Vacuum. Madness Issue. No.22

ISSUE 22

the vacuum

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MADISMS POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE IRISH MADNESS REPRESENTING MADNESS TALKING SENSE MEDICATION THE LUNATIC CITY DERANGEMENT OF THE SENSES AND MUCH MORE...

madness

ISSUE 22

the vacuum

the vacuum

by jason mills

MADISMS A

ccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, madness is characterized by a state of insanity, of having a disordered, dysfunctional mind. The terms ‘mad’, ‘madness’ and ‘crazy’ are universally used and can describe something as simple and informal as an overt enthusiasm for something or someone (eg. crazy about sport). However, they are also often used pejoratively, and have spawned a string of euphemisms and colloquialisms to describe people with mental illnesses.

Certainly, the media is guilty of conjuring and reinforcing stereotypical images by using such terms in conjunction with reports on violent anti-social behaviour. Others have simply become engrained in common speech through time, and their frequency of use is unlikely to dissipate noticably, however unhelpful this may be to popular perceptions of mental illness.

Certainly, renowned ‘crackpot’ Anne Robinson knows plenty of madisms, something which is evident in her snide and disparaging remarks about the mental faculties of contestants on The Weakest Link.

Within the mental health sector itself, many of the terms now used appear particularly anodyne and lacking in any sort of human dimension. Patients have become ‘service users’ or ‘clients’ whose lives are reduced to a series of acronyms for the initiated, such as SMI (Serious Mental Illness) and CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy). However, it is interesting to note that the words ‘imbecile’ and ‘cretin’, now considered derogatory slurs, were actual medical terms used in the early 20th century to refer to people with mental illnesses. ‘Round the bend’ invokes the inhumane Victorian institutions designed to house those considered unfit for integration into society. These were mainly built just outside of town, quite literally round the bend, so that the patient was out of sight and out of mind. These establishments would have been commonly referred to as ‘loony bins’ or ‘nuthouses’, expressions which still prevail today, even in reference to more modern psychiatric hospitals. Within the old asylums, images of ‘rubber rooms’ and ‘padded cells’ abounded in the popular imagination. The term ‘funny farm’ is also often used to refer to psychiatric institutions.

In trying to decipher the causes of madness, various physicians have looked to the moon for answers. Indeed, Sir William Hale’s deduction that “the cycles of the moon have a great influence in all diseases of the brain” was actually incorporated into the Lunacy Act of 1842. The behaviour of inmates in mental asylums was said to become more agitated and unmanageable when the moon was full, although more recent research has failed to find any significant link between the moon and irrational behaviour. Nevertheless, the words ‘lunar’ and ‘lunatic’ have a common derivation, and the association has also given rise to expressions such as ‘wired to the moon’ and ‘barking mad’ (ie. barking at the moon).

A wide range of other food-related imagery has also been applied to concepts of madness.

Indeed, a person can be said to be ‘bananas’ (also the title of a Woody Allen film), although it is uncertain why this particular piece of fruit has been singled out to represent the bizarre, as opposed to, say, pineapples, or the curious pomegranate. Although the word ‘nuts’ is also widely used to describe someone with obvious eccentricities, it is more likely that it derives from the slang for head than from such a

Sir William Hale’s deduction that “the cycles of the moon have a great influence in all diseases of the brain” was actually incorporated into the Lunacy Act of 1842.

perfectly rational savory bar snack. However, there is no mistaking the culinary origins of ‘fruitcake’, which should definitely be included in any picnic that happens to be lacking in sandwiches. And, speaking of picnics, perhaps the inclusion of ‘basket case’ in this particular canon could also be argued for, although on the surface the links appear tenuous.

Another strange association is between the mind and marbles, as in the context of ‘losing your marbles’. In popular folklore the phrase is associated with Lord Elgin, who brought back his famous marbles from the Parthenon in 1804, leaving the Greeks ‘hopping mad’.

However, another theory points to the French word ‘meubles’ (furniture, moveables), suggesting that the phrase comes from the idea of losing the furnishings of one’s mind.

Nigel Rees, author of the book 6000 Curious and Everyday Phrases Explained, suggests that “a home without furniture is empty, so ‘lost one’s marbles = empty-headed, no longer home, no longer there”.

There are a multitude of other slang expressions and localised phrases for madness, some more of which are listed adjacent.

However, it should be remembered that madness is something of an abstract concept, the determination of which relies on a complex set of material and cultural conditions. What is considered mad is informed by the values that society upholds as normal and civilized

at a particular time, but these too are subject to constant mutations. For example, in the present day it would be construed as madness to lock up a woman in a mental institution for having a child outside of marriage, but this is what actually happened the early decades of the 20th century. So, before describing someone as a ‘nutter’ or ‘looper’ in future, we would do well to remember that the meanings of such phrases are based on personal judgement and are open to interpretation. Theories of madness are therefore likely to say more about the theorist than the person they attempt to describe.

SOME TERMS FOR MENTAL ILLNESS Round the bend Crazy Nutter Headcase Bananas Fruitcake Basket case Both oars aren’t in the water Bonkers Batty Berserk Crackpot Cretin Cuckoo Off your trolley Deranged Imbecile Whacko Lights are on but nobody’s home Lunatic Barking mad Wired to the moon Mad as a hatter Mad as a monkey on a trike Mad as a bag of spiders Not playing with a full deck A couple of sandwiches short of a picnic To have a screw loose A few clowns short of a circus A few bricks short of a load One wave short of a shipwreck Four quarters short of a dollar Ten pence short of a pound Five cans short of a six-pack A tinny short of a six-pack (Australian version) A few French fries short of a happy meal One putt short of a par Chink in your armor Lost the plot Out to Lunch Not on the ball Loopy Potty Doolally As sharp as a marble Losing your marbles Suffering from a marble deficiency There’s a rip in his marbles bag Basket case Not firing on all cylinders A kangaroo loose in the top paddock Hasn’t got both hands on the steering wheel Hasn’t got both oars in the water Living in cloud cuckoo land If you gave a penny for his/her thoughts you’d get change back Not the brightest bulb on the tree Not the sharpest tool in the box There are no phones on planet Pluto A few slates missing from the roof A tile (or screw) loose Not quite the full shilling (or quid/ticket)

by geoff spigit

the vacuum

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE Dispatches from the lunatic fringe of the Mary Whitehouse Brigade.

E

ccentrics have always contributed to the weight of broadcasters’ post bags. John Reith, the BBC’s first director general remarked during the corporation’s early years that, “Periodically, letters come in, one per thousand or two, which make one doubt the sanity of the correspondent - in fact, there is little room for anything other than doubt.” In the 1920s the unhinged had to go to the trouble of putting nib to paper and buying a stamp if they wished to share their views with the nation’s media outlets.

Today, in a world of email and interactive television, anyone with a computer and a phone line can fire off missives of madness by the dozen a day.

I work for a UK broadcaster and part of my job involves replying to viewers’ emails. Most people who can be bothered to write in are sane.

Occasionally we’ll get an email from an upset husband who’s accidentally taped over his wife’s favourite gardening show and wants to get hold of a video, but for the most part it’s sensible questions, praise, complaints and enquiries about how to get on game shows. For the most part.

At present we have three regular correspondents whose sanity Lord Reith would certainly question. Let’s call them the Godly One, the Paranoiac and the Concerned Citizen.

The Godly One The Godly One sends his thoughts via his television. Thanks to the wonders of interactive TV technology, the bored and bedridden can entertain themselves by sending messages to us with their remote control. The Godly One, who calls himself Altair, contacts us at least six times daily.

His messages rarely have anything to do with what we broadcast. Instead, I get the impression that something he’s read in the paper triggers an evangelical response that compels him to pick up his remote control and start tapping away. When Christopher Reeve died Altair had this to say: “It is a pretty safe bet that embryonic stem cell research is evil, and Reeve was a very selfish man if he wanted to be cured by the direct murder of the innocent. Rest in peace, Christopher Reeve, may Jesus forgive you your sins.”

As you can see, Altair is a very forgiving gent, but there’s a fire and brimstone side to him too, often directed at Satan himself: “I mean, you say you are Lord of Hell, yet it is the one place you avoid going to. I am not impressed with your lie, er, claim, Demonspawn.”

It’s not all theology though. On National Poetry Day we received this: For the kitty Another ditty; For height, For sight, Be bright, Be light.

What’s most baffling about Altair is not the content of his messages, but who he thinks is going to read them. He did once contact us to apologise for his daily ravings, but since we have no outlet to publish these rants, the only conclusion I can come to is that Altair finds it therapeutic to get spiritual concerns off his chest, whether they fall on deaf ears or not.

The Concerned Citizen Signing each letter “Valerie, Ripon”, the Concerned Citizen knows exactly who she’s talking to. The voice of Middle England, Valerie sends most of her daily emails to every national media outlet, be they TV, radio or press.

This was her response to last year’s Lib Dem Conference: Am I reading this right?

The Liberal Democrats’ Conference in Brighton will have an early debate on a vote on proposals to axe the Queen as Head of State?

What are they thinking of? Flushed with success in Brent, is Charles Kennedy having a brain storm? I won’t be voting in that direction again!

We didn’t forward Valerie’s email to Lib Dem HQ, but were heartened when we discovered that she also had a global outlook.

The dreadful way the Chinese are killing those Civet cats by drowning them in disinfectant, is indicative of how people live there - especially in Guandong Province - said to be the starting place of SARS. If the Chinese and Taiwanese didn’t travel on so many aeroplanes, such germs wouldn’t spread.

As for dogs - Chris Patten’s dog disappeared in Hong Kong and, no doubt, ended up on someone’s plate.

Valerie continued, at length, to explain that a Chinese restaurant near her home had mysteriously closed for a month, possibly under a cloud of stir-fried pooch accusations. Like Altair though, Valerie has a lighter side, as evidenced by the day she was moved a TV weather broadcast.

I can’t find his name, but you seem to have acquired the best weatherman around.

He appeared at 8.30pm tonight I really liked him when he first appeared on television, especially his handy references to umbrellas. Then he disappeared.

We live in a country, where eight months of the year (thank goodness) we desperately need to know whether to have our brollies or not. Without the rain, we would not see green grass.

The Paranoiac Our third regular correspondent is the most interesting, and I’m getting to the stage where I think he’s actually on to something. He calls himself Robert Riley and claims that the CIA experimented on him in the 60s, is under 24hour surveillance and that Tony Blair wants him killed because he “knows too much”.

What makes Robert different from Altair and Valerie is that he writers in such a considered, sober way. When the original version of the Manchurian Candidate was shown on television, we received a critique worthy of a film studies graduate, but with the added bonus of Robert’s explanations of how the film’s main plot device of soldiers being brainwashed pertained to him and those he knows.

Whether it’s a news item about US foreign policy or a documentary examining some of the further reaches of scientific research, few programmes go by without an email from Robert explaining that they are being broadcast as part of a vast pan-government, international conspiracy to close the minds of the world’s citizens to the evils being carried out “in our name”.

As I said, perhaps he’s on to something.

We’ve never replied to any of the emails we’ve received from Altair, Valerie and Robert. For a start they never asked any questions (at least not ones we could answer), and secondly they need no more encouragement to write to us. Altair will continue to update us on his ongoing battle with Satan, Valerie will inform us of the latest offence to her delicate sensibilities and Robert will keep us abreast of his most recent escape from assassination.

the vacuum

by caroline magennis 'Mad as a March hare'

T

he world’s gone insane for crazy.

Or, as John Dryden once wrote, ‘the world is running mad after farce’. We are buying wholesale into the rhetoric of madness.

Madness seems to lend itself to the use of similes. My own favourites include mad as a sack of badgers, mad as a bag of cats, mad as a wet hen, mad as a meat axe, and mad as toast.

These things aren’t inherently indicative of mental illness, but the formula seems to be mad + anything=really crazy. However, a number of the phrases of psychosis make a lot of sense for the crazy. As mad as the March hare refers to the animals being generally quite shy but ruttish in March, their mating season. The expression ‘mad as a hatter’ is most often associated with Lewis Carroll’s famous children’s book Alice in Wonderland of 1865. However, the term actually derives from an early industrial occupational disease. Felt hats were once very popular in North America and Europe, a complicated set of processes was needed to turn fur into a finished hat. Due to this, hatters working in poorly ventilated workshops would breathe in the mercury compounds and accumulate the metal in their bodies, which causes kidney and brain damage.

Physical symptoms include trembling (known as hatter’s shakes), loosening of teeth, loss of co-ordination, and slurred speech; mental ones include irritability, loss of memory, depression, anxiety, and other personality changes.

Mental illness can also be referred to be way of the colloquialism ‘cracked’, coming from the term ‘crackpot’. The London writer F. Anstey used the term in 1891 in a piece about London music halls: “Five thousand jimmy-oh goblets, five thousand good old golden saucepan lids! To think I’ve been such a bloomin’ crackpot all this time and never tumbled on it!”

Those involved in the music industry are the worst offenders in terms of ripping off the shtick of the mentally ill. We have all seem Liam Gallagher’s gurning bake announcing that he is, in fact ‘mad for it’. Those grey Swedes working in vast songwriting factories churn out vast quantities of bilge perfect for dancing around one’s moc croc Primark handbag to at the Bot or some other quality culchie meat market aimed to perfectly replicate a local hotel disco. However, these synthetic Scandinavians, having exhausted every other metaphor for love in songs which serve only act as a backdrop for having a check-shirted ingrate try and shove his tongue down your throat, have decided to employ the vocabulary of insanity in order to get us to waive our hands in the air like we just don’t care. As Beyonce shimmies to ‘Crazy in Love’ or Britney jail-baits her way through ‘(You Drive Me) Crazy’ or the scarily co-dependent ‘Born To Make You Happy’ the language of mad and the realities of mad become divorced and crazy becomes aspirational, kitsch, off the wall.

Another crap wacky student cliché to tire of as soon as you know who’s sleeping on your sofa and you no longer have ‘ironic’ A-Z of getting drunk posters on your wall. The raved up rerelease of Maniac is another case in point, as are those cheeky ska merchants Madness. Last year’s Christmas number one, the desperate dirge that was ‘Mad World’, was taken from

We also want our artists, particularly our poets, with at least a dose of eccentricity. We want them like Lord Byron, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’.

Donnie Darko, you guessed it, a film about a young man afflicted by blackouts and personality disorders. There is also the fine album 24 Hour Psychedelic Freakout by Crazy Penis. Is all this indicative of how mental illness isn’t taken seriously in our society? One can hardly imagine the winner of a TV talent show crooning how their new lover made them breathless like they had emphysema or, after heartbreak, in the throes of necrotising fasciitis. The notable exception to this is, of course, the Snap lyric that ‘I’m serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer’. God may have been onto something when he noted in Jeremiah ‘It is the land of graven images, and they are mad upon their idols’. But maybe he’s crazy, too.

We also want our artists, particularly our poets, with at least a dose of eccentricity.

We want them like Lord Byron, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. We want them to go to the depths of human experience so we don’t have to. An acquaintance of mine once suggested that maybe Yeats was the poet of crazy, what with his compositions including ‘Mad as the Mist and Snow’ and the perfectly reasonable ‘Why should not old men be mad?’ But as someone who is fully convinced that he predicted George W. Bush in ‘The Second Coming’ maybe I’m not the one to be asking about this. Franklin noted that ‘Mad wars destroy in one year the works of many years of peace’ and Mutually Assured Destruction now seems inevitable. ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’, anyone?

FRIGHTENED OF ‘MADNESS’

By Fionola Merideth

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ast summer, i met a woman who hated the word ‘nutter’. She didn’t like ‘looper’ much either. a bipolar disorder sufferer, it made her incandescent with rage when anyone off-handedly used these terms to show casual contempt. She took it deeply personally, as an insult to herself and to all people with mental health problems. But it was the heedless ignorance behind the comments which really got her goat: the way they implicitly unite the ‘sane’, ‘normal’ members of society against the ‘mad’ outsider. You’ve got to admit she has a point. We do it so often. ‘him?’, we say, rolling our eyes and shaking our heads dismissively. ‘he’s a total looper.’ Implication: We’re not.

We’re smart, sorted and in control.

But maybe it’s all a fuss about nothing.

After all, these words are light-hearted, innocuous-sounding, aren’t they? they don’t have the venomous force of sectarian, racist or sexist jibes. sometimes they’re even used to convey affectionate admiration and respect.

Recently, I heard Jeremy Clarkson (not exactly Mr. PC admittedly) referring to the resident test driver on his BBC2 programme Top Gear as ‘going mental - really he’s an absolute nutter’.

But every time we call someone a ‘looper’ or ‘nutter’- however lightly and jokingly - we’re buying into a discourse which ghettoises and ridicules the people who struggle with the horrible reality of mental illness on a daily basis. These sufferers experience high levels of discrimination, but it’s often far less visible than the more familiar kinds of bigotry we know so well. a recent department of health survey of public attitudes showed a worrying pattern. Apparently, the public is becoming more afraid and less tolerant of those with mental health problems. Dave Harper, a senior lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of East London, has studied the power of language in stigmatising mental health patients. responding at the time, he said: ‘the survey is reflective of a deep-seated culture of discrimination, and that can be seen in the way language from and around mental heath is used and abused. Everyone from tabloid editors to elected politicians consider words such as ‘mad’ or ‘nutter’ to be common currency.’

Mad Pride (www.madpride. org.uk) is a not-for-profit organisation which seeks to transform and subvert the dismissive or fearful way mainstream society belittles and demonises mental health patients. It describes itself as ‘committed to ending discrimination against psychiatric patients, promoting survivor equality and celebrating mad culture.’ Inspired by similar tactics used by gay and black pride campaigns, Mad Pride aims to re-appropriate the offensive word – ‘mad’ – and stamp a positive, empowered identity on it. But the group caution that the word should always be written with an upper-case ‘M’ to distinguish it as ‘a deadly serious political word - a constant reminder of how we were treated by others, how we are treated by others, but sending out a

typical example: a man went to his psychiatrist wearing only a pair of clingfilm underpants. the psychiatrist says, i can see your nuts! message that the day has now arrived when we are not going to be treated like this any more.’

Humour is part of the Mad Pride agenda too; they see it as an essential weapon in the war against widespread social prejudice. in fact, they’ve even got a jokes section on their website (typical example: ‘a man went to his psychiatrist wearing only a pair of clingfilm underpants. the psychiatrist says, “i can see your nuts!”’) but humour also has a vital part to play simply in helping sufferers cope. One woman, married to an obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferer, and a mental health patient herself, tells me that she couldn’t keep going without humour in her life. By way of example, she tells me about a hilarious incident that occurred one day when she was visiting her husband in the psychiatric hospital. when she arrived at the hospital, she noticed that many of the patients were furtively clustered around the entrance, smoking heavily and trying to look innocent. They were all facing inwards, towards the main door. Why? because, they said, they were planning to escape, and they believed they had more chance of success if they ran away backwards, very slowly, while still smoking. The woman laughs uproariously as she relates the tale. I join in, slightly hesitantly. Is it okay to laugh at a story like this?

