The Melancholy Of Departure

Filled with sharp dialogue, engaging characters, and offbeat detail, the twelve stories collected in The Melancholy of Departure describe an outsider’s world of longing, disillusion, and survival, where hope is found in unexpected places and understanding comes from unlikely sources. In “Hurley,” the title character is a would-be revolutionary who unsuccessfully tries to explain “the difference between erotica and violence against women” to a clerk at a pornography shop called The Fifth Wheel. “Florence Wearnse” centers on a spinster of the World War I generation who goes deaf “to escape the listening, so tired had she grown of stocks and bonds, whooping cough, motor cars, weddings, the Kentucky Derby.” A bizarre friendship between a former psychiatric war orderly with an interest in sadism and an obese mental patient who sublimates his needs by eating lemon meringue pie is featured in “Ralph and Larry.” As the title of the collection suggests, many of the stories deal with loss or failed relationships. In “Voici! Henri!,” a story set in Paris, an aging Englishman contemplates life without his young lover, Henri, who has left Switzerland with a wealthy baron. “Let Me Tell You How I Met My First Husband, the Clown!” is a bittersweet rememberance of a Jewish woman’s first marriage to “Daniel Muldoon: One-Man Flying Circus,” a man she believes was “a sort of Ba’al Shem Tov with laughing children on his shoulders, a man whom God has put on this earth to show us the study of Talmud was not the only path.” “At Home with the Pelletiers” chronicles the disintegration of a St. Louis family after the oldest son, Walter, returns home from Marine Corps boot camp during the Vietnam War. Younger brother Howard prefers the Jane Fonda he sees on the nightly news to the actress who played Barbarella and feels uncomfortably at odds with the militaristic Walter, whose stories about war atrocities and sex Howard finds frighteningly similar. Fully aware of the dangers that await us all-loneliness, commitment, heartbreak, love-the men and women in this collection call out to us from the fringes of society; they are prophets whose messages fall on uninterested ears.

Filled with sharp dialogue, engaging characters, and offbeat detail, the twelve stories collected in The Melancholy of Departure describe an outsider’s world of longing, disillusion, and survival, where hope is found in unexpected places and understanding comes from unlikely sources. In “Hurley,” the title character is a would-be revolutionary who unsuccessfully tries to explain “the difference between erotica and violence against women” to a clerk at a pornography shop called The Fifth Wheel. “Florence Wearnse” centers on a spinster of the World War I generation who goes deaf “to escape the listening, so tired had she grown of stocks and bonds, whooping cough, motor cars, weddings, the Kentucky Derby.” A bizarre friendship between a former psychiatric war orderly with an interest in sadism and an obese mental patient who sublimates his needs by eating lemon meringue pie is featured in “Ralph and Larry.” As the title of the collection suggests, many of the stories deal with loss or failed relationships. In “Voici! Henri!,” a story set in Paris, an aging Englishman contemplates life without his young lover, Henri, who has left Switzerland with a wealthy baron. “Let Me Tell You How I Met My First Husband, the Clown!” is a bittersweet rememberance of a Jewish woman’s first marriage to “Daniel Muldoon: One-Man Flying Circus,” a man she believes was “a sort of Ba’al Shem Tov with laughing children on his shoulders, a man whom God has put on this earth to show us the study of Talmud was not the only path.” “At Home with the Pelletiers” chronicles the disintegration of a St. Louis family after the oldest son, Walter, returns home from Marine Corps boot camp during the Vietnam War. Younger brother Howard prefers the Jane Fonda he sees on the nightly news to the actress who played Barbarella and feels uncomfortably at odds with the militaristic Walter, whose stories about war atrocities and sex Howard finds frighteningly similar. Fully aware of the dangers that await us all—loneliness, commitment, heartbreak, love—the men and women in this collection call out to us from the fringes of society; they are prophets whose messages fall on uninterested ears.

This book provides a new critical reappraisal of the work of modernist writer and artist Mina Loy. Primarily known for her daring and difficult poems, Loy was also the author of a dazzling variety of other literary and visual artworks in different genres and media. My reading demonstrates the richness and complexity of her work beyond the more often-explored path from Futurism to Dada to Surrealism, emphasizing the importance of her perpetual travel between disparate aesthetics. Engaging in a close analysis of her poetry, essays, manifestoes, and novel Insel, I unearth a multiplicity of hidden literary and pictorial intertexts in her works. Tracing the origins of Loy’s often puzzling imagery, I examine the complex strategies of collage, condensation, distortion, and displacement through which she conflates multiple allusions in enigmatic constellations. I challenge T.S. Eliot’s claim that Loy lacks an œuvre, claiming that there is an aesthetic project, or at least a paradoxical unity in her famously fragmented work. I show how her writings critically engage with the turbulence of avant-garde innovation of her time, pinpointing the essential ephemerality of the avant-gardes and their tendency to become dogmatic ideologies. Through a perpetual shift of the aesthetic paradigm, Loy’s work creates dialogic exchanges between different experimental aesthetic programs. Thus, the book positions Loy not only as an important artist, but also as a major theorist of modernist and avant-garde aesthetics.

Written as an advocacy of melancholy’s value as part of landscape experience, this book situates the concept within landscape’s aesthetic traditions, and reveals how it is a critical part of ethics and empathy. With a history that extends back to ancient times, melancholy has hovered at the edges of the appreciation of landscape, including the aesthetic exertions of the eighteenth-century. Implicated in the more formal categories of the Sublime and the Picturesque, melancholy captures the subtle condition of beautiful sadness. The book proposes a range of conditions which are conducive to melancholy, and presents examples from each, including: The Void, The Uncanny, Silence, Shadows and Darkness, Aura, Liminality, Fragments, Leavings, Submersion, Weathering and Patina.

Your students and users will find biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers in this volume of Contemporary Authors®. Authors in this volume include: Barbara Bush Tenzin Gyato - Dalai Lama Georges Perec Lucius Shepard