Heart Of Dankness

Reporting for the Los Angeles Times on the international blind tasting competition held annually in Amsterdam known as the Cannabis Cup, novelist Mark Haskell Smith sampled a variety of marijuana that was unlike anything he’d experienced. It wasn’t anything like typical stoner weed, in fact it didn’t get you stoned. This cannabis possessed an ephemeral quality known to aficionados as “dankness.” Armed with a State of California Medical Marijuana recommendation, he begins a journey into the international underground where super-high-grade marijuana is developed and tracks down the rag-tag community of underground botanists, outlaw farmers, and renegade strain hunters who pursue excellence and diversity in marijuana, defying the law to find new flavors, tastes, and effects. This unrelenting pursuit of dankness climaxes at the Cannabis Cup, which Haskell Smith vividly portrays as the Super Bowl/Mardi Gras of the world's largest cash crop.

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Among the most productive ecosystems on earth, wetlands are also some of the most vulnerable. Australian Wetland Cultures argues for the cultural value of wetlands. Through a focus on swamps and their conservation, the volume makes a unique contribution to the growing interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities. The authors investigate the crucial role of swamps in Australian society through the idea of wetland cultures. The broad historical and cultural range of the book spans pre-settlement indigenous Australian cultures, nineteenth-century European colonization, and contemporary Australian engagements with wetland habitats. The contributors situate the Australian emphasis in international cultural and ecological contexts. Case studies from Perth, Western Australia, provide practical examples of the conservation of wetlands as sites of interlinked natural and cultural heritage. The volume will appeal to readers with interests in anthropology, Australian studies, cultural studies, ecological science, environmental studies, and heritage protection.

A biographical chapter relates The Secret Agent to Conrad's career. Next, the work's process of composition is discussed, and differences between the serial, the book version and the stage version are explained. An analysis of the plot gives particular attention to its ironic strategies and to the character of the narrator. Various themes and contexts are explored: conceptions of time and topography; anarchistic and Fenian politics; anti-Semitism; evolution, Lombroso and criminology. Literary influences and analogues are illustrated: Dickens, Zola, Ibsen, terrorist fiction. The characters are considered from various viewpoints. A critical survey summarises the work's reception since its first publication. The bibliography provides a guide to further reading.

A guide to reading "Heart of Darkness" and "The Secret Sharer" with a critical and appreciative mind. Includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list.