The truth is, we’re frightened of ‘Madness’ and of ‘Mad’ people. So we make silly jokes about them, and generally try to look the other way. But the boundary between sanity and madness is a fluid, ever-shifting one, always inflected by cultural and historical reinterpretations. Who knows when any one of us could find ourselves on the ‘wrong’ side?

the vacuum

bad news for brazilian athletes

IRISH MADNESS

By COLIN GRAHAM

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ome years ago I sat through a lecture by a very distinguished, exMarxist, English intellectual who was wearied by his own post-Thatcher cynicism. He’d discovered salvation of a kind in his new-found Irish roots, and twirled his Irish grandmother’s wedding ring on his finger as he spoke. His argument was that English madness was far too rational – in fact, not really madness at all. Lewis Carroll, for instance, was just following mathematical formulae when he wrote the Alice books. But Irish madness, now that is the real thing – no pretend eccentricity in Ireland, because we’re just absolutely crackers.

And the deeply reasonable Samuel Beckett was his example. I was confused by this. I told him I was confused. ‘Irish madness – you see, that’s a good thing’, he said, with all his rational persuasiveness. Good because the English have bored themselves to death with their own lack of a real nationality (and are thus without a sense of humour, or an authentic way to be nuts); the Irish, well, ye’s are all just crazy, hey, and can I join you and be crazy too?

Needless to say, this poor man’s floundering on the edges of reason annoyed me a little. It’s alright to class yourself as a bit off-centre, but it never makes you sound quite so interesting when someone else says it for you. So is there a peculiarly Irish form of madness? Of course even the question produces its own madness (who are you calling Irish anyway?). In any case, it’s not quite sane to talk about national forms of madness (though I once sat through a dinner in a German restaurant in Estonia where three people ate cheese soup for starters). Madness is only, as the ex-Marxist argued, not being rational. So then it depends on who defines rationality. And that idea comes mainly from the English, our friend said, so be suspicious, they’re just oppressing you with their reason. Actually I think it was the Scottish philosophers who really got a handle on rationality. And they began with Hutcheson, who was Ulster Scots. Hang on, something’s not right here. That can’t be where the ideas of reason and sanity came from.

Whether the Irish have their own madness or not, they’ve had some spectacular examples of people living out their lives in peculiar ways. So let’s look for a pattern. From the early legends my favourite is Buile Suibhne, or Sweeney. He

Madness is only, as the ex-Marxist argued, not being rational. So then it depends on who defines rationality. has had recent incarnations in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, and in a very proper translation by Seamus Heaney. His madness began when he got fed up listening to the sound of the bells which the Christian clerics rang to announce themselves. Like anyone with a Sunday morning hangover brought to consciousness by the insistent call to worship, he was a tired and irritated soul. So he threw the offending bell in a lake. Not madness yet, just a bad temper.

The madness came on when the cleric cursed him, turned him into a half-man, half-bird, and condemned him to a wandering existence, eating mainly watercress (which seems to have been substantially cheaper before Sainburys started packaging it). Sweeney dallied here and there, finding himself at one point in Scotland, which, as we’ve seen, wasn’t a bad call for someone in search of reason. Sweeney’s madness is surpassed though, in his own story, by the hag who challenges him to a leaping contest (these are the days before pool and darts). She is eventually killed when she leaps too far in trying to outdo Sweeney and falls over a cliff.

So wandering is definitely a theme. From here the clerics take over. So there is St Brendan, who may have done the ultimate wander and gone to America just because it was there, long before anyone else did. What an Irish trend he started. Stay-at-home versions of the early Irish Christian clerics seem to have had turned their strangeness in on themselves a little. So they kept worms in order that they could see their own flesh being eaten (by the worms). Findchu beat himself with seven sickles for seven years because he thought this mortification would get him into heaven more quickly. Let’s hope so. Perhaps, like Brendan, he should just have got out a bit more.

Another oddbod was Perkin Warbeck, who wasn’t actually Irish, but kind of French.

When he arrived in Cork in 1491 he was dressed in the silks sold by his employer, and was meant to be a kind of Tudor fashion model. The locals assumed that someone so well dressed must be of royal line. Warbeck, loathe to disappoint, went along with it, telling all who would listen that he was Richard, Duke of York (who was, in fact, dead), therefore Edward IV’s son, and so rightful King of England. This tall tale got him married into the Scottish royal line, but it also got him executed. It didn’t do a lot for Anglo-Irish relations either.

Warbeck was a ringer, but also another wanderer. The greatest Irish wanderers have been literary. Best of all, of course, is Lemuel Gulliver, creation of Jonathon Swift. Swift himself was a little eccentric, but he sent Gulliver mad. After four traumatic journeys, when his sense of proportion is seriously challenged, Gulliver finds himself back home talking horse to horses, hating his own children, and thinking that humans smell much worse than his new equine friends. Gulliver has a challenger in the eighteenth-century literary strangeness stakes in Laurence Sterne, author of the marvellously offbeat road novel, A Sentimental Journey, and even better The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, in which the narrator has serious trouble getting the story round to his own birth. He uses a black page instead of words when he’s mourning and a marble page for confusion. Unable to describe how someone flourishes their walking stick he draws a squiggle. Not quite madness, but not frightened to look it in the face.

The best site of dark eccentricity in eighteenth-century Ireland was probably the Hell-Fire Club on Killakee mountain, just to the south of Dublin. The ‘Club’ was a burnt-out hunting lodge (deliberately burnt-out to give it atmosphere, it is said) belonging to ‘Speaker’ Conolly, and was used for black masses. Conolly, playing cards one night with a stranger in the Club, dropped his ace of spades and bending down to pick it, saw cloven feet under the table. One of the Hell-Fire Club’s most famous frequenters was Richard ‘Burn-Chapel’ Whaley, so named because of his favourite Sunday hobby.

His son, Buck Whaley, was another man who

made his name in journeying. Buck, penniless, undertook an impulsive bet that he could get to Jerusalem and back in two years. He supposedly played handball against the city walls, and was back in nine months, considerably richer.

The nineteenth century doesn’t disappoint either, with a penchant for strangely gothic figures: Charles Maturin, the novelist, who would paste a wafer to his forehead when writing so as to warn his family not to interrupt him.

There was the mad, blind Dublin poet Zozimus, who recited doggerel all day and wandered the streets at night in an enormous black cape and hat, muttering his dislike of Protestants. Then later in the century, also in a black cape and hat was the wonderful James Clarence Mangan, a man of genuinely confusing intellectual abilities whose poems purported to be translations from languages he couldn’t read.

Amongst my other favourite moments of collective madness in nineteenth-century Irish history is the ‘atmospheric railway’ in Killiney.

This was a Victorian enterprise, which, using the latest technology, sent a small commuter train up a very steep hill using hydraulics only. That is, the train had no engine – it was pushed up by air.

It came down with the brakes on. It was a great success for a year or so. Then rats started to eat through the leather bags which the air was held in. And so a great experiment ended.

Most recently of course the bizarre

Father Horan, he who disrupted the Silverstone Grand Prix and the Olympic Marathon, has reminded the world of Ireland’s reputation for pottiness, just when it seemed that’d all been smoothed over. Picking up the wandering theme, and linking it rather poetically to the marathon’s organised, televised, wandering Father Horan is today’s inheritor of this itchy-feet form of Irish genius. No doubt my ex-Marxist would see his intervention as a radical challenge to empiricism and the totality of reason. So Father Horan is our beacon of hope that Irish madness is still with us, and will never bow down to oppression. Good news for us, bad news for Brazilian athletes.

the vacuum

LEST WE FORGET

BY COLIN GALE

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hat was it like to be ‘mad’ in the nineteenth century? It was rare then for anyone who suffered mental anguish to speak or write of what they were going through, and rarer still for anyone to pay attention to them.

The stigma attached to mental illness was just too great. But the names and experiences of thousands of ordinary people who received psychiatric treatment live on in the historic medical casebooks of the mental hospitals of Britain and Ireland. And no institution was better known than London’s Bethlem Hospital. By the end of the Victorian era, it was home to about 250 patients at any one time, having survived several scandals and changes of regime in its 650-year history. Were it not for the Hospital’s meticulous record-keeping, this population would number amongst the forgotten people of history. As it is, we are afforded a glimpse – it is no more than that – into a range of personal traumas and, sometimes, recoveries. Perhaps, if we allow these (often sad) stories to become in imagination part of us, we might recover a small but neglected piece of our common humanity.

He wanders about the streets at improper hours

William Smith, a 28-year old clerk from Kennington, was admitted to Bethlem Hospital on 27 October 1891. The doctors who certified him insane wrote: Great taciturnacity, his behaviour and general demeanour are at variance with his customary wont. He is aware that he wanders about the streets

at improper hours but says it is to get fresh air. His father says that he refuses food persistently, won’t go to bed at night but will walk the room and eventually lies down on the floor with his clothes on. That he will go out and walk the streets until two or three a.m.

condition remained unchanged. On 25 June he refused to speak to his father who had visited. He was not occupying himself in any way and was reported not to be able to feel anything ‘keenly’.

He was discharged uncured on 19 October, and in December he was put into Hampshire County Lunatic Asylum at Fareham by his father.

and He has an anxious, dejected expression, is reticent, answers questions unwillingly in monosyllables, never raises his eyes, but looks constantly, does not care to be disturbed prefers to be left alone.

Has no special delusion except that he is quite well and fit to follow his occupation. William Smith (father) says that he has been depressed and melancholy for about ten months, does not sleep and refuses food. Never has any friend to see him or has any inclination for society. Has no special delusion but will walk up and down the passage all day. Speaks to no-one. When out with his father stares at the pavement in such a way as to attract the attention of passers-by and cannot be got to carry on any conversation.

When his father left him at the Hospital, he refused to shake hands with him. He denied that this was because he had any quarrel with his father, rather he said it was because he didn’t care whether or not he shook hands. By 4 November he was reported to have made some improvement and was ‘altogether more cheerful’. On 4 December he was described as walking around the Hospital in an absent-minded fashion. He was ‘rather untidily dressed with a drop at the end of his nose’. On 6 February 1892 the notes record that over the past few days he had ‘taken a turn for the worse’. He was now not taking his food and was restless, pacing about the gallery.

He refused to enter in conversation and would not answer direct questions. On 12 February he had the top of his head shaved and blistered and by 19 February this was considered to have slightly improved his condition, so that he was less restless and would answer questions. His

She shook her head when asked if she thought she would ever be well again

Frances Burroughs, a 53-year old widow from Hampshire, was admitted to Bethlem Hospital on 1 February 1893. The doctors that certified her insane wrote: She has an excited expression and general appearance of great mental anguish, screaming and at the same time wringing her hands and throwing herself about in bed. She is in a very emaciated condition. She refuses to speak and appears not to recognise those around her. Informed by Charlotte Dimes (cook), at The Cedars, Croudall – She becomes violent at times, throwing things at and trying to strike those around her. Often refuses to take food. and She has an emaciated and very dejected appearance.

She was shivering and crying. She would not speak but only occasionally nod or shake her head. When asked if she had been rightly brought here she nodded an affirmative as she also did when asked if she thought herself very wicked. She shook her head when asked if she thought she would ever be

well again. Mary Jane Packe, attendant, Bethlem Royal Hospital, informs me that the patient has not spoken a word since admission, although frequently spoken to. She cries the whole time.

She had become depressed following the death of her husband while they had been on a ship off Rio De Janeiro in December 1892.

On arrival in England on 2 January 1893 she had claimed that she didn’t recognise her son and had been lying down with her eyes tightly shut. Although she had not openly expressed any suicidal intention, she had been observed by her nurse to go to a drawer that contained razors.

She had thrown glasses at her nurse. Following admission she sat apart from the other patients and would burst into tears and moan in a piteous manner. She wouldn’t speak to staff, only nodding or shaking her head in response to questions, but would follow instructions.

By 9 April, although she was still entirely mute, she had begun to communicate with the staff by writing notes. She complained that she had a terrible pain in her head and that she believed she would never be well again.

On 15 September there is a note that she is steadily improving and by 20 October was employing herself with chores on the ward. By 13 November she was speaking and told the staff that she felt she must strike someone, and that she had an impulse to do something rash, which was almost overpowering. She seems to have remained in this state for several months.

On 16 May 1894, her time in the Hospital was extended by three months and she was transferred to its convalescent unit in the Surrey countryside on 22 May. Two days later she was returned to Bethlem having become much more agitated and distressed and expressing her own concerns that she would ‘break out and give a lot of trouble’. Following her return she was much more distressed and on 16 June had to be made to wear strong clothing and be transferred to one of the hospital’s refractory wards. She was discharged uncured on 8 August and was transferred to St Luke’s Hospital in Old Street,

the vacuum

London. A final note, dated 24 October 1896, states that she has now recovered and been discharged from St Luke’s.

Threatens to devil his relations

Henry Gamlen, a 25-year old outfitter’s manager from Reading,was admitted to Bethlem Hospital on 11 March 1893. The doctors who certified him insane wrote: Replied to questions in a loud and offensive tone, making a marked division of each syllable of each word. Was frequently muttering with face turned to the wall. Says he hears voices through the wall that speak through him. Sees imps all day off and on. They are some black and others blue and when he shakes his fist at them they evaporate.

Has previously been melancholic. His father, Mr William John Gamlen of Fairview, Caversham Place Park, Oxon., informs me that he is often violent, uses threats and is harsh and irritable to the children. Threatens to devil his relations. and His manner is nervous, his face constantly twitching or drawn into a scowl or sardonic laugh.

He answers questions intelligently, but sullenly and menacingly. He hears voices and keeps up a constant muttering communication with ‘the spirits’ he sees, but declines to say what the voices tell him. His father states that he is restless and violent in manner, that he has threatened to pull his father’s nose, that he constantly mutters and sees spirits and hears voices and that he has been melancholic for some months previously.

His admission diagnosis was delusional and the prognosis thought to be bad unless it could be shown that alcohol had been involved in his symptoms. Following admission he continued to have visual hallucinations, describing ‘spirits or devils’ which were about the same size as humans, were unclothed and coloured red, blue or black and would come out of the walls but disappear if he tried to approach them. He continued to hear voices and the attendants reported that he would often stand by a wall talking as if to someone on the other side. He had also hallucinations of noxious smells and said that, on an occasion when a friend had placed a silver pen in his hand, he had felt a peculiar thrill run up his arm and down his body into his legs.

His condition did not change during his time at the Hospital. He remained solitary and would not converse with other patients or staff. He was often observed to wave his arms around and gesticulate as he walked around the Hospital as if in animated conversation with someone. He was discharged uncured on 12 September.

She remained depressed and reticent when staff attempted to speak with her

Hilda Smart, a 19-year old single woman from Portsmouth, was admitted to Bethlem Hospital on 5 April 1895. The doctors who certified her insane wrote: She was dull and stupid in manner. Complained of people trying to poison her, especially her sister and an aunt in London who sends her tinned food, which is poisoned. She does not go to bed because people are calling out to her and shouting out to her from different parts of her bedroom.

Her mother, Mrs Jessie Elizabeth Smart of 27 Claremont Terrace, Southsea tells me that she complains of people trying to poison her and that she is very difficult to manage sometimes refusing to go to bed till 3 a.m. and She thinks neighbours want to poison her and frequently refuses food for this reason. Says she is afraid to go to bed because of horrid things under the pillow. She is morose, restless, excessively obstinate. Jessie Elizabeth Smart (her mother) states that Hilda Smart has said she should do

injury to herself if at home any longer. That she refuses food for many hours. Will not go to bed or move for hours at night. Refuses to do what she is asked. Also has delusions as to the month of the year and that her sister wishes to poison her.

On admission she was described as depressed and confused. She told the doctor that on the night she was admitted she saw the hands of the clock go round about twenty times and that when she tried to get up at quarter to seven in the morning she was told to wait for a minute or two. What she said had then happened was that she had to wait a further ten minutes until the hands of the clock had gone round a further time and it was then quarter to seven again before she was allowed to get out of bed. She believed that everyone in the Hospital was against her and that the staff would try to keep her in bed for ever. In the days following her admission she remained depressed and reticent when staff attempted to speak with her. She was described as troublesome as regards taking food, but did not have to be fed by tube. There seems to have been little change in her condition until the autumn.

On 30 September she was reported to seem less depressed and to be able to employ herself chiefly by reading books. She was transferred to the Hospital’s countryside convalescent unit on 5 November and returned to Bethlem to be discharged well on 4 December 1895.

Colin Gale is Archivist at Bethlem Royal Hospital, and has authored (with Robert Howard) Presumed Curable: An illustrated casebook of Victorian psychiatric patients in Bethlem Hospital. (Wrightson Biomedical Publishing, 2003).

the vacuum

by paul moore REPRESENTING MADNESS T

he creative professionals of today’s media are…just carrying on traditional depictions of the past.

Many of today’s images, from children’s cartoons through primetime drama to ‘slasher’ movies, are repetitions or residuals of long-standing popular beliefs’1 Otto Wahl’s 1995 quote taken from his study of representations of mental illness in the media is still as pertinent today as it was ten years ago.

Despite an upsurge in political correctness and a claim that we now ‘know’ more about the causes and stresses of mental illness than we ever have, the stereotypical images of mentally ill individuals have not been challenged in the mainstream media.

Simon Cross2 argues that this is because from Victorian times we have tried to sustain a representational iconography in relation to madness that underlines the view that ‘mad’ people are different and hence we should be able to know them as soon as we see them.

Supposedly scientific studies of Victorian criminals produced images of the so-called criminally insane and set a pattern whereby mental illness could be identified immediately from the look of the individual. It was no surprise, therefore, that when the mass media would begin to exploit mental illness for filmic and televisual reproduction it would tap into a semiotic structure that placed the insane ‘outside’ of ‘normal’ society.

It is significant that for some that being an outsider did not necessarily mean that they were disregarded by society. This fortunate few were those who would come under the label of artists. For these individuals the marks of madness were a badge that conferred on them genius status. They saw what ordinary mortals did not see precisely because of their madness.

Hence in representations of artists such as Van Gogh, William Blake or John Clare the very signs that spelt danger in others bestowed status.

For these tortured souls the unkempt hair, the lack of hygiene, the wild look, the frenzied speech and the tattered clothes were all proof of an existence beyond the everyday.

These same attributes also helped, however, to place others beyond the limits of acceptable society and into the realm of dangerous lunacy. For the media the mad must fall into one of a number of categories, few of which are portrayed positively. At its most benign madness is seen as a source of comedic relief. Down and Out in Beverley Hills (1986) and Analyze That (2002) both feed this myth of the mentally ill individual who is misunderstood by society but who has a heart of gold that will eventually lead to his/her redemption.

Interestingly this stereotype does not always translate to the small screen and nowhere was the comedic more brutally juxtaposed with the tragic than in the descent into madness suffered

by Yosser Hughes in The Boys from the Black Stuff.

A more sympathetic representation might be found in the notion of the rebellious free spirit. The most celebrated example of this theme is the role immortalised by Jack Nicholson in One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Unfortunately the character of McMurphy serves to hide the fact that all the other characters are created as stereotypical representations of various forms of madness while their behaviour and appearance cements the view that they are different and need to be

kept away from normal society. McMurphy’s victimisation is understood only because his sanity can be deduced from the insanity of those he befriends. A more contemporary rendition of the same theme can be found in Shine (1996) but this movie also has the added dimension of the tortured artistic genius mentioned earlier, allowing its central character to have two bites at the insanity cherry with the obvious pleasing results for both the audience and the director.

