Download or read book The Flatness and Other Landscapes written by Michael Martone and published by Taylor & Francis US. This book was released on 2003-09 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these essays, the flatness of the Midwest becomes the author's canvas for a richly textured, multidimensional exploration of its culture and history. From depicting the details of mechanized cow-milking to relating the similarities between the Greek city of Sparta and Indianapolis, Martone subtly connects different cultures, times, and stories.
Download or read book Flatness written by B. W. Higman and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are few truths about the modern world that are more self-evident than this: it is flat. We write on flat paper laid atop flat desks. We look at flat images on flat screens mounted on flat walls, or we press flat icons on flat phones while we navigate flat streets. Everywhere we go it seems the structures around us at one time or another had a level placed upon them to ensure they were perfectly flat. Yet such engineered planar surfaces have become so pervasive and fundamental to our lives that we barely notice their existence. In this highly original study, B. W. Higman employs a wide variety of approaches to better understand flatness, that level platform upon which the dramas of modern life have played out. Higman looks at the ways that humans have perceived the natural world around them, moving from Flat Earth theories to abstract geometric concepts to the flatness problem of modern cosmology. Along the way he shows that we have simultaneously sought flatness in our everyday lives and also disparaged it as a featureless, empty, and monotonous quality. He discusses the ways flatness figures as a metaphor for those things or people who are boring, dull, or lacking energy or inspiration, and he shows how the construction of flat surfaces has contributed to a degradation of visual diversity. At the same time, he also shows how we have pursued flatness as an engineering ideal and how we have used it conceptually in art, music, and literature. Written with wit and wisdom, and splendidly illustrated throughout, this book will appeal to all those who are interested in the topography of the modern world, to anyone who has ever marveled at the feel of its smooth surfaces or felt oppressed by the tyranny of its featurelessness.
Download or read book Unconventions written by Michael Martone and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unconventions is a quirky and provocative miscellany that reveals Michael Martone’s protean interests as a writer and a writing teacher. Martone has, shall we say, a problem with authority. His chief pleasure in knowing the rules of his vocation comes from trying out new ways to bend, blend, or otherwise defy them. The pieces gathered in Unconventions are drawn from a long career spent loosening the creative strictures on writing. Including articles, public addresses, essays, interviews, and even a eulogy, these writings vary greatly in form but are unified in addressing the many technical and artistic issues that face all writers, particularly those interested in experimental and nontraditional modes and forms. Martone’s approach has always been to synthesize, to understand and use any technique, formula, or style available. “I find myself, then,” he writes, “self-identifying as a formalist, both and neither an experimenter and/or a traditionalist.” In “I Love a Parade: An Afterword,” Martone writes about not fitting in--and loving it--as he recalls the time he marched alone in a local Labor Day parade, as a one-person delegation from the National Writers Union. Elsewhere, in writings formally, stylistically, purposely at odds with themselves, Martone’s expansive curiosity is on full display. We learn about camouflage techniques, how a baby acquires language, how to “read” a WPA-era post office mural, and why Martone sold his stock in the New Yorker and reinvested his money in the company that makes Etch A Sketch®. Unconventions, then, is Martone’s “Frankensteinian monster,” a kind of unruly, hybrid spawn of the mainstream writing enterprise. “Writing seems to me an intrinsic pleasure, an end in itself first,” says Martone. “The question for me is not whether my writing, or any piece of writing, is good or bad but what the writing is and what it is doing and how finally it is used or can be used by others.”
