End Cycle
The Perpetual Motion Machine by
In the last days of 1907, the German novelist and exponent of glass architecture Paul Scheerbart embarked upon an attempt to invent a perpetual motion machine. For the next two and a half years he would document his ongoing efforts (and failures) from his laundry-room-cum-laboratory, hiring plumbers and mechanics to construct his models while spinning out a series of imagined futures that his invention-in-the-making was going to enable. The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, originally published in German in 1910, is an indefinable blend of diary, diagrams and digression that falls somewhere between memoir and reverie: a document of what poet and translator Andrew Joron calls a -two-and-a-half-year-long tantrum of the imagination.- Shifting ambiguously from irony to enthusiasm and back, Scheerbart's unique amalgamation of visionary humor and optimistic failure ultimately proves to be a more literary invention than scientific: a perpetual motion of a fevered imagination that reads as if Robert Walser had tried his hand at science fiction. With -toiling wheels- inextricably embedded in his head, Scheerbart's visions of rising globalization, ecological devastation, militaristic weapons of mass destruction and the possible end of literature soon lead him to dread success more than failure. The Perpetual Motion Machine is an ode to the fertility of misery and a battle cry of the imagination against praxis.
Call Number: PT2638.E4 P4713 2011ISBN: 9780984115549Publication Date: 2011-05-31
R. Buckminster Fuller by
Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was one of the most innovative and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, Fuller sought out long-term, technology-led solutions to the world's most pressing social and environmental problems. His prodigious creative output-from visionary architectural works and experimental structures to expressive drawings and poetic musings-foreshadowed today's green design and prefab housing movements. R.Buckminster Fuller: World Man documents his never-before-published 1966 Kassler lecture at Princeton University School of Architecture. Delivered at the height of his career (Fuller had appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1964), he used the lecture to reflect on and synthesize his most significant concepts. In addition to a faithful facsimile of the lecture's typewritten transcript, the book includes an introductory essay on Fuller's work, a glossary of key terms and phrases, and an interview with Robert Geddes, the dean responsible for bringing Fuller to teach and lecture at the school.
Call Number: NA2543.G46 R2 2014ISBN: 1616890940Publication Date: 2014
The Gods of Olympus by
An elegant and entertaining account of the transformations of the Greek gods across the ages, from antiquity to the Renaissance and the present day The gods of Olympus are the most colorful characters of Greek civilization: even in antiquity, they were said to be cruel, oversexed, mad, or just plain silly. Yet for all their foibles and flaws, they proved to be tough survivors, far outlasting classical Greece itself. In Egypt, the Olympian gods claimed to have given birth to pharaohs; in Rome, they led respectable citizens into orgiastic rituals of drink and sex. Under Christianity and Islam they survived as demons, allegories, and planets; and in the Renaissance, they triumphantly emerged as ambassadors of a new, secular belief in humanity. Their geographic range, too, has been little short of astounding: in their exile, the gods and goddesses of Olympus have traveled east to the walls of cave temples in China and west to colonize the Americas. They snuck into Italian cathedrals, haunted Nietzsche, and visited Borges in his restless dreams. In a lively, original history, Barbara Graziosi offers the first account to trace the wanderings of these protean deities through the millennia. Drawing on a wide range of literary and archaeological sources,The Gods of Olympus opens a new window on the ancient world, religion, mythology, and its lasting influence.
Call Number: BL783 .G675 2014ISBN: 9780805091571Publication Date: 2014-03-11
The Native Trees of Canada by
A bold reinterpretation of a century-old book While shopping in the used-book store the Monkey's Paw in Toronto, Leanne Shapton happened upon a 1956 edition of the government reference bookThe Native Trees of Canada, originally published in 1917 by the Canadian Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources. Most people might simply view the book as a dry cataloging of a banal subject; Shapton, however, saw beauty in the technical details and was inspired to create her own interpretation ofThe Native Trees of Canada. Shapton distills each image into its simplest form, using vivid colors in lush ink and house paint. She takes the otherwise complex objects of trees, pinecones, and seeds and strips them down into bold, almost abstract shapes and colors: the water birch is represented as two pulsating red bulbs contrasted against a gray backdrop; the eastern white pine is represented by a close-up of its cone against a radiant summer sky. The author ofWas She Pretty? andImportant Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, Shapton puts forth yet another entirely new facet of her creative artistry.
