A Spiral Way


Book Description

Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence Best Research in the General History of Recorded Sound (2000) The invention of the cylinder phonograph at the end of the nineteenth century opened up a new world for cultural research. Indeed, Edison's talking machine became one of the basic tools of anthropology. It not only equipped researchers with the means of preserving folk songs but it also enabled them to investigate a wide spectrum of distinct vocal expressions in the emerging fields of anthropology and folklore. Ethnographers grasped its huge potential and fanned out through regional America to record rituals, stories, word lists, and songs in isolated cultures. From the outset the federal government helped fuel the momentum to record cultures that were at risk of being lost. Through the Bureau of American Ethnology, the Smithsonian Institution took an active role in preserving native heritage. It supported projects to make phonographic documentation of American Indian language, music, and rituals before developing technologies and national expansion might futher undermine them. This study of the early phonograph's impact shows traditional ethnography being transformed, for attitudes of both ethnographers and performers were reshaped by this exciting technology. In the presence of the phonograph both fieldwork and the materials collected were revolutionized. By radically altering the old research modes, the phonograph brought the disciplines of anthropology and folklore into the modern era. At first the instrument was as strange and new to the fieldworkers as it was to their subjects. To some the first encounter with the phonograph was a deeply unsettling experience. When it was demonstrated in 1878 before members of the National Academy of Sciences, several members of the audience fainted. Even its inventor was astonished. Of his first successful test of his tinfoil phonograph, Thomas A. Edison said, "I was never taken so aback in my life." The cylinders that have survived from these times offer an unrivaled resource not only for contemporary scholarship but also for a grassroots renaissance of cultural and religious values. In tracing the historical interplay of the talking machine with field research, A Spiral Way underscores the natural adaptablity of cultural study to this new technology.




A Spiral Way


Book Description

The invention of the cylinder phonograph at the end of the nineteenth century opened up a new world for cultural research. Indeed, Edison's talking machine became one of the basic tools of anthropology. It not only equipped researchers with the means of preserving folk songs but it also enabled them to investigate a wide spectrum of distinct vocal expressions in the emerging fields of anthropology and folklore. Ethnographers grasped its huge potential and fanned out through regional America to record rituals, stories, word lists, and songs in isolated cultures. From the outset the federal government helped fuel the momentum to record cultures that were at risk of being lost. Through the Bureau of American Ethnology, the Smithsonian Institution took an active role in preserving native heritage. It supported projects to make phonographic documentation of American Indian language, music, and rituals before developing technologies and national expansion might futher undermine them. This study of the early phonograph's impact shows traditional ethnography being transformed, for attitudes of both ethnographers and performers were reshaped by this exciting technology. In the presence of the phonograph both fieldwork and the materials collected were revolutionized. By radically altering the old research modes, the phonograph brought the disciplines of anthropology and folklore into the modern era. At first the instrument was as strange and new to the fieldworkers as it was to their subjects. To some the first encounter with the phonograph was a deeply unsettling experience. When it was demonstrated in 1878 before members of the National Academy of Sciences, several members of the audience fainted. Even its inventor was astonished. Of his first successful test of his tinfoil phonograph, Thomas A. Edison said, I was never taken so aback in my life. The cylinders that have survived from these times offer an unrivaled resource not only for contemporary scholarship but also for a grassroots renaissance of cultural and religious values. In tracing the historical interplay of the talking machine with field research, The Spiral Way underscores the natural adaptiblity of cultural study to this new technology. Erika Brady is an associate professor in the folk studies programs at Western Kentucky University. She served as technical consultant and researcher on the staff of the Federal Cylinder Project of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.




Spiral to the Stars


Book Description

All communities are teeming with energy, spirit, and knowledge, and Spiral to the Stars taps into and activates this dynamism to discuss Indigenous community planning from a Mvskoke perspective. This book poses questions about what community is, how to reclaim community, and how to embark on the process of envisioning what and where the community can be. Geographer Laura Harjo demonstrates that Mvskoke communities have what they need to dream, imagine, speculate, and activate the wishes of ancestors, contemporary kin, and future relatives—all in a present temporality—which is Indigenous futurity. Organized around four methodologies—radical sovereignty, community knowledge, collective power, and emergence geographies—Spiral to the Stars provides a path that departs from traditional community-making strategies, which are often extensions of the settler state. Readers are provided a set of methodologies to build genuine community relationships, knowledge, power, and spaces for themselves. Communities don’t have to wait on experts because this book helps them activate their own possibilities and expertise. A detailed final chapter provides participatory tools that can be used in workshop settings or one on one. This book offers a critical and concrete map for community making that leverages Indigenous way-finding tools. Mvskoke narratives thread throughout the text, vividly demonstrating that theories come from lived and felt experiences. This is a must-have book for community organizers, radical pedagogists, and anyone wishing to empower and advocate for their community.




The Spiral Way


Book Description

Detailed account of a 50-year-old woman's Jungian analysis, during which she recovers her energy and sense of self-worth. The emphasis here is on the importance of dreams, which point the way at times of transition.




Meander, Spiral, Explode


Book Description

"How lovely to discover a book on the craft of writing that is also fun to read . . . Alison asserts that the best stories follow patterns in nature, and by defining these new styles she offers writers the freedom to explore but with enough guidance to thrive." ―Maris Kreizman, Vulture A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 | A Poets & Writers Best Books for Writers As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel― one we’re actually told to follow―and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?" W. G. Sebald’s Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc--or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her “museum of specimens” include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison. Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let’s leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.




