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"What happens when the defining moment of your life might be a figment of your imagination? How do you understand — and live with — definitive feelings of having been abused when the origin of those feelings won’t adhere to a singular event but are rather diffused across years of experience?In Bullied: The Story of an Abuse, Jonathan Alexander meditates on how, as a young man, he struggled with the realization that the story he’d been telling himself about being abused by a favorite uncle as a child might actually just have been a “story” — a story he told himself and others to justify both his lifelong struggle with anxiety and to explain his attraction to other men. Story though it was, Alexander maintains that some form of abuse did occur.In writing that is at turns reflective, analytic, and hallucinatory, Alexander traces what it means to suffer homophobic abuse when such is diffused across multiple actors and locales, implicating a family, a school, a culture, and a politics — as opposed to a singular individual who just happened to be the only openly gay man in young Alexander’s life.Along the way, Alexander reflects on Jussie Smollett, drug abuse, MAGA-capped boys, sadomasochism, Catholic priests, cruising, teaching young adult fiction about rape, and a host of other oddly but intimately related topics."

BDSM;bullying;coming out;LGBT;memoir;sexual abuse;trauma

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At the end of his life, Pierre Hadot was a professor at the College de France and he helped Michel Foucault conceptualize ethics. Hadot devoted his career to recovering the ancient conception of philosophy, according to which the discourses of universities are but a fragment of what philosophy is. His engagement with this theme helped Bendik-Keymer understand and develop a personal counter-culture to his academic work, a kind of original academics truer to the idea of the philosophical school Plato first developed. But while Plato's school developed a useful form of life, it had an ambivalent relation to democracy and to everyday people. Whereas Plato was in some ways one of the first egalitarians, he was also deeply classist in his categorization of intellectual potentials. He effectively thought some people were stupid by nature, having no philosophical worth. Hence the Academy existed outside the city, in practice exclusive and somewhat sequestered. To some extent, Plato's vision of philosophy -- at least as explained by Hadot -- had the practical point of philosophy right, but this point still needed to be rendered thoroughly democratic in the polyphony and multiple intelligences of people. Doing so coheres with what Foucault was after in his application of Hadot. It is also what Bendik-Keymer is after -- to extract what is good from original academics and make it democratic, as opposed to dumbing people down. Imagine the kind of philosophy book you might have wished for when you were growing up. Seeking a reader who would be patient and open-minded enough to live with her own questions and to walk around town with her thoughts, this book would not have a single thesis but would rather work through multiple problems and be an experience, born out of life-experience. It would not be summarizable. It would be larger than the reader and open onto different kinds of readings. This is the kind of philosophy book that was at home in the 19th century. Solar Calendar (a follow-up to Bendik-Keymer's The Ecological Life: Discovering Citizenship and a Sense of Humanity) contains six oddities: a family portrait, a parody-essay, a time-capsule poem, an exploded essay, a poetic record of an act, and an aphorism journal for a year. Their inspirations are Epictetus' notebooks, Tarkovski's "Mirror," and Apollinaire's roving "Zone." Also experiments in ecology -- the study of home -- the six sections originate in rifts that challenge us as growing people. They alternate between environmental problems and tensions within families, as if the fissures in love and in society wash back and forth between each other as we try to make a home in the world. Multiple times layer over each other like the sounds of a large, democratic city. The personal and the planetary intersect. The space before, and against, policy where politics arises as assertion opens up in glimpses, fragmenting the body and inertia of oppressive orders. Philosophy arises as a homely and idiosyncratic practice of multiple forms of intuition, reflection and intelligence for muddling through life. Painstaking exercises in being human are grounded in unconditional love and in truthfulness -- in the desire to become.

Art and philosophy. --- American poetry --- philosophy --- ethics --- ecology --- memoir --- poetry --- aphorisms

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A world in upheaval; two lives lived under stress ... This story is set in the social and political landscape of pre- and post-World War II. It tells two vastly different tales of Cecily and John's lives in Australia and overseas, as nations clashed, and governments and international organisations tried to remake the world.

Autobiography: historical, political & military --- Australasian & Pacific history --- John Burton --- Australian Department of External Affairs --- ASIO --- memoir --- autobiography --- Canberra

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In 1991, Snezana Zabic lost her homeland and most of her family's book and record collection during the Yugoslav Wars that had been sparked by Slobodan Milosevic's relentless pursuit of power. She became a teenage refugee, forced to flee Croatia and the atrocities of war that had leveled her hometown of Vukovar. She and her family remained refugees in Serbia until NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999. After witnessing the first nights of NATO's bombing, Zabic took flight again. She moved from country to country, city to city, finally settling in Chicago. She realized -- reluctantly, because she didn't want to relive the past -- that she had to write about what had happened, what she had left behind, and what she had lost. Broken Records is the story of this loss, told with unflinching honesty, free of sentimentality or sensationalism. For the very first time, we learn how it felt to be first a regular teenager during the breakup of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars, and then a 30-something adult, perennially troubled by one's uprooted existence. Broken Records is not a neat narrative but a bit of everything -- part bildungsroman, part memoir, part political poetry, part personal pop culture compendium. And while Zabic represents a Yugoslav diasporan subject, her book also belongs to an international generation whose formative years straddle the Cold War and the global reconfiguration of wealth and power, whose lives were spent shifting from the vinyl/analog era to the cyber/digital era. This generation knows that when they were told about history ending, they were told a lie.

Yugoslavs --- Popular culture --- Refugees --- Teenage refugees --- Yugoslav War, 1991-1995 --- Youth. --- Žabić, Snežana, --- memoir --- fiction --- discography --- Yugoslav Wars

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In 1994, at the age of twenty-five, when the “terrible brokenness that comes with sexual assault” was folded deep within her body and thoughts of suicide were always close by, Erin Manning wrote The Perfect Mango at an almost feverish pitch: nineteen chapters in nineteen days, a sort of self-rescue operation, where writing became a form of making (and feeling) life otherwise. Throughout those nineteen days, and although not able to fully articulate it to herself at the time, Manning wrote her way into a “composition that asks how else life might be lived.” And in the rhythms of that composition, which was also a living, Manning was, and is, able to refuse the category and norm and stillness of “victim” (while still understanding the inheritances of violence) in order to follow instead the more-than-I as well as the joy of the “more-than of experience in the making.” Twenty-five years later, Manning allows these earlier writings to find their way back into the world, which is also a way of giving “voice to those moments of messy survival” while also asking us, who share in (and help to bear) those moments as readers, to consider “other ways of listening to the urgency that is living.” To (re)publish the book now is to give it a place in the world in a way that honors its force as something that is always beyond anyone’s claim to it, even Manning’s. In this sense, The Perfect Mango invites us, with Manning, to be in excess of ourselves, and also to consider, in Manning’s words, “how to create conditions for living beyond humanism’s fierce belief that we, the privileged, the neurotypicals, the as-yet-unscathed, the able-bodied, hold the key to all perspectives in the theatre of living.” Ultimately, The Perfect Mango and Manning’s reflections on its composition ask us to consider living “in the fierce celebration of a world invented by those modes of life which tear at the colonial, white, neurotypical fabric of life as we know it.”

Memoirs --- memoir --- sexual abuse --- trauma --- violence --- embodiement --- creative non-fiction --- neurodiversity --- Sexual abuse victims --- Memoirs. --- Victimes d'abus sexuels --- Manning, Erin. --- Autobiographies.