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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by Akeel Bilgrami

Arthur Danto has just died.

In two places where Arthur worked for many decades — Columbia’s Philosophy Department and the Journal of Philosophy– there had always been a general feeling among us that much as he loved and laboured here, he found us too confining. This was a source of pride rather than hurt. It is an apt measure of the limits of the academy that we should take pride in the fact that every now and then we had among us someone whose talents and intellectual appetites far surpass the nourishment that a mere department or journal or even a professionalized discipline such as Philosophy, can offer.

The larger space, which Arthur occupied with such relish is, of course, the city of New York. In fact his whole style was so supremely metropolitan that one gets no sense at all of where he was born and bred. One might easily have concluded, looking at the style of the man, and of his speech and writing, that everything about his life had been striking, even his birth which was on New Years day of 1924 –yet we mustn’t forget that it was, after all, in Ann Arbor, Michigan that he was born and in Detroit where he was bred. But like all good New Yorkers and good Columbia men and women, Arthur gave the impression, however wrong, that he really only began to flourish after he came to New York and to Columbia.

Early flourishing took the form of successive books in analytic philosophy, which contained original and substantial ideas on the nature of history and human action, ideas which have been widely discussed and assimilated into the tradition of thought on these subjects. Then there were books with invaluably clear and novel interpretations of the thought of philosophers outside of the mainstream of analytic philosophy, Nietzsche and Sartre in particular, which brought him wider fame and, as he liked to say, a summer home in the Hamptons. But it was not until he began a study of the nature of artworks and artworlds that he poised himself for a major defection, or ‘transfiguration’, to use a word that he had almost made his own.

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by Misha Lepetic

“A sphinx in search of a riddle.”
~ Truman Capote, on Andy Warhol

About a month ago, following a rather dissatisfying evening, I found myself scurrying to the subway. I was crossing Astor Place in downtown Manhattan when I came across a strange scene. It was about midnight, and parked by the curb on a side street was a rental truck. I was approaching the front of the truck but I could see a small knot of people behind it, and they all seemed rather excited by what was going on. Like any good New Yorker, I'd thought I'd lucked into the chance to buy some nice speakers, 3000-count sheets or some other, umm, severely discounted merchandise. Wallet in hand, I came round the truck and had a gander, and realized I couldn't have been more wrong.

For the interior of the truck had been transformed into a jungle diorama. There were plants and flowers, which looked real, and stony cliffs, which did not. But there was a small waterfall that plashed gently into a pool, and recorded birdsong playing from hidden speakers, as well as the somewhat unnerving sight of insects and butterflies buzzing about the interior. Far in the background were painted a bridge, a sun, a mountain, and a rainbow.

As delighted as I was (because serendipity insists that such a discovery is always partly thanks to me), I still didn't really know what was up. Next to me was an Italian gentleman with an enormous camera, who had just about wet himself with excitement. “It's him! It's him!” he said, giggling like a schoolgirl. “Who?” “Banksy! We've been chasing after this all day.” I don't really know what it means to chase after street art but, once Banksy's name had been floated, I realized that I'd stumbled across one of several dozen Easter eggs the reclusive artist had begun laying all over the city for the month of October.

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“And in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and 'be arrested if necessary', because climate change 'is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence' .”
.
Who'd Ruin That

don't say we can't keep doing this
because we can —until we can't
or won't

nature
slams a door

some things cannot supplant
the essence of that which we adore
or don't

why just tonight,
walking across a vast tar floor,
the inverse moat
around a big box store,
there, not to keep the other out,
but to ease the other in to spending more

just there, and just tonight
a once-in-a-lifetime sky
stopped me cold

clouds relaxed, sprawled, rear-lit,
edged in gold leaf born of an almost by-gone sun
now below the mountain west
but still shattering the grown-old day
in a blazing blue-green mirror of
early light

who'd ruin that?
we might
.

by Jim Culleny
11/7/13

by Quinn O'Neill

It's a typical Thanksgiving. An elegant dining table is decked with Autumn decor, a large turkey, and all the trimmings. Family and friends have gathered round and bow their heads in prayer. Invariably someone will thank God for this lovely meal and I'll bristle like a cat that's been pet the wrong way.

