Download or read book Aimlessness written by Tom Lutz and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our culture values striving, purpose, achievement, and accumulation. This book asks us to get sidetracked along the way. It praises aimlessness as a source of creativity and an alternative to the demand for linear, efficient, instrumentalist thinking and productivity. Aimlessness collects ideas and stories from around the world that value indirection, wandering, getting lost, waiting, meandering, lingering, sitting, laying about, daydreaming, and other ways to be open to possibility, chaos, and multiplicity. Tom Lutz considers aimlessness as a fundamental human proclivity and method, one that has been vilified by modern industrial societies but celebrated by many religious traditions, philosophers, writers, and artists. He roams a circular path that snakes and forks down sideroads, traipsing through modernist art, nomadic life, slacker comedies, drugs, travel, nirvana, and oblivion. The book is structured as a recursive, disjunctive spiral of short sections, a collage of narrative, anecdotal, analytic, and lyrical passages—intended to be read aimlessly, to wind up someplace unexpected.
Download or read book Patterned Aimlessness written by Barbara Stevens Heusel and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novels of Iris Murdoch are lively journeys across landscapes teeming with ideas. Such texts as An Accidental Man, The Philosopher's Pupil, The Black Prince, and The Sea, The Sea blend art and philosophy in tales that have intrigued and puzzled readers like few other contemporary novels. In Patterned Aimlessness Barbara Stevens Heusel brings an order and a clarity to the mystery of Murdoch's narrative form. She shows how this writer of many genres came to integrate philosophy, morality, psychology, language, and aesthetics in order to call into question the conventions of the English novel. Following Wittgenstein's lead Murdoch makes palpable the complexities of human experience, the "accidental, idiosyncratic happenings of life." Her fiction and her individual voice, Heusel says, reflect the chaos of existence with all of its contradictions, its paradoxes, its jarring rhythms. Heusel turns to literary theory to point out Murdoch's compatibility with Mikhail Bakhtin's views on the narrative voice in the novel. For both, morality is an utmost concern, and language is inherently a social, historical, and ideological creation: words resonate with centuries of meanings and uses. Answering some common criticisms of Murdoch's novels, Heusel also points out that Murdoch's presentation of female characters critiques societal expectations of women. The study culminates with thoughtful analyses of Murdoch's characters in A Word Child, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea, Nuns and Soldiers, and The Message to the Planet in light of the patterns she has introduced.
Download or read book Doing Nothing written by Tom Lutz and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2006-05-16 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Crying, a witty, wide-ranging cultural history of our attitudes toward work—and getting out of it Couch potatoes, goof-offs, freeloaders, good-for-nothings, loafers, and loungers: ever since the Industrial Revolution, when the work ethic as we know it was formed, there has been a chorus of slackers ridiculing and lampooning the pretensions of hardworking respectability. Reviled by many, heroes to others, these layabouts stretch and yawn while the rest of society worries and sweats. Whenever the world of labor changes in significant ways, the pulpits, politicians, and pedagogues ring with exhortations of the value of work, and the slackers answer with a strenuous call of their own: "To do nothing," as Oscar Wilde said, "is the most difficult thing in the world." From Benjamin Franklin's "air baths" to Jack Kerouac's "dharma bums," Generation-X slackers, and beyond, anti-work-ethic proponents have held a central place in modern culture. Moving with verve and wit through a series of fascinating case studies that illuminate the changing place of leisure in the American republic, Doing Nothing revises the way we understand slackers and work itself.
Download or read book Sincerely Harriet written by Sarah Winifred Searle and published by Graphic Universe& 8482. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996 Chicago, thirteen-year-old Harriet Flores, struggling with boredom, loneliness, and a chronic illness, lets her imagination run wild--with mixed results--and learns about the power of storytelling.
