Literature in Art Books

I have been so pleased with this craft book. My daughter is six, and with a little help from me she has been very successful in completing some of these adorable crafts. The illustrated step-by-step directions are extremely clear and easy to follow. The materials are easy to find. There is a nice variety of skills involved (ie. painting, clay, simple sewing, etc.) Finally, so far all of our projects have turned out to look just as good as the samples in the book. A great find!

I think she is one of the best cat artists

This book is all about questions about the stars. If you are a pop music, actor, actress and sports fan. Then this book is a must.

E.B. White's classic children's story "Charlotte's Web" was first published in 1952 and made into a successful animated film in 1973 with Debbie Reynolds as the voice of the title character. With all the advances in movie making magic regarding talking pigs, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood got around to making a "live action" version of the beloved story. The film opened in the United States today with Julia Roberts doing the voice of Charlotte, Dominic Scott Kay the voice of Wilbur, and Dakota Fanning as Fern. For youngsters who are enthralled with the movie, "Charlotte's Web: The Essential Guide" allows them to learn more about Charlotte's world.

This is a DK book so that means there are 20 "chapters," each of which is a 2-page spread, except for the 4-page spread that opens up to show The Farm that serves as a map of Wilbur's journey from the Arables' to the Zuckerman's. This also means that there are well over 100 photographs from the movie on these 48-pages, including a detailed look at Templeton's lair (a shiny key makes an attractive ceiling decoration). The book includes a salutation to the readers from Joy, Aranea, and Nellie, a trio of names you should recognize if you have seen the movie or the animated film (or gone old school and read the book). Then you get to follow Wilbur's journey from the Zukerman's barn to his appearance at the County Fair. Along the way young readers will learn about facts about pigs and other animals, the big words Charlotte uses (like "magnum opus"), and who is Henry Fussy.

Granted, calling this guide "essential" is overplaying things a bit, but for young readers who like the movie this book that Amanda Li has put together will certainly let them find out more about not only the characters in the film but the animals in the real world. I was just sort of surprised Dakota Fanning, who plays Fern, is still doing what would be considered a children's film, but then I remembered she does not become a teenager until next February. Anyhow, if on the way home from the film your kids are all excited about Charlotte, Wilbur and the rest of the gang, this book will allow them to prolong the experience and add a little education to the mix.

What a fabulous message and book! The authors winds a lovely tale of a child's progress through her emotional growth and lifes adventures. Using rhyme and words of wisdom about gratitude and appreciation, Ms. Evans gives life lessons that we all need to embrace. The settings, as illustrated by the award winning Collier, are beautiful and have a life of their own. Evans is a true poet and wordsmith and this is a book that will appeal to all ages and life situations. I can't wait for her next books and think this first edition will be a true collectors item in the near future.
Bravo!!!

Some years back I used to haunt Professor Huerta's UCSD office,perusing one teatro (theater) clipping after another, brushing dustbunnies off stacks of Chicano small press publications. The rest of the world dropped away as I became a time traveler entranced by the revolutionary fervor of the early Chicano social movement.

This book is like a door to that recent historical past. If director/playwright Luis Valdez of El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworker's Theater) is the father of modern Chicano theater, then Jorge Huerta is its godfather. He remains the foremost scholar on the subject despite an increasing vanguard of feminist scholarship. He was the founder and artistic director (1971-74) of El Teatro de la Esperanza (The Theater of Hope); his wife, Ginger, its musical director.

Much can be learned about the early collective efforts of El Teatro Campesino and El Teatro de la Esperanza. Huerta's discussion of the creative output of these and other teatros converges on six areas of contention: the working class, social identity, effects of war, community politics and education, search for justice, and roots of spirituality. (The impact of the feminist and gay/lesbian movements on teatro wouldn't be felt for another generation.)

There is a 24-pg. bibliography which Huerta has sorted covering the pre-Columbian and Mexican colonial periods, Aztlan before 1965, Teatro Campesino and Luis Valdez (1965-80), and other teatros and productions.

TO FIND PLAYS DISCUSSED IN THIS BOOK:

For Luis Valdez's "The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa" and El Teatro de la Esperanza's "La victima" and "Guadalupe," see Jorge Huerta's book NECESSARY THEATER: SIX PLAYS ABOUT THE CHICANO EXPERIENCE.

For El Teatro Campesino/Valdez's actos (socially inspired drama) and Valdez's mito (mythic drama) "Bernabe," see Luis Valdez's book LUIS VALDEZ--EARLY WORKS: ACTOS, BERNABE AND PENSAMIENTO SERPENTINO.

For Valdez's "Zoot Suit," see Luis Valdez's book ZOOT SUIT AND OTHER PLAYS.

For Morton's "Las many muertes de Richard Morales," see Carlos Morton's book THE MANY DEATHS OF DANNY ROSALES AND OTHER PLAYS.

2007 seems like a fine year for reviewing THE CHILDHOOD OF ART / AN INTERPRETATION OF FREUD'S AESTHETICS by Sarah Kofman, but a large number of ironies abound in the context of comic dementia in which I undertake this task. American society has many centers of political power, a few widely recognized organizations devoted to art, a mainstream media dedicated to journalistic rules which make the story that politics wishes to tell the dominant theme for their efforts, and late night television, an American alter ego which allows comedians to have a take on events of the day, blowing up out of all proportion whatever features of modern life can grab the most attention, much like tragedy in ancient Athens was celebrated at an annual festival which allowed poetic dramatists to deal with those issues that seemed most likely to get people's goats. As a baby boomer, born in 1947, I am also uniquely situated to pass judgment as a child raised in an age of TV fantasy, though I was frequently exposed to the ancient creeds of religion and warfare, sometimes simultaneously, as when a sermon reflected on the basis for an adage, "There are no atheists in foxholes," or a chaplain in Nam was requesting that the American troops have a little faith in the institution that they were part of, and show some respect for its leaders, who were certainly trying to do the right thing.

