Download or read book The Road of Excess written by Marcus Boon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the antiquity of Homer to yesterday's Naked Lunch, writers have found inspiration, and readers have lost themselves, in a world of the imagination tinged and oftentimes transformed by drugs. The age-old association of literature and drugs receives its first comprehensive treatment in this far-reaching work. Drawing on history, science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography, Marcus Boon shows that the concept of drugs is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and reveals how different sets of connections between disciplines configure each drug's unique history. In chapters on opiates, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, and psychedelics, Boon traces the history of the relationship between writers and specific drugs, and between these drugs and literary and philosophical traditions. With reference to the usual suspects from De Quincey to Freud to Irvine Welsh and with revelations about others such as Milton, Voltaire, Thoreau, and Sartre, The Road of Excess provides a novel and persuasive characterization of the "effects" of each class of drug--linking narcotic addiction to Gnostic spirituality, stimulant use to writing machines, anesthesia to transcendental philosophy, and psychedelics to the problem of the imaginary itself. Creating a vast network of texts, personalities, and chemicals, the book reveals the ways in which minute shifts among these elements have resulted in "drugs" and "literature" as we conceive of them today.
Download or read book Roads of Excess Palaces of Wisdom written by Jeffrey J. Kripal and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-12 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Blake once wrote that "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Inspired by these poetic terms, Jeffrey J. Kripal reveals how the works of scholars of mysticism are often rooted in their own mystical experiences, "roads of excess," which can both lead to important insights into these scholars' works and point us to our own "palaces of wisdom." In his new book, Kripal addresses the twentieth-century study of mysticism as a kind of mystical tradition in its own right, with its own unique histories, discourses, sociological dynamics, and rhetorics of secrecy. Fluidly combining autobiography and biography with scholarly exploration, Kripal takes us on a tour of comparative mystical thought by examining the lives and works of five major historians of mysticism—Evelyn Underhill, Louis Massignon, R. C. Zaehner, Agehananda Bharati, and Elliot Wolfson—as well as relating his own mystical experiences. The result, Kripal finds, is seven "palaces of wisdom": the religious power of excess, the necessity of distance in the study of mysticism, the relationship between the mystical and art, the dilemmas of male subjectivity and modern heterosexuality, a call for ethical criticism, the paradox of the insider-outsider problem in the study of religion, and the magical power of texts and their interpretation. An original and penetrating analysis of modern scholarship and scholars of mysticism, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom is also a persuasive demonstration of the way this scholarly activity is itself a mystical phenomenon.
Download or read book Proverbs of Hell written by William Blake and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Road of Excess written by and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 11 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Excession written by Iain M. Banks and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novels of Iain M. Banks have forever changed the face of modern science fiction. His Culture books combine breathtaking imagination with exceptional storytelling, and have secured his reputation as one of the most extraordinary and influential writers in the genre. 'Banks is a phenomenon' William Gibson Two and a half millennia ago in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe, the artifact appeared. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back. Diplomat Genar-Hofoen of Special Circumstances is sent to investigate but, sidetracked by an old flame and the spoiled-brat operative Ulver Seich, and faced with the systematic depravities of a race who call themselves the Affront, it's anyone's guess whether he'll succeed . . . Praise for the Culture series: 'Epic in scope, ambitious in its ideas and absorbing in its execution' Independent on Sunday 'Banks has created one of the most enduring and endearing visions of the future' Guardian 'Jam-packed with extraordinary invention' Scotsman 'Compulsive reading' Sunday Telegraph The Culture series: Consider Phlebas The Player of Games Use of Weapons Excession Inversions Look to Windward Matter Surface Detail The Hydrogen Sonata The State of the Art Other books by Iain M. Banks: Against a Dark Background Feersum Endjinn The Algebraist Also now available: The Culture: The Drawings - an extraordinary collection of original illustrations faithfully reproduced from sketchbooks Banks kept in the 1970s and 80s, depicting the ships, habitats, geography, weapons and language of Banks' Culture series of novels in incredible detail.
Download or read book A Space on the Side of the Road written by Kathleen Stewart and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Space on the Side of the Road vividly evokes an "other" America that survives precariously among the ruins of the West Virginia coal camps and "hollers." To Kathleen Stewart, this particular "other" exists as an excluded subtext to the American narrative of capitalism, modernization, materialism, and democracy. In towns like Amigo, Red Jacket, Helen, Odd, Viper, Decoy, and Twilight, men and women "just settin'" track a dense social imaginary through stories of traumas, apparitions, encounters, and eccentricities. Stewart explores how this rhythmic, dramatic, and complicated storytelling imbues everyday life in the hills and forms a cultural poetics. Alternating her own ruminations on language, culture, and politics with continuous accounts of "just talk," Stewart propels us into the intensity of this nervous, surreal "space on the side of the road." It is a space that gives us a glimpse into a breach in American society itself, where graveyards of junked cars and piles of other trashed objects endure along with the memories that haunt those who have been left behind by "progress." Like James Agee's portrayal of the poverty-stricken tenant farmers of the Depression South in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, this book uses both language and photographs to help readers encounter a fragmented and betrayed community, one "occupied" by schoolteachers, doctors, social workers, and other professionals representing an "official" America. Holding at bay any attempts at definitive, social scientific analysis, Stewart has concocted a new sort of ethnographic writing that conveys the immediacy, density, texture, and materiality of the coal camps. A Space on the Side of the Road finally bridges the gap between anthropology and cultural studies and provides us with a brilliant and challenging experiment in thinking and writing about "America."
