A richly imagined novel based on the life of artist Agnes Pelton, whose life tracks the early days of modernism in America. Born into a family ruined by scandal, Agnes becomes part of the lively New York art scene, finding early success in the famous Armory Show of 1913. Fame seems inevitable, but Agnes is burdened by shyness and instead retreats to a contemplative life, first to a Long Island windmill, and then to the California desert. Undefeated by her history—family ruination in the Beecher-Tilton scandal, a shrouded Brooklyn childhood, and a passionate attachment to another woman—she follows her muse to create more than a hundred luminous and deeply spiritual abstract paintings.
A richly imagined novel based on the life of artist Agnes Pelton, whose life tracks the early days of modernism in America. Born into a family ruined by scandal, Agnes becomes part of the lively New York art scene, finding early success in the famous Armory Show of 1913. Fame seems inevitable, but Agnes is burdened by shyness and instead retreats to a contemplative life, first to a Long Island windmill, and then to the California desert. Undefeated by her history—family ruination in the Beecher-Tilton scandal, a shrouded Brooklyn childhood, and a passionate attachment to another woman—she follows her muse to create more than a hundred luminous and deeply spiritual abstract paintings.
Much has been written about Leonard Bernstein, a musician of extraordinary talent who was legendary for his passionate love of life and many relationships. In this work, Mari Yoshihara reveals the deeply emotional connections Bernstein formed with two little-known Japanese individuals, which she narrates through their personal letters that have never been seen before. Dearest Lenny interweaves an intimate story of love and art with a history of Bernstein's transformation from an American icon to a world maestro during the second half of the twentieth century. The articulate, moving letters of Kazuko Amano--a woman who began writing fan letters to Bernstein in 1947 and became a close family friend--and Kunihiko Hashimoto--a young man who fell in love with the maestro in 1979 and later became his business representative--convey the meaning Bernstein and his music had at various stages of their lives. The letters also shed light on how Bernstein's compositions, recordings, and performances touched his audiences around the world. The book further traces the making of a global Bernstein amidst the shifting landscape of classical music that made this American celebrity turn increasingly to Europe and Japan. The dramatic change in Japan's place in the world and its relationship to the United States during the postwar decades shaped Bernstein's connection to the country. Ultimately, Dearest Lenny is a story of relationships--between the two individuals and Bernstein, the United States and the world, art and commerce, artists and the state, private and public, conventions and transgressions, dreams and realities--that were at the core of Bernstein's greatest achievements and challenges and that made him truly a maestro of the world. Dearest Lenny paints a poignant portrait of individuals connected across cultures, languages, age, and status through correspondence and music--and the world that shaped their relationships.
King John of England’s defeat by the French in 1204 led to the territorial fragmentation of the Duchy of Normandy. Henceforth, the Norman mainland, allied to France, and the Channel Islands, allied to England, would find themselves on different sides of an ever-widening linguistic gulf. In Variation and Change in Mainland and Insular Norman, Mari C. Jones examines the way in which contact between the Norman dialect and its two typologically different superstrates (French and English) provides optimal conditions to study the linguistic mechanisms of ‘dialect contact’ and ‘language contact’. Through the analysis of extensive and original phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical data, set in their historical and sociolinguistic contexts, this fascinating study explores how advergence with its superstrates has led Norman to diverge linguistically within these territories.
Mari Ruti combines theoretical reflection, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to analyze the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Proceeding from a playful engagement with Freud’s idea of penis envy, Ruti’s autotheoretical commentary fans out to a broader consideration of neoliberal pragmatism. She focuses on the emphasis on good performance, high productivity, constant self-improvement, and relentless cheerfulness that characterizes present-day Western society. Revealing the treacherousness of our fantasies of the good life, particularly the idea that our efforts will eventually be rewarded—that things will eventually get better—Ruti demystifies the false hope that often causes us to tolerate an unbearable present. Theoretically rigorous and lucidly written, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings is a trenchant critique of contemporary gender relations. Refuting the idea that we live in a postfeminist world where gender inequalities have been transcended, Ruti describes how neoliberal heteropatriarchy has transformed itself in subtle and stealthy, and therefore all the more insidious, ways. Mobilizing Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Jacques Lacan’s account of desire, and Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, she analyzes the rationalization of intimacy, the persistence of gender stereotypes, and the pornification of heterosexual culture. Ruti shines a spotlight on the depression, anxiety, frustration, and disenchantment that frequently lie beneath our society’s sugarcoated mythologies of self-fulfillment, romantic satisfaction, and professional success, speaking to all who are concerned about the emotional costs of the pressure-cooker ethos of our age.
An intimate look at the afterlife of lynching through the personal stories of Black victims and survivors who lived through and beyond its trauma Mari N. Crabtree traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. She unearths how African American victims and survivors found ways to live through and beyond the horrors of lynching, offering a theory of African American collective trauma and memory rooted in the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility—a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain. Black southerners often shielded their loved ones from the most painful memories of local lynchings with strategic silences but also told lynching stories about vengeful ghosts or a wrathful God or the deathbed confessions of a lyncher tormented by his past. They protested lynching and its legacies through art and activism, and they mourned those lost to a mob’s fury. They infused a blues element into their lynching narratives to confront traumatic memories and keep the blues at bay, even if just for a spell. Telling their stories troubles the simplistic binary of resistance or submission that has tended to dominate narratives of Black life and reminds us that amid the utter devastation of lynching were glimmers of hope and an affirmation of life.
