In Mike Corrao's instant cult-classic GUT TEXT, the reader observes the text caught in the physical objectness of a book as it slowly becomes a living organism: self-conscious, feeling pain, fear, and desire. RITUALS PERFORMED IN THE ABSENCE OF GANYMEDE takes the text beyond the physical, where the reader and text enter the search for a body that can contain you both.
You are holding a living organism. Gut Text feels fear, pain, and desire. Within, you will follow four distinct personas as they form on the page, each seeking to transcend the limitations of their existence as they speak to you directly. In his newest release, Mike Corrao has created a challenging and unsettling exploration of identity, and the ways we see it manifest in the physical world. Each persona carries with it a similar desire, but a different means of striving towards it. Slowly, the text begins to move, begins to change, correct its mistakes, and adjust to its restrictive ontology. Gut Text is not only alive, it is growing and learning. Witness the text creating itself, a parthenogenetic conception.
PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY is not a work of philosophy in an academic or traditional sense. It is, however, highly philosophical, totemic, and personal. In the book, Evan uses the sky as an abstract philosophical concept, like a cinematic backdrop, to explore conceptual associations between selfhood, objecthood, the body, apocalypticism, masculinity, masturbation, and self-destruction. The text, symbol, and glyph are partially augmented by chance cut-up processes such as language translators, Markov chain generators, and AI natural language generators for the purpose of eliminating narrative preconception, discovering subconscious visual realms, and spotlighting a point of tension between natural and artificial aesthetic forms. The formatting of text becomes an important cinematographic framing tool.
Two patrons appear in a dim cafe one day. How they've arrived, where they've come from, and why they're there at all, they have no idea. What they do know is that they hate one another. Mike Corrao has with Man, Oh Man masterly crafted a humorous yet insightful experiment that'll have you questioning how you've always approached novels.
The Five Continents of Theatre undertakes the exploration of the material culture of the actor, which involves the actors’ pragmatic relations and technical functionality, their behaviour, the norms and conventions that interact with those of the audience and the society in which actors and spectators equally take part. The material culture of the actor is organised around body-mind techniques (see A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology by the same authors) and auxiliary techniques whose variety concern: ■ the diverse circumstances that generate theatre performances: festive or civil occasions, celebrations of power, popular feasts such as carnival, calendar recurrences such as New Year, spring and summer festivals; ■ the financial and organisational aspects: costs, contracts, salaries, impresarios, tickets, subscriptions, tours; ■ the information to be provided to the public: announcements, posters, advertising, parades; ■ the spaces for the performance and those for the spectators: performing spaces in every possible sense of the term; ■ sets, lighting, sound, makeup, costumes, props; ■ the relations established between actor and spectator; ■ the means of transport adopted by actors and even by spectators. Auxiliary techniques repeat themselves not only throughout different historical periods, but also across all theatrical traditions. Interacting dialectically in the stratification of practices, they respond to basic needs that are common to all traditions when a performance has to be created and staged. A comparative overview of auxiliary techniques shows that the material culture of the actor, with its diverse processes, forms and styles, stems from the way in which actors respond to those same practical needs. The authors’ research for this aspect of theatre anthropology was based on examination of practices, texts and of 1400 images, chosen as exemplars.
Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike.
Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Philosophy. "There is no need to place your hand on a wound to feel it throbbing in pain. There is no need to see its root to know that a tree is dying. I am renouncing history. A film frame has lost its meaning. Vain and cruel, I have become a self that contains all negations to come, I have escaped the universe of time and space--page after page, touch after touch, train after train. I have become the idea of a sea beast moving in the deep. I have become the labyrinth. I am entombed in poetry. In the first stanza, in the last, in the blueness of thirsting ink--in the bruising of eternity. I have become alone. I am alone."--Christina Tudor-Sideri
