A Distant City
A Distant City

Author: Chiara Frugoni

Publisher:

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9780691040837

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In a remarkable synthesis of iconography and social history, Chiara Frugoni addresses the changing concept of the city as revealed in visual and literary images throughout medieval Europe. By exploring the sentiments expressed through the image of the city, she traces how notions of civic identity became fused in the consciousness of the people and in the daily flow of their lives. An examination of cities depicted in early medieval illustrations suggests a widespread feeling of insecurity, often conveyed through networks of bare walls marking the boundary between order and chaos. Analyzing chronicles and other historical texts, Frugoni shows that the strong relationship between cities and their bishops led to a consciousness of the city as a meeting place rather than simply a place to live under protection. As the religious and protective roles of the city diminished during the high Middle Ages and early Italian Renaissance, a secular ideology emerged, finding its expression, for example, in the Lorenzetti fresco in Siena, a political manifesto offering a reassuring view of Good Government in the city.

Overnight to Many Distant Cities
Overnight to Many Distant Cities

Author: Donald Barthelme

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13:

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" ... Donald Barthelme's new collection ... takes us from New York to Tokyo to Copenhagen to Barcelona to Paris to the Radiant City of Le Corbusier, balancing twelve of his widely celebrated short stories against an equal number of brief visionary texts, new in his work, that provide a lovely, haunting counterpoint"--From dust jacket.

How Distant the City
How Distant the City

Author: Freesia McKee

Publisher:

Published: 2017-11-18

Total Pages: 44

ISBN-13: 9780998761022

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*Finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize The poems themselves are archives, of the body, of place, of the body's gestures and movings through the city of these poems. The images are electric with worry and wonder, memory and possibility, and through it all, love. -Natalie Diaz, judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize "What does courage mean anymore?" asks the speaker in Freesia McKee's How Distant the City, a question that pulses through the nuanced body of this book to its profound extremities. "She would fly home more, but TSA never knows who to get to do the pat-down," comes one moment of revelation. "You realized your pain isn't the only pain/ worth knowing," comes another. How Distant the City is a courageous and arresting debut. -Julie Marie Wade, author of When I Was Straight and SIX: Poems Freesia McKee's How Distant the City is a city of questions, asking us to account for how we pay attention to our small wild moments in a time made strange by war. This poet pushes us to keep circling around what most would pass by to mark our stains on each page, to turn our ears to notice who has gone by and who has gone missing. -Ching-In Chen, author of The Heart's Traffic and recombinant Freesia McKee's debut chapbook, How Distant the City, illuminates geographical, emotional and psychic spaces to expose the alienation and displacement we create when we substitute apathy and avoidance for empathy and connection. This collection shines most brilliantly in poems that connect the quotidian to the remarkable, traversing with linguistic adroitness through representations of loss, rape, racial injustice, murder and commonplace acts such as getting a haircut or setting a Thanksgiving table. In the juxtaposition of everyday acts to acts of terror, McKee draws attention to the dialectics of the self's most private desires, struggles and traumas with those of the displaced and terrorized "others" in our villages, in our hearts, in our local and national news, and in our global community. McKee boldly makes connections across differences with a poetic fluency that is vibrant, honest, inspiring and chock-full of integrity. -Donna Aza Weir-Soley, author of First Rain, Eroticism, Spirituality and Resistance in Black Women's Writings, The Woman Who Knew and co-editor of Caribbean Erotic.

Close Up at a Distance
Close Up at a Distance

Author: Laura Kurgan

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-03-26

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1935408283

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Maps poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography trace a profound shift in our understanding and experience of space. The maps in this book are drawn with satellites, assembled with pixels radioed from outer space, and constructed from statistics; they record situations of intense conflict and express fundamental transformations in our ways of seeing and of experiencing space. These maps are built with Global Positioning Systems (GPS), remote sensing satellites, or Geographic Information Systems (GIS): digital spatial hardware and software designed for such military and governmental uses as reconnaissance, secrecy, monitoring, ballistics, the census, and national security. Rather than shying away from the politics and complexities of their intended uses, in Close Up at a Distance Laura Kurgan attempts to illuminate them. Poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography, her analysis uncovers the implicit biases of the new views, the means of recording information they present, and the new spaces they have opened up. Her presentation of these maps reclaims, repurposes, and discovers new and even inadvertent uses for them, including documentary, memorial, preservation, interpretation, political, or simply aesthetic. GPS has been available to both civilians and the military since 1991; the World Wide Web democratized the distribution of data in 1992; Google Earth has captured global bird's-eye views since 2005. Technology has brought about a revolutionary shift in our ability to navigate, inhabit, and define the spatial realm. The traces of interactions, both physical and virtual, charted by the maps in Close Up at a Distance define this shift.

The Distant Glow
The Distant Glow

Author: Terry I. Sarigumba

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2014-02-14

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 1491844523

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As an autobiography, The Distant Glow traces the story of my life to the rough and rigorous way of life in Corella, Bohol my birthplace. Descending from generations of very poor and illiterate ancestors, I exceeded my parents grade three education by finishing grade six and graduating as elementary school valedictorian. Because my parents could not afford to send me to high school in the city, I stayed out of school for six years, helping my father on the farm and my mother in household chores. One of several backbreaking works I used to do was climbing several coconut trees, about 50 feet in height, to tap the trees (sanggutan) for tuba, a coconut juice that yields mildly alcoholic drink. I used to climb 20 coconut trees every morning, noon and evening, mount over top, sit on one of the palms and tap the juice. One evening after sunset, while atop the sanggutan, I saw a glow, a distant glow. I muttered to myself: Someday, Ill find out what causes that glow. I equated that statement to my goals in life. I did find out what caused the distant glow. Other distant glows appeared and I reached most of them with hard work and having a dream. When the owners of a private school offered me an opportunity to go to their school free of tuition, provided that I maintained the first place standing in the class honor roll, I went to high school, starting at age 20. To help shoulder the other costs of going to high school in the city, I paid my room and board with service: scrubbing and polishing the floor, fetching water from an artesian well and gathering firewood every weekend for the landlord family. With all the hardship, I maintained the tuition-free deal and graduated from high school as class valedictorian.

A Distant Mirror
A Distant Mirror

Author: Barbara W. Tuchman

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 1987-07-12

Total Pages: 738

ISBN-13: 0345349571

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A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary