John Seed

A concise and coherent overview of Marx, ideal for undergraduates and covering the full range of his works and ideas.

Marx: A Guide for the Perplexed

Disrupted Realism is the first book to survey the works of contemporary painters who are challenging and reshaping the tradition of Realism. Helping art lovers, collectors, and artists approach and understand this compelling new phenomenon, it includes the works of 38 artists whose paintings respond to the subjectivity and disruptions of modern experience. Widely published author and blogger John Seed, who believes that we are "the most distracted society in the history of the world," has selected artists he sees as visionaries in this developing movement. The artists' impulses toward disruption are as individual as the artists themselves, but all share the need to include perception and emotion in their artistic process. Six sections lay out and analyze common themes: "Toward Abstraction," "Disrupted Bodies," "Emotions and Identities," "Myths and Visions," "Patterns, Planes, and Formations," and "Between Painting and Photography." Interviews with each artist offer additional insight into some of the most incisive and relevant painting being created today.

Paintings for a Distracted World

Disrupted Realism

"Despite exalted notions of the author, writers work with the materials they find around them and try to hammer out some kind of new thing with bits of discursive wood lying around and rusty nails and old string and glue. What I am doing here might even be compared to a film-maker creating a documentary out of other people's bits of film and sound recordings, interspersed with some slight commentary. Editing as creative act!" From John Seed's 'Postface' to 'Brandon Pithouse' Smoke Rising is a documentary poem. Very much in the tradition of Charles Reznikoff's 'Testimony', it utilises oral sources to capture the speech - and perhaps the experience-of those who suffered the London Blitz. However, its elective affinities are also to Walter Benjamin's great unfinished 'Arcades Project': "to carry the principle of montage into history... to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components... to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event."

Smoke Rising

Joanna Macy

Thinking Like a Mountain provides a context for ritual identification with the natural environment, inviting us to begin a process of "community therapy" in defense of Mother Earth. It helps us experience our place in the web of life, rather than on the apex of some human-centred pyramid. An important deep ecology educational tool for both groups and personal reflection.

Towards a Council of All Beings

Thinking Like a Mountain

Fire & Sleet & Candlelight

History Labour Night

Ian Haywood

The Gordon riots of June 1780 were the most devastating outbreak of urban violence in British history. For almost a week large parts of central London were ablaze, prisons were destroyed and the Bank of England attacked. Hundreds of rioters were shot dead by troops and for many observers it seemed that England was on the verge of a revolution. The first scholarly study in a generation, this book brings together leading scholars from historical and literary studies to provide new perspectives on these momentous events. The essays include new archival work on the religious, political and international contexts of the riots and new interpretations of contemporary literary and artistic sources. For too long the significance of the Gordon riots has been overshadowed by the impact of the French revolution on British society and culture: this book restores the riots to their central position in late eighteenth-century Britain.

Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain

The Gordon Riots

A new and controversial perspective on the causes, personalities and consequences of the most devastating urban riots in British history.

Janet Wolff

Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class

The Culture of Capital

Composed of fragments of recorded speech, parliamentary reports, and newspapers, Brandon Pithouse is a history of the coal mine in County Durham, England. It looks at the experience of labor - about the pain and danger of working underground, about the damage to the human body and about the human relationships created in such conditions. It is a study in the attachments and distances which shape our relationships to place and time; it is a set of notes for an unmade Eisenstein film, and a footnote to chapter 10 of the first volume of Marx's Capital. And like any history, it is a ghost story.

John Seed

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