The Ashtray

The Ashtray
Author: Errol Morris
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2018-05-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0226922707

Filmmaker Errol Morris offers his perspective on the world and his powerful belief in the necessity of truth. In 1972, philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at Errol Morris. This book is the result. At the time, Morris was a graduate student. Now we know him as one of the most celebrated and restlessly probing filmmakers of our time, the creator of such classics of documentary investigation as The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War. Kuhn, meanwhile, was—and, posthumously, remains—a star in his field, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a landmark book that has sold well over a million copies and introduced the concept of “paradigm shifts” to the larger culture. And Morris thought the idea was bunk. The Ashtray tells why—and in doing so, it makes a powerful case for Morris’s way of viewing the world, and the centrality to that view of a fundamental conception of the necessity of truth. “For me,” Morris writes, “truth is about the relationship between language and the world: a correspondence idea of truth.” He has no patience for philosophical systems that aim for internal coherence and disdain the world itself. Morris is after bigger game: he wants to establish as clearly as possible what we know and can say about the world, reality, history, our actions and interactions. It’s the fundamental desire that animates his filmmaking, whether he’s probing Robert McNamara about Vietnam or the oddball owner of a pet cemetery. Truth may be slippery, but that doesn’t mean we have to grease its path of escape through philosophical evasions. Rather, Morris argues powerfully, it is our duty to do everything we can to establish and support it. In a time when truth feels ever more embattled, under siege from political lies and virtual lives alike, The Ashtray is a bracing reminder of its value, delivered by a figure who has, over decades, uniquely earned our trust through his commitment to truth. No Morris fan should miss it.

Is Kissing a Girl Who Smokes Like Licking an Ashtray?

Is Kissing a Girl Who Smokes Like Licking an Ashtray?
Author: Randy Powell
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (BYR)
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2003
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9780374436285

An eighteen-year-old pinball addict and a smart-mouthed girl who don't quite fit in with anyone else develop a special relationship.

Extinct

Extinct
Author: Barbara Penner
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2021-11-11
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1789144531

Blending architecture, design, and technology, a visual tour through futures past via the objects we have replaced, left behind, and forgotten. So-called extinct objects are those that were imagined but were never in use, or that existed but are now unused—superseded, unfashionable, or simply forgotten. Extinct gathers together an exceptional range of artists, curators, architects, critics, and academics, including Hal Foster, Barry Bergdoll, Deyan Sudjic, Tacita Dean, Emily Orr, Richard Wentworth, and many more. In eighty-five essays, contributors nominate “extinct” objects and address them in a series of short, vivid, sometimes personal accounts, speaking not only of obsolete technologies, but of other ways of thinking, making, and interacting with the world. Extinct is filled with curious, half-remembered objects, each one evoking a future that never came to pass. It is also a visual treat, full of interest and delight.

Cartooning

Cartooning
Author: Ivan Brunetti
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2011-03-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300172591

Provides lessons on the art of cartooning along with information on terminology, tools, techniques, and theory.

Significant Objects

Significant Objects
Author: Joshua Glenn
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2012-08-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1606995251

