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10th Muse Volume One
With his characteristic talent for finding the connections between writing and the stuff of our lives (most notably in his earlier hit Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer), Peter Turchi ventures into new, and even more surprising, territory. In A Muse and a Maze, Turchi draws out the similarities between writing and puzzle-making and its flip side, puzzle-solving. He teases out how mystery lies at the heart of all storytelling. And he uncovers the magic—the creation of credible illusion—that writers share with the likes of Houdini and master magicians. In Turchi’s associative narrative, we learn about the history of puzzles, their obsessive quality, and that Benjamin Franklin was a devotee of an ancient precursor of sudoku called Magic Squares. Applying this rich backdrop to the requirements of writing, Turchi reveals as much about the human psyche as he does about the literary imagination and the creative process. With the goal of giving writers new ways to think about their work and readers new ways to consider the books they encounter, A Muse and a Maze suggests ways in which every piece of writing is a kind of puzzle. The work argues that literary writing is defined, at least in part, by its embrace of mystery; offers tangrams as a model for the presentation of complex characters; compares a writer’s relationship to his or her narrator to magicians and wizards; offers the maze and the labyrinth as alternatives to the more common notion of the narrative line; and concludes with a discussion of how readers and writers, like puzzle solvers, not only tolerate but find pleasure in difficulty. While always balancing erudition with accessibility, Turchi examines the work of writers as various as A. A. Milne, Dashiell Hammett, Truman Capote, Anton Chekhov, Alison Bechdel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Antonya Nelson, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles D’Ambrosio, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Thomas Bernhard, and Mark Twain, elaborating and illuminating ways in which their works expand and deliver on the title’s double entendre, A Muse and a Maze. With 100 images that range from movie stills from Citizen Kane and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to examples of sudokus, crosswords, and other puzzles; from Norman Rockwell’s famous triple self-portrait to artwork by Charles Richie; and from historical arcana to today’s latest magic, A Muse and a Maze offers prose exposition, images, text quotations, and every available form of wisdom, leading the reader step-by-step through passages from stories and novels to demonstrate, with remarkable clarity, how writers evolve their eventual creations.
Ancient and medieval labyrinths embody paradox, according to Penelope Reed Doob. Their structure allows a double perspective—the baffling, fragmented prospect confronting the maze-treader within, and the comprehensive vision available to those without. Mazes simultaneously assert order and chaos, artistry and confusion, articulated clarity and bewildering complexity, perfected pattern and hesitant process. In this handsomely illustrated book, Doob reconstructs from a variety of literary and visual sources the idea of the labyrinth from the classical period through the Middle Ages. Doob first examines several complementary traditions of the maze topos, showing how ancient historical and geographical writings generate metaphors in which the labyrinth signifies admirable complexity, while poetic texts tend to suggest that the labyrinth is a sign of moral duplicity. She then describes two common models of the labyrinth and explores their formal implications: the unicursal model, with no false turnings, found almost universally in the visual arts; and the multicursal model, with blind alleys and dead ends, characteristic of literary texts. This paradigmatic clash between the labyrinths of art and of literature becomes a key to the metaphorical potential of the maze, as Doob's examination of a vast array of materials from the classical period through the Middle Ages suggests. She concludes with linked readings of four "labyrinths of words": Virgil's Aeneid, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Chaucer's House of Fame, each of which plays with and transforms received ideas of the labyrinth as well as reflecting and responding to aspects of the texts that influenced it. Doob not only provides fresh theoretical and historical perspectives on the labyrinth tradition, but also portrays a complex medieval aesthetic that helps us to approach structurally elaborate early works. Readers in such fields as Classical literature, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, comparative literature, literary theory, art history, and intellectual history will welcome this wide-ranging and illuminating book.
Shedding fresh light on the life and work of William Butler Yeats—widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century—this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet’s long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats’s vision of life and death. Through close reading of selected poems, the first section of Making the Void Fruitful assesses Yeats’s spiritualised treatment of corporeal themes, exploring sex and eroticism as the expression of a duality inherent to his ontological and supernatural convictions. The power-producing tension in Yeats’s work is not only intellectual but emotional. At its vital centre is his Muse: the beautiful political firebrand, Maud Gonne, whose activist Republican politics he considered his one real rival. Through close engagement with the poems and plays she inspired, the second section explores Yeats’s complex relationship with Maud, an obsessive and unrequited love which he sublimated and transformed into the greatest body of Muse poetry since Petrarch, in whose tradition of spiritualized eroticism Yeats, perhaps the last of the great Romantics, was consciously writing. Shaped by the conviction that no modern poet exceeded Yeats in animating the enduring themes of love and spirituality through poetry, this book emphasises the influence, of Blake, Nietzsche, and John Donne, on what Yeats called ‘the thinking of the body’. Grounded firmly in the textual materiality of Yeats’s oeuvre, this book will be of interest to researchers and students of W.B. Yeats, as well as to those in the fields of Anglophone literatures and cultures, and philosophy.
A single line of code offers a way to understand the cultural context of computing. This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a text—in the case of 10 PRINT, a text that appeared in many different printed sources—that yields a story about its making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more. They consider randomness and regularity in computing and art, the maze in culture, the popular BASIC programming language, and the highly influential Commodore 64 computer.
Who is She, this Sister from Below? She's certainly not about the ordinary business of life: work, shopping, making dinner. She speaks from other realms. If you'll allow, She'll whisper in your ear, lead your thoughts astray, fill you with strange yearnings, get you hot and bothered, send you off on some wild goose chase of a daydream, eat up hours of your time. She's a siren, a seductress, a shapeshifter . . . Why listen to such a troublemaker? Because She is essential to the creative process: She holds the keys to the doors of our imaginations and deeper life the evolution of Soul.
Hector Kipling has everything to live for: he is a talented artist with loving parents, a beautiful girlfriend, dependable mates and good health. But when Kirk Church, one of his best friends, and a habitual painter of cutlery, announces that he may have a brain tumour, the prospect of a character-building bereavement, with all the attendant suffering and sympathy, is a little too difficult for Hector to resist. Will it make him a better artist? Will it make him as successful as his friend Lenny Snook, who fills limousines with blood and has just been nominated for the Turner Prize? As events begin to unravel it doesn't take long for Hector's charmed world to fall completely and irreparably apart. From settees to stalkers, con men to corpses, paranoid self-portraits to S&M, The Late Hector Kipling is an irreverent and candid exploration of life, death, art and everything in between. 'Wonderful entertainment . . . A funny and successful satire' Observer Review 'Exquisitely written with a warm heart and a wry wit, this is a stunning debut.' Elle 'David Thewlis has written an extraordinarily good novel, which is not only brilliant in its own right, but stands proudly beside his work as an actor, no mean boast.' Billy Connolly 'I laughed and laughed until I read my own name amongst the carnage of Thewlis's unfortunate characters. This book is a disgrace - it's mean, cruel and refreshingly cynical.' Jake Chapman
Pure interactive fun between two covers! A book that begs to be doodled in with 96 wacky prompts, games, and crafts, and adorable creatures to boot, The Kid’s Awesome Activity Book is packed with activities that take delightful twists and turns, inviting kids to design, draw, and dream—and encouraging creativity on and off the page. Enter an ancient cave to decode a mummy’s message. Find your way through a beehive maze. Write a song for a cat rock band. Design a personalized spaceship—and so much more. Plus, plenty of goodies to return to again and again for hands-on play: paper dolls, finger puppets, bonus stickers, and a giant pullout poster designed to kindle curious minds and active imaginations. A great boredom-buster for travel or rainy days, and a fun birthday or holiday gift. From the author and illustrator of the Doodle Adventures® series and based on the Kid’s Awesome Activity Calendar, the book showcases Lowery’s inimitable quirky style and humor that clicks with all ages—get the whole family in on the fun!
Blending theory, criticism, and ritual, reveals the foundations of the ancient tradition of "matriarchal art," and shows how that tradition flourishes in the works of major contemporary women artists and in contemporary women's spirituality.
"Girls Who Wore Black recovers neglected women writers who deserve more attention for their writing and for their historical role in the mid-century arts scene. This collection of essays reopens and revises the Beat canon, Beat history, and Beat poetics; it is an important contribution to literary criticism and history."-Jennie Skerl, author of A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles "Ronna Johnson and Nancy Grace have done an invaluable service for students of American literature: their collection begins with an essential essay about the three generations of Beat women and then provides fine contributions by critics Anthony Libby, Linda Russo, Maria Damon, Tim Hunt, and others. The value of this book is so clear one must wonder why it wasn't available much earlier."-Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill What do we know about the women who played an important role in creating the literature of the Beat Generation? Until recently, very little. Studies of the movement have effaced or excluded women writers, such as Elise Cowen, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Hettie Jones, and Diane Di Prima, each one a significant figure of the postwar Beat communities. Equally free-thinking and innovative as the founding generation of men, women writers, fluent in Beat, hippie, and women's movement idioms, partook of and bridged two important countercultures of the American mid-century. Persistently foregrounding female experiences in the cold war 1950s and in the counterculture 1960s and in every decade up to the millennium, women writing Beat have brought nonconformity, skepticism, and gender dissent to postmodern culture and literary production in the United States and beyond. Ronna C. Johnson is a lecturer in the departments of English and American Studies at Tufts University. Nancy M. Grace is an associate professor in the department of English and director of the Program in Writing at The College of Wooster in Ohio. She is the author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature.