At the first meeting of his class in Northwest Semitic Epigraphy at Harvard, Frank Cross would inform students that one of the things each of them needed was an “eye for form.” By this, he meant the ability to recognize typological or evolutionary change in letters and scripts. Frank, like his teacher William Foxwell Albright, was a master of typological method. In fact, typology was the dominant feature of his epigraphic work, from the origins of the alphabet to the development of the scripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Indeed, he has written about the importance of typology itself. Because Frank Cross has so dominated the study of the ancient Near East in the last 60 years, Aufrecht once asked him what he considered his primary field of study to be. Without hesitation, he said, “Epigraphy.” It seems, therefore, that the field that he loved and to which he contributed so much is an appropriate subject for this Festschrift in his honor, which is being presented by his colleagues, friends, and former students. Included are an appreciation by Peter Machinist and a contribution by the late Pierre Bordreuil.
For 100 days, Traktung Yeshe Dorje, an American born lama in the Nyingma lineage of Vajrayana Buddhism kept a journal of short reflections. Some mornings, the heartbreaking poetry of devotion, or essays in celebration of dawn, light, trees; on others, razor-like distinctions about the nature of the mind, challenges to conventional views of seeing, or seething commentary on the shallowness of contemporary culture. Taken together, but in small considered bites, the entries will provide a rare meal to any sincere practitioner who recognizes direct and authentic spiritual discourse. The unique offering of this book is the deeply personal manner in which insights are presented-using a journal format rather than direct instructions about spiritual topics. An astute reader will glimpse-even “fall into”-the way of perceiving of a tantric spiritual adept. We experience, if only for a moment, how things appear to one whose mind is free from conditioning. Eye to Form challenges the reader to consider familiar topics and scenarios from a new, perhaps radical, perspective. The invitation here is to profound consideration of life’s deeper meanings through the unique intersection of beauty, wisdom and silence. This is not a “practical guide”-it offers no plans for or steps to enlightenment or happiness. In fact, the author has no compunction in undermining such fast-food approaches to the recognition of Buddhahood. Eye to Form, therefore, can be extremely beneficial to those who not looking to be told what to do, but rather are inspired to think deeply, carefully and freshly. Intelligent choices on the spiritual path can be made only as one’s considerations reach beyond ordinary-mind’s conditioning. The challenge for this type of consideration is perhaps more useful than yet another self-help manual. Traktung Yeshe Dorje has been guiding both individuals and community for the last 23 years, drawing his students and friends into the world of spiritual awakening by offering them a window into a different way of considering appearances. He teaches in the U.S. and Europe, and is also president of Wishing Tree Gardens, a non-profit sustainable-agriculture educational program in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Award-winning poet and TED speaker Agnes TOrOk spent a year living according to current happiness research, and then wrote a poetry collection about what she had learnt. Happiness Is An Art Form is a reflection on what makes our lives good and how we can best equip ourselves to get through difficulty - illness, mental ill health, trauma -you name it. TOrOk speaks about them all, with joy, clarity, and humour. This is a book about you. It is an invitation to think about your life - your good times and your bad, your joys and your challenges. To think about if there is anything you could do, big or small, that could add more joy to your life. Anything that could make the challenges a bit more manageable. Don't worry, you'll have a whole book to help you make up your mind.
An extraordinary collection of essays on the great masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art—from the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending. “An engaging and empathetic volume.” —The New York Times Book Review As Julian Barnes notes: “Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting … But it is a rare picture that stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.” This is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. In his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Barnes had a chapter on Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and since then he has written about many great masters of art, including Delacroix, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkin. The seventeen essays gathered here help trace the arc from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism; they are adroit, insightful and, above all, a true pleasure to read.
