Books by Gordon Osing
The Water Radical
by Gordon Osing
The author spent three years in China and Asia. This volume of poetry is inspired by his time there and the journals that he wrote during his travels.
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Polyphemus: Masques of Desire
by Gordon Osing
Accidents of Attention
What is in these accidents of attention
More than a fate one might choose. (I cannot
Ever trust a theologian without a beret,)
Never mind the advertisements memorized in school.
The gains however do not cancel the losses.
There is demurrage, the old railroad auditor’s
Term for rent owed on delayed rolling stock
Left empty on a spur of the line. Where is
That unchosen one with that other life?
Say the gap widens or it comes together,
Like obvious railroad tracks, always finally.
Like the ones I walked home from school,
In the backsides of warehouses, risking a trestle
And the afternoon train down from Chicago.
Friend, reader at this very moment, think on
Momentary revelations, when you knew almost
Faces of your self, as if accidents of attention,
Were good as decisive moments. Another life
Hangs in the balance and which one is it to die for.
Auden is right, “Injustice is the hell of childhood,”
But Calvinist porn passes time till time to repent.
And then no-face comes along, plus something else,
Perhaps accidentally, but you know mercy cannot be
summoned deliberately. It comes with abjectivity.
between moments out of time and mortal longueurs,
Insolent to what all tangles being in itself. Ergo,
The only freedom is in mercy. We’d best believe
Some accidents are good as sacred. Better.
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Theaters of Skin
by Gordon Osing
Ichthus “The desert is the garden of Allah.” a Moslem saying In the sea of the desert of the self, in the wind and sand, desire lives without meaning. In the garden of the city of waters it lives-- desire for a deity who lives before words, who makes of the desert a garden, daily prayer his empery, what food and drink are to the body. Without our hearts he has no being. Who does not want to touch into the kingdom at the secret heart of language, so close within the heart beneath skin, that rules by silence and desire —making in the desert the stream, the river, the sea.
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Meanwhile
by Gordon Osing
Product Description
Envoi Are you reading this to see, friend, if you want to ramble through what’s inside? Fair enough. It’s not a page turner I’m after, nor airport fiction. I’m after undoing words, so that contexts both make them transparent and invite colors and projections of heart. And more, smear the palette of mere being. Mayday, and all the alarms in the world going off at once are morning birds in Delta bluffs woods, taking me out to the bothy to watch waves on the lake, and a pontoon gliding into an easterly, on westering waters. The boat moves to the east all morning tied to the dock. Until I ask what science traffics in deliberate misunderstandings, incorporates illusions that the senses verify, purposes to undo “the real world,” as parents say. What is proved more than the worlds it takes to stay in place, and the worlds moved to life by the eye stayed in watching.
About the Author
Gordon Osing is now retired after teaching at the University of Memphis since 1973. There he founded The River City Writers Series, now in its thirty-fifth year. He is the author of MEANWHILE (Spuyten Duyvil, 2011), SLAUGHTERING THE BUDDHA (Spuyten Duyvil, 2010), THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED: FICTIONS OF FAMILY EROS (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006), APO/CALYPSO (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002),
From the Boundary Waters (Memphis State University Press, 1981), and
Town Down River (St. Lukes Press, 1985). He has also translated widely from the Chinese. His travels to China inform his other verse and journal collection,
The Water Radical. "The Center is everywhere attention gathers," he has said of his work in verse, prose, and translation. He now lives lakeside in Delta bluffs woods in Eudora, Mississippi, where he is continuing his career in reading, writing and traveling.
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Things That Never Happened: Fictions of Family Eros
by Gordon Osing
The author writes a series of poetic imaginations around the idea of family and identity. The enduring presence of both tends to adhere to fiction, pure and simple, so that the things, the events of our communal time and country are also thrown into this mode of a fictive certainty. The result is a series of lyrical encounters with the loneliness and seeming impossibility of the personal--a universal suffrage that informs everything that happened (history.)
