The Invisible Valley

Lu Beiping is one of 20 million young adults the Chinese government uproots and sends far from their homes for agricultural re-education. And Lu is bored and exhausted. While he pines for romance, instead he’s caught up in a forbidden religious tradition and married off to the foreman’s long-dead daughter so that her soul may rest. The foreman then sends him off to cattle duty up on Mudkettle Mountain, far away from everyone else. On the mountain, Lu meets an outcast polyamorous family led by a matriarch, Jade, and one of her lovers, Kingfisher. They are woodcutters and practice their own idiosyncratic faith by which they claim to placate the serpent-demon sleeping in the belly of the mountains. Just as the village authorities get wind of Lu’s dalliances with the woodcutters, a typhoon rips through the valley. And deep in the jungle, a giant serpent may be stirring. The Invisible Valley is a lyrical fable about the shapes into which human affection can be pressed in extreme circumstances; about what is natural and what is truly deviant; about the relationships between the human and the natural, the human and the divine, the self and the other.

An urgent examination of one of the biggest global crises facing us today--air pollution--looking at the drastic worsening of the problem, and what we can do about it. "Fascinating, readable, and terrifying in equal measure." —Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees The air pollution that we breathe every day is largely invisible—but it is killing us. How did it get this bad, and how can we stop it? Far from a modern-day problem, scientists were aware of the impact of air pollution as far back as the seventeenth century. Now, as more of us live in cities, we are closer than ever to pollution sources, and the detrimental impact on the environment and our health has reached crisis point. The Invisible Killer will introduce you to the incredible individuals whose groundbreaking research paved the way to today's understanding of air pollution, often at their own detriment. Gary Fuller's global story examines devastating incidents from London's Great Smog to Norway's acid rain; Los Angeles's traffic problem to wood-burning damage in New Zealand. Fuller argues that the only way to alter the future course of our planet and improve collective global health is for city and national governments to stop ignoring evidence and take action, persuading the public and making polluters bear the full cost of the harm that they do. The decisions that we make today will impact on our health for decades to come. The Invisible Killer is an essential book for our times and a cautionary tale we need to take heed of.

Èe izraz »prazgodovina« uporabimo za èas in prostor, ki ga pisni viri ne »vidijo«, potem imamo ozemlja, ki so »prazgodovinska« tudi v èasu, ki sicer splošno velja za »zgodovino«. V tem pomenu še vedno obstajajo v Evropi v èasu zgodnjega srednjega veka obširna ozemlja, kjer stanje pisnih virov lahko opišemo kot prazgodovinsko. Še posebej velja to za ozemlja, ki so jih naseljevali Slovani. Mednje spada tudi današnja Slovenija, kjer leži Bled. Ta »stopi v zgodovino« šele leta 1004. Ali je ob tem notranji pogled v življenje za pisne vire nevidnih ljudi sploh mogoè? Res se ne moremo preprosto prestaviti v minuli èas, da bi si ogledali, kako je bilo. Lahko pa se postavimo v isti prostor (isti vsaj v koordinatnem smislu) in poišèemo vse preostanke nekdanjega življenja, ki so se zapisali v jezik, imena, ljudsko izroèilo, oblikovanje in urejanje prostora, razliène materialne ostanke, celo v mnogo mlajše pisne vire kot svojevrstni odmevi starejšega dogajanja. Najmanj, kar lahko z vsem tem dosežemo, je vloga pasivnega opazovalca. Zato skuša ta knjiga s souporabo razliènih vrst virov (pisnih, arheoloških, etnoloških, filoloških, historièno-geografskih) pokazati, da naloga, ujeti notranji pogled, morda ni povsem neuresnièljiva. Podoba zgodnjesrednjeveške blejske družbe, ki se na ta naèin oblikuje, je slika gospodarsko in upravno-politièno povezane celote. Ali so jo tedaj v resnici imenovali župa Bled, nam pisni viri sicer ne povedo, vsaj verjetno pa je. Srednjeveški pisci govorijo o Slovanih kot ljudeh pretežno enakega jezika, prava in obièajev. Kot osnovne politiène gradnike slovanskega sveta lahko predpostavljamo posamezne župe, ki so bile podobno strukturirane, s sorodnim jezikom, pravom, obièaji in rituali, kar je predpogoj za vtis celote, ki so ga imeli vsi, ki so Slovane opisovali. Morda je ustrezna matematièna prispodoba, ki enaèi župe z nekakimi fraktali, saj na ravni vsake župe najdemo tisto, kar lahko sicer opazujemo tudi na ravni grupacij posamiènih žup v veèje teritorialne skupine. V takem fraktalnem smislu je vsaka župa resnièni pars pro toto celote. Domišljati si, da s poznavanjem ene župe poznamo vse, je že samo zaradi razliènih geografskih okolij seveda hudo pretiravanje, gotovo pa ni preveè predrzna misel, da smo s tem vendarle pomembno napredovali tudi v razumevanju celote. _ _ _ _ _ Is the inside-view into the life of people invisible to the written records possible, then? One cannot simple transfer oneself into the past and observe. However, one can immerse in the same landscape and seek for the residuals of the past in language, place names, folklore, ordering of the landscape and various material remains, or even in younger written records in the form of the so called wirkungsgeschichte (record of younger consequence of an earlier phenomenon). The least one achieves is the role of the passive observer. It is the aim of this book to go even further and to demonstrate that the "inside" perspective is not unattainable; it can be achieved by using a combination of various sources: written sources, archaeology, ethnology, philology and historic geography. The image of early medieval society in the Bled micro-region thus forming reveals the community with tightly economic and political ties. Weather or not it was referred to as Župa Bled is not confirmed by the written sources but it is at least likely. Medieval authors refer to the Slavs as the people that are mostly speaking the same language and are following similar traditions and law. It would seem that the Slavs' society was based on a series of small territorial entities, known as župa. These had all a similar social structure, language, law, traditions and rituals – all of these were necessary in order for the Slavs to be perceived by the others – the medieval writers – as an entity. Using a mathematical metaphor the comparison with the fractals is perhaps in order. It explains the observed behaviour of the medieval Slavic society in which each individual župa behaves the same as larger territorial entity consisted of numerous župa's does. In this simile each župa is indeed a pars pro toto of the whole. To assume that by knowing Župa Bled we became familiar with the entire medieval Slavic society would be presumptuous solely on the grounds of environmental differences, not to dwell on numerous other variables. But it is not, we believe, stretching the truth to say that our knowledge of the whole has been significantly advanced.

