#david maccabe

[twixnmix]

Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and Gerard Malanga at David McCabe's Studio in New York City, 1965.

Photos by David McCabe

[grandhotelabyss]

I recently watched Donald Cammell’s WHITE OF THE EYE, which you prefer over Zulawski’s own 80s cult classic POSSESSION. When you speak highly of a film on here I take it seriously, and was not let down: a narratively, thematically, and aesthetically rich (and just remarkably weird) desert southwest giallo slasher of sorts with sinister performances from David Keith and Cathy Moriarty. As I can no longer find the post where you first mentioned it, would you speak more to why you like it?

Thank you, and I'm glad you liked it! I had trouble finding the original post too—Tumblr's tagging system used to use hyphens for spaces and now doesn't, making even reasonably labeled things hard to rediscover—but I did manage to dig it up. I hope you don't mind if I simply paste it in here since a lot of newer readers probably missed it. I only saw the movie once and won't try to recapture the (over)enthusiastic prose I wrote upon the first viewing. Tumblr is also bad at date-labeling things, but I believe this dates from summer 2021.

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I now believe White of the Eye (1987) is criminally unheralded in the semi-arty horror-thriller pantheon (do not, please, speak to me of Ari Aster). 

Being a philistine, I like White of the Eye better, for instance, than the connoisseur’s go-to ’80s cult object, Żuławski’s Possession, which I find unendurably over-stylized despite its other merits. Fun fact: Possession was co-written by novelists’ novelist Frederic Tuten, who once received the most extravagant blurb from my beloved Cynthia Ozick, as friend-of-the-blog @danskjavlarna pointed out: “What an amazing, glittering, glowing, Proustian, Conradian, Borgesian, diamond-faceted, language-studded, myth-drowned dream!” exclaimed our greatest living Republican-voting novelist (remember that Cormac McCarthy doesn’t vote). Tuten, by the way, is not to be blamed for what I call Possession’s over-stylization, which is a matter of performance not script. But I don’t want to get into a hipper-than-thou spiral, “My cult movie’s better than your cult movie,” to be trapped in a crisis of Girard’s mimetic desire or Bourdieu’s cultural capital—merde, but the French are depressing, “too human, too historical,” as Deleuze complained in acclaiming “the superiority of Anglo-American literature.” The work of art has formal, affective, conceptual intrinsic qualities, not just extrinsic social determinants, and White of the Eye is, I argue, intrinsically spectacular.

Speaking of performance: White of the Eye was directed by Donald Cammell, the co-director with Nicolas Roeg of the classic 1970 film Performance. Again a philistine, I could never get into Performance—never even watched it all the way through—even though it sits at the nexus of two of my early influences. First, in a Comics Journal interview in the mid-’90s, English artist Bryan Talbot credited Performance’s jump-cut montage techniques for inspiring the storytelling innovations in his graphic novel The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. The underread Arkwright is the lost key to comics’s British Invasion—without it we wouldn’t have had V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Sandman, or The Invisibles. (It’s also a key to this movement’s cryptic politics, as Talbot stages a Jacobite uprising as anti-fascist revolution, precursor to Moore’s much more famous but still baffling ancom in Guy Fawkes garb. Is all anarchism Tory anarchism?) Second, Performance was a particular interest of Professor Colin MacCabe’s, whose class on James Joyce, with its mind-altering 12 weeks on Ulysses, helped to make me the reader and writer I am today back in that explosive landmark year, 2001. Protagonist of an epochal affaire in poststructuralism’s history and erstwhile director of the British Film Institute, MacCabe later wrote a book on Performance, which, alas, unlike his books on Joyce and Godard, I haven’t read. 

I like White of the Eye better than Performance as I like it better than Possession, though. Mysterious symbolism, desert desolation, languorous eroticism, and, yes, some montage. The scorching, doomed marriage between a fanatic Western audiophile—he looks like the young W. Bush—and his breathy, no-nonsense New York wife; a Paglia-esque misogynist rampage (“that fuckin’ black hole…if that’s not female, I don’t know what is”) in an arid outpost of the Reagan-era bourgeoisie and its multicultural fringe: it all evokes the inherent evil of the American landscape that Burroughs observes in Naked Lunch. It has that ’80s quality of emotional amplitude not just between but within scenes. At every moment you might ask, “Is this sad, funny, or horrifying?” and answer, “Yes.” I do see filmmakers today working in the same vein and aspiring to the same compass. Witness the already famous Jacques Derrida High School in David Prior’s ultimately disappointing Empty Man or the scarcely resistible vaporwave dreamscape of Anthony Scott Burns’s also ultimately disappointing Come True (can’t anybody end a movie anymore?). But White of the Eye does it without effort or self-consciousness, as the very essence of its being an artwork at all—an artifact from a lost civilization.

[myfavoritepeterotoole]

Laurence Olivier and Peter O'Toole at the National Theatre, 22nd October 1963 photo by Robert McCabe

***

以前投稿した下の写真はおそらくHamletの公演前後だろうと推測していたのですが、一枚目のgettyの写真と同じ時に写したものと思われ、撮影時期がわかってスッキリしました（ただし、captionが正確だとして、ですが）。

http://myfavoritepeterotoole.tumblr.com/post/157080981117/laurence-olivier-and-peter-otoole

http://myfavoritepeterotoole.tumblr.com/post/156756383017/laurence-olivier-and-peter-otoole-caption

[autumnhobbit]

me reading the bible: job, my man, you’re the only b!#%* in this club i ever respected

[nanapandaz]

Cognitive Impairment in Schizophrenia

Disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional, I can’t diagnose you. If you think you have a mental illness please reach out to your doctor or a mental health professional.

