The Virus The Word

With the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959, William Burroughs abruptly brought international letters into the postmodern age. Beginning with his very early writing (including a chapter from his and Jack Kerouac's never-before-seen collaborative novel), Word Virus follows the arc of Burroughs's remarkable career, from his darkly hilarious "routines" to the experimental cut-up novels to Cities of the Red Night and The Cat Inside. Beautifully edited and complemented by James Grauerholz's illuminating biographical essays, Word Virus charts Burroughs's major themes and places the work in the context of the life. It is an excellent tool for the scholar and a delight for the general reader. Throughout a career that spanned half of the twentieth century, William S. Burroughs managed continually to be a visionary among writers. When he died in 1997, the world of letters lost its most elegant outsider.

A large venetian blinds format board book introducing children to the concept of immunology.

THE VIRUS & THE WORD: The Breaking of the Silence of Meher Baba. Poems by Paul Smith & Quotes of Meher Baba. From July 10, 1925 until shortly before his dropping the physical form in 1969, the Perfect Spiritual Master, Meher Baba, was silent. He communicated first by using an alphabet board, and later by unique hand gestures that were interpreted and spoken out by one of his mandali, usually by his close disciple Eruch Jessawala. Meher Baba said that his silence was not undertaken as a spiritual exercise but solely in connection with his inner universal work. 'Man's inability to live God's words makes the Avatar's teaching a mockery. Instead of practicing the compassion he taught, man has waged wars in his name. Instead of living the humility, purity, and truth of his words, man has given way to hatred, greed, and violence. Because man has been deaf to the principles and precepts laid down by God in the past, in this present Avataric form, I observe silence.' He declared that he would 'break his silence' with the one Word of words that would be heard by all and begin the New Humanity on earth after a world-wide catastrophe. Here are free-form poems and ghazals by Paul Smith over 50 years about Meher Baba's Silence and the Word, along with quotes by Meher Baba and his closest disciples on his Silence and the Word that was promised to be spoken. Large Format Paperback 7" x 1o". Pages 330. Paul Smith (b. 1945) is an Australian poet and translator of many books of Sufi poets of the Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Turkish, Pashtu, Kashmiri and other languages including Hafiz, Sadi, Nizami, Dard, Nazir, Rumi, 'Attar, Sana'i, 'Iraqi, Jahan Khatun, Obeyd Zakani, Nesimi, Kabir, Anvari, Ansari, Jami, Khayyam, Ghalib, Iqbal, Rahman Baba, Huma, Seemab, Jigar, Mir, Hali, Khushak, Ahmed Shawqi, Ibn al-Farid, Rabi'a, Mahsati, Zauq, Faizi and many others, as well as his own poetry, fiction, plays, biographies, children's books and a dozen screenplays.

Completely revised and updated to take into account the new taxonomy and grouping changes made by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses in their 8th Report, The Dictionary of Virology provides an authoritative and concise list of all viruses affecting vertebrate species, from humans to fish. Includes the new viruses of medical or veterinary importance that have emerged since 2001, such as the new human coronaviruses, SARS and NL63 and a new subtype of influenza (H1N2) Includes new terms in virology Extensive cross-referencing and illustrative tables further enhance the use of this book

In the summer of 1944, a shocking murder rocked the fledgling Beats. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, both still unknown, we inspired by the crime to collaborate on a novel, a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and art, obsession and brutality, with scenes and characters drawn from their own lives. Finally published after more than sixty years, this is a captivating read, and incomparable literary artifact, and a window into the lives and art of two of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.

In recent years, the word 'virus' has lost its biological perimeter of reference to acquire a much broader – could say 'paradigmatic' – meaning. The term 'virus' can be seen as a key word or an explanatory model also for processes that go beyond the infectious sphere. Every event appears to have a viral character: from the way information is transmitted to the processes of cultural globalization, from the impact of human beings on the planet to the subversion of ecosystems, from pandemic risks to the demographic increase on the planet. This seems to be indeed the Age of the Virus. Its model can be applied to most of the phenomena that characterize the twenty-first. Its profile – its looming and invisible nature, its ability to use other people's resources to spread and to transform into a dangerous doppelganger – is perfect to represent the fears of the contemporary age.

Julia Tanney offers a sustained criticism of today’s canon in philosophy of mind, which conceives the workings of the rational mind as the outcome of causal interactions between mental states that have their bases in the brain. With its roots in physicalism and functionalism, this widely accepted view provides the philosophical foundation for the cardinal tenet of the cognitive sciences: that cognition is a form of information-processing. Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge presents a challenge not only to the cognitivist approach that has dominated philosophy and the special sciences for the last fifty years but, more broadly, to metaphysical-empirical approaches to the study of the mind. Responding to a tradition that owes much to the writings of Davidson, early Putnam, and Fodor, Tanney challenges this orthodoxy on its own terms. In untangling its internal inadequacies, starting with the paradoxes of irrationality, she arrives at a view these philosophers were keen to rebut—one with affinities to the work of Ryle and Wittgenstein and all but invisible to those working on the cutting edge of analytic philosophy and mind research today. This is the view that rational explanations are embedded in “thick” descriptions that are themselves sophistications upon ever ascending levels of discourse, or socio-linguistic practices. Tanney argues that conceptual cartography rather than metaphysical-scientific explanation is the basic tool for understanding the nature of the mind. Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge clears the path for a return to the world-involving, circumstance-dependent, normative practices where the rational mind has its home.