Butler Books

Judith Butler, who is nowadays best known for her theory of "performative" gender differenciation, wrote her thesis about the reception of Hegel's philosophy in France. The book is not an exhaustive overview of Hegelian reflections as they appeared, in various forms, in the twentieth century France, but it certainly does include the most important of them (except for Georges Bataille, whose version of Hegelianism is not mentioned in the book, but in her new preface, Judith Butler herself admits this absence). In the first part of the book, Butler deals with Kojeve's and Hyppolite's interpretations of Hegel's Phenomenology, while the second part is concerned with Sartre, Lacan, Foucault and Deleuze. Even though the book doesn't bring anything new to those who are already familiar with the work of the thinkers mentioned above, it may be read as an extremely clear and concise introduction to the French Hegelianism.

If you're looking for gay erotica this fits the bill. John Butler does an excellant job of keeping you satisfied and ready to go. I don't even understand some of the current gay erotica. For the most part it's just boring. John creates characters you want to hop in bed with and play all night. You come away completely satisfied. I hope to find more authors like John.

In the first section of this book (Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry), Yeats gathered a large number of stories (about 65) on a variety of supernatural subjects. I found some a little perplexing, but most were enjoyable. The second part of this book is Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne. Being unfamiliar with the legend of Cuchulain, I am unable to compare this version with any others. However, I found it to be an interesting tale of an epic hero, although I had difficulty keeping track of the names of all of the characters and locations.

Having only read American variants of Irish folklore, I was caught off guard by the style and structure of the stories. Readers should not expect them to follow the Brothers Grimm, "Once upon a time...happily ever after"-type construction. However, if you're familiar with Irish myths or you're up for trying something new, this collection is thoroughly entertaining.

John Locke was a brilliant and very influential philosopher. This does a pretty good job of putting Locke into his proper context, but doesn't offer enough about his specific arguments. Even still, I recommend it because someone studying American history will find many of his ideas appearing in much of our founding fathers' dialogue.

This is a delightful book, first published, I believe, in 1935. It includes chapters on Winckelmann, Lessing and Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, Heine and a concluding chapter that includes a section on Nietzsche. A fine examination of the (over) 200 year fascination of Germany with ancient Greece. This wonderfully sentimental and evocative work, that is tinged throughout with the spice of despair, both examines and exhibits said fascination. See especially the chapters on Holderlin and Heine in this regard. I was still quite young (in high school) when I first read this book and it left me yearning for more Greece, and also, I add somewhat sheepishly, a bit of Ms. Butler too! Yes, of course it is not really serious scholarship, but rather a romance with and about such scholarship. But nonetheless, it is filled with fine observations. I pick two at (or near) random:

"Goethe and Shakespeare, Homer and Dante, tower above their fellows but stand with them on the earth. Their range is immeasurably wider than Holderlin's, but no one has ever reached the same dizzy heights. [...] Then came the time when this life in poetry gradually changed to a life in prophecy"

"Dionysus, who came late into Greece, came late into Germany too. Heine ushered him in and then left it to Nietzsche..."

Thus the Germans went from admiring the Greek gods to wanting to be them, which would not have been a problem if their conception of the gods did not go from the light of Apollo to the shadows of Dionysus. - With results that even today, in our dumbed-down world, are studied in civics classes throughout the land. 'Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.' ...It really is such a pity that this bittersweet study is so long out of print.

Quite a useful little book for anyone thinking about doing repairs or upgrades to their small fibreglass yacht. The book covers glassing tools and techniques for hull and deck reinforcement, hull and deck fitting beds, bouyancy /water /storage tanks and a bit of canvas work, which seemed like an odd addition at the end of this book. You would be better off with Don Caseys book 'Canvaswork & Sail Repair' for this subject as it covers many more projects. If you are new to working with glass you should find this book quite valuable. The projects are good, the diagrams while not up with those in Don Caseys books are reasonable.