For schizophrenics like myself, some of the most stigmatized, and sensationalized symptoms are the positive ones, meaning delusions, hallucinations, and movement disorders to some extent. You see them in textbooks and in the media; seeing, hearing, smelling or feeling things that aren’t real. Believing strange ideas, and this is my own example, like that the alien government lizard people are coming after you. These draw the most attention from the public eye, and I can’t blame them, alien government lizard people is pretty out there. But what about the less talked about symptoms such as negative and cognitive symptoms? Well, this essay will examine the cognitive side of a schizophrenia diagnosis.

According to Columbia University (2016), “many people with [Schizophrenia] also have cognitive deficits, including problems with short- and long-term memory.” They go on to say that cognitive factors can be the most disabling for people, leading to difficulty holding down a job and maintaining social relationships. They don’t have many answers as to the cause or cure for memory problems. Sucks to be us I guess. I personally have a plethora of issues with memory, short term and long term. I find myself lost when the dialogue of TV shows gets even slightly complicated because I immediately forget what was said, maybe that’s just me but it takes a toll on my self-esteem when I can't follow slightly complicated dialogue. But anyway, back to memory. Apparently when a group of healthy controls were compared to a group with schizophrenia, the healthy group, unsurprisingly, did better at memory tasks. In fact the health control groups brains showed increased brain activity the tests got harder and decreased activity when it got easier while the people with schizophrenia showed significantly weaker activity across the board.

According to Bowie and Harvey (2006) cognitive symptoms are the central feature of schizophrenia. As well as that these impairments may even present before the emergence of positive symptoms. They also found that there were “moderate deficits in attention, verbal fluency, working memory, and processing speed, with superimposed severe deficits in declarative verbal memory and executive functioning.” What is executive functioning? Well to quote Goodman (2021), “[e]xecutive functioning skills help you get things done. These skills are controlled by an area of the brain called the frontal lobe.” Things executive functioning helps you do is “manage time, pay attention, switch focus, plan and organize, remember details, avoid saying or doing the wrong thing, do things based on your experience, and multitask” (Goodman, 2021).

I’ll cover some ways to deal with executive dysfunction in a later essay.

Most people with schizophrenia will show some kind of cognitive impairment, but the severity will vary across different people. One interesting thing about these cognitive impairments is that they will remain relatively stable over time. There are some different types of impairments that I will summarize.

General Intelligence

I take some offence at the description that all people with schizophrenia have lower IQ’s, I mean there are/were some very smart people with it, like John Nash, or the people Cernis, Vassos, Brebion, McKenna, Murray, David & MacCabe (2015) studied, finding that there is “a high-IQ variant of schizophrenia that is associated with markedly fewer negative symptoms than typical schizophrenia” However the science seems to be overwhelmingly favourable in the direction that people with it have lower IQ’s as a group. On the other hand, I don’t know what kind of people they picked for their healthy control group, because if they were all university grads then it’s not really fair. So take this with a grain of salt. While the tests say that we are as a group, less intelligent than the “general” population it doesn’t mean you specifically are not intelligent. We can be just as successful as anyone else.

Attention

This one is simple, people with schizophrenia have a deficit in their ability to maintain their attention, this occurs even before the first psychotic episode.

Working memory

I have a terrible working memory, bad enough for it to be considered a learning disability. However I’m not alone in this, many people with schizophrenia have some kind of dysfunction in working memory, and apparently specifically verbal working memory. Bowie and Harvey (2006) state that “Working memory can be conceptualized as the ability to maintain and manipulate informative stimuli.” This is in contrast to attention span, with working memory being more cognitively challenging and attention span being more simple. In working memory, “The information must be held online for processing, but does not necessarily transfer to long-term storage, unlike episodic memory” (Bowie and Harvey, 2006). And poor memory can even affect social and interpersonal relationships because of the inability to pay attention to “multiple streams of information” Bowie and Harvey, 2006).

Verbal fluency

People like us sometimes find it rather difficult to speak in a coherent fashion, I remember many instances where I’ve tried to speak only for word salad to spill out of my mouth, and the looks of confusion and worry on other peoples faces is just great, really what I wanted to happen, not embarrassing at all. This inability to speak is due to “poor storage of verbal information as well as inefficient retrieval of information from semantic network” (Bowie and Harvey, 2006). Furthermore, "information that is stored is not always retrieved as a result of this inability to properly access semantic networks” (Bowie and Harvey, 2006).

Verbal and learning memory

A main impairment of schizophrenia is the difficulty of retaining verbal information. From what I understand, recognition memory seems to be able to work well in most cases, but “the pattern of deficits in schizophrenia tends to be reduced rates of learning over multiple exposure trials and poor recall of learned information” (Bowie and Harvey, 2006). So basically it takes a while for us to learn something but once we do we have good recognition memory. Now, recognition memory is the ability to recall something when you’ve seen it before, so I think what happens is if you’re able to process the information into long term memory you’ll be able to recall when you encounter that information again. Maybe I’m totally wrong, I don’t know.

