5 comments about Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (Native Agents).

1. Cookie's book is one of those 20 or so of the many books I have ever read that I really treasure and recommend to my friends unreservedly. By the end of the book you have something of an insight into this fascinating and wonderful person. I just hope it gives each new reader as much pleasure as it did me when I first read it!



2. wonderful book!!! every lady needs to read this! cookie mueller rules!



3. I found out about this book & jumped at the chance to read it. Cookie tells some of her experiences being an underground Film star & Adventuress. I always loved Cookie in John Water's films, but I never got that chance to read her work, But Now I am a big Fan. She never whitewashes her experiences with Drugs, Sex, hippies, farming, whatever. I hope her other collections are reprinted and well distributed very soon. Meet back up with an old friend, you might not have really known, through this great collective memoir.



4. I really identified with Cookie Mueller, the author of "Walking Through Clear Water." We were born a few months apart, lived our lives travelling back and forth between coasts, probably attended events together in 60s era San Francisco, East Village, NY, etc. One thing for sure, after reading this book, I wish I had known her and feel like I did. She comes across as so alive and vibrant on the printed page, that when I learned in the "about the author" page at the end of the book that she had died of AIDS in 1989, I felt as though I had personally lost a friend.

   Do not let that depressing bit of information in any way dissuade you from reading her story, or to get the impression that this book is at all morbid or maudlin. This is one of the funniest accounts of life on the fringes of American culture I've read in many a moon. She has such an enagingly humorous conversational style, that even when she is describing truly horrifying scenes such as an attempted rape in the backwoods of Maryland, the effect owes more to Rabelais, than to Peckinpah.

   Mueller reminds me a lot of a female version of Ken Kesey. Her prose moves along with the same sort of wild energy and the incidents she describes never get bogged down in needless detail. She has great writers' instincts. She sees life in the same tragi-comic vein as does Kesey, as well. Perhaps they both had run-ins with the same Cosmic Joker, at one time or other. Whatever the personal histories, they were certainly kindred souls, who had a look at the full spectrum of humanity and were able to get their impressions down on paper in thoroughly memorable ways.

   This is as easy and enjoyable a read as you are likely to come across. I'm by no means a fast reader, but was able to breeze through it in just a few hours. I can unreservedly say that I couldn't put it down, and I find that rare these days. Spend a few hours with Cookie Mueller. She'll probably make friends with you, too.

   BEK




5. Cookie Mueller was a goddess inflamed. Her stories are hysterical, beautiful, outrageous, and heartwrenching. It's true what they say above; we're lucky she took notes.

2 comments about The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory.

1. The philosophy of Santayana is remembered mostly by his theory of aesthetics, which is discussed in detail in this book. His aesthetic theory is basically subjective, or "psychological", and if viewed from a contemporary standpoint, somewhat at odds with current developments in neuroscience, but closer than most schools of Western philosophy. All philosophical theories of aesthetics are interesting to investigate from the standpoint of comparing them to what is said about the human aesthetic faculty in modern research in neuroscience.

   As in ethics, Santayana approaches aesthetics in three different ways, namely as the exercise of the aesthetic faculty, the history of art, and the psychological. The first two do not concern the author in the book, his attention devoted entirely to the third. His intention is to remove himself from the influence of the poets and of Plato, and find the out how ideals are formed in the mind, how objects may be compared with them, what properties are shared in beautiful things, and the process by which humans become sensitive to beauty and in turn value it. He is after a definition of beauty that explains its origin in human experience, and one that explains the human capacity to be sensible of beauty and the relation between a beautiful object and its ability to excite the human senses.

   The author takes a different definition of aesthetics, being one that he calls "critical" or "appreciative perception", and which results from combining a notion of criticism with that of the notion of aesthetics as a theory of perception. Santayana wanted to develop a theory of aesthetics that relies on perceptions as a judgmental, critical notion. Perceptions that are not appreciations are thus to be excluded. An aesthetic theory then deals with the "perception of values".

   The author's view of religion is well-known, and his atheism rare for his time. The religious imagination he says, has resulted in creations that rival those of the poets and novelists, so much so, he says, that humans believe the content of these creations to have objective reality. The ideas of these divinities are further enhanced by the realization of their natural power, with the belief in the reality of an ideal personality bringing about its further idealization, eventually spanning many human generations. History and tradition are cast by the imagination of these deities, in which peity resides and is nourished. The author of course does not excuse the God of Christianity from this, but he acknowledges the possibility that the human conceptions of Christ and Mary may in fact have real counterparts (the evidence of this not to be explored in this work).