In the modern State, power rests on the consensus of the citizens. They accord its institutions the authority to regulate society. State theory suggests that this authority is a right to speak on certain matters in certain ways and to have the audience agree with those statements. It is a matter of an authorised language; all others fall into the category of ratbaggery. In this 1991 book, the first major book applying State theory to Australia, Alastair Davidson shows how Australian citizens were formed in the nineteenth century, and how their particular characteristics led to the empowering of a certain language of power: legalism. He further shows that this made the judiciary the most powerful arm of government - unlike countries where the people arm sovereign and the legislature supreme - because the judiciary has the last say on all issues and in its own language.

As the first and largest guestworker program, the U.S.–Mexico Bracero Program (1942–1964) codified the unequal relations of labor migration between the two nations. This book interrogates the articulations of race and class in the making of the Bracero Program by introducing new syntheses of sociological theories and methods to center the experiences and recollections of former Braceros and their families.

Picturing the Invisible presents different disciplinary approaches to articulating the invisible, that which is not known or that which is not provable. The challenge that we have seen is how to articulate these concepts, not only to those within a particular academic field but beyond, to other disciplines and society at large. As our understanding of the complexity of the world grows incrementally, so does our realisation that issues and problems can rarely be resolved within neat demarcations. Therefore, the importance of finding means of communicating across disciplines and fields becomes a priority. Whilst acknowledging the essential importance of the specialist academic, the capacity to understand other disciplines, their priorities, methodologies and even the language used can become crucial in being an effective instrument for change. This book brings together insights from leading academics from a wide range of disciplines including Art and Design, Curatorial Practice, Literature, Forensic Science, Medical Science, Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Philosophy, Astrophysics and Architecture with a shared interest in exploring how, in each discipline, we strive to find expression for the invisible or unknown, and to draw out and articulate some of the explicit and tacit ways of communicating those concepts that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Lucifer had it allbrains, beauty, position. What the hell happened? For that matter, what did the angels think their king was doing when he created the heavens and the earth? Putting together a new kind of being, thats what. In a unique living exhibit: a three-dimensional universe of time and space. And thats where the trouble began. Had the king left well enough alone, as Lucifer was fond of saying, things might have turned out differently. But then, the king of heaven was never one for leaving things alone. The Image of the Invisible opens as the king prepares to unveil his new creation in the Museum of Natural History. As First Thinker, Lucifer alone foresees danger to the realm if the king succeeds in bringing the inferior specimens out of the museum. Why is the king so besotted, so reckless? Worse, the king repeatedly ignores kingdom principles in dealing with these creatures. Is he still fit to reign? As Lucifers doubt escalates, he dreams of a terrifying and cunning alter ego, the Satan, who conspires to take over the kings city. Torn between his devotion to the king and his concern for the city, Lucifer must choose. Can he make the ultimate sacrifice to save the kingdom he loves?