Inhospitable World

Inhospitable World
Author: Jennifer Fay
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-03-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 019069680X

In recent years, environmental and human rights advocates have suggested that we have entered the first new geological epoch since the end of the ice age: the Anthropocene. In this new epoch, humans have come to reshape unwittingly both the climate and natural world; humankind has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluted the oceans, and irreversibly altered the atmosphere. Ironically, our efforts to make the planet more hospitable to ourselves seem to be driving us toward our inevitable extinction. A force of nature, humanity is now decentered as the agent of history. As Jennifer Fay argues, this new situation is to geological science what cinema has always been to human culture. Film, like the Anthropocene, is a product of the industrial revolution, but arises out of a desire to preserve life and master time and space. It also calls for the creation of artificial worlds, unnatural weather, and deadly environments for entertainment, scientific study, and devising military strategy. Filmmaking stages, quite literally, the process by which worlds and weather come into being and meaning, and it mimics the forces that are driving this new planetary inhospitality. Cinema, in other words, provides an image of "nature" in the age of its mechanical reproducability. Fay argues that cinema exemplifies the philosophical, political, and perhaps even logistical processes by which we can adapt to these forces and also imagine a world without humans in it. Whereas standard ecological criticism attends to the environmental crisis as an unraveling of our natural state, this book looks to film (from Buster Keaton, to Jia Zhangke, to films of atomic testing and early polar exploration) to consider how it reflects upon the creation and destruction of human environments. What are the implications of ecological inhospitality? What role might cinema and media theory play in challenging our presumed right to occupy and populate the world? As an art form, film enjoys a unique relationship to the material, elemental world it captures and produces. Through it, we may appreciate the ambitions to design an unhomely planet that may no longer accommodate us.

The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth
Author: David Wallace-Wells
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2019-02-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 052557672X

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

Intimations

Intimations
Author: Alexandra Kleeman
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2016-09-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 006238872X

Praised by the New York Times Book Review as “a powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation,” Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, earned her comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, and Tom Perrotta. In her second book, a collection of twelve stories irresistibly seductive in their strangeness, she explores human life from beginning to end: the distress of birth into a world already formed; the brief and confusing period of “living” when we understand what is expected of us and struggle to do it; and, finally, the death-y period, when we sense everything is winding down and that it will conclude only partially understood, at best. The title Intimations is taken from one of the stories but is also a play on Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality”—in this case it’s not clear exactly what is being intimated, only that it’s nothing so gleaming and good as Immortality. At once familiar and mysterious, these stories have an eerie resonance as the characters find themselves in new and surprising situations. An unnamed woman enters a room with no exit and a ready-made life; the disappearance of people, objects, and memory creates an apocalypse; the art of dance is used to try to tame a feral child; the key to surviving a house party lies in knowing the difference between fake and real blood. Elegant, surprising, wondrous, and haunting, Intimations is an utterly transporting collection from one of our most ingenious and brilliant young writers.

Dublinesque

Dublinesque
Author: Enrique Vila-Matas
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2012-06-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811219615

Inspired by a dream, a retired publisher spontaneously embarks on a trip to the Dublin cemetery in which a character from Joyce's "Ulysses" was buried, where he meets a mysterious person who resembles Samuel Beckett.

It's a Jungle Out There

It's a Jungle Out There
Author: Amanda Marcotte
Publisher: Seal Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2008-03-25
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 1580052797

For all of you humming “I Will Survive” while watching the political debacles gracing the evening news, when getting an earful from your Limbaugh-loving brother-in-law, or as you’re ducking into the bathroom to avoid the date espousing the wisdom of those Mars versus Venus books, this book is for you. It’s a Jungle Out There gives all you smart, independent women out there the funny pranks, witty comebacks, and stalwart sources of strength you need in these trying times. With her tongue firmly in cheek and her middle finger stuck straight up in the air, Amanda Marcotte (of Pandagon.net) takes you on a tour through the perils that await any feminist who must navigate day-to-day life in the U.S., from the abstinence-only classrooms to the glass-ceiling of the office world. Drawing on her personal experiences of dealing with anti-feminists—from her years of blogging about feminism and living in the woman-unfriendly state of Texas—Marcotte brings her wit and distinct lack of patience to the topic of surviving while feminist. She doles out priceless advice along the way on how not only survive but also thrive, and even how to carve out a space for your feminist self in these oft-times hostile environments.

BOOK 1 Beyond imagination

BOOK 1 Beyond imagination
Author: Jamie d Cook
Publisher: Pencil
Total Pages: 72
Release: 2023-09-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 935883062X

The trio stood together on the barren planet, staring down an army of powerful enemies. They had been fighting for days, and they were exhausted, battered, and bruised. They had not anticipated that they would face such fierce opposition, and they knew that they could not hold out much longer. As they regrouped, they realized that their only chance was to make a desperate move. One of them would have to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the world and defeat the enemies. They knew there was no other way. For a long moment, there was silence as they each considered the magnitude of the decision. Finally, one of them, the bravest of the trio, stepped forward. "I will do it," he said firmly. "I know what I have to do." His decision was met with tearful, solemn nods from the others.