It is also worth pointing out that the salvation for these individuals (if there is any) lies in their own hands. Hence the audience is encouraged to accept the notion that mental illness has to do with the individual and not the society that houses that individual. This belief is at the heart of the government’s policy of community care where the responsibility for the individual lies with that individual and his/her ability to cope with the stresses of daily life that may have caused the illness in the first instance.

And of course in media representations if the individual cannot redeem him or herself there will always be the constancy of true love (usually from an unknown and unexpected quarter) to pull them through.

Women do not fare well in the media representations of madness. Either they are the insane seductress or the bunny-boiling stalker, a term that has become everyday parlance since Glenn Close’s performance in Fatal Attraction (1987). The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992) revisited this theme of female obsession but it is a construction that is to be found as early as 1957 in The Three Faces of Eve. The role of the male in prompting these extremes of behaviour is generally free from analysis and even if the male is implicitly criticised it is in the context of being ridiculed for not playing the game by the appropriate rules.

From these films we enter the hardcore centres of madness. These are the films populated with the sly manipulator in films such as The Cable Guy (2001), the mad scientist who first graced our screens in Frankenstein and the ultimate in madness, the homicidal maniac to be found in classics such as Psycho (1960), American Psycho (2000) and of course The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The case of Hannibal Lector is interesting, however, in that we can see how far we have come from the whimpering madman with a mother fixation in Hitchcock’s classic to the suave, murderous sophistication which Hannibal epitomises. This becomes the ultimate terror, a murderer whose modus operandi is constructed around intellect rather than insanity and a man who, apart from his eyes, is evidently not in any way obviously different. The real genius of Hannibal is the understanding that difference is all we have to judge insanity by and hence we too could be the next victims of his grace, sophistication, intellect and deranged brutality.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most positive representations of madness are to be found in documentary television. Simon Cross argues that because UK television maintains a close affinity to the notion of public service, and the viewer as citizen, companies have made real attempts to create representations of madness which step outside accepted notions of expertise and try to create relationships built around the concept of common sense and grounded experience. Cross cites programmes such as Michael Apted’s series of ‘Up’ films particularly that

Women do not fare well in the media representations of madness. Either they are the insane seductress or the bunnyboiling stalker, a term that has become everyday parlance since Glenn Close’s performance in Fatal Attraction which showcased the story of Neil’s depression and ‘Mad, Bad or Sad’ the video diaries of a woman called Sharon whose life is dominated by the voices she hears. Cross concludes that much has yet to be done, but these programmes are helping to encourage debate in a situation where ‘as the central institution of the public sphere, television is the epicentre of public discourse about what it means to be a normal citizen’3.

Unfortunately it might be argued that the very move to a populist television that Cross sees as positive may have opened the door for forms of television that blur the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour (Big Brother, The Swan, Jerry Springer, Extreme Makeover) to the extent that one might be tempted to agree with Sharon when she claims, punning the old aphorism, that ‘the lunatics have taken over Stretford’.4 While we no longer blindly accept the explanations for mental ill health postulated by ‘experts’ such as Freud, the fact is that mental health is a complex issue and complex issues are

notoriously difficult (impossible?) to represent in the media without resorting to stereotypes.

Ironically the one medium that might facilitate a move outside constructed notions of difference is radio yet this is the very medium that has been slow to confront issues of mental health except in worthy documentary/health and welfare productions. Productions such as John Cage’s Roartorio underline the fact, however, that here is a medium capable of capturing and replaying the vast range of thoughts, voices and manifestations the human brain is capable of delivering. This is a medium that can indeed harness the contradictions that Roland Barthes maintained led many to be considered mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Imagine someone…who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple discard of that old specter: logical contradiction; who mixes everyday language, even those said to be incompatible; who silently accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity; who remains passive in the face of Socratic irony….and legal terrorism. Such a man would be the mockery of our society: court, school, asylum, polite conversation would cast him out; who endures contradiction without shame? Now this anti-hero exists: he is the reader of the text at the moment he takes his pleasure’.

Notes 1 Wahl, O.F. quoted in Cross S (2004)

Visualizing Madness in Television and New Media, Vol 5 No 3 Pages 197-216 2 Cross S (2004) Visualizing Madness in

Television and New Media, Vol 5 No 3 Pages 197-216 3 Ibid, Page 211

the vacuum

by matt seaton

TALKING SENSE M

ental health is a huge field, with a bewildering array of professional organisations, service providers, lobbying, policy and campaign groups. Many of them attempt to represent or incorporate the views of ‘mental health services users’, as the jargon has it (or ‘survivors’, if you prefer the more radical alternative), but very few are run by users for users. The exceptions are groups like ECT Anonymous, which campaigns on a particular issue - in this case, against the use of Electro-Convulsive Therapy, the highly controversial treatment for depression.

Mad Pride – the equivalent of Gay Pride for people who have suffered mental ill-health - is different because, above all, it wants to change the way in which society views people with mental health problems. Knife-wielding loners who jump into lions’ dens, ‘danger patients’ set loose on society like ‘bombs waiting to explode’, ‘lepers’ who cannot live safely and sanely among the rest of us, these are the headlines that are driving Mad Pride activists mad. So, using a classic civil rights tactic to combat these misleading stereotypes, Mad Pride takes the label with a negative value (‘mad’) and reappropriates it. ‘Glad to be Mad’ is its slogan.

‘The philosophy,’ explains Simon Barnett, a 43-year-old former Metropolitan police officer and Mad Pride activist, ‘is that the end of the 20th century was dominated by civil rights movements; we’ve had the American civil rights movement in the Sixties, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement. Perhaps we’re the next ones to win our rights and some sort of freedom.’

Mad Pride is the sister organisation - ‘the entertainment wing,’ says Barnett - of the more political Reclaim Bedlam movement. Reclaim Bedlam began in l 997 when the Royal Bethlem and Maudsley Hospitals decided to hold celebrations for their 750th anniversary. The original ‘Bedlam’ asylum was founded in l 247 on the site of Liverpool Street Station. It later occupied the building which currently houses the Imperial War Museum, before moving to sites in Camberwell and Beckenham. Pete Shaughnessy, a former Maudsley patient, and one of the driving forces behind Mad Pride, saw nothing to celebrate in either the original Bedlam (“a symbol for man’s inhumanity to man, for callousness and cruelty,” in historian Roy Porter’s words), or the state of mental health care. Therefore, he started Reclaim Bedlam as a counter-movement.

Speaking to me back in 2000, he recalled, ‘I was involved at Maudsley at the time, and they came and talked to us, as an afterthought, and said we’ll have a “Users’ Day” on the third day. I thought that was really token, that we were tacked on at the end of this really naff event. And then they said we’re having a Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s, and I think that’s probably when I snapped. We called that a Commemoration, for the people who have died and the sadness they’ve lived in.’ Severe mental illness is relatively uncommon: about one in l00 people, for instance, suffers from schizophrenia.

But for the occurrence of more common mental health problems such as depression or anxiety, the aggregate figures vary from one in six (Department of Health) to one in four (Mental

Health Foundation).

‘I think the stigma attached to mental health is as powerful as racism or as powerful as sexism,’ Shaughnessy argued. ‘It’s just as powerful but it doesn’t get talked about.’ He pointed to how few celebrities are upfront about mental ill-health.

Paul Merton, who has been an in- patient at the Maudsley, and Denise Welch, who played Natalie Barnes in Coronation Street and has talked openly about her postnatal depression, are two notable exceptions. The first Reclaim Bedlam events were a rally and march from the Imperial War Museum to the Maudsley in Camberwell in protest at the celebrations; and a picket of the service at St Paul’s, which involved a minute’s silence on the steps outside. Hundreds of mental patients around the country supported the movement, and the BBC2 series From The Edge made a programme about it. At a time of many community-care horror stories, a very different message was finally getting out.

Shaughnessy himself committed suicide in December 2002, aged 40, and his own personal story is typical in that it shows how mental ill-health can affect anyone. He used to work as a bus driver on the number 36 bus out of Peckham Garage. Following a vicious assault by two passengers in l992, when he went to the aid of his conductor, he was forced to take time off work and became depressed. When he went back to work early on the advice of his GP, Shaughnessy was criticised by his trade union - which then, just a few months later, advised him to take a wage cut and work longer hours because of privatisation. ‘I went bananas,’ he says. He staged a brief solo hunger strike outside the garage, and then decided to quit and go travelling. But the stress had taken its toll, and in Ireland Shaughnessy found himself admitted to hospital with the first of what have become periodic episodes of psychosis. He resorted to taking several drugs to treat his manic depression and occasionally admitting himself to hospital, living on disability benefit, writing articles and doing voluntary work when he felt well.

Although his last months were marked by deep depression, Pete continued to campaign alongside doctors and patient groups against the government’s planned overhaul of mental health laws. The advent of asylum closures and community care has resulted in many mental health services moving into the community and there is a widespread consensus that a new statute is required to take account of these changes. But the emphasis of the new legislation was neither on care nor non-discrimination, but on ‘risk management’ and ‘public safety’. In other words, the Government is responding primarily to a media-inspired, populist agenda which says it is community care that has placed all those axewielding loonies on our streets. The draft Mental Health Act, which was published in June 2002 and is currently going through parliament, would enable the forced detention of mentally ill people deemed to pose a risk to the public.

‘All the language is in terms of risk and safety,’ says Joanna Moncrieff, a psychiatrist at the Charing Cross Hospital and a member of the Critical Psychiatry Network. ‘It really should be called a Public Safety and Disorder Bill. I feel this is extremely hypocritical.’

The public perception is certainly that there

'media coverage

has fuelled the myth that they are more violent than others, when that’s simply not true.’

are more seriously deranged people out there, threatening mayhem and mischief. The rare tragic cases, such as the l992 killing of Jonathan Zito by Christopher Clunis, a schizophrenic, have provided graphic ‘evidence’ for this anxiety.

‘What we’re concerned about is the backlash against people with mental health problems,’ explains Mind’s spokesperson Sue Baker, ‘that has come as a result of an awful lot of negative media coverage about community care and people with mental health problems - and which has fuelled the myth that they are more violent than others, when that’s simply not true.’

The truth is, paradoxically, the opposite of public perception. A recent article in the British Journal of Psychiatry demonstrated conclusively, using the Home Office’s own statistics, that the proportion of homicides committed by people with a mental disorder (at most, ten per cent of all homicides in any case) has declined year on year, not only since the advent of community care, but ever since the late Fifties when asylum populations were at their peak. The schizophrenic, in particular, has become a kind of modern bogeyman from whom we need to be protected.

‘We all felt that to put public safety first was an unfortunate way round,’ says Genevra Richardson, Professor of Law at Queen Nary and Westfield College, who chaired the Expert Committee which reviewed the 1983 Mental Health Act prior to the government’s Green Paper proposals. ‘The answer really was to establish proper accessible mental health services.’ `Our underlying principle was that of nondiscrimination on the grounds of mental health,’ she goes on. ‘And that has just gone out of the window – it was nowhere in the Government’s response; it was nowhere in the Green Paper.’

The biggest bone of contention in the new legislation is the proposal for Compulsory

Treatment Orders (CTOs), by which people with mental health problems who are not considered to be a sufficient threat either to themselves or anyone else to be admitted to hospital, may nevertheless be compelled to take their medication. ‘This is quite a worrying development,’ says Mark Roberts, a former musician and market researcher who suffered several bouts of severe depression in the Eighties. Now in his late forties, he works for Greater London Action on Disability on a mental health users’ project. ‘With the closure of the asylums, there aren’t the places for people to go on a voluntary basis, so the Government thinks people ought to be treated at home and forced to take medication, and that’s the heart of the Compulsory Treatment Order.’

The former minister for mental health, Paul Boateng, insisted that there would be no question of injections being administered ‘over the kitchen sink’, but it remains unclear what arrangements the Government has in mind for making people take their medicine.

Mind has published a joint statement with 18 other organisations, from the Community Psychiatric Nurses Association to the Law Society, objecting to CTOs. But the director of SANE (Schizophrenia - A National Emergency), Marjorie Wallace, has taken a public stand as an apologist for the proposals. This made her the target for a Reclaim Bedlam demo. Around 200 people gathered to protest noisily outside SANE’s offices, while a ‘patient’ was given an injection over a kitchen table with a six-foot-long simulation of a syringe.

‘I suppose what attracts me to some of the Mad Pride initiatives,’ says Rachel Perkins, ‘and I’m not the going-on-the-streets-demonstrating sort of person - is that I certainly believe we need to challenge the stereotypes people have.’

An engaging, energetic woman in her early forties, with a blonde ponytail and large glasses, Dr Perkins works as a clinical director at the Springfield Hospital in Balham. She is also a manic depressive. ‘What concerns me is that the whole agenda around mental health is driven by issues of violence, vulnerability, containment, support - really presenting an incredibly negative picture of the possibilities of life with a mental health problem. My concern is to change that agenda, and look at the contribution that people with mental health problems can and do make to our community.’

the vacuum

aidan higgins rocks my world TOUCHED BY GENIUS

By Eamon Hughes

Never meet your heroes, for while they’re displaying a complete lack of interest in the insights that only you, hero-worshippingly, can bring to their work, you’ll be discovering their feet of clay (the two things may be related). At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work; we’re meant to keep our distance. But the world isn’t quite like that. Stardom has become celebrity and where stardom was marked by a distance that deified them, celebrity is something that we consume.

Once upon a time your path intersected randomly with that of a hero and, whatever happened, it was magical: look at the result when Moses asked for an autograph, for example. Some years later I bumped into the god-like genius that was Rory Gallagher and came away massively impressed that not only were his jeans and tee-shirt shabbier than mine but he’d also let me buy him a pint.

Moses and I were probably equally satisfied with our respective encounters (and probably spent as much time boring friends and passing acquaintances with the story), because no matter what happened in such encounters, some sense of distance remained and lent magic to the moment.

There’s a story about a friend of mine, a massive Kinks fan, who once spent several hours at a dimly-lit party chatting to a bloke whom he didn’t recognise as Ray Davies. He’s never been able to

work out whether it was a tragedy that he didn’t really meet his hero, or a joy that, in failing to recognise him, he was able to bridge the distance that overt hero-worship would have created. But I have a sense that stardom is now debased: in an age of celebrity we now have so many different ways of encountering our heroes that meeting them in the flesh is just one option among many, and even if we meet them in the flesh there’s a strong possibility that they’ll be so shielded by a PR-generated aura that we can’t be really sure if we’ve actually met them. What we’re looking for in such encounters is the unguarded, the authentic moment which promises revelation but that seems no longer possible. Our desire for such promised revelation needs that starry distance which makes it all but impossible anyway: who got closer to the real, the unguarded, the authentic: Moses, my friend or me?

I do have to admit that my attitude here is determined by two key factors. First, I’m old enough too remember punk which altered forever my attitudes. After years of sitting about a mile away from a stage on which ant-size figures preened under a light show that itself barely filled the stadium, field or wherever, I discovered the joys of gigs in bars and clubs. I’ve stood close enough to The Clash to be able to tie Joe

Strummer’s shoe-laces together (don’t be daft, of course I didn’t - have you ever tried to tie a knot while pogo-ing?). That environment played a part in altering my musical tastes - my love of jazz is, now I think about it, largely due to it taking place in such small clubs, places where you can hear what the players are saying to each other off-mic between numbers (that unguarded, that authentic moment). I’ve shaken Elvin Jones’s hand (and after 50 years of flailing drum sticks, what a hand it was); I’ve chatted to Lee Konitz over a drink between sets. Just last month I had a chat with Django Bates and the piano player from the Mingus Big Band bummed a post-gig cigarette off me. So if you want to be able to meet your heroes, choose your area of interest wisely.

Alternatively, and this is where the second key factor comes into play, work your way into a position where your heroes come to meet you.

For some years, I’ve helped organise the English Society at Queen’s and so have met many people whose work I love and /or admire. And, despite the warning about feet of clay at the start of this piece, many of them are good people to meet - Martin Amis stands his round, Doris Lessing is a sweetie, Christopher Hitchens is just as much fun as you’d expect - and only a few are real prats (Allen Ginsberg, since you ask, and since he’s dead and can’t sue). And yet, and yet, we’re all being professionals together: I want people to be interested in literature (enlightened self-interest for a literature academic) and they have audiences to foster, books to sell and fees to bank (enlightened self-interest for freelance writers). So how unguarded, how authentic? In all of these encounters two stand out. I once introduced a reading

by Edna O’Brien and more importantly acted as her minder during the signing session - hers are fans who want to touch the hem, whose lives have been changed by reading her. Afterwards, a group of us took her to a local restaurant where we had a discreet table at the back. Returning to the table after a pit-stop someone called my name and there was one of my sisters and a bunch of her friends, one of whom remarked as I stopped for a chat: ‘I said earlier that I thought I saw you come in.

And, do you know, one of the people you’re with looks just like Edna O’Brien.’ A conversational

open goal if ever there was one: ‘That’s because it is Edna O’Brien - come over, I’ll introduce you.’

But none of them would - was it the possibility of getting too close perhaps that stopped them?

And my final moment is over 20 years ago. I was a young research student in the English Midlands where writers, especially the Irish writers I was getting interested in, were thin on the ground.

I went to London to an Irish literary festival. I attended a reading, more of a lecture really, by Aidan Higgins whose work I loved. He’d stuck the pages of his script together in some complicated way that meant he kept losing his place, finding it again and then not being sure when he’d got to the end of a section, and once he’d worked out that he had indeed finished a section he discarded that set of pages over his shoulder where they fluttered to various parts of the floor. At the end he left with the organisers and I was the only one, it seemed, interested in gathering up his script.

When I had it, I also had a quandary: now I had what, in those typewriting days, was probably the only copy of the talk, a unique relic - treasure trove - but wouldn’t Higgins need it? I found him in a local bar and returned the script; he bought me a drink, we talked, we drank, we talked, we drank amnesia-inducingly more. Next morning, alongside the hangover, I had a gap where our conversation should have been, but I also had the sense that I’d made contact not just with Higgins, but with Irish Literature in the flesh - it actually existed beyond the confines of the library stacks.

I’d got close to something, but drink-impaired memory also let me keep that crucial distance.

So, if Aidan Higgins is reading this: I’m still a huge admirer of the work (from the early stories, through Langrishe Go Down and onto the more recent playfully autobiographical volumes - and others reading this should search them out), but, I’m sorry, I’ll not be inviting you to Belfast.

I cherish that memory, or rather that sense of contact protected by my drunken amnesia: it was unguarded, authentic, but amnesia lends distance and the whole thing is too dear to me to risk ruining it by revisiting it.

A SORRY UPDATE Following Sorry Day, Richard West (co-editor of this paper) instructed the law firm Higgins Hollywood Deazley to issue proceedings against the Council for a judicial review of their decision making. On the 7th January leave was granted for the case to be heard in the High Court. A date has still to be set for the hearing. Richard West is represented by Mary Higgins BL and Michael Lavery QC. Mr. Lavery argued that the Council’s real reason for demanding an apology and recantation was a blatant attempt at censorship.