This book is a historical and philosophical meditation on paying back and buying back, that is, it is about retaliation and redemption. It takes the law of the talion - eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth - seriously. In its biblical formulation that law states the value of my eye in terms of your eye, the value of your teeth in terms of my teeth. Eyes and teeth become units of valuation. But the talion doesn't stop there. It seems to demand that eyes, teeth, and lives are also to provide the means of payment. Bodies and body parts, it seems, have a just claim to being not just money, but the first and precisest of money substances. In its highly original way, the book offers a theory of justice, not an airy theory though. It is about getting even in a toughminded, unsentimental, but respectful way. And finds that much of what we take to be justice, honor, and respect for persons requires, at its core, measuring and measuring up.
"[An] elegantly written, unsentimental memoir."—PEOPLE MAGAZINE [PEOPLE's Pick of the Week] Winner of the 2014 Nautilus Award represents “Better Books for a Better World”—the Silver Award in the category of Parenting /Family. When Laura Estreich is born, her appearance presents a puzzle: does the shape of her eyes indicate Down syndrome, or the fact that she has a Japanese grandmother? In this powerful memoir, George Estreich, a poet and stay-at-home dad, tells his daughter's story, reflecting on her inheritance --- from the literal legacy of her genes, to the family history that precedes her, to the Victorian physician John Langdon Down's diagnostic error of "Mongolian idiocy." Against this backdrop, Laura takes her place in the Estreich family as a unique child, quirky and real, loved for everything ordinary and extraordinary about her. "In this wise and moving memoir, George Estreich tells the story of his family as his younger daughter is diagnosed with Down syndrome and they are thrust into an unfamiliar world. Estreich writes with a poet's eye and gift of language, weaving this personal journey into the larger history of his family, exploring the deep and often hidden connections between the past and the present. Engaging and unsentimental, The Shape of the Eye taught me a great deal. It is a story I found myself thinking about long after I'd finished the final pages." —Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper's Daughter "A poignant, beautifully written, and intensely moving memoir" —Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone “The Shape of the Eye is a memoir of a father’s love for his daughter, his struggle to understand her disability, and his journey toward embracing her power and depth. Estreich is raw and honest and draws us each into a new view of what it means to be 'human’ and what it means to be ‘different.’ This book is beautifully written, poetically insightful, and personally transformative. To read it is to rethink everything and to be happy because of the journey.” —Timothy P. Shriver, Ph.D., Chairman & CEO of the Special Olympics "The Shape of the Eye personalizes Down syndrome, bringing a condition abstracted in the medical literature into the full dimensionality of one family's life. It's brave of George Estreich to make what has befallen his family so public, trusting of him to let an unknown audience second-guess the family's choices. Because he's opened his home and heart in this memoir, we are privileged to witness in chaotic, heart-wrenching, joyous detail what it means to have and to love a child with Down syndrome." —Marcia Childress, Associate Professor of Medical Education (Medical Humanities), University of Virginia School of Medicine
'The Objective Eye' explores the fundamental concepts we use constantly in our innocent thoughts and conversations about art, as well as in the most sophisticated art theory. The book progresses from pure philosophy to applied philosophy and ranges from the meta-physics of colour to Renaissance perspective.
What--other than embarrassment--could one hope to gain from prolonged exposure to the social mistake? Why think much about what many would like simply to forget? In Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Kent Puckett argues that whatever its awkwardness, the social mistake-the blunder, the gaffe, the faux pas-is a figure of critical importance to the nineteenth-century novel. While offering significant new readings of Thackeray, Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, Puckett shows how the classic realist novel achieves its coherence thanks to minor mistakes that novels both represent and make. While uncovering the nineteenth-century novel's persistent social and structural reliance on the non-catastrophic mistake-eating peas with your knife, saying the wrong thing, overdressing-Bad Form argues that the novel's once considerable cultural authority depends on what we might otherwise think of as that authority's opposite: a jittery, anxious, obsessive attention to the mistakes of others that is its own kind of bad form. Drawing on sociology, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and the period's large literature on etiquette, Puckett demonstrates that the nineteenth-century novel relies for its form on the paradoxical force of the social mistake.
