Experimental Books

Modern Chrysler Concept Cars illustrates how concept car designs spurred another business recovery of Chrysler during the 1990s. The storyline is how Tom Gale's daring cab-forward and retro design concepts (again) rescued Chrysler from post-Iacocca business doldrums. The book gives a great birdseye view of the business value of pushing beyond current design boundaries through the voice of Chrysler design honcho,Tom Gale. On this basis alone it should probably be required reading for students of car design. Buy this book for its business lesson about the business power of design and for its great photos of handsome cars, not for revelations of the visual keys to car design.

Despite many high-quality photos (which alone make the book worth buying) there is little about visual design principles behind the success of Gale's cab-forward and retro designs. Most of the pictures are dramatic three-quarter perspectives that reveal little about the shapes and proportions underlying the designs. To understand a car's design you need to understand its basic proportions, shapes and primary lines. These are only revealed clearly in "elevations" - perpendicular-to-the-viewer side, front, rear and overhead views of a car. Such views are rarely shown anywhere and not in this book. These cars are handsome; I want to know why and these quarter-view photos don't show me, nor does the text. The text of this book is more about mechanical concepts, intended performance and design-management decisionmaking than about visual principles or insights into the designs pictured.

This story begins with the financial failure of Chrysler's daring Airflow design in the late 1930s. The Airflow failure induced a long period in which Chrysler marketed increasingly dull designs on the basis of solid engineering. By 1949-50, Chrysler's obsolete pre-WW II design concepts were trumped in the market by the 1949 Ford and Mercury, the first finned Cadillacs and other new design concepts. The book gives only one paragraph to Chrysler's rescue-by-daring-design in the 1950s when Chrysler designer Virgil Exner turned to Italian coachbuilder Ghia for a series of seminal concept cars.

Design themes in the Exner/Ghia show cars quickly found their way into production cars such as the original Chrysler 300, a winning combination of design and performance engineering, the Plymouth Valiant and the gunsight taillights of the Imperial, for example. Only a passing reference is made to the Ghia d'Elegance as a source of design themes in the Chrysler Chronos concept car of the 1990s, citing its radiator-shaped grill. Omitting the 1950s episode is odd given that the 1990s Tom Gale design and performance-based concepts reprise the Exner/Ghia1950s design/performance rescue of a slumping Chrysler. Perhaps the author omitted this era because first-hand design players of the 1950s were not available to interview now whereas Tom Gale and his colleagues were. Even so, Chrysler's 1950's rescue-by-design deserves a full section, not just a short paragraph. Those who do not know history are fated to repeat it. So buy this book to learn how strong design can rescue business, to enjoy dramatic photos of excellent car designs, but not to learn much about what makes these cars look so good.

I thought this book would be the usual pointless gushing, with lots of pictures and no information. Well, there's lots of pictures, all in color, along with sketches. Surprisingly, though, the writer also interviewed notables such as Bob Lutz and Tom Gale to get the story behind the concepts and their journey to production - or not. Lots of surprises.

I actually had the honor of having George McGuire, one of the authors of this book as my professor for a course in Nonlinear Physics.

This book was quite solid overall. Sometimes the questions asked go far beyond the methodology and theory taught. (Typically these were questions he'd ask to make sure no one got an A+. ) It also is hard to tell sometimes if you've gotten the right answer, as there are no answers in the back of the book.

In certain sections the theoretical derivations were a bit limited. Otherwise it was quite good. The labs in the textbook also are great for showing nonlinear behavior and make for interesting ideas for future research.

I should add this book isn't hard to use (at all)to teach yourself. George's methodology for this course was very hands off, mainly we (the students) worked on the problems in class and would ask him for help. He maybe did 3-5 actual lectures the whole semester.

Nice book for professionals and first-year students. Nice graphics (via Maple). Good introduction to advanced non-linear applications - students should be able to find lots of interesting areas to explore. (be first!)