The Council has been ordered to lodge replying affidavits within 21 days. They will seek to

explain to the court that their decision was not: irrational based on bias or in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights (in particular Article 9 on freedom of thought, conscience and religion and Article 10 on freedom of expression) See future issues for an update on the case.

The Vacuum would like to thank everyone who helped on Sorry Day.

Sorry Santa with PDQ. Photo courtesy of www.peedy.tv

Brian Patterson's 'Sorry' on a beach in Melbourne, Australia.

Dan Shipsides and Stephen Hull's 'Sorry' on Cave Hill.

The Sorry Bus in action on Botanic Avenue.

the vacuum

by michael begg

what is it

the vacuum issue 22 HOW TO MAKE

SOMEONE MAD

Published by Factotum Mostly Englishmen however.

ADDRESS:

112-114 Donegall Street Belfast BT1 2GX 028 90330893 [e] info@factotum.org.uk www.factotum.org.uk Editors & Design Stephen Hackett Richard West Reviews Editor Eugene MacNamee

T

hese days there are any number of ways to make someone mad. From putting Sir Cliff’s Millennium Prayer on repeat at a tile-shifting volume until your neighbour cuts his own ears off, to feeding your family from aluminium saucepans for ten years and waiting for them to start forgetting where they parked the car and filling their own turnups with drool, the choice available in today’s optionstrewn society is wider than ever before for the would-be loonifier. However, lessons can always be drawn from history. Here we look at a few classic episodes from the past involving the creation of grade-A nimrods.

Always popular in classical antiquity has been the idea of driving someone mad through physical anguish. In 4000 BC, Thith, minor Egyptian god of condiments (appearance: head of jackal, body of a Schwarz jar) was punished by sun god Ra when the latter sneezed over some heavily-nutmegged glühwein. Condemned to perpetual sand in his loincloth, Thith wandered the plains of the upper Nile in torment so unremitting that his howls were said to spoil an evening’s entertainment in Hades itself. His ruin became complete when he began experiencing hallucinations and bit the nose off the Sphinx for what he perceived as her amusement at his plight, provoking Ra to tie him to the bumper of his sun-chariot and drag him off to the dark side of the moon during a solar eclipse.

Madness through misuse of psychedelic drugs, usually regarded as a phenomenon of the 1960s, occurred in days long before those of the loon pant and embarrassing lyric. In 1273, corn-merchant and early music enthusiast Gyles of Cheesebridge so irritated his wife with his ceaseless lute plunking that she began to flavour his morning mead with privet leaves, now known to be a source of mind-bending dilithium benzophosphate, then just hoping it would choke him. Gyles went into a decline of increasingly erratic behaviour, from hedgehogbothering to flinging dung at local monks, and records of the Cheesebridge assizes show him as receiving punishment of three days in the stocks for sexually assaulting a haystack, the judge describing him as “ae pryze wyndowelickerre”. Unfortunately, the windows he licked were leaded, affording him an excruciating and distressing death, for which his wife was later

Illustrations Duncan Ross

In 1588, the second son of Pope Flatulus XII, angry at his father’s refusal to let him marry a Florentine blacksmith, began a whispering campaign in the Vatican to portray him as overfond of particularly inexpensive wine. tried as a witch and flung in the village duckpond with her wimple full of goose fat.

Making someone lose their mind through the power of suggestion can be tricky to pull off, but a joy to observe in the methods of a natural.

In 1588, the second son of Pope Flatulus XII, angry at his father’s refusal to let him marry a Florentine blacksmith, began a whispering campaign in the Vatican to portray him as overfond of particularly inexpensive wine. The Pope grew enraged at this slight on his ludicrously opulent and degenerate lifestyle and decreed that all communion wine had to be from the Médoc region and of at least 15 years’ vintage.

When his son began to leave empty Hungarian cabernet sauvignon bottles in the Vatican recycling bin, Flatulus took a fit of temper so strong that he burst several hundred capillaries in his face, leaving him with the appearance of a meths drinker, which only fuelled the rumours further. His comportment e soon eccentrified, and by the time he was declared insane by his chief physician, he was taking his morning baths in Sauternes and brushing his teeth with Dom Perignon 1564. He remained Pope for another 25 years, although for the last 7 of these he was actually dead but so well preserved that nobody noticed.

Spontaneous collective insanity, usually associated with Conservative election victories and Daniel O’Donnell concerts, has taken place

in even more unlikely circumstances in times gone by. In 1708, Devon publican Jethro Glee, in an endeavour to win a bet with the vicar of Poopton and make the world’s strongest cider, constructed a 6,000 gallon vat in a barn and filled it with 7 tons of ageing apples, rainwater and a particularly virulent strain of yeast used in the production of Polish vodka, which had killed an entire cargo of pigs on a boat from Königsburg (now Gdansk) the month before.

Overcome by the miasma emitting from the vat on inspecting it after only three days’ fermentation, Glee fell in and drowned, leaving the barn unattended throughout the hottest summer for 40 years. By September, all 300 inhabitants of the village had seen manifestations of the Virgin Mary and had their hair turn completely white.

Following complaints of unnatural practices from neighbouring villages, Poopton was levelled and its well filled in, and its villagers transported to South Georgia where they died out after attempting to interbreed with the local penguins.

Finally, being driven mad through witchcraft, something we all regard as firmly rooted in the days of thumbscrews and puritanical hats, has indeed had its instances surprisingly recently.

In 1927, society layabout and amateur Satanist Georgie Fitzgibbon attempted to make a pact with the devil to sell his soul for improved Charlestoning ability. Mispronouncing the text of an ancient manuscript during the ritual, he accidentally summoned the spirit of a 500-yeardead Samurai warrior, who chased him round his Berkeley Square flat for three days before the building’s porter called in the police. Following a medical inspection, Fitzgibbon was retired to his family seat in Warwickshire, where he spent the remaining 40 years of his life wearing chain mail and hiding in the shrubbery, only coming inside to take his meals in the greenhouse with his favourite chicken.

Web editor Stephen Hull Distribution Manager and proof reading Jason Mills Advertising Stephen Hackett To advertise in the Vacuum or receive information about our advertising rates call 028 90330893 or email info@factotum.org.uk Print run: 15,000 Distribution: Greater Belfast and Dublin The Vacuum welcomes and encourages correspondance. Write to the above address or email letters@factotum.org.uk All copyright remains with the authors.

Printer: Bangor Spectator

the vacuum

coffee vision slapping the botty

PRAVDA

BY STUART WATSON

Info., Botanic Inns Newsletter, Issue 2 At first glance info., the Botanic Inns group newsletter, seems uniquely suited to represent the ethos of the organisation, apparently having been the lucky recipient of the same design as the company’s bars: garish, clashing colour schemes; a self-consciously modern layout; expanses of poorly utilised space and an overall look and feel that pains the eyes and numbs the soul. The content of the newsletter largely follows the template of other such corporate publications, naturally tailored to present the most palatable view of the company’s activities.

So fittingly for a company that emphasises the importance of employee development there is the profile of the long term employee explaining why they adore working for the organisation, indeed throughout there is constant reference to staff welfare. The news or “business update” page reveals that in the last quarter the company received “Corporate Recognition from Investors in People”. Of course customer care is presented as being at least as highly valued; in the proud corporate tradition of quoting mean-

ingless statistics in an attempt to validate dubious claims we are told that the “customer satisfaction rating for the last quarter was 86.0%, up from 85.7% in the last quarter”. How customers were satisfied or that extra 0.3% gained remains tantalisingly unexplained.

Ploughing through the remainder of the newsletter one could be forgiven for suspecting that it had been cunningly designed to reproduce the experience of drinking in one of Botanic Inns’ bars. The bland, characterless contents soon brought on a feeling of ennui and uniquely soul destroying depression and lethargy. Perhaps surprisingly, beyond one supernaturally irritating advertisement for Bushmills whiskey (deservingly eviscerated in the previous issue of The Vacuum) and references to cheap drink offers in the What’s On section, there is virtually no prominent mention of what could naturally be assumed to be the majority activity taking place in these establishments and what they should primarily be facilitating: the consumption of alcohol. Surely if the casual reader or indeed drinker is to be encouraged to return to a Botanic Inn some evidence should be produced

to support the notion that these are places where libations may be enjoyed. Instead the reader is presented with articles claiming that the act of drinking coffee is a lifestyle “experience”; indeed the company claims to have a “coffee vision”, presumably a revelatory experience brought on by injecting caffeine directly into the primeval reptile brain.

Further articles emphasise the charitable and voluntary community works undertaken by the staff of Botanic Inns under the direction of the Community Involvement Committee.

Still there is little mention of the drinking of alcohol or indeed any photographs or articles throughout the newsletter that hint at such an activity.

While it is not uncommon for the corporate publications of such groups to attempt to humanise the corporate entity by presenting an image of an essentially profit based enterprise as having the best interests of the wider community at heart, rather then the acquisition of huge sacks of cash, I can’t help but feel that this apparent determination to avoid a substantial mention of the company’s greatest source of revenue is more than a little disingenuous. The emphasis of the newsletter seems squarely placed on more societally palatable activities such as the above mentioned coffee culture and support for worthy causes such as the Northern Ireland Mother & Baby Association; the actual drink barely gets a mention beyond the deals squeezed into the magazine’s back pages. Perhaps in addition to the community work mentioned the organisation might see fit to address its role in the problems caused in certain residential areas of Belfast by the behaviour of the students they so warmly welcome back with the aforementioned cheap offers.

This apparent reluctance to engage with what a bar should surely be primarily for reveals a core problem with what the newsletter presents as the Botanic Inns philosophy, and one endemic to central Belfast. The lead news item is the departure of Jas Mooney from the Botanic Inns

group, in which it is stated that Mooney has “done more than most to re-create an entertainment scene in Northern Ireland”. If by this it is meant that this has been achieved by buying up established bars and converting them from pleasant imbibing emporiums to empty barns and over designed meat markets with all the atmosphere of a family tomb, and which are about as pleasant to spend some time in, then he can be said to have succeeded admirably. Still, Jas does look a bit uncomfortable in the accompanying photograph; maybe he’s just had a life experience or coffee vision in one of his past creations.

the vacuum

by leontia flynn

ON THE MEDICATION I

n the July/ August 2002 issue of the magazine Mother Jones, Brendan I. Koerner persuasively made the case against pharmaceutical companies’ strategies for promoting mental health drugs: first they ‘discover’ a mild, nebulous mood affliction with a vast catchment of potential ‘sufferers’, then market the pills to treat it. This method of hyping the disease rather than selling the drug was, the author argued, itself a symptom of our ‘post-Prozac era’, in which SSRIs, Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors, are ubiquitous and pushed as cure-alls.

Koerner’s evidence for the existence of this strategy is the case history of Paxil. When the medication (which is called Seroxat here) came on the market in the United States in 1993, it remained in the shadow of Eli Lilly’s Prozac and Pfizer’s Zoloft (Lustral) until positioned as an anti-anxiety drug rather than as a treatment for depression. The successful campaign began, apparently, with makers GlaxoSmithKline poking through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (a bible for the classification of crazies which is almost always mentioned in conjunction with the fact that until 1973 homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder) and coming across the entry for GAD: Generalised Anxiety Disorder. What followed set the template, Koerner argued, for pharmaceutical marketing since. Originally a dustbin diagnosis for anxiety disorders for which there was no specific name (or acronym), SmithKline, realising the potentially huge pool of victims, first funded studies to prove Seroxat’s efficacy in treating GAD and then applied to the Food and Drug Administration for approval of this new, anti-anxiety use for the pills. Finally, permission granted, the public- relations exercises began: GAD-awareness billboard campaigns, doctors affirming the ‘hidden epidemic’, and patient groups recruited to tell the tragic human story of GAD. I still have the Observer article from the 14th of October 2001, which details GAD’s official recognition (‘anxiety finally out of the closet’), manages to relate the illness to the widespread unease since the September the 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre (“imagine feeling this anxious all the time, for no reason”) and offers a handy inventory by which readers might establish whether their own anxiety levels are abnormal. A panel listing possible treatments for GAD gives top place to SSRIs, but all this is done, as critics of the pharmaceuticals so often point out, without disclosing the companies’ role in researching the disorder, or detailing the side effects of SSRIs - side effects which I have always been pleased to note include, in the case of Seroxat, ‘anxiety’.

Pharmaceutical companies being, precisely, companies, none of this is very surprising: it seems that GlaxoSmithKline have also attempted to drum up recruits for Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and, even more dubiously, something called Pre-Menstural Dysphoric Disorder, the symptoms of which include monthly mood swings and physical pain. The latter, like recent attempts to cash in on the success of Viagra by raising awareness of Female Sexual Dysfunction, is too easy to parody as a magic pill for routine facts of life (periods, rubbish sex). It is, however, very bad news for depression’s profile, for several reasons.

Firstly, for the uninitiated who believe depression or anxiety disorders to exist on a continuum with, or to be inseparable from, unhappiness and anxiety as they are ‘normally’ experienced,

the widespread prescription of SSRIs for assorted complaints unfortunately creates a pecking order of madness

SSRIs look like medicine for weaklings who have difficulty with the fallout from being conscious -- having to think and feel – and, once more, for life being a bit shit. Recently Gulf War Syndrome has been recognised, where ‘recognised’ stands, in part, for ‘not just psychological’, this fundamental lack of understanding of the mind’s sway over the body continues – and the most cynical view of GAD (the implausibility of millions of sufferers from a serious illness failing to sense that their pain amounts to a serious illness) will fuel studies of escalating anxiety as an hysterical epidemic without investigating its root cause. Secondly, among those who consider their depression acute, the widespread prescription of SSRIs for assorted complaints unfortunately creates a pecking order of madness whereby ‘serious’ sufferers feel the need to separate themselves from amateurs attracted by GAD’s publicity drive. Thus, in Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel notes that she always points out that she takes lithium as well as Prozac, to distinguish her from the Prozac-guzzling masses. While Wurtzel is a self-publicist whose book leaves the rooting for her next suicide attempt, it is true that having completed a GAD inventory, or the ‘Understanding Depression’

checklist available in doctor’s surgeries (likely to be produced by Eli Lilly), and answered ‘most of the time’ to all the questions, you might then notice how vague these questions are: “I can’t concentrate, remember things, or make decisions”; “I am tired all the time and have no energy”; “I avoid dealing with life’s difficulties”; “I wish could be as happy as the people around me”. Depressives who suspect that avoiding dealing with life’s difficulties does not actually qualify as a disease might, therefore, feel compelled to differentiate themselves with an inventory of their own symptoms – such as, say, “I can’t move” and “I am being sick over myself” and “I have recurring fantasies of pushing my fingers into my brain”.

The final reason, however, why the drive to ‘raise awareness’ of mental disorders is paradoxical and fraught with inaccurate terms extends beyond the greed of the pharmaceutical companies and encompasses the whole culture of debate and openness about mental illness – to the literature and some of the Literature, to the Guardian’s Blue Notes column which logs one man’s experience of anxiety and depression, and, most particularly, to the widespread tendency to describe depression as though it were a delimited phenomenon with clear edges. It is likely that a mildly crazy person, or one recovering from some bad spell will be soothed by these upbeat public accounts of the mean reds, and, in particular, by how they are hedged in language which separates depressive illness from the self, making it a detached, almost organic complaint – something that blows across the life, leaving your self intact; a kind of brain flu.

This is the language, of course, which is used by the manufacturers of SSRIs, who will list as a ‘symptom’ of depression, ‘suicidal thoughts’.

Getting rid of taboos about mad people is, of course, a good thing, and it is true that those who feel themselves suffering from more than ‘ordinary human unhappiness’ might find the whole thing setting in with same lack of obvious cause and rapidity as gastric flu. Nevertheless, while anyone who has ever been very depressed will know how completely it fragments the sense of self, this is not the same fragmentation which allows you entirely to separate the depressed thought from the self who is thinking it.

Depression is mediated by and implicated with consciousness, and your mind can’t fully be both patient and doctor – so for those in the depths, all breezy discussions of ‘treatable illness and plans of action are liable to sound pretty hollow.

In depression, I think, all you know is your own pain, and that you – or whoever you were –are alone in your awareness of it, and possibly unreliable in your communication of it to others.

And in this situation, you may find yourself liable to put aside your political objections and sense of co-option, and wait, and hope that the drugs will work, again.

the vacuum

drawing by miriam deburca

The Lunatic City

By Neal Alexander

M

etaphorically speaking, Belfast wears an expression of bluff sobriety and earnest good sense on its broad, unsmiling face.

A Victorian industrial city, its tightly bunched red brick terraces radiate a ruddy glow of workmanlike perseverance, whilst the grey facades of its civic buildings maintain a sombre vigil over the geometric plan of the city centre. And yet, something in the very stones of which Belfast is built insistently rebels against this mask of order and decorum, producing all manner of alarming tics which convulse the features of this outwardly complacent and self-satisfied city. Take the City Hall, for instance, which acts as both an architectural and institutional hub around which so much of the city’s life is ordered and arranged (as the editors of The Vacuum are painfully aware). Contemplating this ostentatious Edwardian extravaganza, the historian C.E.B. Brett, having allowed himself the liberty of criticising the porte-cochere, concludes that “no building could better have symbolized the pretensions of the Edwardian city. From far and near, the dome floats above the roof tops, like a light-buoy marking out the centre of Belfast”. The modulation in tone here is arguably an example of one of the ‘facial tics’ mentioned above, provoking as it does a decisive shift in the reader’s perception of a familiar landmark. It is as if the symbolic weight of the building itself, its surplus signification, produces an effect of etherialisation upon

the image of the City Hall, which proceeds to drift gracefully through the imagination, trailing streamers of metaphors and similes in its buoyant wake. Brett’s evocative phrase therefore suggests a sense in which, by reading between the lines, we might think of the City Hall as symbolically excessive, a radiant, and faintly preposterous, urban core threatening to detach itself from terra firma, and sending shockwaves through the fabric of the city over which it would preside.

This ambivalent sense of the city as simultaneously firmly anchored and drifting from its moorings is one that would have been recognised

by E.M. Forster. In an essay on his friend, the Belfast novelist Forrest Reid, Forster offers the following thumbnail sketch of the city: “Belfast, as all men of affairs know, stands no nonsense and lies at the head of Belfast Lough. […] And yet she is haunted by a ghost, by some exile from the realms of the ideal who has slipped into her commonsense”. Here again, the city’s sober countenance suffers another uncomfortable spasm, as hallucinations of the ‘ideal’ invade and undermine the iron fastenings of its commonsense. This dialectic is continued in a few brief remarks by another visitor, the actor and dramatist Michael MacLiammoir, who records with evident bemusement his strange affinity for the Northern city’s “fantastic practicality”: “[Belfast’s] air is that of a Business Man stepped straight out of Alice’s Wonderland and marching side by side with the Jabberwock through yards of bunting and a gritty

Denis Ireland coined the term “Ulsteria”, whereby God and Ulster become interchangeable terms north-east wind to the rolling of drums”. This is a very singular identity parade indeed; one that consciously probes the internal contradictions of Belfast’s self-image and finds itself running up against the threshold of madness. All three writers highlight the ways in which imaginative geographies of the city act upon its more anxious self-projections, distorting or rupturing the placid surfaces of commercial prudence and social respectability. In each, the straight edges of reason and order begin to curl and fray, so that, at

least in MacLiammoir, the gibbering of repressed voices comes to be heard, faintly but insistently.

