Letting Go Is All We Have To Hold On To: Humor For Humans

by Gregg Eisenberg

$11.99

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Author: Gregg Eisenberg

Publisher: Curved-Space Comedy

Paperback:
ISBN 10: 1732296901
ISBN 13: 978-1732296909

"The book that happened while you were making other plans."
"For people in recovery from the self-help industry."
“A book about impermanence that will last forever.
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All humor is philosophical inquiry. But Austrian linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein went even further and wrote: "An entire treatise of philosophy could be written that consists entirely of humor." Author and teacher Evan Hodkins similarly wrote: "The next religion will consist of an expansive catalog of jokes." And the Mexican poet Cesar Cruz commented that all art should "comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable."

Now, dear reader, you have stumbled upon a curious but relatable collection of all-original jokes that combines all three ideas together -- in easy-to-digest, family-friendly, bite-sized nuggets!

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"A riveting read for people who crave laughter and require mental stimulation."
"A real iconoclassic!"
“Hilarious, original jokes that play with logic and turn conventional thinking on its side.”
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(From the Preface) - It's rare to find a trifecta of thought streams and modalities as unexpectedly intertwined as what we find in this one-of-a-kind collection of original, one-sentence jokes, aphorisms (or "laughorisms") known as The Eisenberg Principles. In these one-sentence vignettes, the fields of philosophy, physics, and psychology marry into uproariously funny trysts of paradoxical play, each one like a piece of deluxe brain-candy which is no less serious in its treatment of the human condition as it is absurd. We are not only afforded a chance to glimpse into the thoughts of this wondrously twisted thinker, we are challenged to follow him into the surprising and impossible rabbit holes of language he unearths on every page.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time -- and still retain the ability to function." This catalog of contradictory humor is a compendium of "modern Zen koans", a collection of mind-bending brain-teasers - that puts you through Fitzgerald's test, playing with the principles of paradox, polarity, and incongruity to take you from the "comforts of cliché" to the "chasms of contradiction" with just a few strokes of a pen.
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"The book about quieting the mind that everyone is talking about!"
"A revolutionary approach to maintaining the status quo!"
"For people in no shape for the human condition."
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"Many of the jokes Eisenberg unspools have the psychic charge of a Zen koan, the brevity and immediacy of a haiku, and aim to capture the absurdity of an existence that can make the most sense when efforts to comprehend it are fully abandoned." Charles Brennan, Boulder Daily Camera.

"Eisenberg uses verbal gymnastics to twist and stretch the boundaries of logic, throwing the semantics of everyday expressions into question - hopefully stirring our collective conversation about meaning and consciousness forward." Michael Travers, EJI
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This is the small-print/pocketbook size. There is also a large-print 5x8 size book for sale on Amazon, found by clicking on "All Three Versions" and exploring the drop-down menu).

"When we said humor can lead to enlightenment, we were not joking!"
~Gregg Eisenberg
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Enjoy a few hilarious clips of the author reading from this book in the Museum of Boulder (Colorado) in Oct. 2019: https://cutt.ly/ArqYzDs
Enjoy an in-depth interview with the author about the streams of ideas running through his material: https://cutt.ly/6rqYlIb

Curved-Space Comedy: Beating the Conundrums since 2001.

"We live vicariously, so you don't have to."

www.curvedspacecomedy.com --- for more clips, snips, interviews, and songs.

Review

"Many of the jokes Eisenberg unspools have the psychic charge of a Zen koan, the brevity and immediacy of a haiku, and aim to capture the absurdity of an existence that can make the most sense when efforts to comprehend it are fully abandoned." Charles Brennan, Boulder Daily Camera, March 6, 2019

"Eisenberg uses verbal gymnastics to twist and stretch the boundaries of logic, throwing the semantics of everyday expressions into question - hopefully stirring our collective conversation about meaning and consciousness forward." -Michael Travers, EJI Journal

"The pocketbook guide to people." Melissa Page, Boulder CO

"Great for mediators, moderators, motivators, meditators, and medicators."

"For people in no condition for the human race."

From the Author

Michelangelo wrote: "You keep sculpting, and sculpting, and sculpting, until... there is nothing left to take away." And that is how I feel about this book. This material, this "carefully curated collection of contradictions" started having a logic of its own years ago. My job as a writer was to be dutiful to the muse, to follow where she led, to keep playing with language and word combinations in all their perplexing permutations, and in the end to keep editing out mediocre content until there was "nothing left to take away."

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I wrote this book to uplift my friends, real and imagined, far and near, who ponder the perennial questions about the human condition (which usually have no solid answers), to keep them entertained & challenged for a few turns in the road; to keep them engaged & comforted for a few twists in the path.

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Don't worry about the content being dogmatic or didactic. Or conclusive. The point of the book is to excavate & examine the everyday language we use to express ourselves, to throw into question some of the logic and semantics which shape our thoughts, and to stir our collective conversations about the natures of time, self & society a little bit forward.

"When we said humor can lead to enlightenment, we were not joking!"

"The desire to spread levity in the world weighs heavily upon me."

~ Gregg Eisenberg

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Letting Go Is All We Have To Hold On To: Humor For Humans