Download or read book The Wisdom of Aramis written by Elia Pekica Pagon and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2018-12-12 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new book of essays by poet and publicist Elia Pekica Pagon titled The Wisdom of Aramis talks about real-life treasures as opposed to false ones. It emphasizes all that really matters in life through simple truths from our everyday lives. The Wisdom of Aramis provides us with profound messages drawn from the lessons we can learn from our best friends and most devoted companions, our furry angels. It is a book dedicated to the author’s beloved pug, Aramis Giving of Good, who will always stay in her heart and who will fill the hearts of the readers with such a great sentiment of love, peace, tolerance, and compassion. The book talks about the joy of unconditional love, about deep compassion and inner peace, about the importance of acceptance and sincere kindness, about the magic of patience and miraculous coincidences. The book gives us the chance to discover a better world and a better version of ourselves through our self-awareness through which we can truly get to know ourselves, find our place in this world and beyond, and live in perfect harmony with nature and the entire universe. There is so much to learn from our pets. Everything we love about them is what we miss most in our lives, and that is true friendship—a pair of sincere eyes, a face without a social mask, someone to be here for us when no one else is, someone to understand us and love us unconditionally. We enjoy their company because they help us be who we really are, and they teach us how to enjoy our lives and this world in such a lovely way. Our beloved companions help us find our inner peace, and that’s exactly how we can establish universal peace—by bringing peace into our lives.
Download or read book Anointed to Win written by Liberty Turnipseed and published by Charisma Media. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There’s a difference between failing and living in failure. This book will guide you to a life of true freedom and joy. Your mistakes and failures will no longer define who you are as you learn to embrace a refreshed life that can only be found in Jesus. You will be fully equipped to take authority over the enemy’s attacks against you. Failurism. That may be an unfamiliar term, but it’s a very real spirit that is keeping many Christians trapped in cycles of failure and defeat. Drawing from her personal experiences and revelations from Scripture, Liberty Turnipseed shows readers how to defeat the stronghold that hinders their success and tries to ruin their future. Through this book, readers will discover: the thought process created when we fail and how we allow ourselves to become bound to failurism how the spirit of failurism manifests and how smaller demons infiltrate our lives and attach themselves to this stronghold how the devil uses lies and deception to make failurism a way of life how to be set free from this demonic stronghold As children of God, we may fail at times, but we don’t have to continually walk in our past mistakes and make failure a lifestyle. We are anointed to win! This book provides the tools and understanding to walk in that victory.
Download or read book The Church School Journal written by and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 1014 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book I Miss You When I Blink written by Mary Laura Philpott and published by Atria Books. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER A charmingly relatable and wise memoir-in-essays by acclaimed writer and bookseller Mary Laura Philpott, “the modern day reincarnation of…Nora Ephron, Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and Laurie Colwin—all rolled into one” (The Washington Post), about what happened after she checked off all the boxes on a successful life’s to-do list and realized she might need to reinvent the list—and herself. Mary Laura Philpott thought she’d cracked the code: Always be right, and you’ll always be happy. But once she’d completed her life’s to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies—check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling small talk, and sprawling traffic. She’d done everything “right” but still felt all wrong. What’s the worse failure, she wondered: smiling and staying the course, or blowing it all up and running away? And are those the only options? Taking on the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood, Philpott provides a “frank and funny look at what happens when, in the midst of a tidy life, there occur impossible-to-ignore tugs toward creativity, meaning, and the possibility of something more” (Southern Living). She offers up her own stories to show that identity crises don’t happen just once or only at midlife and reassures us that small, recurring personal re-inventions are both normal and necessary. Most of all, in this “warm embrace of a life lived imperfectly” (Esquire), Philpott shows that when you stop feeling satisfied with your life, you don’t have to burn it all down. You can call upon your many selves to figure out who you are, who you’re not, and where you belong. Who among us isn’t trying to do that? “Be forewarned that you’ll laugh out loud and cry, probably in the same essay. Philpott has a wonderful way of finding humor, even in darker moments. This is a book you’ll want to buy for yourself and every other woman you know” (Real Simple).