On the surface, the expression of gratitude seems gracious, but it strikes me as logically incoherent and very obviously so. It's as if someone had expressed thanks for the elephant we're about to feast upon. “I think it's actually a turkey,” I might suggest in bewilderment. “I mean, it looks like a turkey, it's definitely a bird, and I'm quite sure it's not an elephant.” Of course no one mistakes the turkey for an elephant, but it seems just as strange to me, given the annual starvation deaths of millions of children around the world, to suppose that a fair and loving God could be to thank for our lavish feast. Are we to believe that God is responsible for the distribution of food in general or just in those communities where people have enough to eat?

Theism means different things to different people, but as I understand it, it is a conception of God as a supernatural agent who's involved in the governance and direction of worldly affairs. The theist God intervenes in earthly events, answers prayers, and blesses us with holiday feasts.

Theism is the norm both worldwide and in North America, and it spawns regular spectacles of absurdity. “Everyone pray that we'll have nice weather for our picnic this weekend!” a friend might suggest, as if a god who presides over the entire universe, with all of our planet's ruinous typhoons and tsunamis, would tweak the weather systems just to dapple our picnic blanket with sunshine.

When it comes to matters of life and death, appeals for divine intervention are common and the motivation understandable. Loved ones may call for prayers for the safe return of a missing child or for the recovery of a gravely ill relative. But why not pray that no child will ever go missing again or for an end to illness entirely? Would this be any less reasonable?

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By Liam Heneghan

More than 75 years ago Robert Lloyd Praeger (1865 –1953) wrote of the Pied Wagtail roost in Dublin’s O’Connell Street describing it as “undoubtedly the most interesting zoological feature that Dublin has to offer”. The birds moved into the capital’s central thoroughfare in the winter of 1929, settling into the plane trees on the north side of Nelson’s Pillar, a 121 ft. monument commemorating Horatio Nelson, Vice Admiral of the British Navy and hero of Trafalgar. Over the following years their numbers rose to about two thousand. The wagtails survived the bombing of the pillar by former members of the Irish Republican Army in March 1966 (apparently most of the birds would take off for the gardens of the Dublin suburbs by the end of March) and the birds still populated the street when I was a child. They were finally banished from O’Connell Street in the early years of this millennium when the trees were removed to make way for The Monument of Light or the Spire, as it is more commonly called, a 398 ft. stainless steel column commemorating nothing.

In Ireland, Praeger is associated with the botanical investigation of that country’s wildest places. Less attention has been paid to Praeger as a proto-urban ecologist: a naturalist who spent most of his life in the city, who wrote extensively about his garden, and who devoted a chapter of his most renowned book, The Way That I Went, An Irishman in Ireland (1937), to Dublin and its environs. Not only did he write about the famous wagtail roosts in O’Connell Street, but he also provided records on the ferns on Dublin walls, and the plants on North Bull Island, a coastal conservation area in Dublin bay. He and a small team also surveyed and wrote extensively on Lambay Island a couple of miles off the coast, north of the city.

In addition to his urban interests, what appeals to me about Praeger is that though in many ways he was a fairly traditional natural historian whose extensive writings — in all there were 800 papers and twenty-four books — detail the distribution of plants in Ireland, he nonetheless wrote reflectively and lyrically about botanical field work as a pleasure for its own sake. Praeger raised walking to the level of exultation and methodology, and not conveyance merely. After all, his most famous book is The Way That I Went — not Where I Went and What I Found There.

I have been working on a lengthy essay on Praeger in recent months, having spent a week last February rummaging through his archives in the Royal Irish Academy, in Dublin. During this time, the idea occurred to me that not only is there a Praegerian product (all those papers and books) but there is also a Praegerian spirit: a spirit of openness to the world, a type of attentiveness that Praeger insists one can cultivate only on foot. Working on this material, I decided that I would, as a type of sympathetic exercise, embrace Praeger’s peripatetic inclination, but employ it in a strictly urban direction, bringing together two parts of Praeger’s work and interests. I am proposing therefore, over each of the next five years, to walk 1000 miles in the city. I invite you to join me by planning a thousand-mile walk of your own in the city or town in which you live. Before you commit, let me give you a little more information on the great man himself and the significance of the 1000-mile annual walk.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Federico Garcia Lorca’s casidas are free adaptations of the Andalusi-Arabic qasidas, which he had read in Spanish. In Robert Bly’s English rendition of Lorca’s casidas, the flavor of the classical Arabic qasida form has been preserved to a considerable extent, even though it reaches us through various levels of distillation: first, the Andalusi version that Lorca designed his casidas after, then the modern English translation. The question relevant to the purpose of this annotation is: Why did Lorca choose the medieval Hispano-Arabic (Andalusi) form to write his twentieth century poems? The obvious answer lies in Lorca’s letters, drawings, plays and other poems that show how deeply he cherished his identity as an Andalucian, having grown up in Granada— a city still haunted by its near-millennium of Andalusi (or “Muslim-Spanish”) history. But attachment to Andalucia aside, what were the artistic reasons for this choice of the qasida form? Bly, in his commentary on Lorca, states that the defining feature of Lorca’s literary work is his “desire-energy” (or “duende”), which “passes through Lorca’s poems as if the lines were clear arteries created for it.” Lorca’s work was produced at a time, when, according to a contemporary of Lorca’s, Europe was “suffering from a withering of the ability to desire.” A recurrent word in Lorca’s poetry is “quiero” or “I desire.” Did he find, in the qasida form, an adequate vehicle to express desire?