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Slaughtering the Buddha
by Gordon Osing
About the Author Gordon Osing has taught at the University of Memphis since 1973. He founded there The River City Writers Series, now in its twenty-second year. He is the author of SLAUGHTERING THE BUDDHA, APO/CALYPSO, THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED, From the Boundary Waters, and A Town Down-River. He has also translated widely from the Chinese. His travels to China inform his other verse and journal collection, The Water Radical. "The Center is everywhere attention gathers," he has said of his work in verse, prose, and translation. Product Description BLURB Not since Jahweh and Adam gave each other the finger has so much beneficent darkness and dreadful light been shed on the long, insolent path we all traverse on the way to we’re not sure except hopefully not alone. Who trudges off nightly into mountain snows in your pillow? I daresay you don’t know unless someone who can elevate mercy, invent the zero sum that haunts the mayhem, and smile deeply as Yeats’s notable Chinaman. Anyway, you get the idea. So here it is. If geezer and little boy have changed places, if the sentences are too many, no matter; only if all of life is early morning dark.
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La Belle Dame
by Gordon Osing
They gossip about a girl’s ecstasies they caused, over brandies, that fine ladies choose not to allow, for it amounts to surrender to his beliefs about his God-given self. Acting is little known to him. Country girls and always from other towns know better when they soon enough go knees andtoes circling on stage and leaving the crowds on an arm for what’s left of the evening. Their manhood lives in our pleasure, so why not sell it to them. Nothing’s free. What else have we got to sell? The naïve among us are the most to be pitied. The best may get a better place in town.
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The Late Show
by Michael Connelly, Gordon Osing
Introducing Renee Ballard, a fierce young detective fighting to prove herself on the LAPD's toughest beat, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly.
Renee Ballard works the night shift in Hollywood--also known as the Late Show--beginning many investigations but finishing none, as each morning she turns everything over to the day shift. A once up-and-coming detective, she's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.
But one night she catches two assignments she doesn't want to part with: the brutal beating of a prostitute left for dead in a parking lot and the killing of a young woman in a nightclub shooting. Ballard is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her partner's wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night. As the investigations entwine, they pull her closer to her own demons and the reason she won't give up her job, no matter what the department throws at her.
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The Late Show
by Michael Connelly, Gordon Osing
In this first installment of the Renée Ballard series, #1 bestselling author Michael Connelly introduces a "complicated and driven" young detective fighting to prove herself on the LAPD's toughest beat (The New York Times).
Renee Ballard works the midnight shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing few, as each morning she turns everything over to the daytime units. It's a frustrating job for a once up-and-coming detective, but it's no accident. She's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.
But one night Ballard catches two assignments she doesn't want to part with. First, a prostitute is brutally beaten and left for dead in a parking lot. All signs point to a crime of premeditation, not passion, by someone with big evil on his mind. Then she sees a young waitress breathe her last after being caught up in a nightclub shooting. Though dubbed a peripheral victim, the waitress buys Ballard a way in, and this time she is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her partner's wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night.
As the investigations intertwine, Ballard is forced to face her own demons and confront a danger she could never have imagined. To find justice for these victims who can't speak for themselves, she must put not only her career but her life on the line.
Propulsive as a jolt of adrenaline and featuring a bold and defiant new heroine, The Late Show is yet more proof that Michael Connelly is "a master of the genre" (Washington Post).
Copies
No copies available.
The Late Show
by Michael Connelly, Gordon Osing
In this first installment of the Renée Ballard series, #1 bestselling author Michael Connelly introduces a "complicated and driven" young detective fighting to prove herself on the LAPD's toughest beat (The New York Times).
Renee Ballard works the midnight shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing few, as each morning she turns everything over to the daytime units. It's a frustrating job for a once up-and-coming detective, but it's no accident. She's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.
But one night Ballard catches two assignments she doesn't want to part with. First, a prostitute is brutally beaten and left for dead in a parking lot. All signs point to a crime of premeditation, not passion, by someone with big evil on his mind. Then she sees a young waitress breathe her last after being caught up in a nightclub shooting. Though dubbed a peripheral victim, the waitress buys Ballard a way in, and this time she is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her partner's wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night.
As the investigations intertwine, Ballard is forced to face her own demons and confront a danger she could never have imagined. To find justice for these victims who can't speak for themselves, she must put not only her career but her life on the line.
Propulsive as a jolt of adrenaline and featuring a bold and defiant new heroine, The Late Show is yet more proof that Michael Connelly is "a master of the genre" (Washington Post).
Copies
No copies available.
The Late Show
by Michael Connelly, Gordon Osing
Traveler
We are all emigrants, immigrants in time,
and here are the rules. When you find yourself
in somebody else’s world, take everything
for granted as ordinary. That will save you
the tour guide’s patronizing exaggerations.
