Download or read book Jazz Jail and God written by Mel Clay and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biography. "The poet nailed on the hard bone of this world. His soul dedicated to silence is a fish with frog's eyes. The blood of a poet flows out with his poems, back to the pyramid of bones from which he is thrust his death is a saving grace. Creation is perfect" -Bob Kaufman, 1980.

Download or read book Down in the Chapel written by Joshua Dubler and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold and provocative interpretation of one of the most religiously vibrant places in America—a state penitentiary Baraka, Al, Teddy, and Sayyid—four black men from South Philadelphia, two Christian and two Muslim—are serving life sentences at Pennsylvania's maximum-security Graterford Prison. All of them work in Graterford's chapel, a place that is at once a sanctuary for religious contemplation and an arena for disputing the workings of God and man. Day in, day out, everything is, in its twisted way, rather ordinary. And then one of them disappears. Down in the Chapel tells the story of one week at Graterford Prison. We learn how the men at Graterford pass their time, care for themselves, and commune with their makers. We observe a variety of Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, and others, at prayer and in study and song. And we listen in as an interloping scholar of religion tries to make sense of it all. When prisoners turn to God, they are often scorned as con artists who fake their piety, or pitied as wretches who cling to faith because faith is all they have left. Joshua Dubler goes beyond these stereotypes to show the religious life of a prison in all its complexity. One part prison procedural, one part philosophical investigation, Down in the Chapel explores the many uses prisoners make of their religions and weighs the circumstances that make these uses possible. Gritty and visceral, meditative and searching, it is an essential study of American religion in the age of mass incarceration.

Download or read book The Typewriter Is Holy written by Bill Morgan and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anyone who cares to understand the cultural ferment of America in the later twentieth century must know of the writings and lives of those scruffy bohemians known as the Beats. In this highly entertaining work, Bill Morgan, the country's leading authority on the movement and a man who personally knew most of the Beat writers, narrates their history, tracing their origins in the 1940s to their influence on the social upheaval of the 1960s. The Beats, through their words and nonconformist lives, challenged staid postwar America. They believed in free expression, dabbled in free love, and condemned the increasing influence of military and corporate culture in our national life. But the Beats were not saints. They did too many drugs and consumed too much booze. The fervent belief in spontaneity that characterized their lives and writings destroyed some friendships. As we watch their peripatetic lives and sexual misadventures, we are reminded above all that while their personal lives may not have been holy, their typewriters and their lasting words very much were.