Download or read book You Can t Always Get What You Want written by Sam Cutler and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2010-02-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “straight-dope, tell-all account” of touring with two of the world’s greatest bands of the 60s and 70s—A “fast-moving narrative of rock-n-roll excess” (Publishers Weekly). In this all-access memoir of the psychedelic era, Sam Cutler recounts his life as tour manager for the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead—whom he calls the yin and yang of bands. After working with the Rolling Stones at their historic Hyde Park concert in 1969, Sam managed their American tour later that year, when he famously dubbed them “The Greatest Rock Band in the World.” And he was caught in the middle as their triumph took a tragic turn during a free concert at the Altamont Speedway in California, where a man in the crowd was killed by the Hell’s Angels. After that, Sam took up with the fun-loving Grateful Dead, managing their tours and finances, and taking part in their endless hijinks on the road. With intimate portraits of other stars of the time—including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Band, the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd, and Eric Clapton—this memoir is a treasure trove of insights and anecdotes that bring some of rock’s greatest legends to life.
Download or read book On Reading Well written by Karen Swallow Prior and published by Brazos Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ★ Publishers Weekly starred review A Best Book of 2018 in Religion, Publishers Weekly Reading great literature well has the power to cultivate virtue, says acclaimed author Karen Swallow Prior. In this book, she takes readers on a guided tour through works of great literature both ancient and modern, exploring twelve virtues that philosophers and theologians throughout history have identified as most essential for good character and the good life. Covering authors from Henry Fielding to Cormac McCarthy, Jane Austen to George Saunders, and Flannery O'Connor to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Prior explores some of the most compelling universal themes found in the pages of classic books, helping readers learn to love life, literature, and God through their encounters with great writing. The book includes end-of-chapter reflection questions geared toward book club discussions, original artwork throughout, and a foreword by Leland Ryken. The hardcover edition was named a Best Book of 2018 in Religion by Publishers Weekly. "[A] lively treatise on building character through books.'"--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Download or read book The Culture of Excess written by J. R. Slosar and published by . This book was released on 2009-10-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the 2008-2009 economic recession, this revealing work offers a psychological explanation of how we as a nation grapple with self-control and how we can develop a new and healthier generation. As J.R. Slosar shows in this urgent, sometimes startling volume, the nation's fast-and-loose approach to money was in fact a symptom of a more widespread pattern of excessive behavior. In The Culture of Excess: How America Lost Self-Control and Why We Need to Redefine Success, Slosar portrays an America where the drive to succeed and the fear of missing out manifested itself not only in self-entitled corporate fraud, but in everything from sharp rises in obesity and cosmetic medical procedures to equally troubling increases in eating disorders, panic attacks, and outbreaks of uncontrollable rage. The Culture of Excess is the first book to assess the impact of economic and social factors on the nation's psychological well-being. Narcissism, productive narcissism, psychopathy, rigidity and self destruction, perfectionism, the illusion of success, and identity achievement all come into play as Slosar diagnoses the psychological drivers behind this indulgent age, offering his prescription for helping Generation Me become Generation We. Numerous vignettes and case studies illustrate the major themes of the book Dozens of research citations at the end of each chapter An extensive bibliography referencing 75 professional journals and 48 books A comprehensive index
Download or read book Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead written by Olga Tokarczuk and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "A brilliant literary murder mystery." —Chicago Tribune "Extraordinary. Tokarczuk's novel is funny, vivid, dangerous, and disturbing, and it raises some fierce questions about human behavior. My sincere admiration for her brilliant work." —Annie Proulx In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . . A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?
