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This paper focuses on the concept of boredom in the creative work of one of the significant figures of Soviet underground culture - Elena Shvarts. All the creative heritage - both poetic and prosaic - is treated like a semiotic unity, so that it is possible to see the evolution in understanding such a notion during more than five decades of the poet's life. While analyzing the five-volume collection by Shvarts, statistical calculation has revealed only 28 cases of using the concept. Even though for Shvarts's lyrical subjects, who are usually passionate and ecstatically active, boredom is not specific at all, the author sometimes puts this concept in the meaningful center of her creative universe. It could be done both explicably and implacably through the description of "boring" landscapes and events. After close reading of the texts from the five-volume collection, it is claimed that boredom in Shvarts's oeuvre is strictly associated to the physical (and\or physiological) world, with its routines, wishes and activities. To the contrast, the transcendental world and everything connected to the sacrum, according to Elena Shvarts, cannot be boring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Human Soul (Lost) in Transition at the Dawn of a New Age is Erel Shalit's final book. It was completed posthumously by Nancy Swift Furlotti, who also contributed two chapters of original material. The book works as a whole to bring a Jungian perspective to more fully understand the psychological and ecological risks inherent in the digital age, including the changing phenomenology of the image and development of the transient personality. The book is a call to present and future generations to maintain a reflective attitude and a connection with the natural world as we become increasingly dependent on technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Marco Biraghi's Project of Crisis provides a broad introduction to the thought and working-methods of historian Manfredo Tafuri. It also explores how this framework informed his studies of contemporary architecture. This review foregrounds the most distinctive aspects of Biraghi's analysis, focusing upon its attention to the diversity of Tafuri's philosophical sources. However, it argues that the author's decision to focus upon the letter of Tafuri's texts pushes questions of cultural and political context into the background. On occasion, this obscures the formative role that a set of historical, political and cultural changes had upon Tafuri's work. It also undermines Biraghi's capacity to grasp the political entanglements and limitations of Tafuri's thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eric Sandweiss's The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman's Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America collects more than 145 color images by amateur photographer Charles Cushman. Between 1938 and 1969, Cushman crisscrossed the United States multiple times, capturing on film a rapidly disappearing American landscape. Sandweiss works from scant biographical sources to masterfully recreate the lives of Cushman, his troubled wife, Jean, and other members of their family. The book explores what drove Cushman on his three-decade odyssey. This review proposes the influence of a postmodern archetype and cultural complexes to explain Cushman's motivations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts a reading of Italo Calvino's novel, The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969) from a postmodern perspective. The novel has always been seen as structuralist experimentation, particularly because it was written at a time when Calvino was associated with the OULIPO, the group of the French philosophers like Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and others. The paper argues that the simultaneous reading of the words in the text and pictures in the margin, challenges the very practice and method of reading. The novel suggests that it can be read as a card game, a game that accentuates deferral and plurality of meaning. These conflicting readings create the semiotics of violence, which again is reflected in the theme of the stories. The paper cites example of three stories which show that the violence of language is codified as the violence of the feminine on the masculine, arguing that the feminine challenges the rules, laws, and structures of language as well as life and destroys things that adheres to any strict binary form. The conflict between the rule of the Father and the lawlessness of the Mother leads to no higher synthesis-it ends in violence that refuses all routes of communication or meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Manifestos for History," edited by Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow.

Reviews two books. "From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century," by Jennifer Ashton; "Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight," by Alan Gilbert.

Reviews three books. "Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry," by Peter Middleton; "A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry," by Susan Schultz; "Dissonance (if you are interested)," by Rosmarie Waldrop.

Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Edward W. Soja. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. xx and 440 pp., diags., photos., notes, bib., and name and subject indices. $30.95 paper (ISBN 1-57718-001-1). Reviewed by Thomas L. Bell, Department of Geography, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Sport, Leisure and Culture in the Postmodern City," edited by Peter Bramham and Stephen Wagg.