It is, however, with the introduction of political factors into the equation that Belfast begins to leer, grimace, and foam at the mouth. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Indeed, for outside observers, the manner in which politics have shaped Belfast’s eventful history has long been considered symptomatic of a peculiarly Northern malaise which, as the continuing suspension of the Northern Ireland Assembly suggests, could well prove terminal. It was in much these terms that the writer and politician Denis Ireland coined the term “Ulsteria”, whereby God and Ulster become interchangeable terms, a delirium that is to be observed in many DUP voters. There is, as yet, no known cure, although contributions to the furtherance of research are warmly solicited. Instructively, Ireland goes on to sketch out the consequences of an encounter with patients suffering from Ulsteria, and its effects upon an otherwise healthy Englishman: In brief, the sensation of landing in Belfast must be, for an Englishman, rather like arriving overnight in a kind of political lunatic asylum where the walls are painted with panels depicting, in the most appalling taste, scenes from the more lurid and reprehensible portions of his own past, and, horribile dictu, and most embarrassing of all, the inmates insist on turning out with deplorably uncivilised fife and drum bands to welcome him as one of themselves.

the vacuum

breakdown and breakthrough Belfast was now like a madman who tears his flesh, puts straw in his hair and screams gibberish.

Here, then, we have not only a description of the city as lunatic asylum, but a sort of descent into Hell bristling with all the fantastic imagery of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breugel. Alice’s Wonderland has colonised the entire city and the Jabberwock has donned the mayoral robes and chain. It is only to be hoped that the said Jabberwock and his minions will pursue a more balanced and circumspect policy regarding the allocation of arts funding in the future. Sorry?

Visions of Belfast as a degraded and essentially incomprehensible Hell were, of course, to proliferate over the thirty year period of the Troubles. In fact, for liberal commentators, news correspondents, and local clergy alike, the events of the Troubles could only be explained as a sort of madness at the heart of Northern society itself.

Novelists also had a field day with this idea, as in the following passage from Deirdre Madden’s Hidden Symptoms (1986): Belfast was now like a madman who tears his flesh, puts straw in his hair and screams gibberish.

Before, it had resembled the infinitely more sinister figure of the articulate man in a dark, neat suit whose conversation charms and entertains; and whose insanity is apparent only when he says calmly, incidentally, that he will club his children to death and eat their entrails with a golden fork because God has told him to do so; and then offers you more tea.

If nothing else, this is a good example of a ‘serious’ novelist internalising and regurgitating the more lurid tendencies of what has come to be called ‘Troubles trash’. However, besides often figuring as madman and psychotic – Stewart Parker also describes the city as “brain-damaged and dangerous” in Northern Star (1984) – the Belfast of Northern fiction is also typically home to a diverse population of deviants, weirdos and perverts. Moreover, many novels implicitly posit a direct connection between derangement and the urban environment - which is both revealing and, in a sense, accurate. For ‘derangement’ literally means a disordering, a rearrangement of objects, coordinates, or trajectories which is at once confusing and unsettling, and this is characteristic of both what cities do, and how they are experienced day in, day out. In this respect, the twin processes of urbanisation and industrialisation – to which the modern Belfast we know today owes its genesis – were widely experienced as a wholesale derangement of the existing social order, a madness sweeping across the frontiers of Western Europe. Consider Friedrich Engels’s response to this new world of sights and sounds on arriving in London from provincial Rhineland: “The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which all human nature rebels. […] The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate essence, and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme”.

Engels is chiefly repulsed by what he sees as the morbid symptoms of urban alienation, conceiving of the city in terms akin to those of schizophrenia: a sundering of relations between constituent elements and factors, and a sort of autistic withdrawal from social contact or interaction. A similar diagnosis is applied to Belfast in David Hyndman’s documentary film, Schizophrenic City (1991), in which the dissolution of Northern

culture into implacably opposed monoliths is chronicled from a pseudo-objective distance, and the city is implicitly seen to be suffering from an especially divisive multiple personality complex.

Yes, that old chestnut.

Yet, as the psychoanalyst R.D. Laing has affirmed, “madness need not be all breakdown.

It may also be breakthrough”, and perhaps it is in the city that this proposition might most fully be put to the test. Ciaran Carson seems to agree, for his poem “Linear B” finds itself almost in step with a familiar crank threading his way through crowds on Royal Avenue. This strolling schizophrenic, flaneur manqué, is also seen scribbling simultaneously in an open notebook, and it is upon this enigmatic article that the speaker eventually zeroes in, finding there: Squiggles, dashes, question marks, dense as the Roseta stone.

His good eye glittered at me: it was either nonsense, or a formula – for Perpetual motion, the scaffolding of shopping lists, or the collapsing city.

Breakdown and breakthrough are inextricable here, for this ancient mariner’s glittering eye implies the possibility of epiphanic insights as much as the delusions of a mind thinking in code.

If there is a formula for the collapsing city then it hovers between the nonsensical and the indecipherable, for the city resists easy textualisation.

What it does suggest, however, is a productive way in which to think about the city’s intrinsic derangements - to live with and through them – and in so doing to begin wiping the smug expression from Belfast’s well-fed face.

SUN CITY

Belfast Exposed Photography The Exchange Place 23 Donegall Street Belfast 28 January to 26 February 2005

Peter Granser

T: W: E:

+44 028 9023 0965 www.belfastexposed.org info@belfastexposed.org

the vacuum

by elizabeth malcolm

Madness, Statistics and the Irish: a Short History B

y the beginning of the 1960s there were more than 21,000 patients in the Irish Republic’s mental hospitals, comprising a little over 0.7 per cent of the country’s total population. In Northern Ireland the comparable figure was nearly 6,500 patients or 0.45 per cent. A government commission of inquiry into mental illness, which reported in 1966, suggested that the Republic probably had the highest rate of psychiatric bed usage in the world. Whereas the number of beds per 1,000 of population was 4.5 in Northern Ireland, 4.6 in the UK and 4.3 in the USA, in the Republic the comparable figure was 7.3; while in parts of the west of the country it was a remarkable 11.0 psychiatric beds per 1,000 people. The town of Ballinasloe in Co. Galway was the site of St Brigid’s Hospital, the largest mental hospital in the west. According to the 1951 census, Ballinasloe had a population of nearly 5,560, of whom a startling 45 per cent were either patients in St Brigid’s or full-time employees of the hospital.

The commission that reported these figures in the mid 1960s was clearly alarmed by them and it recommended a range of measures aimed to drastically reduce the numbers committed to Irish psychiatric hospitals. Yet nearly 20 years later, in 1984, there were still around 13,000 patients in the Republic’s psychiatric hospitals.

In 1990 this figure was down to about 8,000 – with another 2,000 in Northern Ireland – but the Republic’s hospitalisation rate was still nearly double that of both England and France.

This situation was far from a new one, however. Beginning in the mid 18th century alarm had been expressed about the apparently high levels of Irish ‘lunacy’. Ireland’s first purpose-built mental hospital was opened in Dublin in 1757. This was a small, private institution, but between 1815 and 1869 the British government built 22 asylums throughout the country that by the early 1870s had around 7,600 beds. During the 1890s, while the overall population continued its steady post-Famine decline, the existing hospitals were expanded and several new ones built, so that by 1904 Ireland had some 18,000 district asylum beds. However, far from all those classed as ‘lunatics’ were in public asylums. In 1904 nearly 22,800 persons were institutionalised for insanity in Ireland, with about 20 per cent of them confined in workhouses and private asylums. By the early years of the 20th century some Irish public asylums were as large as small towns. The Richmond Asylum in Dublin had some 2,500 patients; Cork had 1,700; while both Belfast and

Ballinasloe had over 1,000 patients each.

In a book about Ireland, published in 1909, the Nationalist MP, R. Barry O’Brien, commented that the three main ‘scourges’ of the country were ‘Emigration, Tuberculosis and Lunacy’. Yet, over the following 50 years, rates of committal to mental hospitals continued to climb, until by the 1960s, in the south, they had reached world-record levels.

Looking at these extraordinary figures today, one is inevitably compelled to ask: why?

Why were so many Irish people committed to institutions, successively called madhouses, asylums, mental hospitals and, now, psychiatric hospitals. And why did these high levels of committal last for well over a century?

In order to answer these broad questions, we need to ask others, most obviously: was mental illness more prevalent among the Irish than among other nations? Many certainly thought so, and especially when it began to emerge during the mid and late 19th century that rates of committal were also disproportionately high among Irish emigrants abroad, in countries like the USA, England and Australia. The authorities in New York and Boston were complaining about the numbers of immigrant Irish entering their asylums as early as the 1840s and 1850s, while similar complaints were heard from Liverpool and Manchester during the 1870s and 1880s. In the 1890s the chief inspector of asylums in Sydney reported that much of the city’s insanity was being imported from Ireland.

He accused the Irish of deliberately ‘exporting’ their lunatics and argued that one sure way of reducing Australian rates of mental illness was by tightening the immigration laws.

As late as the 1970s doctors and politicians were discussing what was described as an ‘epidemic’ of schizophrenia in the west of Ireland. One notorious contribution to this debate was a 1979 American book entitled, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics. It, however, portrayed serious mental illness as not so much epidemic in the west, as endemic.

But if the Irish really were more prone to mental illness than other peoples, there is still the question of why. What caused the Irish to go mad more readily than, say, the English or the Americans or the Australians? Were Irish life styles pathological? Was it a matter of too much poverty, emigration, religion and drink? Or was madness an hereditary affliction, passed on among isolated, inbred, small-farming families?

All these questions were explored by experts and observers from the 1870s up to the 1970s.

In a Japanese bar you might find a print of a sumo wrestlerʼs hand on

During the 1980s and 1990s fashionable postcolonial theories began to make their appearance in the debate. These suggested that perhaps the Irish were not to blame at all; rather it was the British and their centuries of colonial oppression and exploitation that had created socio-economic lifestyles conducive to mental breakdown. At the same time, left-wing critics of psychiatry were arguing that asylums developed rapidly during the 18th and 19th centuries as state-sponsored institutions of social control. They were used by emerging capitalist societies to get rid of their disruptive and unproductive members.

They were custodial, not therapeutic, and, like prisons, workhouses and orphanages, they helped discipline and control the more unruly elements in the working class.

So had British rule, on the one hand, seriously damaged the mental health of the Irish and then, on the other, provided plentiful institutions in which disturbed and difficult Irish people could be incarcerated? This is certainly an argument that has been advanced in recent decades.

Most of the explanations that have appeared over the last 150 years to account for Irish mental illness have tended to employ either a heredity/race model or a society/politics model or a combination of the two.

Eugenics, or the theory of the inheritance of racial characteristics, was especially influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Irish asylum/mental hospital records during this period repeatedly list the cause of illness as ‘heredity’. Sometimes there are notes on a relative ‘similarly afflicted’, but in most cases the single word ‘heredity’ seems to have been considered adequate explanation on its own.

And, by definition, an hereditary disorder is ‘incurable’. In 1903 fully one- quarter of the inmates of Irish public asylums were diagnosed as suffering from an hereditary, incurable mental illness. The debate over epidemic or endemic schizophrenia in the west of Ireland during the 1960s and 1970s also tended to put a strong emphasis on the importance of inheritance, given that schizophrenia had been identified as running in families.

But eugenicist explanations were also often combined with social, cultural and economic ones. There was the notion that the lifestyles of the rural Irish were a serious threat to mental health, and once mental illness had taken root in isolated families or communities then inbreeding and inheritance ensured that it spread and became entrenched, persisting even when external conditions improved.

So eugenicists usually acknowledged that the root cause of the problem lay with Irish society and culture, and especially the poverty, celibacy, emigration and resulting drunkenness that afflicted the rural west. Modern postcolonial theorists also tend to broadly accept this view, although they see British rule as largely responsible for the creation of a pathological culture, rather than the Irish themselves.

While it is true that social deprivation has been widely correlated with mental illness, there are in fact other significant, although less obvious, factors which need to be kept in mind. There is, for instance, the important issue of how people were committed – or, after the 1940s, admitted - to hospitals. Who organised this and what checks or safeguards existed to prevent wrongful committal? The truth is that, before the 1940s, there were virtually no checks or safeguards, and precious few afterwards.

Committals were normally arranged by families and the police, with the assistance of magistrates and/or doctors. From 1838 until 1932 in Northern Ireland and 1945 in the Republic, committals were regulated by the Dangerous Lunatics Act – first passed in 1838 and substantially amended in 1867. As the title of this act suggests, ‘lunatics’ were ‘dangerous’, and thus they were treated as criminals. Before 1867, magistrates, on the basis of information from relatives and the police, could commit a lunatic without a medical certificate. The person concerned was initially sent to prison and later transferred either to an asylum, if judged an ‘acute’ case, or to a workhouse, if judged a ‘chronic’ case. ‘Dangerous lunatics’ had no right

So eugenicists usually acknowledged that the root cause of the problem lay with Irish society and culture, and especially the poverty, celibacy, emigration and resulting drunkenness that afflicted the rural west. of appeal against their open-ended ‘sentences’.

After 1867, medical certificates were required, but doctors signing these - who rarely had any training in psychiatric medicine - were paid a handsome fee. Much anecdotal evidence survives suggesting that doctors frequently signed certificates cavalierly, sometimes without even examining the patient. Under the Republic’s 1945 Mental Treatment Act, the Minister of Health was given power to review committal orders made by doctors, but this power was withdrawn in 1961. As late as 1992 a government Green Paper acknowledged that ‘there is no independent review of a decision to detain a person in a psychiatric centre or any subsequent decision to extend detention’.

It was all too easy for families, with the aid of compliant police, magistrates, doctors and governments, to rid themselves of troublesome and unwanted members under the Irish legislation governing mental illness. So, who exactly was institutionalised under these lax laws? And, more importantly, were these people really mentally ill? As late as the 1980s over one-quarter of those admitted to psychiatric hospitals in the Republic were diagnosed as suffering from alcoholism, while about 58 per cent of resident patients were either over 65 years of age or mentally handicapped. Although statistics collected before the 1940s are far less reliable, similar patterns with regards to patient populations do emerge. To use the terminology of the 19th-century, asylums were full of ‘drunkards’, ‘idiots’ and the ‘senile’. But, according to modern medical nosology, such people are not mentally ill.

These facts would suggest that, perhaps throughout their long history, Irish institutions specifically intended to house those suffering from an identifiable mental illness did no such thing. A majority – or, at the very least, a substantial minority - of those committed or admitted to psychiatric hospitals were not mentally ill at all. To use modern terminology, many were victims of substance abuse, dementia or various mental disabilities.

If true, this would mean that the long and heatedly debated problem of the Irish and insanity has been misconceived. Levels of mental illness in a society should not be gauged by admission rates to psychiatric institutions or by the number of psychiatric beds per head of population. Admissions can reflect all manner of familial and communal tensions, while the number of beds can have a great deal to do with the priorities of governments and medical professionals.

This is not to say, however, that mental illness in Ireland was not, or is not, a serious and tragic problem; clearly it was and it is. But, nevertheless, we should treat with considerable scepticism alarmist statistics that appear to demonstrate disproportionately high levels of mental illness among the Irish, both in the past and still today.

Elizabeth Malcolm Professor of Irish Studies University of Melbourne

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by jason mills

the vacuum

DERANGEMENT OF THE SENSES T

he idea of drugs mimicking madness is one which has been around since Western culture began to record its encounters with psychoactive substances in written form. In many ways this follows on from the somewhat idealistic theory, relating to the large number of famous writers who have suffered from disorders, that creativity and mental illness are genetically linked, and, indeed, that drugs are a gateway to the visionary experience. One intersection at which the topic can be easily approached is through enthusiastic mescaline-gobbler Aldous Huxley's �The Doors of Perception� (a term which, largely thanks to Jim Morrison, has since been banished to the realms of cliché). Despite having had such compliments as �the woolgathering of a misguided crackpot� heaped upon it, the book revived an interesting concept of the brain as a reducing valve which, out of the chaos of existence, filters through information which is biologically necessary for human survival. However, whilst off his tits on various powerful hallucinogens, Huxley noted, in a largely mundane tirade of ostentatious terminology, that the �Mind at Large� was now able to seep through his no-longer-watertight valve.

He argued that this ego-diminishing exercise and sequence of random, disordered information can be seen as similar to the psychotic or schizophrenic state, in that familiar boundaries between people, events, time and space are dissolved. However, whereas drugs generally wear off allowing a transition back to construed reality, albeit not always a smooth one, the psychotic or schizophrenic individual is left permanently stranded beyond the reach of what Huxley calls the homemade universe of common sense.

Although there is convincing evidence that classical writers such as Milton dabbled in consciousness-altering substances, De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, published in 1821, was the first literary text devoted to the discussion of drug use. It is widely studied at academic level (including 1st year English at Queens, although, as I recall, quite a few people were too busy attending to their own preferred methods of intoxication to actually bother reading it all) as an example of the Romantic preoccupation with visions, dreams and nightmares, At any rate, there was certainly no pussy-footing around with De Quincey; he first took opium in 1812 (to cure a toothache) and continued using it every day until his death in 1859. The book is an account of drug-induced psychic decomposition in which vivid phantasmagoric visions elicited a merging of reality and illusion. It contains all of the sense of heightened awareness, wonderment and terror often attributed to the schizophrenic. Indeed, the suggestion of mental illness is implicit in his descriptions of “unimaginable horror”, “mythological tortures” and “the abortions of my dreams” which dominate the section entitled ‘The Pains of Opium’ – “Over every form and threat, and punishment, and dim, sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness”. Indeed, such is his sense of delirium that he neglects to mention the (presumably beneficial) effects of heavy opium use on his original toothache.

Preferring the more direct, intravenous approach to narcotics consumption, William Burroughs was also a man to be reckoned with in terms of derangement of the senses. While 1953’s Junky was a fairly straightforward account of the dehumanizing effects of heroin

To a certain extent, writers have constructed the idea of themselves as natural constituents for mind-altering substances and the modification of consciousness.

addiction, Naked Lunch, which appeared six years later, is a testament to excess and chaos.

Burroughs later claimed that he had no distinct recollection of writing the crumpled, staincovered notes which became Naked Lunch only after they were gathered from the floor of his apartment by his buddies Ginsberg and Kerouac.

