Oscar Books

I was not a big fan of log homes until I saw this book. I enjoyed seeing the depth of detail through the house, very similar to the work of James Cutler. A very fine book to add to the architectural libray.

By the 1980's, Phoenix needed a new library.

The requirements were simple. It had to be downtown, which has the highest crime rate in the city including a murder rate that is eight times the national average. The chief librarian wanted a big box, "a warehouse for books." Only limited funds were available, and budgets were being trimmed for a library system that circulates more books for less money than any other city in the nation.

Phoenix itself is a "branch plant" town where out-of-state businesses build box-like factories for semi-skilled workers who assemble products. The major media are owned by out-of-state companies. The university is famed as one of the top party schools in the nation. The crime rate is among the highest in the nation, social services are among the lowest, the traditional architectural style is the strip mall and the modern version is faux theme park, while urban sprawl spreads faster than ragweed. The library site is between a parking lot and the lush green lawns of a city park.

This may sound familiar other hard-pressed city officials.

It's a classic case of downtown urban renewal. Dozens of cities have faced similar challenges, and many have renovated old neighborhoods and historic districts. In Phoenix, the decision was to build a state-of-the-art library as one of the crown jewels needed to revive the downtown.

The new library is primarily due to the leadership of an outstanding mayor -- Terry Goddard -- who recognized the importance that quality means to civic pride. The result is that Phoenix architect Will Bruder built one of the outstanding new libraries in the nation. This book is primarily photographs and drawings, showing how it came to be and what it is today. It will inspire any public official faced with the need to do a lot more with less, and to do it with beauty. It shows that outstanding civic quality is possible despite sometimes severe budget limitations, and that signature buildings can be built without raiding the public treasury.

The east and west sides are clad in copper, one of the four C's on which Arizona was founded -- copper, cotton, citrus and climate. South side windows are shaded by adjustable louvres, for protection against temperatures that can reach 122 degrees. North windows use fabric sails to cut the glare. Twelve inch thick concrete walls shade the main portion of the building, soaking up heat during the day and allowing it to dissipate easily at night instead of soaking into the building.

The fifth floor Reading Room was inspired, at least in part, by the Frank Lloyd Wright design of the Johnson Wax Building which features tall columns that flare out at the top like lily pads. Bruder did something different; he designed tall columns that taper toward the top like massive dinner candles, with a circular skylight above each. The columns are laced together with a network of cables on which the roof floats, free of the walls and the columns. The atmosphere is like being out of doors.

In Bruder's words, the library embodies his core philosophy "that real architecture exists when both pragmatism and poetry are served with equal passion."

This book expresses it well. It shows what a community can accomplish when civic officials are willing "to think outside the box." Civic officials contemplating a major project, whether they have ample budgets or not, will find this book is an inspiration to soar above mediocrity.

Despite its modest format, this elegant monograph more than does justice to Vincent James' extraordinary copper pavilions floating in a birch forest, comprehensively illustrated here with a wide range of visual materials, from early design sketches, construction photographs, and extensive working drawings to exquisite images of the finished building through four seasons of rain, mist, snow, and sun. Fold-out plans are provided in the inside cover, with a location key to all photos for readers' convenience. The graphic design of the book is clearly a labor of love, far beyond the often perfunctory standard of architectural publishing. Professional readers will regret the absence of scale information, but this is a minor lapse amidst the books many virtues.

Twenty or so years ago, I found a 1959 reprint of this book, A SMATTERING OF IGNORANCE, in a thrift shop and it provided me a new hero - Oscar Levant. Such a witty man! I'd almost say he was funnier than Groucho. Without doubt, I've never encountered a more entertaining raconteur. Levant's anecdotes all shed light on the fascinating worlds of music, show business and letters of a classic era. He was a very good pianist with a particular affinity for the music of his friend George Gershwin, and it would certainly surprise many nowadays to learn that for a while early in the 1940s, he was the most successful pianist in the world in monetary terms.

There are five chapters in my copy of this book, all breezy and inviting. They are:

"Music in Aspic" - concerning orchestras and, especially, their renowned conductors. Hilarious!

"Memoirs of a Mute" - Who else but Harpo Marx!

