Book Recommendations

[Dr. Bantham]

Quote Originally Posted by Ligeia

A long-time favorite lexicon of my own!
[ The Devil's Dictionary Dot Com ]

[Ligeia]

In every art circuit throughout the world the latest trend is "hyper dramatic painting", which consists of the use of human models as canvas. The murder of Annek, a 14 year-old girl who worked as canvas in the work "Defloration", in Vienna, puts the Austrian Police and the Ministry of the Interior on their guard, both pressured by the mighty Van Tysch Foundation not to make the crime public -in fear of causing the panic among models and the mistrust among buyers of hyper-dramatic painting.
Meanwhile, Clara Reyes, another canvas model working in a gallery in Madrid, receives the visit of two foreigners who tempt her into a work of a "hard and challenging" nature. The challenge starts at that very moment with the psychological sculpting of the model. This is how Clara steps into a whirlpool of fear and fascination that ultimately affects the reader, opening a debate on the value of art and human life.

[Ligeia]

[Ligeia]

"The night is different, its opposition to day marked by darkness and danger... [B]ut its fears are balanced by its freedoms," begins this enthralling and important trans-historical study of the metaphoric and actual meaning of night cultures. Palmer's canvas is huge--it ranges from an analysis of early modern witch culture (which he connects to the later development of Puritanism) to the emergence of 19th-century semisecret fraternal orders such as the Oddfellows, the vibrant 20th-century gay male cultures of drag and sadomasochism, and the emergence of a U.S. jazz and blues culture--yet he manages to bring these diverse topics together in a cohesive and astute analysis. Integrating unusual details and artful nuances (from the specifics of 18th-century pirate executions to the links between the Rosenberg trial and the novels of Micky Spillane), Palmer creates a multilayered but seamless portrait of four centuries of Western culture. The underlying theme here is not simply that "night" offers the occasional transgressive respite from the orderly civilization of "day," but that these alternative social, political and artistic spaces are often where the impetus for social change begins. Palmer's bold theme is sustained by his ability to communicate his in-depth, far-ranging scholarship with a broad political vision, which is Marxist in origins but tempered by postmodernism, and by his accessible and highly entertaining writing style.

[deldergod]

[Cyril Tourneur]

MimesisBookShop

brilliant book by an even more brilliant editor (IF YOU UNDERSTAND ITALIAN IT'S A MUST!!!!!!!!)


Günther Anders was an early critic of the role of technology in modern life and in this context was a trenchant critic of the role of television. His essay "The Phantom World of TV," written in the late 1950s, was published in an edition of Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White's influential anthology Mass Culture as "The Phantom World of Television." In it he details how the televisual experience substitutes images for experience, leading people to eschew first-hand experiences in the world and instead become "voyeurs," His dominant metaphor in this essay centers on how television interposes itself between family members "at the dinner table." See "Die Welt als Phantom und Matrize. Philosophische Betrachtungen über Rundfunk und Fernsehen (The World as Phantom and Matrix. Philosophical Observations on Radio and Television) (1956)."

Foreword.""Outdatedness of Human Beings 1", 5th edition
"The three main theses: that we are no match for the perfection of our products; that we produce more than we can visualize and take responsibility for; and that we believe, that, what we can do, are allowed to do, no: should do, no: must do - these three basic theses, in light of the environmental threats emerging over the last quarter century, have become more prevailing and urgent than they were then."

Changing the world
"It does not suffice to change the world. We do that anyway. And to a large extent that happens even without our involvement. In addition we have to interpret this change. Precisely because to change it. That therefore the world does not change without us. And ultimately into a world without us."

from: Introduction. "Outdatedness of Human Beings 2"
This volume is "...a philosophical anthropology in the age of technocracy". With "technocracy" I do not mean the rule of technocrats (as if they were a group of specialists, who dominate today's politics), but the fact, that the world, in which we live and which determines us, is a technological one - which extends so far, that we are not allowed to say, that in our historical situation there is among other things technology, rather do we have to say: within the world's status called "technology" history happens, in other words technology has become the subject of history, in which we are only "co-historical".

[yellowish haze]

The Blue Room by Eugene Richards



from Amazon.com:
Eugene Richards was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston. After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in English and journalism, he studied photography with Minor White at MIT. In 1968 he became a health care advocate in eastern Arkansas. Two years later, he helped found a social service organization and a community newspaper, Many Voices, that reported on black political action and the Ku Klux Klan. After publication of his first two books, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta (1973) and Dorchester Days (self-published in 1978), Richards was invited to become a nominee at Magnum. He was a member until he departed in 1995, returned to the cooperative in 2002, and departed for a second time in 2005.



Richards has been the recipient of numerous awards over the course of his career, including the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, the Olivier Rebbot Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for coverage of the disadvantaged. His photographs are collected and exhibited widely, and a major touring retrospective of his work premiered at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographies in Arles, France in 1997. His photo essays have appeared in countless publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, TIME, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Fortune, and Life. In addition to his prolific photography, Richards has also written, photographed, directed, and produced four short films as well as an hour-long documentary. His documentary, entitled Now, then, forever, is a cinema verite treatment of life inside a Nebraska nursing home that had its world premiere at the 2003 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Other films included Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, a powerful portrait of a crack-infested neighborhood in Philadelphia, and But, the day came chronicles the passage of a 92-year-old farm into a nursing home. The latter received the Jury Award for Best Short Film at the 2000 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.



Despite his success in other fields, Richards remains best known for his books and photo essays on cancer, drug addiction, poverty, emergency medicine, the mentally disabled, aging, and death in America. His intense vision and unswerving commitment have led him to become what many believe is America's greatest living social documentary photographer. This new body of work, entitled The Blue Room, is one of Richards' most personal works to date. It his is first-ever color project, and it brings together the overarching themes of all his work ''the transient nature of things'' in a beautiful and moving series of pictures of the landscape and abandoned houses of the American West, covering the states of Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Arkansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, and the Dakotas. This is the area where settlers came around the turn of the twentieth century, pursuing the promise of homesteads where they could build successful communities. However, in the wake of the Great Depression and the dust storms of the 1930s, the farms in this isolated, semi-arid region faltered and failed, leaving the land littered with forgotten homes.

Richards' photographs are a statement on the vulnerability of man in the face of the shifting economic opportunities and the climate; a commentary on the inevability of change. In these contemplative pictures we are inspired to imagine the lives of the homes' former occupants. Richards enigmatic pictures make The Blue Room a thought-provoking meditation on memory; a quiet yet incredibly powerful body of work.

[Doctor Munoz]

LITTLE, BIG by John Crowley

Haunting, elusive, lyrical, complex, a novel about fairyland and how influence the lives of a whole family. The little people are not explained, they are the others, and longing for their realm is, perhaps, longing for dead. Exquisite, but thankfully devoid of prettiness. Edgewood, the victorian house which is also an architectural folly (and a door to elsewhere) is a powerful presence, even if it is made of allusions and sense of being watched rather than bricks. When the plot goes from the woods to New York, a sizeable portion of literary enchantment is preserved, and that is a real success for Crowley.

[bendk]

This recommendation is inspired by the Sideshow Passage of the Day thread. The following description is on the inside flap of the book.


Dr. Caligari's Black Book edited by Peter Haining

Nearly half a century after it was made, (book published in 1972) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari remains as one of the finest-and most terrifying-horror films ever produced. It heralded an entirely new kind of screen entertainment and inspired so much that has since delighted and chilled audiences around the world. Now it has inspired a completely unique anthology of horror stories. For here are tales from the world of Dr Caligari: mysterious sideshows, freaks and monsters, seances, macabre plays, and all manner of dark terrors lurking in the shadows.
In compiling this anthology, the editor has drawn on rare stories by some of the most famous names in the genre: Ray Bradbury, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Agatha Christie, J.B. Priestly, H.R. Wakefield and many more. You have been warned: the ghost of Dr. Caligari is lurking on every page!

CALIGARISM - Anything distorted or bizarre

"What I have experienced is stranger than anything you have ever encountered."
-The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Contents

Introduction
The Second Awakening of a Magician by S.L. Dennis
The Jar by Ray Bradbury
Satan's Circus by Lady Eleanor Smith
The Last Seance by Agatha Christie
Mrs. Elting Plays Her Part by August Derleth
The Third Performance by Anthony Gittins
The Waxwork by A.M. Burrage
The Sorceror's Apprentice by Robert Bloch
The Dwarf by Marcel Ayme
The Demon King by J.B. Priestly
The Horror in the Museum by Hazel Head
Farewell Performance by H.R. Wakefield
The End of a Show by Barry Pain

[yellowish haze]

As a college student Blackmore was determined to devise experiments to reveal the reality of parapsychology, but found her experiments revealed nothing. Her quest for parapsychological evidence along other paths constantly turned up faults in experiments: this new book charts her journey and reveals revelations in her field. -- Midwest Book Review

"True skepticism has nothing to do with disbelief," says Susan Blackmore. "It is about taking people's claims seriously and trying to understand them." As a starry-eyed student, Blackmore was convinced of the reality of astral planes, telepathy, and life after death. She was determined to devote her life to parapsychology, but what she found wasn't what she had bargained for. None of her cleverly devised experiments revealed a hint of the psi she was seeking. In a determined effort to find it somehow, she tested young children in play groups, trained students in imagery and altered states of consciousness, and even put Tarot cards to the test. She visited haunted houses and was regressed to a "past life."Finally, accused of being a "psi-inhibitory experimenter" with the power of abolishing paranormal effects, she visited other, more successful, experimenters. Here she found only errors in their experiments. In this new and updated edition of "The Adventures of a Parapsychologist", Blackmore is at last at liberty to explain just what she found in those ill-fated experiments at Cambridge. She brings her story up to date in a lively and personal account of one scientist's never-ending search for the paranormal.