Unlike De Quincey, the book is distinctly unaesthetic with Burroughs simply attempting to write himself out of the self-made hell in which he was immersed at the time. Ultimately then, it is a non-linear record of whatever happened to be at the front of his senses whenever a pen was at hand. The result is a collection of scrambled thoughts, words and sentences which tumble out chaotically like loose pieces dumped from a particularly bizarre puzzle box; bodily fluids, giant talking arseholes, imaginary Mugwumps and, of course, plenty of heroin. The collection of random nightmarish flashes was later aped into the ‘cut-up’ technique, which Burroughs used in subsequent books, and which was a further rejection of traditional constructs of reality. One commentator referred to this as his ‘aphasia’ – the loss of ability to articulate ideas through damage to the brain. Through his heavy drug use Burroughs came to the conclusion that schizophrenia was caused by a chemical imbalance in the body similar to drug-induced psychosis, a point made explicit at a random intersection in Naked Lunch – “Eventual result of junk use is permanent backbrain depression and a state much like terminal schizophrenia: complete lack of affect, autism, virtual absence of cerebral event”. Whereas prior to the 1950’s such illness was generally characterized by psychologists as a poor adaptation to society, Burroughs ideas pre-dated the popular model of mental disorder as an illness with a physiological component.

Also around the late 1950’s, British psychiatrists such as R.D. Laing were using LSD to treat schizophrenia and alcoholism, reputedly with some success. In the US, the government was using the drug to conduct psychotomimetic (madness mimicking) experiments, at which Ken Kesey famously partook for $20 a session.

He became so interested in this approach that he took a job as a psychiatric aide at a mental

hospital and, with a good head full of acid and unlimited access to the other temptations of the medicine cabinet, conceived One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. The character of Chief Bromden, the Native American narrator, inhabits a twilight world of insight, delusion and hallucination indicative of the drug state – “that foggy jumbled blur which is a lot like the ragged edge of sleep”.

He imagines that the room in which patients are sleeping is lowered into a huge robot-operated machine room in the floor “like in the bowels of a dam”. This is reflective of the overlapping of realms of experience brought on by drugs like acid, and also of schizophrenic symptoms whereby internal concerns (his tribe were paid off by the government in order that a dam could be built on their settlement) are experienced as external events within visual and auditory hallucinations. In the novel Kesey also alludes to the negative effects of psychotropic ‘treatment’ drugs on patients, effectively altering their neurochemical balance in order to make them acquiescent. Indeed. such drugs have also been the primary subject of contemporary literature, although in the case of the widely read Prozac Nation they are treated with alarmingly little scrutiny. Author Elizabeth Wurtzel states in the book that “Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression”, something that Wurtzel unintentionally does well to counterbalance with her self-indulgent style.

However, that is not to say that the ramblings of Huxley, De Quincey and Burroughs would necessarily generate any more enthusiasm amongst more passive consumers of popular culture who didn’t have a specific interest in the topic or method at hand than Wurtzel’s does (Kesey being the notable exception in this case).

To a certain extent, writers have constructed the idea of themselves as natural constituents for mind-altering substances and the modification of consciousness. The details of literature’s many attempts to capture the flux of the mind are obviously too numerous to go into here, but needless to say that everyone from Shakespeare to Irvine Welsh have indulged in drugs in an attempt to assimilate madness into their work.

The similarities between drug-induced states and madness are due to complex chemical altera-

tions which reveal trajectories not normally accessible. And although it is necessary to revert to ordinary language to define that which often defies description, there have still been some pretty good literary attempts at reflecting the inherent madness of the human condition. Allen Ginsberg’s epic peyote poem ‘Howl’ is another classic example, and the ripest material yet for a Belfast parody, (‘Howl on a Minute’?)….. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by the city fathers, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the vomit-covered streets at dawn, looking for some cultural activity……”

The following piece comprises of four articles from this issue of the Vacuum fed through a cut-up machine designed to imitate the experimental methods of William Burroughs.

“Madness is confusion of levels of fact” – William Burroughs Pharmaceutical companies being, precisely, companies, recruit Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) swings and physical pain. The Female Sexual Dysfunction, is too unhappiness and anxiety as being conscious - syndrome the mind’s sway over their depression acute, ‘serious’ sufferers feel the need of a fairly straightforward account appeared of excess and escape the self-made hell into which talking arseholes, of the ‘cut-up’ further caused by a chemical Naked imbalance – generally adaptation to society, an illness with its civic in the very stones of an architectural life is ordered. The bit historian C.E.B. from centre of Belfast, the modulation in it of the City through buoyant wake.

Brett’s evocative fabric of the city most obviously was also in 1850s New York and Boston were reported that much their lunatics argued that entitled, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics. But seem the mad pathological? Was it a matter madness isolated, GlaxoSmithKline have also Pre-Menstural Dysphoric Disorder, the symptoms routine facts bad news for firstly, exist on difficulty for life being a shit for failing to sense serious epidemic without investigating its publicity drive.

Preferring the Lunch more in terms of later recollection after they were gathered from is a non-linear writing; and for the most part referred to as his heavy drug use at a state much like cerebral bluff sobriety and brick terraces radiate a ruddy mask of this order and features city. Take the Contemplating porte-cochere, concludes that no building could separate above the facial landmark. It is surplus signification, reading between the lines, we threatening to detach more other nations? Many during the mid of asylums as early 1870s and 1880s.

In the mental illness 1970s doctors and as notorious contribution in other peoples, there is still the families? All these observers none of this is latter, Viagra by raising awareness of life: periods, anxiety disorders are ‘normally’ experienced, SSRIs look from lack of understanding of implausibility of millions of the widespread prescription of SSRIs whereby themselves 1953’s Junky six years later is a reflection or a De Quincey, immersed of random nightmarish flashes later aped of traditional. Through schizophrenia in the body, random intersection in psychologists is a poor physiological component.

Ultimately then, it’s imaginary heroin. The collection technique psychosis, a point made explicit illness was Burroughs ideas predated as expression of glow the geometric plan of the city. This and institutional hub city’s Vacuum are painfully aware. The roof tops, like one produces image of the imagination, trailing streamers of by itself from terra to answer these broad questions, countries like the USA, England Irish entering their 1890s imported from Ireland. He accused one to this debate as not so much epidemic the Americans or the Edwardian of drink? Or was very up and even more include monthly mood rubbish sex while crumpled, stain-covered notes became Naked Kerouac in a fortnight, fundamental sufferers from studies of escalating anxiety as from intravenous approach to the senses. Unlike whatever happened this including a wide range of constructs of reality.

One damage to the brain junk terminal schizophrenia: complete lack of characterized by Belfast industrial city, tightly bunched whilst producing all manner of Hall, for instance, which himself the recognised liberty of criticising the far and provoking as if the symbolic weight of the sense in the radiant, and faintly thought so, and especially when disproportionately high and from Liverpool and chief inspector of the immigration laws. As schizophrenia in the west more prone to why on among up to the 1970s. What more Australians? surprising: recent attempts to cash to parody as or to be inseparable from, like with the in part, continues – and the most cynical.

Secondly, among those for order of madness amateurs the dehumanizing effects of heroin addiction, claimed that apartment book was using his pen at the time. Of course, plenty of used in subsequent books, the conclusion that similar to drug-induced use the 1950’s the popular model of mental disorder perseverance, a sombre vigil over centre is built insistently around which so much of the this ostentatious light-buoy dome floats here is arguably an example of etherialisation upon the metaphors and similes in firma, which would preside. In order prevalent among that rates Australia. The authorities in immigrant city’s insanity was being a sure way of reducing a 1979 west American book and illness: the English too much poverty, emigration, religion and experts.

the vacuum

by richard west

LOOPER

Or A Short History of Aerobatics and Civilization

W

hat a time of marvels the first decade of the 20th Century must have been. At the local music hall they were projecting pictures of the sea and the waves moved. People came from miles around to see them. And then people started to fly in special machines made of wire and struts.

And then they started flying crazy loops and spirals. And then there was the First World War which seems, looking back on it, to have been a less marvellous period. It carried on after the war and before long there were jets breaking the sound barrier, and TV, and trips to the moon but these milestones never quite capturing the excitement of the beginning of it all, being a more official kind of adventure.

As with so many of the finest things in the 20th Century the origin of the term to ‘loopthe-loop’ is associated with bicycles. The Strand magazine for January 1902 described how a kind of primitive rollercoaster had been built from a wooden track with a 40 foot high loop in it, designed to give rides in a kind of cart. Trick cyclists attempted to ride through the loop which The Strand reported, ‘was courting certain death’, and indeed the first two riders attempting the feat retired hurt, one with a broken ankle. But then a Mr. Vandervoort stepped up, and after a little practice and modifying his bicycle by giving it solid tyres, managed to perform the loop a number of times, becoming the world’s first recorded looper.

Trick cyclists were among those who soon took up flying. Ralph Johnson had specialised in a stunt that involved flipping his bicycle off a springboard. He became a display pilot for the Wright brothers who would demonstrate their aircraft to large audiences as a way of promoting sales. In 1910 the team’s demonstration was described as the ‘greatest display of eccentric aeroplane riding ever seen in America’.

The craze for flying spread across the world with the first flight in Britain occurring in 1908 and in Ireland at the end of 1909 (with Harry Ferguson’s flight at Newcastle). Short Brothers Ltd., then based in England, were set up in 1908 to manufacture Wright brothers’ aeroplanes under license. Public flying meetings were held in Britain, at Doncaster and Blackpool and attracted midweek crowds of 50,000 to see primitive aeroplanes trundle around a field and only very occasionally leave the ground.

A magazine, The Aeroplane, was founded under the redoubtable editorship of Charles Grey, a man with a mission to get flying taken seriously.

He saw the principle obstacles to this acceptance as being the recklessness of pilots, their popularity with the public and a corresponding indifference in government. A typically weary comment on the appearance of a new type of aviator belt in 1911 reads, ‘there is no particular objection to a man breaking himself if he really wishes to do so, but when he has a lingering prejudice in favour of remaining in one piece it is sheer foolishness of him not to take even the simplest precautions.’ At this stage aeroplanes did not have belts as it was considered no more likely that you would ride upside-down in an aeroplane than you would, say, on a horse.

This had troubling consequences for a certain Lieutenant Reynolds who is the first person recorded to have flown upside-down (and live).

An aeroplane like that flown by Lieutenant Reynolds showing the seating arrangements unsuited to inverted flight.

The Lieutenant was flying his Bristol biplane near Bedford when he was caught in a thunderstorm. This is how the incident was reported in The Aeroplane under the headline ‘A Terrific Experience’: ‘Reynolds started to come down, when a gust caught him and turned him right over – a complete somersault, then the machine started to come down in a series of dives with a short period of floating to and fro between each dive. By a million to one chance Reynold’s machine hit the ground when it was in one of the “floating” periods. It came down upside-down, with Reynolds hanging on to the uprights and wires. He was badly shaken and a bit cut about and bruised but otherwise all right.’

Meanwhile in Ireland, without the stimulation of business interest or patronage, not very much was happening. Grey published articles such as ‘Ireland’s Backwardness’ asking why no one was following Ferguson’s example. To add encouragement an air race was organised for September 1912 to travel between Dublin and Belfast. It attracted a field of international competitors who took off in bad weather and headed for Belfast where a crowd of 20,000 awaited their arrival. Flying into a strong wind, only two pilots made it past Dundalk, then, fearing they might be blown out to sea or into the Mourne mountains, they turned inland and eventually landed in fields near Newry. The disappointed crowds in Belfast were told that by way of compensation they would see a display by the two winning pilots the following weekend. A week later a massive crowd saw one of the pilots, a Mr.Astley, misjudge a turn and crash, narrowly missing spectators, Ireland’s first aviation fatality.

Perhaps deterred by this spectacle there was little else for The Aeroplane to report on from Ireland until in November, hopeful that flying might find a government sponsor, Grey reported ‘It is rumoured that Sir Edward Carson is at the moment considering a scheme whereby he might

use aeroplanes to protect Ulster against the expected ravages of rampant Home Rulers… It may mean the establishment in Ireland of a new industry, of which Mr. Harry Ferguson was the pioneer.’

set about performing a loop himself. He soon became the ‘king of loopers’ and by the end of 1914 had performed 1,000 loops, travelling to 126 cities in the US and being seen by 17 million people.

Adolphe Pégoud, pioneer looper and parachutist

Lincoln Beachey in the aeroplane in which he performed his loops (but not wearing his flying suit)

The serious business of flying recklessly was being done elsewhere. As in America French manufacturers had flying teams and one Adolphe Pégoud flew for Mr. Bleriot. Pégoud had already distinguished himself by being the first person to jump out of an aeroplane with a parachute.

Next he turned his attention to flying upsidedown (intentionally). He practised using the controls strapped into a plane hanging inverted in a hanger. Then in September 1913 he took off, climbed to a safe height, rolled the aeroplane over and flew for a few seconds inverted before righting it and coming in to land. All admired the coolness with which he had performed the manœuvre but it turned out that as soon as he had inverted the aircraft fuel oil had sprayed into his face and he had been able to see little of what was going on until he landed.

Pégoud now set his sights on performing the first loop but just a week before he would do so reports arrived that a Lieutenant-aviator Nesteroff in Russia had completely looped the loop. In The Aeroplane, Grey reported that ‘unimpressed by the success of the manœuvre, the authorities, aghast at the possible waste of government property, sentenced him to one month’s detention in a fortress.’ In fact Nesteroff was soon promoted to Captain when news of his feat spread.

Grey predictably adopted a disapproving tone when reporting the latest stunts: ‘the performance of aerial somersaults in public would be merely pandering to depraved taste. One does not require machines to turn somersaults; one wants machines which stay right side up and are designed to do so.� At the end of September 1913, Pégoud came to fly in England, now with the loop in his repertoire. At the same time news was heard that the French military had banned aerobatics after a pilot had died in a crash. Grey reported Pégouding is not to become fashionable in the French army. It is clearly so much cheaper and wiser to waste a few needless civilians on this sort of work.

Despite Grey’s protests at the frivolity of trick, flying the new stunts were taken up by other pilots. In England an ‘upside-down dinner’ was held for the first English loopers. Beneath a plane hung suspended upside-down from the ceiling, the meal was served in reverse order and included ‘looping lobster’. Meanwhile they were entertained by a music hall act who sang while standing on his head. As soon as news of the first loops arrived in America Lincoln Beachey, a former stunt pilot for the Curtis company,

Beachey had ‘retired’ temporarily from flying in 1913 when he was blamed for the deaths of many pilots who imitated his flying (badly). He was aware of the attraction of so-called ‘death defying’ stunts saying, ‘they call me Mr. Birdman but they pay to see me die’. In fact, what was painfully obvious to Charles Grey was that few of the display pilots avoided death. The news of the death of famous pilots was a regular feature in newspapers between 1910 and 1914. Ralph Johnstone’s was the first aviation death in the US. It was reported in the Dayton Daily News on 18 November 1910: ‘Scarcely had Johnstone hit the ground before morbid men and women swarmed over the wreckage, fighting with each other for souvenirs. One of the broken wooden stays had gone almost through Johnstone’s body. Before doctors or police could reach the scene one man had torn this splinter from the body and run away, carrying his trophy with the aviator’s blood dropping from its ends.’ Beachey was killed in 1915 when he was asked to try out a new aeroplane in a display and it collapsed in flight. When the First World War started in 1914, Nesteroff attacked the first German aeroplane he saw. Not having a gun, he attempted to do this by cutting their wings with his propeller (with fatal results for both of them). Pégoud became the first �ace� of the war but was shot down and killed a year later.

As high as the death toll may have been from the antics of pilots in 1913 and 1914 it was nothing compared to that of the war. Cecil Lewis, who wrote an account of flying in the war, said the life expectancy of a new pilot on the Western front was two weeks. Experienced pilots meanwhile started to act as if they were invulnerable, taking ever greater risks, flying alone and attacking giant formations of enemy aircraft single handed. In this fatalistic atmosphere many pilots took to performing suicidal stunts like ground loops where a pilot would do a loop as soon as they had left the ground, leaving no room for error, or in an extreme case take off and perform a loop through the space where his aeroplane had been parked between other aeroplanes (the exponent of this stunt eventually flew into the side of a hanger).

By the end of the war flying was a quite different enterprise. Twenty-two thousand trained pilots left the RAF without employment and there were thousands of surplus aeroplanes. Looping the loop was now part of basic flight training and most of the public had now at least seen a aeroplane fly, even if they had

on the half roll never been in one. Pilots attempted to make a living out of flying round the country, doing displays and giving rides. In the US, the film industry produced a spate of stunt flying films with wing walking, flying under bridges and people leaping from cars to planes or from one plane to another. In May 1921 Laura Brommell performed 199 loops in New York, then a Laura Ingalls performed an absurd 980 consecutive loops both to be outdone by the quite ridiculous ‘loop-the-loop’ Murphy who looped all the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles. But after a series of accidents, involving worn out aircraft and hapless members of the public, greater regulation was introduced with an Air Navigation Act in Britain in 1920 and aeroplane licensing in the US in 1926.

By the 1930s air displays in Britain had none of the fatal appeal of twenty years previously.

They were intended to stimulate progress in the aviation industry and acceptance by national and local government. So when Sir Alan Cobham’s display squadron toured to Northern Ireland in 1935, although they may have advertised the involvement of ‘Miss Joan Meakin, the celebrated “Glider-Girl”… the only woman who has ever looped a glider’, when they arrived at Coleraine their first passengers were the Mayor and Mayoress.

The Second World War brought the same carnage as the first but with far more technologically advanced aircraft and better trained pilots. There was therefore less crazy flying, except when guns were being fired, and by the end of the war both pilots and aircraft were ready to be adapted to civil aviation. Although the public might pay to watch people die flying, if they were going to fly themselves then their concern was with not dying. Investment was therefore put into bigger and safer aircraft, better instrumentation, black box recorders and more pilot training. Efforts were made to eradicate potential ‘pilot error’ and then with the development of accident investigation and ‘aviation psychology’ the pilot was seen as a component part of a system that was to be

The view out of the window of the Boeing 707 as it was rolled by Alvin Johnston.

tailored to perform with optimum safety. The pilot as a individual who might attempt a bit of high spirited aerobatics was excluded from the system (almost).

The last public unauthorised display of aerobatics in civil aviation was the test flight of the Boeing 707 in August 1955. As the Boeing company president entertained potential customers, the test pilot Alvin ‘Tex’ Johnston was supposed to simply fly the new aircraft past to show it off. In fact as he passed he performed a barrel roll and then went back and did it again for good measure. As with previous aerobatic episodes he was grounded and then promptly reinstated as orders for the aeroplane started to flood in.

There are rumours that pilots still fly civilian airliners in ways they are not supposed to when there are no passengers on board. Very occasionally they come unstuck, as was the case in August 1993 with two pilots who attempted to perform a barrel roll, at low altitude, at night, on a practice flight, in a small twin-engined aeroplane called a Beech-99. This is the black box recording: Pilot Flying: [It is] our desire to see the world turn upside down and then right itself again.

Pilot Not Flying: How would this be?

PF: By doing what we’re just doing but keepin’ going.

the vacuum

PNF: Have you done such a thing.

PF: No. PNF: I’ve not either. I’ve never rolled an airplane.

PF: You never rolled any airplane?

PNF: Zero point zero.

PF: Well **** [expletive], never rolled a ninety nine.

PNF: Done a four oh two?

PF: Nope. One fifty two’s, one seventy two’s.

