Michael Taft

The Mindful Geek tells you how to derive the real world benefits of hardcore mindfulness meditation without drinking the metaphysical Kool-Aid. Meditation teacher, Michael W. Taft gives you step-by-step instructions in the powerful and reliable techniques of mindfulness meditation, and outlines the psychological and neuroscientific research underpinning these practices. By treating mindfulness as a scientifically-based, psychological technique, you can keep your atheistic or agnostic secular skepticism and still maintain a powerful, regular, and deeply effective meditation practice. That's because meditation doesn't require you to believe in it to work. Like any good technology, if you use it correctly, it will do the job reliably whether you believe in it or not. And-make no mistake-meditation is a kind of technology; a technology for hacking the human wetware in order to improve your life. This book is a practical, hands-on manual about how to make the most of that technology for yourself. If you are smart, skeptical, technically-inclined, and have a desire to see what meditation is really all about, this book is for you. Michael has taught a lot of meditation programs at tech corporations like Google, so this material has been field-tested on some world-class geeks.

Secular Meditation for Smart Skeptics

The Mindful Geek

An Anthology

Blues Lyric Poetry

This book is the first rigourous and detailed exploration of exactly how blues singers used formulas to create songs, and it more than amply fills the gap in the the study of the blues, where the structure and content of the lyrics have been less fully explored than the musical form. Focusing on the songs recorded by African-American singers for pre-World War Two commercial recording companies, this is an excellent structural analysis of the formulaic composistion of blues lyrics. This book gives a step-by-step description of the rules implicit in this formulaic structure and inspires new discussion of lyric structures. A wide array of readers will find this insightful and informative: from students of African-American music, cultural studies, history and linguistics, to Blues fans fascinated by exactly how the lyrics of this influential music style are written.

The Blues Lyric Formula

This computer-generated anthology serves as a companion to Taft's Blues Lyric Poetry: a Concordance and gives the user the complete poetic context for every word, phrase or line in which he is interested. He also provides a selection of blues lyrics which have never appeared in print before or are scattered. Taft has transcribed over 2,000 blues lyrics from recordings made between 1920 and 1942 and includes over 350 singers such as Josh White, Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey. The anthology includes both country and urban, male and female, "downhome" and vaudeville singers. The songs are arranged according to singer and under each singer, according to dates of recording and sequences in the recording sessions. Information given includes singer, title, place, date and record numbers. The final section is a line-concordance index to the titles of the songs. ISBN 0-8240-9235-X (alk. paper) : $75.00 (For use only in the library).

A Concordance

Blues Lyrics, 1921-1942

Talkin' to Myself

An Anecdotal History of the University of Saskatchewan

Inside These Greystone Walls

Talkin' to Myself: Blues Lyrics, 1921-1942 is a compendium of lyrics by the great blues recording artists of the classic blues era. It includes over 2000 songs, transcribed directly from the original recordings, making it by far the most comprehensive and accurate collection of blues lyrics available.

Giving Western literature and art many of its most enduring themes and archetypes, Greek mythology and the gods and goddesses at its core are a fundamental part of the popular imagination. At the heart of Greek mythology are exciting stories of drama, action, and adventure featuring gods and goddesses, who, while physically superior to humans, share many of their weaknesses. Readers will be introduced to the many figures once believed to populate Mount Olympus as well as related concepts and facts about the Greek mythological tradition.

Michael Taft

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