Half a century after "founding" the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg has written this powerful collection of poems that are suffused with a range of emotional colors that gives Ginsberg's work an elegiac tone.

Fascinating hardcover book that recounts the encouragement Bob Dylan gave the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to go into the studio in 1971 to record his first ever album of music. He then re-entered the studio in 1976 and 1981 and finally in 1983 he compiled all of the recordings (which featured contributions from Dylan, members of his band, and Arthur Russell, and was produced by John Hammond Sr.) onto a double LP called First Blues. This book has a preface which records an important piece of historical collaboration between this Beats icon and the Counter Culture icon, Bob Dylan, and includes the lyrics/poems and musical notations for the noted namesake album. Approximately 75 pages and 32 songs.

Plutonian Title poem combines scientific info on 24,000-year cycle of the Great Year compared with equal half-life of Plutonium waste, accounting Homeric formula for appeasing underground millionaire Pluto Lord of Death, jack in the gnostic box of Aeons, and Adamantine Truth of ordinary mind inspiration, unhexing nuclear ministry of fear. Following poems chronologies Wyoming grass blues, a punk-rock sonnet, personal grave musing, Manhattan landscape hypertension, lovelorn heart thumps, mantric rhymes, Neruda’s tearful Lincoln ode retranslated to U.S. vernacular oratory, Nagasaki Bomb anniversary haikus, Zen Bluegrass raunch, free verse demystification of sacred fame, Reznikoffian filial epiphanies, hot pants Skeltonic doggerel, a Kerouackian New Year’s eve ditty, professional homework, New Jersey quatrains, scarecrow haiku, improvised dice roll for high school kids, English rock-and-roll sophistications, an old love glimpse, little German movies, old queen conclusions, a tender renaissance song, ode to hero-flop, Peace protest prophecies, Lower East Side snapshots, national flashed in the Buddhafields, Sapphic stanzas in quantitative idiom, look out at the bedroom window, feverish birdbrain verses from Eastern Europe for chanting with electric bands, Beethovinean ear strophes drowned in rain, a glance at Cloud Castle, poems 1977-1980 end with International new wave hit lyric Capitol Air

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) kept a journal his entire life, beginning at the age of eleven. In these first journals the most important and formative years of the poet's storied life are captured, his inner thoughts detailed in what the San Francisco Chronicle calls a “vivid first-person account...Ginsberg's unmistakable voice coming into its own for the first time.” Ginsberg's journals-so candid he insisted they be published only after his death-document his complex, fascinating relationships with such figures of Beat lore as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, and reveal a growing self-awareness about himself, his sexuality, and his identity as a poet. Illustrated with never-before-seen photos and bolstered by an appendix of his earliest poems, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice is a major literary event.

One of the central relationships in the Beat scene was the long–lasting friendship of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Ginsberg introduced Snyder to the East Coast Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, while Snyder himself became the model for the serious poet that Ginsberg so wanted to become. Snyder encouraged Ginsberg to explore the beauty of the West Coast and, even more lastingly, introduced Ginsberg to Buddhism, the subject of so many long letter exchanges between them. Beginning in 1956 and continuing through 1991, the two men exchanged more than 850 letters. Bill Morgan, Ginsberg's biographer and an important editor of his papers, has selected the most significant correspondence from this long friendship. The letters themselves paint the biographical and poetic portraits of two of America's most important—and most fascinating—poets. Robert Hass' insightful introduction discusses the lives of these two major poets and their enriching and moving relationship.

A composer's study and celebration of a difficult but influential artist, his work, and his time Proposing that Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) has been more discussed than heard, more tolerated than loved, composer Allen Shawn puts aside ultimate judgments about Schoenberg's place in musical history to explore the composer's fascinating world in a series of "linked essays--soundings" that are more searching than analytical, more suggestive than definitive. In an approach that is unusual for a book of an avowedly introductory character, the text plunges into the details of some of Schoenberg works, while at the same time providing a broad overview of his involvements in music, painting and the history through which he lived. Emphasizing music as an expressive art of rhythms and tones, Shawn approaches Schoenberg primarily from the listener's point of view, uncovering both the seeds of his radicalism in his early music and the traditional bases of his later work. Although liberally sprinkled with musical examples, the text can be read without them. By turns witty, personal, opinionated and instructive, ""Arnold Schoenberg's Journey"" is above all an appreciation of a great musical and artistic imagination in a time unlike any other.

Ben-Meir, Alon

This book sets forth a new area in the study of extraordinary individuals in religious traditions. It develops the category of “Religious Genius” as an alternative to existing categories, primarily “saint.” It constructs a model by which to appreciate these individuals, suggesting key characteristics such as love, humility, and self-surrender. Religious geniuses transform their traditions and their legacies endure through these very transformations. They also inspire changes across religious boundaries and traditions. The study of religious geniuses in various faith traditions therefore advances interfaith engagement today. The book complements existing, primarily historical, studies of saints by offering a phenomenological approach that seeks to touch the subjectivity of these individuals, and how they have affected the unfolding of their religious traditions.