That’s when I knew it was time to get out of instructing. Those slugs, they don’t roll very well at all. We were doing aileron rolls where you just sit like this and just crank, and they come round kinda hard. The barrel roll’s a lot easier on, uh, they don’t have enough poop to barrel roll, one seventy two’s not too bad, just where you’s kinda nose down I guess we’ve got enough speed right now and you just kinda start coming in like this, pullin’ up.

PF: And keep positive G’s on it. Take it all the way around, unload.

PF: And then point straight for the ground.

End of recording Today the element of pioneering risk has been almost completely removed from aviation.

Aerobatics is now a sport not unlike synchronized swimming. Strict laws govern who can fly and where and when they can do it. However, while pilots can be trained and regulated there remains one element of the system that can still prove unpredictable – the passengers. While professional pilots and airlines may not wish to see their large, expensive aeroplanes performing stunts every so often a non-professional will intervene.

Auburn Calloway, a disgruntled Fedex employee, decided to take revenge on the company by hijacking one of their aircraft and flying it into an airport terminal building. He hitched a lift on a DC10 with a guitar case that contained two claw hammers, two sledge mallets, a knife and a speargun (he believed these would produce injuries consistent with a crash). Once in flight he attacked the crew of three with a hammer. This was all taped by the black box recorder (see the entire transcript at www.tailstrike.com – not for nervous flyers) Andy Peterson (Flight Engineer): After takeoff is complete.

Jim Tucker (Co-pilot): Do you, uh, live over in Arkansas, Dave, or...?

David Sanders (Pilot): Naw, I live in Fisherville.

JT: Aw, Fisherville, great spot.

(Sounds of hammer blows striking pilots.)

AP: Ow! JT: God! JT: Oh, ah, shit.

DS: God almighty!

AP: Ow! JT: What the fuck are you doing?

DS: God, (groan), (groan), God almighty! God, God, God....

JT: Get him, get him, get him DS: He’s going to kill us.

JT: Get him!

DS: Get up, get him!

AP: I can’t, God! UV: STOP! Hold his goddamn...

Auburn Calloway: Sit down, sit down, get back in your seat, this is a real gun, I’ll kill ya.

Is Looping Natural?

An ideal experiment enquiry for a quiet afternoon in the bar. Test it for yourself. Does a fly landing on a ceiling perform a half roll or a half loop?

Hint, observe which way are the pointing before and after landing.

please, back to Memphis at this time, hurry!

Voice from rear: Let go of it! (sounds of struggle) Let go of the spear!

Struggling with Calloway Sanders was suffering from multiple lacerations to the head and a dislocated jaw, while Peterson also had a fractured skull. Tucker put the aeroplane into a steep dive, travelling at over 500 miles an hour (off the scale on the aeroplane’s instruments). He just managed to pull the aeroplane up to level flight by which time his colleagues had gained some control of Calloway.

AP from rear: Help, the son of a bitch is biting me! (loud voice from rear of plane, sounds of struggle) JT to rear: Andy!

DS from rear: Put it on autopilot and come back here!

AP from rear: Quick, Jim! DS from rear: Hurry, Jim! COME BACK HERE NOW!

morning flight from Tokyo to Sapporo on 23 July, 1999. Nishizawa was armed with a kitchen knife and his plan was to seize control of the plane and then perform a loop under Tokyo’s Rainbow Bridge. There were 503 other passengers and 14 crew members on board at the time.

He broke into the cockpit, fatally stabbed the 51 year old captain and took the controls. He put the plane into a dive and had descended to 300 metres when the crew stormed the cockpit and wrestled him out of the pilot’s seat. An offduty pilot who was on board then took over the controls. At his trial, Nishizawa pleaded guilty to murdering the pilot but his lawyers argued he was mentally unstable at the time and so should not be held liable for his actions. This is the closest anyone has ever got to looping a jumbo jet.

Tucker helped them subdue Calloway and they restrained him until Sanders had landed the plane. Calloway is currently serving a life sentence in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

Unlike in 1910 it is now possible for someone to get an idea of flying even the largest aeroplanes, like a jumbo, on computer flight simulator. The 33 year old Yuji Nishizawa enjoyed playing on his computer but felt that he was now ready to fly the real thing. He booked a ticket for a

Despite gruesome injuries the crew prevented Calloway getting control of the plane. Jim Tucker, suffering from a fractured skull so his right arm was partly paralysed tried to help his wounded colleagues by pulling back on the stick and banking violently so the aircraft performed a barrel roll and Calloway was thrown off balance.

Flying upside-down at 19,700 feet the fighting men were tossed back into the galley area.

JT: Get him, get him, get him, get him, get him, get him!

Automatic warning: bank angle, bank angle...

JT: Get him, get him, get him!

AC: I’m gonna kill you!

JT to Center: Center listen to me! Express 705, I’ve been wounded, we’ve had an attempted takeover on board the airplane, give me a vector

An artist’s impression of a 747 flying beneath Tokyo’s Rainbow bridge (not to scale).

the vacuum

up up and away

PADDY BLOOMER'S GUIDE TO

BIRDMEN People who develop instruments of flight are greatly different to those who strive for technological progress in other areas. The best ones pilot their own apparatus and seem to be afflicted with deep seated psychological traits which force them to defy gravity and with quasi-religious conviction, fly free like a bird/brick. Too often the history of manned flight is assumed to start with the Wright Brothers while their predecessors go uncelebrated.

Of all devices concocted by early inventors, apparatus with which to effect human flight where by far the most diabolical. These machines can be sub-divided into three categories; lighter than air, heavier than air and maximum drag decelerator or parachute. The first known written account of which is found in Da Vinci’s notebooks (cl495).

Da Vinci also designed an early helicopter and was a pioneer of ornithology or bird flight this type of flapping flight was all the rage in the middle ages. Despite a few notable exceptions many visionary geniuses plummeted to there deaths in a slapstick manner during this time with foolish wings strapped to there arms. While flapping flight for humans has proved distinctly unsuccessful it remains ever popular with birds who refuse to conform to conventional aviation practice. The bar woman in my Slovenian local says that humans can never fly like birds because birds have hollow bones, but she does admit to knowing someone who wants to walk on water like an insect and believes he can fashion long enough feet.

TOP 10 BIRD MEN IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDERBECAUSE IT' S NOT ABOUT WINING, IT'S ABOUT TAKING PART.

JENEZ Unknown unfortunate individual (in the absence of any better information we shall call this man Jenez and assume he lived in a place far away, a long time ago) Jenez made a daring escape from a prison using a crude glider made out of ear wax and bellybutton fluff. He was quickly recaptured and tortured to reveal the means of his escape his captors were as sceptical as you no doubt are- but said if he could repeat the escape in the manner described they would grant his freedom.

Jenez successfully glided out of the prison a second time, but now with a considerable audience and was immediately burnt as a heretic...

FAUSTE VERANZIO This enthusiastic individual constructed a parachuting device similar that in Da Vinci’s drawing and jumped from a tower in venice in 1617 without sustaining any injury.

A SHEEP, ROOSTER AND A DUCK. Lighter than air flight was first successfully demonstrated by Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier.

In 1783 the first passengers in the colourful balloon were a sheep, a rooster and duck. It rose to a height of 6000 feet and landed in a field one mile away where it was promptly attacked by pitchfork-waving peasants and torn to pieces as an instrument of evil. The first manned flight was on November 21, 1783, the passengers were Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier and Francois Laurent.

JAKOB DEGEN Degen combined a hot air balloon with the flapping wings and caused considerable excitement when he demonstrated his machine at public performances in Paris. On his third attempt, in 1812, Degen attempted to fly with flapping wings alone and no balloon. Despite his frantic flapping and some running about Degen did not leave the ground. The large crowd assembled became increasingly unruly and attacked the ridiculous birdman. Degen would have been kicked to death if he had not been rescued by the police.

JEAN MARIE LE BRIS Le Bris was a french sea captain who had observed the soaring flight of the albatross while at sea; he killed one of the soaring wonders and experimented with its wing. In 1856 he had constructed an artificial albatross with a 50 foot wing-span from wood and cloth. The albatross was placed on top of a horse and cart. Le Bris sat in a manmade cockpit on the birds back and directed the driver to move the horse down a road, into the wind. the glider lifted off but took the driver with it as he was ensnared on a rope.

Le Bris, the cart driver and the albatross rose to 300 feet, sailed about 600 feet, and then made a safe and controlled gentle landing, Le Bris went on to achieve several more flights, two crashes and a broken leg before he ended his career as a sailor of the air. Later he was murdered by gang members. Although some of the accounts seem unlikely there is photographic evidence that proves the artificial albatross did fly in a fashion.

VINCENT DE GROOF Belgian shoemaker Vincent De Groof, styling himself “the flying man" combined an ornithop-

ter with a parachute. On the 8th of july, 1874 he was hoisted aloft on his “beating wing flyer” with ballooning apparatus by his good friend Mr Simmons. Simmons released De Groof over St. Luke’s church at an estimated height of 80 feet, where upon he was precipitated into Robert Street, Chelsea at a terrific velocity and pronounced dead on arrival. Mr Simmons lost consciousness due to shock and the unladen balloon ascended rapidly. Simmons regained consciousness over Victoria Park and implemented a hasty descent. His balloon had crashed landed on a railway line in Essex. Alighting the balloon carcass before it was struck by an approaching steam train.The aviator showed remarkable insight when he declared 'the path of the inventor is undoubtedly strewn with thorns'.

OTTO LILIENTHAL Lilienthal studied bird flight and built elegant gliders, a replica of one of these can be seen at Ljubljana airport. Lilienthal proved that it was possible to build a plane but more importantly that it was possible to control a plane in flight. In doing this he inadvertently invented hang gliding- but with out the brightly coloured outfits.

Lilienthal wrote a book on aerodynamics that was published in 1889 and this text was used by the Wright brothers as the basis for their designs.

After completing more than 2500 flights from the top of a special constructed hill in Austria, Lilienthal died form a broken spine in 1896 when he lost control and fell 50 feet. Allegedly his last words were 'sacrifices must be made'.

HARRY FERGUSON Known as the “mad mechanic" because of his daring driving in early car and motorcycle races.

Ferguson worked with his brother Joe at their garage in Belfast (See plaque on Donegal Square East) where he designed and built his own plane and at the age of 24 was the first man to fly in Ireland. Flying at Hillsbourgh and Newcastle (See monument on the promenade) he pioneered (inadvertently) upside down aviation and succeeded in decanting himself and the aircrafts engine into a winn bush. This incident and other crashes are less well documented, unfortunately they are not celebrated through the medium of commemorative plaques. Ferguson retired from aviation but this was not the end of his rock n roll antics. He designed a revolutionary new lightweight tractor and a range of implements still in use throughout the world. The first tractors incorporating the Ferguson system, three point linkage and rear power take of shaft were built in partnership with David Brown. In a bid to relieve war time food shortages Ferguson made a gentleman's agreement with Henry Ford allowing Ford to produce the tractors in America under licence. Ferguson recruited a crack team of extreme tractor drivers to show the world what a great yoke the TE20 was and explorer Edmund Hilary lead a successful tractor expedition to the south pole.

The mad mechanic turned down the offer of a knighthood, sued Henry Ford's cheeky grandson to the tune of 9250,000 dollars for patent violation and got into race car design and four wheel drive transmissions. All this before dying of a drugs overdose in 1960. A replica of the Ferguson plane can be seen at the Ulster folk and Transport museum. A TE20 is small and grey, often up to its axles in shit and can be seen nearly any where.

HENRI MIGNET Mignet pioneered extreme DIY as a recreational activity and popularized amateur aviation in the early thirties. In his book Le Pou-Du-Ciel, translated from French by the Air League of the British Empire, Mignet explains how to build and fly your own plane. The writing style is not typical of an instruction manual, while the author admits in the longwinded introduction that his clumsy vocabulary may 'lead the reader a dance to the detriment of clearness of style'. He reassures the fledgling pilots 'I only wish to have your confidence. Believe what I am saying, this book is not a love romance of a naughty little girl, it's real. It has been lived. It has been suffered'. after failing to gain a pilots license despite many attempts he was inspired to design the flying flea, 'the plane which any one can build and anyone can fly, fly free like a bird in paradise'.

The plane is small enough to be built in an upstairs flat measuring 3m x 5m. The author suggests that if you are going to build the plane in such an environment then it would be wise to fit rubber blocks too the legs of your workbench to reduce the irritation caused to neighbors by persistent hammering. On completion of the plane there is a thorough instruction on how to take off. It is recommended that the first flight should be only a few centimeters off the ground- then its time to practice landing.

Once the amateur aeronaut has perfected making very short flights at an altitude of about 3m they can embark on a first trip using a technique called 'hedge hopping', which helps hone takeoff and landing skills.

The flying flea was a big success, using a motor bike engine and basic wood and metal working skills it was indeed possible for the amateur to construct a plane and it was easy to master the controls. Hundreds of fleas were constructed and flown but there was a nasty design flaw, it was impossible to pull the plane out of a certain type of shallow dive and the handling became difficult when flying with a stalled engine. After a bout of flying flea related deaths the plane was outlawed.

It was probably at around this time that my grandfather managed to pick up copy of the book in Smithfield market. But do not despair amateur aviators, new modified designs for the flying flea are available on the internet with assurances that nasty handling traits have been ironed out.

the vacuum

prancing around like a MY BEEF IS...

PERFORMANCE ART

By Daniel Jewesbury OK, before I start, and based on the defensive nature of several recent conversations I’ve had on this subject, can I implore the more ardent fans of performance art to remain calm while I make my argument? After all, it’s just an opinion. It’s not as if I have the power to ban performance art outright. Yet. For anyone who doesn’t know what performance art actually is, a brief description is appropriate (the briefer the better). In the early twentieth century a number of artists working in Europe, affiliated initially with Futurism and later with Dada, decided to challenge the complacency of the art that filled the galleries and salons of the day. Their agenda was political as much as aesthetic: art, they proclaimed, was

simply the affectation of an effete bourgeoisie, another commodity to be owned and traded (this disdain for the bourgeoisie came as much from the right as the left: the Futurists were basically proto-fascists). They started staging ‘actions’, in which they directly confronted their audience, shouting slogans and obscenities, instigating riots, or sometimes just performing everyday, routine acts to baffled and bemused onlookers.

During the ‘30s and ‘40s performance came under the influence of Antonin Artaud and his ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ and there was generally much cross-fertilisation between experimental theatre, dance, and performance art at this stage.

In the 1950s, Yves Klein poured blue paint over naked women and then dragged them over canvases to make his ‘anthropometries’. But it was during the 1960s that the performance flourished, as the ideas of Dada found a new audience, and artists started looking for a more ‘conceptual’ way of working that would move art beyond discrete objects sitting on museum plinths.

So far, so good. What I want to know is how we got from there to here. Here, in case you’re not familiar with it, is the sorry situation where ‘performance’ has somehow become an excuse for trotting out the same banal ritualism and trite metaphors again and again, at live art festivals all over the world, week in, week out.

I’m sure that everyone has to go through a stage in art school where they get their knackers out and smear ketchup on a bed sheet, whilst intoning the words of the Irish Constitution.

I know I did. The thing is, I now look back at those performances and realise just how embarrassingly one-dimensional they were, like most juvenilia. But I can honestly say that 90 per cent of all the performances I’ve seen, executed this time by mature, respected men and women, are just as awful: we stand and watch (eyeing up the exits) as some self-important prat gets their kit off and puts us through a thoroughly degrading,

I’m sure that everyone has to go through a stage in art school where they get their knackers out and smear ketchup on a bed sheet, whilst intoning the words of the Irish Constitution. I know I did.

them. These artists are continuing the tradition of working beyond the status of art-as-object.

These artists have concentrated their practice on coming to a sharpened understanding of their materials, their media, their own bodies. Others ditch completely the po-faced overall-clad affects of performance and produce works that are selfconscious, humorous explorations of troublesome subjects.

These are the minority. The rest of the bunch are still wearing clingfilm underpants and smothering themselves in raw meat and writing on the wall in their own blood. And they’re doing it for hours and hours and hours.

These are my two problems with performance art, really: the ‘durational’ aspect (as they like to call it), and the meaningless, boring aspect (as I like to call it). So much performance art depends on using crassly obvious metaphors

indulge it in performance? Or rather, why are we so loathe to say, ‘go home and stop humiliating yourself’? The ‘ritual’ aspect comes in here too; it seems that the recipe for performance can be reduced to ‘choose a deeply traumatic subject, preferably something awful that happened or is happening to you, describe it in the most artless way possible, reduce it to some kind of ritualised action that can be repeated, and repeat it… and repeat it… and… repeat it… again’. I don’t understand why, if a straightforward description of an event or subject is translated into portentous, pretentious, ridiculously hammy gestures or actions, it’s suddenly meant to be elevated into some higher realm of meaning. It’s not. It’s just bad art.

And the durational thing is, most of the time, just another excuse for not really having any ideas. To be able to convincingly pull off a performance that is at all long – and if the audience aren’t sitting down somewhere reasonably comfortable I’d call half an hour quite long – the performer has to be very skilled, thoughtful and subtle. Yet so many performance artists clearly believe that the best thing to do if they can’t think of anything to do is to take the bit they’ve got, slow it down and make it last all night. Why? I understand that art can sometimes have a cathartic role for the artist. And I understand that a lack of informed criticism leads to sloppy practice in all artforms. But I have really had enough of turning up to see the same clique of self-congratulatory back-slappers declare how ‘wonderful’ some utterly tedious bit of primal screaming and bath-chainsawing is. ‘Oh hello sweetie, how did Reykjavik go?’ ‘Oh wonderful, I haven’t seen you since – last week in Warsaw!’ ‘I thought the way you set fire to that flag and then drank a pint of pigshit was really seminal!’

Step away from the animal carcass and put your clothes back on. Sir, please step away from the animal carcass and put your clothes back on.

Please, sir, put your clothes back on.

Thank you.

demeaning experience, and then expects us to ponder the ‘meaning’ of it.

Some performance artists are capable of genuinely subtle, or unnerving, or enlightening work. They use their bodies, and the spaces which they are inhabiting, to communicate something that cannot be written or drawn, they pull the audience into a relationship, so that they are implicated in the action unfolding before

that add nothing to the subject matter of the piece – isn’t metaphor meant to be a rhetorical device by which a subject is transformed, the juxtaposition of two images so that each can be seen differently? I can see that performance art is not the only form plagued by bad practice – crap metaphor is something that artists resort to in any medium; but why are we so happy to

the vacuum

THE BOOKof The Book OF ANGELS Angels MedbhMcGuckian MedbhMcGuckian Gallery Gallery Press Press 2004 2004

REVIEWS

Medbh MedbhMc McGuckian Guckianisisalways alwaysmentioned mentionedas as the thelone lonefemale femaleamongst amongstthe thevery verytop toprank rankof of contemporary contemporaryNorthern NorthernIrish Irishpoets. poets. Stylistically Stylistically her herwork worksits sitsoutside outsidethe thegeneral generalnarrative narrative focus focusof ofmost mostof ofher herpeers, peers,and andsome somesee seein in this thisaaparticular particularfeminine femininesensibility. sensibility. Even Even Paul PaulMuldoon Muldoonat athis hismost mostallusive allusiveand andarcane arcane doesn’t doesn’tcome comeclose closeto toMc McGuckian’s Guckian’sabstractions abstractions into intovery verypersonal personalimages imagescomposed composedin insimple simple singing singinglanguage. language. Despite Despitethe thefriendly friendlytitle, title,the the poems poemsin inthis thisbook bookare areno noless lessopaque opaquethan thanusual usual ––ififyou youwant wantto tofind findstories storieshere hereyou’d you’dbetter better be beequipped equippedwith withmap, map,compass, compass,and andaalot lotof of patience. patience. The Thebook book jacket jacketframes framesthe thecollection collection as asfollows: follows: ‘… ‘…taking takingit’s it’sinspiration inspirationfrom fromthe thereconciliareconciliation tionin inRenaissance Renaissanceand andmedieval medievalart, art,between between the thetenets tenetsof ofChrist’s Christ’sPassion Passionand andthe thetensions tensions of ofpassion, passion,between betweenAgape Agapeand andEros, Eros,these these poems poemsuse usethe themillenial millenialstandpoint standpointto tocontemcontemplate platethe theeternally eternallyunfathomable unfathomablemystery mysteryof of the theIncarnation.

