by Gerald Dworkin

I recently watched the latest Claude Lanzmann documentary on the Holocaust called the Last of the Unjust. It is a four hour interview with Benjamin Murmelstein who was the last of the Judenrat in Theresienstadt. These were Jews who were selected to act as advisors to the Nazi administrators who ran the camp. Murmelstein has been the subject of much dispute in terms of the role he played. It is fascinating to listen to Murmelstein, a former rabbi in Vienna and a scholar of mythology, as he details his interactions with Eichmann, his denial that he was aware that camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor were death camps (although he admits there were clues that he should have taken more seriously), and the many moral dilemmas that someone in his role faced. At one point, when pressed by Lanzmann, he says that people in his position should be “condemned but not judged.” I leave it to the reader as an exercise to figure out whether this can be understood in a way that makes sense.

Having watched this film I was led to reflect upon the magnificent Lanzmann documentary Shoah and the questions it raises about the ethics of lying. Kant is notorious for denying that it is ever legitimate to lie –even to the murderous man who comes to your door and demands to know whether a particular person is hiding in your house, whom the man wishes to kill. Alan Wood has recent given the most plausible attempt to defend the Kantian view by arguing that Kant distinguishes between a declaration, which only takes place when one warrants that one is telling the truth, and a falsification which takes place in a context where there is no such warrant. Wood claims that Kant’s theory should say that if our false statement is not a declaration then it is permissible because not a lie. If it is a declaration, but extorted from us, i.e. we are forced to say something as opposed to keeping silent, then that should be permissible. In effect, says Wood, Kant misunderstood his own theory.

I turn away from the thickets of Kant interpretation to the question of what exceptions to the general prohibition against lying we ought to accept, in particular how to respond to Nazis–at the door, or as we shall see, otherwise.

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Show Moon

look out your window the moon is huge
but not bigger-than-life, smaller than that
though big enough to make life take a look,
to admire its yellow flatness with hint of rouge
upheld in a mosh-pit of trees, their naked limbs
a dark mesh across a field upon a sky of blue-grey steel
which, as long as nights last and days begin,
will be the place this moon plays, stage rear,
then up and front as it climbs a starry scrim
and down again —and life applauds
before it disappears
.

by Jim Culleny
11/16/13

by Leanne Ogasawara

The other day, my beloved and I were wandering around Best Buy looking for refill cartridges for his scanner pen.

Walking in vain up and down the aisles, I thought how we are indeed living in an age when consumerism has replaced citizenship. It was somehow really disheartening seeing all the “stuff.”

But then, just as I was going to lodge a complaint, something amazing caught my eye…A McIntosh sound system with exposed tubes on display right in front of my eyes!! Is it possible, I wondered, that McIntosh somehow stayed in business and are still putting old-style systems out? Not surprisingly given the ecstatic look on our faces a sales staff member invited us to try out the system in their special sound room. And there as we sat in the sweet spot listening to Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes felt the soundwaves washing over us.

Nostalgically, I recalled how music used to be something you could feel in your tummy–something that traveled on the air making its way to your ears… My beloved probably would have preferred listening to Mozart on that sound system –but for me, I was transported back to Southern Africa, when a neighbor in Mafeteng used to listen at night to that album on an old record. It was in the early 90s and the sound really traveled…Music was such a part of everyday life there and what was not live singing and playing was on records and old casette tapes.

Uncompressed and amplified.

This all reminded me of a great show Robert Harrison did for entitled opinions with fellow Stanford professor Gabriella Safron on the history of listening.“Generalizations are always problematic,” he said, “but there is one generalization you can make about western civilization that won't get you into any trouble. And that is that Western civilization is one that thorougly philoscopic.” That is to say that Western culture from very ancient times has priledged vision over the other senses. There is no question about this; from Plato's Ideal forms (eidos: visible aspect) to a Proustian vision, it was spiritual vision (and rational in-sights) that were thought to be the means to knowledge.

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by Matt McKenna

Sometimes careening space debris is simply careening space debris, but other times it is a metaphor for something nearly as catastrophic back on Earth. The debris in Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity is, of course, the latter. Cuaron is Mexican, but he clearly takes an interest in American politics because never before has the complexities of a government shutdown been so succinctly dissected via a 3D science-fiction suspense-thriller. It is no surprise then that Gravity's U.S. release date was moved to coincide with the federal government shutdown this past October. Warner Bros. and Cuaron must have strongly felt that the struggles incurred by the characters in the film would inform the political struggle over funding the United States federal government.

The film begins with light banter amongst astronauts performing repairs on the Hubble telescope until–and this isn't a spoiler if you've seen the trailer that plays out the film's inciting incident sans editing–a cloud of debris crashes into the venerable space structure to which the film's protagonists are unfortunately attached.

And so begins the ninety-one minute exploration of the United States' broken government by way of a floating Sandra Bullock and a jetpack-strapped George Clooney. While it is certainly possible to dismiss Gravity as nothing more than an interesting filmic experiment mixing a minimal cast into a vat of computer generated graphics, this interpretation misses Cuaron's carefully placed parallels (presciently laid out years ago) between Gravity's fictional reality up in space and our actual reality down on Earth.

Most obviously, the hurtling debris that serves the role of Gravity's antagonist-with-impeccable-timing represents the legion of discretionary appropriations that Congress failed to handle in a timely fashion. As the speeding space junk threatens every structure and person in the film, so too does America's unfunded discretionary programs threaten the integrity of the United States federal government and the welfare of the people subject to that government. Indeed, just as a solar panel traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour will do irreparable damage the human body it slams into, so too will irreparable damage done to the human body that is unable to acquire adequate nourishment due to a lack of funding provided for discretionary programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.

