Owens Books

My father was buried at Arlington in 1987. Upon my visit for that service, and subsequent visits, I found very little in the gift shop and in bookstores at the time. As I am involved in the design profession as an art director, I am also a bit more choosy. I was drawn to this small, elegant book when I first noticed it on a shelf in a bookstore years ago. I purchased it on a visit to DC in 1991, and serendipitously, met and worked with the photographer, Cameron Davidson, years later on numerous years of commerical photography shoots, nationwide. I was amazed to learn he had photographed the wonderful book I chose above others to remember my powerful visit to Arlington with. Cameron's exquisite images truly evoke the feeling of visiting Arlington, and the writers words support his photos. His family has military ties and it comes across in the way he uniquely 'sees' Arlington. My only wish is that this book was larger, and still in print. Anyone with any connection to Arlington deserves to be able to obtain this lovely book.

I am currently using this book as a kindergarten teacher AND community college instructor in the early childhood dept. My kinder students benefit from my use of the continuum presented in the book - clear assessment, clear teaching. My college students (preschool teachers, childcare providers) benefit from the vignettes - what to say to children to increase oral language, comprehension, and writing skills.

Highlights for me: 1) How to add writing to children's "work", which can be blocks or playdough, if a child is not ready to draw or write. 2) How to help children increase details, in order to remember the "story" in a drawing. 3) The adaptability of the continuum to my own district's objectives. 4) Ease-of-use for children of all languages and language abilities.

This book is based on the belief that children learn best when teachers understand what they need. As a teacher, I know that's best practice!

No matter what he writes about, Blaise Cendrars fascinates.

Cendrars is an author, like Sir Richard Burton & like Joseph Conrad & like Ernest Hemingway, who will appeal to the manly side of a reader's sensibility. His favorite topics are war & travel & women. But he writes like no one else. When writing on WWI, for instance, he is not interested in the politics of the whole thing nor in the individual battles nor in the loss of the old order, rather Cendrars (born Swiss and so fighting for the French Foreign Legion) as always is interested in adventure for adventure's sake and in how various adventures bring us closer to the truth of life. With Cendrars you get a love of unadorned salt of the earth existence and so the attraction to war is at once an attraction to adventure and a chance to commune with his fellow man but its also a chance to examine war itself close up. "War," he concludes, "is a drug designed to counteract the fear of living." Instead of getting yet another orthodox war memoir by a Robert Graves or a Siegfried Sassoon (both terrific memoirs by the way), with Cendrars you get a war memoir that spends an entire chapter discussing the joys of stealing wine from other regiments. Cendrars is not interested in WWI heroics, he is simply interested in showing men (namely his Foreign Legion buddies who are as averse to order & accepted decorum as he is) as they are and life as it is lived.

Cendrars is my favorite author, and this is my favorite of his many books. Though this is marketed as a memoir (the first in a series of four), its really more of a collage of war & travel writings as well as a collection of portraits of the many people that he met while doing the many things that he did (...colonel in the French Foreign Legion during WWI, documentary filmaker in Africa, patron to many of Marseilles' many dens of vice, chronicler of gypsy life...). The amazing thing is that Cendrars was an active man (one might even say hyperactive) who also happens to be one of the early twentieth centuries most important poets. As a poet he is hypervigilant of the fact that many writers fall "prey to [their] obsessions" as well as become "victims" to the "distortions of [their] vocations" but the thing that comes across in Cendrars poetry & prose is that despite the many liberties taken with objective fact he never seems to let his craft get the better of him. In other words, Cendrars does stretch the truth and embellish and spice it up here & there but not in order to make "life" into "art" nor to make himself look good but always to tease out the real life within the tale. And so, although Cendrars is not a strict adherent to the world of objective fact, "the truth" is never really sacrificed in the name of "writing." Cendrars is ultimately serving something more dear to him than art, he's serving his sense of life and his sense of life is marked by two things: an insatiable hunger for more of it & an almost religious awe before all things (although this religious, almost mystic, reverence for life is easy to miss as it is almost always buried beneath a potpourri of sensual detail & earthly delight).

Cendrars is "modern" in the sense that he understands that the old ways of ordering the world no longer work, but unlike other "moderns" he is in no rush to find a new order for Cendrars embraces disorder, chaos, & anarachy as man's natural element. He knows exactly who he is & exactly what he is doing with words & why what he is doing is different than what others have done. In his earthy kinetic prose he captures the frenetic pace and the disorienting effects & allure of modern life as if the whole thing were placed before him to induce one phantasmic state after another. One senses that he purposefully upsets genres, but not because he wants to make an artistic statement or breakthrough, but because he has no patience with the confines of established rules & genres & accepted writerly decorums (all of which he enjoys smashing). Rather, Cendrars is a liberator who feels that art should serve life & that form should serve content and not the other way around; new life needs new forms and so Cendrars ceaslessly invents. There are certainly plenty of innovators among the moderns, but Cendrars' motive for innovation makes him almost entirely unique among them. Hemingway, who also tried to create an art that was much more in touch with the rhythms of real life, is the most obvious precedent, but Cendrars embraces much more of life than Hemingway was ever able to. Cendrars embraced both the high & (especially) the low, in a way that Hemingway does not. If Hemingway is the modern equivalent of a classical tragedian mourning the loss of traditional values like courage & discipline & honor, Cendrars is the equivalent of a classical comedian reveling in the newfound freedoms & energies of the new epoch.