100 EXTRAORDINARY STORIES ABOUT ORDINARY THINGS SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS: A Literary and Economic Experiment Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object? The Significant Objects project set out to answer that question once and for all, by recruiting a highly impressive crew of creative writers to invent stories about an unimpressive menagerie of items rescued from thrift stores and yard sales. That secondhand flotsam definitely becomes more valuable: sold on eBay, objects originally picked up for a buck or so sold for thousands of dollars in total — making the project a sensation in the literary blogosphere along the way. But something else happened, too: The stories created were astonishing, a cavalcade of surprising responses to the challenge of manufacturing significance. Who would have believed that random junk could inspire so much imagination? The founders of the Significant Objects project, that’s who. This book collects 100 of the finest tales from this unprecedented creative experiment; you’ll never look at a thrift-store curiosity the same way again. FEATURING ORIGINAL STORIES BY: Chris Adrian • Rob Agredo • Kurt Andersen • Rachel Axler • Rob Baedeker • Nicholson Baker • Rosecrans Baldwin • Matthew Battles • Charles Baxter • Kate Bernheimer • Susanna Breslin • Kevin Brockmeier • Matt Brown • Blake Butler • Meg Cabot • Tim Carvell • Patrick Cates • Dan Chaon • Susanna Daniel • Adam Davies • Kathryn Davis • Matthew De Abaitua • Stacey • D'Erasmo • Helen DeWitt • Doug Dorst • Mark Doty • Ben Ehrenreich • Mark Frauenfelder • Amy Fusselman • William Gibson • Myla Goldberg • Ben Greenman • Jason Grote • Jim Hanas • Jennifer Michael Hecht • Sheila Heti • Christine Hill • Dara Horn • Shelley Jackson • Heidi Julavits • Ben Katchor • Matt Klam • Wayne Koestenbaum • Josh Kramer • Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer • Neil LaBute • Victor LaValle • J. Robert Lennon • Jonathan Lethem • Todd Levin • Laura Lippman • Mimi Lipson • Robert Lopez • Joe Lyons • Sarah Manguso • Merrill Markoe • Tom McCarthy • Miranda Mellis • Lydia Millet • Maud Newton • Annie Nocenti • Stephen O’Connor • Stewart O’Nan • Jenny Offill • Gary Panter • Ed Park • James Parker • Benjamin Percy • Mark Jude Poirier • Padgett Powell • Bob Powers • Todd Pruzan • Dan Reines • Nathaniel Rich • Peter Rock • Lucinda Rosenfeld • Greg Rowland • Luc Sante • R.K. Scher • Toni Schlesinger • Matthew Sharpe • Jim Shepard • David Shields • Marisa Silver • Curtis Sittenfeld • Bruce Sterling • Scarlett Thomas • Jeff Turrentine • Deb Olin Unferth • Tom Vanderbilt • Matthew J. Wells • Joe Wenderoth • Margaret Wertheim • Colleen Werthmann • Colson Whitehead • Carl Wilson • Cintra Wilson • Sari Wilson • Douglas Wolk • John Wray

Lost Dogs

Lost Dogs
Author: Jeff Lemire
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Total Pages:
Release: 2012
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1603091246

"Pure pulp pugilism." -- Rue Morgue "Lost Dogs is rough, it is raw as hell, but it's rough like a bareknuckle fist fight and raw like a rusty knife into your gut... Lemire's stories pour out of him on to the page, his id spilling out into the world."-- from the introduction by Timothy Callahan Long out of print, Jeff Lemire's Xeric-Award-winning LOST DOGS now returns in a newly remastered edition, soaked with blood and ink. This 104-page mythic yarn follows a family man who's larger than life... but even he may not be powerful enough to prevent the loss of everything he's ever known. Bold, brutal, and emotionally raw, LOST DOGS represents an acclaimed storyteller's first professional work -- an early exhibition of the gifts that have made his ESSEX COUNTY and SWEET TOOTH so phenomenally popular.

How God Moved My Ashtray

How God Moved My Ashtray
Author: John Paladino
Publisher:
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2019-08-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780998630649

Up until his mid-40's, John, "Little John" Paladino's life was spent stealing, robbing, cheating and pursuing illegal activity. A notorious and feared enforcer for the mafia, John prided himself on inflicting others with terror and ensuring devastation. Having been in and out of prison and other correctional facilities most of his life, his peace was void and pain plagued and pierced everything and everyone around him. In between prison bids, John was also involved in several near-fatal accidents, including one which killed his own friend. There was no explanation to John's continued survival other than the beginning of his recognition, that God just wasn't done with him yet. It was on Memorial Day 2011, that his life changed radically after a foolish challenge to God, just the night before. This is the story of how God moved John Paladino's "ashtray," a feat no man could do for himself, and the subsequent steps John took to walk out a new life, redeemed, as a new man.

Mind-Body Problems

Mind-Body Problems
Author: John Horgan
Publisher: Independently Published
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2019-01-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781731440488

Science journalist John Horgan presents a radical new perspective on the mind-body problem and related issues such as consciousness, free will, morality and the meaning of life. Horgan argues that science will never discover an objectively true solution to the mind-body problem because such a solution does not exist. Horgan explores his thesis by delving into the professional and personal lives of nine mind-body experts, including neuroscientist Christof Koch, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, child psychologist Alison Gopnik, complexologist Stuart Kauffman, legal scholar and psychoanalyst Elyn Saks, philosopher Owen Flanagan, novelist Rebecca Goldstein, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, and economist Deirdre McCloskey.

Believing Is Seeing

Believing Is Seeing
Author: Errol Morris
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2014-05-27
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 0143124250

Academy Award–winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography In his inimitable style, Errol Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs. With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris shows how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal, and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Each essay in this book is part detective story, part philosophical meditation, presenting readers with a conundrum, and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record. Believing Is Seeing is a highly original exploration of photography and perception, from one of America’s most provocative observers.