The chapters collected in this book, prepared by a think tank of the Elijah Interfaith Academy, address the subject of religious leadership. The subject is of broad relevance in the training of religious leaders and in the practice of religious leadership. As such, it is also germane to religious thought, where reflections on religious leadership occupy an important place. What does it mean to be a religious leader in today’s world? To what degree are the challenges that confront religious leadership today the same perennial challenges that have arrested the attention of the faithful and their leaders for generations, and to what degree do we encounter challenges today that are unique to our day and age? One dimension is surely unique, and that is the very ability to explore these issues from an interreligious perspective and to consider challenges, opportunities, and strategies across religious traditions. Studying the theme across six faith traditions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism, and Buddhism— The Future of Religious Leadership: World Religions in Conversation recognizes the common challenges to present-day religious leadership. Contributors: Awet Andemicael, Timothy J. Gianotti, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Anantanand Rambachan, Maria Reis Habito, Meir Sendor, Balwant Singh Dhillon, Miroslav Volf

"Alvin Curran has realized a long and fruitful career as a composer, performer, installation artist, writer, and teacher in the American experimental music tradition. He studied with Ron Nelson, Elliott Carter, and Mel Powell, and co-founded the group Musica Elettronica Viva in 1966 in Rome where he currently resides. His music, whether chamber works, radio-art, large scale environmental theater or solo performance, embraces all sounds, all spaces, and all people. This illustrated anthology of compositions, musical fragments, and instruction pieces is intended to be enjoyed and used by adventurous musicians both literate and unlettered, scholars, teachers of composition and improvisation, and anyone interested in the evolution of art-music in our time."--Page 4 of cover

Hospital Series, a bruisingly intimate colloquy with an elusive lover, is Italian poet Amelia Rosselli's virtuoso, subversive, neo-Petrarchan sequence of poems. Rosselli wrote much of the series in the mid 1960s after being hospitalized for a mental illness she suffered from for most of her life, and whose pain shapes her language and difficult vision. These explosive poems, a furious cacophonic crescendo of semantic and syntactic accumulations deeply admired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, place Rosselli among the greatest writers of her generation.

Poetry. Italian Studies. Translated from the Italian by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti. Although for much of her life controversial and underrated in her own country, Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) is now acknowledged internationally as one of the most important European poets of the 20th century. "VARIAZIONI BELLICHE" [WAR VARIATIONS] is her groundbreaking 1964 collection, posthumously edited and to which poems were added in the definitive 2009 Mondadori "I Meridiani" edition. WAR VARIATIONS is a new edition of Lucia Re's and Paul Vangelisti's prize winning translation (Premio Flaiano & PEN USA translation awards, 2006), with entirely revised & corrected texts, as well as the additional poems from the definitive Italian edition. Amelia Rosselli's accomplishments as poet and linguistic innovator remain unique and unsurpassed in her own language and in post-War European literature. WAR VARIATIONS is an extremely moving fusion of the personal and public, within a singularly innovative poetic vision and diction.

Facsimiles of selected documents from the American Jewish Committee archives dealing with the Committee's activities during the Holocaust.

The re-unification of Germany has awakened conflicting emotions. This book looks at how the movement is affecting people on a personal and populations on a national level. The author describes the organizations that were set up to facilitate relations between family and friends who were divided by the intra-German border. She gives an account of a German rally in the Sudetenland and notes the force of the movement among populations living beyond the German borders. She also shows in striking counterpoint the life of the few remaining Jews still living in Germany, a reminder, if such was needed, of the terrible evil of which fanatical nationalism is capable.

a remarkable degree of indifference

"This book develops a method that emphasizes the entwinements of "technology," "ideology," and the medium-specific particularities of photography in five twentieth-century cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect"--

Coney Island, 1939: On the eve of World War II, fifteen-year-old Harry Carzker spends his after-school hours on his bike, picking up betting slips from Coney Island carnival freaks for the local bookie and racing his imaginary sworn enemy, German Captain Ziegenbaum, whose ship menaces the coastline. His parents are in their own world: his father writes a serial novel for the local Yiddish newspaper by day and hangs out with other intellectuals at the Cafe Royal by night; his beautiful mother grows increasingly bitter, yearning for a glamorous life that is certain to be denied to the wife of a writer. As the lights of the Cyclone and Luna Park glow in the Coney Island night. Harry finds a surrogate family in the freaks and low-lifes. A premature victim of Welischmerz, "lovingly applied by loved ones, ignorant of its toxicity on the young", Harry ponders life, art, and philosophy with Aba, a Yiddish poet who boards with his family, yet he is unable to shake the dark foreboding of a disaster that finally materializes, changing his life utterly. Coney, soaked through with atmosphere and guided by an uncommon comic touch, captures the essence of a young man's coming of age in an extraordinary place and time. Depicting Coney Island in all its garish and gritty human spectacle. Amram Ducovny's dark and brilliant first novel has the stark intensity of a Weegee photograph, the heart of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and the soul of an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel.

Provides the first broad introduction to feminist work in classical studies. Including lesbian theory, black feminist theory, American and French feminist theory, classics will never be the same again.