Die Wise does not offer seven steps for coping with death. It does not suggest ways to make dying easier. It pours no honey to make the medicine go down. Instead, with lyrical prose, deep wisdom, and stories from his two decades of working with dying people and their families, Stephen Jenkinson places death at the center of the page and asks us to behold it in all its painful beauty. Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well. Die Wise is for those who will fail to live forever. Dying well, Jenkinson writes, is a right and responsibility of everyone. It is not a lifestyle option. It is a moral, political, and spiritual obligation each person owes their ancestors and their heirs. Die Wise dreams such a dream, and plots such an uprising. How we die, how we care for dying people, and how we carry our dead: this work makes our capacity for a village-mindedness, or breaks it. Table of Contents The Ordeal of a Managed Death Stealing Meaning from Dying The Tyrant Hope The Quality of Life Yes, But Not Like This The Work So Who Are the Dying to You? Dying Facing Home What Dying Asks of Us All Kids Ah, My Friend the Enemy
Manifesto for the Dead is a surreal noir that takes as its main character the master of noir, the late crime novelist Jim Thompson at the end of his career, suspecting he has been framed by a Hollywood producer for the murder of a young starlet. An intricate blend of biography, fiction, and suspense, this literary thriller offers a hair-raising portrait of one of crime fiction’s most notorious true-life figures—and a brutal satire of the entertainment industry in the tradition of The Day of the Locust. As the novel opens, the aging writer is at the end of his string—a habitué of Hollywood bars and endless drinking sessions at the Musso & Frank Grill. Here he is approached by a small-time producer, Billy Miracle, with an offer to work on a project designed to resurrect the career of a fading screen star. Thompson accepts, and soon finds himself at the center of a lurid triangle, inadvertently following a trail that leads from a dead starlet—found strangled in the back of a Cadillac—to the doorstep of one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Set in the seamy back streets of Los Angeles, in 1972, Manifesto for the Dead tells the story of legendary crime writer Jim Thompson in his darkest hour. It is a book about desire and lust, about a writer struggling with illusion, disillusion and fate on the back lots of Hollywood. But the Manifesto is also a novel-within-a-novel, telling two stories that intertwine—one set in Hollywood, the other in Thompson’s imagination—each rushing headlong into the other, into that area where fact and fiction are no longer distinguishable, and the darkness is inseparable from the light.
Sue Coe’s advocacy of animal rights is unmatched in its eloquence, forcefulness, and lasting impact. She does so with a combination of extraordinary images and few words. In her unstinting insistence on tolerance and love, Coe brings us to a life-affirming philosophy that values compassion over greed, community over self, and life over capital. In 115 black-and-white woodcut illustrations for The Animals’ Vegan Manifesto, Sue Coe unleashes an outraged cry for action that takes its rightful place alongside the other great manifestoes of history. As a prize-winning artist, she bears witness to unspeakable crimes, and has long advocated that we human beings must take more responsibility for ourselves, our fellow species, and the planet. Her illustrations, in the tradition of Goya, Kollwitz, and Grosz, will be familiar to many; her paintings, drawings and prints have been exhibited in galleries and museum around the world, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Julia Neuberger addresses the question of what life will actually be like for us as we get old, and suggests answers for making our later years as good as when we were young.
A complete guide for those making funeral arrangements with or without a funeral director. Families, friends, and support groups who want to say goodbye in a meaningful way-not just write a big check to a funeral director-will find detailed and practical legal information in this unique guide. By taking an active role in funeral and memorial arrangements, families can save thousands of dollars while better serving the emotional needs of loved ones. Caring for The Dead gives the legal requirements of each state, how to obtain and file permits and death certificates, explanations of cremation and embalming, burial procedures, and other necessary information. Readers learn how to shop for the best services at the most reasonable prices, while avoiding fraudulent and deceptive mortuary practices. This landmark book helps readers take control of one of life's most intimate experiences-the final act of love for a friend or relative.
Classic radical feminist statement from the woman who shot Andy Warhol “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Outrageous and violent, SCUM Manifesto was widely lambasted when it first appeared in 1968. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published the book just before she became a notorious household name and was confined to a mental institution. But for all its vitriol, it is impossible to dismiss as the mere rantings of a lesbian lunatic. In fact, the work has proved prescient, not only as a radical feminist analysis light years ahead of its time—predicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against underrepresentation in the arts—but also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman. In this edition, philosopher Avital Ronell’s introduction reconsiders the evocative exuberance of this infamous text.
