Occasional Desire

In his new collection of essays, Occasional Desire, David Lazar meditates on random violence and vanished phone booths, on the excessive relationship to jewelry that links Kobe Bryant and Elizabeth Taylor, on Hitchcock, Francis Bacon, and M. F. K. Fisher. He explores, in his concentrically self-aware, amused, and ironic voice, what it means to be occasionally aware that we are surviving by our wits, and that our desires, ulterior or obvious, are what keep us alive. Lazar also turns his attention on the essay itself, affording us a three-dimensional look at the craft and the art of reading and writing a literary form that maps the world as it charts the peregrinations of the mind. Lazar is especially interested in the trappings of memory, the trapdoors of memory, the way we gild or codify, select, soften, and self-delude ourselves based on our understanding of the past. His own process of selection and reflection reminds us of how far this literary form can take us, bound only by the limits of desire and imagination.

A STAND ALONE story in the bestselling SIX PACK RANCH series by New York Times Bestselling Author Vivian Arend​ ------------- Nothing comes easy. You’ve gotta work for it. Matt Coleman always figured at this point in his life, he’d be settled down with a family. Since his ex split for the big city, though, no way will he give anyone else the chance to drop-kick his heart. Physical pleasure? Hell, yeah, he’ll take—and give—with gusto, but nothing more. Hope Meridan is working long hours to hold on to her new quilt shop, going it alone since her sister/business partner ran off. Sex? Right, like she’s got the time. Not that she doesn’t have the occasional dirty fantasy about Matt. Fat chance he’d dream of knocking boots with her—the younger sister of the woman who dumped him. Nope, she’ll just have to settle for friendship. Friends would be far easier if there wasn’t something combustible going on between them. And when casual interest starts to grow into something more, their tenuous bond strengthens in the heat of desire. But it may not survive the hurricane-force arrival of the last person either of them ever wanted to see again… Warning: Small-town rivals, men in pursuit and family meddling—in good and bad ways. Look for a cowboy who knows how to rope, ride and rein in a hell of a lot more than eight seconds of sheer bliss. Previously published in 2012 Keywords: Canadian Author, cowboy, western, contemporary, small town For readers who enjoy: Jennifer Ryan, Joan Johnston, Kate Pearce, Linda Lael Miller, Lindsay McKenna, Diana Palmer, Maisey Yates, Vicki Lewis Thompson, Lorelei James.

Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions, and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely overlooked aspect of the Era Reformasi concerns the transition from a moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship, political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago. Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all domains of life.

Desire is a rich term meaning wish and want, willingness and relish, appetite and lust. This volume is an effort to analyse the concept of desire and its different practical contexts from a morally philosophic point of view. By analysing multiple definitions and studying underlying motivations, the authors offer a variety of explanations and interpretations. The volume consists of three main parts. The first part, "Desire and Practice," examines desire as a mental state that seeks personal satisfaction. The second part of the volume, "Desire and Moral Life," explores social, cultural, and literary facets of desire. Finally, in the third part, "Business Ethics and Other Contexts," the authors apply PR axiological principles to the business world, examining the conflict between frugality and consumerist ideology, the role of intuition in decision-making, and the need for design education as the basis of effective planning. The contributors to this, the newest volume in Transaction's Praxeology series, seek to explore desire in PR axiological terms, with an eye toward the three E's of praxeology: ethics, effectiveness, and efficiency. In doing so, they demonstrate that desire is central for practical activity in general and work in particular.

List of members in each vol.

A debut poetry collection exploring the real lives of siblings Georg and Grete Trakl while addressing themes of desire, addiction, loss, and absence. Georg Trakl is one of the most celebrated poets of the early twentieth century. Less is known about his sister, Grete: also gifted, also addicted to drugs, and dead by her own hand three years after Georg’s overdose. But in Solve for Desire—selected by Srikanth Reddy as the winner of the 2017 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Caitlin Bailey summons Grete from the shadows. At once sensual and acidic, obsessive and bereft, the Grete of these poems is a fairy-tale sister leaving “missives dropped around the city, crumbs / for your ghost.” Can one person be addicted to another? Can two souls be twinned, and where does that leave the physical? How do we solve for desire when the object we adore disappears—and how does the poet solve and resolve the past, its wounds and its absences? “Each time I write your name,” Bailey writes, “a key / turns somewhere in a lock.” Like the “perfect red burst” of poppies and of blood, these poems are a blooming, keening exploration of desire between brother and sister, poet and subject, the living and the dead. Praise for Solve for Desire “The work of a poet who sings, boldly, across the distances between us.” —Srikanth Reddy “A sobering look at desire, addiction, loss, and absence in this debut collection of short, lyric poems that are by turns lush and understated, lofty and plainspoken. . . . She performs a kind of feminist resuscitation of the lesser-known Grete, focusing on small moments of quiet, grief, lust, and memory, and fleshing out a story that is still disputed” —Publishers Weekly “This precarious, satisfyingly disjointed debut collection of poetry captures the spirit of the [Trakl] siblings. . . . Bailey’s brilliantine lyrics shine brightest when the siblings’ characters are wrought in full relief.” —Booklist

In Vagaries of Desire, Timo Airaksinen develops a new philosophical account of desire understood as mental state that focuses on a desirable possible world. Literary and philosophical themes, including sexuality, are discussed in terms of their metaphoric and metonymic features.