Call Number: ND249.S48 A4 2010ISBN: 9781770460324Publication Date: 2010-11-23
Last Man by
Written by Brian K. Vaughan; Art by Pia Guerra and Jos#65533; Marz#65533;, Jr.; Painted Cover by J.G. Jones When a plague of unknown origin instantly kills every mammal with a Y chromosome, unemployed and unmotivated slacker Yorick Brown suddenly discovers that he is the only male left in a world inhabited solely by women. Accompanied by his mischievous monkey and the mysterious Agent 355, Yorick embarks on a transcontinental journey to find his girlfriend and discover why he is the last man on Earth. But with a gang of feminist extremists and the leader of the Israel Defense Forces hunting him, Yorick's future, as well as that of the human race, may be short-lived.
Call Number: PN6728.Y2 V38 2003ISBN: 1563899809Publication Date: 2003-01-02
Lesabéndio by
First published in German in 1913 and widely considered to be Paul Scheerbart's masterpiece, Lesabendio is an intergalactic utopian novel that describes life on the planetoid Pallas, where rubbery suction-footed life forms with telescopic eyes smoke bubble-weed in mushroom meadows under violet skies and green stars. Amid the conveyor-belt highways and lighthouses weaving together the mountains and valleys, a visionary named Lesabendio hatches a plan to build a 44-mile-high tower and employ architecture to connect the two halves of their double star. A cosmic ecological fable, Scheerbart's novel was admired by such architects as Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, and such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (whose wedding present to Benjamin was a copy of Lesabendio). Benjamin had intended to devote the concluding section of his lost manuscript -The True Politician- with a discussion of the positive political possibilities embedded in Scheerbart's -Asteroid Novel.- As translator Christina Svendsen writes in her introduction, -Lesabendio helps us imagine an ecological politics more daring than the conservative politics of preservation, even as it reminds us that we are part of a larger galactic set of interrelationships.- This volume includes Alfred Kubin's illustrations from the original German edition. Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion, who wrote fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.
Call Number: PT2638.E4 L413 2012ISBN: 9780984115594Publication Date: 2012-12-30
Hand of Fire: the Comics Art of Jack Kirby by
Jack Kirby (1917-1994) is one of the most influential and popular artists in comics history. With Stan Lee, he created the Fantastic Four and defined the drawing and narrative style of Marvel Comics from the 1960s to the present day. Kirby is credited with creating or cocreating a number of Marvel's mainstay properties, among them the X-Men, the Hulk, Thor, and the Silver Surfer. His earlier work with Joe Simon led to the creation of Captain America, the popular kid gang and romance comic genres, and one of the most successful comics studios of the 1940s and 1950s. Kirby's distinctive narrative drawing, use of bold abstraction, and creation of angst-ridden and morally flawed heroes mark him as one of the most influential mainstream creators in comics. In this book, Charles Hatfield examines the artistic legacy of one of America's true comic book giants. He analyzes the development of Kirby's cartooning technique, his use of dynamic composition, the recurring themes and moral ambiguities in his work, his eventual split from Lee, and his later work as a solo artist. Against the backdrop of Kirby's earlier work in various genres, Hand of Fire examines the peak of Kirby's career, when he introduced a new sense of scope and sublimity to comic book fantasy.
Call Number: PN6727.K57 Z69 2012ISBN: 161703178XPublication Date: 2012
The Essential Paul Laffoley by
Paul Laffoley, who once worked for Frederick Kiesler and Andy Warhol, emerged in recent years as one of the leading visionary artists of our time. Lavishly illustrated, The Essential Paul Laffoley documents the evolution of his unique intellectual, spiritual, and artistic approaches. Living and working in a tiny space in Boston he called the "Boston Visionary Cell," Laffoley became best known for his large mandala-like paintings filled with symbols and texts. Their titles range from the paranormal and arcane, such as The Ectoplasmic Man and The Sexuality of Robots, to the organic, as with Das Urpflanze Haus, to the erudite, including De Rerum Natura, a reference to the Roman poet Lucretius. Whether focused on working with plants to create living architecture or centered on the process of alchemy, these detailed, brilliantly colored works reflect Laffoley's utopian hopes and transdisciplinary interests: throughout, he aimed to unite the boundless freedom of human imagination with the mathematical precision of the physical world. Nearly one hundred of Laffoley's works are showcased here along with his accompanying "thought-forms," texts specific to each painting that comment on its particular content. Together with an introduction by editor and gallerist Douglas Walla, a biography by fellow artist Steven Moskowitz, and essays by scholars Linda Dalrymple Henderson and Arielle Saiber, this book is a long-awaited celebration of the theories, writings, and artworks of an extraordinary mind.
