Michael Davidson

MICHAEL DAVIDSON (1897-1975) was an English foreign correspondent who caused a sensation in 1962 when he published an autobiography, The World, The Flesh and Myself, which opened with the sentence "This is the life history of a lover of boys." In an England where homosexuality was still illegal and widely reviled, it was incredibly daring, but his patent honesty won hearts and it was well-received: "the twofold story of a courageous and lovable person's struggle to come to terms with his Grecian heresy and of a brilliant journalist's fight against colonial jingoism" - Arthur Koestler (author of Darkness at Noon), The Observer. One of the books that were "the only salvation and sense in my life" and "reflected my own emotional turmoil and my own circumstances" - Stephen Fry on himself as a teenager, Moab Is My Washpot. Davidson followed the success of his first book with this even more revealing sequel, a fond memoir of his adolescent friends in sixteen cities spanning three continents over three decades. Written with the keen observation of a brilliant journalist invariably open to diverse customs and warmly empathetic with the young: "We should be grateful that in Mr. Davidson we have a highly intelligent writer with a sensitive awareness of his nature. As to his style, no other contemporary English writer of prose possesses such exact lyricism, wit and learning" - Colin Spencer, The Evening Standard. For this edition, some explicit passages, cut from both previous British editions but included in the very rare American edition, have been restored, and explanatory background notes have been added by novelist Edmund Marlowe.

Why do modern poets quote from dictionaries in their poems? How has the tape recorder changed the poet's voice? What has shopping to do with Gertrude Stein's aesthetics? These and other questions form the core of Ghostlier Demarcations, a study of modern poetry as a material medium. One of today's most respected critics of twentieth-century poetry and poetics, Michael Davidson argues that literary materiality has been dominated by an ideology of modernism, based on the ideal of the autonomous work of art, which has hindered our ability to read poetry as a socially critical medium. By focusing on writing as a palimpsest involving numerous layers of materiality—from the holograph manuscript to the printed book—Davidson exposes modern poetry's engagement with larger historical forces. The palimpsest that results is less a poem than an arrested stage of writing in whose layers can be discerned ghostly traces of other texts. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Why do modern poets quote from dictionaries in their poems? How has the tape recorder changed the poet's voice? What has shopping to do with Gertrude Stein's aesthetics? These and other questions form the core of Ghostlier Demarcations, a study of modern poetry as a material medium. One of today's most respected critics of twentieth-century poetry and poetics, Michael Davidson argues that literary materiality has been dominated by an ideology of modernism, based on the ideal of the autonomous work of art, which has hindered our ability to read poetry as a socially critical medium. By focusing on writing as a palimpsest involving numerous layers of materiality—from the holograph manuscript to the printed book—Davidson exposes modern poetry's engagement with larger historical forces. The palimpsest that results is less a poem than an arrested stage of writing in whose layers can be discerned ghostly traces of other texts. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

The role of disability and deafness in art Distressing Language is full of mistakes—errors of hearing, speaking, writing, and understanding. Michael Davidson engages the role of disability and deafness in contemporary aesthetics, exploring how physical and intellectual differences challenge our understanding of art and poetry. Where hearing and speaking are considered normative conditions of the human, what happens when words are misheard and misspoken? How have writers and artists, both disabled and non-disabled, used error as generative elements in contesting the presumed value of “sounding good”? Distressing Language grows out of the author’s experience of hearing loss in which misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence. Davidson maintains that verbal confusions are less an aberration in understanding than a component of new knowledge. Davidson discusses a range of sites, from captioning errors and Bad Lip Reads on YouTube, to the deaf artist Christine Sun Kim’s audiovisual installations, and a poetic reinterpretation of the Biblical Shibboleth responding to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Deafness becomes a guide in each chapter of Distressing Language, giving us a closer look at a range of artistic mediums and how artists are working with the axiom of “error” to produce novel subjecthoods and possibilities.