Spiral Jetta


Book Description

Erin Hogan hit the road in her Volkswagen Jetta and headed west from Chicago in search of the monuments of American land art: a salty coil of rocks, four hundred stainless steel poles, a gash in a mesa, four concrete tubes, and military sheds filled with cubes. Her journey took her through the states of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. It also took her through the states of anxiety, drunkenness, disorientation, and heat exhaustion. Spiral Jetta is a chronicle of this journey. A lapsed art historian and devoted urbanite, Hogan initially sought firsthand experience of the monumental earthworks of the 1970s and the 1980s—Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, and the contemporary art mecca of Marfa, Texas. Armed with spotty directions, no compass, and less-than-desert-appropriate clothing, she found most of what she was looking for and then some. “I was never quite sure what Hogan was looking for when she set out . . . or indeed whether she found it. But I loved the ride. In Spiral Jetta, an unashamedly honest, slyly uproarious, ever-probing book, art doesn’t magically have the power to change lives, but it can, perhaps no less powerfully, change ways of seeing.”—Tom Vanderbilt, New YorkTimes Book Review “The reader emerges enlightened and even delighted. . . . Casually scrutinizing the artistic works . . . while gamely playing up her fish-out-of-water status, Hogan delivers an ingeniously engaging travelogue-cum-art history.”—Atlantic “Smart and unexpectedly hilarious.”—Kevin Nance, ChicagoSun-Times “One of the funniest and most entertaining road trips to be published in quite some time.”—June Sawyers, ChicagoTribune “Hogan ruminates on how the work affects our sense of time, space, size, and scale. She is at her best when she reexamines the precepts of modernism in the changing light of New Mexico, and shows how the human body is meant to be a participant in these grand constructions.”—New Yorker




The Spiral Way


Book Description




The Spiral Path


Book Description

This novel has been previously published as Phoenix Falling. It is now being rereleased under its original title, The Spiral Path. The second contemporary novel by New York Times bestselling author, The Spiral Path sweeps from the distant mountains of New Mexico to the rolling hills of the English countryside in a story of love, loss, reconciliation—and the hard work of making movies. For years, Kenzie Scott was everything to Raine Marlowe—the friend she turned to for courage and comfort, the lover who touched the hidden depths of her heart, the husband she adored but never really knew. Even as their marriage disintegrates into a civilized divorce, he helps her achieve her dream of becoming a director by agreeing to play the lead in The Centurion, the movie she has dreamed of making for years. Rainey knows the role of the mysterious, tortured hero is perfect for Kenzie—but he fears that the character’s dark secrets may be dangerously close to his own. When filming begins, Kenzie realizes that he must make peace with the tragic past he has buried for years—or lose the one woman he will love for all time… The Spiral Path was named a "Top Pick!" by Romantic Times Magazine. “The Spiral Path is one of the most gripping and darkly emotional books to come along in a long while… [Putney’s] books hold out such promise of hope, redemption and triumph that you will be unable to put them down.” —Romantic Times “Putney handles her potentially melodramatic material with emotional honesty and insight while maintaining the taut romantic tension between her richly developed, complicated protagonists.” —Publishers Weekly “As always, Putney can be relied on to deliver something different. The result is a book that will take your breath away from the first page to the last…. there is only one word for it: unforgettable. Ultimately, it's a keeper of a story that only an author like Putney can tell—and tell very, very well.” —AllAboutRomance.com




Spiraling Upward


Book Description

Dual Winner -- 2016 Nautilus Gold Award (Women) and Silver Award (Business & Leadership). Women comprise 51 percent of the world's population, make up over half the workforce, and control 85 percent of consumer decisions. Never before have women been so degreed or so represented as decision makers in all areas of influence. Why, then, do we still feel as if success eludes us? Why do we sometimes struggle to keep our drive alive? The linear, heads-down, forward-at-all-cost approach to success that has been forged by men will never take us to the heart of fulfillment. Women are not designed for the straight and narrow path. But until now there hasn't been another choice. Pioneering corporate coach Wendy Wallbridge recognizes this unmet need of professional women for an alternative path to success. Spiraling Upward: The 5 Co-Creative Powers for Women on the Rise offers a cogent, step-by-step roadmap for professional women to unlock their power and achieve success on their own terms. The "Spiral Up" method teaches women to cultivate the five co-creative powers of energy, thoughts, feelings, speech, and action--the fundamentals of self-creation--in order to redefine success and re-author their lives. If you're ready to rise up and express your creativity, authenticity, voice, and power to effect the changes you want, Spiraling Upward will show you the way. Complete with easy-to-follow steps and exercises, as well as inspiring stories of successful women, this book offers a cogent road map for professional women looking to unlock their power and achieve success on their own terms.




The Learning Spiral


Book Description

Will memorizing a mountain of related chess positions help you to learn? Have you spent untold time studying a chess idea and then found that you can't remember it in a game? Education research, says Kevin Cripe, has found that optimal learning is based largely on the structure of problem sets and your brain's ability to understand similarities and differences. In The Learning Spiral, the author contends that you will actually absorb the game's concepts faster with seemingly random but carefully selected puzzles than with traditional, step-by-step teaching techniques. The key is that this is closer to real-life chess play, where nobody tells you the "theme" of the position in front of you. With twenty-five years' experience getting underprivileged kids to achieve beyond all expectations, Cripe now takes his holistic instructional methods to the chess arena. Designed for both chess novices and their coaches, The Learning Spiral sets out the theory, explains how it works, and then applies it with more than 400 positions for the student to solve. So go ahead, analyze, differentiate and improve quickly!




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