Singing The Chaos

Combining both a historical and a critical approach toward the works of major British, American, French, German and Russian poets, this work surveys a century of high poetic achievement

In this innovative book, Stacy Holman Jones presents torch singing as a much more complicated phenomenon than the familiar trope of a woman lamenting her victimhood. With an ethnographer's eye, she observes the bluesy torch singers, asking if they are possibly performing critiques of the very lyrics they sing. From this perspective, we see the singer giving expression not not only to desire but also to an incipient determination to resist and change. Holman Jones also reveals points of contact in the opposition between spectators and performers, emotion and intellect, and love and power. Instead of interpreting the expression of love as a woman's violent mistake—as willing deception and passive fate—Holman Jones allows us to hear an active search for hope.

An award-winning and extraordinary story of a boy who protects a baby whale that locals believe is threatening their livelihood. Winner of the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults 2015 Young Adult Category Winner New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults 2015 Storylines Notable Young Adult Fiction Award 2015 Will Jackson is hiding out, a city boy reluctantly staying with his uncle in small town New Zealand while he struggles to recover from a brutal attack and the aftermath of a humiliating YouTube clip gone viral. After he discovers a young abandoned orca whale his life is further thrown into chaos, when he rallies to help protect it against hostile, threatening interests. This threatens to tear apart the small fishing community and forever changes Will’s life. The boy and the whale develop a special bond, linked by Will's love of singing. With echoes of classic book and film The whalerider this powerful connection is utterly convincing on the page. An exciting plot-driven story full of drama, tension and romance, this magical book captures both heart and mind to hold the reader enthralled from start to finish. These qualities, along with its lyrical use of language and its compelling and persuasive exploration of many global concerns, makes this a beautifully touching, rich and multi-layered story by an award-winning writer for young adults. Singing Home the Whale will appeal to all readers of high-quality New Zealand fiction.

Escaping Germany, Weilbach describes her surreal experience aboard the luxury refugee ship the St Louis, refused the right to land first by Cuba and then by the United States and Canada and finally forced to turn back to Europe, where England and other countries eventually provided some sanctuary. She recalls her experiences in London - loneliness, confusion, and an incomprehensible language but also the healing acceptance of classmates and teachers. With the approach of World War Two, the mass evacuation of her school to the countryside brings a return to village life, with surprising happiness and the hint of a better future, despite the immediate chaos of war. Singing from the Darktime presents a voice of innocence and resilience in a cruel and frightening world. An afterword by renowned Holocaust scholar Doris Bergen provides historical context.

A biographical and bibliographical guide to current writers in all fields including poetry, fiction and nonfiction, journalism, drama, television and movies. Information is provided by the authors themselves or drawn from published interviews, feature stories, book reviews and other materials provided by the authors/publishers.

The notion of care is at times misunderstood in the context of music education--equated simply with kindness or associated with lowered expectations--and is often dismissed without consideration of its full value to music learning. When viewed through a student "deficit" perspective, concepts of care might evoke unnecessary pity or a sense of rescue, thereby positioning teachers and learners in a superior/inferior relationship that may be unhealthy and unhelpful to either person. Furthermore, many well-meaning approaches to care emphasize a unidirectional relationship from teacher to student, discounting the ways in which a teacher also continues to learn and develop. A more empowering conceptualization of care in music education involves sharing--sharing experience, sharing passion, sharing excitement, sharing goals, and sharing humanness. The Oxford Handbook of Care in Music Education addresses ways in which music teachers and students interact as co-learners and forge authentic relationships with one another through shared music-making. Concepts of care addressed in the handbook stem from philosophies of relationship, feminist ethics, musical meaningfulness, and compassionate music teaching. These essays highlight the essence of authentic relationships and shared experiences between teachers and learners, extending previous conceptions of care to meet the needs of contemporary music learners and the teachers who care for, about, and with them.

Hermann Gunkel was a scholar in the generation of the origins of Assyriology, the spectacular discovery by George Smith of fragments of the “Chaldean Genesis,” and the Babel-Bibel debate. Gunkel’s thesis, inspired by materials supplied to him by the Assyriologist Heinrich Zimmern, was to take the Chaoskampf motif of Revelation as an event that would not only occur at the end of the world but had already happened at the beginning, before Creation. In other words, in this theory, one imagines God in Genesis 1 as first having battled Rahab, Leviathan, and Yam (the forces of Chaos) in a grand battle, and only then beginning to create. The problem with Gunkel’s theory is that it did not simply identify common elements in the mythologies of the ancient Near East but imposed upon them a structure dictating the relationships between the elements, a structure that was based on inadequate knowledge and a forced interpretation of his sources. On the other hand, one is not entitled to insist that there was no cultural conversation among peoples who spent the better part of several millennia trading with, fighting, and conquering one another. Creation and Chaos attempts to address some of these issues. The contributions are organized into five sections that address various aspects of the issues raised by Gunekl’s theories.