Night Café is a book for the senses that think. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren takes us through a history of coffee as recorded for and by the thinkers of the 19th and 20th century. The Night Café brings together prominent critics, artists, and intellectuals in an encounter which the author describes as a meeting between epistemo-lovers who are equally into rigorous mathematics and the architecture of the tastes. Here's some coffee according to Walter Benjamin, Vincent Van Gogh, Hemingway, Rilke, Ovid, and others. "These amorous notes show a deep, dark passion for philosophy, literature and art-as well as an ardent love of the dispeller of all worries, the drink whose ingestion-and the ensuing thoughts-Gray convinces us amounts to a Hell of a lot more than a mere hill of beans: coffee." (Bent Sørensen) "When one opens the pages of Kochhar-Lindgren's Night Café, after inspecting the menu, one ultimately chooses to fill the optic cup to the brim, that concave receptacle, which synthesizes light from the pupil, iris, & retina, beaming color  & imagery into the optic nerve. A pathway, past fact, into depths of imagination,  reaching down to the Shaman of Trois Freres, & seeing through the eyes in Cafés of Vincent van Gogh, Walter Benjamin, Ernest Hemingway, & others. Refills are desirable & free!" (Robert Gibbons)

Night Café: The Amorous Notes of a Barista

Arts & Photography

Kochhar-Lindgren, Gray

History & Criticism

EyeCorner Press

This is a book of fragments and prose poetry celebrating what mothers try to pass on to their children: a sense of how to be grateful for the experiences in life that can be said to be not only beautiful but also significant in form. The author's own mother, a logician, emerges as a powerful woman who has things to say to people she encounters through mediation: mathematicians, prophets, lovers, and fools. The introduction to the collection is an informative memoir which entangles the personal essay with the formal properties of writing that can be said to be both epistemic, creating a certain kind of knowledge, and also creative in terms of approaches to narrative.

The Logician

Literature & Fiction

Elias, Camelia

Poetry

The Acolytes depicts the yearning of the young artist for success, acceptance, fulfillment. In this dark, searing tale of hope becoming obsession, admiration festering into entrapment, excitement bending into curse, Gabriel starts as a naïve young man full of dedication to high art and to the transformative powers of the imagination. In Amos, the renegade of American letters and cult figure, Gabriel thinks he has found his guiding star, but Ivan, the charismatic yet sinister theater director exerts a strange, mesmeric power over the author and his entire coterie. Terence, the unobtrusive moral fulcrum of the novel, and a cast of others are unable to escape from the welter of exploitation to which their lack of self-knowledge condemns them. Replete with horrors that rise to the grandeur of myth, The Acolytes is a novel like no other. -- "The Acolytes is an original and powerful visionary novel which introduces and explores territory-heroic idealism, its illusions and discontents-rarely touched on in American fiction. It addresses deep longings and aspirations that most artists have swept to the side, which is not only courageous, it could prove beneficial to our culture. Hanshe gives promise of becoming a truly important writer." -Daniel Blue -- The Acolytes "flies in the face of mainstream publishing with its eye on something bigger and vaster than the conventional marketplace. In mode its allegorical approach is so different than the types of Jonathan Franzen 'family sagas' that publishers pick up on nowadays. It's quirky, weird, and mannered and many of the scenes have the strange power of dreams. They proceed according to their own logic, stately as yachts, moving irrevocably, like Time. Like John Cowper Powys, Hanshe has the talent for making other species come to life." -Kevin Killian -- "The connection between the aesthetic and the religious realm in the term "acolyte" is important for Rainer J. Hanshe's novel as it subtly links his story of masters and disciples in the thespian and literary arts to the contemporary crisis in the Church. In the acolyte's realm the cults of art and religion converge. Hanshe's novel also illuminates, in beautiful and also horrifying ways, the many-nuanced nature of "love." In a deeply poetic subplot it shows the oneness of two beings in and with each other as an evocation of cosmic unity. The novel is a riveting, slightly surreal portrait of the bohemian underworld of New York and it exposes the sinister underside of the ever-beckoning dream of art. It shows with fascinating nuance the multi-faceted nature of artistic ambition, illuminating a range from lofty yearning to diabolical craving for power." -Walter H. Sokel

The Acolytes

Hanshe, Rainer J.

Literary

Towards a Genealogy of Spectacle is an exploration of contemporary experience of spectacle in its multiple layers, as it attempts to expose the forces that are at work in the making of spectacular events. It sets before itself two goals: to understand the language of spectacle, and to dissect the pathos of spectacle of contemporary society. In an age that is saturated with technology and the products of mass media, it aims to show how and why grand artistic spectacles are needed for the life and health of a culture. The book engages with the ideas of various thinkers from Kant and Schopenhauer to Foucault and Debord on the subject and aims to open up new spaces for thinking and is an invitation to spectacle-makers towards a fusion of art and philosophy. --- "In Towards a Genealogy of Spectacle Yunus Tuncel shows what it means to reflect, once again, Nietzsche's claim of aesthetic justification of life in the height of our time. He does not just accept this claim, but rather renews it by thoughtfully bringing before our eyes how spectacle could be thought of as a place for the gathering of creative forces." (Arno Böhler, Wien)

Towards a Genealogy of Spectacle: understanding contemporary spectacular experiences

Politics & Social Sciences

Tuncel, Yunus

Philosophy

"Collectively, the entries here are not a manifesto nor a theory. This is neither an academic treatise nor a textbook. What destruction is sought is a destruction of received consciousness, not a bomb thrown into a building or a classroom. They describe a theatre that does not exist, that may never exist except as an imaginative possibility in the mind of the dreamer." (From the "Preface for the author") --- "George Hunka's skills and experience as a dramatist and director are manifested, refracted, in Word Made Flesh, one of the most memorable, haunting and artful performances over which he has presided. ... Here we encounter Hunka's notated performance of the evolution of himself, man and artist, through proposition, interrogation, digression, impatience, righteous anger and a sensual delectation in thought and language. His focus is a theatre which does not seek to reproduce or represent life; but to re-present life, and the possibilities of the self in the world." (From the Afterword by David Ian Rabey, University of Wales, Aberystwyth)

Word Made Flesh: Philosophy, Eros, and Contemporary Tragic Drama.