   The author states that unless human nature undergoes radical change, the main intellectual and aesthetic value of ideas will come from the creative acts of imagination. If human perceptions are not connected with human pleasures, there would be no need to look at things, no interest in them at all, and no importance would be imputed to them. It is indeed amazing how many ideas, thought to be rational, logical, or abstract, actually fit in with the author's aesthetic worldview. Concepts and results in science and mathematics in particular, after their discovery, are sometimes thought of as having their origin in logic and reason. But it was the keen human imagination that brought them about: a grand interplay of intuition and playfullness. Ugly ideas are not permissible: only the most beautiful survive...and oddly, and most interestingly, it is these that usually seem to work the best, and transcend the context in which they were discovered.




2. In this book, Santayana rejects the Platonic conception of beauty is an intrinsic characteristic of a thing, and argues for beauty that exists only in the mind (and senses, hence the title) of the viewer. The pleasure that beauty gives its audience is universal, but what is beautiful is not universal across audiences. That may be old hat to us, but wasn't quite so old hat in his time. Santayana enumerates various types of beauty, and relates each to the pleasure it gives its audience. Santayana even claims that some of our other preferences -- for example, for youth over age -- are fundamentally aesthetic in nature.

   The argument is Santayanaesque, and thus not exactly rigorous. A lot of the physiology ("Psychology is always physiological," he writes) is hokey to our "modern" medical minds. Some of the digressions seem to be just him taking the opportunity to say something clever, rather than advancing the main argument in any way.

   Still, Santayana is a virtuoso of putting together large, complex "big think" arguments, and he writes subtly and beautifully. This book is worth it, even if only to see Santayana doing what he does best: arguing broadly and forcefully, this time for a new conception of aesthetics.

No comments about Office Design Sourcebook: Solutions for Dynamic Workspaces (Interior Design and Architecture).

3 comments about The Spirit of Butterflies: Myth, Magic, and Art.

1. Until I read this book I thought that only Nabokov could write about butterflies at such a level
   Maraleen, all my compliments brava!!



2. Every culture known to man throughout the rise and fall of civilizations, has carried a myth or symbol about the butterfly. Evidence of this includes the myth of Eros and Psyche, ancient Mycenean gold relics, wall ornaments of Teotihuacan in Mexico, the Japanese paintings, the Native American legend. This book captures the collective ethos of this powerful universal symbol well. It is well-illustrated.
   
   So, what does all of this mean? Why is it such a recurring and powerful symbol in the collective psyche?
   
   The spirit of the butterfly is the transformative symbol of the regeneration of love which can fly. Love gives you the wings to fly, to be free. This notion of the beauty of love with its gossamer wings, is something that is more precious than anything, for it allows one's heart to open within it where the seed may be born to flower. This flower may blossom fully into joy beyond one's own conscious power to imagine. The seed that may open up and spring up within one's heart can be a form of transformation that does last forever. This is a form of one's own opening to a current within one's own being, a current that can magnetize others when it is fully open. That power to magnetize is something that we are all born with, but that few seldom realize because they are not open to their own feeling in their heart of being free and at one with others.
   
   That is what this book is about and why it is meaningful in capturing the essence of a universal symbol.



3. This book succeeds both as a tremendous joy for the general reader and a serious treatment of its subject. It is perhaps the best, maybe the only, book on the market right now treating its subject well and completely. Exceeding the breadth of its title, the book actually treats the cultural significance of butterflies throughout history. This is no small feat. Butterflies have been taken by many cultures to inculcate hope, rebirth, transformation and transcendence, matters at the heart of mankind's internal concern for many millennia. Despite its masterful photography and copious illustrations, Ms. Manos-Jones's production immediately belies any notion that it is simply a "coffee table book". The chapter titles well illustrate the book's topical landscape-- for example "The Sacred Butterfly", "The Artful Butterfly", "The Verbal Butterfly", [famous] "Butterfly People", and so on. By the time you've gotten through each of the ten chapters, be you butterfly buff or butterfly scholar, you will probably be surprised that, concerning this topic, you "didn't know the half of it". It is important to point out that Ms. Manos-Jones brings to this book a well-informed knowledge both of butterflies and world environmental issues. In life, she wears another hat-- as an environmentalist associated with the important Michoacan Reforestation Fund-- a premier conservation group working to protect Monarch butterfly overwintering habitats in Mexico. Given these credentials, the book is a really wedding of Ms. Manos-Jones' professional level expertise on conservation and the pure love of her subject-- butterflies. This book can be recommended wholeheartedly to the general reader and the informed butterfly enthusiast alike. I imagine that a few scholars and historians will want to dig into it as well.

No comments about The Great God Pan: The Survival of an Image (Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures).

1 comments about The Roots of Postmodernism.

1. I think the content of this book is OK!
   But I do't content myself for received a black/white copied book.
   Though, I was objected to the Amazon,there are no any reply.
   Therefor I'll suggest who intent to buy this book,the book has no any color, in fact, it's a rudey copied item.

No comments about Art - A Community Connection.

3 comments about Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series).