Download or read book Oval written by Elvia Wilk and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bizarre weather. Unprecedented economic disparity. Artists employed by corporations. And the ultimate work of art: Oval, a pill that increases generosity. This unforgettable debut novel asks questions of empathy and power on every scale—from bodies to bureaucracies—to create an unsettling portrait of the future. In the near future, Berlin’s real estate is being flipped in the name of “sustainability,” only to make the city even more unaffordable; artists are employed by corporations as consultants, and the weather is acting strange. When Anja and Louis are offered a rent-free home on an artificial mountain—yet another eco-friendly initiative run by a corporation—they seize the opportunity, but it isn’t long before the experimental house begins malfunctioning. After Louis’s mother dies, Anja is convinced he has changed. At work, Louis has become obsessed with a secret project: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user’s brain to be more generous. While Anja is horrified, Louis believes he has found the solution to Berlin’s income inequality. Oval is a fascinating portrait of the unbalanced relationships that shape our world, as well as a prescient warning of what the future may hold. ”A fascinating near-future exploration of relationships, sustainability, and power. An extraordinarily accomplished debut novel." —Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne and Annihilation “Elvia Wilk’s Oval is a marvel. At the core of this seductive, acute, superbly-contemporary update of mid-period J.G. Ballard lies a deep-beating, deep-dreaming heart.” —Jonathan Lethem
Download or read book Idleness written by Brian O'Connor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For millennia, idleness and laziness have been regarded as vices. We're all expected to work to survive and get ahead, and devoting energy to anything but labor and self-improvement can seem like a luxury or a moral failure. Far from questioning this conventional wisdom, modern philosophers have worked hard to develop new reasons to denigrate idleness. In Idleness, the first book to challenge modern philosophy's portrayal of inactivity, Brian O'Connor argues that the case against an indifference to work and effort is flawed--and that idle aimlessness may instead allow for the highest form of freedom. Idleness explores how some of the most influential modern philosophers drew a direct connection between making the most of our humanity and avoiding laziness. Idleness was dismissed as contrary to the need people have to become autonomous and make whole, integrated beings of themselves (Kant); to be useful (Kant and Hegel); to accept communal norms (Hegel); to contribute to the social good by working (Marx); and to avoid boredom (Schopenhauer and de Beauvoir). O'Connor throws doubt on all these arguments, presenting a sympathetic vision of the inactive and unserious that draws on more productive ideas about idleness, from ancient Greece through Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Schiller and Marcuse's thoughts about the importance of play, and recent critiques of the cult of work. A thought-provoking reconsideration of productivity for the twenty-first century, Idleness shows that, from now on, no theory of what it means to have a free mind can exclude idleness from the conversation."--Provided by publisher
Download or read book The Subterranean Brotherhood written by Julian Hawthorne and published by IndyPublish.com. This book was released on 1914 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book American Nervousness 1903 written by Tom Lutz and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paper edition of a 1991 study. The subject is "a cultural complex--a disease called neurasthenia" (from the preface), examined at a specific historical "moment"--1903. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book How to Focus written by Thich Nhat Hanh and published by Parallax Press. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The simple, refreshing meditations of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh give us the tools to cultivate concentration. Practicing mindfulness brings concentration, and concentration brings insight and understanding. With our world experiencing the deep effects of loneliness, digital overload, and a proliferation of potential distractions, this pocket-sized How To book reminds us of the value of developing our concentration, so we can let go of misperceptions and cultivate the clarity of mind that is the basis for understanding ourselves, each other, and the world. Written with characteristic simplicity and kindness, these wise meditations teach us that by practicing mindfulness in daily life, we are cultivating the power of concentration and fostering the conditions that bring insight, liberating us from misperceptions and misunderstanding. The Mindfulness Essentials series is a back-to-basics collection from world-renowned Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh that introduces readers to the essentials of mindfulness practice. All Mindfulness Essentials books are illustrated with playful sumi-ink drawings by California artist Jason DeAntonis.
Download or read book Making Life Worth While written by Herbert Wescott Fisher and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hitler s Second Book written by Adolf Hitler and published by Enigma Books. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unpublished followup to Hitler's autobiography never published during the dictator's lifetime includes details of his vision for a foreign policy based on continual aggression that would inevitably result in a confrontation with the United States, which he saw as a major stumbling block to his plans.
Download or read book Tokens of Affection written by Maria Bryan Harford Connell and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A refined and remarkably well-educated woman, Maria Bryan began corresponding with her sister when she was sixteen years old. As Carol Bleser points out in her introduction, Bryan travels, reads the popular books of the day, entertains visitors, and makes social calls. At the same time, however, notes Bleser, Bryan's letters belie popular notions about the privileged lives of "typical" planters' daughters in the antebellum South, for she also works at housekeeping, tends the sick at home and in the neighborhood, makes clothes for the family's slaves, and tutors younger siblings.
Download or read book Sagittarius Predictions 2017 written by Karmel Nair and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sagittarius Predictions 2017 unravels your future with the help of the magical Tarot cards and reveals everything about your health, wealth, career and love life. The book also talks about your leaning towards spirituality by giving you a detailed spiritual reading. It shows you ways and means to change the future and arrive at a desired outcome by harnessing the dormant spiritual power we all have within us.