Download or read book Blows Like a Horn written by Preston Whaley and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reopening the canons of the Beat Generation, Blows Like a Horn traces the creative counterculture movement as it cooked in the heat of Bay Area streets and exploded into spectacles, such as the scandal of the Howl trial and the pop culture joke of beatnik caricatures. Preston Whaley shows Beat artists riding the glossy exteriors of late modernism like a wave. Participants such as Lawrence Lipton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and at great personal cost, even Jack Kerouac, defied the traditional pride of avant-garde anonymity. They were ambitious to change the culture and used mass-mediated scandal, fame, and distortion to attract knowing consumers to their poetry and prose. Blows Like a Horn follows the Beats as they tweaked the volume of excluded American voices. It watches vernacular energies marching through Beat texts on their migration from shadowy urban corners and rural backwoods to a fertile, new hyper-reality, where they warped into stereotypes. Some audiences were fooled. Others discovered truths and were changed. Mirroring the music of the era, the book breaks new ground in showing how jazz, much more than an ambient soundtrack, shaped the very structures of Beat art and social life. Jazz, an American hybrid--shot through with an earned-in-the-woodshed, African American style of spontaneous intelligence--also gave Beat poetry its velocity and charisma. Blows Like a Horn plumbs the actions and the art of celebrated and arcane Beat writers, from Allen Ginsberg to ruth weiss. The poetry, the music, the style--all of these helped transform U.S. culture in ways that are still with us. Table of Contents: Introduction: Opening Measures 1. Horn of Fame 2. On the Brink 3. Celluloid Beatniks 4. Ready for Breakfast 5. Howl of Love Conclusion: The Horn Keeps Blowing Notes Credits Index Mr. Whaley, in this book, takes an academic approach to a subject that is just now beginning to attract scholarly interest. He thoroughly fleshes out a range of sources that span the artistic spectrum in order to give balance and objectivity to his treatment of American culture during the bebop and beat eras. The 1960s, with the Civil Rights Movement, the advent of hippie culture, and the protests against the Vietnam War, has long garnered attention from scholars, writers, musical historians, and filmmakers alike. In the popular conception of pop culture, the 1950s are often labeled boring or drab by comparison. Preston Whaley's analysis, however, will go a long way toward identifying the cultural movements of the 1940s and 1950s as part of a linear whole, a direct predecessor of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. --Douglas Brinkley, author of World War II: the Axis Assault, 1939-1942 This book has a nice exuberance and conviction, a consistent vision and a persuasively engaging tone. It has a winsome, masculinist, optimistic, expansive style that is reminiscent of beat literature itself. --Maria Damon, author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry Whaley's Blows Like a Horn made me want to read ruth weiss, see The Subterraneans, reread Visions of Cody and well, I already listen to Coltrane and read Howl all the time .. but these are signs to me of a very effective book. Whaley wants to find a new way of talking about the Beats and post-Beat culture, one that doesn't fall into the rhetoric of liberation and resistance that is so common in the analyses of this genre, or to the cultural studies critiques of the beats that have pointed out the movement's appropriation by the hegemonic structures of Western, white, patriarchal, hetero capitalism and left it there. Whaley looks for a hitherto ignored space in Beat culture in which the aspirations, experiments and prejudices of the Beats can be directly related to precisely the kind of struggles that cultural studies itself is engaged in as a field. The Beats may not solve all problems, but they are aware of many of them, to varying degrees. There's a subtle, improvisatory quality to Whaley's writing that mirrors the kind of in situ politics and aesthetics that he's trying to evoke in Beat culture. He moves between high and low, personal and theoretical as the situation needs. He talks to the reader directly. There's a refreshing directness here, a willingness to address fundamental human situations. --Marcus Boon, author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs

Download or read book Dissonant Voices written by Joseph Pizza and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2023-09-28 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dissonant Voices uncovers the interracial collaboration at the heart of the postwar avant-garde. While previous studies have explored the writings of individual authors and groups, this work is among the first to trace the cross-cultural debate that inspired and energized mid-century literature in America and beyond. By reading a range of poets in the full context of the friendships and romantic relationships that animated their writing, this study offers new perspectives on key textual moments in the foundation and development of postmodern literature in the U.S. Ultimately, these readings aim to integrate our understanding of New American Poetry, the Black Arts Movement, and the various contemporary approaches to poetry and poetics that have been inspired by their examples.

Download or read book I Remember Jazz written by Al Rose and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1999-03-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Al Rose has known virtually every noteworthy jazz musician of this century. For many of them he has organized concerts, composed songs that they later played or sang, and promoted their acts. He has, when called upon, bailed them out of jail, straightened out their finances, stood up for them at their weddings, and eulogized them at their funerals. He has caroused with them in bars and clubs from New Orleans to New York, from Paris to Singapore -- and survived to tell the story. The result has been a lifetime of friendship with some of the music world's most engaging and rambunctious personalities. In I Remember Jazz, Rose draws on this unparallelled experience to recall, through brief but poignant vignettes, the greats and the near-greats of jazz. In a style that is always entertaining, unabashedly idiosyncratic, and frequently irreverent, he writes about Jelly Roll Morton and Bunny Berigan, Eubie Blake and Bobby Hackett, Earl Hines and Louis Armstrong, and more than fifty others. Rose was only twenty-two when he was first introduced to Jelly Roll Morton. He quickly discovered that they had more in common than a love of music. Something of a peacock at that age, Rose was dressed in a "polychromatic, green-striped suit, pink shirt with a detachable white collar, dubonnet tie, buttonhole, and handkerchief" -- and so was Jelly Roll. About Eubie Blake, Rose notes that he was not only a superb musician but also a notorious ladies' man. Rose recalls asking the noted pianist when he was ninety-seven, "How old do you have to be before the sex drive goes?" Blake's reply: "You'll have to ask someone older than me." Once in 1947, Rose was asked to assemble a group of musicians to play at a reception to be hosted by President Truman at Blair House in Washington, D.C. The musicians included Muggsy Spanier, George Brunies, Pee Wee Russell, Pops Foster, and Baby DOdds. But the hit of the evening was President Truman himself, who joined the group on the piano to play "Kansas City Kitty" and the "Missouri Waltz." I Remember Jazz is replete with such amusing and affectionate anecdotes -- vignettes that will delight all fans of the music. Al Rose does indeed remember jazz. And for that we can all be grateful.

