Magic

Magic
Author: Jamie Sutcliffe
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262543036

The first accessible reader on magic’s generative relationship with contemporary art practice. From the hexing of presidents to a renewed interest in herbalism and atavistic forms of self-care, magic has furnished the contemporary imagination with mysterious and often disorienting bodies of arcane thought and practice. This volume brings together writings by artists, magicians, historians, and theorists that illuminate the vibrant correspondences animating contemporary art’s varied encounters with magical culture, inspiring a reconsideration of the relationship between the symbolic and the pragmatic. Dispensing with simple narratives of reenchantment, Magic illustrates the intricate ways in which we have to some extent always been captivated by the allure of the numinous. It demonstrates how magical culture’s tendencies toward secrecy, occlusion, and encryption might provide contemporary artists with strategies of remedial communality, a renewed faith in the invocational power of personal testimony, and a poetics of practice that could boldly question our political circumstances, from the crisis of climate collapse to the strictures of socially sanctioned techniques of medical and psychiatric care. Tracing its various emergences through the shadows of modernity, the circuitries of ritual media, and declarations of psychic self-defence, Magic deciphers the evolution of a “magical-critical” thinking that productively complicates, contradicts and expands the boundaries of our increasingly weird present.

Whitechapel Noise

Whitechapel Noise
Author: Vivi Lachs
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2018-05-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0814343562

New perspectives on Anglo-Jewish history via the poetry and song of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in London from 1884 to 1914. Archive material from the London Yiddish press, songbooks, and satirical writing offers a window into an untold cultural life of the Yiddish East End. Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London 1884–1914 by Vivi Lachs positions London’s Yiddish popular culture in historical perspective within Anglo-Jewish history, English socialist aesthetics, and music-hall culture, and shows its relationship to the transnational Yiddish-speaking world. Layers of cultural references in the Yiddish texts are closely analyzed and quoted to draw out the complex yet intimate histories they contain, offering new perspectives on Anglo-Jewish historiography in three main areas: politics, sex, and religion. The acculturation of Jewish immigrants to English life is an important part of the development of their social culture, as well as to the history of London. In part one of the book, Lachs presents an overview of daily immigrant life in London, its relationship to the Anglo-Jewish establishment, and the development of a popular Yiddish theatre and press, establishing a context from which these popular texts came. The author then analyzes the poems and songs, revealing the hidden social histories of the people writing and performing them. For example, how Morris Winchevsky’s London poetry shows various attempts to engage the Jewish immigrant worker in specific London activism and political debate. Lachs explores how themes of marriage, relationships, and sexual exploitation appear regularly in music-hall songs, alluding to the changing nature of sexual roles in the immigrant London community influenced by the cultural mores of their new location. On the theme of religion, Lachs examines how ideas from Jewish texts and practice were used and manipulated by the socialist poets to advance ideas about class, equality, and revolution; and satirical writings offer glimpses into how the practice of religion and growing secularization was changing immigrants’ daily lives in the encounter with modernity. The detailed and nuanced analysis found in Whitechapel Noiseoffers a new reading of Anglo-Jewish, London, and immigrant history. It is a must-read for Jewish and Anglo-Jewish historians and those interested in Yiddish, London, and migration studies.

The Rural

The Rural
Author: myvillages.org
Publisher: Documents of Contemporary Art
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Art and society
ISBN: 9780854882717

Part of the acclaimed series of anthologies which document major themes and ideas in contemporary art. A timely collection of texts, interviews and documentation reflecting the complex interrelationship between the urban, the rural and contemporary cultural production. What, and where, is 'the Rural'? From the rocks that break a farmer's plough on a field in Japan, to digital infrastructures which organise geographically dispersed interests and ambitions, vast parts of our lives are still connected and dependent on resources, production and infrastructures located within rural geographies, and the rural remains a shared and common cultural space. This anthology offers an urgent and diverse cross-section of rural art, thinking and practice, and considers how artists respond to the socio-economic divides between the rural and the urban, from re-imagined farming practices and food systems to architecture, community projects and transnational local networks. Edited by three artists who have been working within rural situations and communities for the last twenty years, this anthology is formed as a document, tool and navigation device for future artistic practice, where 'the Rural' is filtered through a lens sharpened by an audiencebased model of art which practices from within the culture it addresses. Artists, practitioners and organisations surveyed include Lina Bo Bardi, Futurefarmers, Fernando García-Dory, Grizedale Arts, Hagiwara Farm, Sigrid Holmwood, Freeyad Ibrahim, Brian Jungen, Renzo Martens, M12 Group, Hélio Oiticica, Robert Smithson, Bedwyr Williams. Writers include Kenneth Anders, Homi K. Bhabha, Ivan Illich, Julia Kristeva, Henri Lefebvre, Maria Lind, Marco Marcon, Georgy Nikich, Vandana Shiva, Paul O'Neill, Doina Petrescu, Natalie Robertson, David Teh, Reinhardt Vanhoe, Colin Ward.

Whitechapel's Sherlock Holmes

Whitechapel's Sherlock Holmes
Author: Dick Kirby
Publisher: Wharncliffe
Total Pages: 471
Release: 2014-11-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1473843006

Jack the Ripper and beyond—forty-one years in the investigative career of a man hailed by many as Scotland Yard’s greatest detective of all time. Fred Wensley was a Somerset gardener when he joined the Metropolitan Police in 1888. His first case was to unmask Jack the Ripper. At least it familiarized Wensley with Whitechapel, where he bided his time collaring less threatening ne’er-do-wells. After joining the CID, Wensley’s career was a succession of triumphs. He brought to book the Bessarabian, Odessa, and Vendetta crime syndicates of London’s East End; he played an instrumental role in smashing Latvian revolutionaries in the notorious Siege of Sidney Street; he formed the Flying Squad, a stealth surveillance team still operating to this day; and most infamous of all—his arrest in one of Great Britain’s most notorious crimes of passion, a controversial cause célèbre that would shadow Wensley for the rest of his life. Retired Flying Squad officer Dick Kirby has dug deep to paint a fascinating portrait of Fred Wensley, Chief Constable of the CID and the first recipient of the King’s Police Medal, in this “welcome biography of a distinguished detective” (History by the Yard).