Executive functioning

Now most schizophrenics have difficulties with most of all of the processes involved with executive dysfunction. Bowie and Harvey (2006) say that “schizophrenia patients have trouble adapting to changes in the environment that require different behavioral responses” which is directly due to issues with executive dysfunction. Furthermore, this “inflexibility” is highly associated with what Bowie and Harvey call “occupational difficulties.” This makes sense, when someone can’t plan, practice self-care, engage in social and interpersonal matters or participate in community functions, it’s gonna take a toll on your work life.

Treatment

Atypical antipsychotics seem to be the best treatment for cognitive impairments, though the results are sorta weak, Bowie and Harvey (2006) admit that “they have had very limited, if any, success in producing cognitive improvements. However, the search for new compounds designed specifically for cognitive enhancement in schizophrenia continues to be a promising area for future research.”

However there is also behavioural treatments, but there isn’t a lot of research on this topic. On the other hand, what little research there is, is very promising. “These strategies include training on computerized tasks similar to existing cognitive tests, teaching new learning strategies, training on novel tasks, and/or performing tasks repetitively” (Bowie and Harvey, 2006).

In the end, it seems that a combination of medication and therapy is the key. On the other hand, research by Everding (2005) states that “memory problems in schizophrenia can indeed be reduced and suggests that helping people use the right memorization strategy is critical to success.” The right strategies seem to be to remember more ‘deeply’ or according to Jantzi, Mengi, Serfaty, et al., (2019) to engage in retrieval practice, also Antzi, Mengi, Serfaty, et al.’s (2019) study is “the first to demonstrate that retrieval practice is also superior to restudy in improving later recall in patients with schizophrenia presenting with episodic memory impairment.” This is great news for us because it presents a real way of improving our memories, which apparently most of us need.

REFERENCES

Study finds brain marker of poor memory in schizophrenia patients: possible key to understanding and treating cognitive symptoms of the disease, (2016). Columbia University. Retrieved from https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/study-finds-brain-marker-poor-memory-schizophrenia-patients

Bowie, C. R., & Harvey, P. D. (2006). Cognitive deficits and functional outcome in schizophrenia. Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment, 2(4), 531–536. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2671937/

Černis ,E,. Vassos, E,. Brébion, G,. McKenna, PJ,. Murray, RM,. David, AS,. MacCabe, JH. (2015). Schizophrenia patients with high intelligence: A clinically distinct sub-type of schizophrenia? Eur Psychiatry. (5):628-32. Retrieved from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25752725/

Gerry Everding (2005). Memory study shows brain function in schizophrenia can improve with support, holds promise for cognitive rehabilitation: need cues, memory aids. Washington University. Retrieved from https://source.wustl.edu/2005/07/memory-study-shows-brain-function-in-schizophrenia-can-improve-with-support-holds-promise-for-cognitive-rehabilitation/

Jantzi, C., Mengin, A., Serfaty, D. et al. (2019). Retrieval practice improves memory in patients with schizophrenia: new perspectives for cognitive remediation. BMC Psychiatry 19, 355. Retrieved from https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-019-2341-y#citeas

Goodman, B. (2021). Executive function and executive dysfunction disorders. WebMD. Retrieved from https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/executive-function

[kantinkepo-blog]

Mengungkap Empat Rahasia Kartu Remi Berdasarkan Pembagiannya

Mengungkap Empat Rahasia Kartu Remi Berdasarkan Pembagiannya - Seperti yang kita kenal apabila kartu remi kerap diperlukan oleh sebagian orang buat main bersama-sama dan kerap diperlukan jadi sarana tempat pertaruhan dengan mata uang asli atau benda berharga lainnya. Permainan yang demikian akrab di golongan masyarakat indonesia bahkan sudah mendunia dan kerap kita kenal atau kerap dimainkan oleh banyak orang yaitu permainan poker.

Permainan poker serius sangatlah asyik buat dimainkan, ditambahkan main dengan rekanan, kerabat atau sanak keluarga. Situs judi ini ialah situs yang demikian serasi buat tempat masuk nya sebagian orang buat mencari keseruan bersamanya. Tapi sebenarnya di balik keseruan main poker, ada berbagai hal yang tersembunyi di kartu remi. Inilah yang mengungkap empat rahasia kartu remi berdasarkan pembagiannya :

1. Mewakili jumlah minggu, Di balik kartu remi dimana pemakaiannya selama ini yang sekedar bertindak jadi alat mendukung satu permainan poker bahkan juga buat permainan yang lain yang sangatlah mungkin dapat memanfaatkan kartu remi. Tetapi di sini, ada satu rahasia dimana jumlah kartu remi bisa mewakilkan kalkulasi jumlah minggu dalam 1 bulan. Ini bisa dibuktikan terdapatnya 13 tipe kartu yang berada di kartu remi ini seperti kartu as, kartu angka mulai dua hingga sepuluh, kartu jack, kartu queen dan kartu king.

