Animal Money

Animal Money

Author: Michael Cisco

Publisher: Lazy Fascist Press

Published: 2015-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781621052128

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A living form of money results in the unraveling of the world.


Unlanguage

Unlanguage

Author: Michael Cisco

Publisher: Eraserhead Press

Published: 2018-04

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9781621052661

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From Michael Cisco, one of the most innovative and subversive writers working today, comes the long-awaited, ground-breaking novel of a suicide survivor trying in vain to write himself back into existence. Unlanguage is the story of a man transformed by death and by language change. The language, once understood, transforms him, and transforms learning itself. One day, he looks down at the hand resting on his thigh and sees that it's just an ordinary hand. What had been composed of colored light made solid goes back to being meat and blood. His body reverts to the ordinary sloshing heaviness of a regular body. The exalted vision of his eyes becomes the filmy, blurred vision of the usual kind. He slumps back into his former self. Whirlwinds of shame close on him. With a violent, monkey-like energy he wracks his brains for a way back. Then it occurs to him, he can still write that language. He must write his way back. Told as a structural guide to impossible grammar, Michael Cisco's Unlanguage is a brilliant, thought-provoking novel that not only pushes the boundaries of literature but of language itself.


Text, Context and the Johannine Community

Text, Context and the Johannine Community

Author: David A. Lamb

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2014-04-24

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0567129667

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Text, Context and the Johannine Community adopts a new approach to the social context of the Johannine writings by drawing on modern sociolinguistic theory. Sociolinguistics emphasizes language as a social phenomenon, which can be analysed with reference not only to its broad context of culture, but also, through the use of register analysis, to its narrower context of situation. The Johannine writings have increasingly been seen as the product of a distinct Johannine Community, depicted by some scholars as a sectarian group, opposed both to wider Jewish society and to other Christian groups. This model has largely been constructed on historical-critical grounds, yet given our lack of reliable external information about the origin of the Johannine writings, a more fruitful approach may be to examine their lexico-grammatical and discourse features to determine what these imply about interpersonal relationships. This study compares selected 'narrative asides' from the Gospel of John with a passage section from 1 John and with the two shorter Johannine Epistles. It concludes that register analysis of these texts does not support the idea of a close-knit sectarian group.


The Gnostics

The Gnostics

Author: Jacques Lacarriere

Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers

Published: 2014-08-01

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 0720618029

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Gnostics have always sought to “know” rather than to accept dogma and doctrine, often to their peril. This inquiry into Gnosticism examines the character, history, and beliefs of a brave and vigorous spiritual quest that originated in the ancient Near East and continues into the present day.Lawrence Durrell writes, “This is a strange and original essay, more a work of literature than of scholarship, though its documentation is impeccable. It is as convincing a reconstruction of the way the Gnostics lived and thought as D.H. Lawrence’s intuitive recreation of the vanished Etruscans.”


Desperate Magic

Desperate Magic

Author: Valerie A. Kivelson

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2013-11-15

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 0801469376

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In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe in the same period. While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars' courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy.Broadly comparative and richly illustrated with color plates, Desperate Magic places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. Piecing together evidence from trial records to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history, Kivelson explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused. Assembled, they create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions, Kivelson addresses methodological and ideological questions about the Muscovite courts' equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated.Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world. Masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and officers and soldiers alike believed there should be limits to exploitation and saw magic deployed at the junctures where hierarchical order veered into violent excess.


The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature

The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature

Author: Christopher Slatsky

Publisher:

Published: 2020-01-28

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780578574189

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From the author of Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales comes this devastating collection of fifteen stories and essays. A father's desperate search for his missing child leads to a cosmic haunted realm. A woman returns to her childhood home to find a past preserved in a semblance of life. A young man and his canine companion find themselves in the heart of an occult government exercise deep within a Pacific Northwest forest. An elderly man is subject to mysterious experiments as he descends into dementia. And, in the title novella, a forensic anthropologist is called to the site of the mass suicide of an anti-natalist cult intent on communicating with Nature.


Polari - The Lost Language of Gay Men

Polari - The Lost Language of Gay Men

Author: Paul Baker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 113450635X

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Polari is a secret form of language mainly used by homosexual men in London and other cities during the twentieth century. Derived in part from the slang lexicons of numerous stigmatised and itinerant groups, Polari was also a means of socialising, acting out camp performances and reconstructing a shared gay identity and worldview among its speakers. This book examines the ways in which Polari was used in order to construct 'gay identities', linking its evolution to the changing status of gay men and lesbians in the UK over the past fifty years.


Antisocieties - Deluxe

Antisocieties - Deluxe

Author: Michael Cisco

Publisher:

Published: 2021-03-15

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 9781087929538

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ANTISOCIETIES is a collection of ten stories about isolation - what it does to people, and what isolated people do to each other and themselves. An ominously quiet town. A haunting young adult novel from the turn of the century. Two starving captives frozen in agony. A young boy from a doting family. A man in a cheap Halloween mask. A succession of portraits of people trapped in their own identities, some of whom insist on their own ideas because they would have nothing at all without them. People for whom being seen by another is terrifying. And, like any collection of portraits, ANTISOCIETIES is also a collection of speculative mirrors ...


The Victorian Underworld

The Victorian Underworld

Author: Kellow Chesney

Publisher:

Published: 1991-01

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 9780140139709

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Beneath the respectable surface of Victorian England lay a criminal world as diverse, turbulent and vicious as any. This begins by looking at that age and its penal methods and it then recreates the showmen, religious fakes, garrotters, pickpockets, prostitutes and magsmen who thronged the murky rookeries and lays of the cities.