Hackers Books

Being a lover of art and an art major, this oversized book is full of Janet Fish prints to inspire everyone. The work that it contains are very real and clear. This book is not only a collection of brillant paintings, it is the story of a great artist. Everyone should take advantage of this book and read it.

Baker and Hacker offer an incisive critique of modern linguistic theorising and philosophical conceptions of language based upon this mode of reasoning. Drawing heavily, but productively, upon the later logical work of Wittgenstein, they show, decisively in my view, that the Chomskian project is through-and-through misconceived, as are the philosophical works which ensued from his baleful influence. Applying recursive-function-theoretic concepts to the analysis of parts-of-speech (syntax), Chomsky believed that his analyses would cast light upon the universal grammar of all human languages, thence upon the essence of human mentality. Baker and Hacker (sometimes mercilessly) attack the very bases of such a project, including its apparently deep motivating concern: the new sentence production phenomenon. Nowhere in contemporary critisicm of modern linguistics can you find a more sustained, informed and well-argued attack upon the mythologies being perpetrated by the MIT linguists than here in this wonderful, scholarly and remarkably wide-ranging book.

A friend gave me this book last month, and I have been reading in it almost every day since. Emmanuel Moses is an extremely interesting and affecting poet. The poems are saturated with history, both personal and official, and there's a quiet, concentrated core of intelligence about this history underlying every poem, be it more conceptual, more experiential, funny, or sad, that I find thrilling. Emmanuel Moses is catholic in his tastes, and chameleonlike in his poems, which, like "Anat Taitelboim" in a section of the long poem "Year of the Dragon" are "up for anything." This is a poetry of movement -- from the lines themselves, which move with a mysterious joy across the page -- to the symbols, primary among which is the hotel, which becomes both a kind of ideal place, with its comforting promise of permanent impermanence, of borrowed warmth (which is perhaps the only kind one can hope for in this world), and a site of mystery and transformation, where one can leave one's burdensome identity behind. The poems operate more by subtlety than by dazzle -- though they can also dazzle -- and this subtlety is uncannily effective. I find myself thinking about the pink city and the discarded summer sandals long after I've read the poems. This is a must-have for any reader of world poetry and of poetry at all. Marilyn Hacker's translations are particularly good.

Very enjoyable book written to get more out of life. I found this advice to be both sagely and benefical. Great book for a day of reflection whether in an airport or sitting by a lake.

This work is a part of the series named "Artefacts" associated with London's Science Museum, whose editors "encourage authors to use objects as evidence for their studies of the history of science and technology." The eleven chapters of this volume were written by authors from universities and museums. The topics vary widely, from 15th-century Valois Burgundian artillery, World War I U.S. women's uniforms, the display of arms in museums, artifacts of the German occupation of Britain's Channel Islands in WWII, to the use and image of U.S. submarines in the Cold War. The essays get at what can be learned about the respective military forces of the time and also what can be learned about the relationship between such forces and the society of which they were a part.

This collection is truly amazing. You can follow the evolution of Matta's work in great detail. I wish that the text was available in English, but there seems to be a strange blocking of Matta's existence in the U.S. But since each one of his paintings is worth far more than a thousand words, there is endless study and inspiration available here. The lines and the created space bring out both feelings for the subjects and a great sense of design possibilities. Highly recommended for anybody wanting to paint, draw, photograph, or even compose music.

This book brings together 40 prints of the artist's paintings in beautiful colour, as well as a lengthy text which precedes them, with photographs of Modigliani, and examples of his sculptures and caryatids. Werner presents M as a tragic figure since his health was poor - he suffered from tuberculosis all his life, and he died relatively young at 35, without receiving any substantial recognition of his work. Much is made of his excessive social life in Paris, though M was Italian, where he is said to have indulged in alcohol and hashish. He focused on painting after he was unable to continue with sculpture because of his lack of money, the difficulty in obtaining materials, and the affect of the stone dust on his weak lungs. Werner also tells us that M suffered from a psychoneurosis, and calls him a "solipsist who produced exclusively self-portraits, symbolic representations of his own tortured soul". However these arguments do not appear to relate to the nature of his painting. His work is calm, not tortured, and the idea that his infamous style of Expressionist distortion is meant to reveal a "paranoiac autism" seems silly. The photos we see of M show that he does not resemble his skittle-shaped, swan-necked, almond-eyed portraits. Even the notion that some of the subjects having closed eyes meaning an inner directed concentration based on a fear of the world, does not appreciate the stylistic choice he made to express his form of conception upon reality. He had trained as a draftsman and considered his work "illuminations", accentuating attributes to the point of caricature. The faces of his sculptures bear the same kind of visage. His work is both striking in his use of colour, where he favoured strong lines and prefered primary blacks and reds; and tender in the delicate way he treats the subjects, whether they be Parisian socialities, other artists, his two mistresses - Beatrice Hastings and Jeanne Hebuterne, or working class models like maids and peasants. What ultimately makes the work of Modigliani great is how one can return to the prints again and again, to revel in their mannered elegance, their sadness and beauty, and his unique balance between naturalism and abstraction.

A story about a little girl sent to live with her aunts in Saucilito, Ca. and the friends and secrets she discovers. The stories interesting old multi-level houses, the wharf and mysterious little theater, and with the Swan Lake ballet as the mystery's back drop this story turned out to be my favorite children's book.

On this essay, J. G. Frazer collects myths all around the world about the origin of fire. This is an excellent instrument to compare and analyze the common topics and variations on the old tales about the way humankind was able to obtain fire. It goes beyond western myths and includes Tasmania, Austrailia, Torres Straits Islands and New Guinea, Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, Indonesia, Asia, Madagascar, Africa, South America, Central America and Mexico, North America, Europe, Ancient Greece and Ancient India. This book was written in 1930, therefore, further investigation should be done in order to complete and update this compendium. Nevertheless, it's a wonderful compilation, and a good starting point to have an overview on the way our ancesters tell us that fire was discovered.

A somewhat later version of this or some of this is supposed to be available on the http://www.catb.org/jargon/html but I am not sure how similiar the two texts are. It is possible that each may contain something not in the other. Or maybe this is not the same book mentioned on the web page, which says it was published by MIT Press. See http://www.catb.org/jargon/mirroring.html

Somebody needs to check further.

Of course a hard copy is easier to consult, and well worth buying even if it contains nothing that is not on the web,

The web version doesn't appear to have been added to since 2003.