Call Number: N6537.L335 E87 2016ISBN: 9780226315416Publication Date: 2016-05-09
Traveling the Rainbow by
The first full-length celebration of an African American and Native American self-taught master's landscapes and travels In The New York Times, Wendy Steiner named Joseph E. Yoakum (1890-1972) one of the six masters among American outsider artists. John Perreault wrote in The Village Voice, "The discovery of an authentic 'naive' artist such as Yoakum does not happen very often so it is cause for some celebration." With 50 color and 145 black-and-white reproductions, Traveling the Rainbow: The Life and Art of Joseph E. Yoakum is a fitting tribute to this fascinating creator of visionary landscapes. Despite the initial excitement of his discovery, relatively little was known of the life of this artist. What emerges in Traveling the Rainbow fits an adventure novel. Yoakum traveled the oceans on steamliners working in their boiler rooms. He rode America's railways as an inspector. With an elite team of African American troops in World War I, he toured Europe. On the road with the Ringling Brothers Circus he posted circus flyers. He spent a year in a psychiatric hospital. Late in his life he created majestic, animated landscapes infused with the motion and energy of travel. Part African American, part Native American, Yoakum drew on his dual background and conjured powerful forms of expression -- the blues and Native American symbolism -- to create dynamic cultural fusions. Traveling the Rainbow corrects major biographical errors published in numerous artist anthologies and exhibition catalogues. Much of what he told about his life -- especially about his travels -- was thought to be invented, but Derrel DePasse makes startling discoveries about the artist's landscapes and finds that much of his story of himself was grounded in fact. Intimate and panoramic, Yoakum's water-color and pencil drawings are compared to the work of artists as diverse as William Blake and Thomas Moran. His life spanned the golden epochs of the American railroad, the traveling circus, and the unique American musical idiom known as the blues. This book reveals how the artist recorded his memories of these both in his landscapes, as well as in a small number of distinctive portraits of prominent African Americans. Derrel B. DePasse is president of the Blauvelt Group. She is a contributing author to Self-Taught Artists of the Twentieth Century: An American Anthology (Museum of American Folk Art/Chronicle Books, 1998).
Call Number: N6537.Y6 D47 2001ISBN: 1578063116Publication Date: 2000-12-07
Raymond Pettibon by
The signature ink-wash drawings of this significant innovator of figurative art. In the early 1980s California-based artist Raymond Pettibon first began making his signature inkwash drawings - combinations of cartoon-like images with short, enigmatic texts - to adorn the record covers of underground music groups like Black Flag and Sonic Youth. After turning a generation of punk fans into unwitting art collectors, Pettibon was gradually picked up by the established art world as an artist producing some of the most unusual new representational artwork being made. Although he also produced paintings, collages, artist's book, videos and fanzines, Pettibon is known for his prolific production of drawings. These drawings have a great cumulative effect; they become increasingly intriguing the more one sees of them. Much has been made of Pettibon's literary background and reclusive personality as the biographical sources for these humorous yet dark, complex pictures. Yet the artist claims that his work has nothing to do with his own experience but is culled from the printed pages of American popular underground culture- Gumby, Ronald Reagan, surfers, Joan Crawford. At times his drawings seem almost dashed off from a comic strip; other are more painstakingly drawn. Most are in a simple graphic style combined with bits of text - sometimes weiredly connected to the imagery, but often providing baffling non-sequiturs. His unusual draftsmanship and mysterious personality have made him one of the most sought-after artists currently working in America. After appearing in numerous Whitney Biennials, in recent years Pettibon had his first museum-organized retrospective (at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Drawing Centre) with more than 500 drawings covering some 20 years' work, establishing definitively his reputation in the uppermost ranks of contemporary American art.