Download or read book Anarchists Beats and Dadaists written by Jim Burns and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2015-10-12 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This seventh collection of essays and reviews kicks off with a survey of some overlooked British poets from the 1940s who, through a network of little magazines with anarchist inclinations, attempted to offer an alternative to the MacSpaunDay generation's sensibilities. Another piece considers how British writers were monitored by MI5 and local police forces, while a third switches attention to the USA and looks at the still-controversial case of Alger Hiss and his alleged role as a spy who passed information to Russia. There are essays about lesser-known Beat-related writers like Bob Kaufman and Brion Gysin, inspections of some little magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, and two long reviews which consider the effect that Dadaism had and the role played in the movement by Tristan Tzara. Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie, and Malcolm Cowley also make an appearance.

Download or read book Sound and Light written by William Duckworth and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2009 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of essays and original material that introduces the avant-garde artist-collaborators, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela to those unfamiliar with their life and art, as well as providing the more acquainted readers with new and useful insights and analyses of the fundamental issues in their life and work. The book explores the recurring themes that have influenced Young's minimalist music and Zazeela's ongoing engagement with the use of light in art. These themes include the importance of nature and its natural shapes and sounds, the importance of mathematics and organized tuning systems based on natural harmonics, enhanced attention spans and increased sensitivity to differences within apparent sameness, extensions of time, and alterations of space. Essays by Terry Riley, John Schaefer, Henry Flynt, Christine Christer Hennix, Mitchell Clark, Kyle Gann, Ben Neill, and Robert Palmer are included. Young and Zazeela contribute to the book with original text materials that focus on continuous sound and light environments.

Download or read book Ruined Time written by Robert Briggs and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2008-11-24 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Notes to Make the Sound Come Right written by T. J. Anderson and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2004-07-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In “When Malindy Sings” the great African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar writes about the power of African American music, the “notes to make the sound come right.” In this book T. J. Anderson III, son of the brilliant composer, Thomas Anderson Jr., asserts that jazz became in the twentieth century not only a way of revising old musical forms, such as the spiritual and work song, but also a way of examining the African American social and cultural experience. He traces the growing history of jazz poetry and examines the work of four innovative and critically acclaimed African American poets whose work is informed by a jazz aesthetic: Stephen Jonas (1925?–1970) and the unjustly overlooked Bob Kaufman (1925–1986), who have affinities with Beat poetry; Jayne Cortez (1936– ), whose work is rooted in surrealism; and the difficult and demanding Nathaniel Mackey (1947– ), who has links to the language writers. Each fashioned a significant and vibrant body of work that employs several of the key elements of jazz. Anderson shows that through their use of complex musical and narrative weaves these poets incorporate both the tonal and performative structures of jazz and create work that articulates the African journey. From improvisation to polyrhythm, they crafted a unique poetics that expresses a profound debt to African American culture, one that highlights the crucial connection between music and literary production and links them to such contemporary writers as Michael Harper, Amiri Baraka, and Yusef Komunyakaa, as well as young recording artists—United Future Organization, Us3, and Groove Collection—who have successfully merged hip-hop poetry and jazz.

Download or read book Jesus In Jail written by Frederick Hermann and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2023-01-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you are in jail or prison, this book will give you true freedom right where you are. It features letters from prisoners who discovered God's love behind bars. It reminds us that Jesus was imprisoned by the Romans. In fact everyone is in a prison of one kind or another, shackled by the chains of pride, envy, lust, addiction, depression, and selfishness. So we are all searching for the freedom to live, laugh and love again. In these pages you will learn how true freedom begins in your mind, awakens your heart, and renews your soul. This book will truly set you free.