I did get some really good information about why listening to oneself read can really help struggling readers and that was my purpose in buying the book. However, the rest of the book became a commercial for buying the product and I could have learned the same thing in an article without paying for the entire book.

The Sound of Learning is directed at three audiences: teachers, parents, and speech-language pathologists. Two professors and an expert in speech-language pathology wrote this book, and the book reflects that depth of knowledge. Self-amplification is a powerful literacy tool, and you will learn a lot from this book.

The book starts by explaining how sound is connected to literacy and learning. Before this book, I did not understand how sound is important to learning. For example, I never knew why babies babble in a quiet room, but now I know they are actually teaching themselves how to speak. When children start to read and write, sound becomes even more important.

After the investigation of how sound is connected to learning, much of the book is about improving literacy. Almost all children will learn to read by sounding out the letters in words. That's pretty obvious, but if one thought about the situation, it's equally obvious that matching letters to the correct sounds is important. Unfortunately, many children learn to read in noisy environments in which they cannot clearly hear either themselves or their teachers. Lots of children overcome this obstacle on their own (at least, to some extent), but slow readers often do not. The closest comparable situation is if you had to memorize the names for new colors, but every time you saw a color it looked different because different colored lights were shining on it. That's the difficulty when learning to read: a clear voice signal helps children read because it helps them recognize the word-letter match.

The book also contains suggestions for using the self-amplifier in other learning activities. For example, remember when you sang in chorus with other children, but couldn't hear your own voice above the din? With a self-amplifier, children can sing in groups but still hear their own voices. This is similar to how musicians have speakers pointing the sound of their own instruments back at them. They can play together with the group while also perfecting their own work.

The middle of the book contains information for speech-language pathologists. First, the authors explain how self-amplification is used in therapy with the auditory and T-P-K feedback loops, then they detail practical ideas to improve results using portable self-amplification. Many common speech-language applications are presented along with suggestions on using the unique characteristics of the WhisperPhone to attain therapeutic success.

The last half of the book contains a variety of activities, and each activity is presented in teacher and parent versions. These easy-to-understand activities require a self-amplifier (such as a WhisperPhone), index cards and pencils. Each activity is designed to be completed in 5-15 minutes.

This book is designed to be used with a self-amplifier such as the WhisperPhone. The WhisperPhone is a device that takes the sound from a person's mouth and transmits it directly to the ear. It's also battery-free and hands-free, which makes it unique among self-amplifiers. (You can see a WhisperPhone in the pictures at the top.) Once you use a WhisperPhone, it's easy to understand why it's so effective: Your voice is amazingly clear.

If you want to know more, google "whisperphone" to find a few good websites. Amazon.com also sells WhisperPhones, so you can check them out if you want.

My attention was returned to this book by Amazon's "Buried Treasure" link. I tend to treasure it as such and strongly recommend it remain buried. If you would enjoy succumbing to the rantings of a decrepid, self-bombed, relentless little thief, then this book may be for you.

Wild amazing mind of Harry Smith, poet, archivalist, anthropogist, shaman, revealed in sudden bursts of illuminating starfall. Read these interviews and dance with a firebreath world. Planets spin and we spin with them. Great.

This book unfortunately does not come up to the usual standards of the works of Dennis Cooper and is neither salacious nor interesting. Its variance from story to story (it is a collection of short stories basically from first-time writers) is too wide from my view. I realize that Mr. Cooper is only the editor, but he chose these titles and one wonders how good some of the rejected stories were in comparison. The book was a disappointment and I am sorry that I purchased it.

All of the writers have contributed to the blog of famed US experimentalist Dennis Cooper, most of them probably thrilled out of their minds to be thisclose--coinage by Walter Winchell--to their hero, and mine. When I met Cooper for the first time he hadn't even written a novel yet, or barely, and yet I felt like Kenneth Anger approaching Aleister Crowley in the back room of Thelema Abbey, heart completely in my throat despite the reassurances of many friends that he is, in fact, not personally scary at all but just the opposite, warm, nurturing, plain spoken, nearly a polymath, and on top of everything else, wickedly handsome and could have been a movie star. Well, after that I lost my heart completely I'm afraid, so let me just say that I am with these nervous bloggers in spirit, for I know what it's like to come up to the table of the gods and have them lay hands on me. Like that scene in FELLOWSHIP IF THE RING when Frodo gets all those gifts from Cate Blanchett and her light confounds him, and her divine practicality.