Call Number: NC1429.P49 S76 2001ISBN: 0714839191Publication Date: 2001-06-13
The Wild Girls by
Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the 40 years since her first publication, her works have changed not only the face, but also the tone and agenda, of science fiction. Her Nebula award-winning novelette The Wild Girls - here newly revised and presented in book form for the first time - tells of two captive 'dirt children' living in a society of sword and silk. Also included is Le Guin's scandalous and scorching Harper's essay, Staying Awake While We Read, and an interview with the author herself.
Call Number: PS3562.E42 W55 2011ISBN: 9781604864038Publication Date: 2011-05-01
The Wave in the Mind by
Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of readings. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.
Call Number: PS3562.E42 W38 2004ISBN: 1590300068Publication Date: 2004-02-17
High-Rise by
When a class war erupts inside a luxurious apartment block, modern elevators become violent battlegrounds and cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on "enemy" floors. In this visionary tale, human society slips into violent reverse as once-peaceful residents, driven by primal urges, re-create a world ruled by the laws of the jungle.
Call Number: PR6052.A46 H54 2012ISBN: 9780871404022Publication Date: 2012-04-16
The Crystal World by
From J. G. Ballard, author of 'Crash' and 'Cocaine Nights' comes his extraordinary vision of an African forest that turns all in its path to crystal. Through a 'leaking' of time, the West African jungle starts to crystallize. Trees metamorphose into enormous jewels. Crocodiles encased in second glittering skins lurch down the river. Pythons with huge blind gemstone eyes rear in heraldic poses. Most flee the area in terror, afraid to face a catastrophe they cannot understand. But some, dazzled and strangely entranced, remain to drift through this dreamworld forest: a doctor in pursuit of his ex-mistress, an enigmatic Jesuit wielding a crystal cross and a tribe of lepers searching for Paradise. In this tour de force of the imagination, Ballard transports the reader into one of his most unforgettable landscapes. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard's works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including James Lever, Ali Smith, Hari Kunzru and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs.
Call Number: PR6052.A46 C75 1978ISBN: ISBN0586024190Publication Date: 1978
Your Private Sky by
"In this companion volume to the "visual reader" Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller; The Art of Design Science Fuller is heard primarily through his own writings, in which he expounded his world view and his ideas about design. Essays by other authors supplement and augment the selection of Fuller texts. The book collects important unpublished works and key texts that are not easily available, choosing from all phases of his creativity, and places them in the context of an art and science of design, in the sense implied in Fuller's term design science. The selection of texts provides access to Fuller's central concepts at the point they were first developed and presents them in their earliest valid formulation. The book thus affords a genuine look into his workshop of ideas. The volume includes texts that have become classics in the philosophy of design: Fuller's first essay, "Lightful Houses," the lecture on his Dymaxion House, the first papers on synergetic geometry, and the tensegrity essay. The book also includes a facsimile of his previously unpublished basic text on the construction of geodesic domes, "Noah's Ark #2.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Call Number: TA140.F9 A3 2001ISBN: 3907044940Publication Date: 2001-02-12
Celebrate People's History by
The best way to learn history is to visualise it! Since 1998, Josh MacPhee has commissioned and produced over 100 posters by over 80 artists that pay tribute to revolution, racial justice, women's rights, queer liberation, labour struggles and creative activism. These essential moments are presented as a visual tour through decades and across continents, from the perspective of some of the most interesting and socially engaged artists working today. Includes work by Cristy Road, Swoon, Nicole Schulman, Christopher Cardinale, Sabrina Jones, Eric Drooke and Klutch.
Call Number: NC 1849.S54 C45 2010ISBN: 9781558616776Publication Date: 2010
Absolute All Star Superman by
Written by GRANT MORRISON Art and cover by FRANK QUITELY The Eisner Award-winning 12-issue series from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely is now available in Absolute format! The Man of Steel battles Bizarro, Zibarro and more before facing the final revenge of Lex Luthor. Also includes a bonus sketchbook section and more!
Call Number: PN6728.S9 M676 2010ISBN: 9781401229177Publication Date: 2011-11-01
Sol Lewitt by Call Number: ND1839.L46 A4 1996ISBN: 3893227539Publication Date: 1996-01-02Artwork by Sol Lewitt. Edited by Christina Bechtler. Contributions by Charlotte von Koerber.
