This book offers new definitions, vocabularies and insights for “scribbling”, viewing it as a fascinating and revealing process shared by many different disciplines and practices. The book provides a fresh and timely perspective on the nature of mark making and the persistence of the gestural impulse from the earliest graphic marks to the most sophisticated artistic production. The typical treatment of scribbling in the literature of artistic development has cast the practice as a prelude to representation in drawing and writing, with only occasional acknowledgment of the continuing joy and experiment of making marks across many arts practices. The continuous line the author traces between the universal practice of scribbling in infancy and early childhood and the work of radical creativity for contemporary and historical artists is original and clarifying, expanding the range of drawing behaviors to that of avant-garde painters, performance and the digital.
This book provides a revitalised account of the study of children’s drawing by outlining a departure from existing approaches privileging developmentalist accounts and presenting drawing as a specialised human endeavour separated from other material entanglements constituting children’s everyday experiences. The book takes on current developments in the fields of early childhood arts and early childhood literacies to advocate for process-oriented, new materialist and decolonial approaches that re-conceptualise the study of children’s drawing. It proposes a future-oriented approach, centred on thinking experimentally with a focus on nonrepresentational elements, such as movement, sensation, intensity, rhythm, story and place, which singularly assemble in drawing events. Thus, the book discusses drawing as a process of sense-making that is not enclosed in the individualised body of the child and that unfolds corporeally in time and space. It revises the relation of drawing with symbolisation by suggesting that the use of language and signs in drawing form in entanglement with matter and sensation in processes of creative speculation connected with the movement of thought. Presenting a series of contributions by internationally recognised scholars and artists, the book aims to create synergies between theory and practice that speak of everyday realities interconnecting children, learning and sense-making.
A new collection of essays from Dodie Bellamy on disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, and profound embarrassment. So. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back? Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette's aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart. --Dodie Bellamy, "Hoarding as Ecriture" This new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy's highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which the themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Bellamy writes with shocking, and often hilarious, candor about the experience of turning her literary archive over to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale and about being targeted by an enraged online anti-capitalist stalker. Just as she did in her previous essay collection, When The Sick Rule The World, Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence, and calm.
In the face of debates about the Anthropocene - a geological epoch of our own making - and contemporary concerns about ecological crisis and the Sixth Mass Extinction, it is more important than ever to locate the timeframe of human activity within the deep time of planetary history. This path-breaking book is a timely critical review of the anthropology of time, exploring our human relationship with the timescale of geological formation. Richard D. G. Irvine shows how the time-horizons of social life are a matter of crucial concern, and lays bare the ways in which human activity becomes severed from the long-term geological and ecological rhythms on which it depends.
The Roman emperor Nero is remembered by history as the vain and immoral monster who fiddled while Rome burned. Edward Champlin reinterprets Nero's enormities on their own terms, as the self-conscious performances of an imperial actor with a formidable grasp of Roman history and mythology and a canny sense of his audience. Nero murdered his younger brother and rival to the throne, probably at his mother's prompting. He then murdered his mother, with whom he may have slept. He killed his pregnant wife in a fit of rage, then castrated and married a young freedman because he resembled her. He mounted the public stage to act a hero driven mad or a woman giving birth, and raced a ten-horse chariot in the Olympic games. He probably instigated the burning of Rome, for which he then ordered the spectacular punishment of Christians, many of whom were burned as human torches to light up his gardens at night. Without seeking to rehabilitate the historical monster, Champlin renders Nero more vividly intelligible by illuminating the motives behind his theatrical gestures, and revealing the artist who thought of himself as a heroic figure. Nero is a brilliant reconception of a historical account that extends back to Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio. The effortless style and artful construction of the book will engage any reader drawn to its intrinsically fascinating subject.