Download or read book So the Story Goes written by John T. Irwin and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2005-05-13 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing about a wide variety of subjects and in a multitude of styles, the twenty writers collected here share a mastery of language and an extraordinary ability to entertain. Ellen Akins from World Like a Knife, Her BookSteve Barthelme from And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, ZorroGlenn Blake from Drowned Moon, MarshJennifer Finney Boylan from Remind Me to Murder You Later, Thirty-six Miracles of Lyndon JohnsonRichard Burgin from Fear of Blue Skies, BodysurfingAvery Chenoweth from Wingtips, PowermanGuy Davenport from Da Vinci's Bicycle, A Field of Snow on a Slope of the RosenbergTristan Davies from Cake, CounterfactualsStephen Dixon from Time to Go, Time to GoJudith Grossman from How Aliens Think, RoveraJosephine Jacobsen from What Goes without Saying, On the IslandGreg Johnson from I Am Dangerous, Hemingway's CatsJerry Klinkowitz from Basepaths, BasepathsMichael Martone from Safety Patrol, Safety PatrolJack Matthews from Crazy Women, Haunted by Name Our Ignorant LipsJean McGarry from Dream Date, The Last TimeRobert Nichols from In the Air, Six Ways of Looking at FarmingJoe Ashby Porter from Lithuania, West BaltimoreFrances Sherwood from Everything You've Heard Is True, HistoryRobley Wilson from The Book of Lost Fathers, Hard Times
Download or read book Jerusalem Creek written by Ted Leeson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every existence has its pulse points," writes Ted Leeson in this latest book, "those places where life rises somehow closer to the surface and makes itself more keenly felt. Spring creeks have been mine." Jerusalem Creek is an exploration into the unique landscape of the "driftless area" in southwest Wisconsin, "a geography of small concealments"-of coves and hollows, oak groves and shady bends, winding brooks and trout. "It is not a landscape that you hike up, or climb down into, or stand out looking upon; it is one that you slip inside of," and this book presents the view from within. Leeson reflects on waters and people, and the experiences and ideas that shaped his understanding of spring creek country. By turns thoughtful and hilarious, passionate and wry, he journeys into the special charms of small-scale waters and pastoral spaces; the nature of meandering trout streams and fishermen; ruminations on dairy cows, honeybees, and the midwestern character; family and angling companions; Amish farmsteads; the memory of a missing photograph; the equivocal dream of owning a trout stream; the ways in which the past endures in the present. Layered and overlapping, like the limestone geology of driftless country, the meditations in this book cumulatively tell the story of how we create the places we love, and how they in turn create us. Jerusalem Creek is a wise, poignant, and haunting book about those places that remain with us long after we've left them.
Download or read book The Politics of Making written by Mark Swenarton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique collection of contemporary writings, this book explores the politics involved in the making and experiencing of architecture and cities from a cross-cultural and global perspective Taking a broad view of the word ‘politics’, the essays address a range of questions, including: What is the relationship between politics and the making of space? What role has theory played in reinforcing or resisting political power? What are the political difficulties associated with working relationships? Do the products of our making construct our identity or liberate us? A timely volume, focusing on an interdisciplinary debate on the politics of making, this is valuable reading for all students, professionals and academics interested or working in architectural theory.
Download or read book Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction written by Lex Williford and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-12-11 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This indispensable anthology brings together works from fifty contemporary writers including Cheryl Strayed, David Sedaris, Barbara Kingsolver, and more. Selected by five hundred writers, English professors, and creative writing teachers from across the country, this collection includes only the most highly regarded nonfiction work published since 1970—from memoir to journalism, personal essays to cultural criticism. Contributors include: Jo Ann Beard, Wendell Berry, Eula Biss, Mary Clearman Blew, Charles Bowden, Janet Burroway, Kelly Grey Carlisle, Anne Carson, Bernard Cooper, Michael W. Cox, Annie Dillard, Mark Doty, Brian Doyle, Tony Earley, Anthony Farrington, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Diane Glancy, Lucy Grealy, William Harrison, Robin Hemley, Adam Hochschild, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Kingsolver, Ted Kooser, Sara Levine, E. J. Levy, Phillip Lopate, Barry Lopez, Thomas Lynch, Lee Martin, Rebecca McClanahan, Erin McGraw, John McPhee, Brenda Miller, Dinty W. Moore, Kathleen Norris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lia Purpura, Richard Rhodes, Bill Roorbach, David Sedaris, Richard Selzer, Sue William Silverman, Floyd Skloot, Lauren Slater, Cheryl Strayed, Amy Tan, Ryan Van Meter, David Foster Wallace, and Joy Williams.
Download or read book A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900 1950 written by John T. Matthews and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-03-25 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cutting-edge Companion is a comprehensive resource for the study of the modern American novel. Published at a time when literary modernism is being thoroughly reassessed, it reflects current investigations into the origins and character of the movement as a whole. Brings together 28 original essays from leading scholars Allows readers to orient individual works and authors in their principal cultural and social contexts Contributes to efforts to recover minority voices, such as those of African American novelists, and popular subgenres, such as detective fiction Directs students to major relevant scholarship for further inquiry Suggests the many ways that “modern”, “American” and “fiction” carry new meanings in the twenty-first century
Download or read book Indigenous written by Cris Mazza and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2003-05 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging memoir about growing up in rural Southern California and identifying as a "Californian" for life.