Second, learn to shut up deeply enough
that you begin to see. “So far” and “if”
describe most meanings. Third, imagine
that anything declared true must have
plausible contradictions. Try to avoid
believing your simplest needs mean anything
to those charged with satisfying them.
Don’t be effusive for his assistance.
Finally, don’t be surprised at anything
somebody believes, even if he merely hopes
it’s true, wishes, if he needs for it to be.
Many have lost the only or ultimate world
they believe ought to have endured, that
the one before them is totally wrong, temporary,
and the true one will return one day (soon?),
like Arthur from Avalon. That, too, is ordinary.
Try to find out what they take for funny.
That will tell you what they want not to fear,
I mean what they do. Think your own thoughts
are just as old as theirs, and just as altered,
made do with, impressed, being what one had.
Do you know how lucky for you it is to have
your own world overturned, made new.
Copies
No copies available.
The Late Show
by Michael Connelly, Gordon Osing
In this first installment of the Renée Ballard series, #1 bestselling author Michael Connelly introduces a "complicated and driven" young detective fighting to prove herself on the LAPD's toughest beat (The New York Times).
Renee Ballard works the midnight shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing few, as each morning she turns everything over to the daytime units. It's a frustrating job for a once up-and-coming detective, but it's no accident. She's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.
But one night Ballard catches two assignments she doesn't want to part with. First, a prostitute is brutally beaten and left for dead in a parking lot. All signs point to a crime of premeditation, not passion, by someone with big evil on his mind. Then she sees a young waitress breathe her last after being caught up in a nightclub shooting. Though dubbed a peripheral victim, the waitress buys Ballard a way in, and this time she is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her partner's wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night.
As the investigations intertwine, Ballard is forced to face her own demons and confront a danger she could never have imagined. To find justice for these victims who can't speak for themselves, she must put not only her career but her life on the line.
Propulsive as a jolt of adrenaline and featuring a bold and defiant new heroine, The Late Show is yet more proof that Michael Connelly is "a master of the genre" (Washington Post).
Copies
No copies available.
The Late Show
by Michael Connelly, Gordon Osing
In this first installment of the Renée Ballard series, #1 bestselling author Michael Connelly introduces a "complicated and driven" young detective fighting to prove herself on the LAPD's toughest beat (The New York Times).
Renee Ballard works the midnight shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing few, as each morning she turns everything over to the daytime units. It's a frustrating job for a once up-and-coming detective, but it's no accident. She's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.
But one night Ballard catches two assignments she doesn't want to part with. First, a prostitute is brutally beaten and left for dead in a parking lot. All signs point to a crime of premeditation, not passion, by someone with big evil on his mind. Then she sees a young waitress breathe her last after being caught up in a nightclub shooting. Though dubbed a peripheral victim, the waitress buys Ballard a way in, and this time she is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her partner's wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night.
As the investigations intertwine, Ballard is forced to face her own demons and confront a danger she could never have imagined. To find justice for these victims who can't speak for themselves, she must put not only her career but her life on the line.
Propulsive as a jolt of adrenaline and featuring a bold and defiant new heroine, The Late Show is yet more proof that Michael Connelly is "a master of the genre" (Washington Post).
Copies
-
$14.00
Desperate Things
by Gordon Osing
Then and Now Sixty-five plus years ago I began catching the early GM&O train, #8, to Chicago, and walking around the Loop till noon, to Cubs’ games and a stage show late afternoons before the evening train, #5, back to Springfield. I had my own pass. Father was the chief division auditor. After the game, a stage show at the Chicago Theatre made a great day. Frankie Lane, Patti Page, Les Paul and Mary Ford, those were among the stars of those days. The morning train arrived in the Union Station in the hour after dawn. We slid backwards through the yard beneath a brightening sky, shifting sideways in the rails. In and out of light, I watched the loading docks and water tanks on the backs of buildings, and the morning workers waving. Then the sky went away and we eased into the shadows of the terminal shed and I saw myself in the window, seeing myself seeing. That’s how it is, I say, now.
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Night Train
by Martin Amis, A. L. Snijders, Gordon Osing
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Fusing brilliant wordplay with all the elements of a classic whodunit, "Amis has created a quicksilver narrative that grabs the reader and refuse to let go” (The New York Times).