Low by
"One day I blew my nose and half my brains came out." Los Angeles, 1976. David Bowie is holed up in his Bel-Air mansion, drifting into drug-induced paranoia and confusion. Obsessed with black magic and the Holy Grail, he's built an altar in the living room and keeps his fingernail clippings in the fridge. There are occasional trips out to visit his friend Iggy Pop in a mental institution. His latest album is the cocaine-fuelled Station To Station (Bowie: "I know it was recorded in LA because I read it was"), which welds R&B rhythms to lyrics that mix the occult with a yearning for Europe, after three mad years in the New World. Bowie has long been haunted by the angst-ridden, emotional work of the Die Brucke movement and the Expressionists. Berlin is their spiritual home, and after a chaotic world tour, Bowie adopts this city as his new sanctuary. Immediately he sets to work on Low, his own expressionist mood-piece.
Call Number: ML420.B754 W55 2005ISBN: 0826416845Publication Date: 2005-08-19
The Extraordinary Journeys by
This new translation is faithful to the lyricism, verve, and humour of the original, and is the only annotated edition available.
Call Number: PQ2469.V75 E5 1998ISBN: 0192836757Publication Date: 1998-09-17
Journey Through the Impossible by Call Number: PQ2469.V73 E5 2003ISBN: 1591020794Publication Date: 2003-05-01
Information Doesn't Want to Be Free by
In sharply argued, fast-moving chapters, Cory Doctorow’sInformation Doesn’t Want to Be Free takes on the state of copyright and creative success in the digital age. Can small artists still thrive in the Internet era? Can giant record labels avoid alienating their audiences? This is a book about the pitfalls and the opportunities that creative industries (and individuals) are confronting today -- about how the old models have failed or found new footing, and about what might soon replace them. An essential read for anyone with a stake in the future of the arts,Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free offers a vivid guide to the ways creativity and the Internet interact today, and to what might be coming next.
Call Number: KF3020 .D63 2014ISBN: 9781940450285Publication Date: 2014-11-18
The Life of Super-Earths by
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus fomented a revolution when he debunked the geocentric view of the universe, proving instead that our planet wasn't central to the universe. Almost five hundred years later, the revolution he set in motion is nearly complete. Just as earth is not the center of things, the life on it, it appears, is not unique to the planet. Or is it? The Life of Super-Earths is a breathtaking tour of current efforts to answer the age-old question: Are we alone in the universe? Astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, the founding director of Harvard University's Origins of Life Initiative, takes us on a fast-paced hunt for habitable planets and alien life forms. He shows how the search for "super-Earths"--rocky planets like our own that orbit other stars--may provide the key to answering essential questions about the origins of life here and elsewhere. That is, if we don't find the answers to those questions here first. As Sasselov and other astronomers have uncovered planets with mixes of elements different from our own, chemists have begun working out the heretofore unseen biochemistries that those planets could support. That knowledge is feeding directly into synthetic biology--the effort to build wholly novel forms of life--making it likely that we will first discover truly "alien" life forms in an earthly lab, rather than on a remote planet thousands of light years away. Sasselov tells the gripping story of a moment of unprecedented potential--a convergence of pioneering efforts in astronomy and biology to peer into the unknown. The Life of Super-Earths offers nothing short of a transformation in our understanding of life and its place in the cosmos.
Call Number: QH326 .S27 2012ISBN: 9780465023400Publication Date: 2012-01-24
Autobiography of Red by
The award-winning poet reinvents a genre in a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present. Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist "Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today." --Michael Ondaatje "This book is amazing--I haven't discovered any writing in years so marvelously disturbing." --Alice Munro "A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." --The New York Times Book Review "A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday." --The Village Voice
Call Number: PS3553.A7667 A94 1999bISBN: 037570129XPublication Date: 1999-07-27
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by
One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the -infraordinary-: the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday---what happens, - as he put it, -when nothing happens.- His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one cafe window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.
Call Number: http://magik.gmu.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=907943ISBN: 9780984115525Publication Date: 2010-09-30
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.
