Richard Deming

"... Rich and sensitive." --The Wall Street Journal "Loneliness is everywhere these days. But this book will chase some of it away, and maybe replace it with connection." --Patton Oswalt, Emmy and Grammy winning comic A examination of the life and work of six brilliant minds of the twentieth century, intent on answering the question "What can be done not despite but because of loneliness?" At an unprecedented rate, loneliness is moving around the globe--from self-isolating technology and political division to community decay and social fragmentation--and yet it is not a feeling to which we readily admit. It is stigmatized, freighted with shame and fear, and easy to dismiss as mere emotional neediness. But what if instead of shying away from loneliness, we embraced it as something we can learn from and as something that will draw us closer to one another? In This Exquisite Loneliness, Richard Deming turns an eye toward that unwelcome feeling, both in his own experiences and the lives of six groundbreaking figures, to find the context of loneliness and to see what some people have done to navigate this profound sense of discomfort. Within the back stories to Melanie Klein's contributions to psychoanalysis, Zora Neale Hurston's literary and ethnographic writing, the philosophical essays of Walter Benjamin, Walker Evans's photography of urban alienation, Egon Schiele's revolutionary artwork and Rod Serling's uncanny narratives in The Twilight Zone, Deming explores how loneliness has served as fuel for an intense creative desire that has forged some of the most original and innovative art and writing of the twentieth century. This singular meditation on loneliness reveals how we might transform the pain of emotional isolation and become more connected to others and more at home with our often unquiet selves.

A replica of the June 1953 issue of MANHUNT digest magazine featuring FAR CRY by Henry Kane, HOT-ROCK RUMBLE by Richard S. Prather, THE LOYAL ONE by Richard Deming, THE DOUBLE FRAME by Harold Q. Masur, SMALL HOMICIDE by Evan Hunter, THE FACELESS MAN by Michael Fessier, YBOR CITY by Charles Beckman Jr., THE CALLER by Emmanuel Winters, and ONE DOWN by Hunt Collins.

Orson Welles' classic 1958 noir movie Touch of Evil, the story of a corrupt police chief in a small town on the Mexican-American border, starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, is widely recognised as one of the greatest noir films of Classical Hollywood cinema. Richard Deming's study of the film considers it as an outstanding example of the noir genre and explores its complex relationship to its source novel, Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson. He traces the film's production history, and provides an insightful close analysis of its key scenes, including its famous opening sequence, a single take in which the camera follows a booby-trapped car on its journey through city streets and across the border.

Lawyers are much in demand these days -- overworked and, as some would claim, overpriced. More and more people find themselves needing legal advice in such matters as making a will, buying a house, defending a suit for damages (or entering one), starting a business, securing one's rights as a consumer, obtaining a divorce. How is the gap to be bridged between the supply of lawyers and demand for services? One answer, growing in popularity everywhere, is the paralegal, also called the lawyer's assistant, legal assistant, paralegal assistant, or paralegal associate.

Cutting across literature, film, art, and philosophy, Art of the Ordinary is a trailblazing, cross-disciplinary engagement with the ordinary and the everyday. Because, writes Richard Deming, the ordinary is always at hand, it is, in fact, too familiar for us to perceive it and become fully aware of it. The ordinary he argues, is what most needs to be discovered and yet is something that can never be approached, since to do so is to immediately change it. Art of the Ordinary explores how philosophical questions can be revealed in surprising places—as in a stand-up comic's routine, for instance, or a Brillo box, or a Hollywood movie. From negotiations with the primary materials of culture and community, ways of reading "self" and "other" are made available, deepening one's ability to respond to ethical, social, and political dilemmas. Deming picks out key figures, such as the philosophers Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim; poet John Ashbery; artist Andy Warhol; and comedian Steven Wright, to showcase the foundational concepts of language, ethics, and society. Deming interrogates how acts of the imagination by these people, and others, become the means for transforming the alienated ordinary into a presence of the everyday that constantly and continually creates opportunities of investment in its calls on interpretive faculties. In Art of the Ordinary, Deming brings together the arts, philosophy, and psychology in new and compelling ways so as to offer generative, provocative insights into how we think and represent the world to others as well as to ourselves.

He had found her in a quiet bar -- a sulky-mouthed, awkward, green-eyed kid trying desperately to pick up a man. He taught her how to dress, to walk, to laugh, made her into the kind of woman who makes every man reach into his pocket for hundred-dollar bills. Looking at her now, Sam was proud of himself. He had done a good job on her. He was almost sorry she had to die...

"Much of this book is a dense, exhilarating ride through phantasmagoria, illuminated by bright, gleaming generalities: 'someone in the audience will wonder if that is how we are meant to survive our memories.' How are we to survive not only our memories, but diminishment and nightmare? Many of the gods who preside here are movie makers, from Jacques Tourneur to Takashi Miike. But startlingly, these mysterious and eloquent poems culminate in the long, next-to-last, magnificent poem 'Son et Lumiere.' Stevens now is the fecund model, as Richard Deming modulates beautifully between four- and five- and even six-line stanzas. This is a tremendously accomplished, fascinating book." -Frank Bidart

In Listening on All Sides, Richard Deming finds an intersection of literature and philosophy in the poetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams that offers aesthetic models for the construction of community. Building on the work of Stanley Cavell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin, Deming challenges current trends in American literary studies and advances the newly developing field of ordinary language criticism. Continental literary theory and Anglo-American philosophy work together in this book to uncover the role literary texts play in the way that language use creates and defines culture.

In Let's Not Call It Consequence, Richard Deming's first full-length collection of poems, the poet brings together abstraction and precise images to explore the intensities and reversals of lyric thinking, that "infinitely stuttering thing." These poems searchingly engage the content and form of anger, violence, intimacy, and the poetics of proximity, exploring the intricacies of language use to find the ways that "to ache, so to speak, is human."