A Desert Of Pure Feeling

From the writer whose voice Carolyn See has characterized as one of the strangest, most distinguished in American fiction writing today ("There is really nothing to compare her with, except, maybe, the austere beauty of a Japanese rock garden"), here is a richly dramatic novel about a woman struggling to make peace with herself as a mother, a lover, an artist, and a friend. Lucy Patterson has just encountered her past in the person of a man whom she has not seen for twenty-five years. Dr. Carlos Cabrera saved the life of her infant son, and it was her love for him that compelled her to end her marriage -- the first moment in an arc of emotional turbulence and upheaval that has since defined her existence. Her past having caught up with her, Lucy has come to an isolated motel in the desert outside Las Vegas to write out her life, reexamine it, and, she hopes, find its calm center. It's a journey she is determined to make alone, but in the next room is a young woman -- a single mother, stripper, and prostitute panicked about her own life -- whom Lucy finds she cannot, and finally does not want to, ignore. A fiercely odd pair, they nonetheless become indispensable to each other in navigating the emotional terrain of their past and in finding, separately and together, clear paths into the future. A Desert of Pure Feeling is the finest work we have yet seen from a writer whose gifts, at once lyrical and tough-minded, become vividly apparent in this penetrating and compelling story.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

What tensions arise between philosophy of religion and theology? What strengths and weaknesses of analytical methods emerge in relation to strongly confessional philosophical theologies, or to Continental philosophies? Faith and Philosophical Analysis evaluates how well philosophy of religion serves in understanding religious faith. Figures who rarely share the space of the same book - leading exponents of analytic philosophy of religion and those who question its legacy - are drawn together in this book, with their disagreements harnessed to positive effect. Figures such as Richard Swinburne and Basil Mitchell reflect on their life-long projects from a perspective which has not previously been seen in print. A wide range of approaches found in contemporary philosophy of religion are explored, including: reformed epistemology, 'traditional' metaphysical theory building, feminist methodologies, Wittgensteinian approaches, and American pragmatism. Considering the trends in philosophy of religion as they are interacting across continents, looking particularly at philosophical influences in North America, Britain, and Continental Europe, this book will appeal to students, scholars and general readers with an interest in philosophy of religion, theology, or analytical philosophy.

An arresting, lyrical memoir about the path the author took—sometimes unwittingly—out of her Mormon upbringing and through a thicket of profound difficulties to become a writer. At twenty-two, Judith Freeman was working in the Mormon church–owned department store in the Utah town where she’d grown up. In the process of divorcing the man she had married at seventeen, she was living in her parents’ house with her four-year-old son, who had already endured two heart surgeries. She had abandoned Mormonism, the faith into which she had been born, and she was having an affair with her son’s surgeon, a married man with three children of his own. It was at this fraught moment that she decided to become a writer. In this moving memoir, Freeman explores the circumstances and choices that informed her course, and those that allowed her to find a way forward. Writing with remarkable candor and insight, she gives us an illuminating, singular portrait of resilience and forgiveness, of memory and hindsight, and of the ways in which we come to identify our truest selves. (With black-and-white photographs throughout.)

Build and run intelligent applications by leveraging key Java machine learning libraries About This Book Develop a sound strategy to solve predictive modelling problems using the most popular machine learning Java libraries. Explore a broad variety of data processing, machine learning, and natural language processing through diagrams, source code, and real-world applications This step-by-step guide will help you solve real-world problems and links neural network theory to their application Who This Book Is For This course is intended for data scientists and Java developers who want to dive into the exciting world of deep learning. It will get you up and running quickly and provide you with the skills you need to successfully create, customize, and deploy machine learning applications in real life. What You Will Learn Get a practical deep dive into machine learning and deep learning algorithms Explore neural networks using some of the most popular Deep Learning frameworks Dive into Deep Belief Nets and Stacked Denoising Autoencoders algorithms Apply machine learning to fraud, anomaly, and outlier detection Experiment with deep learning concepts, algorithms, and the toolbox for deep learning Select and split data sets into training, test, and validation, and explore validation strategies Apply the code generated in practical examples, including weather forecasting and pattern recognition In Detail Machine learning applications are everywhere, from self-driving cars, spam detection, document search, and trading strategies, to speech recognitionStarting with an introduction to basic machine learning algorithms, this course takes you further into this vital world of stunning predictive insights and remarkable machine intelligence. This course helps you solve challenging problems in image processing, speech recognition, language modeling. You will discover how to detect anomalies and fraud, and ways to perform activity recognition, image recognition, and text. You will also work with examples such as weather forecasting, disease diagnosis, customer profiling, generalization, extreme machine learning and more. By the end of this course, you will have all the knowledge you need to perform deep learning on your system with varying complexity levels, to apply them to your daily work. The course provides you with highly practical content explaining deep learning with Java, from the following Packt books: Java Deep Learning Essentials Machine Learning in Java Neural Network Programming with Java, Second Edition Style and approach This course aims to create a smooth learning path that will teach you how to effectively use deep learning with Java with other de facto components to get the most out of it. Through this comprehensive course, you'll learn the basics of predictive modelling and progress to solve real-world problems and links neural network theory to their application

The philosophy of art, including the theory of interpretation, has been among the most generative branches of philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century. Remarkable, interesting, and important work has emerged on both sides of the Atlantic, from all the major sources of philosophic thought. For the first time, Stephen David Ross brings together the best of recent writing with the major historical texts and the most influential works of the past century to provide valuable insight into the nature of art and how we are to understand it. The selections in this collection comprise a remarkably wide array of positions on the nature and importance of art in human experience. A wealth of material is divided into four parts. Part I from the history of philosophy includes selections by the essential writers: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche. In Part II there are significant selections from Dewey, Langer, Goodman, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The major selections in Part III are from Hirsch and Gadamer on the nature of interpretation, supplemented by selections from Pepper, Derrida, and Foucault. Selections in Part IV sharpen the issues that emerge from the more theoretical discussions in the preceeding sections. Part IV includes important psychological theories, seminal proclamations by twentieth century artists, and selections from Bullough on aesthetic distance, as well as from Marcuse, who develops an important variation on the Marxist view of art.

Los Angeles has grown from a scattered collection of towns and villages to one of the largest megacities in the world. The editors of THE CITY have assembled a variety of essays examining the built environment and human dynamics of this extraordinary modern city, emphasizing the dramatic changes that have occurred since 1960. 58 illustrations.