"Dazzling.... Whistles into the police-procedural structure only to blow it to bits." —Wall Street Journal
Detective Mike Hoolihan has seen it all. A fifteen-year veteran of the force, she's gone from walking a beat, to robbery, to homicide. But one case—this case—has gotten under her skin.
When Jennifer Rockwell, darling of the community and daughter of a respected career cop—now top brass—takes her own life, no one is prepared to believe it. Especially her father, Colonel Tom. Homicide Detective Mike Hoolihan, longtime colleague and friend of Colonel Tom, is ready to "put the case down." Suicide. Closed. Until Colonel Tom asks her to do the one thing any grieving father would ask: take a second look.
Not since his celebrated novel Money has Amis turned his focus on America to such remarkable effect. Amis exposes a world where surfaces are suspect (no matter how perfect), where paranoia is justified (no matter how pervasive), and where power and pride are brought low by the hidden recesses of our humanity.
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Night Train
by Martin Amis, A. L. Snijders, Gordon Osing
Brevity is the soul of beauty in these tiny masterworks of short short fiction Gorgeously translated by Lydia Davis, the miniature stories of A. L. Snijders might concern a lost shoe, a visit with a bat, fears of travel, a dream of a man who has lost a glass eye: uniting them is their concision and their vivacity. Lydia Davis in her introduction delves into her fascination with the pleasures and challenges of translating from a language relatively new to her. She also extols Snijders’s “straightforward approach to storytelling, his modesty and his thoughtfulness.”
Selected from many hundreds in the original Dutch, the stories gathered here―humorous, or bizarre, or comfortingly homely―are something like daybook entries, novels-in-brief, philosophical meditations, or events recreated from life, but―inhabiting the borderland between fiction and reality―might best be described as autobiographical mini-fables.
This morning at 11:30, in the full sun, I go up into the hayloft where I haven’t been for years. I climb over boxes and shelving, and open the door. A frightened owl flies straight at me, dead quiet, as quiet as a shadow can fly, I look into his eyes―he’s a large owl, it’s not strange that I’m frightened too, we frighten each other. I myself thought that owls never move in the daytime. What the owl thinks about me, I don’t know.
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Night Train
by Martin Amis, A. L. Snijders, Gordon Osing
Jake,
Jaime, jambe, jamnes, iacob, jacobus, James, the “leg grabber,” which evolution alludes to incorporation of the law into Faith, which seems not possible unless the OT presides in thought, word and deed, the Gospel is modified and Paul leaves the Levant in a snit. I wouldn’t pull your leg in matters of this importance. We both know Europe’s history of fucking the world for Jesus, Heaven for burial insurance. Ok, no Heart of Darkness is on stage here. “Everybody Knows” the Leonard Cohen song, and Graham Greene’s soldier priest. in The Comedians, putting the kabosh on those who righteously believe in doing nothing.
The Gospel, is either political or merely fabulous, and, as luck has it, my pilgrimage goes on, if often as not it promises not to arrive unless where it began, and Jacob’s ladder finds me both on the way up and down at once, caught in the blandishments of presentation, that simply cannot imagine arrival in eternity. Stay with ladders that traffic in the heart, Yeats proffered. Need can be a lot like love. Besides, “if the people find you can fiddle, then fiddle you must,” says Fiddler Jones, and I learned to see through a rococo screen a form for everything that passed before me. Mum’s the word for everything after that.
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Silent Movies
by Gordon Osing
Reader, Friend
Haydn reminded me this morning in the opening measures of a piano concerto that all the twists and turns of melody developing and revising itself throughout are in the beginning, the oak found eight inches high and already with leaves. The boys thought I was a veteran in our first year at pre-theological school; I knew the whole world of Luther’s Small Catechism and culture as the oatmeal. Desire was my nightly chore. “Come Lord Jesus,” not Lord Ganesh, not then. “Now I lay me down,” remotely menacing. Salvation was baseball. My self labored at truly believing—and so
I loved the music more than anything, the twists and turns of a declared theme, the story within. The rest, they say, is history. Bless painters and pianists who have bypassed the words in stories that have needed me. I learned to love the silence in music. Which brings me to my point. How can now play then except in cues and contradictions. It is neither I seek, but their developments, words in an irretrievable life. I know how to live my choices. Heart has labored long and hard to keep brutality at bay. Mercy, ergo, I pray attends these pages
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