This book is about the role of disability and deafness in contemporary aesthetics and how physical and intellectual difference challenges generic terms for art and poetry. The book's title combines language that disturbs or causes anxiety with language that is ripped, worn, or damaged. This interplay brings together the social environment in which language is exchanged with the materiality of words that frustrate easy comprehension. Where hearing and speaking are considered normative conditions of the human, what happens when words are misheard and misspoken? How have writers and artists, both disabled and non-disabled, used error as generative elements in contesting the presumed value of "sounding good?" This book grows out of the author's experience of hearing loss in which misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence. Deafness becomes a guide in each chapter in considering how verbal confusions are less an aberration in understanding than a component of new knowledge"--
Professor Davidson---an accomplished literary critic---offers a focused and balanced analysis of poetry, film, and the arts honed with his excellent knowledge of the latest advances in disability studies. He is brilliant at reading texts in a sophisticated and aesthetically pleasurable way, making Concerto for the Left Hand one of the smartest books to date in disability studies." ---Lennard Davis, University of Illinois, Chicago "Moving elegantly among social theorists and cultural texts, Davidson exemplifies and propels an ethical-aesthetic model for criticism. Davidson asks continuously and with a committed intensity 'where a disability ends and the social order begins' . . . this book brings the study of poetry and poetics into the twenty-first century." ---Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University Concerto for the Left Hand is at the cutting edge of the expanding field of disability studies, offering a wide range of essays that investigate the impact of disability across various art forms---including literature, performance, photography, and film. Rather than simply focusing on the ways in which disabled persons are portrayed, Michael Davidson explores how the experience of disability shapes the work of artists and why disability serves as a vital lens through which to interpret modern culture. Covering an eclectic range of topics---from the phantom missing limb in film noir to the poetry of American Sign Language---this collection delivers a unique and engaging assessment of the interplay between disability and aesthetics. Written in a fluid, accessible style, Concerto for the Left Hand will appeal to both specialists and general audiences. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book should appeal not only to scholars of disability studies but to all those working in minority art, deaf studies, visual culture, and modernism. Michael Davidson is Professor of American Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His other books include Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics and Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World.
Guys Like Us considers how writers of the 1950s and '60s struggled to craft literature that countered the politics of consensus and anticommunist hysteria in America, and how notions of masculinity figured in their effort. Michael Davidson examines a wide range of postwar literature, from the fiction of Jack Kerouac to the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. He also explores the connection between masculinity and sexuality in films such as Chinatown and The Lady from Shanghai, as well as television shows, plays, and magazines from the period. What results is a virtuoso work that looks at American poetic and artistic innovation through the revealing lenses of gender and history.
One of our most distinguished Army commanders identifies the failed policies that have compromised the U. S. military's ability to protect the nation's interests.
This new book by eminent scholar Michael Davidson gathers his essays concerning formally innovative poetry from modernists such as Mina Loy, George Oppen, and Wallace Stevens to current practitioners such as Cristina Rivera-Garza, Heriberto Yépez, Lisa Robertson, and Mark Nowak. The book considers poems that challenge traditional poetic forms and in doing so trouble normative boundaries of sexuality, subjectivity, gender, and citizenship. At the heart of each essay is a concern with the “politics of form,” the ways that poetry has been enlisted in the constitution—and critique—of community. Davidson speculates on the importance of developing cultural poetics as an antidote to the personalist and expressivist treatment of postwar poetry. A comprehensive and versatile collection, On the Outskirts of Form places modern and contemporary poetics in a cultural context to reconsider the role of cultural studies and globalization in poetry.
Invalid Modernism contributes to an intersectional moment in disability studies by looking at modernist aesthetics through a 'defamiliar body'. It also offers an intersectional understanding of modernism by studying the representation of physical and cognitive difference during a period marked by progressive reforms in health, labor, and welfare. Readings of texts by Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Oscar Wilde, F.T. Marinetti, Jean Toomer, an opera by Alexander Zemlinsky, and paintings and constructions by dadaists and surrealists are set against the historical developments in sexology, medical discourse, and the pseudo-sciences of eugenics and anthropometry. Modernist works are well known for challenging formal features of narration and representation, but it is seldom observed that this challenge has often been enabled by figures of shell-shocked veterans, tubercular heroines, blind soothsayers, invalid aesthetes, and neurasthenic women. Such figures complicate an aesthetics of autonomy by which modernism is often understood. Since its evolution in the eighteenth century, aesthetics has been seen in terms of judgments based on detached appreciation. What begins as a highly privative, sensate response to an object or natural formation results in a disinterested judgment about the value of that response. By looking at modernist aesthetics through a disability optic, Invalid Modernism attempts to restore the missing body to aesthetics by disclosing a structure of feeling around dramatic changes in modernity. These changes are registered on and through the bodies and minds of figures considered in medical discourse of the period as 'invalid' citizens and subjects.
