sadistic forms of torture that such flights and transfers would have resulted in.
Then read Harry Browne’s essay here about the people who were brave enough to stand up at that time to the transgressions both known at the time and unknown.
Barthes: Mourning
I am reading or pinch reading on thanatophobia and grief in anticipation of a piece I must write and contribute next year at a conference, thus I revisited or flittered into Roland Barthes Mourning Diary (Wang and Hill) and was taken (up) by his sentiment or the resonance to be found in this entry:
“Many others still love me, but from now on my death will kill no one.
— which is what’s new.
(But Michel?)”
He’s referring to the death of his mother and it struck me that he marks something here. That there are certain deaths — one’s parents or partner — where, if you like, a standing guard is removed. Barthes records this realization. He seems to also be asking Who will bury me now? or who will be worked up sufficiently to bury me? Since the organization of burial is involved and requires a degree of commitment it’s quite a responsibility that you cannot just ladle on to any passing person.
Barthes is calculating or re calibrating where this puts him as an adult now his mother, his reliable burial steward or executor we might imagine, is already buried. Who remains?
In burial as in most things roles are cast. He anticipates the absence of a key player and marks his grief and death anxiety through this shift.
Mary Harper
Mary Harper is doing terrific reporting on Somalia (and has been since the 1990s). I’ve been following her BBC World Service reports for a while. I began with her report about a writers festival in Somaliland (which I think I must have blogged on) and ever since I keep my ears and eyes open for her reports. I truly admire her work and that she speaks 4 languages!
Here she contributes to BBC Newshour Extra on What is Fuelling the Global Jihad? well worth a listen to this programme.
Quite a contrast to think (in relation to last post) of the luxury of refuting or delaying notions of death vs bloodthirsty death cults donging the instant death knell on other people’s behalf with the equivalent frequency to making a cup of tea.
Radio links: Reith Lecture “Hubris”
The Reith Lectures are underway on BBC Radio 4.
#3 Hubris I found most compelling:
“Dr. Gawande argues that the common reluctance of society and medical institutions to recognise the limits of what professionals can do can end up increasing the suffering of patients towards the end of life.”
I’d add to that the common reluctance more widely to face any notion of death at all (not merely at the end of life or terminal diagnosis when you’ve no choice but to face it, but in the everyday healthy population who chose not to think or dwell on it until it banjaxes them) is also inherent in refusing or refuting the limits. If you were to introduce the concept of the limits early: would you be better adjusted once they were upon you?
A curious change or shift is the lack of visible public mourning. I rarely to never see a funeral cortege in the city I live in. I am therefore never aware of anyone’s death around me unless they are personally known to me. This may be a peculiarity to this city. (You can read my LRB blog on the Final Funeral Forum to understand more about the specifics here) But if you take note of the new forms of overt social media mourning and outpourings, you cannot but notice a certain public possession towards the dead who are not known to us. Whether this is public figures or artists or people we’re vaguely familiar with or stories of people we’ve (now) been familiarized with through the channels of social media. Sometimes it can take the tone of near strident and heightened outpourings. Sometimes it’s verging on an Olympic competition. Then the rapid tributes arrive, endless anecdotes, breached correspondences, it starts to read like the semi-finals of who can now outdo the last espousal. In our confessional culture, the plate is wide and forks lose the run of themselves.
It’s likewise easy to get emotionally operatic at the end of one’s fingertips in relation to a person, actively, unknown to us as a living being but whose persona we’ve attached to. Note it’s much easier to attach to a distant, carefully shaped persona than engage with the difficulties and complexities and, one hopes, liveliness of an actual person. I would be curious about the absenting of one form of visible public mourning (the funeral cortege) versus the arrival of the invisible (self invited) funeral cortege where the stakes may not demand the same level of respect, in tandem with wider deflection on accepting death. (Becker’s Denial of Death) Case in point: you cannot hurl yourself into or at a passing funeral car or group of mourners. You must maintain some kind of decorum and respectable distance while bearing witness to what is passing, what that indicates, a life has ended. This isn’t the case at your keyboard into the vortex of social media and new media journalism, where you can bounce up and down on a trampoline of self directed, insulated, wombling as you wish, to the extent the dead person is merely an accessory for you to womble around and tweet about.
Strange evolving disparities and disconnects that do not necessarily do much to engage with the urgent matter of thanatophobia. The limit of the final bus stop and the need to at some point get off the bus.
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3×3: Kayaking- Les Miserables – Stay in Bed weather event
Even the experts agree this is one heck of a weather system. A matriarch of a triple mama system. We are due to receive a sub-tropical weather event that involves three storms over three days.
The numbers are madness. The North Shore will see 300mm of rain in the three days. We are currently in round 1 of these three storms. Usually the entire rainfall for November and December is 300mm so obviously this volume in three days will likely cause problems. Floods are likely and more worrying, mudslides are possibility.
There was a recent mud slide on that side of the city (North) during another rain and storm event and there are boulders (I have recently learned) that fell into the Seymour River. Not clear how the boulders tumbled but one hunch is the rain caused it.
If you are a pedestrian it’s very hard to see you in this weather and this is the most likeliest moment not to be seen by a car thus don’t wander absent mindedly staring at your phone. Be careful when crossing the road. Wave your arms if you have to. Visibility is dreadful in this epic rain.
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Thank you to the lovely people of Powell River and Sechelt for coming out to my public reading events in both those communities.
Much joy and exchange on literature was had.
Thank you so much to the Canada Council For the Arts for funding these readings. So marvellous to travel to different BC communities and read and discuss literature.
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I am buried in reading.
From Leskov to Benjamin to Balzac and more. It forms its own cartography.
I hope you are too.