Whitechapel Gods

Whitechapel Gods
Author: S.M. Peters
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2008-02-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780451461933

A thrilling new Steampunk fantasy from a talented debut author TWO GODS-ONE CHANCE FOR MANKIND In Victorian London, the Whitechapel section is a mechanized, steam-driven hell, cut off and ruled by two mysterious, mechanical gods-Mama Engine and Grandfather Clock. Some years have passed since the Great Uprising, when humans rose up to fight against the machines, but a few brave veterans of the Uprising have formed their own Resistance-and are gathering for another attack. For now they have a secret weapon that may finally free them-or kill them all...

The Murder That Defeated Whitechapel's Sherlock Holmes

The Murder That Defeated Whitechapel's Sherlock Holmes
Author: Paul Stickler
Publisher: Grub Street Publishers
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2018-04-30
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1526733862

A real-life murder mystery in turn-of-the-century London, and Scotland Yard’s “greatest detective of all time” who was determined to discover whodunit. By 1919, Det. Chief Inspector Fred Wensley was already a legend, having investigated the Jack the Ripper slayings, busted crime syndicates, and risked his life at the notorious Siege of Sidney Street. But the brutal murder of kindly fifty-four-year-old widow and shopkeeper Elizabeth Ridgley was an unexpected challenge in a storied career. Elizabeth and her dog were both found dead in her blood-spattered shop in Hitchin. But even in the early days of forensics, Wensley was stunned by the inept conclusion of local Hertfordshire police: it was a freak, tragic accident that had somehow felled Elizabeth and her Irish terrier. At Wensley’s urging, Scotland Yard proceeded with a second investigation. It led to the arrest of an Irish war veteran. The only real evidence: a blood-stained shirt. But the Ridgley case was far from over. Drawing on primary sources and newly-discovered material, Paul Stickler exposes the frailties of county policing in the years after WWI, reveals how Ridgley’s murder led to fundamental changes in methods of investigation, and attempts to solve a seemingly unsolvable crime.

Appropriation

Appropriation
Author: David Evans
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2009
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262550709

"Many influential artists today draw on a legacy of 'stealing' images and forms from other makers. The term appropriation is particularly associated with the 'Pictures' generation, centred [sic] on New York in the 1980s; this anthology provides a far wider context. Historically, it reappraises a diverse lineage of precedents - from the Dadaist readymade to Situationist détournement - while contemporary 'art after appropriation' is considered from multiple perspectives within a global context." --back cover.

Dust and Shadow

Dust and Shadow
Author: Lyndsay Faye
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2009-04-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1416583300

In Dust and Shadow Sherlock Holmes hunts down Jack the Ripper with impeccably accurate historical detail, rooting the Whitechapel investigation in the fledgling days of tabloid journalism and clinical psychology. This astonishing debut explores the terrifying prospect of hunting down one of the world's first serial killers without the advantage of modern forensics or profiling. Sherlock's desire to stop the killer who is terrifying the East End of London is unwavering from the start, and in an effort to do so he hires an "unfortuate" known as Mary Ann Monk, the friend of a fellow streetwalker who was one of the Ripper's earliest victims. However, when Holmes himself is wounded in Whitechapel attempting to catch the villain, and a series of articles in the popular press question his role in the crimes, he must use all his resources in a desperate race to find the man known as "The Knife" before it is too late. Penned as a pastiche by the loyal and courageous Dr. Watson, Dust and Shadow recalls the ideals evinced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most beloved and world-renowned characters, while testing the limits of their strength in a fight to protect the women of London, Scotland Yard, and the peace of the city itself.

Beauty

Beauty
Author: Dave Beech
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2009
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN: 9780262512381

Key texts on beauty and its revival in contemporary art.

The Werewolf of Whitechapel

The Werewolf of Whitechapel
Author: Suzannah Rowntree
Publisher: Bocfodder Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2021-03-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Murder, monsters…and a disreputable Victorian lady’s maid. A killer stalks the grimy streets of Whitechapel—but Scotland Yard seems determined to turn a blind eye. With one look at her best friend's corpse, Liz Sharp already knows the truth: the killer is a werewolf. No one important will hold a werewolf accountable—after all, the monsters rule Europe. Certainly, no one will believe a werewolf victim like Liz: the very scars that make her determined to investigate Sal’s death also condemn her as the sort of female who’d sell her blood for easy money. As it happens, Liz’s best hope for justice might well lie with her emotionally repressed employer, Princess May. Though the princess has connections with werewolf royalty, there’s no one else Liz can turn to. Certainly, she can’t risk trusting the irritatingly personable Inspector Short, who dogs her steps from the slums of Whitechapel to the palaces of St James. But as corpses mount up, Liz discovers that no one is precisely who she thought: not Sal, not herself, and certainly not the werewolf. Luckily, she has a few tricks hidden in the pockets of her trusty bloomers… The first novel of Miss Sharp’s Monsters is a witty historical fantasy adventure, perfect for fans of The Parasol Protectorate or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! Pick up The Werewolf of Whitechapel and join Miss Sharp on the uncanny streets of Victorian London…