The role of disability and deafness in art Distressing Language is full of mistakes—errors of hearing, speaking, writing, and understanding. Michael Davidson engages the role of disability and deafness in contemporary aesthetics, exploring how physical and intellectual differences challenge our understanding of art and poetry. Where hearing and speaking are considered normative conditions of the human, what happens when words are misheard and misspoken? How have writers and artists, both disabled and non-disabled, used error as generative elements in contesting the presumed value of “sounding good”? Distressing Language grows out of the author’s experience of hearing loss in which misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence. Davidson maintains that verbal confusions are less an aberration in understanding than a component of new knowledge. Davidson discusses a range of sites, from captioning errors and Bad Lip Reads on YouTube, to the deaf artist Christine Sun Kim’s audiovisual installations, and a poetic reinterpretation of the Biblical Shibboleth responding to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Deafness becomes a guide in each chapter of Distressing Language, giving us a closer look at a range of artistic mediums and how artists are working with the axiom of “error” to produce novel subjecthoods and possibilities.

Climate change is a key problem of the 21st century. China, as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has committed to stabilize its current emissions and dramatically increase the share of electricity production from non-fossil fuels by 2030. However, this is only a first step: in the longer term, China needs to aggressively strive to reach a goal of zero-emissions. Through detailed discussions of electricity pricing, electric vehicle policies, nuclear energy policies, and renewable energy policies, this book reviews how near-term climate and energy policies can affect long-term decarbonization pathways beyond 2030, building the foundations for decarbonization in advance of its realization. Focusing primarily on the electricity sector in China - the main battleground for decarbonization over the next century – it provides a valuable resource for researchers and policymakers, as well as energy and climate experts.

Addendum: Unorthodox, Ontological Analogy Concerning Existence and Reality, is meant as an introduction to metaphysics; a word coined my Aristotle to express a reality other than the physical. We begin with a focus on consciousness, followed by an emphasis on ancient Greek wisdom. At times we will wander in rivulets to other topics along the way. The scope of this treatises is, as said and introduction to the ancient metaphysical wisdoms, but also a plunge into the fathomless ocean of esoterism. Our journey into the perception of reality is two-fold and is analogues to the dichotomy of Newtonian physics versus Quantum. In this work, the dichotomy is between perception and observation i.e. Duality and Oneness.

Fundraising is the hardest work you ask your board members to do. If they're not fully committed and engaged and they don't feel they have a strong stake in your organization, they aren't going to fundraise for it. In this groundbreaking book, Michael Davidson and Brian Saber bring their collective expertise and their 20 years of working together on governance and fundraising issues to help you understand how good governance is a means to inspire your board to fundraise. Most board members are not actively engaged in fundraising and don't have the proper level of responsibility for it. This holds nonprofits back in critical ways. In Engaged Boards Will Fundraise we will provide you with an understanding of the relationship between overall board governance and fundraising; strategies that are most likely to motivate and engage your board in fundraising; and practices that can support board fundraising.

Fire and Ice came to me on a morning while living in Sierra Madre, California. It was like watching a film, and I simply wrote what I saw. The Grave was an experiment in writing in a different style, and was written after visiting an overgrown and disorganized graveyard in the hills east of Cambria, California. Meet Me at Ala Mar is a fictional tale focused on a quaint motel on the Cabrillo Highway in Santa Barbara, California, overlooking the Santa Barbara harbor. It tells the story of a beautiful and passionate woman who meets, clandestinely, with a man at the Ala Mar Motel. My Life with Luke and Heidi is auto-biographical. It was written two months after my dog Luke died. You may have noticed some similarities between, 'Meet me at Alar Mar' and 'My Life with Luke and Heidi. It was done consciously. The Stories and the writing styles of these four tales could not be more dissimilar. There is, however, a similar theme that reveals itself in each book. Can you find it?