Call Number: PQ7798.1.I7 E6513 2006ISBN: 0811216306Publication Date: 2006-05-25
Varamo by
Unmistakably the work of C#65533;sar Aira, Varamo is about the day in the life of a hapless government employee who, after wandering around all night after being paid by the Ministry in counterfeit money, eventually writes the most celebrated masterwork of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Boy. What is odd is that, at fifty years old, Varamo “hadn’t previously written one sole verse, nor had it ever occurred to him to write one.” Among other things, this novella is an ironic allegory of the poet’s vocation and inspiration, the subtlety of artistic genius, and our need to give literature an historic, national, psychological, and aesthetic context. But Aira goes further still — converting the ironic allegory into a formidable parody of the expectations that all narrative texts generate — by laying out the pathos of a man who between one night and the following morning is touched by genius. Once again Aira surprises us with his unclassifiable fiction: original and enjoyable, worthy of many a thoughtful chuckle, Varamo invites the reader to become an accomplice in the author’s irresistible game.
Call Number: PQ7798.1.I7 V3713 2012ISBN: 9780811217415Publication Date: 2012-02-22
Drawing Now by
From John Currin's old-master-style Playboy bunnies to Elizabeth Peyton's fin-de-siecle portraits; from Julie Mehretu's dizzying, multilayered architectural landscapes to Shahzia Sikander's multipatterned miniature ones; from Yoshitomo Nara's angry and enigmatic little girls to Kara Walker's stereotypical negresses; and from Barry McGee's caricatures of urban graffiti to Matthew Ritchie's cosmological diagrams--drawing is back, if it ever went away. In contrast to the digitized, multimedia direction that much of contemporary art has taken in the past decade, drawing has become the major mode of expression for many of today's most important young artists. Drawing Now, published to accompany the first major survey of contemporary drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 15 years, contains more than 100 color reproductions of work by 26 international artists, both well-known and emerging, that demonstrate the fascinating variety of methods and approaches, mediums and scales, apparent in this old-again, new-again art. Accompanying essays by the exhibition's curator, Laura Hoptman, explore eight themes that she perceives in the field--Drafting & Architecture, Mental Maps & Metaphysics, Popular Culture & National Culture, Fashion, Likeness & Allegory, Envisioning a City, Science & Art, Comics & Other Subcultures, Ornament & Crime--and provide key impulses behind drawing's recent resurgence.
Call Number: NC15 .N55 2002ISBN: 0870703625Publication Date: 2002-10-02
Comic Abstraction by
In recent years, a number of artists have abstracted images culled from slapstick, comic strips and films, cartoons and animation into a new representational mode to address perplexing issues about war and global conflicts, the loss of innocence and ethnic and cultural stereotyping. From Julie Mehretu's intricately layered paintings and Arturo Herrera's psychological collages made of Walt Disney coloring books to Ellen Gallagher's seductively Minimalist paintings, permeated by -blackface- signs culled from minstrel performances, to Rivane Neuenschwander's wiped-out cartoon characters, the world of comic abstraction reflects the intensely personal relationship that many contemporary artists maintain with political currents. This publication, which accompanies a Spring 2007 exhibition of the same name at The Museum of Modern Art, presents the first major investigation into this new model of representation. It features recent work by 13 artists and a selection of 30 large-scale works and installations that bridge the rift between abstraction and comics in ways that are at once critical and playful. It also includes a critical essay, interviews with the artists, and a selected exhibition history and bibliography. Features work by Polly Apfelbaum, Inka Essenhigh, Ellen Gallagher, Arturo Herrera, Michel Majerus, Julie Mehretu, Juan Munoz, Takashi Murakami, Rivane Neuenschwander, Philippe Parreno, Gary Simmons, Franz West and Sue Williams.
Call Number: N6494.A2 M37 2007ISBN: 9780870707094Publication Date: 2007-03-01
Report from Planet Midnight by
A fascinating fictive polemic from the award-winning Nalo Hopkinson. Hopkinson address the crowd during a Guest of Honour address to the 2012 conference of Interational Association of the Fantastic in the Arts, in the voice of an alien. The alien evaluates Earth's strange customs, including the marginalisation of works by non white and women authors. A dramatic mix of humour, anger and shrewd analysis pervades this discussion of the unconcious and unacknowledged racism of white colleagues and points the way to a more diverse and inclusive future.
