Eat the Document

Eat the Document

Author: Dana Spiotta

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2006-02-21

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0743288998

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From the National Book Award nominated author of Innocents and Others and Wayward, a bold and moving novel that follows a fugitive radical from the 1970s who has lived in hiding for twenty-five years and explores themes of idealism, passion, sacrifice, and the cost of living a secret. In the heyday of the 1970s underground, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker—passionate, idealistic, and in love —organize a series of radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities, and never see each other again. Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her fifteen-year-old son, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother's generation. She has no idea where Bobby is, whether he is alive or dead. Shifting between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of those choices in the 1990s, Dana Spiotta deftly explores the connection between the two eras—their language, technology, music, and activism. Dana Spiotta, "wonderfully observant and wonderfully gifted...with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadness of contemporary life" (The New York Times), has written a character-driven, brilliant, and riveting portrait of two eras and a revelatory novel about the culture of rebellion, with particular resonance now.


Wayward

Wayward

Author: Dana Spiotta

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2022-06-21

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 059331249X

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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A “furious and addictive new novel” (The New York Times) about mothers and daughters, and one woman's midlife reckoning as she flees her suburban life. “Exhilarating ... reads like a burning fever dream. A virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad.” —The New York Times Book Review Samantha Raymond's life has begun to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two she finds herself staring into "the Mids"—that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation. When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life—and her family—as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter, in a country that is coming apart at the seams. Dana Spiotta's Wayward is a stunning novel about aging, about the female body, and about female complexity in contemporary America. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird times, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins.


Stone Arabia

Stone Arabia

Author: Dana Spiotta

Publisher: Canongate Books

Published: 2012-06-07

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 0857863754

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Growing up wild in the 1970s, Nik was always the artist, always in a band. His beloved sister Denise was his most passionate fan. But now Denise watches as Nik retreats into a strange and private world of his own creation, leaving her to navigate the real world on her own. When her daughter, Ada, decides to make a film of Nik's life and work, and tragedy strikes very close to home, Denise must try to make sense of what it means to be a sister, a daughter and a mother. Evocative, honest and fiercely original, Stone Arabia is about how we become the adults we are. It's a story of family, obsession, memory and the urge to create, no matter what.


Eat the Apple

Eat the Apple

Author: Matt Young

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2018-02-27

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1632869527

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"The Iliad of the Iraq war" (Tim Weiner)--a gut-wrenching, beautiful memoir of the consequences of war on the psyche of a young man. Eat the Apple is a daring, twisted, and darkly hilarious story of American youth and masculinity in an age of continuous war. Matt Young joined the Marine Corps at age eighteen after a drunken night culminating in wrapping his car around a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases charged with making him a Marine. Matt survived the training and then not one, not two, but three deployments to Iraq, where the testosterone, danger, and stakes for him and his fellow grunts were dialed up a dozen decibels. With its kaleidoscopic array of literary forms, from interior dialogues to infographics to prose passages that read like poetry, Young's narrative powerfully mirrors the multifaceted nature of his experience. Visceral, ironic, self-lacerating, and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the absurdism of 21st-century war, the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front lines, and the true, if often misguided, motivations that drove a young man to a life at war. Searing in its honesty, tender in its vulnerability, and brilliantly written, Eat the Apple is a modern war classic in the making and a powerful coming-of-age story that maps the insane geography of our times.


Bob Dylan on Film

Bob Dylan on Film

Author: Jonathan Hodgers

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-03

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0429997574

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In May 1967, during a discussion about his yet-to-be-released film Eat the Document, Bob Dylan cryptically remarked, ‘The film is finished. It’s different.’ It would not be the last time he could make this claim. Beyond his musical prowess, Dylan’s career encompasses a lesser-explored facet – that of a filmmaker creating works that defy convention. This book delves into these cinematic forays, unravelling the intriguing interplay of Dylan’s presence both behind and in front of the camera. Dylan’s cinematic experiments, ranging from the ground-breaking Dont Look Back (1967) to the enigmatic Masked and Anonymous (2003), stand as unique and thought-provoking additions to his artistic legacy. Unveiling an experimental and inquisitive sensibility, these films draw inspiration not only from cinematic predecessors but also from Dylan’s songcraft. Often residing in the periphery of Dylan studies, a closer examination of his cinematic oeuvre reveals an underrated auteur who fearlessly transcends the boundaries of the page, stage, and screen.