Sebenarnya jumlah 13 ini melambang satu jumlah minggu pada suatu bulan yaitu 13 yang berarti 1+3 = 4, ada 4 minggu pada suatu bulan. Tidak cuma itu, tapi juga dapat melambangkan ikon yang berwarna hitam serta merah yang berarti pada suatu bulan 4 minggu itu terdiri dalam siang serta malam.

Mengungkap Empat Rahasia Kartu Remi Berdasarkan Pembagiannya

2. Melambangkan Pilar Penting Kehidupan, Buat rahasia setelah itu apabila sebenarnya kartu remi dibuat dengan sengaja sehubungan dengan kehidupan manusia. Ini dapat kita kenal atau dapat kita peroleh dari beberapa ikon yang diperlukan dalam kartu remi, dimana ikon pada kartu remi punyai arti kehidupan yang penting sekali. Seperti yang kita kenal apabila ada ikon pada kartu remi seperti Spade (sekop), Heart (hati), Diamond (wajik), dan Club (waru).  

Keempat symbol ini tidak cuma berfaedah jadi ikon saja, tapi punyai arti. Spade berarti kebolehan militer, heart berarti kepercayaan, diamond berarti beberapa pedagang bersama dengan kepentingan hidup, dan club berarti pertanian. Keempat ini dapat mewakili tersedianya pilar kehidupan tertutama buat kehidupan di masa pertengahan dan ini dapat dibuktikan kan?

3. Mewakili Musim, seperti yang sudah kita kaji di point nomor dua, apabila di kartu remi ada beberapa ikon yang dimaksud ikon yang punyai arti. Seperti yang kita lihat, sebenarnya keempat ikon yaitu hati, sekop, wajik, dan waru ini adalah ikon yang melambangkan satu musim yang ada di dunia yang rata-rata punyai 4 musim.

Semua musim di dunia ini bisa tergambarkan lewat kartu remi ini dan ini sudah pasti bukan satu kebetulan. Ikon sekop melambangkan musim dingin, hati melambangkan musim gugur, wajik melambangkan musim semi, dan waru melambangkan musim panas. Ini tunjukkan apabila keempat ikon ini tidak menyatu, lantaran itu ini sama dengan juga ada yang hilang dan membuat musim tidak lengkap.

4. Mendeskripsikan tokoh disukai banyak orang, Dalam sebuah kartu remi sudah pasti setiap ikon punyai kartu jack, queen serta kingnya khusus kan? Sebenarnya king, queen dan jack yang dilukiskan ini tidak sekedar asal-asalan gambar, tapi punyai arti.

Tokoh King, dalam ikon sekop adalah King David yaitu Raja Israel, ikon Hati adalah Charlemagne yaitu pendiri Holly Roman Empire, ikon Wajik adalah Julius Caesar yaitu The Great Dicrtator Rome dan ikon Waru adalah Alexander yaitu Jenderal Macedonia. Tidak cuma dari rajanya, tapi pada kartu ratunya dengan urut yaitu Judith, Ragnel, Pallas dan Argeia. Sedang pada kartu jacknya dengan urut adalah Judah Maccabe, Ogier, Aulus Hiritus, dan Hector.

[digi-lead]

Why Isn't There a Palestinian State?

Why Isn’t There a Palestinian State?

Why don’t the Palestinians have their own country? Is it the fault of Israel? Of the Palestinians? Of both parties? David Brog, Executive Director of the Maccabee Task Force, shares the surprising answers. Donate today to PragerU! http://l.prageru.com/2ylo1Yt

Read David Brog’s book, “Reclaiming Israel’s History”. http://l.prageru.com/2nmj8ez

Joining PragerU is free! Sign up now to get all our…

[poetryofchrist]

November 2018 Biblical Studies Carnival

Biblical Studies Carnival 153 - Cold Entertainment

"power is an object of critique, and critique a means to attain power"1

Week 1... to Nov 6

Zeal to promote the common good, ...2

Don't miss the political tent. Oh No. Is there no other tent on the carnival grounds? Is every act of reception of the Bible a political act? (via James McGrath) Here's a distant view on the body politic from Jim Gordon, posted independently of the prior link. James also shared this choice from the NYT. The Political tent of TNK

... Civility, wholesome Laws,learning and eloquence ...

Pomegranate in razor wire

Via Jim Davila, an ancient political choice, Was Jeroboam pagan or yahwist?

The will to power via knowledge, Prof. Carol Meyers on The Shunammite woman and patriarchy Like us or not? Bosco Peters has a series on disagreeing with the bible. Mark Goodacre' colleague, Marc Brettler, reflects on Torah as the tree of life. Deception to get attention to a cause, Daniel Falk on Dead sea scrolls are a priceless-link. Noted also by Michael Langlois De faux rouleaux au Musée de la Bible. Rivka's questions and our own building lessons via Rachel Barenblatt.

Protection schemes from Bob MacDonald, your host, in 1 Samuel 25, illustrating the law of brotherhood. Moshe Blidstein on oaths while holding a Torah scroll - politics and God. Wondering about the history of the usage of political? Here's a contribution this month Colin Maccabe and Holly Yanacek, from OUP.

The NT Political Tent

... bridled and restrained from outrageous behaviour, ...