‘Writers, their friends, enemies, editors, and publishers began to materialise out of the library’s archive boxes, and I found myself setting off in search of these elusive, eccentric, and often quarrelsome characters.’ With his unique and entertaining blend of memoir, biography, and literary detective work, Craig Munro recreates the lives and careers of a group of renowned Australian editors and their authors in a narrative spanning from the 1890s to the 1990s. Among those encountered on the journey are A.G. Stephens, who helped turn foundry worker Joseph Furphy’s thousand-page handwritten manuscript into the enduring classic Such Is Life; P.R. Stephensen, who tangled with an irascible Xavier Herbert to tame his unwieldy masterpiece Capricornia; Beatrice Davis, whose literary soirees were the talk of Sydney, and who insisted Herbert cut his controversial novel Soldiers’ Women in half; and award-winning fiction editor Rosanne Fitzgibbon, who championed the work of many authors, including the prodigiously talented Gillian Mears. Throughout it all, in beguiling and elegant style, Craig Munro weaves his own reminiscences of a life in publishing while tracking down some of Australian literature’s most fascinating stories. Literary Lion Tamers is a delight for anyone interested in the world of books and those who create them.
18 lectures in Dornach, January 9 - February 22, 1920 (CW 196) In the vast range of Rudolf Steiner's lectures, jewels of all kinds lie hidden in plain sight, awaiting only our discovery of them. Such lectures contain a kind of wisdom not found anywhere else. And sometimes, as in What Is Necessary in These Urgent Times, they also have a translucency and conviction that makes them transformational. In early 1920, political, economic, social, and spiritual chaos was everywhere. The old world had fallen apart and would need to be rebuilt. Anthroposophy, too, had to be remade. Recognizing this, Rudolf Steiner tirelessly working for the "threefold social order," establishing the first Waldorf school, helping to create businesses, and addressing the talented, educated, and idealistic young people who were beginning to turn toward Anthroposophy for answers. In these lectures, Steiner speaks in the new, direct "Michaelic" way, seeking the path to a new way of doing Anthroposophy. Throughout the critical situation of the time, he never lost his sense of humor or his compassion and equilibrium. His tone is warm, relaxed, and intimate. Rather than following a strictly predetermined path, he speaks directly from the heart about what concerned him. He stresses that the task of spiritual science is to awaken us to reality and to a true understanding of life that sees through illusions and understands the ever-present potential of evil. Speaking both esoterically and exoterically, he returns repeatedly to the importance of community, of meeting one another face-to-face, heart-to-heart, as individuals. Thus, rather than seeking power and control, we are called to cultivate trust and receptivity. This takes a spiritual transformation. We must learn to live this present life in the context of our greater spiritual life, which extends from before birth through earthly life and into the life after death that precedes our next birth. At the same time, we must come to know the Christ, who is to be met only in community. Selfishness, egotism, has no part in the new way: "When someone is alone Christ is not there. You cannot find Christ without first feeling a connection to humanity as a whole. You must seek Christ on the path that connects you with all humankind.... To be connected only with your own inner experiences leads you away from Christ." Steiner deals with many other important themes, as well, including "imperialism," the initiate behind Shakespeare, Bacon, and James I--makers of our modern age--and well as fascinating, initiatory remarks on reincarnation, esoteric physiology, and psychology. Running throughout the talks is the earnest admonition to be true to the spirit and the call to come to our senses and not fall prey to self-pity. Now, as it was then, the world needs us to be awake spiritually, and we need the world to be awake spiritually. There is nowhere to hide. What Is Necessary in These Urgent Times is a translation from German of Geisitige und soziale Wandlungen in der Menschheitsentwikelung (GA 196).
This book brings together Steiner's philosophical, biodynamic and cultural contributions to education, where 'spirit' and ‘soul’ are the creative elements in human evolution. His thought is applied to selected examples of innovative artistic practice and pedagogy of the present. This volume is intended for researchers in the arts and education with an interest in Rudolf Steiner's huge influence on educational thought and policy.This is an urgent point in time to reflect on the role of arts in education and what it might mean for our souls. An accessible yet scholarly study of interdisciplinarity, imagination and creativity is of critical widespread interest now, when arts education in many countries is threatened with near-extinction.
