Double Ghosts

This narrative recounts the 18th and 19th century shipping out of Pacific islanders aboard European and American vessels, a kind of counter-exploring, that echoed the ancient voyages of settlement of their island ancestors.

Revamped from its original "double album" version of 350 pages into this unique "remix," To Repel Ghosts captures the dynamic work and brief life of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In spare, jazzlike verse Kevin Young tells the story of Basquiat's rise from the mock prophet and graffiti artist SAMO to one of the hottest painters of the 1980s ("blue-chip Basquiat / playing the bull / market"), exploring the artist's bouts with fame and heroin, mourning his untimely death, and celebrating his legacy. Along the way Young riffs on Basquiat's paintings and sayings, on the music he loved, on the artists he ran with (Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, among them), and on the black heroes (Charlie Parker, Muhammad Ali, Billie Holiday) who inspired him. Young's poetic channeling of Basquiat--a jostling, poignant brand of downtownspeak--makes for an urban epic in the tradition of Langston Hughes's "A Dream Deferred." To Repel Ghosts, along with Young's Jelly Roll: A Blues and Black Maria, his recent book of film noir verse, forms an American trilogy--Devil's Music--that explores other art forms through poetry. In its creation, Yound has become a poet whose work speaks both for and beyond his genre, with a music all its own.

Making spirits visible has been a part of the theatrical experience since at least the sixteenth century. Instead of illusions, however, ghostly doubles in theatre are materially real and pervasive. In Ghosts, Alice Rayner examines theatre as a memorial practice that is haunted by the presence of loss, looking at how aspects of stagecraft turn familiar elements into something uncanny. Citing examples from the works of Shakespeare, Beckett, and Suzan-Lori Parks as well as the films Vertigo, Gaslight, and The Sixth Sense, she begins by describing time as it is employed by theatre with multiple aspects of presence, duration, and passage. Suggesting that objects connect past to present through the sense of touch, she explores how props are suspended backstage between motion and meaning. Her final chapters consider the curtain as theatre's means for attempting to divide real and imaginary worlds. If ghosts hover where secrets--secrets of the past, secrets from oneself, secrets of life and death--are kept, then, according to Rayner, "theatre is where ghosts best make their appearances and let communities and individuals know that we live amid secrets hiding in plain sight." Alice Rayner is associate professor of drama at Stanford University and author of, most recently, To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action.

This book resituates the ghost story as a matter of literary hospitality and as part of a vital prehistory of modernism, seeing it not as a quaint neo-gothic ornament, but as a powerful literary response to the technological and psychological disturbances that marked the end of the Victorian era. Linking little-studied authors like M. R. James and May Sinclair to such canonical figures as Dickens, Henry James, Woolf, and Joyce, Thurston argues that the literary ghost should be seen as no mere relic of gothic style but as a portal of discovery, an opening onto the central modernist problem of how to write ‘life itself.’ Ghost stories are split between an ironic, often parodic reference to Gothic style and an evocation of ‘life itself,’ an implicit repudiation of all literary style. Reading the ghost story as both a guest and a host story, this book traces the ghost as a disruptive figure in the ‘hospitable’ space of narrative from Maturin, Poe and Dickens to the fin de siècle, and then on into the twentieth century.

On the jungle world of Monthax, Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt and his Tanith First and Only await the order to advance into the sweltering wilderness and drive the alien eldar from the Imperial planet. As battle approaches, Gaunt walks the lines, raising his men's spirits and rememberin their greatest battles and heroic acts - and the tragedies that have dogged Gaunt's Ghosts from the day of their founding on lost Tanith; The day that Gaunt became known as the Ghostmaker.

It is not possible to read Heidegger's text without the image of his arm raised in the Nazi salute haunting it. The image compels us to examine Heidegger's philosophy in terms of its susceptibility to Nazi ideology. Heidegger's philosophy was inscribed at the end of the history of philosophy, a time when Nazism was on the rise and on its way to the renewal of German destiny. In paragraph six of Being and Time Heidegger outlined his agenda for the renewal of philosophy. The renewal necessitated the destruction of the errant history of ontology in order to retrieve the pure primordial experiences. The parallels between the forms of two agendas are coincidental. However, my work shows where they overlapped. I explore the consequence of this overlap by soliciting the 'first' text of philosophy, The Anaximander Fragment, that speaks about justice and injustice. Justice is also at issue in the text of Jacques Derrida. Derrida's primary resource is paragraph six of Heidegger's Being and Time, a fact that caused some of his readers to assimilate him to Heidegger. Derrida has tried to distance himself from Heidegger and in a late text he has offered us the prescriptive phrase, "Deconstruction is justice," to guide our reading of his text. The phrase invites us to examine Derrida's work in light of its saying. This is what I try to do. I show that a separation cannot be accomplished without a price, because whether an author intends it or not, justice is something ghostly and it keeps its own account. Heidegger's arm and Derrida's hand caught in the trap of paragraph six tell another story, different from the stories the authors tell. The limbs tell the story about the ghosts of justice.

One day, Andrew got old paper which is packed with his breads. "A ghost gave information. Scotland police arrested Mayer for murdering his wife." This news wondered Andrew. A news item in the corner of the paper attracted Andrew. "A ghost gave information. Scotland police saved ten kidnapped girls and arrested criminals."