BiblioVault - Books about Grain

Against the Grain

Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army

James Carson

University of North Texas Press, 2015

Against the Grain

Interviews with Maverick American Publishers

Robert Dana

University of Iowa Press, 1986

Against the Grain is a collection of interviews with nine small press publishers, each one characterized by strength of resolve and a dedication to good books. Each press reflects, perhaps more directly than any large trade publisher could, the character of its founder; and each has earned its own place in the select group of important small presses in America.

This collection is the first of its kind to explore with the publishers themselves the historical, aesthetic, practical, and personal impulses behind literary publishing. The publishers included are Harry Duncan (the Cummington Press), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lights), David Godine (David R. Godine), Daniel Halpern (the Ecco Press), Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson (Copper Canyon Press), James Laughlin (New Directions), John Martin (Black Sparrow), and Jonathan Williams (the Jargon Society). Their passion for books, their belief in their individual visions of what publishing is or could be, their inspired mulishness crackle on the page.

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Dostoevsky's Secrets

Reading Against the Grain

Carol Apollonio

Northwestern University Press, 2009

When Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaims that he is a "realist in a higher sense," it is because the facts are irrelevant to his truth. And it is in this spirit that Apollonio approaches Dostoevsky’s work, reading through the facts--the text--of his canonical novels for the deeper truth that they distort, mask, and, ultimately, disclose. This sort of reading against the grain is, Apollonio suggests, precisely what these works, with their emphasis on the hidden and the private and their narrative reliance on secrecy and slander, demand.

In each work Apollonio focuses on one character or theme caught in the compromising, self-serving, or distorting narrative lens. Who, she asks, really exploits whom in Poor Folk? Does "White Nights" ever escape the dream state? What is actually lost--and what is won--in The Gambler? Is Svidrigailov, of such ill repute in Crime and Punishment, in fact an exemplar of generosity and truth? Who, in Demons, is truly demonic? Here we see how Dostoevsky has crafted his novels to help us see these distorting filters and develop the critical skills to resist their anaesthetic effect. Apollonio's readings show how Dostoevsky's paradoxes counter and usurp our comfortable assumptions about the way the world is and offer access to a deeper, immanent essence. His works gain power when we read beyond the primitive logic of external appearances and recognize the deeper life of the text.

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From Grain to Pixel

The Archival Life of Film in Transition

Giovanna Fossati

Amsterdam University Press, 2018

Film is in a state of rapid change: the transition from analog to digital is profoundly affecting not just filmmaking and film distribution but a number of other facets of the industry, including the ways in which films are archived. In From Grain to Pixel—the first volume in the new Framing Filmseries from Amsterdam University Press—Giovanna Fossati brings together scholars and archivists to discuss their theories on digitization and to propose new possibilities for future archives.

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From Grain to Pixel

The Archival Life of Film in Transition, Third Revised Edition

Giovanna Fossati

Amsterdam University Press, 2018

In From Grain to Pixel, Giovanna Fossati analyzes the transition from analog to digital film and its profound effects on filmmaking and film archiving. Reflecting on the theoretical conceptualization of the medium itself, Fossati poses significant questions about the status of physical film and the practice of its archival preservation, restoration, and presentation. From Grain to Pixel attempts to bridge the fields of film archiving and academic research by addressing the discourse on film's ontology and analyzing how different interpretations of what film is affect the role and practices of film archives. By proposing a novel theorization of film archival practice, Fossati aims to stimulate a renewed dialogue between film scholars and film archivists.Almost a decade after its first publication, this revised edition covers the latest developments in the field. Besides a new general introduction, a new conclusion, and extensive updates to each chapter, a novel theoretical framework and an additional case study have been included.