Something about respect seemed like it was an attempt to attack every fiber of my being, which has always been subversive to the core, and the basis of my respect for Freud has always been close to my appreciation for his examination of wit as a habit of mental life which makes intellectual pleasure possible in the face of great ambivalence or outright hostility. As a child, I saw denominations merge in an ecumenical attempt to express the fundamental unity of religious life by combining groups which had different traditions but which, it was hoped, would soon find themselves existing together in the same place at the same time. My father was a minister engaged in the merger of his German Reformed and E&R tradition into the Congregational Christian churches to form the United Church of Christ, a denomination which lost half the total membership in the 40 years which followed the merger. Most likely, half of its people were staying home, watching TV, instead of seeking ways to be more actively involved in their communities. I married within the larger denomination, and also observed my wife come home and watch TV, though she did not always want to see what I wanted to watch when "Saturday Night Live" was on and I did not happen to be asleep, which was far more likely. There are a few comments in THE CHILDHOOD OF ART about comedy releasing inhibitions, and I believe Henry Miller found Freud useful for ridding himself of whatever inhibitions might keep him from writing things down, so we are not all the Lone Ranger on this.

The last major chapter of THE CHILDHOOD OF ART, "Artistic Creation to Procreation, concludes with a comment about Nietzsche, another thinker that Sarah Kofman and I enjoy. A note on page 224 quotes about ten lines of section 1 of THE GAY SCIENCE, ending with, "For the present, we still live in the age of tragedy, the age of moralities and religions." Nietzsche makes an attack on philosophy as a teacher of ethics much more explicit than the lines quoted in the note, which I would like to include in a more recent translation by Josefine Nauckhoff of Wake Forest University for Cambridge University Press:

The ethical teacher makes his appearance as the teacher of the purpose of existence in order that what happens necessarily and always, by itself and without a purpose, shall henceforth seem to be done for a purpose and strike man as reason and an ultimate commandment; to this end he invents a second, different existence and takes by means of his new mechanics the old, ordinary existence off its old, ordinary hinges. (Nietzsche, THE GAY SCIENCE, p. 28).

Comic dementia reaches its potential when an individual who has been responsible for creating the illusions that prone thinkers with suspended disbelief can live by is subjected to a roast that would live up to Nietzsche's expectations:

. . . But you will never find someone who could completely mock you, the individual, even in your best qualities, someone who could bring home to you as far as truth allows your boundless, fly- and frog-like wretchedness! To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh from the whole truth -- for that, not even the best have had enough sense of truth, and the most gifted have had far too little genius! (Nietzsche, THE GAY SCIENCE, p. 27).

This book examines Freud's attempt to define the kind of genius that he was able to observe in the arts which he appreciated enough to attempt to make some explanation. Instead of a bibliography, there is a list "Works of Freud Cited" on pages 227-229 giving titles of works found in the first 23 volumes of THE STANDARD EDITION OF THE COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD (1953). To give an example of Sarah Kofman's handling of a matter for which she added a note in the third edition pointing out that Freud regarded a hat as a prolonged, detachable head, I quote a paragraph near the end of her book:

Now, behind the unmasking of the artist, we must read the unmasking of the father, and here one cannot help thinking of Freud's father, the "great man" stooping to pick up his hat at a Christian's command--a scene about which one can either cry or laugh, but which brings disappointment that can only lead to the end of admiration for the father and with it, the death of the sacred. However, instinctual renunciation is possible only thanks to the superego and its satisfaction: it is still through the father that one overcomes the father. Yet the greatest proof of one's faithfulness to him is to "kill" him, not in order to put oneself in his place, but to construct a new concept of paternity stripped of sanctification. The yield of pleasure obtained by the superego in renouncing its infantile illusions is humorous pleasure. "Humor seems to say: Look! There is the world that seems so dangerous! A mere child's game! The best thing to do is joke about it! . . . When the superego tries, by means of humor, to console the ego and protect it from suffering, this in no way contradicts its origin in the parental agency" ("Humor," 21:166). (Sarah Kofman, THE CHILDHOOD OF ART, p. 173).

In ten years, I'm the first to comment; amazing. This book provides a lot of material in preparing for the college class I'm teaching on children's literature. I read aloud from it often in class because I can't say it as beautifully as the people who wrote the sections; people such as Marcia Brown and Madeleine L'Engle. The title is a play on the book by White but is actually a compilation of writings in honor of Charlotte Huck by many of her former students in the masters of children's literature at Ohio State University.

The collaborative production of Vibeke Bordahl (Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen) and photographer and Chinese culture expert Jette Ross (1936-2001), Chinese Storytellers: Life And Art In The Yangzhou Tradition is a remarkable and informative study of the ancient Chinese art form of narrating classic stories. A survey of the history of this practice, as handed down from master to student, precedes several adventurous and vivid tales, each presented both in English and in the original Chinese. Black-and-white photographs offer a visual glimpse of the storyteller's gestures and poses, and an accompanying VCD gives a glimpse of the full experience of a master storyteller's craft. Chinese Storytellers is a unique and highly recommended addition to Chinese Culture Studies collections and supplemental reading lists.

With all Joe Wheeler Christmas in my heart books and I have 6 I always look for the next one to come out. I can't say more then I think there great and worth getting. Something to read to family and past down from one generation to the next.