A History of Clouds

A History of Clouds PDF Author: Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Publisher: Seagull Books Pvt Ltd
ISBN: 9781906497453
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
POETRY TEXTS & ANTHOLOGIES. In these ninety-nine meditations, poet and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrates the tenacity of the normal and routine in everyday life, where the survival of the objects we use without thinking - a pair of scissors, perhaps - is both a small, human victory and a quiet reminder of our own ephemeral nature. He sets his quotidian reflections against a broad historic and political backdrop - the cold war and its accompanying atomic threat, the German student revolt, would-be socialism in Cuba, China, and Africa, and World War II as experienced by the youthful poet. Enzensberger's poems are conversational, skeptical, and serene; they culminate in the extended set of observations that gives the collection its title. Clouds, alien and yet symbols of human life, are for Enzensberger at once a central metaphor of the Western poetic tradition and "the most fleeting of all masterpieces. 'Cloud archaeology', writes Enzensberger, is "a science for angels.

A History of Clouds

A History of Clouds PDF Author: Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Publisher: Seagull Books Pvt Ltd
ISBN: 9781906497453
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Get Book Here

Book Description
POETRY TEXTS & ANTHOLOGIES. In these ninety-nine meditations, poet and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrates the tenacity of the normal and routine in everyday life, where the survival of the objects we use without thinking - a pair of scissors, perhaps - is both a small, human victory and a quiet reminder of our own ephemeral nature. He sets his quotidian reflections against a broad historic and political backdrop - the cold war and its accompanying atomic threat, the German student revolt, would-be socialism in Cuba, China, and Africa, and World War II as experienced by the youthful poet. Enzensberger's poems are conversational, skeptical, and serene; they culminate in the extended set of observations that gives the collection its title. Clouds, alien and yet symbols of human life, are for Enzensberger at once a central metaphor of the Western poetic tradition and "the most fleeting of all masterpieces. 'Cloud archaeology', writes Enzensberger, is "a science for angels.

The Invention of Clouds

The Invention of Clouds PDF Author: Richard Hamblyn
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312420017
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Presents the story of Luke Howard, an ameteur meterologist, and his groundbreaking work that began with naming and classifying clouds.

Clouds

Clouds PDF Author: Richard Hamblyn
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780237707
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Clouds have been objects of delight and fascination throughout human history, their fleeting magnificence and endless variety having inspired scientists and daydreamers alike. Described by Aristophanes as “the patron goddesses of idle men,” clouds and the ever-changing patterns they create have long symbolized the restlessness and unpredictability of nature, and yet they are also the source of life-giving rains. In this book, Richard Hamblyn examines clouds in their cultural, historic, and scientific contexts, exploring their prevalence in our skies as well as in our literature, art, and music. As Hamblyn shows, clouds function not only as a crucial means of circulating water around the globe but also as a finely tuned thermostat regulating the planet’s temperature. He discusses the many different kinds of clouds, from high, scattered cirrus clouds to the plump thought-bubbles of cumulus clouds, even exploring man-made clouds and clouds on other planets. He also shows how clouds have featured as meaningful symbols in human culture, whether as ominous portents of coming calamities or as ethereal figures giving shape to the heavens, whether in Wordsworth’s poetry or today’s tech speak. Comprehensive yet compact, cogent and beautifully illustrated, this is the ultimate guidebook to those shapeshifters of the sky.

A Prehistory of the Cloud

A Prehistory of the Cloud PDF Author: Tung-Hui Hu
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262330105
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The militarized legacy of the digital cloud: how the cloud grew out of older network technologies and politics. We may imagine the digital cloud as placeless, mute, ethereal, and unmediated. Yet the reality of the cloud is embodied in thousands of massive data centers, any one of which can use as much electricity as a midsized town. Even all these data centers are only one small part of the cloud. Behind that cloud-shaped icon on our screens is a whole universe of technologies and cultural norms, all working to keep us from noticing their existence. In this book, Tung-Hui Hu examines the gap between the real and the virtual in our understanding of the cloud. Hu shows that the cloud grew out of such older networks as railroad tracks, sewer lines, and television circuits. He describes key moments in the prehistory of the cloud, from the game “Spacewar” as exemplar of time-sharing computers to Cold War bunkers that were later reused as data centers. Countering the popular perception of a new “cloudlike” political power that is dispersed and immaterial, Hu argues that the cloud grafts digital technologies onto older ways of exerting power over a population. But because we invest the cloud with cultural fantasies about security and participation, we fail to recognize its militarized origins and ideology. Moving between the materiality of the technology itself and its cultural rhetoric, Hu's account offers a set of new tools for rethinking the contemporary digital environment.

