Michael W. Clune Livres

A classic of addiction and recovery. How do you describe an addiction in which your drug of choice creates a hole in your memory, a “white out,” so that every time you use it is the first time—new, fascinating, vivid? Michael W. Clune’s story takes us straight inside such an addiction—what he calls “the memory disease.” With dark humor, and in crystalline prose, Clune’s account of life inside the heroin underground reads like no other. Whisking us between the halves of his precarious double life—between the streets of Baltimore and the college classroom, where Clune is a graduate student teaching literature—we spiral along with him as he approaches rock bottom: from nodding off in a row house with a one-armed junkie and a murderous religious freak to having his life threatened in a Chicago jail while facing a felony possession charge. After his descent into addiction, we follow Clune through detox, treatment, and finally into recovery as he returns to his childhood home, where the memory disease and his heroin-induced white out begin to fade. White Out is more than a memoir. It is a rigorous investigation that offers clarity, hope, and even beauty to anyone who wants to understand the disease or its cure. This tenth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author.

Writing Against Time explores the twentieth-century literary effort to create an image that will never get old.

Exploring the allure of the free market, this book delves into its representation in postwar literature, examining how economic themes shaped narratives and character development. It highlights the interplay between literature and economic thought, revealing how authors responded to and critiqued the capitalist landscape of their times. Through various literary works, the text uncovers the deeper implications of economic ideologies on society and individual identity, providing a rich analysis of the cultural context of postwar writing.

"If professors of literature have an expertise, it is in making judgments about value. They select works that deserve their students' attention because they are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange, insightful. The intellectual coherence and social role of literary studies depend on the ability of literature professors to make such claims. Yet literary studies has largely disavowed judgments of artistic value on the grounds that they are inevitably grounded in prejudice or entangled in problems of social status. Michael W. Clune's provocative book challenges these objections to judgment and offers a positive account of literary studies as an institution of aesthetic education. Literature professors' most basic challenge to aesthetic judgment is that it violates their commitment to equality. Clune argues that rejecting judgment on these grounds ratifies the market's monopoly on value and disables aesthetic education's political potential. Clune envisions a progressive politics freed from the strictures of dogmatic equality and enlivened by education in aesthetic judgment. Moving from theory to practice, he takes up works by Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Gwendolyn Brooks, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Bernhard, showing how close reading-the profession's traditional key skill-harnesses judgment to open new modes of perception"--

Portrait of the artist as a young gamer. Gamelife is part memoir of childhood in the eighties, part meditation on the imaginative world of computer games—and altogether wonderful, luminous and profound. Michael Clune's first computer game is the text-based adventure 'Suspended' in which the player types commands, directing robots to save the planet from destruction. The game raises deep questions for the boy and provides a framework for his imagination about himself and the world. Seven primitive PC games take on an almost religious significance in Michael's life. Gamelife is one of those books that makes you see things differently, a brilliant memoir of a kid discovering his own mental powers, and the magic of an electronic world he can escape into while riding the shockwaves of his parents' divorce, his own adolescence and his apprenticeship in the world of perception.