"A Cog in the Wheel" - music in Hollywood

"My Life (or the Story of George Gershwin)" - Levant's musical life was famously bound up with the Gershwins... for better and worse.

"The Boys Are Marching" - Aaron Copland and other contemporary composers

Also, an introduction by the writer S. N. Behrman and a short afterword by Levant entitled "Con Sordine". 189 pages. Easy to pick up and set down, A SMATTERING OF IGNORANCE can be read satisfyingly a few pages at a time. It will surely become one of your favorites!

I saw a recommendation for this book in Cindy Adams NY Post column and decided to pick it up. I know a lot about the Academy Awards and found this book challenging and fun. There are a variety of puzzles, quizzes, games, wordscrambles etc. Some are easy but some are really difficult!
If you like movie trivia and interacting with puzzles, this book is right up your alley.

Being a self-proclaimed R&H buff, I was always scouting for this book and that. I found _Some Enchanted Evenings_ in a used bookstore. Besides amazing detail on both of the men and their previous works (before each collaborated with the other), there are fantastic pictures that I'd never seen before. I was highly impressed. Best of luck to anyone looking for this book--it's a wonderful addition to anyone's collection.

In outraged reponse to Wilde accurately and profoundly depicting in his plays the corruption and obscenity of the British Empire's aristocracy, the Empire struck back by painting falsely and slanderously Wilde as a degenerate, a scapegoat sacrificed for its own sins. This book, written by his surviving son, with emendations and commentary and suggestions by his grandson, reveals the true Wilde, who early loved his sons and whose greatest and most painful loss in his pillorying by the Empire was his family. Wilde is not the painted savant fruit he is pictured, but a true family man, a true nationalist Irishman (to know Wilde, know his mother), and a truly gentle genius who strayed to near in playing court jester to the wrathful British throne.

To read this book is to hear once again the epic tale of sons in search of their lost father. In this case Telemachus never again sees Odysseus, who dies lost and weeping for his children on the bizarre islands of exile, and the aching yearning between father and son oozes gently from these pages like an embarrased fatal wound.

The greatest artistic work, and the most grecian tragic, as Wilde predicted, became his own life. To understand WIlde, please read this book. What wonders of literature this talented son might have produced, besides his remarkable translations from the French, etc., had this gifted family remained intact, and even at home with Lady Wilde in Dublin. Perhaps Wilde's second son would never have died for the Empire at war, perhaps with a purpose. But such musings lead to the despairing madness which ultimately tempted Oscar upon his early deathbed.

Essential for any and all student and reader of Mr. Wilde, for a truer and comprehensive understanding of this great writer. A universal legend of filial affection in its own right, as cross generational as any Garcia Marquez work, and beautifully written.

ThIs excellent collection of Irishman Mr. Wilde's most serious writings includes:

Soul of Man under Socialism - an interesting call for individualism of spirit under economic socialism, a resolution of his feelings for the Fabians

De Profundis- A letter to Bosie, a homnosexual young man whose father the powerful Marquess of Queensbury, had Wilde, previously a noted and dedicated family man who adored his children, imprisoned brutally on false charges. Reading Wilde's feelings of losing his children alone, for whom he wrote wonderful famous bedtime stories, wrenches the heart and gives a chance to grieve to half at least the fathers in America who have lost our children to unjust judicial action.

Letters from prison to newspapers

The Ballad of Reading Gaol- a great poem of life and death imprisoned, including how children are brutalized and all hope lost, a lesson for our current inhuman policy on Guantanamo where we imprison cruelly and torture innocent children not accused of any crime. Read tis peom aloud as you walk and you will see.

Not five years later Wilde died a broken man, the greatest of our Irish writers of his generation, in whose very popular plays exposed the profound corruption and petty cruelties of the English ruling class. He was through Bosie investigating for later dramatization the sexual perversity of the aristocracy, but was imprisoned lest he write his keen perceptions of those who brought so much suffering to the world and indulged their lives of hypocritical luxury

Fine reading. Food for thought. Healing for the heart under oppression.