Behind the Cloud

Behind the Cloud PDF Author: Marc Benioff
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470521163
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
How did salesforce.com grow from a start up in a rented apartment into the world's fastest growing software company in less than a decade? For the first time, Marc Benioff, the visionary founder, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, tells how he and his team created and used new business, technology, and philanthropic models tailored to this time of extraordinary change. Showing how salesforce.com not only survived the dotcom implosion of 2001, but went on to define itself as the leader of the cloud computing revolution and spark a $46-billion dollar industry, Benioff's story will help business leaders and entrepreneurs stand out, innovate better, and grow faster in any economic climate. In Behind the Cloud, Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish.

Book of Clouds

Book of Clouds PDF Author: Chloe Aridjis
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 144811344X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Tatiana, a young Mexican woman, is adrift in Berlin. Choosing a life of solitude, she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive Doktor Weiss. Through him she meets 'ant illustrator turned meteorologist' Jonas, a Berliner who has used clouds and the sky's constant shape-shifting as his escape from reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds begins to change...

Where Clouds are Formed

Where Clouds are Formed PDF Author: Ofelia Zepeda
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816527793
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
A Native American poet explores aspects of language, American Indian culture, and the land.

The Theory of Clouds

The Theory of Clouds PDF Author: Stéphane Audeguy
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780151014286
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The novel tells the story of Akira Kumo, a retired couturier living in Paris, owner of the world's largest collection of books about clouds, and Virginie Latour, whom Kumo hires to help catalogue his library. While they work he tells her the story behind three figures in particular, all British, all obsessed by clouds: Luke Howard, a real-life Quaker who in 1802 wrote the first treatise classifying clouds (we still use it today); a painter named Carmichael, clearly based on John Constable, one of the most famous cloud painters of all time, and a fictional amateur meteorologist named Richard Abercrombie, who aspires to write the definitive book on cloud description, which would come to be known in cloud circles as the Abercrombie Protocol. Kumo sends Virginie Latour to London to buy the Protocol. By the end of the novel, we learn the Protocol's great secret; we understand what binds these men together; and and we learn that Kumo himself is a survivor of the Hiroshima blast, in whose cloud his family vanished.

Gallery of Clouds

Gallery of Clouds PDF Author: Rachel Eisendrath
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681375443
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
A personal and critical work that celebrates the pleasure of books and reading. Largely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century pastoral romance Arcadia was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for King Lear; Virginia Woolf saw it as “some luminous globe” wherein “all the seeds of English fiction lie latent.” In Gallery of Clouds, the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to Arcadia in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds: “The clouds in my Arcadia, the one I found and the one I made, hold light and color. They take on the forms of other things: a cat, the sea, my grandmother, the gesture of a teacher I loved, a friend, a girlfriend, a ship at sail, my mother. These clouds stay still only as long as I look at them, and then they change.” Gallery of Clouds opens in New York City with a dream, or a vision, of meeting Virginia Woolf in the afterlife. Eisendrath holds out her manuscript—an infinite moment passes—and Woolf takes it and begins to read. From here, in this act of magical reading, the book scrolls out in a series of reflective pieces linked through metaphors and ideas. Golden threadlines tie each part to the next: a rupture of time in a Pisanello painting; Montaigne’s practice of revision in his essays; a segue through Vivian Gordon Harsh, the first African American head librarian in the Chicago public library system; a brief history of prose style; a meditation on the active versus the contemplative life; the story of Sarapion, a fifth-century monk; the persistence of the pastoral; image-making and thought; reading Willa Cather to her grandmother in her Chicago apartment; the deviations of Walter Benjamin’s “scholarly romance,” The Arcades Project. Eisendrath’s wondrously woven hybrid work extols the materiality of reading, its pleasures and delights, with wild leaps and abounding grace.

A Theory of /Cloud/

A Theory of /Cloud/ PDF Author: Hubert Damisch
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804734400
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the conceptions underlying the history of art. The author’s basic idea is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of visual experience and that it could be said to generate an oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the cloud. On a literal level, this could be represented by the absence of the sky, as in Brunelleschi’s legendary first experiments with panels using perspective. Or it could be the vaporous swathes that Correggio uses to mediate between the viewer on earth and the heavenly prospect in his frescoed domes at Parma. Insofar as the cloud is a semiotic operator, interacting with the linear order of perspective, it also becomes a dynamic agent facilitating the creation of new types of pictorial space. (Damisch puts the signifer cloud between slashes to indicate that he deals with clouds as signs instead of realistic elements.) This way of looking at the history of painting is especially fruitful for the Renaissance and Baroque periods, but it is also valuable for looking at such junctures as the nineteenth century. For example, Damisch invokes Ruskin and Turner, who carry out both in theory and in practice a revision of the conditions of appearances of the cloud as a landscape feature. Even for the twentieth century, he has illuminating things to say about how his reading of cloud applies to the painters Leger and Batthus. In short, Damisch achieves a brilliant and systematic demonstration of a concept of semiotic interaction that touches some of the most crucial features of the Western art tradition.