What is the most important lesson the early church learned from Jesus? from Andrew Perriman. Jim Gordon on stones. I will also give that person a white stone. Phillip Long on A warning against too much wealth. Andrew Perriman on "geo-political realignment" here, and the presence of hell. From Biblical Studies online, Female disciples in early Christianity Candida Moss on anti Semitic use of bible. From Larry Hurtado Terminology and its effects e g scribes-vs-copyists. Via Jim Davila, Aren M. Wilson-Wright on Politics begins in childhood with the abcedary. Jim West reviews Lukas Bormann's New Testament Theology.

Weeks 2-4 TNK

... enabled to inform and reform others...

Jacob’s Dream by Aert de Gelder 1710-1715

A review of Kings, Subjects, and the Divine: Politics in the Hebrew Bible by Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes by reviewer, David Polansky. James Pate reviews Creation and Doxology, The Beginning and End of God's World. Airtonjo on Research in the Pentateuch. Baruch Schwartz asks, Can one do source criticism of a dream? Jones F. Mendonça notes the peculiarity of day 2. Rachel Barenblatt speaks with the voice of Eden. Zilla Eschel on Paying with shekels of silver. Bob Ekblad on Strangers and Aliens. The Hebrew Language Detective on Bavel. Henry Neufeld on the value of Pi. Via Jim Davila, a meteor blast for Sodom?

John Martin's 'Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,' 1852

A podcast with Kyle Greenwood via James McGrath on Genesis 1 and 2. From BAR, how to make a mud-brick. Moshe Sokolow on Adam vs Nephesh, an interesting twist, subject to testing and verification. Dualism in TNK? Albert Baumgarten on the textual issue in Esau's kissing of Jacob.

A leaf from T-S A43.1, one of the Genizah’s serugin manuscripts, how to read a shorthand Bible Jer 27.

William Whitt introduces a new translation of Samuel. Full text is online here.

Micah and Defense Spending, Jim Gordon on Hans Walter Wolfe. This newsletter from Cambridge on the Genizah fragments was noted by Jim Davila. Tim Bulkeley on Jesus as a false prophet according to Zechariah 13:6. Heavy sheep from Tim, the shepherd, on Isaiah 53. (Phil Long has some wolves to add to these.) Statutes that were not good, Oliver Achilles on Ezekiel 20. A final status report from your host on his completed draft English libretto for the music of the te'amim. Another Robert has also completed his Bible as noted here.

The opening of Psalm 68 (‘Salvum me fac’) from the Vespasian Psalter

A work of beauty from the Medieval manuscripts blog on the Vespasian Psalter. Via A. Riddle, Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament, Cultural, Social, and Historical Contexts, edited by Jonathan S. Greer, John W. Hilber, and John H. Walton. Via Jim Davila, a review of Septuaginta, a reader's edition. Brian Davidson gives an example from Exodus 32. Claude Mariottini reports on the lost tribe of Manasseh and a follow up on the northern deportation.

Henry Neufeld muses on the Old in Old Testament, a hermeneutical strategy noted here by James Mcgrath. Jim Gordon begins a series of guest posts on Eugene Peterson with a note by Simon Jones on Under the unpredictable plant.

NT

we subject ourselves to everyone's censure,

Via Jim Davila, Gospels before the book. What, Me Worry? Phil Long on The birds and the grass (now legal in Canada).

James McGrath on the poor in spirit and cultural blindness.

Jesus and the Synagogue, Bosco Peters on Liturgy. Michael Bird on Rachel Held Evans and the Canaanite woman.

James Tissot (French, 1836-1902). Jésus dans la synagogue déroule le livre)

Paul Anderson on Anti-Semitism and Religious Violence as False Interpretations of the Gospel of John. An interesting inscription from Nazareth in a book about Wilhelm Froehner, a colleague of Ernest Renan. Via Jim Davila. Larry Hurtado on the wild theory of textual transmission of the Gospels and on Saul as Persecutor and Jewish Tolerance of Diversity. And a dialogue here on God's Library. Robin Jensen considers the image of the cross in history. Andrew Perriman on Why did the Jews accuse Jesus of making himself equal to God. And again citing McGrath and Barrett on the use of I am in John. Wayne Coppins reviews the action at SBL on Frei's, The Glory of the Crucified One, and adds some missing comments on his favorite parts as co-translator particularly as regards the implications for Christology in John. Ring found with Pilatus inscribed note by James McGrath and Todd Bolen. Additional comment from Jim Davila. Lena Einhorn posted a video (from SBL 2012) on a time-shift between the Gospels and Josephus. Spencer Robinson works through Schreiner's Romans. Issue 5 of JJMJS is available, all on Paul, Judaism, and the Jewish People. Including Matthew Thiessen's riff on Jon Lennon's Imagine, also several scholars on personal callings and conflicts with interpretive schools. Tim Bulkeley has a very short 50th anniversary note here.

The 4 horsemen

Henry Neufeld on Romans 9-11 concerning human wiggle room, (a.k.a. free will), and foreknowledge vs 'a reasonable amount of ordinary knowledge for a deity'. d. miller on family practice, the holy kiss.

Brian Small on the two mountains in Hebrews 12. And a paper revisiting High Priesthood Christology. And from SBL Hebrews at the Cyber-Center.

Marg Mowczco on 1 Timothy, a critique of the ESV Study Bible notes. And on ministry titles in 1 Corinthians 16:16. Mike Bird interviews Jörg Frei on Jude and 2 Peter, a glimpse into the difficult history of the Biblical canon. Richard Fellows comments on Jerome's list of New Testament proper names. Narrative, subtlety, and urgency in the Alpha and the Omega, political eschatology in Revelation. Ian Paul on Conspiracy theory and the book of Revelation. Greg Jenks on amber and red lights, reviewing N.T. Wright. Your host has been influenced this month by this research for the carnival, so much so that he formed a last post of the month on how to form a reading strategy for the New Testament. Other things

and happy is he that is least tossed upon tongues;

Part of an ancient computer

Larry Hurtado on Evans JBL 136.4 (2017): 749-64 about over-emphasis on a performance model of the use of Scripture. Also on silent reading in Roman antiquity. More abstracts (prior to the pay wall) are available on performance criticism here in the Oral History Journal of South-Africa. An interview with Steve Walton, Paul Trebilco, and David Gill on their collection of essays, The Urban World and the First Christians. Here's a nice technique of mouse over magnification and detailed analysis Taylor-schechter-genizah-research-unit...fragment-8. Centre for the study of New Testament Manuscripts has digitized Codex Koridethi. Ancient technology outlined by Airtonjo. More on it from Livius Drusus here and via Jim Davila here. Modern technology will get you to the Hebrew alphabet classes in Seoul. The video is quite cute.

Ian Paul issued a note on Facebook worthy of the political theme noted this month. A whole raft of Anglicans had a conversation on Twitter about the least of these and with more on the early teachers in Christendom on the least. Sefaria has released two dictionaries online A Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature by Marcus Jastrow and A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English by Ernest Klein.

Tim Bulkeley notes a free Biblical Archaeology course from Bar Ilan University here. There's probably time before the end of the world. Via Drew Longacre, National Geographic has an article on the cloak and dagger search for sacred tests. Jim Davila points to an article on reading obituaries in ancient Judah.

Hand from Tomb 2. Photo by Jeremy Smoak

While searching for a secured image of the hand in that article on obits, I accidentally discovered this November article in Chinese, 十個關於早期基督教出乎意料的事實 Ten unexpected facts about early Christianity copied from an article a few months earlier in English and showing how scholars are quoted in or out of context around the world by Facebook, Blogger, and Google+. It would seem that the English speaking world of Biblical Studies has limited contact with similar studies in other cultures. ulb Münster has several bibles online including the Complutensian Polyglot, Erasmus, Bengel, Wettstein, Griesbach, Tregelles, Westcott and Hort, Nestle, and others, all free to download. Africa Journal of Evangelical Theology is now online from 1982-2012 as noted here. Jean Lipman-Blumen has a reflection on toxic, the word of the year. A final note from Religion and Politics on Eugene Peterson and the Imperative of Biblical Literacy.

Next Carnivals

So hard a thing it is to please all,

Local storefront near Oak Bay junction, a study in culture

What comes after 153? Advent. Dale Brueggemann has an Advent series planned that might interest some of you. Post is here. Christopher Scott (@ChristopherLS) will be hosting the December 2018 carnival CLIV (due January 1, 2019). Please email (plong42 at gmail.com) or direct message on Twitter (@plong42) to volunteer for a 2019 carnival. Phil has thrown down the gauntlet. Hosting a carnival is a valuable task. You will be challenged to decide what to include from the several possible source streams that you follow on aggregators, flipboards, social media, blogs, and other news feeds. Just what is Biblical Studies? BS opens up questions that may be disturbing to an established position. Do you follow people that you may disagree with? You may allow some leeway since preachers and theologians of all confessional stripes say they 'study the Bible'. And you may watch secular blogs and newspapers, for some of them express reception history, whether assumed or critical, from the Bible. As the month progresses, a theme emerges, maybe flippant or serious, not always as expected. Take up the gauntlet. 1 From CRASSH on The Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics. 2 Source of the right justified commentary, https://ift.tt/2U1q92J

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2ADp2xk via IFTTT

[beckythesquirrel]

The American Nightmare

2000 ‧ Indie film/Horror

Film-makers such as John Carpenter, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, Tobe Hooper, John Landis and George A. Romero explain how the horror films of the 1960s and 1970s reflected the social and political upheaval of the times.

Release date: 22 September 2003

Director: Adam Simon

Screenplay: Adam Simon

Producers: Colin MacCabe, Paula Jalfon

[lopezdorothy70-blog]

Increase in Psych Drugs Correlates to Increase in Suicides in the U.S.

CCHR's Psychotropic Drug Awareness Campaign Extends to Suicide Warning

by Citizens Commission on Human Rights

Coinciding with the recent tragic suicides of celebrities Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported the suicide rate in the U.S. jumped 30 percent from 2000 to 2016.[1]

In light of such high-profile suicides, there are, naturally, calls for “more effective treatments” for depression.

However, Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) International, a mental health industry watchdog, warns that these calls can include demands for more antidepressants without investigating how these and other treatments may be a potential cause of, or contributing factor in, suicides.

