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Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 054413320X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 054413320X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 179
Get Book Here
Book Description
Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
Author: Roman Mars
Publisher: Dey Street Books
ISBN: 0358126606
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast
Author: Sophia Psarra
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787352390
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.
Author: Adi Ophir
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134959737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
This book offers an original and detailed reading of Plato's Republic, one of the most influential philosophical works in the emergence of Western philosophy. The author discusses the Republic in terms of discursive events and political acts. Plato's act is placed in the context of a politico-discursive crisis in Athens at the end of the fifth and the beginning of the fourth century B.C that gave rise to the dialogue's primary question, that of justice. The originality of Dr. Ophir lies in the way he reconstructs the Republic's different spatial settings - utopian, mythical, dramatic and discursive - using them as the main thread of his interpretation. Against the background of Plato's critique of the organisation of civic-space in the Greek polis, the author relates the spatial settings in the Plato text to each other. This provides a basis for a re-examination of the relationship between philosophy and politics, which Plato's work advocates, and which it actually enacted.
Author: Kyle Gillette
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429649282
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
The Invisible City explores urban spaces from the perspective of a traveller, writer, and creator of theatre to illuminate how cities offer travellers and residents theatrical visions while also remaining mostly invisible, beyond the limits of attention. The book explores the city as both stage and content in three parts. Firstly, it follows in pattern Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, wherein Marco Polo describes cities to the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, to produce a constellation of vignettes recalling individual cities through travel writing and engagement with artworks. Secondly, Gillette traces the Teatro Potlach group and its ongoing immersive, site-specific performance project Invisible Cities, which has staged performances in dozens of cities across Europe and the Americas. The final part of the book offers useful exercises for artists and travellers interested in researching their own invisible cities. Written for practitioners, travellers, students, and thinkers interested in the city as site and source of performance, The Invisible City mixes travelogue with criticism and cleverly combines philosophical meditations with theatrical pedagogy.
Author: Darran Anderson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022647030X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 573
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Book Description
How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547542380
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 143
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Book Description
A novel of a delightful eccentric on a search for truth, by the renowned author of Invisible Cities. In The New York Times Book Review, the poet Seamus Heaney praised Mr. Palomar as a series of “beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination.” Throughout these twenty-seven intricately structured chapters, the musings of the crusty Mr. Palomar consistently render the world sublime and ridiculous. Like the telescope for which he is named, Mr. Palomar is a natural observer. “It is only after you have come to know the surface of things,” he believes, “that you can venture to seek what is underneath.” Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, or a topless sunbather, he tends to let his meditations stray from the present moment to the great beyond. And though he may fail as an objective spectator, he is the best of company. “Each brief chapter reads like an exploded haiku,” wrote Time Out. A play on a world fragmented by our individual perceptions, this inventive and irresistible novel encapsulates the life’s work of an artist of the highest order, “the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century” (The Guardian).
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241339111
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 55
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Book Description
'Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.' Science and fiction interweave delightfully in these playful Cosmicomic short stories. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
Author: Wade Davis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451628366
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
A scientific investigation and personal adventure story about zombis and the voudoun culture of Haiti by a Harvard scientist. In April 1982, ethnobotanist Wade Davis arrived in Haiti to investigate two documented cases of zombis—people who had reappeared in Haitian society years after they had been officially declared dead and had been buried. Drawn into a netherworld of rituals and celebrations, Davis penetrated the vodoun mystique deeply enough to place zombification in its proper context within vodoun culture. In the course of his investigation, Davis came to realize that the story of vodoun is the history of Haiti—from the African origins of its people to the successful Haitian independence movement, down to the present day, where vodoun culture is, in effect, the government of Haiti’s countryside. The Serpent and the Rainbow combines anthropological investigation with a remarkable personal adventure to illuminate and finally explain a phenomenon that has long fascinated Americans.
Author: David Shattuck
Publisher: Wordtech Communications
ISBN: 9781625490469
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 94
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Book Description
INVISIBLE CITIES by David Shattuck attempts to chart the paths back into memory where connections are forged and lost in the backdrop of abandoned cities, past lives, and what Loren Eiseley called the "wild, impassible places" found in nature. The Invisible City is the one we build in our minds with memories and parts dreamed up to fill in the gaps where memory fails. It's where we first lived alone, first faced death, found love and lost it, and grew immeasurably into ourselves. "David Shattuck's INVISIBLE CITIES is a beautiful collection of poems, brimming with heartache and solace, lyricism and longing, wrenching desolations and the true comforts of the physical life. Drunk and drowsy by the shore, he writes, 'I am ready for anything: / like a fawn still wet / from his mother, stumbling / for the first time, / stunned at the insistence of air.' Here is a poet in the world's-grace-seeking vein of Jim Harrison, Richard Hugo, and Theodore Roethke. I have been waiting for a collection such as this from someone of Shattuck's generation for a long time."-Jonathan Johnson "'How wide the world had seemed, / how easy the surrender into it, ' David Shattuck writes in INVISIBLE CITIES. This surrender yields a book of departures but also returns, and unreels haunting portraits of people displaced between places both new and familiar to them-the cities they regret, the wild mountains and islands of pine, the rivers full of stubborn fish and drowned souls. But out of this restlessness, Shattuck forges moments of consolation, too, transmuting regret, turning exile into a kind of boon. 'And because I have nowhere / to go and no one expects me, ' he writes, 'I am the earth's / most fortunate son.' We, too, are fortunate to receive this striking and confident debut."-Corey Marks "David Shattuck's remarkable collection contrasts the richness of the inner life with the isolate journeys of consciousness through a coldly objective world that spares no one its vivid perplexities. In a language often reminiscent of the late James Wright, Shattuck's poems confront primary mortal facts: we don't know who we are, neither blessing nor suffering will stay, our separateness (fully admitted and lived) offers us our most profound experience of community. This is an important, first rate first book."-Christopher Howell