Download or read book Desire and Excess written by Jonah Siegel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2000-08-20 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating look at the creative power of institutions, Jonah Siegel explores the rise of the modern idea of the artist in the nineteenth century, a period that also witnessed the emergence of the museum and the professional critic. Treating these developments as interrelated, he analyzes both visual material and literary texts to portray a culture in which art came to be thought of in powerful new ways. Ultimately, Siegel shows that artistic controversies commonly associated with the self-consciously radical movements of modernism and postmodernism have their roots in a dynamic era unfairly characterized as staid, self-satisfied, and stable. The nineteenth century has been called the Age of the Museum, and yet critics, art theorists, and poets during this period grappled with the question of whether the proliferation of museums might lead to the death of Art itself. Did the assembly and display of works of art help the viewer to understand them or did it numb the senses? How was the contemporary artist to respond to the vast storehouses of art from disparate nations and periods that came to proliferate in this era? Siegel presents a lively discussion of the shock experienced by neoclassical artists troubled by remains of antiquity that were trivial or even obscene, as well as the anxious aesthetic reveries of nineteenth-century art lovers overwhelmed by the quantity of objects quickly crowding museums and exhibition halls. In so doing, he illuminates the fruitful crises provoked when the longing for admired art is suddenly satisfied. Drawing upon neoclassical art and theory, biographies of early nineteenth-century writers including Keats and Scott, and the writings of art critics such as Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Wilde, this book reproduces a cultural matrix that brings to life the artistic passions and anxieties of an entire era.
Download or read book Liner Notes On Parents Children Exes Excess Decay A Few More Of My Favourite Things written by Loudon Wainwright III and published by Omnibus Press. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Liner Notes is, unsurprisingly, as good as its author’s songs, with moments of sharp humor alternating with real-life pain, and vivid reflections on love, death, and the whole damn thing. Loudon Wainwright is a true original: not like anyone else, just as he set out to be.’ Salman Rushdie In the late 1960s, Loudon Wainwright III established himself as a loner, deliberately standing outside the conventional. He recorded his first album in 1969, full of raw, angry poetry, but it was the 1972 novelty song ‘Dead Skunk’ that brought him popular recognition. Wainwright’s songs are as hilarious as they can be painful. In Liner Notes, he details the family history and fractured relationships that have informed him: the alcoholism, infidelities and competitiveness; the successes, joys and love. Wainwright writes poignantly about being a son, a parent, a brother and a grandfather while re-printing selections from his father’s columns and meditating upon family, inspiration and art. As plain-speaking on the page as in his songs, Wainwright lays everything bare in this heartfelt memoir of music and family. His lyrics adorn and inform the text, amplifying his prose and connecting his songs to the life he led. ‘He is unafraid and clear-eyed about the events of his life – and utterly engaging.’ Rosanne Cash ’Fans of the self-lacerating, painfully funny Wainwright III will find the memoir they want here’ Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book In Praise of Copying written by Marcus Boon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is devoted to a deceptively simple but original argument: that copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in. In spite of the laws, stigmas, and anxieties attached to it, the word “copying” permeates contemporary culture, shaping discourse on issues from hip hop to digitization to gender reassignment, and is particularly crucial in legal debates concerning intellectual property and copyright. Yet as a philosophical concept, copying remains poorly understood. Working comparatively across cultures and times, Marcus Boon undertakes an examination of what this word means—historically, culturally, philosophically—and why it fills us with fear and fascination. He argues that the dominant legal-political structures that define copying today obscure much broader processes of imitation that have constituted human communities for ages and continue to shape various subcultures today. Drawing on contemporary art, music and film, the history of aesthetics, critical theory, and Buddhist philosophy and practice, In Praise of Copying seeks to show how and why copying works, what the sources of its power are, and the political stakes of renegotiating the way we value copying in the age of globalization.
Download or read book Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature written by Joshua Scodel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised "golden means" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture. Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.
Download or read book Alternative Moons written by and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The moon has been a source of inspiration and imagination throughout human history. Laden with mythological and superstitious narratives, it has also been a source of speculative science fiction and surprisingly real facts. The first collaborative artists' book by Nadine Schlieper and Robert Pufleb offers a fantastical journey through a fictitious conceptualisation of the moon. With more than 40 photographic images of moons and cosmic landscapes, it presents an equal number of new discoveries and revelations. Join the space trip and discover formerly unseen images of mysterious moons from an unknown galaxy, as the dawn of reality is catching up behind the scenes.
Download or read book Love in the Time of Global Warming written by Francesca Lia Block and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a devastating earthquake destroys the West Coast, causing seventeen-year-old Penelope to lose her home, her parents, and her ten-year-old brother, she navigates a dark world, holding hope and love in her hands and refusing to be defeated.
Download or read book A Really Big Lunch written by Jim Harrison and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2017-03-24 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essay collection from “the Henry Miller of food writing” and New York Times–bestselling author of The Raw and the Cooked (The Wall Street Journal). Jim Harrison was beloved for his untamed prose and larger-than-life appetite. Collecting many of his most entertaining and inspired food pieces for the first time, A Really Big Lunch “brings him roaring to the page again in all his unapologetic immoderacy, with spicy bon mots and salty language augmented by family photographs” (NPR). From the titular New Yorker article about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to essays on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews, A Really Big Lunch is shot through with Harrison’s aperçus and delight in the pleasures of the senses. Between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades. Including articles that first appeared in Brick, Playboy, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, and more, as well as an introduction by Mario Batali, A Really Big Lunch offers “sage and succulent essays” for the literary gourmand (Shelf Awareness, starred review).
