"A Life of Olson & a Sequence of Glyphs is equal parts oracular biography and ocular surfeit, as if Ed Sanders' lines of bios ("life") were translating from a dead language into life his hand-drawn graphia ("to record by lines drawn"). Olson has never ceased calling the poet to see for oneself-and Sanders lets us see Olson for ourselves, through his almost tactile trove of glyphs, documents, and data clusters. This is a method familiar to readers of Sanders' recent illustrated biography of RFK and admirers of classics like 1968"--
A nail-biting tale of survival and brotherhood atop one of the world's most dangerous mountains. This fast-paced, three-part narrative takes readers on three expeditions over 15 years to K2, one of the deadliest mountains on Earth. Roped together, these teams of men face perilously high altitudes and battering storms in hopes of reaching the summit. As each expedition sets out, they carve new paths along icy slopes and unforgiving rock, creating camps on ledges so narrow they fear turning over in their sleep. But disaster strikes -- in 1939, four men never make it down the mountain. Fourteen years later, a man develops blood clots in his legs at 25,000 feet, leaving his team with no safe path off the mountain. Filled with displays of incredible strength and heart-stopping danger, Into the Clouds tells the incredible stories of the men whose quest to conquer a mountain became a battle to survive the descent.
LIFE IS A RIP OFF: THE COMPLETE BOOK is 404 pages and 12 months of record reviews--one record a day, every day, for one year. Yes, John "Inzane" Olson aka Inzane Johnny of Wolf Eyes aka American Tapes did that. And he reviewed everything from death metal demo cassettes to the Staples Singers' gospel. Enter into the OLZONE and find out about music you've never known, bands from places that you've never heard, and then read his review of classic rock cornerstones such as KANSAS. Reading LRIP will make you re-realize why blues is relevant, why every punk band in America matters, why jazz is good for the heart, and metal will always ride by your side. "To write music op-ed this good, you have to tap the primordial sap sack, to butterfly stroke the ancient ooze of tune begatment, cave dwell with the knuckle draggers, scratch symbols into the dirt with the freaks and make it rain. He do and it did."--Henry Rollins "[Life is a Rip Off] is the best way [John Olson] can add another cubist layer to the sound and visuality he's already presented for the last twenty or so years. He's sharing something the people who don't know him personally don't get enough of--his textual, syntactical brain, stained as it is with dollar-store spray paint."-- Ben Hell Hall, Detroit artist. "When John agreed to write a record review a day, back in 20xx, I wasn't too keen on the idea. Not because I didn't think he could do it - but that I knew he would do it, even if it became a years-long all-encompassing obsessive task."--Tovah Olson, The Dead Machines. "[John Olson] didn't just introduce me to different worlds, the man introduced me to entire universes."--Bryan Ramirez, Killertrees Records
An incandescent biography of the inventor of "projective" verse, this comprehensive portrait distinguishes the convivial, bluff public figure from the tormented inner man. A lapsed Catholic, Olson (1910-1970) turned to Sumerian myths, Mayan legends and Islamic mysticism for cosmic insights that would inform poems of cyclic sweep. Torn by contradictory feelings toward his proud, stern father—a Swedish immigrant postman in Worcester, Mass.—the poet found a father-figure in mentor Edward Dahlberg and later in Ezra Pound. Reclusive self-absorption sapped his two common law marriages; he harbored enormous guilt over his neglect of his two children and over second wife Betty Kaiser's death (in a car accident), which may have been self-inflicted during a severe depression. Clark, author of books on Kerouac, Celine and Ted Berrigan, reveals that Olson grappled with homosexual impulses, took hallucinogens and dominated those around him, seeking periodic release from inner demons in frenzied floods of images.
Covering the fundamentals of stochastic processes, this title includes the basics of Poisson processes, Markov chains, branching processes, martingales, and diffusion processes. It presents a unique blend of theory and applications, with special emphasis on mathematical modelling, computational techniques and examples from the biological sciences. It is appropriate for students in applied mathematics, biostatistics, computational biology, computer science, physics, and statistics.
Maud (English, Simon Fraser U.) offers a narrative account of the life and work of poet Charles Olson, focusing on the poet's lifelong reading material as a basis for understanding his work. Drawing on an annotated listing of his library, as well as his childhood books and poetry by his contemporaries, he links the books to the poet's intellectual and poetic development at each stage of his career. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This volume situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970) at the centre of the early post-war American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson's work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson's published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early post-war American modernism. The development of Olson's work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage, Charles Olson and American Modernism offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of post-war American modernism.
“Staying Open, Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences” investigates the inter-disciplinary influences on the work of the mid-Century American poet, Charles Olson. This edited collection of essays covers Olson’s diverse non-literary interests, including his engagement with the music of John Cage and Pierre Boulez, his interests in abstract expressionism, and his readings of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The essays also examine Olson’s pedagogy, which he developed in the experimental environment at Black Mountain College, as well as his six-month archeological journey through the Yucatan Peninsula in 1950 to explore the culture of the Maya. This book will, therefore, be a strong research aid to scholars working in diverse fields – music, archeology, pedagogy, philosophy, art, and psychology – as it outlines methods for close inter-disciplinary work that can uncover the mechanics of Olson’s creative, literary processes. Building on the straightforward scholarship of George Butterick, whose Guide to the Maximus Poems remains indispensable for readers of Olson’s work, the essays in this volume will also guide readers through the thick allusions within The Maximus Poems itself. New interest in the wide-ranging and non-literary nature of Olson’s thought in several recent academic works makes this book both timely and necessary. Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After by Peter Middleton as well as Contemporary Olson edited by David Herd have started the process of uncovering the extent to which Olson’s inter-disciplinary interests inflected his poetic compositions. “Staying Open” extends the preliminary investigations of Olson’s non-literary sources in those volumes by bringing together a community of scholars working across disciplines and within a wide variety of humanistic concerns.
Charles Olson was an important force behind the raucous, explicit, jaunty style of much of twentieth-century poetry in America. This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of his life and work. Paul Christensen draws upon a wide variety of source materials—from letters, unpublished essays, and fragments and sketches from the Olson Archives to the full range of Olson's published prose and poetry. Under Christensen's critical examination, Olson emerges as a stunning theorist and poet, whose erratic and often unfinished writings obscured his provocative intellect and the coherence of his perspective on the arts. Soon after World War II, Olson emerged as one of America's leading poets with his revolutionary document on poetics, "Projective Verse," and his now-classic poem, "The Kingfishers," both of which declared a new set of techniques for verse composition. Throughout the 1950s Olson wrote many polemical essays on literature, history, aesthetics, and philosophy that outlined a new stance to experience he called objectism. A firm advocate of spontaneous self-expression in the arts, Olson regarded the poet's return to an intense declaration of individuality as a force to combat the decade's insistence on conformity. Throughout his life Olson fought against the depersonalization of the artist in the modern age; his resources, raw verve and unedited tumultuous lyricism, were weapons he used against generalized life and identity. This volume begins with an overview of Olson's life from his early years as a student at Harvard through his short-lived political career, his rectorship at Black Mountain College, and his retirement to Gloucester to finish writing the Maximus poems. Christensen provides a systematic review of Olson's prose works, including a close examination of his brilliant monograph on Melville, Call Me Ishmael. Considerable attention is devoted to Olson's theory of projectivism, the themes and techniques of his short poems, and the strategies and content of his major work, the Maximus series. In addition, there is a critical survey of the works of Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and other poets who show Olson's influence in their own innovative, self-exploratory poetry.