Download or read book Double wide written by Michael Martone and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected early fiction of one of Indianas premier writers
Download or read book Brief Encounters A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction written by Judith Kitchen and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-11-09 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best of short literary memoirs, essays, and reflections, many of which were written expressly for this collection. Also available The late Judith Kitchen, editor of the perennially popular anthologies Short Takes, In Short, and In Brief, was greatly influential in recognizing and establishing flash creative nonfiction as a form in its own right. In Brief Encounters, she and writer/editor/actor Dinah Lenney expand this vibrant field with nearly eighty new selections: shorts—as these sharply focused pieces have come to be known— representing an impressive range of voices, perspectives, sensibilities, and forms. Brief Encounters features the work of the emerging and the established—including Stuart Dybek, Roxanne Gay, Eduardo Galeano, Leslie Jamison, and Julian Barnes—arranged by theme to explore the human condition in ways intimate, idiosyncratic, funny, sad, provocative, lyrical, unflinching. From the rant to the rave, the meditation to the polemic, the confession to the valediction, this collection of shorts—this celebration of true and vivid prose—will enlarge your world.
Download or read book The Preface written by Ross K. Tangedal and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on insights from the fields of textual criticism, bibliography, narratology, authorship studies, and book history, The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century examines the role that prefaces played in the development of professional authorship in America. Many of the prefaces written by American writers in the twentieth century catalogue the shifting landscape of a more self-consciously professionalized trade, one fraught with tension and compromise, and influenced by evolving reading publics. With analyses of Willa Cather, Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, and Toni Morrison, Ross K. Tangedal argues that writers used prefaces as a means of expanding and complicating authority over their work and, ultimately, as a way to write about their careers. Tangedal’s approach offers a new way of examining American writers in the evolving literary marketplace of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Refining Nature written by Scott Jennings Melbourne and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Walker is one of the most seminal and prolific figures in contemporary landscape design worldwide – both as a teacher and as practitioner. Among his best-known works are Nasher Garden in Dallas, Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland and the World Trade Center Memorial in New York. This academic review of Walker's unique oeuvre look closely at his design work and provides a comparative analysis.
Download or read book Landscape and Literature 1830 1914 written by R. Ebbatson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the vital centrality of 'readings' of nature in a variety of literary forms in the period 1830-1914. It is exploratory and original in approach, stressing the philosophical and cultural implications in a range of texts from Tennyson, Hardy, Jefferies and Thomas.
Download or read book Hard boiled Masculinities written by Christopher Breu and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The persona of the American male in the period between the two world wars was characterized by physical strength, emotional detachment, aggressive behavior, and an amoral worldview. This ideal of a hard-boiled masculinity can be seen in the pages and, even more vividly, on the covers of magazines such as Black Mask, which shifted from Victorian-influenced depictions of men in top hats and mustaches in the early 1920s to the portrayal of much more overtly violent and muscular men. Looking closely at this transformation, Christopher Breu offers a complex account of how and why hard-boiled masculinity emerged during an unsettled time of increased urbanization and tenuous peace and traces the changes in its cultural conception as it moved back and forth across the divide between high and low culture as well as the color line that bifurcated American society. Examining the work of Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, and William Faulkner, as well as many lesser-known writers for the hypermasculine pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, Breu illustrates how the tough male was a product of cultural fantasy, one that shored up gender and racial stereotypes as a way of lashing out at the destabilizing effects of capitalism and social transformation. Christopher Breu is assistant professor of English at Illinois State University.
Download or read book Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape written by Isabel Sobral Campos and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays surveys ecopoetry from a global perspective across different historical epochs. Its comparative approach foregrounds the importance of ecopoetics within the context of distinct national literatures and cultures to reveal the ubiquitous intersection of poetry with ecocriticism. The collection analyzes environmental problems resulting from the legacies of colonialism and focuses on issues of environmental justice and indigenous issues as well as on the intersection of genocide studies and environmentalism. It also examines ecologically-informed modes of relating to the world. In particular, it engages with interactions between the human and nonhuman as well as mind and matter. Finally, it broadens the scope of place to include both the absent land of exiled peoples, and the urban, built environment.
Download or read book Metaheuristics written by El-Ghazali Talbi and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unified view of metaheuristics This book provides a complete background on metaheuristics and shows readers how to design and implement efficient algorithms to solve complex optimization problems across a diverse range of applications, from networking and bioinformatics to engineering design, routing, and scheduling. It presents the main design questions for all families of metaheuristics and clearly illustrates how to implement the algorithms under a software framework to reuse both the design and code. Throughout the book, the key search components of metaheuristics are considered as a toolbox for: Designing efficient metaheuristics (e.g. local search, tabu search, simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm optimization, scatter search, ant colonies, bee colonies, artificial immune systems) for optimization problems Designing efficient metaheuristics for multi-objective optimization problems Designing hybrid, parallel, and distributed metaheuristics Implementing metaheuristics on sequential and parallel machines Using many case studies and treating design and implementation independently, this book gives readers the skills necessary to solve large-scale optimization problems quickly and efficiently. It is a valuable reference for practicing engineers and researchers from diverse areas dealing with optimization or machine learning; and graduate students in computer science, operations research, control, engineering, business and management, and applied mathematics.