Invalid Modernism contributes to an intersectional moment in disability studies by looking at modernist aesthetics through a 'defamiliar body'. It also offers an intersectional understanding of modernism by studying the representation of physical and cognitive difference during a period marked by progressive reforms in health, labor, and welfare. Readings of texts by Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Oscar Wilde, F. T. Marinetti, Jean Toomer, an opera by Alexander Zemlinsky, and paintings and constructions by dadaists and surrealists are set against the historical developments in sexology, medical discourse, and the pseudo-sciences of eugenics and anthropometry. Modernist works are well known for challenging formal features of narration and representation, but it is seldom observed that this challenge has often been enabled by figures of shell-shocked veterans, tubercular heroines, blind soothsayers, invalid aesthetes, and neurasthenic women. Such figures complicate an aesthetics of autonomy by which modernism is often understood. Since its evolution in the eighteenth century, aesthetics has been seen in terms of judgments based on detached appreciation. What begins as a highly privative, sensate response to an object or natural formation results in a disinterested judgment about the value of that response. By looking at modernist aesthetics through a disability optic, Invalid Modernism attempts to restore the missing body to aesthetics by disclosing a structure of feeling around dramatic changes in modernity. These changes are registered on and through the bodies and minds of figures considered in medical discourse of the period as 'invalid' citizens and subjects.

Meaningful change is a parody. It is titled as a detailed account of President Donald Trump's accomplishments but it is, in fact, the exact opposite. Any reader who is a Democrat or non-supporter of the President will be amused upon opening to find the book is filled with nothing. The book simply, yet powerfully allows the empty pages to point out Trump's downfalls in topics like race-relations, party unity and global synergy. Meaningful Change is meant to be a humorous but poignant message on Donald Trump's negative effect on his country and the world. Please use the blank pages as a notebook to inspire greater ideals for how you would make change in the world.

Ghost texts--the overheard conversation, the remembered line, the daily paper--clamor to enter the poems in Michael Davidson's Bleed Through. Here, the page is a plane for working out aesthetic problems, engaging the reader's intellect and love of beauty. Each new word or phrase calls forth another; attentions create their own nimbus of associations. Davidson's poems are a kind of battleground, where larger philosophical questions are grappled with through the sieve of language and form, but they are also a response to the vital use people make of everyday speech. Faced with hearing loss, he questions the acoustical models--voice, ear, rhyme, rhythm, text--upon which poetry depends and takes as his subject the problems and questions of our cultural history. From "The Second City": in the second cityI live out the dream of the firstliving neither for its access and glamour nor dying from its disregardsimply talking towards the twin spiresof an ancient cathedrallike a person becoming like a person

This definitive biography gives a brilliant account of the life and art of Robert Duncan (1919-1988), one of America's great postwar poets. Lisa Jarnot takes us from Duncan's birth in Oakland, California, through his childhood in an eccentrically Theosophist household, to his life in San Francisco as an openly gay man who became an inspirational figure for the many poets and painters who gathered around him. Weaving together quotations from Duncan's notebooks and interviews with those who knew him, Jarnot vividly describes his life on the West Coast and in New York City and his encounters with luminaries such as Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Michael McClure, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson.

This new book by eminent scholar Michael Davidson gathers his essays concerning formally innovative poetry from modernists such as Mina Loy, George Oppen, and Wallace Stevens to current practitioners such as Cristina Rivera-Garza, Heriberto Yépez, Lisa Robertson, and Mark Nowak. The book considers poems that challenge traditional poetic forms and in doing so trouble normative boundaries of sexuality, subjectivity, gender, and citizenship. At the heart of each essay is a concern with the "politics of form," the ways that poetry has been enlisted in the constitution-and critique-of community. Davidson speculates on the importance of developing cultural poetics as an antidote to the personalist and expressivist treatment of postwar poetry. A comprehensive and versatile collection, On the Outskirts of Form places modern and contemporary poetics in a cultural context to reconsider the role of cultural studies and globalization in poetry.