The belief in the transformative potential of education has long underpinned critical educational theory. But its concerns have also been largely political and economic, using education as the means to achieve a better - or ideal - future state: of equality and social justice. Our concern is not whether such a state can be realized. Rather, the belief in the transformative potential of education leads us to start from the assumption of equality and to attend to what is "educational" about education. In Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy we set out five principles that call not for an education as a means to achieve a future state, but rather that make manifest those educational practices that do exist today and that we wish to defend. The Manifesto also acts as a provocation, as the starting point of a conversation about what this means for research, pedagogy, and our relation to our children, each other, and the world. Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy invites a shift from a critical pedagogy premised on revealing what is wrong with the world and using education to solve it, to an affirmative stance that acknowledges what is educational in our existing practices. It is focused on what we do and what we can do, if we approach education with love for the world and acknowledge that education is based on hope in the present, rather than on optimism for an eternally deferred future.
Further, Deeper, Weirder Explorations of Fringe Culture The second volume of this highly successful exploration of fringe culture delves into the worlds of fashion, UFOlogy, conspiracy theory and other milieux too numerous to mention and too good to be true (but they are).
"The recent 10,000 year history of climatic stability on Earth that enabled the rise of agriculture and domestication, the growth of cities, numerous technological revolutions, and the emergence of modernity is now over. We accept that in the latest phase of this era, modernity is unmaking the stability that enabled its emergence. Over the 21st century severe and numerous weather disasters, scarcity of key resources, major changes in environments, enormous rates of extinction, and other forces that threaten life are set to increase. But we are deeply worried that current responses to these challenges are focused on market-driven solutions and thus have the potential to further endanger our collective commons. Today public debate is polarized. On one hand we are confronted with the immobilizing effects of knowing "the facts" about climate change. On the other we see a powerful will to ignorance and the effects of a pernicious collaboration between climate change skeptics and industry stakeholders. Clearly, to us, the current crisis calls for new ways of thinking and producing knowledge. Our collective inclination has been to go on in an experimental and exploratory mode, in which we refuse to foreclose on options or jump too quickly to "solutions." In this spirit we feel the need to acknowledge the tragedy of anthropogenic climate change. It is important to tap into the emotional richness of grief about extinction and loss without getting stuck on the "blame game." Our research must allow for the expression of grief and mourning for what has been and is daily being lost. But it is important to adopt a reparative rather than a purely critical stance toward knowing. Might it be possible to welcome the pain of "knowing" if it led to different ways of working with non-human others, recognizing a confluence of desire across the human/non-human divide and the vital rhythms that animate the world? Our discussions have focused on new types of ecological economic thinking and ethical practices of living. We are interested in: Resituating humans within ecological systems Resituating non-humans in ethical terms Systems of survival that are resilient in the face of change Diversity and dynamism in ecologies and economies Ethical responsibility across space and time, between places and in the future Creating new ecological economic narratives. Starting from the recognition that there is no "one size fits all" response to climate change, we are concerned to develop an ethics of place that appreciates the specificity and richness of loss and potentiality. While connection to earth others might be an overarching goal, it will be to certain ecologies, species, atmospheres and materialities that we actually connect. We could see ourselves as part of country, accepting the responsibility not forgotten by Indigenous people all over the world, of "singing" country into health. This might mean cultivating the capacity for deep listening to each other, to the land, to other species and thereby learning to be affected and transformed by the body-world we are part of; seeing the body as a center of animation but not the ground of a separate self; renouncing the narcissistic defense of omnipotence and an equally narcissistic descent into despair. We think that we can work against singular and global representations of "the problem" in the face of which any small, multiple, place-based action is rendered hopeless. We can choose to read for difference rather than dominance; think connectivity rather than hyper-separation; look for multiplicity - multiple climate changes, multiple ways of living with earth others. We can find ways forward in what is already being done in the here and now; attend to the performative effects of any analysis; tell stories in a hopeful and open way - allowing for the possibility that life is dormant rather than dead. We can use our critical capacities to recover our rich traditions of counter-culture and theorize them outside the mainstream/alternative binary. All these ways of thinking and researching give rise to new strategies for going forward. Think of the chapters of this book as tentative hoverings, as the fluttering of butterfly wings, scattering germs of ideas that can take root and grow."--Publisher's website.
A landmark book, “brilliant, thoughtful” (The Atlantic) and “raw and gorgeous” (LA Times), that fast-forwards the discussion of the central artistic issues of our time, from the bestselling author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead. Who owns ideas? How clear is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction? Has the velocity of digital culture rendered traditional modes obsolete? Exploring these and related questions, Shields orchestrates a chorus of voices, past and present, to reframe debates about the veracity of memoir and the relevance of the novel. He argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality,” precisely because we experience hardly any, and urgently calls for new forms that embody and convey the fractured nature of contemporary experience.