In the Studio

In the Studio
Author: Brian R. Jacobson
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2020-07-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520297598

Studios are, at once, material environments and symbolic forms, sites of artistic creation and physical labor, and nodes in networks of resource circulation. They are architectural places that generate virtual spaces—worlds built to build worlds. Yet, despite being icons of corporate identity, studios have faded into the background of critical discourse and into the margins of film and media history. In response, In the Studio demonstrates that when we foreground these worlds, we gain new insights into moving-image culture and the dynamics that quietly mark the worlds on our screens. Spanning the twentieth century and moving globally, this unique collection tells new stories about studio icons—Pinewood, Cinecittà, Churubusco, and CBS—as well as about the experimental workplaces of filmmakers and artists from Aleksandr Medvedkin to Charles and Ray Eames and Hollis Frampton.

Extraterritorialities in Occupied Worlds

Extraterritorialities in Occupied Worlds
Author: Exterritory Project
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2016
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0692629432

"The concept of extraterritoriality designates certain relationships between space, law, and representation. This collection of essays explores contemporary manifestations of extraterritoriality and the diverse ways in which the concept has been put to use in various disciplines. Some of the essays were written especially for this volume; others are brought here together for the first time. The inquiry into extraterritoriality found in these essays is not confined to the established boundaries of political, conceptual, and representational territories or fields of knowledge; rather, it is an invitation to navigate the margins of the legal-juridical and the political, but also the edges of forms of representation and poetics.Within its accepted legal and political contexts, the concept of extraterritoriality has traditionally been applied to people and to spaces. In the first case, extraterritorial arrangements could either exclude or exempt an individual or a group of people from the territorial jurisdiction in which they were physically located; in the second, such arrangements could exempt or exclude a space from the territorial jurisdiction by which it was surrounded. The special status accorded to people and spaces had political, economic, and juridical implications, ranging from immunity and various privileges to extreme disadvantages. In both cases, a person or a space physically included within a certain territory was removed from the usual system of laws and subjected to another. In other words, the extraterritorial person or space was held at what could be described as a legal distance. (In this respect, the concept of extraterritoriality presupposes the existence of several competing or overlapping legal systems.) It is this notion of being held at a legal distance around which the concept of extraterritoriality may be understood as revolving.

St: New Frontier #2 Into The Void

St: New Frontier #2 Into The Void
Author: Peter David
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2012-08-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1471108031

Roll Call: The Crew of the U.S.S. Excalibur: Captain Mackenzie Calhoun:An unorthodox, decisive young captain who loves his crew and his ship, and loves testing their limits even more. Commander Shelby:A woman of strong opinions and strong values, Shelby never hesitated to tell her captains when she thought they were wrong, and Mackenzie Calhoun won't be any exception. Burgoyne 172:The chief engineer of the Excalibur, with the decisiveness of Calhoun, the strength of Shelby, and the gender of both. Burgoyne is a Hermat, and when s/he sets his/her sights on you, s/he isn't an easy...person...to refuse. As the Thallonian Empire succumbs to violence and insurrection, the U.S.S. Excalibur prepares to launch on her humanitarian mission of mercy. But her departure is destined to be a memorable one, as Calhoun contends with an unexpected stowaway, a stormy relationship with his crew, and -- light-years away -- frightened refugees aboard a dying ship.

Film History for the Anthropocene

Film History for the Anthropocene
Author: Seth Peabody
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2023
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1640141618

"From its beginnings, some of German film's most prominent genres and directors have focused on the natural world and its transformations by humans. Heimat films, "city symphonies," mountain films, and rubble films all blend the boundary between landscape documentary and fiction film. Yet German film studies has been slow to adopt an environmental focus, concentrating (understandably) on its subject matter's political implications. This book reveals critical connections between German film, sociopolitical context, and environment, showing it to have been a creative catalyst for the social and ecological transformation of the Anthropocene. The book first considers the interplay between German film and environmental history in films and discourses of Heimat. Weimar-era films such as E. A. Dupont's Die Geierwally (1921), Carl Ludwig Achaz-Duisberg's Sprengbagger 1010 (1929), and Phil Jèutzi's Hunger in Waldenburg (1929) document and create a forum for discussing environmental change. The book then looks at film as a visual archive of and catalyst for infrastructure development, focusing on Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), the mountain films of Arnold Fanck, and the Berlin films Stadt der Millionen (Adolf Trotz, 1925), Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), and Menschen am Sonntag (1930). Nazi-era and postwar films are also examined. By exploring German film history alongside environmental history and theory, this book provides a case study of the power of film within processes of environmental transformation"--