CCHR cited how psychiatric drug prescriptions, including sedatives, antidepressants, psycho-stimulants and antipsychotics, increased 117 percent from 1999 to 2013 and, during that same time period, the CDC had reported the suicide rate had increased 24 percent.[2]

Within three years, that figure is now 30 percent. A CDC survey also found the number of Americans who took an antidepressant over the past month - despite 49 official psychiatric drug warnings of the adverse effects of self-harm, suicide or suicidal thoughts[3] - rose by 65 percent between 1999 and 2014.[4]

Fashion designer Ms. Spade was taking medication for her depression, while it's unknown whether chef-turned-TV-host Mr. Bourdain was taking any psychotropic medication, although he was seeing a therapist in 2016 that featured in scenes of his show “Parts Unknown.”

Whether or not there was a psychotropic drug involved, it should be incumbent upon health authorities in light of their tragedies, and with any suicide, to investigate if and what treatments were administered, CCHR says. This includes the potential for adverse withdrawal effects if a person stops taking psychotropic drugs, for example.

CCHR says such an investigation is needed because the suicide rate continues to climb despite 43 million Americans taking antidepressants.[5]

The suicide doesn't have to be from a drug overdose; CCHR is looking at what chemically may contribute to a person committing self-harm. Often prescribed to treat depression, a 2018 study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry concluded that “antidepressants are largely ineffective and potentially harmful.”

Lead researcher Michael P. Hengartner at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland conducted a thorough literature review focusing on randomized, controlled trials - the gold standard of evidence-based recommendation. Hengartner cited evidence that the likelihood of relapse is also correlated with duration of treatment. That is, the more one takes an antidepressant, the likelier one is to have another episode of depression.

For those taking antidepressants under the age of 24, a black box FDA label warning of suicidal side effects from the use of antidepressants is included. But a 2016 review of clinical trial data published by the Royal Society of Medicine determined “antidepressants double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers that can lead to suicide and violence.”[6]

Studies also link psychiatric drug withdrawal effects to suicide. Post-withdrawal symptoms from antidepressants “may last several months to years” and include disturbed mood, emotional lability [excessive emotional reactions and frequent mood changes] and irritability, according to a study in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics in 2012.[7]

British psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff and others reported in The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, “It is now accepted that all major classes of psychiatric medication produce distinctive withdrawal effects which mostly reflect their pharmacological activity.”[8]

After 30 years of the new “miracle” SSRI antidepressants, psychiatrists now say that for at least a third of those taking them, the drugs don't “work.”

In one study, psychiatrists admitted the failure rate to be as high as 46 percent. Research confirms that antidepressants may not be effective at all.

In a 2014 study, Irving Kirsh, associate director of the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School, stated, “analyses of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits [of antidepressants] are due to the placebo effect.”[9]

In February 2018, a study published in Lancet, asserting the opposite, had been conducted by researchers with strong financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, CCHR reports.

Of the 522 trials in their analysis, 409 were funded by pharmaceutical companies.

Because of antidepressant ineffectiveness, today, an antipsychotic - normally limited to treat severe psychosis or “schizophrenia”- can be prescribed as an “add-on” to the antidepressant - mindless of any adverse chemical reaction this may cause.

Glen Spielmans, Ph.D., a researcher and associate professor of psychology at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, conducted a review of 14 previous randomized clinical trials in which the combined use of an antidepressant and an antipsychotic were compared to the use of an antidepressant with a placebo.

“In terms of quality of life and how well people were functioning, there was really not much evidence that these drugs did anything,” said Spielmans.[10]

A 2017 Journal of Clinical Psychiatry study found non-response rates with first- and second-line antipsychotics as high as 25% and 83%, respectively.

Read the full article at CCHR.

References:

[1] “The US suicide rate has increased 30% since 2000 - and it tripled for young girls,” Business Insider, 15 June 2018, https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/the-us-suicide-rate-has-increased-30-25-since-2000-e2-80-94-and-it-tripled-for-young-girls/ar-AAyCArX.

[2] “Psychiatric Medications Kill More Americans than Heroin,” Rehabs.com, 5 Jan. 2016, citing: MEPS (Medical Expenditure Panel Survey) database, https://www.rehabs.com/pro-talk-articles/psychiatric-medications-kill-more-americans-than-heroin/; Sally C. Curtin, M.A., Margaret Warner, Ph.D., and Holly Hedegaard, M.D., M.S.P.H., “Increase in Suicide in the United States, 1999-2014,” NCHS Data Brief No. 241, Apr. 2016, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db241.htm.

[3] “Psychiatric Drugs: Create Violence & Suicide,” Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, March 2018, p. 5, https://www.cchrint.org/pdfs/violence-report.pdf.

[4] Laura A. Pratt, Ph.D., Debra J. Brody, M.P.H., and Qiuping Gu, M.D., Ph.D., “Antidepressant Use Among Persons Aged 12 and Over: United States, 2011-2014,”Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Aug. 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db283.htm.

[5] IQVia Total Patient Tracker (TPT) Database, Year 2017, Extracted April 2018.

[6] Andreas Ø Bielefeldt, et al., “Precursors to suicidality and violence on antidepressants: systematic review of trials in adult healthy volunteers,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, October 2016, Vol. 109, No. 10, p. 381, http://jrs.sagepub.com/content/109/10/381.full; Stephan Barlas, ” FDA Adds Young Adults to Black Box Warnings on Antidepressants,” Psychiatric Times, I June 2007, http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/addiction/fda-adds-young-adults-black-box-warnings-antidepressants.