That said, it's a mixed bag but that's what's so intriguing about it. The tones are varied more than in DISCONTENTS, a previous fiction anthology edited by Cooper back in the day. Well, those days were all about AIDS and "Against Nature," etc., and here the social landscape against which this writing is conducted is very different, attenuated, sad, post-apocalyptic and lukewarm as opposed to the fiery inferno of DISCONTENTS. Cooper says in his preface that this if fiction "alive with passion" but I don't think so, not so you'd notice. It is however, fresh and exciting and all involved deserve a big round of applause. I see some of the writers as just being so excited about meeting Dennis Cooper that they were agonizing about "What should I write?" just like Cinderella was all like, "What can I wear?" as she ran through all her rags on coat hangers before the birds, mice and fairy godmother showed up to help her out. So some of the writing is too brief, too tenuous, really to see what its authors have in mind. A paragraph here, a sketch there, as though one were no longer allowed to write (as lyric poets paused, however briefly, according to Theodor Adorno's strictures on Auschwitz)--postmodernism has subtracted as much as it has made things open up. And these are some of the best pieces, in fact, in USERLANDS, but by the same token one has no idea what a second story by these minimalists might actually be like, it is sort of personality-free. Forty-one writers, three or four of them female, nearly all of them white (so there is a "whited-out" feeling too, pace Barthes), a sensation of possibilities eliminated. (The writers represented here were from an early prototype of Cooper's blog and hardly represent today's 42 per cent female membership.)

Garrison Taylor's story is sharp, fast-moving, and frequently amusing, and yet underneath the anomie we get a feeling for real people, real problems, and a current of real sexual feeling. Bett Williams' beautiful prose is stripped for action, like a greyhound, and here she develops a poesis of "the road" that pulls Kerouac's through the needle's eye and gives it a shock of adrenalin. Of a sympathetic waitress in an Arizona diner, her heroine muses, "I would have tried to hit on her but it would have taken language not available to that particular room." In "I Don't Know What This Means," young Joshua Dalton gives us a too-brief slice of another wigged-out family living out the American nightmare of possession, exorcism, and penitental sex, as a shower of meteorites flares overhead. "Meteors shred the clouds." Like the late John Cheever, the protagonists in these stories are often watching the skies, looking for perspective I suppose to balance out their often unsettled and violent lives. Nick Hudson explores the highly flavored world (Alka-Seltzer vs. lemonade) of a mentally deranged sitter and the six year old boy who remembers, years later, the things she made him do.

Some of the stories involve wild, drugged-out sex parties of college-age kids, apparently written by those who believe the opening scenes of THE RULES OF ATTRACTION represent exactly the epitome of art and the most to strive for. Two of these stories actually appear next to each other, like a little serial story where identical heroes and girlfriends appear under different aliases. In Charlie Quiroz' "Out of Control," a boy and a girl tell each other Joan Didionesque tales in a car, in a clipped, modulated American English that feels comfortable enough to abbreviate "out of control" as OOC, "just eough conversation go keep the both of us awake, the words coming in small ripples, the radio on quietly almost in deference to the night." I can't quote enough to give you a sense of how beautiful this writing is. I'd be here all day typing out of the book, one elbow flattening it open, while my wrists got tired from paraphrasing. What else did I like, Jack Shamama's porn scenario in Syd Field form gone bananas; Nicholas Rhodes' "Klonopin," which takes us to a highly charged situation, then makes us try to experience it through extremes of distance and disaffection; Stanya Kahn's LA "Hell" in which her Mardi Gras of visual and verbal detail belies the apparent cataclysm of its atmosphere--she notices so much, everything's marvelous; Aaron Nielsen's neo-Gothic tale of the supernatural come to life on an ordinary day in a late capitalist city--so assured and en pointe you'd think he was Lincoln Kirstein; Matthew Williams' manifesto in place of a story, "My Body's Work," nearly genius in its stripped-down, caustic Brion Gysin instruction: "Stop writing in order to write better," etc., the longest, perhaps most important piece in the anthology; and Will Fabro's story "Duels," like some fantastic lost chapter from an early Brad Gooch novel. They're all super writers.

