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Other people : takes & mistakes / David Shields.

by Shields, David, 1956- author.

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New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

Other (Philosophy)

9780385351997 (hardcover) :

0385351992 (hardcover)

xi, 369 pages ; 25 cm

I. Men -- Comp Lit 101: advice from my dad -- Bloodline to star power -- Mr. Big -- Father's Day -- Eulogy for my father -- The groundling -- Everything I know I've learned from my bad back -- Men and games and guns -- Letter to my father -- II. Women -- Motherhood -- Love is a dog from hell -- Usher -- Gookus explains the eternal mysteries -- Desire -- Reflection in a one-way mirror -- Satire -- Ode to the Donner party -- Rebecca's journal -- The sheer joy of amoral creation -- A brief survey of ideal desire -- Love is illusion -- Postcards from Rachel, abroad -- Economies of desire -- Despair -- Mask of masks -- Delilah -- Karen -- A fable -- III. Athletes -- Another fable -- Words can't begin to describe what I'm feeling -- Heaven is a playground -- Life is not a playground -- 44 tattoos -- White bronco -- Being random is the key to life -- Bring the pain -- History of America, #34 -- Blindness -- Everybody's a winner -- The whole of American life is a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant -- IV. Performers -- The same air -- Information sickness -- Why we live a the movies -- Why we live at the movies (ii) -- Why we live at the movies (iii) -- Radio -- Problems and solutions to problems -- Radio (ii) -- The subject at the vanishing point -- Life/art -- Robert Capa, misunderstood -- Doubt -- The only solution to the soul is the senses -- Almost famous -- Stars -- He was there; he wasn't really there: dreams about Kurt Cobain -- Contemporary film criticism -- V. Alter egos -- Almost famous (ii) -- The sixties -- The smarter dog knows when to disobey -- The heroic mode -- The wound and the bow -- The cultural contradictions of late capitalism -- Negotiating against myself -- Love this -- Love this (ii) -- Remoteness -- Surviving with wolves -- The unknown life -- Life story -- Notes on the local swimming hole -- Love is not a consolation -- love is a light -- All our secrets are the same.

"An intellectually thrilling and emotionally wrenching investigation of otherness: the need for one person to understand another person completely, the impossibility of any such absolute knowing, and the erotics of this separation. Can one person know another person? How do we live through other people? Is it possible to fill the gap between people? If not, can art fill that gap? Grappling with these questions, David Shields gives us a book that is something of a revelation: seventy-plus essays, written over the last thirty-five years, reconceived and recombined to form neither a miscellany nor a memoir but a sustained meditation on otherness. The book is divided into five sections: Men, Women, Athletes, Performers, Alter Egos. Whether he is writing about sexual desire or information sickness, George W. Bush or Kurt Cobain, women's eyeglasses or Greek tragedy, Howard Cosell or Bill Murray, the comedy of high school journalism or the agony of first love, Shields's sustained, piercing focus is on the multiplicity of perspectives informing any situation, on the irreducible log jam of human information, and on the possibilities, and impossibilities, for human connection" --

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