Bergman Books

The first part of the book lists translations of 1000 common terms, each into 26 languages. This section is very readable, given that each entry takes exactly a quarter page, the languages appear in the same order, and only a single form is given in each language. All translations in this section are Romanized (i.e. in an English alphabet, but including accents of several languages, as well as indicators of stressed syllables in a couple.)

In the second part of the book, single-language lists are given alphabetically in the alphabet of the language, and indexed by the number used in part one. Even as early as for my 1968 edition, they took the time to work with several international fonts - such as for Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese, although some language-specific spellings are incorrect.

Most of the 1000 entries are nouns, although they do have some other words such as verbs and adjectives. One way this book hides grammatical differences is to avoid words requiring multiple translations in language-specific ways (examples of omitted words that are certainly among the 1000 most common: you, I, how, what.)

Given that such ommitted words are necessary to use a language, this should not be regarded as a dictionary or translation guide. But it does give a very good way to gain quick insight into how languages are related. In the small subset of languages I know, the single best translation appears to be chosen in over 90% of cases.

DragonHeart, the Fantasy Card Game Book begins with a quicksynopsis of the story behind the movie, then proceeds to give a shortdetail of each character, and finally introduces you to the game. A wonderful way to be slowly introduced into the game itself! The collector will love the way in which the tale is displayed, each page beautifully decorated with images of Draco that one would expect sewn into tapestries of ancient times. Children will love the promotional shots taken from the movie, the background story and the games themselves, which play at an easy level but do require some skill. Just the right tempo for those who haven't quite grasped full Pokeman fever.

This is a solidly bound hardcover journal useful for integrating daily meditations with subsequent experiences and psychic/psychological explorations, such as dreamwork, astrology, or body work. 20 pages of instructions and ideas launch the book. Then, in the inner margin of each page (aka "the gutter," but who wants inspiritational quotes in the gutter?) is a quote from a literary figure (Iris Murdoch, D.H. Lawrence) or other wise person (Florence Scovel Shinn, Paramahansa Yogananda, Kahlil Gibran) and plenty of lined space for one's own inner work.

What appealed to me most is the good quality of paper and production (there's even a silk bookmark) and the functional design. It is a fairly heavy volume, though, so don't plan to take it backpacking with you, but that's the trade-off you get when you have a book with some heft and dignity like this one.

This is the story of the world famous clown Jac Tracbac, who lives in Hollywood. He is visited by a distant relative from Sweden and the ageing clown relives his youth and childhood in the old country. This is Hjalmar Bergmans last book he ever wrote. It's the story of an ageing artist who gathers his powers for one last grand performance, this is the closest thing to an autobiography that Hjalmar Bergman ever wrote. It's well worth reading

If you love Ingrid Bergman, here is a book full of beautifully done professional photos of her. These 99 photos are taken as far back as 1935, when Ingrid was starting as an actress in Sweden, and up to 1970 during her filming of "Walk in the Spring Rain". Though all photos are in black and white, they shine with her luminescence and her peaches and cream beauty. The book's focus is the photos, but there is an introduction that gives a short, but interesting biography of her career. This is a good book for a Bergman collector or a Hollywood legend movie buff.

Bergman, Mara. Oliver Who Would Not Sleep! Illustrated by Nick Maland. Scholastic Inc. 2007.

This funny, rhyming story about a boy named "Oliver Donnington Rimington-Sneep (who) couldn't and didn't and would not sleep" features a bedtime scenario where the child is not afraid of going to sleep; he just wants to play. This new collaboration by the author and illustrator of, "Snip Snap!! What's That?" (Greenwillow Books, 2005) works well as a group read-aloud even though not all the pictures are full size. Verse, "So with a great big stretch and a great long yawn..." just begs to be acted out, and an accompanying illustration shows Oliver with his mouth wide open, tonsils revealed and his arms outspread. Whimsical pastel watercolors sporting multiple black lines convey a child friendly sensibility: Oliver pulls a lamb out of a magician's hat; he flies off in a rocket ship and takes his first steps on Mars. The fact that the fantastic creatures and rocket ship represented in this story resemble toys in Oliver's room is reminiscent of Sandol Stoddard's wonderful story, "Bedtime Mouse" (Houghton Mifflin, 1981). Enlarged font size alerts the reader when some emphasis of tone is recommended. Share with children, ages 2- 6.

The "Great Explorations in Math and Science" are wonderful teacher guides for introducing elementary and middle school students to particular science topics and science processes. This Guide provides suggestions for extending the GEMS activities into other areas of the curriculum through references to children's literature. Although some of the recommended books are out of print, one great thing about children's literature is that so much of it is "classic" and library copies are often available.

make me stroll around the imagenation of hot, wet, drea

Well...

On the plus side, the writer's had first-hand experience: he's a respected film-maker in his own right; he's worked with - gasp - IB himself, e.g. on 'Fanny and Alexander; and he's married to IB semi-regular Gunnel Lindblom. And I like the way this book concentrates on the work itself, not a load of goosip about IB's life and how it might (not) influence the films... PLUS it's really useful for those obscure early films we're all dying to see... AND the writer talks not only about the content of the scripts (which we can read for ourselves anyway) but also the techniques used to transfer the 'personal vision' to the screen...

