Remembering The Catastrophe

History is marked by catastrophic events that defy meaning and understanding. The 20th century was a century of prosperity and progress; it was also history's bloodiest. The death toll from war and genocide reached 140 million people. Trauma of this magnitude poses grave challenges to memory and thought. This work explores failures of memory and cognition - the blackout - as a condition that plagues history, and is particularly problematic in an era of media, in which memory is increasingly disembodied and virtualized, undermined by a Generalized Media Disorder. Technologies of media and war are creating a condition in which the virtual world is displacing the ethical world. BLACKOUT traces this phenomenon through a century of upheaval - from World War I, which exceeded all previous notions of destruction, to the War on Terror, a perpetual war in a realm of perpetual media. World War II is particularly significant in its deployment of previously unfathomable technologies of disappearance - extermination, nuclear weapons, and the massive incineration of cities in Germany and Japan. The blackout is a space of memory and thinking that collapses with catastrophe and falls into a stupor. Our humanity has been nearly extinguished by the tremendous violence it has enacted, pushing philosophy, language and ethics to their limits. Joan Grossman is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and video artist, based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been shown in more than 20 countries. She also teaches media theory and production, and received her doctorate in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland.

Memories of catastrophes--both those which occur naturally and those which are consequences of human actions--loom large in the modern consciousness. The volume opens with an investigation of the concepts of catastrophe and collective memory, and the relationships between them. Arguing that a pervasive catastrophic memory may be as disabling as it is instructive, Gray and Oliver stress the necessity of rendering the phenomenon subject to secular critical inquiry. The value of such an approach is then demonstrated in a series of case studies.

Tells what it was like for TV and radio journalists to report the terrifying story of their lives.

"Terror, disaster, memory, selfhood, happiness . . . leave it to a poet to tackle the unthinkable so wisely and so wittily."* A literary guide to life in the pre-apocalypse, The Unreality of Memory collects profound and prophetic essays on the Internet age’s media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world’s ills. We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase “Did you see?” The feeling that we’re living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten—and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last. The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end—if indeed it will—and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it. Can we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? With The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert offers a hauntingly perceptive analysis of our new ways of being and a means of reconciling ourselves to this unreal new world. "A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery.” *—Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less

2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize — Nonfiction Runner Up The complex histories and memories of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis today frame Israel’s future possibilities for peace. 1948: As Jewish refugees, survivors of the Holocaust, struggle toward the new State of Israel, Arab refugees are fleeing, many under duress. Sixty years later, the memory of trauma has shaped both peoples’ collective understanding of who they are. After a war, the victors write history. How was the story of the exiled Palestinians erased – from textbooks, maps, even the land? How do Jewish and Palestinian Israelis now engage with the histories of the Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe") and the Holocaust, and how do these echo through the political and physical landscapes of their country? Vividly narrated, with extensive original interview material, Contested Land, Contested Memory examines how these tangled histories of suffering inform Jewish and Palestinian-Israeli lives today, and frame Israel’s possibilities for peace.

Wang Wen-hsing caused a sensation in Taiwan in 1972 with publication of Family Catastrophe, his first full-length novel. Many critics were outraged, called it socially irresponsible, morally corrupt, and stylistically irrational, but the novel weathered its controversial reception to become what is now widely regarded as a masterpiece in modern Chinese fiction and the benchmark of Taiwan’s Modernist movement. Often described as Joycean, Family Catastrophe is significant for its stylistic and linguistic experimentation as well as for its disturbing and universal themes. It appears now in English for the first time.

The landmark work on mindfulness, meditation, and healing, now revised and updated after twenty-five years Stress. It can sap our energy, undermine our health if we let it, even shorten our lives. It makes us more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, disconnection and disease. Based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s renowned mindfulness-based stress reduction program, this classic, groundbreaking work—which gave rise to a whole new field in medicine and psychology—shows you how to use medically proven mind-body approaches derived from meditation and yoga to counteract stress, establish greater balance of body and mind, and stimulate well-being and healing. By engaging in these mindfulness practices and integrating them into your life from moment to moment and from day to day, you can learn to manage chronic pain, promote optimal healing, reduce anxiety and feelings of panic, and improve the overall quality of your life, relationships, and social networks. This second edition features results from recent studies on the science of mindfulness, a new Introduction, up-to-date statistics, and an extensive updated reading list. Full Catastrophe Living is a book for the young and the old, the well and the ill, and anyone trying to live a healthier and saner life in our fast-paced world. Praise for Full Catastrophe Living “To say that this wise, deep book is helpful to those who face the challenges of human crisis would be a vast understatement. It is essential, unique, and, above all, fundamentally healing.”—Donald M. Berwick, M.D., president emeritus and senior fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement “One of the great classics of mind/body medicine.”—Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., author of Kitchen Table Wisdom “A book for everyone . . . Jon Kabat-Zinn has done more than any other person on the planet to spread the power of mindfulness to the lives of ordinary people and major societal institutions.”—Richard J. Davidson, founder and chair, Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin–Madison “This is the ultimate owner’s manual for our lives. What a gift!”—Amy Gross, former editor in chief, O: The Oprah Magazine “I first read Full Catastrophe Living in my early twenties and it changed my life.”—Chade-Meng Tan, Jolly Good Fellow of Google and author of Search Inside Yourself “Jon Kabat-Zinn’s classic work on the practice of mindfulness to alleviate stress and human suffering stands the test of time, a most useful resource and practical guide. I recommend this new edition enthusiastically to doctors, patients, and anyone interested in learning to use the power of focused awareness to meet life’s challenges, whether great or small.”—Andrew Weil, M.D., author of Spontaneous Happiness and 8 Weeks to Optimum Health “How wonderful to have a new and updated version of this classic book that invited so many of us down a path that transformed our minds and awakened us to the beauty of each moment, day-by-day, through our lives. This second edition, building on the first, is sure to become a treasured sourcebook and traveling companion for new generations who seek the wisdom to live full and fulfilling lives.”—Diana Chapman Walsh, Ph.D., president emerita of Wellesley College

"An in-depth exploration of the way the biblical record illuminates various phenomena observed in the natural world"--

On May 10, 2008, a tornado struck the northeastern Oklahoma town of Picher, destroying more than one hundred homes and killing six people. It was the final blow to a onetime boomtown already staggering under the weight of its history. The lead and zinc mining that had given birth to the town had also proven its undoing, earning Picher in 2006 the distinction of being the nation’s most toxic Superfund site. Recounting the town’s dissolution and documenting its remaining traces, Picher, Oklahoma tells the story of an unfolding ghost town. With shades of Picher’s past lives lingering at every intersection, memories of its proud history and sad decline inhere in the relics, artifacts, personal treasures, and broken structures abandoned in disaster’s wake. In Todd Stewart’s haunting photographs, faded snapshots and letters, well-worn garments, and books and toys give harrowing and elegiac testimony of constancy and dislocation. Empty buildings and bared foundations stand in silent witness to the homes, schools, churches, and businesses that once defined life in Picher. As these photographs and Alison Fields’s accompanying essays explore the otherworldly town teetering over massive sinkholes, they reveal how memory, embedded in everyday objects, can be dislocated and reframed through both chronic and acute instances of environmental trauma. Though hardly known outside the Three Corners Region of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, the fate of Picher echoes well beyond its borders. Picher, Oklahoma reflects the broader intersections of memory, time, material objects, and changing environments, demanding our attention even as it resists easy interpretation.