Kingsley recounted an episode that took place while filming (Schindler’s List?) in Poland, when he and members of the film crew found themselves in a bar. While in the bar, they were subject to racist / anti-Semitic abuse. One of the party, possibly an actor, on the receiving end of this violence, broke down.

I recall that Sir Ben was pretty damming in his account of the cowardice he witnessed.

Does anyone remember the episode? Can anyone correct me in any of the details?

We left in silence at the film’s end. But we carried different kinds of silences. Her’s was a silence waiting to be broken, once her grappling of her emotional response found its expression. Mine was a silence borne out of something else entirely. Much later, she said

I don’t know why I’m so disturbed by the film. The different perspectives of people, influences, how cruel life can be. Injustice, brutality, peace

I said

That’s how I feel and bring into most days

Post-script:

Better still, read Rochenko’s short piece on Fascism & Representation over at Smokewriting.

If you’re still hungry, there is also Matthew Crowder’s The Holocaust and Melancholia over at Saving The World

Amazing. Their Literature section is quite impressive. And these are some of the courses which include audio and / or video elements.

The reason? The very existence of the Journal of Management, Spirituality, & Religion. Don’t let the innocuous looking www.jmsr.com lull you into any sense of anything; indeed, my initial judgement was that the enjoining of the terms proves the death of all four.

The problem (insofar as it is a problem), I think, is that journals such as this tap into an undercurrent that exists on a research level (for example). There is also the unintended consequence: what one learns does not lead inevitably to one’s career. And there is the temptation to deal with the exotic, hence the attempt at speculative philosophy in Newcastle University Business School.

It is also worthwhile to mention the work – such as it is – of Robert H. Nelson (Economics as Religion and the earlier Reaching for Heaven on Earth: the theological meaning of economics). On the one hand, these do not advance theoretically beyond (the young) Hegel, Weber, or Zizek’s Weber (‘Protestantism becomes superfluous, it can vanish as a mediator, the moment the very social reality is structured as a “Protestant universe”’, For they know not what they do, Verso, London, p 184), but these “advance” the debate toward the utility of certain claims, which in turn will eventually gloss over the meaning of management as control.

Regardless, though, what’s funny is this comment from the original thread:

I think I would subscribe if there was a fourth term that would somehow destabilize the equation with the promise of possible awesome consequences: say, Journal of Management, Spirituality, Religion and Deliciousness….

Much better than my own attempt: “Interdisciplinary Journal of Management, Spirituality, Religion & Street Art”

Norman Geras:

I remember a particularly slim volume which managed to elude me for the entire duration of my first term as an undergraduate. I was in desperate need of Marx & Human Nature, in part to complete my essay for the standard, pre-1989 Karl Marx course in the Politics Department and, more practically, to come to grips with the then prevalent simplicities for the justification of capitalism.

Geras’s blog, which happily flies in all sorts of tangents, is located at www.normblog.typepad.com

Christopher John Arthur:

Christopher J. Arthur (of The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital fame) maintains www.chrisarthur.net which collects a reasonable selection of his writings on Marx and Dialectic.

Michael N. Forster:

Back into the more distant past again, in the beginning of a Warwick year, I devoured Forster’s Hegel and Skepticism in a frenzy. Despite reading Hegel un-Systematically, at least in this book, it remains one of the few secondary works on Hegel that left an imprint. Forster’s faculty site carries a selection of his published articles.

Brian Leiter:

Leiter is another of the Nietzsche commentators with a rabid blogging appetite. He maintains several sites – personal, philosophical, legal etc., In answer to the question Why is this Presindential election even close?, his cut-to-the-chase-reply carries some merit:

Racism and the apparently bottomless stupidity of a certain portion of the electorate would seem simpler explanations.

Robert M. Wallace:

Last, but by no means least, we have Robert M. Wallace’s newly created “Philosophical Mysticism” site (blog, curriculum vitae included). I’m not sure where he intends to go with his thoughts but if his remarks on Simon Critchley are anything to gauge, it’s a peculiar place indeed.

Go to him.

Writing and surviving in the Netherlands

Write Livelihood: Because I Can

Pia’s nest

Eight Diagrams

and Kevin Dolgin tells you about places you should go in Europe

Note that these tend to be sites that exhibit blogging tendencies – forgive me. There are others, from designers, film-makers, poets, writers, literary journals, nuts, that are worth visiting, too.

By the way, if you haven’t already been there or heard about it, you might want to urgently click your way to Overheard in New York, a site that reports exactly that, with gems such as:

Fat chick on cell: Well, it kind of sucks because the subway is like two avenue blocks away and–
Queer passerby: And there’s no Krispy Creme in between?

–Astoria

Or this one:

Girl #1: He’s coming into town to visit me this weekend…but he says he doesn’t wanna leave the house except to go eat sushi.
Girl #2: Ew, sushi.
Girl #1: I know, right? He expects me to eat that shit? I’m not a fucking polar bear.
–7 train

and another thing …

Here’s what I get for surfing the net. It’s an entire community of like-minded independent women. Mercurial Girl and overworked and underf*cked are pretty decent reads.

Well, at least laughter takes away gravitas, and gravitas is the province of dictatorship – that much we glimpse in Kundera’s novels. And dictatorships lack taste, as demonstrated by Idi Amin, Marcos, Ceausescu et al (see October’s edition of Wallpaper*). Now I see the correlation. As if:

In exchange for the repression of your freedoms, I renounce my true aesthetic sensibility!

Gravitas sans taste. That is the tag-line of dictatorship in the 2oth century.

By the way, Google searches for “Hannah Arendt” fail to filter pass God’s sieve, however, which tends to undermine my hypothesis, such as it was.

Hey, wait, that was my first blurb!

Wonder if anyone has ever framed a comment …