In Bly’s words, Lorca “adopted old Arab forms to help entangle that union of desire and darkness, which the ancient Arabs loved so much.” Bly does not elaborate on this statement. We are left to surmise what the union of darkness and desire might mean in the context of the Arabic qasida, though, in the context of Lorca’s poetry, we can chart a general tendency towards “darkness” in his writings about death and such, as if he were going through a personal “dark” period during the tumultuous times of the Spanish civil war, just before he was killed by an impromptu firing squad of the Nationalists.

The qasida can certainly be seen as a poetic tradition with desire as its central theme. The classical Arabic qasida has fifty to a hundred lines with a fixed rhyming pattern. It is divided into three main thematic components and further divided into smaller units of certain fixed metaphors, which find nuances in the hands of the particular poet using the form. The primary metaphor that constitutes the qasida is that of being lost in the desert in the pursuit of the loved one, whose caravan always eludes the speaker. The journey is an all-important subject of the qasida, and journey stands for desire. The different movements in the poem signify specific places along the journey that co-relate to the poet’s emotional journey: the origins of his desire, nostalgia for past camp-sites, the particularities of the pursuit of the loved one, the larger map of life, the pride he takes in his tribe/caravan, how he relates to the tribe of the loved one, so on. The tone of the poem could be laudatory, melancholy or romantic, even light-hearted and humorous in one of the sub-sections. The imagery often tends to be abstract or symbolic, relying on the traditional, complex network of metaphors. As the ancient form of qasida developed through the centuries and across cultures, poets adapted it to suit concerns relevant to them, as in the case of the Andalusi poets that Lorca emulates.

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by Jalees Rehman

The unprecedented increase in the mean life expectancy during the past centuries and a concomitant drop in the birth rate has resulted in a major demographic shift in most parts of the world. The proportion of fellow humans older than 65 years of age is higher than at any time before in our history. This trend of generalized population ageing will likely continue in developed as well as in developing countries. Population ageing has sadly also given rise to ageism, prejudice against the elderly. In 1950, more than 20% of citizens aged 65 years or older participate used to participate in the labor workforce of the developed world. The percentage now has dropped to below 10%. If the value of a human being is primarily based on their economic productivity – as is so commonly done in societies driven by neoliberal capitalist values – it is easy to see why prejudices against senior citizens are on the rise. They are viewed as non-productive members of society who do not contribute to the economic growth and instead represent an economic burden because they sap up valuable dollars required to treat chronic illnesses associated with old age.

In “Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America“, the scholar and cultural critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette ties the rise of ageism to unfettered capitalism:

There are larger social forces at work that might make everyone, male or female, white or nonwhite, wary of the future. Under American capitalism, with productivity so fetishized, retirement from paid work can move you into the ranks of the “unproductive” who are bleeding society. One vile interpretation of longevity (that more people living longer produces intolerable medical expense) makes the long-lived a national threat, and another (that very long-lived people lack adequate quality of life) is a direct attack on the progress narratives of those who expect to live to a good old age. Self-esteem in later life, the oxygen of selfhood, is likely to be asphyxiated by the spreading hostile rhetoric about the unnecessary and expendable costs of “aging America”.

Instead of recognizing the value of the creative potential, wisdom and experiences that senior citizens can share with their respective communities, we are treating them as if they were merely a financial liability. The rise of neo-liberalism and the monetization of our lives are not unique to the United States and it is likely that such capitalist values are also fueling ageism in other parts of the world. Watching this growing disdain for senior citizens is especially painful for those of us who grew up inspired by our elders and who have respected their intellect and guidance they can offer.