Cendrars is not a self-promoter as so many of the moderns were (ie the Surrealists); he lacks the self-interest of the artist who always has one eye on public & critical opinion. Cendrars is completely immune from that kind of concern. What he does have is a rare kind of curiosity for and geuine passion for all kinds of "life" that comes primarily from living such a rich and varied existence, but also from reading all kinds of books for all kinds of reasons and this sets him apart from other writers whose lives & interests seem narrow and self-important in comparison. Said in another way, "art" is simply one of his many interests and I don't even recall him ever using that word. Since Cendrars always comes across as being more interested in people than in art (something that cannot be said of most "modern" writers) what he does seems to be something much more than just "art", something much less categorizable, and thus he is a writer that is rarely mentioned in the usual literary places. Restless readers hungry for unique visions (those interested in countermodernisms, if you will) will respond to Cendrars immediately.

But the uncontainable energy of the man, and his insatiable urges, really need no lengthy introduction, it is all expressed best by Cendrars himself in virtually every sentence that he writes: "The moment the steamer berthed, I jumped on the dock, then leapt into a taxi to be driven to a cafe in the Old Port with as much haste as if I were an opium smuggler anxious to get rid of his hot merchandise, I, who always come back from my trips overseas with a burst of laughter, often a wad of banknotes, and, as naturally as possible and without anyone knowing, a couple of poems..."

As with any unorthodox writer, it is an all or nothing affair: you find the writer to be completely engaging and immediately part of your pantheon of favorites or you do not. For me, there is no greater pleasure than finding yet another hard-to-find Cendrars novel or memoir. Lucky for me, it seems that every few years another few Cendrars titles become available in English translation.

Note: The second volume of Cendrars' four-volume memoir called Planus (or Bourlingeur in the French) is extremely difficult to find; however, as of July '08, a Canadian re-issue is about to go to press and is already available for pre-order (through amazon.ca). Hopefully, the third volume, Lice, will also be re-issued. The fourth volume, Sky, is fairly easy to find.

This author conducted his own research & experiments with various metaphysical subjects before defining his associations & rulerships for the Cards. This title is under revision into a 2 volume set*, but the information is also covered in small pamphlets focused on specific areas:
The 'Key' Spread, The Universal Spread, Aspects, Planetary Rulers, Planetary Squares, Cycles of Periodicity

*[SS 7] Magian Cardology Readings Spreads with Explanatory Text + Cycles Date-Tables, ISBN: 1885500211; available 12/05!

He also offers the lowest-cost edition of the 90 Spreads (title: Pure, Life & Age Spreads) used in all versions of the systems derived from Olney H. Richmond's Mystic Test Book.

C. E. O. Carter was perhaps the greatest astrologer of the 20th Century. His vast experience and intellectual brilliance combine to make this book essential reading for all astrologers, beginners and experts alike. Although this book has never been out of print since first published in 1930, Carter's stunningly profound insights are remarkably contemporary. It is a classic in the true sense of the word.

I had always heard that one could divinate from a regular pack of playing cards but usually it is in the context of a truncated Tarot without the major arcana. This system is unique in the sense that it is astrologically based not Tarot based and you can spend less than $10 on a decent pack of playing cards, take them anywhere with you, divinate in public without getting the evil eye from born again Christians, and just generally have an alternate way to sharpen your intuition. I liked the astrological concept in this system and it has already helped me with my regular Tarot readings. I say, good show!

"At the Lake" is a nonfiction, picture book that describes what happens in the natural world around a small lake during a 24 hour period. A clock reveals the time change at the bottom of the full-color, illustrated pages. The beautiful scenes and text describe the many animals that visit the lake during the day and night. A Nonfiction Note at the end of the book explains the difference between nocturnal and diurnal animals.
"At the Lake" is a wonderful introduction to the natural world for beginning readers (time, animals, nature).

Athena Sings Wagner And The Greeks by academician and musicologist M. Owen Lee is an informed and deftly written introduction to how ancient Hellenic culture and art influenced the compositions of work of Richard Wagner. Examining the origin and soul of great music with scholarly depth, Athena Sings Wagner And The Greeks is a refreshing study and dissection of the melding and interplay between narrative and fluid ideals which is enthusiastically recommended for students and scholars of European classical music in general, as well as the non-specialist general reader with an interest in Wagnerian productions in particular.

The theory of Plate Tectonics is now taught as absolute truth. There are a number of alternative theories. One alternative is that the Earth is expanding in radius size. Hugh Owen believed this. As the head of the Department of Palaeontology of the British Museum he had access to the best ocean floor data and the skill to put it together in an understandible way. He has compiled meticulously detailed sets of maps here showing reconstruction of the Earth going back to 80% of its current radius. There are full world maps for a broad view. There are specific region maps of narrow areas (like the separation of N. America from Africa) that show the exact ocean age dates of expansion. Plate Tectonic theory accepts that the Earth expands at the mid-ocean ridges, but then the theory developed the assumption of "subduction" in 1967 to remove this expansion. Ocean floor drilling was not completed until the 1980's and it did not confirm subduction. The Pacific Basin was surprisingly found to be not far older than the Atlantic Basin (as was expected), but the same age. Dr. Owens ocean data uses the newer data from the 1970's and 1980's. While accepting some subduction, Dr. Owens also shows the need for some expansion and backs up his claims with clear, detailed, graphic evidence.

Keenan takes the reader from the heady, exciting, politically influenced atmosphere of Belfast during the troubles to the not too disimilar atmosphere of Beirut. While I do not wish to demean Belfast, it is a city where you need to be careful and on your guard. I know, I have been there many times. (For the love of a beautiful Irish girl, I met on holiday many years ago.)

Keenan relaxes a little bit too much one day and finds himself kidnapped by a fundamentalist group who by all accounts, don't really know what it is they actually wish to demand, and who it is they wish to demand it from.

So you find yourself turning page after page (rather quickly) wondering when the hell the poor man is going to be released.
A wonderful frank, vulgar, blunt, violent account of a horror, none of us mere mortals could ever imagine.