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The Grain of the Clay

Reflections on Ceramics and the Art of Collecting

Allen S. Weiss

Reaktion Books, 2016

Ceramics give pleasure to our everyday lives, from the beauty of a vase’s elegant curves to the joy of a meal served upon a fine platter. Ceramics originate in a direct engagement with the earth and maintain a unique place in the history of the arts. In this book, Allen S. Weiss sharpens our perception of and increases our appreciation for ceramics, all the while providing a critical examination of how and why we collect them.
Weiss examines the vast stylistic range of ceramics and investigates both the theoretical and personal reasons for viewing, using, and collecting them. Relating ceramics to other arts and practices—especially those surrounding food—he explores their different uses such as in the celebrated tea ceremony of Japan. Most notably, he considers how works previously viewed as crafts have found their rightful way into museums, as well as how this new-found engagement with finely wrought natural materials may foster an increased ecological sensitivity. The result is a wide-ranging and sensitive look at a crucial part of our material culture.

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The Grain of the Voice

Interviews 1962-1980

Roland Barthes

Northwestern University Press, 2009

This book brings together the great majority of Barthes’s interviews that originally appeared in French in Le Figaro Littéraire, Cahiers du Cinéma, France-Observateur, L'Express, and elsewhere. Barthes replied to questions—on the cinema, on his own works, on fashion, writing, and criticism—in his unique voice; here we have Barthes in conversation, speaking directly, with all his individuality. These interviews provide an insight into the rich, probing intelligence of one of the great and influential minds of our time.

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The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism

Reading Against the Grain

Kevin Dettmar

University of Wisconsin Press, 1996

For nearly three quarters of a century, the modernist way of reading has been the only way of reading James Joyce—useful, yes, and powerful but, like all frameworks, limited. This book takes a leap across those limits into postmodernism, where the pleasures and possibilities of an unsuspected Joyce are yet to be found.
Kevin J. H. Dettmar begins by articulating a stylistics of postmodernism drawn from the key texts of Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jean-François Lyotard. Read within this framework, Dubliners emerges from behind its modernist facade as the earliest product of Joyce’s proto-postmodernist sensibility. Dettmar exposes these stories as tales of mystery, not mastery, despite the modernist earmarks of plentiful symbols, allusions, and epiphanies. Ulysses, too, has been inadequately served by modernist critics. Where they have emphasized the work’s ingenious Homeric structure, Dettmar focuses instead upon its seams, those points at which the narrative willfully, joyfully overflows its self-imposed bounds. Finally, he reads A Portrait of the Artist and Finnegans Wake as less playful, less daring texts—the first constrained by the precious, would-be poet at its center, the last marking a surprising retreat from the constantly evolving, vertiginous experience of Ulysses.
In short, The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism explores what happens when the extra-literary pronouncements of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, as well as Joyce’s early critics, are set aside and a new, “unauthorized” Joyce is allowed to appear. This postmodern Joyce, more willful and less easily compartmentalized, stands as a counterpoint to the modernist Joyce who has perhaps become too familiar.

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Quality Maintenance in Stored Grains and Seeds

Clyde M. Christensen and Richard A. Meronuck

University of Minnesota Press, 1986

Quality Maintenance in Stored Grains and Seeds was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Storage molds are a major cause of quality loss in grains and seeds held in farm bins and tanks, in commercial elevators and warehouses, and in barge and ship transport. The damage done by these storage molds is at first invisible, but later shows up as caking, mustiness, total spoilage of part or all of the grain, and heating - sometimes to the temperature of ignition. The authors, both of whom have had extensive first-hand field and laboratory experience with these grain storage fungi and the problems they cause, summarize in readable and readily understandable form the basic principles and specific practices to be followed in order to minimize such losses.

Chapters are devoted to grain grades and quality; storage fungi; conditions that promote or prevent loss in quality; spoilage in barge and ship transport; mycotoxins (toxic compounds produced by fungi growing in grains and feeds) and mycotoxicoses (the diseases caused in animals that consume such toxic products); insects, mites, and storage fungi, quality control; and identification of storage fungi as an aid in evaluation of grain condition and storability.

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