Search results for ""Melville House""

Over a long, hot Christmas in Australia, Throwing Muses frontwoman and critically acclaimed solo artist Kristin Hersh considers her future as a songwriter. Is it possible to create music and not show off about it? How can artists establish and refine a following without becoming part of the commercial problem? And just how many times is it healthy to watch It''s A Wonderful Life in three weeks? In The Future of Songwriting, Hersh chooses to interrogate these questions through philosophical dialogue. From in-depth conversations with a comedian friend about the similarities between songs and jokes, via a fruitful visit to Sydney''s ''bone museums'', to a revelation from an acupuncturist in New Orleans, she delivers a fierce, funny and existential meditation on the art of the song - and its future.

Read more less

The Aeronauts is the true story behind the forthcoming Major Motion Picture, telling the daring life and death escapades of pioneering Victorian balloonist James Glaisher. In 1862, Glaisher set out to do the impossible: ascend higher into the skies than ever before. A pioneer of weather forecasting and of photography, he wanted to take ground-breaking research measurements from different altitudes. Before aeroplanes, the only unpredictable available method of air transportation was the hot air balloon. This is his memoir, detailing death-defying air ballon journeys in his own words.

Read more less

'Brexit' reflected perhaps the biggest vote of no confidence in the political establishment in modern British history. But how did we get here? Paul Stocker examines how ideas of the far right-always a fringe movement in Britain-have become part of the cultural and political mainstream, over the course of decades.

Read more less

Who wrote the book of love? In an impassioned polemic, Ron Rosenbaum - who has written books on the mysteries of thermonuclear explosions - takes on perhaps his greatest challenge: the nature of love. Rosenbaum argues that what we know as love is imperilled now by the quantifiers, the digitizers, and their algorithms, who all seek to reduce love to electrical, chemical, and mathematical formulas. Rosenbaum brings excitement to his thinking as he interrogates the neuroscience of love, with its ''trait constellations,'' and the efforts of others to turn all human lovers into numerical configurations. He asks us why our culture has become so obsessed with codifying and quantifying love through algorithms. The very capacity that makes us human, Rosenbaum argues, is being taken over by numerical methods of explanation. In Defense of Love is more than an examination of the intersection of love with literature and science. It is a celebration of the persistence of a mysterious and uncanny phe

Read more less