Incarnation. The Thedivine divineand andsecular secularare are held heldin insolution solutionby byaaseries seriesof ofvignettes vignettesof of the theAnnunciation, Annunciation,followed followedby byaavisitation visitation to tothe themost mostthis-worldly this-worldlyand andcarnal carnalparadise paradise of ofHollywood, Hollywood,Los LosAngeles.

Angeles. Included Includedare are responses responsesto tothe theapocalyptic apocalypticwars warsengendered engenderedby by September September11, 11,but butultimately ultimatelythe thebook’s book’sfocus focus isison onpersonal personaltriumph triumphover overthe theforces forcesof ofdissodissolution lutionand andthe thepossibility possibilityfor forhuman humansalvation salvation through throughthe theadvent adventinto intothis thislife lifeof ofextraordinary extraordinary and andexceptionally exceptionallyloveable loveableindividuals, individuals,who whomay may or ormay maynot notbe beakin akinto towhat whatwe wemean meanby by‘angels’. ‘angels’.

Yes, Yes,well wellmaybe maybebut butthis thisover-blown over-blownfanfare fanfare doesn’t doesn’tprepare preparethe thereader readerat atall allfor forwhat’s what’s inside. inside. The Thebook bookisisdivided dividedinto intofive fiveparts partsof of unequal unequallength, length,and andalthough althoughthere thereare arediscerndiscernible iblechanges changesof oftone toneand andemphasis, emphasis,thematithematically callythe thebook bookseems seemsmuch muchless lessdirect directthan than the thejacket jacketsuggests. suggests.The Thecollection collectionopens openswith with ThePublisher ThePublisherof ofInwardness, Inwardness,which whichruns; runs; ‘This ‘Thisisisthe thetime timeafter afterseasons. seasons.

ItItisistoo toowarm warmfor forspruce spruce to tosketch sketchaadeep deephorizon. horizon.

IIphotograph photographasleep asleep like likethe thedetachable detachablesoul soulof ofaachild child the thefinal finalresting restingplace placeof ofmetals metals in inthe thereceiving receivingwaters, waters, so somobile mobilein insoil, soil, by bymy mywordwork, wordwork, by bytaking takinghis hislifetime lifetime into intomy mymouth mouthas asaaword word to tomake makeaaworld. world.

AAword wordthat thatends endsup upunder under sea-ice, sea-ice,or oraaparable parable by bythe theseashore, seashore,embroidering embroideringdawn. dawn.

This Thisisisaafair fairreflection reflectionof ofjust justhow howhard hardthe the poems poemsgenerally generallyare areto topin pindown. down. It’s It’salso alsoaa good goodreflection reflectionof ofaacertain certaingrace gracethat thatthe thepoems poems possess, possess,aacomfortable comfortableself-possession self-possessionin inthe the strength strengthof ofthe theimages imagesand andthe thecompleteness completenessof what hashas been said.said.

There’s no invitation inside of what been There’s no invitation the experience, no technical show-offery in inside the experience, no technical show-offery turning words or rhythms inside out,out, no moment in turning words or rhythms inside no of epiphany.

It’s delightful in this sense of an unmoment of epiphany.

It’s delightful in this sense pretentious achievement of something difficult of an un-pretentious achievement of something and strange, it’s very into staying difficult and and strange, andseductive it’s very seductive with rhythms images for a while, into the staying with and the rhythms and imageseven for ifa you don’t know what’s Throughout while, even if you don’tgoing knowon. what’s going the of the book certainly moments on.rest Throughout thethere rest are of the book there are when things becomewhen clearer and become you can clearer tell that certainly moments things the is inspired piece of art or element andpoem you can tell thatby thea poem is inspired by of a piece theseofmoments ofart, clarity a piece ofof artart, or but element a piece of but to me moments come as a of bitclarity of a let-down.

I don’t really these to me come as a bit want anyone elseI don’t following Durcan of a let-down. reallyPaul want anyoneinto elsethe national gallery and giving reaction gallery to this following Paul Durcan intotheir the national or and that. giving Buttheir I find reaction delicious to moments this or that. even But here, I

like from A Blessingeven Christ findthis delicious moments here, like this from A Blessing Christ ‘Only in the short time when light was time annunciation-strong ‘Onlythe in the short would space to flattened out when the light was annunciation-strong to suchspace a ravishing ivory. out would to flattened to such a ravishing ivory.

Inhabitable world, near dormition that has not world, been fully Inhabitable nearrealised, dormition as though thebeen war-horse had that has not fully realised, aasmoment been reined though before the war-horse had in. a moment before been reined in.

In the closing sections of the book we are perhaps, as thesections jacket suggests, being to In the closing of the book wetreated are encounters earthly angels. being This idea is fast perhaps, as with the jacket suggests, treated to losing its flavour throughangels. over-use, butidea these encounters with earthly This is fast poems I find stronger thanover-use, those of but the middle losing its flavour through these section the stronger book. The with poems Ioffind thanself-containment those of the middle which together with strong sectionMc of Guckian the book.writes, The self-containment with imagery, takes on a kind of together spiritual quality that which Mc Guckian writes, with strong suits this kind From The Angels imagery, takesof onadventure. a kind of spiritual quality that were Mistake suits athis kind of adventure. From The Angels were a Mistake The cruelty blossoms two a now Thehalves crueltyofblossoms sent two through halves oftime a now as owls are known sent through time to fly headfirst into the are walls of barns. as owls known to fly headfirst into the walls of barns.

I see that his name isI see contained yours, that hisinname and often think of you is contained in yours, as a pilgrim before a distant shrine, and often think of you violated beneath archways. as a pilgrim before a distant shrine, violated beneath archways.

If this is angels then it’s not the kind of Angel Delight normally goes this territory.

If this isthat angels then it’s notwith the kind of Angel I won’t give thenormally ending away, so here’s secondI Delight that goes with this the territory. last poem, of a Soul’s Release won’t give Vision the ending away, so here’sfrom the second Purgatory last poem, Vision of a Soul’s Release from Purgatory One turn of the bared heart One turnthe of the bared heart in whom hearbeats could be felt in whom could be felt very near, the thishearbeats second heart verytonear, heart had waitthis for second the birds to arrive had wait for the birds to arrive at thetospeed of blood in their multicoiling at the speed of blood in their multicoiling to know in all the angles of the wing in flight to know in all the angles of the wing in flight the slightest stirrings thethe slightest stirrings of suddenly illuminated body, of final the suddenly body, its melodic illuminated curve, its finaland melodic curve, always all along opened out, always and all along opened out, if prayer did not bend, if prayer did of notyour bend, the lightness dying. the lightness of your dying.

Evangelical Truth

By Ciarán Tracey

By Ciarán Tracey Having been in an Orange Hall but once in my life, and on that occasion indeed overnight (it’s been the in an Orange in my aHaving long story), chance to Hall have but the once somewhat life, and onmystical that occasion indeed overnight (it’s occult and grey haze cleared from what story), themany chance to have the somewhat isa long to myself and others an acutely alien way occult and mystical grey haze cleared from what of life comes as something of an eyebrow-raising is to myself and many others an acutely alien way proposition.

Enter Evangelicaltruth.org.uk of lifeascomes as something of an “Behind eyebrow-raising then, the vehicle for plugging Closed proposition.

Enter Evangelicaltruth.org.uk Doors”, an apparently candid exposé of the more then, asand theesoteric vehicle associations for pluggingheld “Behind Closed arcane by both Doors”, an apparently candid exposé written of the more the Orange Order and Freemasonry, by and esoteric helderstwhile by both aarcane current Born Againassociations Christian and the Orange andthe Freemasonry, written by Loyalist withOrder links to highest echelons of this a current Born Again Christian and erstwhile at times abstruse organisation.

Loyalist with links to the highest echelons of this The point here isn’t so much to shed light on the at times abstruse organisation.

The point hereand isn’toften so much to shed light sometimes absurd vaguely humorous on the sometimes absurd and often initiation routines of the Order and vaguely its shadowy humorous initiation routines the Order and subsets (anyone remember theofStone Cutters?), itsthat shadowy remember Stone as wouldsubsets be too(anyone easy. Rather it is tothe draw Cutters?),toasthe that wouldcarbon be toocopy easy.similarities Rather it attention almost is to draw attention thethose almost copy between these ritualstoand of carbon Pagan and similarities thesecrux rituals and as those other occultbetween groups. The is that a of Pagan and other occult groups. the TheOrder’s crux fanatically Christian organisation, is that as of a fanatically Christian organisation, adoption such heathen imagery, aesthetic, the Order’sand adoption ofwildly such heathen imagery, symbolism ritual is at variance with

the core Biblical teaching upon is which it purports aesthetic, symbolism and ritual wildly at to found with itself.the core Biblical teaching upon variance which it purports to found itself.

With particular attention to the Royal Arch With particular toOrder the Royal Arch to Purple, an orderattention within the off limits most common-or-garden Brethren, thelimits author Purple, an order within the Order off to most common-or-garden the author describes and outlines the Brethren, various Degrees available alloutlines our favourite pillarsDegrees of the describesto and the various community, andour thefavourite constituent entry rituals available to all pillars of the thereof.

Andand while the secretive nature community, thegranted constituent entry rituals of the Order that fewthe willsecretive be able to verify thereof.

And means while granted nature these and melodramatic of thearchaic Order means that few willroleplays, be able totheir verify composition indeed a seriouslyroleplays, entertaining these archaicisand melodramatic their read that will iseither adda seriously new bile to old composition indeed entertaining prejudices or indeed opennew thebile debate as to why read that will either add to old the Order still exists at all in otherascapacity prejudices or indeed open theany debate to why than a clubstill for exists social at advancement like capacity any other. the Order all in any other than a club for social advancement like any other.

Well, not not quite likelike anyany other actually; it’s ait’s Well, quite other actually; bit more specific than that.

Betraying some a bit more specific than that.

Betraying some important leanings toward the right wing, the author finds the activities of both the Freemasonry and Orangeism to be wholly in keeping with the increasingly subtle efforts of contemporary Western leaderships to find “Unity through diversity”, and to generally even out the playing field of the human situation, which it doesn’t take a genius to realise is clearly a threat to those in secret status-enhancing clubs everywhere. It’s also in this respect that the conflicting vexations of the author Paul Malcomson begin to poke through; is his criticism that of a wrathful Born Again, or of an elitist who merely hates the gradual dilution of class and caste?

Aside from plugging a book, the actual Aside plugging book, thesomewhat actual critical criticalfrom thrust of this asite seems thrust of this site seems confused depending on somewhat which of itsconfused constituent depending on which its constituent parts parts are being read. of While taking its analytical are being read.

While taking its analytical stance from vociferous and zealous Christianity stance from vociferous and zealous to the point of literal acceptance of Christianity Biblical Writ, author’s open hostility to the Orange to the the point of literal acceptance of Biblical Orderthe in particular seems to stemtonot Writ, author’s open hostility theonly Orange Order in particulardisagreement, seems to stembut notrather only a from ecclesiastical from ecclesiastical but of rather jealous indignationdisagreement, at not being part somea jealous indignation not being part of some club that no longer at wants him. As such then, club thatverge no longer wants him.rather As such then, remarks on the stinging than the remarks verge on the stinging rather than the considered, rendering the whole enterprise open considered, the whole enterprise open to suspicionsrendering of mere back-biting. to suspicions of confusion mere back-biting.

The critical arises further because despite this sometimes unbalanced approach, The confusion arises because therecritical are a few genuinely wellfurther thought out despite this sometimes approach, points made in relationunbalanced to the current body there fewOrder genuinely politicare of athe itself,well and thought ones thatout bear points in relationitto current body how seriousmade consideration: is the striking however politic of the Order itself, ones that bear many are social rather thanand spiritual.

Although seekingconsideration: to decry the Order’s very raison serious it is striking however how d’etre many are socialorrather than spiritual.

Although on a doctrinal ideological basis, it seems that seeking decry the Order’s raison d’etre beneathto this self-effacing andvery pious veneer is on a doctrinal ordissatisfaction ideological basis, seems that simply gut level at a itlowering of beneath self-effacing and pious veneer is standardsthis within the institution.

Thegut purported introductionatofa alcohol simply level dissatisfaction loweringand of standards theand institution. bars insidewithin Lodges its resultant behavioural effects comes in for particular criticism. While The purported introduction of alcohol and this would be easy to ignore on the basis that bars inside Lodges and and its resultant behavioural intoxicating beverages evangelical Christians effects comesdid in mix for particular criticism.

While never really (more latent jealousy), this would be to ignore on the basis the images of easy inebriated thuggishness of that some intoxicating evangelical Christians Orangemen beverages (and moreand regularly their hangers never really didour mixscreens (more every latentsummer jealousy), on) that grace would the images of thuggishness of some admittedly doinebriated well to force a consideration of the Orangemen (and more regularly their hangers overall link to standards. on) The that most grace entertaining our screens every summer aspects of this would critique admittedly well to force a consideration however aredothe ones that come unwittingly,of the overall to standards. throughlink a select few simple allusions and turns of phrase that seem not so much the innocent observations that they appear, rather some The most entertaining aspects but of this critique not-so-subtle reader Having however are the onesprogramming. that come unwittingly, through select few simple allusionsFreemasonry, and turns earlier inathe discussion denounced of that seem soof much the innocent it isphrase duly pointed outnot that the founding fathers observations they “History appear, but rather some of the Orangethat Order, reveals that all not-so-subtle reader programming.

Having three were dedicated Freemasons, and two of the three were local pubdenounced owners.” Ouch.

Not earlier in the discussion Freemasonry, it is duly pointed out that the founding fathers always well balanced, and of critically muddled, this of the Orange Order, “History all website will nonetheless providereveals a few that minutes three were Freemasons, two of not only ofdedicated light humour, but also and serious reflection for anyone curious aboutOuch. this most the three were local pub owners.”

Not always balanced, and critically this arcane well of local organisations.

Thenmuddled, again, who website will nonetheless provide few minutes needs balance when you’ve have aBible Writ? not only of light humour, but also serious reflection for anyone curious about this most arcane of local organisations. Then again, who needs balance when you’ve have Bible Writ?

up eamonns alley who adares wins

How romantic, given that the flyer was found in a café just down the street from regular marraige ceremonies. And how we long for the days when we could serve tea to Brits in jeeps and then enact boyhood Provo checkpoint fantasies, as the vague wooliclavad head in newsprint graphics might imply. Someone thinks so.

Though there’s little doubt that anyone who books a Grey Mariah will, unlike the real people usually in them, turn up in time and will, be it a mobile shebeen, dial a drug or, “whatever the occasion, turn up in style...’ Maybe the whole thing is cathartic but it’s certainly not the cops.

G Orwell

pumps out sub rockford files cocktail jazz-funk.

The food is great however- but i'm no restraunt critic, prefering the humble peanut butter on creamcracker any day.

SH

THE PAVILION DOUBLE BOOKINGS

NIBBLES

Apparently, life is like a box of chocolates because you never know what you’re going to get. But imagine a box of chocolates in which the fillings range from something you really like, to something you don’t mind but aren’t in the mood for, to actual human faeces. And that the little insert with all the pictures and flavours has been deliberately designed to be as random and misleading as possible.

JM

WWW.MEATWAGONS. COM

DIRTY WORK New six-week series from Eamonn Holmes, the man who famously described Belfast as the capital of “chewing gum, urine and vomit”. See him lark around in alleyways and hoak through people’s bin-bags with Sam and Sharkey the City Council foot-soldiers (who play a suitably amusing rat-related prank on him). Later, Holmes reveals himself to have no coprophiliac tendencies by firstly declaring his love of a nice clean entry and then contradictorily saying “Please, please tell me that’s dog poo”. Dirty man.

JM

LA FITNESS Flyer for LAFitness has image of woman pouring undisclosed liquid into eye. Old boy next to her giving me a look of brooding strength and wisdom – all humanity's joy and pain in those deep-set eyes. On the whole, the assembly of Photoshopped figures suggests a rapturous experience. Apparently there’s a bar in there. You can also tuck into a Snickers from the in-house confectionary after your holistic personalised spank.

DR

JOHNNY ADAIR GOES FREE

CHARLES MANSON ART The now defunct Passionate Café on the Dublin Road is currently the site of a striking new art installation featuring the charismatic and misunderstood mass murderer. As Charlie gazes out on cinemagoers from a third floor window, we have to wonder whether or not the café was, all along, just a front for some absurd cult which prays on the lost and the gullible.

JM

THE POTTHOUSE Another chi-chi bar for the city of Belfast.

Interior consists of beautifully polished chairs, tables made of oak and the usual industrial fittings. There are a few giant wine glass's dotted around the place. A translucent glass second floor allows vistors to the look up men's trouser legs whilst they dance on a thursday night.This brought back memories of Mosney holiday camp (Co.Dublin) in the 1980s. At mosney the cafe was underneath the swiming pool, you could watch people swiming (but mostly flashing) through glass panels. A flat screen TV displays Laganside corporation propaganda about the Cathedral Quarter whilst the soundsystem

I have always liked to imagine that there is a French verb ‘adais’ meaning ‘to suck’. Therefore ‘I suck’ would be ‘J’adair’, and the cherished piece of local culture declaring ‘Free J.Adair’ (with accompanying scrawl of some slapheaded, muscley-armed gay icon) would roughly translate as ‘I Suck For Free’. Someone even went to the trouble of painting the surrounding kerbstones in the national colours of France.

JM

NEW BUSES In an unexpected show of generosity, the government has now deemed Belfast worthy of a £50million investment to feminise the transport system. 300 new pink Metro buses (presumably designed to address the patriarchal reign of the blue provincial Ulsterbus) are to be unleashed upon 12 main city roads. The excitement builds, the bus stops are already up, but alas, someone has forgotten to remove the clear plastic packaging from them.

JM

the vacuum

The site’s not up yet so no details. But the flyer suggests that we hire an old UDR paddywagon or other oppressive army vehicle for birthday bashes [wouldn’t be the first time a bashing was administered inside one], corporate events [ a good opportunity to revive the practice while you’re served free carbonated pisswater or something], hens, stags [how wild] and weddings.