Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Apparently I haven't made one of these since mid-2024. I remember getting wildly overwhelmed by not being able to keep track of what podcast episodes I've particularly enjoyed. I can't easily just save a pinboard pin from apple podcasts, the way I save links from my phone browser. For a while I was trying to cross-post to Twitter, then Mastodon, and now I try to remember to use highly-reckons at bluesky.

Whatever, I clearly can't catch up now, so let's look at some recent listening.

Music:

Apparently, this is about Bob Hawke. It is telling that I had to look this up, as it could describe any number of Australian politicians before and after Redgum's day:



On the subject of blokey music, would you like a song that sounds like 90s queer-ish britpop is being belted in a scrappy Aussie pub, only it's extremely queer?



Podcasts, Fictional: Lately I have been watching Dimension 20: Fantasy High (eg, today, I sat on the parental couch and painstakingly sewed a trouser-hem, grumpily used resistance bands, and got through 3 episodes of the sophomore year series). At the end of the freshman series I had WITHDRAWALS and yet had too many chores to do that couldn't be done in front of a TV.

Enter, Worlds Beyond Number, a high fantasy RP adventure DMed by Brennan Lee Mulligan. The tone is very different - there is a little leavening humour, and I wouldn't say it's DARK per se, but it's not a comedy. Something it carries off very well is that the DM and players had conducted a campaign zero, prior to starting the main campaign - so they know backstory that the audience doesn't. This feels very different to the DM knowing things that neither the players nor the audience know - it feels less like "fly on the wall watching your parasocial pals play DND" and closer to an audiodrama, I guess, while still having the the narration and choice-reaction-improv aspects.

Podcasts, informative:

I really enjoyed Margaret Killjoy's Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff two-parter A madhouse against the Nazis.

The first episode, which is the one I've linked, actually looks at Françoise Tosquelle's life in and flight from Catalonia, and his early innovations in the field of psychiatry during the Spanish Civil War. Tosquelles was with the POUM, the same anti-stalinist anti-fascist group George Orwell volunteered with, in anarchist-controlled parts of Catalonia. The history of shellshock>PTSD as I know it (and I've been reading up a bit lately), filtered through mainly UK/US histories of both war and medicine, doesn't talk about much between WWI and WWII. But out there in Catalonia, Tosquelles was working out that his traumatised soldiers needed to stay in community, in or near their homes and/or the communities who had been housing them as volunteers.

So Tosquelles set about setting up psychiatric hospitals close to the front. Local monastic institutions worked with him, providing the physical infrastructure and some staff. But where would he get nurses? Insead of sending for medically trained nurses from the cities or appealing to the red cross, he looked to the local area, and enlisted other professionals to do shifts as psych nurses (in this context, doing jobs that would be later specialised to social work or occupational therapy). Apparently lawyers were common (keen to support, not usually keen soldiers), as were artists, writers, teachers and... sex workers. You see, anarchist Spanish regions had usually legalised sex work and set up worker-owned brothels. The soliders were already their client base. So Tosquelles went around looking for women who wanted a second job: they couldn't see the same clients in both roles, but one imagines they already had a good understanding of the psychological fragility of the war-traumatised soldier.

By the end of episode one, Margaret has followed Tosquelles over the Pyrennes and into a refugee camp in France, where he promptly sets up a makeshift psychiatric unit under dire conditions, before eventually being sought out and transferred to work - not initially as doctor, oh no, just a nursing assistant - at a nearby asylum. The second episode follows the asylum's radical transformation during the Vichy regime (with no ration cards for mental patients, the patients, staff and doctors began to work together to pool resources, trade labour on local farms for produce, get locals to teach foraging classes - and meanwhile radically restructure the heirarchy of the institution), with the spectacular highlight in Margaret's eyes being their work (colletively agreed upon by all at the hospital) housing and even running guns for the resistance.

I really enjoy Margaret Killjoy's take on this, as I have some of her other health-focused work. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them I think is that as a trans woman she's both acutely critical of pathologising institutions, but also... hardly anti-treatment, anti-medication, etc. (The other axis, and this isn't true of all anarchists any more than it is of all trans women, that I think I particularly appreciate is a streak I'm starting to see in the anarchist-leaning podcasts I follow, where the commitment to something radically better, no better than that or that or anything else on offer, seems to come with an openness to positives that aren't Total Movement Success / Total Revolution.)

At any rate, I trundled off to do some further reading afterwards. This essay by Ben Platts-Mills was clearly one of Margaret's key sources. This interview between Platts-Mills, Camille Robcis (a scholar of the psychiatric movement which arose out of St Albans after the war), and Martine Deyres, who had made a docummentary about St Albans, is also worth a read - I particularly appreciated Martine Deyres' comments about how St Albans was, yes, physically and politically isolated during the Vichy regime (allowing its survival), but that the psychiatric community and the leftist-communist community was very well networked, even during the war. One of the key resistance fighers who was there during the war - his grandfather had been a previous director at St Albans, and as a communist in the 30s, this chap had known of Tosquelles' work in Catalonia.

Finally, Margaret describes herself as a "simple girl" and not a theory-head, but she does a good job of breaking down the wild inter-group tensions, and paradigm-shifting historical differences, between and across far left history. She says she ended up reading more about Tosquelles in the context of Theory than she wanted (I'm guessing because Camille Robcis is really the only anglophone scholar to have touched on him), but there were questions *I* had that she put aside, and some basic Theorist Facts I didn't know (like Franz Fanon's career trajectory). I found this article on the APA blog a great supplement there.

In fact I shall leave with a blockquote from that post (Gregory Evan Doukas, 2023):

Institutional psychotherapy also attended to the ways that institutions not only are shaped by but shape human action. Many make the error of associating institutions intrinsically with coercion; institutional psychotherapy took seriously the capacity of institutions to instead empower. The institutional psychotherapy advocated by Tosquelles also differed from anti-psychiatrists who rejected all neurological bases for mental illness. Evidence of this is that they often prescribed medication. Following Lacan, who Fanon argued in his medical dissertation was correct when asserting that “madness is a pathology of freedom,” the Saint-Alban school argued that the goal of therapy was freedom. This meant that the job of the psychiatrist was to reinstitute the social in the human personality. For Hermann Simon, an important influence on Tosquelles, this necessitated a “more active therapy,” one which took advantage of the organization of the hospital, the land it was on, and the patients’ families and social networks (22). It required revolutionizing the hospital staff and breaking down both physical and logistical barriers, de-carceralizing the institution. The nurses were asked to take off their uniforms and dress indistinguishably from the patients. “Walls” separating the administrative and medical divisions of the hospital were torn down; everyone who worked there, including the patients, began to take responsibility for running the institution and playing an active role in the healing process.