Why do modern poets quote from dictionaries in their poems? How has the tape recorder changed the poet's voice? What has shopping to do with Gertrude Stein's aesthetics? These and other questions form the core of Ghostlier Demarcations, a study of modern poetry as a material medium. One of today's most respected critics of twentieth-century poetry and poetics, Michael Davidson argues that literary materiality has been dominated by an ideology of modernism, based on the ideal of the autonomous work of art, which has hindered our ability to read poetry as a socially critical medium. By focusing on writing as a palimpsest involving numerous layers of materiality—from the holograph manuscript to the printed book—Davidson exposes modern poetry's engagement with larger historical forces. The palimpsest that results is less a poem than an arrested stage of writing in whose layers can be discerned ghostly traces of other texts. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
When I asked the artist, Douglas Jones, if he could come up with an illustration depicting evil overcome by good, within the context of the plot for the cover of my new book; I knew it was a tall order. Well, what you see is what I got; and you don't mess with the art of an artist without the probability of dire consequences, so I decided to set with it for a while. By the time I did call him, I'd grown to appreciate what he'd done and, being a writer, I asked him if he could put some words to the conceptual figure he'd drawn. He stated, unequivocally, that there was nothing, even remotely, conceptual regarding his work and that he had clearly fulfilled my request. The illustration on the cover is a highly expressionistic representative portrait of the Ocean Front Mall, and a representation of the primordial struggle between good and evil. The Toy Store, within the mall, is the cancerous heart, circumscribed and protected by the Demon, Samael; the ‘Fallen Angel of Death,' who periodically attempts embodiment through the current property owner of the mall. Jon Sadler is presented with a journal revealing the history of the mall and four generations of related owners. The journal introduces Jon to an enigmatic character, by the name of “Preacher.” The Preacher offers a riddle in the form of an incomplete symbol, the solution of which promises and end to the curse on the Ocean Front Mall.
Fire and Ice came to me on a morning while living in Sierra Madre, California. It was like watching a film, and I simply wrote what I saw. The Grave was an experiment in writing in a different style, and was written after visiting an overgrown and disorganized graveyard in the hills east of Cambria, California. Meet Me at Ala Mar is a fictional tale focused on a quaint motel on the Cabrillo Highway in Santa Barbara, California, overlooking the Santa Barbara harbor. It tells the story of a beautiful and passionate woman who meets, clandestinely, with a man at the Ala Mar Motel. My Life with Luke and Heidi is auto-biographical. It was written two months after my dog Luke died. You may have noticed some similarities between, ‘Meet me at Alar Mar' and ‘My Life with Luke and Heidi. It was done consciously. The Stories and the writing styles of these four tales could not be more dissimilar. There is, however, a similar theme that reveals itself in each book. Can you find it?
ᅠThe Mad Thing characterizes that most uncommon of all slayers, the female serial killer. A self-appointed vigilante roams the streets of Los Angeles at night, hunting, killing and mutilating men who have but one tortured behavior in common. Jon Sadler, a profiling for long-time friend, Larry Radino of the Los Angeles Police Department, discovers a common denominator between the victims buried deep within the voluminous files of LA s largest bureaucracy, the Los Angeles Department of Children s Services. In a bizarre turn of events, Jon discovers the identity of the killer, but is compelled to withhold the identification. ᅠ
Judge Rath is the fourth book in the Jon Sadler Mystery series. I thought after I’d written Darth and the Puppeteers, I was finished with Mr. Sadler. But I missed him and eventually came up with an idea of how I could get him in trouble again. If you’ve read my three previous novels with Jon Sadler as protagonist, you will know that I lean slightly toward the psychic and metaphysical. In Judge Rath I have created a mystery in which, Jon, as Judge Rath, and some of my favorite characters in the first three novels, find themselves in their past lives caught up in a wild-west whodunit set in the year 1864. The scene is the City of San Fernando, California, in the San Fernando Valley. Jon has been sent into the past by, Aaron, an Avatar affiliated with our old friend, Darth. For reasons explained in the book, Jon was in need of discovering an element in his nature that had been passive in his life as a psychiatrist. Judge Rath has a proclivity to shoot first, and shoot again, and finds himself mired in what appears to be the random killings of saloon whores. Out of frustration, Jon telegraphs the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Chicago. Alan Pinkerton sends out his ace female detective, Kate Wayne, the first female detective in the country. Together, and with the support of President Abraham Lincoln, they undertake to solve what history will refer to as: The Case of the Cannabis Cannibals.
