First published in 1962, A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard by American author Paul Bowles is a book comprising four tales of contemporary life in a land where cannabis, rather than alcohol, customarily provides a way out of the phenomenological world. Thus, of the men in these stories, Salam uses suggestions supplied by smoking kif to rid himself of a possible enemy. He of the Assembly catches himself up in the mesh of his own kif-dream and begins to act it out in reality. Idir’s victory over Lahcen is the classical story of the kif-smoker’s ability to outwit the drinker. Driss the soldier, with aid of kit, proves the existence of magic to his enlightened superior officer. For all of them the kif-pipe is the means to attaining a state of communication not only with others, but above all with themselves. “His work is art. At his best Paul Bowles has no peer.”—Time

Short stories based on incidents and situations that the author either witnessed or heard while in Morocco.

'Peter Lamborn Wilson shows why we cherish pirates - and why, for the sake of the future, we must continue to do so. Interesting and compelling...a rollicking, adventurous book.'Marcus Rediker, author, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea'A chronicler, a historiographer, and a piratologist in the tradition of Defoe...with immense learning and interesting sympathies. His scholarship cuts through the seas of ignorance and prejudice with grace and power.'Peter Linebaugh, author, The London Hanged'One of those rare books which give historians new ideas to think about. It deals with 17th century European converts to Islam - usually but not always as pirates - whose numbers Wilson puts at thousands. His careful analysis of (the) renegadoes, their ideas, and political practice leads to a very tentative suggestion that some of them may have links with Rosicrucianism and the 18th-century Enlightenment...Historians will have to think about this book's novel theme and pursue its implications. Wilson really does turn the world upside down!'Christopher Hill, author, The World Turned Upside DownFrom the 16th to the 19th centuries, Muslim corsairs from the Barbary Coast ravaged European shipping and enslaved thousands of unlucky captives. During this same period, thousands more Europeans converted to Islam and joined the pirate holy war. Were these men (and women) the scum of the seas, apostates, traitors -- Renegadoes? Or did they abandon and betray Christendom as a praxis of social resistance?Peter Lamborn Wilson focuses on the corsairs' most impressive accomplishment, the independent Pirate Republic of Salé, in Morocco, in the 17th century. Corsairs, Sufis, pederasts, "irresistible" Moorish women, slaves, adventures, Irish rebels, heretical Jews, British spies, a Moorish pirate in old New York, and radical working-class heroes all populate a book which intends to entertain and to make a point about insurrectionary communities.

Over the last century, developments in electronic music and art have enabled new possibilities for creating audio and audio-visual artworks. With this new potential has come the possibility for representing subjective internal conscious states, such as the experience of hallucinations, using digital technology. Combined with immersive technologies such as virtual reality goggles and high-quality loudspeakers, the potential for accurate simulations of conscious encounters such as Altered States of Consciousness (ASCs) is rapidly advancing. In Inner Sound, author Jonathan Weinel traverses the creative influence of ASCs, from Amazonian chicha festivals to the synaesthetic assaults of neon raves; and from an immersive outdoor electroacoustic performance on an Athenian hilltop to a mushroom trip on a tropical island in virtual reality. Beginning with a discussion of consciousness, the book explores how our subjective realities may change during states of dream, psychedelic experience, meditation, and trance. Taking a broad view across a wide range of genres, Inner Sound draws connections between shamanic art and music, and the modern technoshamanism of psychedelic rock, electronic dance music, and electroacoustic music. Going beyond the sonic into the visual, the book also examines the role of altered states in film, visual music, VJ performances, interactive video games, and virtual reality applications. Through the analysis of these examples, Weinel uncovers common mechanisms, and ultimately proposes a conceptual model for Altered States of Consciousness Simulations (ASCSs). This theoretical model describes how sound can be used to simulate various subjective states of consciousness from a first-person perspective, in an interactive context. Throughout the book, the ethical issues regarding altered states of consciousness in electronic music and audio-visual media are also examined, ultimately allowing the reader not only to consider the design of ASCSs, but also the implications of their use for digital society.

Chronicle of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

Beat generation writers dismantled mainstream America. They wrote under the influence of psychedelic drugs; they crossed and navigated multicultural boundaries and questioned the American dream; and they explored homosexuality, feminism and hyper-masculinity, redefining America's marital and familial codes. Teaching such a history can be daunting, but film adaptations of Beat literature have proven to engage students. This book looks closely at the film adaptations of works by such authors as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Carolyn Cassady, Amiri Baraka and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as they relate to American history and literary studies.

The complete guide to the commercial, medicinal and pyschotropic.

The further adventures of David Balfour in which he continues his friendship with Alan Breck Stewart and support of the Scottish highlanders' cause, travels abroad to complete his education, and finds romance.

As we withdraw farther from American canonical literature and poetry and move closer to a re-appraisal of literature’s impact upon the arts through media, we may easily find a match for greater humanism and popular interaction in American rock culture through Paul Bowles. In this work, Bowles is re-invented within the postmodern, the postcolonial, and the renegade future underscored by liberal elites that had breathed new life into the American counterculture. Re-Creating Paul Bowles attests to the moments of relentless humanism and imaginative transformation that are most dreamlike, engaging the antagonism of psychology with imperialism at last. In his youth a classical composer and critic, Bowles deserves credit for spawning new generations of rock and pop music through his use of sound and tapping of non-Western or non-European folk music, bringing classic ethnography to the rock generation with Music of Morocco. Re-Creating Paul Bowles examines the Latin American, American, African, and Arab moments of his scholastic effort, a primary beginning for understanding modern popular music’s free transcription of tradition. Re-Creating Paul Bowles includes several examples of films that adapt the author’s personal life and times, the production of surrealist technique in film and literature, and the re-invention of classic works such as The Sheltering Sky and Collected Stories. It assumes the technique for re-production allows the elder Bowles greater freedom in crossing cultural boundaries and overruling the colonialist separateness that guarded cultural content for centuries. Bowles has always deserved re-appraisal in the American academy—and liberation from his stereotypical cult figure identity, a positive force in the ethnic comprehension of Self and society.

America Besieged deals with the underlying forces within U.S. society that deeply affect our lives. Showing how we are being misled and harmed by those who profess to have our interests at heart, Michael Parenti writes: "We are indeed a nation besieged, not from without but from within, not subverted from below but from above; the moneyed power exercises a near monopoly influence over our political life, over the economy, the state, and the media. Some Americans are astonished to hear of it. Others have had their suspicions, although they may not be quite sure how it all adds up. This book invites the reader to stop blaming the powerless and poor and, in that good old American phrase, start 'following the money.' That is the first and most important step toward lifting the siege and bringing democracy back to life." Michael Parenti, one of America's most astute and entertaining political analysts, is the author of Against Empire, Dirty Truths, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, Democracy for the Few, Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America, and many other books.