1. Wonderful illustrations. Up-tu-date analyses & comments. For amateurs and specialists as well.



2. This is a superbly illustrated and written book, with photographs of renown artifacts from museums around the world, and even more outstanding essays by relevant scholars. I suspect anyone interested in Ancient Art from the formative stages (3000-2000 BCE) of the world's first civilizations will enjoy reading this book.



3. A magnificent volume, for those who might be interested in the miriad small and large details pertaining to the earliest artifacts of those primordial history writing civilizations. A great many details as to the History, Physical conditions, Geography, Economics, Foreign relations, Art, Religion, Litterature, Iconography, Archaeology and so on, both textual and visual. A most interesting book for those interested in the cradle of civilisation.

5 comments about Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche.

1. Reading this Book made me feel like I too was Staying Up Much Too Late. Using the iconic Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, Theisesn roams into the dark parts of our conscience that typically surface during late night conversations. Having visited a retrospect of Hopper's work, I was stunned by the darkness of his vision - stunned and attracted by it. Nighthawks is emblematic of this darkness, as are masterpieces like Automat and Office at Night. Theisen ties the symbolism with Hopper's work to the darkness of the American soul in the twentieth century. His analysis is spot on and very applicable to Hopper's work. The writing is accessible and flows smoothly. If you are interested in the darker part of the American conscience, this book is a good place to live for a while.



2. At first glance, I expected this to be a heavy duty history of Hopper's painting, with copious documentation, contemporary views of the work, and lots of secondary source citations--something like reading a published dissertation. I was pleasantly surprised to find Theisen's book is not an ordinary work of scholarship. It's not so much academic art criticism as it is a comment on American culture and mores. Theisen uses Hopper's seminal work, "Nighthawks," as a jump-off point to discuss film noir, Pulp Fiction, Andy Warhol, pornography and Puritanism, the Beats, Russ Meyer, the Great Gatsby--you name it. At times, it feels overstuffed, and it contains unnecessary editorializing (about the Iraq War, for example) and some sloppy mistakes (as one amazon reviewer has noted, Theisen wrongly says Gatsby kills himself at the end of Fitzgerald's novel). But overall it is an imaginative and engrossing work that will inform those who don't know much about Hopper the man and who always found him an understudied artist. Theisen's book could have a place on a cultural studies or U.S. history shelf, and it would make interesting reading for a freshman American history survey class. An unusual, though very readable thought piece.



3. The book was great in theory but some of the connections and referances were a little week. I recommend it because it was thought provoking and intelligent.



4. There are two mistakes apparent on first glance at a clever little book--the female character in Pulp Fiction is "Honey Bunny" not "Honeybunch" and Gatsby does not commit suicide in The Great Gatsby. The first mistake is a minor pop culture snag and the second is a serious error in American literature. Gatsby is murdered by George Wilson, whose wife Myrtle was having an affair with Daisy Buchannan's husband, Tom. Wilson kills himself after he shoots Gatsby who he mistakenly believes ran down his wife.
   
   Whatever happened to editors and fact checkers?
   
   The premise of the book is interesting and entertaining, but these errors are distracting.



5. Edward Hopper's paintings, well known to almost everyone in this country, are unique in that they convey a sense of loneliness, yearning, suggestions of dark thoughts, pessimism, and hopelessness - not exactly the moods one would want to examine on a daily basis, but certainly painterly images that cause us to pause when we encounter them in museums and collections.
   
   Gordon Theisen is a fine writer and in this book STAYING UP MUCH TOO LATE: EDWARD HOPPOER'S 'NIGHTHAWKS' AND THE DARK SIDE OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHE he manages to successfully use the famous night diner painting of the artist to address the current mental state of affairs seeping into our consciousness. He wisely covers every aspect of the artist's life and work, giving us the necessary details of his life and his idiomatic stance in American art, spreads those ideas into his output thus assuring us that the one painting of the title is not an isolated image, and then begins to apply his ideas to our cultural status - at times not comfortable, but always creatively informative.
   
   If Thiesen strays a bit too far from his title subject, drawing on his own interpretation of concepts he perceives as more than just legitimate diversions, then he can be forgiven by the reader who want more from an author than a term paper presentation. Thiesen indulges in reminiscing about our cultural icons such as diners, cigarettes, coffee, plastic, jazz, war, sex, film noir, and personality disintegration in a time of easy drugs AKA medications. Perhaps these are topics many would not elect to explore, but then they are bookmarks to the greater understanding of where our current culture stands.
   
   If indeed our artists are our shamans then Hopper as Thiesen presents him is a prophet of sorts. Not that the book is depressing as the Nighthawks painting: Thiesen has the good will to engage us in the positive aspects of all of the negatives listed above. There is humor here, but it is humor with an edge. This book, along with other contemporary 'paintings as examples of current thought' books by such authors as Biel and van Hensbergen in their evaluations of Grant Woods' American Gothic and Picasso's Guernica, once again proves that art gives us more than visual delight: art gives us valuable food for thought...and change. Grady Harp, November 06

No comments about The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773.