The basketball team from Davidson College captivated the country in the 2008 NCAA tournament. It was more than just a Cinderella story. There was a coach who preached balance and family, a boy-faced superstar shooter who wrote scripture on his sneakers and a gritty, smiling point guard who went from being little-used to leading the nation in assists. It all led to a singular moment.In Taking the Shot, Michael Kruse, a Davidson grad and a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times, tells the tale of hope, trust and togetherness. This is the story of that moment, and why it meant so much to so many.From the book: "It wasn't a feeling of imminent victory. What it was was an overwhelming feeling of opportunity. The chance. We can win this. It was, for some alums, particularly for those who had been boys during the Lefty years of the 1960s, something like a reawakening of the possibility of national success. Two days after that, late in the second half of the comeback against Georgetown, one fan turned to his left and looked down his row in Raleigh and saw a white-haired alum with a single tear running down his cheek and then turned back to his young son and asked him to please watch this game close.
Alina is the true story of a beautiful and seductive woman seemingly born out of time and place to a culture inundated with pitfalls she was inherently unable to navigate. As a child she survived sexual molestation only to find herself in the grip of a lifelong untreated bi-polar condition. This is an account of the thoughts and feelings of a woman who suffered through silent alternating periods of depression and a sense of omnipotence that eventually led her to the door of a psychopath. The author reveals an early childhood dominated by a controlling and abusing grandfather, a chaotic relationship with her first husband and father of her first two children, a comparatively stable relationship with her second husband ending in a sudden violation of trust, and a brutal eight-year involvement with the father of her third child. Alina’s story illustrates a fundamental flaw in the nature of three men who sought to fulfill their needs through the willing participation of a woman unaware of her own, and her desperate attempt to free herself from an existence that had spiraled into hell. It is also a story of blind courage, resiliency, and a search for love.
Every Friday evening in an office six doors off Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena California, Jon Sadler and three fellow psychotherapists practice a therapeutic intervention with hand puppetry in an attempt to assist their clients in drawing out the dark side of their personalities, what Carl Jung coined as the Shadow. The depth of their combined knowledge assures them of the benign nature of their undertaking so that they were unprepared for the results of their efforts and unaware that the neighb
Addendum: Unorthodox, Ontological Analogy Concerning Existence and Reality, is meant as an introduction to metaphysics; a word coined my Aristotle to express a reality other than the physical. We begin with a focus on consciousness, followed by an emphasis on ancient Greek wisdom. At times we will wander in rivulets to other topics along the way. The scope of this treatises is, as said and introduction to the ancient metaphysical wisdoms, but also a plunge into the fathomless ocean of esoterism. Our journey into the perception of reality is two-fold and is analogues to the dichotomy of Newtonian physics versus Quantum. In this work, the dichotomy is between perception and observation i.e. Duality and Oneness.
In this classic work, the author joins the dots between three of the most powerful words in language: life, judgment, and inheritance. The edition is packed with new thoughts that move the reader both spiritually and metaphorically from life through judgment to the wedding feast of the Lamb. (Christian)
Familial chylomicronemia syndrome (FCS) is an ultra-rare genetic disorder characterized by the abnormal build-up of chylomicrons, the largest type of lipoprotein, which transport dietary fat from the gut to the rest of the body. Patients with FCS often experience severe symptoms, the most feared of which is acute, potentially life-threatening, pancreatitis. This resource is intended to raise awareness of FCS among all members of the healthcare team who come into contact with patients with FCS, with the aim of earlier diagnosis and management, thus preventing some of the more devastating physical, neurological and cognitive symptoms of the disorder. Table of Contents: • Terminology, etiology and pathophysiology • Diagnosis • Complications • Management and prevention • Research directions
Trapped on the island, Eddie Dees does everything he can to hold his family together. The storm, he believes, is feeding on people's fear and paranoia. The more people turn on each other, the stronger it becomes. Believing there are small, systematic breaks in the storm, he plans to make his way off the island with as many residents as possible. But he must first deal with the crazed gunman roaming the streets as well as another growing threat: Klutch, a violent army vet suffering PTSD, has recruited a band of followers who believe the storm is a weaponized weather experiment gone awry. Klutch plans on stopping anyone from leaving the island and one of his followers, unfortunately, is Eddie's own teenage son.
There is no light without dark; no highlights without shadows; no good without evil. The Devil is where things happen. Where stories begin. This collection brings together stories from multiple cultures, featuring the Devil both as an abstract concept and a creature, a terror, a force of nature, an enemy, a trickster, and so many more. Step into the world of shadows, and travel through Devil’s many incarnations spanning centuries of history and myth, from the Ancient Greece, African and Caribbean folklore, dark ages in Europe, all the way to the present day. This anthology features new and established authors from diverse, multicultural backgrounds.
In this tale, the last in the six-book series of Jon Sadler Mysteries, I have editorialized the nature and evolution of our protagonist, Jon Sadler. We have watched as he fought and survived many battles, and we have witnessed a previous lifetime in which he was prepared for this, his final battle. Now, we watch as fate leads him to his occult destiny, that of the Avenger. Jon's ancient association with the Cult of the Pereire reveals the nature of an assassin. This assassin has been waiting for many incarnations to strike at the appropriate time in history. Jon rediscovers a lost love in the mists of time. Anita will fulfill her own destiny by assisting this man, this Judas.
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