So why am I only half-convinced?

Well... it's basically a problem of style. Maybe it's the translation, but the sentences are all jerky and one generalisation contradicts another and... Also, this book was written in the 60's, so it cuts off at (yawn) 'About all these Women', before the classics 'Persona' and 'Cries and Whispers'...

For a really well-written, rounded picture, stick with Peter Cowie's 'IB: A personal and Critical Portrait'.

The range of styles surveilled in this anthology, chanted aloud, taps on the eardrum like some snooty, kibitzing skip-rope rhyme: from Flemish primitivism to Blakean theosophy to Japanese photography to Bulgarian art to Barbizon landscapes to Italian baroque to Francis Bacon�s death-empty Existenz.... (And skip, and weave, and jump, and sashay.) Ashbery�s weekly obligation to grind out art-gallery reportage takes the edge off his game (there is little zing and panache in these articles, surely not the Ashbery of �Convex Mirror� or �Wet Casements� or �Tapestry�), but we can sense the poet assembling secret stanzas beneath the prim, deadpan facade, the lyrical footnoting of each gallery-critique with a submerged kabbalah of vision-forming events. Many of the articles seem like secret rehearsals for the sinuous liquid-measures that would shoal in on the melt-waters of Ashbery�s passing-strange future verse odysseys. Being forced to *respond* to such a barrage of multicultural artworks, consistently and intelligently, may have been the excitant to desert-thirst Ashbery needed, an entry-burn to some exotic, chimerical, Parisian boot-camp of the Critical Eye set to hone his assimilative powers.

Here, his tone is light and disaffected, rinsed clean of resentment, of snooty ire (of polemic, in short). He smiles without mirth. He muses quietly on the splotched canvases and hieroglyphic streaks of pigment smeared straight from the tube. The painting glasses his eye, drizzling a cool rain on the transformative poetic pyre, surrendering the *gravitas* of the nipping stanza for the quiet, unassuming air of journalism and reportage. Admirers of *Flow Chart* or *Houseboat Days* or *Can You Hear, Bird?* must tune to a different wavelength, endure Ashbery�s incognito for 400 pages of canny, priggish prose.

To his credit, however, Ashbery manages to clarify our confusion without diminishing it, allowing the painting or sculpture or collage to work its idiopathic design into the crawling hues of our ocular node, to extend its mesh of associations into us, to interleave its voice with the recessed intaglio of our deep painterly source-code, because the pattern gleams there, too.

Granted, all great love wants to *create* the beloved, and I may be over-subjectifying my experience of these essays. (Ashbery is, after all, no Arthur C. Danto, much less a Ruskin or a Pater.) Poems like �Tapestry� taught me how and whom to love, and left me burdened with a programme for self-enhancement that would keep me howling to an inward moon for as long as I can read and write (silly pretentious tart that I am). If no such creature is ever sighted, we are resolved to create one in its stead. Likewise, whenever Ashbery�s journalism disappoints us by not *attacking* these gallery-exhibitions with the same gold-standard inbreaking rush of poetic zeal we�ve come to expect, there is always the temptation to project our own cocksure aesthetic fantasies onto the stark-white glossy canvas of the not-quite-there.

�The conception is interesting: to see, as though reflected / In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through / Their own eyes....� --�Wet Casements�

Few people really care whether the canvases of George Mathieux really surge with polychromatic rhythms equal to the fin-de-siecle squiggling of France�s post-Dada cabal, whether William Blake�s illuminated epics prognosticate the kino-eye intensity of modern cinema, whether H.R. Giger�s machine-world mechanosphere can help us de-romanticize the industrial megalomania that has dessicated the Earth, and our refusal to know is already part of the disaster. Ashbery�s book stands a minor classic to help us bulwark the spelunking eye against an �anything goes� contemporary art-culture that would lead us to believe that, well, anything goes....

Nobody seems to remember the utopian art-academies that John Ruskin or Walter Pater (or, heck, even Camille Paglia) bequeathed to us in blueprint, a god-revealing curriculum that combined Renaissance audacity with the semiotic motion-sculptures of modern cinema with the elite conceptual sonatas of post-Nietzschean tragic theater to tear modern culture a new one. Rather we have university arts programs that nurture aggressive extroverts in fashion-victim garb who wouldn�t know the harsh, ascetic legacy of 20th-century modernism if it jumped up the wazoo.

A strong intertextual reading of *Reported Sightings* combined with Ashbery�s collected verse will permit us something of the strong Wildean vision of *The Critic As Artist*, where the vanished statues and apocalyptic chapel-ceilings of Renaissance boldness will be put to work alongside the chemo-industrial landscapes of cyberpunk-capitalism and the world philosophical cinema that lights up our pain fibers at the vanishing point of the man-made horizon, that renews the exploratorium of the Ruskinian and Paterian world-artist in the machine-environments forced on us by exponential cybernetic influx and 24-7 media spamming.....[pause for breath].

Or something to that effect. Lemme work on it. Meanwhile buy the book.