This books is a good historical treatment for middle school students. The first half of the book tells about Hitler and the German extermination of the Jews and the second half tell the Jews' side of the story. Black and white pictures are plentiful with one every few pages. Kids will understand how prevalent anti-Semitism was when they see the picture of a game board for "Jews Get Out," a board game sold in Germany in 1939 and 1940. The one thing I did not like was on a map which shows the destruction of the Jews in Europe by country (showing the number of Jews killed over the prewar Jewish population), you cannot read the numbers for Poland because they are stuck in a crack. Also the map of Europe under the German Rule is hard to read because of its black and white color scheme. But all in all, the book is an easy to read and informative history of this time.

Flannery takes a myriad of information and transforms it into an incredibly interesting work. I have only once before been so drawn in by a book of such histrionic magnitude. The subject itself needs no attraction; however, Flannery keeps the eyes wide open from page to page, chapter to chapter. I highly recommend this book to anyone having an interest in W.B. Yeats or theatre itself. It tells an interesting tale of much of Irish--as well as English and French--drama, poetry, and its' theatres.

This is a single cassette in one of those tall boxes that could hold two. The notes are sparse - just a listing of the poems and a capsule bio of Mr. McKenna. The package also claims 80 minutes worth of poetry, but the timings printed on the tape itself for each side (35:29 for side A, 34:04 for B) leave us more than 10 minutes shy of that. I myself have not done the requisite timing, but tend to believe the (spurious?) precision of the tape's numbers.

The readings are workmanlike, and the selections are good. All the famous poems are there, and a good deal more. (Offhand, the only other one I would really like included is "Lapis Lazuli".) Unfortunately, the old recording by Siobhan McKenna (related?) and Cyril Cusack is no longer available. It was truly magical.

My gripe with this is the fact that you need to keep this oversize box around to hold your tape, and to preserve what scanty documentation there is. A regular cassette package with an included info sheet would have been better.

Susan Johnston Graf has done something quite rare in Yeats criticism. She has examined the poets occult beliefs without prejudice, accepted them for what they were, and examined exactly what they might mean to his writing, without any snide disclaimers or protestations of disbelief which usually accompanies such studies.

In the first fourth of the book Ms Graf gives a clear summary of W. B. Yeats's occult background in Theosophy, his long association with the Order of the Golden Dawn and its successors, his formation of several Celtic magical orders, and his later interests in spiritualism. The real core of the work is the detailed examination of Per Amica Silentia Luna (1916) perhaps Yeats's most understudied and most underrated book. Squeezing meaning from this work is rather like deciphering a coded document, because it is written in Yeats's most carefully crafted, measured, and completely deceptive prose. Many turns of phrases heretofore interpreted as poetic figures of speech by literary academics are revealed by Graf to be Yeats's own private esoteric terms with specific, concrete meanings. Most Yeats scholars have considered Per Amica to be an obscure prelude to A Vision (1925 and 1934), but Graf reveals it to be a unique and revealing work, in many ways expressing ideas much different and different from its better known cousin.

The final chapters deals with the series of mediumistic experienced by Yeats bride Georgie (known as George) Hyde-Lees which began to occur four days after their wedding in October 1917. These mediumistic experiences, became the basics of Yeats's new "philosophy" published the two versions of A Vision, and became the underpinning of almost everything he wrote during the later period of his life.

Graf's book forms a powerful antithesis to Brenda Maddox's recent odorous book Yeats's Ghosts (1999), which suggested that the entire visionary experience of Yeates was driven by the ticking of Mrs Yeats' biological time-clock, and that she faked the entire mediumistic experience to keep her husband's interest and to deliver instructions about their sex lives designed to produce pregnancy in the most efficient manner. Instead Graf advances a more reasonable thesis: that the Yeats were engaged in a form of sex magic, guided the supernal intelligences toward the creation of "children of a higher order," perhaps an Irish Avatar for the new age. This does not negate the ticking of George's time-clock, or her desire to have children as a motive, but recognizes and accepts the deeply held occult convictions of both of the Yeates.

Graf's book may signal a new "middle ground" approach the Yeats's occult interests such as been recently applied to the history of Theosophy by K Paul Johnson and Joscelyn Godwin. If so, she has performed an invaluable service to the study of Yeats.