âWithout hope, a dream is a wretched curse that only fools endeavor.â  Mrs. Devlinâs son, Roderick, is expelled from the parishâs only school, one run by a deliciously wicked Mother Superior.Mrs. Devlin sees his re-admission as both his ticket out of the inevitable village tedium and as proof that she is worthy ofâ¦something, finally.Sheâll stop at nothing to see him schooled, quickly realizing sex and subversion are tools not only the Church can wield with knife-edge precision. âRory dâEon writes a sensual tale of a motherâs boundless ambition. His lyrical prose captivates as well as compels.â Sylvia McNicoll, author of Last Chance for Paris
Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw its way back from obsolescence. New cassette labels emerge from hipster enclaves while the cassette’s likeness pops up on T-shirts, coffee mugs, belt buckles, and cell phone cases. In Unspooled, Rob Drew traces how a lowly, hissy format that began life in office dictation machines and cheap portable players came to be regarded as a token of intimate expression through music and a source of cultural capital. Drawing on sources ranging from obscure music zines to transcripts of Congressional hearings, Drew examines a moment in the early 1980s when music industry representatives argued that the cassette encouraged piracy. At the same time, 1980s indie rock culture used the cassette as a symbol to define itself as an outsider community. Indie’s love affair with the cassette culminated in the mixtape, which advanced indie’s image as a gift economy. By telling the cassette’s long and winding history, Drew demonstrates that sharing cassettes became an acceptable and meaningful mode of communication that initiated rituals of independent music recording, re-recording, and gifting.
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is among the most widely read books in the world. For more than 50 years, it has been regarded as a morality tale for the possible future of modern society, a future involving nothing less than extinction of humanity itself. Does Nineteen Eighty-Four remain relevant in our new century? The editors of this book assembled a distinguished group of philosophers, literary specialists, political commentators, historians, and lawyers and asked them to take a wide-ranging and uninhibited look at that question. The editors deliberately avoided Orwell scholars in an effort to call forth a fresh and diverse range of responses to the major work of one of the most durable literary figures among twentieth-century English writers. As Nineteen Eighty-Four protagonist Winston Smith has admirers on the right, in the center, and on the left, the contributors similarly represent a wide range of political, literary, and moral viewpoints. The Cold War that has so often been linked to Orwell's novel ended with more of a whimper than a bang, but most of the issues of concern to him remain alive in some form today: censorship, scientific surveillance, power worship, the autonomy of art, the meaning of democracy, relations between men and women, and many others. The contributors bring a variety of insightful and contemporary perspectives to bear on these questions.
"Having undergone profound material, aesthetic, and institutional transformations since the arrival of digital technologies, photography and film frequently intersect in the processes of convergence (the shared technological basis of diverse media in digital code) and remediation (the mutual reshaping of old and new media). However, the foundational relations between film and photography have a long history extending well back into the nineteenth century. This history includes many acclaimed practitioners who have worked in both media, such as Albert Kahn, Helen Levitt, Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Robert Frank, Wim Wenders, Abbas Kiarostami, and Fiona Tan, but it also involves a range of intermedial forms that combine elements of both media, such as the film still, the film photonovel, and the photofilm. These hybrid forms were long neglected critically because they were considered marginal forms of paratextuality or deviations from medium specificity-the idea that a medium must be deployed according to its own specific capacities compared to other media"--
This book comes from the 2008 Summer Retreat held in Joshua Tree, and includes the 3 days of talks given by Mark Griffin there, as well as three talks in the following weekly meetings that dealt with the aftermath and continuing effects of the Summer Retreat. It also includes the following Intensive given by Mark in July, when he continued the theme of coming into one's own power: "What Is Here Is Everywhere". The principle themes of this book deal not only with what is Spiritual Power, but also what it means to one's own sadhana - their spiritual evolution - to attain power, and be granted access to pure power. How do we come into our own power? What are the psychological issues we must face to do this? What is the importance of addressing the dark side of our psyche, and what stands in the way of our ability to do so? What is it like to meditate in the heart of one of the earth's power vortices? As Mark Griffin says: "Power is possibility. All possibilities are related to the presence or absence of power. There’s different kinds of power. There is the power of the City, which is social power, higher and lower classes, economic power, having a lot or having a little. That’s one kind of power. There’s also a kind of power that is just sheer force. Sometimes it’s quiescent, sometimes it’s wrathful and swift. We will be studying the unseen power of spirit. It is the true power. It is awesome. It is terrifying. And it is exact. When you get involved with power, everything that you bring to the situation is manifest. You come to understand who and what you truly are. This is why it’s a little bit dangerous, and why you want to have as much training as possible when you come in to more and more access with power. There are deep challenges to attracting, gaining, storing and integrating power. This is what spiritual training is about, and this is the basis of our work." This is available now as a 5.5" x 8.5" perfect-bound edition, 228 pages in length, ISBN 978-0-975902-09-7228
Mead’s fifth collection candidly and openly explores the long process that is death. These resonant poems discover what it means to live, die, and come home again. We’re drawn in by sorrow and grief, but also the joys of celebrating a long life and how simple it is to find laughter and light in the quietest and darkest of moments.
A new theatrical provocation by Alice Birch, co-commissioned by NT Connections and theatre company Clean Break. [BLANK] is no traditional play, it's a series of sixty scenes - some of which may feel connected, others less so - about adults and children impacted by the criminal justice system. It's about what life is like when adults feel absent from it. But it can be about whatever you like - readers and performers can choose as many or as few scenes in order to construct their own narratives.