[7] “Patient Online Report of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor-Induced Persistent Post-withdrawal Anxiety and Mood Disorders,” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 19 Jan. 2012, https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/341178.

[8] Joanna Moncrieff, M.B.B.S., David Cohen and Sally Porter, “The Psychoactive Effects of Psychiatric Medication: The Elephant in the Room,” J Psychoactive Drugs, Nov. 2013; 45(5): 409-415, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4118946/; Smitha Bhandari, “Treatment-Resistant Depression,” Web M.D., 23 June 2017, https://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/treatment-resistant-depression-what-is-treatment-resistant-depression#1.

[9] Irving Kirsch, “Antidepressants and the Placebo Effect,” NCBI, 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/; The Harvard Catalyst, https://connects.catalyst.harvard.edu/profiles/display/Person/96221.

[10] Traci Pederson, “Adding Antipsychotic Meds to Antidepressant Shows Risk, Little Benefit,” Psych Central, https://psychcentral.com/news/2013/03/14/adding-antipsychotic-meds-to-antidepressants-shows-risk-little-benefit/52597.html; John Lally, James H. MacCabe, “Antipsychotic medication in schizophrenia: a review,” British Medical Bulletin, 1 June 2015, pp. 169-179, https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article/114/1/169/246291.

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[grandhotelabyss]

Though my online course is over, I still feel obligated to provide audiovisual content on Mondays. Above is a movie I watched recently, White of the Eye (1987). I hadn’t even heard of it before I ran across it in Bezos’s archive, and I now believe it’s criminally unheralded in the semi-arty horror-thriller pantheon (do not, please, speak to me of Ari Aster). 

Being a philistine, I like White of the Eye better, for instance, than the connoisseur’s go-to ’80s cult object, Żuławski’s Possession, which I find unendurably over-stylized despite its other merits. Fun fact: Possession was co-written by novelists’ novelist Frederic Tuten, who once received the most extravagant blurb from my beloved Cynthia Ozick, as friend-of-the-blog @danskjavlarna pointed out: “What an amazing, glittering, glowing, Proustian, Conradian, Borgesian, diamond-faceted, language-studded, myth-drowned dream!” exclaimed our greatest living Republican-voting novelist (remember that Cormac McCarthy doesn’t vote). Tuten, by the way, is not to be blamed for what I call Possession’s over-stylization, which is a matter of performance not script. But I don’t want to get into a hipper-than-thou spiral, “My cult movie’s better than your cult movie,” to be trapped in a crisis of Girard’s mimetic desire or Bourdieu’s cultural capital—merde, but the French are depressing, “too human, too historical,” as Deleuze complained in acclaiming “the superiority of Anglo-American literature.” The work of art has formal, affective, conceptual intrinsic qualities, not just extrinsic social determinants, and White of the Eye is, I argue, intrinsically spectacular.

Speaking of performance: White of the Eye was directed by Donald Cammell, the co-director with Nicolas Roeg of the classic 1970 film Performance. Again a philistine, I could never get into Performance—never even watched it all the way through—even though it sits at the nexus of two of my early influences. First, in a Comics Journal interview in the mid-’90s, English artist Bryan Talbot credited Performance’s jump-cut montage techniques for inspiring the storytelling innovations in his graphic novel The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. The underread Arkwright is the lost key to comics’s British Invasion—without it we wouldn’t have had V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Sandman, or The Invisibles. (It’s also a key to this movement’s cryptic politics, as Talbot stages a Jacobite uprising as anti-fascist revolution, precursor to Moore’s much more famous but still baffling ancom in Guy Fawkes garb. Is all anarchism Tory anarchism?) Second, Performance was a particular interest of Professor Colin MacCabe’s, whose class on James Joyce, with its mind-altering 12 weeks on Ulysses, helped to make me the reader and writer I am today back in that explosive landmark year, 2001. Protagonist of an epochal affaire in poststructuralism’s history and erstwhile director of the British Film Institute, MacCabe later wrote a book on Performance, which, alas, unlike his books on Joyce and Godard, I haven’t read. 

I like White of the Eye better than Performance as I like it better than Possession, though. Mysterious symbolism, desert desolation, languorous eroticism, and, yes, some montage. The scorching, doomed marriage between a fanatic Western audiophile—he looks like the young W. Bush—and his breathy, no-nonsense New York wife; a Paglia-esque misogynist rampage (“that fuckin’ black hole...if that’s not female, I don’t know what is”) in an arid outpost of the Reagan-era bourgeoisie and its multicultural fringe: it all evokes the inherent evil of the American landscape that Burroughs observes in Naked Lunch. It has that ’80s quality of emotional amplitude not just between but within scenes. At every moment you might ask, “Is this sad, funny, or horrifying?” and answer, “Yes.” I do see filmmakers today working in the same vein and aspiring to the same compass. Witness the already famous Jacques Derrida High School in David Prior’s ultimately disappointing Empty Man or the scarcely resistible vaporwave dreamscape of Anthony Scott Burns’s also ultimately disappointing Come True (can’t anybody end a movie anymore?). But White of the Eye does it without effort or self-consciousness, as the very essence of its being an artwork at all—an artifact from a lost civilization.