Hunka, George

Performing Arts

The Way of the Sign is a book about extraction, about reducing methods of inquiry to the bare bones. In a clear, concise, and dialogic style, Camelia Elias guides students through 10 schools of theory and criticism. The focus is on 'asking' each theory to give its best in the simplest way, by making us see what is at stake and how we might respond to it.

The Way of The Sign: Cultural Text Theory in Two Steps

In TAROLOGY Enrique Enriquez sees the Tarot de Marseille through the prism and science of pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions. By following into the footsteps of Oulipian writers, he applies the idea of constraint and the rule of restriction to the surprisingly visual and gestural nature of Tarot. The result is not only illuminating but also enriching for all those interested in the history of Tarot and its divinatory practices. Enriquez develops a whole new method of reading cards, which combines careful considerations of chance with choice. By using a phenomenological and constructivist approach to the cards, Enriquez shows how the Tarot de Marseille speaks poetry and thus reveals some of our deepest concerns with language, with what we can say when we are at a loss for words. --- "In TAROLOGY, going from pataphysics to poetry, Enrique Enriquez PERFORMS tarot in a way that is marvelously free of cultural preconditioning to the workings of myth and symbol, while at the same time proposing following the rules of 'watch and learn', 'keep it simple', 'stay on track', 'be surprised', 'be fearless', and 'let the image talk the walk'. This is no small achievement." (Camelia Elias, Professor of American Studies and Tarot de Marseille Reader)

Tarology (Divination)

Religion & Spirituality

Enriquez, Enrique

New Age & Spirituality

Baka Tarot is a calligraphic tarot that pays homage to martial arts, Zen masters, and the powerful energy of black ink to come through in any rendition, from the hand to the digital processing of the marks left on paper. In this book Camelia Elias describes her cards, offering also short readings of 3-card strings for each individual representation. 
Baka Tarot consists of 26 cards: 22 are named after the standard tarot trumps and 4 are named after poker actions: Call, Check, Raise, and Fold. The aim of this combination is to suggest that what we do with the cards and the way we create them is forever subject to chance. If this wasn't the case, we wouldn't be able to appreciate the ludic in life. 'Baka, ' the Japanese word for Fool, participates in this game as a nod to the calligraphic tradition. 
Note: The cards are not included with this book. They can be purchased from the author.

Baka Tarot: The Fool's Calligraphic Journey

Comics & Graphic Novels

How To Create Comics & Manga

A collection of five daring, radical reconfigurations of ancient plays and myths by US playwright Caridad Svich, winner of a 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement. From the mediatised archival landscape of the haunting Antigone Arkhe to the brutalised labyrinth-city of Steal Back Light from the Virtual to the eerie, broken universe of Wreckage, Svich burns through the core of mythic stories with a heightened sense of theatricality and ecstatic poetry. --- "Like rain when it's dry and ice cream in the summer - you can't say no to the writing of Caridad Svich; you need it, you deserve it. Her mind is generous and nimble; she is capable of subtlety at the highest levels of refinement, and is also inexhaustibly cruel (ice cream is cold as well as sweet). Svich does much here to crack the classic problems of the epic on stage - the epic is for her much more than an accumulation of event - it is the risk of the infinite. Here characters and stories continually threaten to spiritualize, yet ultimately remain in their blood." - Erik Ehn, playwright

Blasted Heavens: Five Contemporary Plays Inspired by the Greeks

Svich, Caridad

Dramas & Plays

In these 2 volumes Enrique gathers fresh voices and sharp tongues to speak of the art of Tarot as the art of living magically. Forty-seven tarot luminaries (readers, historians, philosophers, magicians, and scientists alike) gather here to offer unique perspectives on what we can think of as divination with bones, human bones. Artists, deck creators, and modern-day neo-platonists follow Enrique's lead, letting themselves be enchanted by the piper at the gate of games. Some of the central questions that Enrique deals with are: do we read for the symbol, or the image? Do we read for the narrative that the cards create or their potential for transformation? Do we read for the plot, the poetry, or the formal properties? We find Enrique holding the torch and asking everybody the same questions: how do we experience the tarot? Through symbolic readings or through interacting with the image? While it is clear that he goes with the latter, he gives everyone a chance to state their preferences. But he doesn't stop there. He wants to see what the argument is for such preferences. What are the motivations in considering where images take us? How do the images do that? Why do we go to fortunetellers? My own contribution to this is to suggest that we read cards for the magic of narrative. We go to fortunetellers to see others play with our lives. Here are 47 of them. -- CAMELIA ELIAS, "HE RECO ME: ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ'S POETICS OF DIVINATION"

En Terex It: Encounters Around Tarot: Volume 1 (Divination)

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