High economic growth and relatively equitable distribution were among the most conspicuous characteristics of the postwar Japanese political economy. The lure of the Japanese model, however, has faded since the 1990s. Growth is in short supply and equality a thing of the past. In Welfare through Work, Mari Miura looks in depth at Japan's social protection system as a factor in the contemporary malaise of the Japanese political economy. The Japanese social protection system should be understood as a system of "welfare through work," Miura suggests, because employment protection has functionally substituted for income maintenance. A gendered dual system in the labor market allowed a high degree of labor market flexibility, which enabled Japan to achieve high employment rates as well as strong legal protections for regular workers. In recent years, conservatives gradually replaced the productivism and cooperatism that had resulted from earlier party politics with neoliberalism, which, in turn, hampered the effectiveness of the welfare through work system. In Miura's view, the dynamics of partisan competition fostered ideational renewal, just as the political visions and ideologies of the governing party strongly affected the design of the social protection system. In the scenario Miura describes, the partisan dynamics since the 1990s resulted in the policy change that further undermined the social protection system, and the ensuing disruption has been felt throughout Japan.
This is the first book to examine the role of women in the origins, development and contemporary landscape of snowboarding. Focusing on organised and professional snowboarding, it explores the significance of women as participants, coaches, leaders, and high-profile sport stars. The book explores the history of snowboarding, the organisation of international snowboarding, issues related to facilities, competition formats which are the same for female and male riders, and injury risk, safeguarding, training and coaching. Before the concluding chapter, three elite snowboarders representing different epochs and riding styles – Åshild Lofthus, Stine Brun Kjeldaas, and Kjersti Buaas – are introduced, whose narratives shed light on the main themes of the book. With a broad scope in terms of topics and academic disciplines, from medicine and biomechanics to the social sciences and sport governance, the book is grounded in sociology and gender studies. This book is fascinating reading for scholars and students with an interest in the sociology of sport, coaching, sport management, sport history or interdisciplinary perspectives in sport science, or anybody with a passion for snowboarding.
A realistic and comprehensive review of joint approaches to machine learning and signal processing algorithms, with application to communications, multimedia, and biomedical engineering systems Digital Signal Processing with Kernel Methods reviews the milestones in the mixing of classical digital signal processing models and advanced kernel machines statistical learning tools. It explains the fundamental concepts from both fields of machine learning and signal processing so that readers can quickly get up to speed in order to begin developing the concepts and application software in their own research. Digital Signal Processing with Kernel Methods provides a comprehensive overview of kernel methods in signal processing, without restriction to any application field. It also offers example applications and detailed benchmarking experiments with real and synthetic datasets throughout. Readers can find further worked examples with Matlab source code on a website developed by the authors: http://github.com/DSPKM • Presents the necessary basic ideas from both digital signal processing and machine learning concepts • Reviews the state-of-the-art in SVM algorithms for classification and detection problems in the context of signal processing • Surveys advances in kernel signal processing beyond SVM algorithms to present other highly relevant kernel methods for digital signal processing An excellent book for signal processing researchers and practitioners, Digital Signal Processing with Kernel Methods will also appeal to those involved in machine learning and pattern recognition.
This thundering book by the author of Old Jules is the story of the vast cattle industry of the American West; stupendous in length, concept, and achievement, it is the result of a lifetime of knowledge and research. . . . The whole story is here, long but never dull, written with humor and understatement."—Kirkus Service "Here, tough as whang leather, nourishing as pemmican, turbulent as Dodge City on a Saturday night in the late 1870s, is what time may well decide is the definitive history of the founding and flourishing of the cattle industry on this continent. . . . This splendid book says more (and says it better) about the most romantic figures of the old West than dozens of other books that have ranged over this familiar ground. Mari Sandoz has given herself room to move with tremendous drive and scholarship."—Victor P. Hass, Chicago Sunday Tribune "Drawing the fullest flavor from her expert descriptive technique, Mari Sandoz has written a regional history to stand among the best of its kind."—Library Journal
This book chronicles a family of diplomats who experienced the world in transition. Subjects of capricious fate, they forged a destiny as a family that overcame some of the most cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. Diplomats and Dreamers is a family biography that begins with the careers of the parents in 1887 and ends with the death of Nadejda Stancioff, their eldest child, in 1957. The context of historical developments in an uncertain period of European history highlights their lives. Members of the haute bourgeoisie, this accomplished family is noteworthy for an unflagging ability to survive and persist with success and grace. Furthermore, this book addresses issues of gender by using the careers of the Stancioff women as exemplars of how a woman could develop her life in an atmosphere of strict gender divisions in labor. The Stancioff women's way of fitting into the mainstream of elite society is yet another model of a new generation of women who stepped beyond the narrow expectations of what their gender could achieve. Based on unexplored, unpublished primary materials, this book enriches both women's history and European history.
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