It may seem wilful to lead a selection of Oscar Wilde's major critical prose with an essay on left-wing politics, but 'The Soul of Man under Socialism' is more concerned with aesthetics than ethics: Wilde found socialism 'beautiful' because it encouraged freedom and individualism, freeing man to develop his emotional and imaginative lives. Wilde's Utopian scheme, as he admits, is gloriously impractical and contrary to human nature, but that's the point - it's because reforms are based on what is considered practical, rather than what might be possible or even unthinkable, that inequality and suffering persist. His vision of a future in which men dream and absorb Art as vaguely-imagined machines do all the menial work, reads like a delightful lampoon of HG Wells. Favourite Quotation: 'the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist and becomes a dull or amusing craftsman, an honest or dishonest tradesman').

The selection begins with examples of Wilde the professional reviewer at work, attending art lectures by Whistler, reading books by Pater and Swinburne, drawing attention to poetry anthologies by labouring socialists, praising an actress's memoirs. Some of the pieces are more theoretical, arguing, for instance, the importance and legacy of actors as critics of great theatre. Each article presents difficult and often radical ideas in an accessible and witty manner. FQ: 'where there is no exagerration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding'.

'The Portrait of Mr. W.H.' (printed here in its extended 1889 revision) is quite simply one of the greatest achievements in the world literature of short fiction. 'Short story' doesn't begin to describe this work about a young scholar who commits suicide after being caught forging evidence to 'prove' a theory claiming that Shakespeare dedicated his Sonnets to a young actor-lover. 'Portrait' is mostly a dazzling exercise in critical play, but it is also a touching gay fantasy, a Nabokovian study of mad academics, a defence of 'forgery' as an aesthetic mode, a literary detective story, a history of the Elizabethan stage, an anthology of Elizabethan gossip, a Borgesian metaphysical puzzle and so much more. FQ: 'he always set an absurdly high value on personal appearance, and once read a paper before our Debating Society to prove that it was better to be good-looking than to be good'.

'In Defence of Dorian Gray' collects letters written by Wilde to hostile newspapers that branded his only novel immoral, decadent and demanded its interdiction. While it's depressing to see our hero stoop to these tedious non-entities, we must remember the dangerous influence of the reactionary press, and at least the letters make galvanising reading, helping Wilde formulate ideas that would shape the novel's famous 'All art is quite useless' preface. FQ: 'Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination'.

But the major achievement here is the four-part collection 'Intentions', a still explosive series of critical dialogues, memoirs and essays which are only 'safe' today because they are labelled 'classic' - if anyone actually absorbed these radical, liberating pieces, with their provocative, teasing, shifting, playful, ironic, contradictory, unsystematic, aphoristic, hilarious assertions on Art, Beauty, Life, Philosophy, Morality, Ethics, Crime etc., the whole world would implode, or at least irrevocably change. 'The Decay of Lying' demolishes the depressing modes of realism and naturalism and the tyranny of facts; 'Pen, Pencil and Poison' is a portrait of Wainewright the Poisoner, Wilde discussing his crimes with the same aesthetic detachment as he does his art and writing; ''The Critic as Artist' is his masterpiece, a credo and a gauntlet; 'The Truth of Masks' is an essay on the importance of costume and historical accuracy when staging Shakespeare, and seems to contradict eveything else in the volume, with Wilde winningly admitting, 'Not that I agree with everything I have said in this essay'. FQ: 'The truth of metaphysics are the truth of masks'.

There are (at least) two Wildes in this volume; one whose address is utterly contemporary and congenial, intellectually curious, blasting all that is deadening, hypocritical and humbug, an alien in his own time. The other is startlingly Victorian, passionately engaged with elitist subjects that have little importance or (ugh) 'relevance' today (Classical literature, Aesthetics, the importance of form etc.), couching his theories in language that is often ornate, oritund, exotic, even verbose, a lush challenge to his fusty, pedantic peers.

Linda Dowling's introduction rescues Wilde from his earnest post-modern apologists and returns him fruitfully to his original context, the Oxford debates about 'Art for Art's sake' and the function of poetry and criticism,. Her copious notes are a blessing and necessity, as well as recreating a strange, wonderful, intellectually audacious cultural world, one that shames our depleted, dead-end, theory-strangulated, accept-anything age. I know you've heard this before, but this time it's true: BUY THIS BOOK AND LET IT CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

This is a very good book. I suggest you buy it!