D.A. Pennebaker

D.A. Pennebaker

Author: Keith Beattie

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2011-10-15

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 025209364X

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This volume is the first book-length study of the extensive career and prolific works of D.A. Pennebaker, one of the pioneers of direct cinema, a documentary form that emphasizes observation and a straightforward portrayal of events. With a career spanning decades, Pennebaker's many projects have included avant-garde experiments (Daybreak Express), ground-breaking television documentaries (Primary), celebrity films (Dont Look Back), concert films (Monterey Pop), and innovative fusions of documentary and fiction (Maidstone). Exploring the concept of "performing the real," Keith Beattie interprets Pennebaker's films as performances in which the act of filming is in itself a performative transgression of the norms of purely observational documentary. He examines the ways in which Pennebaker's presentation of unscripted everyday performances is informed by connections between documentary filmmaking and other experimental movements such as the New American Cinema. Through his collaborations with such various artists as Richard Leacock, Shirley Clarke, Norman Mailer, and Jean-Luc Godard, Pennebaker has continually reworked and redefined the forms of documentary filmmaking. This book also includes a recent interview with the director and a full filmography.


Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel

Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel

Author: P. Vermeulen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-01-06

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1137414537

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This book explores the paradoxical productivity of the idea of the end of the novel in contemporary fiction. It shows how this idea allows some of our most significant twenty-first century writers to re-imagine the ethics and politics of literature and to figure intractable forms of life and affect.


Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan

Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan

Author: David Dalton

Publisher: Omnibus Press

Published: 2012-06-01

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0857127799

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Bestselling author David Dalton goes in seach of the real Bob Dylan in an electrifying biography that puts all the others in the shade. As an artist Bob Dylan has been a major force for half a century. As a musical influence he is without equal. Yet as a man he has always acted like an outlaw on the run, constantly seeking to cover his tracks by confounding investigators with a dizzying array of aliases, impersonations, tall tales and downright lies. David Dalton presents Dylan's extraordinary life in such a way that his subject's techniques for hiding in full sight are gradually exposed for what they are, Despite the changing images, the spiritual body swerves, the manipulative nature and the occasionally baffling lurches between making sublime music and self-indulgent whimsy, the real Bob Dylan has never been more visible. Among the eyewitnesses cited are Marianne Faithful, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Larry 'Ratso' Sloman, Nat Hentoff, Suze Rotolo and many more. Yet in the end it is Dalton's impressive ability to find revealing patterns in Dylan's multiple disguises that reveals more than we ever expected to learn about the real man behind the Dylan legend.


I'm Not There

I'm Not There

Author: Noah Tsika

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2023-11-14

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1477328394

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An examination of director Todd Haynes and his Bob Dylan biopic. As the first and only Bob Dylan “biopic,” I’m Not There caused a stir when released in 2007. Offering a surreal retelling of moments from Dylan’s life and career, the film is perhaps best known for its distinctive approach to casting, including Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin, a Black child actor, as versions of Dylan though none of the characters bear his name. Greenlit by Bob Dylan himself, the film uses Dylan’s music as a score, a triumph for famed queer filmmaker Todd Haynes after encountering issues with copyright in previous projects. Noah Tsika eloquently characterizes all the ways that Dylan and Haynes harmonize in their methods and sensibilities, interpreting the rule-breaking film as a biography that refuses chronology, disdains factual accuracy, flirts with libel, and cannibalizes Western cinema. Fitting the film’s inspiration, creation, and reception alongside its continuing afterlife, Tsika examines Dylan’s music in the film through the context of intellectual property, raising questions about who owns artistic material and artistic identities and how such material can be reused and repurposed. Tsika’s adventurous analysis touches on gender, race, queerness, celebrity, popular culture, and the law, while offering much to Haynes and Dylan fans alike.


Music Films

Music Films

Author: Neil Fox

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-05-16

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1839023457

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In Music Films, Neil Fox considers a broad range of music documentaries, delving into their cinematic style, political undertones, racial dynamics, and gender representations, in order to assess their role in the cultivation of myth. Combining historical and critical analyses, and drawing on film and music criticism, Fox examines renowned music films such as A Hard Day's Night (1964), Dig! (2004), and Amazing Grace (2006), critically lauded works like Milford Graves Full Mantis (2018) and Mistaken for Strangers (2013), and lesser-studied films including Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959) and Ornette: Made in America (1985). In doing so, he offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, situating these films within their wider cultural contexts and highlighting their formal and thematic innovations. Discussions in the book span topics from concert filmmaking to music production, the music industry, touring, and filmic representations of authenticity and truth. Overall, Music Films traces the evolution of the genre, highlighting its cultural significance and connection to broader societal phenomena.