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by Eric Byrd

For me the most ominous chapter in Young Pushkin – the first volume of Yury Tynyanov's unfinished “epic on the origins, development and death of our national poet,” serialized in Soviet journals 1937-43 and recently translated by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush, the other Russian-to-English connubial translating team – is the valedictory debauch staged by Pushkin's maternal grandfather, Osip Abramovich Gannibal. The Gannibals – that unlikely Afro-Baltic family of artillerists and siege engineers. The founder, the “dark star of the Enlightenment” (said Voltaire), was emancipated and experimentally educated by Peter the Great, and the sons born to him by a Swedish noblewoman were pillars of Catherine's establishment and heroes of her wars with the Turks. The mingled blood of Cameroon and Sweden, fighting for the Romanovs against the Ottomans – what a world! Peter conferred the surname – for what else would you call a family of African soldiers?

Once a naval officer, Osip Abramovich had “sacrificed everything to his passion” – in the translator's (and presumably Tynyanov's) terse, resonant style that means not simply his passion for the mistress for whose sake he abandoned his family, but his violently sensual nature. When Tynyanov's novel opens, Osip Abramovich is ailing and obese, wheezing out his last days on his dilapidated estate at Mikhailovskoe – where his grandson will later live under house arrest – amid a sloppy harem of barefoot peasant girls. In one scene, which Claire Denis directed in my head, five sweating servants carry him in his chair out to the banya. A few nights later this provincial Sardanapalus decides to end it all:

Masha danced for him without a stitch on. He wanted to get up but couldn't move. Only his lips and fingers trembled like Masha's gyrating hips. The musicians performed his favorite song more and more loudly and rapidly, the servant-boy beat the tambourine without stopping. Masha's feet moved faster and faster.

“Ah, white swan!” the old man groaned.

He waved his hand, grasped a big fistful of air, closed his fingers tightly and burst into tears. His hand fell down, his head dangled. Tears were rolling down his face onto his thick lower lip and he swallowed them slowly.

He then orders half his wine distributed to the serfs, the other half mixed with oats in a giant tub and fed to the horses he's set loose.

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by Grace Boey

What does the brain have to do with mental illness? The answer is – perhaps – a lot. Psychiatric drugs that affect brain chemistry have met with increasing success and acceptance over the past few decades, giving credence to the idea that fixing the brain might fix our mental problems. Growing amounts of research also suggest that many psychiatric conditions are linked to the brain. Though nothing as dramatic as a single “depressive switch” has been found, independent studies suggest that dysregulation of the cortical-limbic system plays a large role in major depression. It’s also been hypothesized that schizophrenia is a misconnection syndrome, or an underlying problem in the ability of different brain regions to send messages back and forth efficiently and accurately.

Yet, overly brain-based approaches to mental disorder face large amounts of backlash. For one, studies like the ones above are far from conclusive. Also, history has given us good reason to be suspicious of brain-based psychiatric theories and treatments (lobotomy, anyone?). Psychoactive drugs alone are often inadequate for treating mental illness, and most patients respond best to a combination of medication and psychotherapy.

Perhaps the biggest setback to neurobiological views of psychiatry is the following intuition: that we aren’t just our brains. A person can’t simply be reduced or equated to her brain, and to do so would dehumanize the patient. Viewing clinical psychiatry as a brain-fixing exercise ignores the fact that patients are people with feelings, stories and personal problems that have brought them to the doctor’s office in the first place. We can't just pump patients full of drugs, and then tell them to go home. The importance of this seems to be confirmed in the superior efficacy, in so many cases, of psychotherapy over drugs.

So, what are we supposed to do with all this neuropsychiatric research? It hardly seems that we should just ignore it. At the same time, we want to recognize that a patient can’t – and shouldn’t – be treated as just a brain. Lots of lip service is paid to how neuroscience and psychology are supposed to “work together hand in hand”, yet tugging intuitions on mental illness make it hard to articulate just why or how this harmony is supposed to occur. The current patchwork, “whatever works best” approach to psychiatric treatment betrays a widespread lack of grounding principles for the concept of mental disorder. As Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) puts it, “Patients with mental disorders deserve better.”

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by Josh Yarden

Living north of the Ben Franklin Parkway, we regularly walk through Logan Square, often stopping to look around at the profound beauty—and the confounded beast—which our city has become. Standing at the Swann Fountain, I am struck by the juxtaposition of the people and the place.

I see The Franklin Institute to my left, The Free Library and Family Court through the spray, the Cathedral Basilica to my right, just beyond Sister Cities Park, in the heart of the City of Brotherly Love—all these powers of a great society at a glance.

Cars zoom through the square. People drive by easily ignoring the widow and the orphan, the broken and the powerless. Hunger and humanity are somehow invisible against the backdrop of these proud buildings. I think about the folks on the square—not the tourists with their cameras, and not the transients like me walking through on our way, but the people who always seem to be there: my brothers lying on the grass next to their possessions, my sisters under the plastic tarp in the rain, the people on line at the public library waiting for the public bathrooms to open each morning, the public waiting for the food distributions—these no-truer residents of the Logan Square Neighborhood.

I am a daydreamer, given to imagining new worlds in the very brief moment of time it takes to sense the thin whisper of a still voice. Look—

These neighbors of mine

all stand in the square

listening to the music

the orchestra is performing

on the steps of the cathedral

A Fanfare for the Common Man

The trumpets call

the faithful to prayer

at this open air mass

Parkway drivers stop

park on their way

in the middle of the road

Everyone listens in rapt attention

the rhythm changes

the orchestra is joined by a rock band

two separate-not-so-separate entities

collide and adapt in musical conversation

there is an uncommon energy in the air

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