James Champagne's piece is the paradigm of the new story that Cooper seems bent on proposing: it's nearly indistinguishable from a blog entry; the lines between fiction and non fiction have totally burnt away, in a fire of self-obsession and assertion that takes everything else with it. He tells the songs he likes, the songs he doesn't like. It's definition through the eyes of MySpace (though there are minute distinctions to be made: he breaks away from a topic saying that he's already ranted about it on LJ); Champagne is all about the frustration, perhaps, of having a beautiful name but perhaps not so much of a personality. By contrast, a story like Jack Dickson's "Mine," with its perfectly achieved blend of terror, nuance, and disgust, seems a little over-worked, as though care has been taken to engage the reader in an alien path of knowledge. --Old fashioned care, and a yank towards and improbable perfection.

Quite simply, anyone interested in the history of avant-garde film and its major filmmakers needs to pick "Visionary Film" up. It's one of the first, and still one of the finest, major texts to be published on the subject. Sitney has dedicated the majority of his life to the study of American avant-garde filmmaking, and it shows; he brings to his work both a breadth of knowledge and a depth of insight that are pretty much unparalleled.

It's quite a dense text, and some of the films discussed in the book can be very difficult to see, due to any number of distribution issues and the fact that many of the filmmakers discussed here have only exhibited their works on film. Still, you shouldn't let either of these things dissuade you from reading it; it's incredibly rewarding regardless.

One Note: The subtitle to the third edition here is somewhat misleading, since the book, originally published in 1974 (with a 2nd Ed. in 1979), focuses primarily on filmmakers and films from the early 1940s to the late 1970s. The final chapter of the third edition essentially acts as a brief summation of trends in the avant-garde from the end of the 1970s up to the end of the 20th century. It's certainly informative, but cursory compared to the rest of the book. Those disappointed by this, or anyone looking for a more detailed study of major avant-garde filmmakers and works during this time period should also take a look at Sitney's latest book, "Eyes Upside Down," which I am currently working my way through; so far, it too is exceptional.

Proffesor Stiney has a unique vision and perception of experimental film. This text has some interesting ideas and good points but I believe somewhat limited in scope. I would recomend this text as a good primer for many interested in avante garde and experimental film and video.

My students have benefited from the structure and multiple ways of collecting data but have complained of the amount of information packed into each chapter. They have found it difficult to outline and follow. This, I think, has confused some. I will adopt the book again and pare down some of the chapter reading. I appreciate the obvious attention to NAEYC values!

Emphasis will be place on observing and assessing young children in order to create an optimal environment, writing suitable goals and objectives and implementing developmentally appropriate educational experiences in all developmental domains.

This book is aimed mainly at workers in the field and in related aspects of brain functioning. It is solid, important and well worth reading.

If you want an inside view of what it is like teaching at an inner city school, "Against the Current" will do it for you. The amazing part about this book is that the director of the program is a quadriplegic. I thought John Hockenberry's book, "No Highway" demonstrated a paraplegic with grit-The Urban Coolaborative Program director, Rob DeBlois, is an amazing individual and educator. As a 25 year middle school educator, I had a difficult time grasping the background of the middel school kids DeBlois and his staff had to deal with. If you want to learn about true poverty, Providence city schools and stellar educators, pick up "Against the Current."

A history of American cinema in the 1960s. It focuses on the avant garde, experimental scene -- Brakhage, Warhol et al.