Download or read book Reconstructing the Beats written by J. Skerl and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-03-03 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of scholarly essays reassesses the Beat Generation writers in mid-century American history and literature, as well as their broad cultural impact since the 60s from contemporary critical, theoretical, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives. The traditional canon of major writers in this generation is expanded to include women and African Americans. The essays offer critiques of media stereotypes and popular cliches that influence both academic and popular discourse about the Beats, connect the literature of the Beat movement to music, painting, and film, and ultimately open new directions for study of the Beats in the 21st century.

Download or read book Finding God in Prison written by Jack Berryman and published by . This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a series of stories, bible studies and testimonies of men who have found God in prison and who have been able to give up their criminal lifestyle.

Download or read book Gangster to God written by Timothy Rau and published by WestBow Press. This book was released on 2021-01-08 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gangster to God is an incredible true life story and testimony of Love and Grace, filled with incredible miracles only God could have set in motion. After enduring years of tragedy, drug addiction and finally a life sentence in prison, suicide seemed the only option for this man when God intervened and through overwhelming odds, his life was turned around and completely changed forever by The Love Of Jesus Christ.

Download or read book Jail House Religion written by Stephen Canup and published by . This book was released on 2017-07-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After being on top of the world with an office on Park Avenue, Stephen Canup lost it all and found himself homeless and incarcerated. Jail-House Religion is his true life story of God's redeeming love and grace. "Jail-House Religion", a term we have all heard and often made fun of, can be "the real thing" and not just "a cheap imitation". Stephen Canup knows first-hand how real and lasting a true relationship with Jesus can be. Jesus found Stephen in prison - broken, bound, battered, betrayed and busted. But Jesus saved him and changed him forever. This is his story."Jail-House Religion"-How many times have we heard that phrase? It's usually in a mocking way. Is it the "real thing" or a "cheap imitation"? Can someone really find God in a jail or prison? Is God close enough to sinners there to hear their sincere cry? Can a person really be heard by Him if they commit, or re-dedicate, their hearts to walk with Christ? Can He actually use a convict, who turns his life around, to advance the cause of His Kingdom?Having once been incarcerated for nearly three years, Stephen knows first-hand what "society" says and thinks about prisoners - they call them misfits, outcasts and career criminals. For the most part, they despise prisoners. Society thinks they are worthless, dangerous and not capable of changing their ways. But many people have been "imprisoned" in the free world by their own bad choices even though they may have never been actually "incarcerated". When someone is as low as they can go, and think that the only "light at the end of the tunnel" is a train headed their way, what do they do? When they finally wake up one day and realize they are sick and tired of being in bondage because of our own stupid actions, wrong decisions and addictions, to whom do they turn? Isn't this the best time to cry out to God?God always runs to welcome truly repentant sinners! Stephen's story is very much like "the prodigal son" in Luke 15!

Download or read book PostNegritude Visual and Literary Culture written by Mark A. Reid and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1997-03-06 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights movement and other national and cultural movements fractured dominant paradigms of American identity and demanded a reformulation of American values and norms. This book borrows the moral, ethical, and political purposes of these movements to show how film, literature, photography, and television news broadcasts construct essentialist myths about race, gender, sexuality, and nation. It also examines how some visual and literary works and public reactions challenge these essentialist myths by exploring racial, sexual, and national anxieties. Reid explains how artists such as filmmakers Julie Dash, Spike Lee, and Marlon Riggs, photographers Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Gordon Parks, novelists John A. Williams and Ayi Kwei Armah, playwright Adrienne Kennedy, and poet Bob Kaufman portray the fears of people in the grips of social and psychological change. In each chapter, he explores how an important social issue—black feminism, interracial intimacy, biracial and homosexual identity, and black erotica, for example—is presented in film, literature, and photography. Throughout the book Reid's analysis is driven by a postNegritude understanding of race and cultural identity as a socially acquired and unfixed process rather than a biological fact. By showing how visual and literary artists challenge hegemonies of power through the creative imagination, he challenges monolithic and fixed notions of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, religion, and cultural identity.

Download or read book God Behind Bars written by John Perry and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2006-08-06 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Charles Colson was released after seven months of prison time following the Watergate scandal, the last thing on earth he wanted to do was go back into those dark, frightening prisons, but God called him to do just that. Thus was born a life-long ministry, and here, for the first time, if the amazing success story of Prison Fellowship's thirty years of work in the darkest places on earth.