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Punctuation

Period—

With this almost inconspicuous dot I wrap things up.
Bring all pleasures to an end. Call it off.
There’s a tiny tidiness to it, but the muscle of
cessation too —it can stop a truck.

Question Mark—

With this sinuous hook I pop a question
whenever I want to reach outside the box I’m in:
Why God, for instance?
Or how come these crows do not give ground
but stand and glare as if they owned this field
of mine and me?
How deeply down are they aware?
How far under do they stare?
How much more of something do they see?

Comma—

With this tadpoled period I may pause a second,
swimming among multitudes noting and naming.

Mesmerized by its breath-taking tail I rest,
then go on expanding and elucidating,
although in this case of hesitating
I’ve nothing more to say
and no one’s waiting anyway
except for future anthropologists
nosing round and carbon dating

But wait, there’s more. With comma’s versatility
I may string ten thousand things like beads
listing names of every city in the world, every lover,
their triumphs, dreams and classic poses
or as the evening closes, I may breathe mid-sentence
and signify I’ve thought of something else:
alyssum, flox, hydrangea, roses

And finally, to show how much you mean to me, my friend,
I’ll set your name apart with two of these for rapt attention
until I’m ended with that dot I mentioned.
.

by Jim Culleny, 11/2/13

by Paul Braterman

Rotation of back paw allows red panda to descend head first down tree. Taken at the Cincinnati Zoo. Photo by Greg Hume through Wikipedia

Keywords: sex, violence, baby swapping, mistaken identity, DNA testing, international relations, Richard Nixon, Viagra, Sixth Mass Extinction

Same thumb, different family

Names can be deceptive. The red panda and the giant panda are not two different varieties of the same species; they are completely different species, and only distantly related. They do not even look very similar. The red panda is much smaller than the giant panda, coloured brown and cream, and has a long striped tail. The giant panda is, of course, black and white, with a very short tail, and black patches over its eyes. These patches help give it the cuddly appearance that makes it so popular in zoos.

Both animals are found in China, although the red panda spills over into Nepal and northern India; both are anatomically carnivores, but live on bamboo; and both have the same kind of false “thumb”. This “thumb” is, really, nothing of the sort, but simply a modified wrist bone, while all five true digits are used in walking. The “thumb” is opposable, meaning that it can be moved to grip against the other digits, but has no joints or claw.

As early as 1825, Frédéric Cuvier (brother of the more famous Georges) described the red panda and proposed that was related to the racoon. The giant panda, however, did not become known in the West until considerably later. A French missionary in China described a skin in 1869; Teddy Roosevelt Jr and his brother Kermit, sons of President Teddy Roosevelt, saw a giant panda in China in the 1920s (true to family tradition, they promptly shot it); and it was not until 1936 that the first giant panda arrived in a Western zoo. Most zoologists considered it to be a kind of bear, on the basis of its anatomy, although a few thought that the two kinds of “panda” really were closely related. The matter was finally and conclusively resolved by comparing the DNA of both animals with that of other species. As expected, the giant panda belongs to the bear family, while it turns out that the red panda is in a genus all of its own, with skunks, raccoons and badgers as its closest relatives. But you do not find the false thumb in raccoons and skunks, and you do not find it in polar bears and grizzlies. So it is not a shared feature of this branch of the carnivore family tree, but a separate similar development in the two “pandas”. A similar false thumb is also found in some species of mole. These are examples of what is called parallel evolution, in which the same modification arises independently in different species. To use technical language, the thumbs are analogous (similar, and performing the same function), but not homologous (not a feature inherited from a common ancestor).

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Startling, the morning and startling, the noon.

Mist, and we didn’t understand it.

There was a message coming from unimaginable mountains

and we breathed dumbly inside it.

Some of us had our ears to the angels,

to the windows in the basins of whiskey glasses;

measured ourselves against different sticks

and stretched our shadows.

There was never a way to medicate

the loons of the inner heart, or stop

the white scarves of our breath in winter

from howling about us. We cracked

perfect white eggs for breakfast,

glimpsed the lining of the darker

jokes, and felt very wise

and frightened. The word ‘brave’

grew a ring around it. Spilt coffee

widened on the tablecloth; it mattered

separately from other things, like the way

hearts hung inside question

marks, and the rising water, the outline

of an ark; that it was our turn to board it.

We could not sense death.

But a thicket of nights gathered in the muck

that lovingly blackens the base of the skull

and we thought of beautiful things.

by Mara Jebsen