Call Number: PR9199.3.H5927 R476 2012ISBN: 9781604864977Publication Date: 2012-07-17
A Man of Misconceptions by
A Scientific American Best Science Book of 2012 An Atlantic Wire Best Book of 2012 A New York Times Book Review “Editor's Choice” The “fascinating” (The New Yorker) story of Athanasius Kircher, the eccentric scholar-inventor who was either a great genius or a crackpot . . . or a bit of both. The interests of Athanasius Kircher, the legendary seventeenth-century priest-scientist, knew no bounds. From optics to music to magnetism to medicine, he offered up inventions and theories for everything, and they made him famous across Europe. His celebrated museum in Rome featured magic lanterns, speaking statues, the tail of a mermaid, and a brick from the Tower of Babel. Holy Roman Emperors were his patrons, popes were his friends, and in his spare time he collaborated with the Baroque master Bernini. But Kircher lived during an era of radical transformation, in which the old approach to knowledge—what he called the “art of knowing”— was giving way to the scientific method and modern thought. A Man of Misconceptions traces the rise, success, and eventual fall of this fascinating character as he attempted to come to terms with a changing world. With humor and insight, John Glassie returns Kircher to his rightful place as one of history’s most unforgettable figures.
Call Number: CT1098.K46 G53 2012ISBN: 9781594488719Publication Date: 2012-11-08
The Anatomy by
This unique learning tool teaches anatomical concepts and illustrates all the structures and systems of the body through coloring exercises, an effective teaching device that also aids in the retention of the material. 163 detailed illustrations are organized according to body systems *A colour-key system links terminology to illustrations
Call Number: QM25 .K3 1993bISBN: 0064550168Publication Date: 1997-01-16
Hollow Earth by
Beliefs in mysterious underworlds are as old as humanity. But the idea that the earth has a hollow interior was first proposed as a scientific theory in 1691 by Sir Edmond Halley (of comet fame), who also suggested that there might be life down there as well. Hollow Earth traces the many surprising, marvelous, and just plain weird permutations his ideas have taken over the centuries. Both Edgar Allan Poe and (more famously) Jules Verne picked up the torch in the nineteenth century, the latter with his science fiction epic A Journey to the Center of the Earth. The notion of a hollow earth even inspired a religion at the turn of the twentieth century-Koreshanity, which held not only that the earth was hollow, but also that we're all living on the inside. Utopian novels and adventures abounded at this same time, including L. Frank Baum's hollow earth addition to the Oz series and Edgar Rice Burroughs's Pellucidar books chronicling a stone-age hollow earth. In the 1940s an enterprising science-fiction magazine editor convinced people that the true origins of flying saucers lay within the hollow earth, relics of an advanced alien civilization. And there are still devout hollow earthers today, some of whom claim there is a New Age utopia lurking beneath the earth's surface, with at least one entrance near Mt. Shasta in California. Hollow Earth travels through centuries and cultures, exploring how each era's relationship to the idea of a hollow earth mirrored its hopes, fears, and values. Illustrated with everything from seventeenth-century maps to 1950s pulp art to movie posters and more, Hollow Earth is for anyone interested in the history of strange ideas that just won't go away.
Call Number: PN3433.6 .S73 2006ISBN: 0306813734Publication Date: 2006-07-10
Notes from Underground by
Slug & Lettuce, Pathetic Life, I Hate Brenda, Dishwasher, Punk and Destroy, Sweet Jesus, Scrambled Eggs, Maximunrocknroll—these are among the thousands of publications which circulate in a subterranean world rarely illuminated by the searchlights of mainstream media commentary. In this multifarious underground, Pynchonesque misfits rant and rave, fans eulogize, hobbyists obsess. Together they form a low-tech publishing network of extraordinary richness and variety. Welcome to the realm of zines. In this, the first comprehensive study of zine publishing, Stephen Duncombe describes their origins in early-twentieth-century science fiction cults, their more proximate roots in 60s counter-culture and their rapid proliferation in the wake of punk rock. While Notes from Underground pays full due to the political importance of zines as a vital web of popular culture, it also notes the shortcomings of their utopian and escapist outlook in achieving fundamental social change. Duncombe's book raises the larger questionof whether it is possible to rebel culturally within a consumer society that eats up cultural rebellion. Packed with extracts and illustrations from a wide array of publications, past and present, Notes from Underground is the first book to explore the full range of zine culture and provides a definitive portrait of the contemporary underground in all its splendor and misery.
Call Number: PN4878.3 .D86 1997ISBN: 1859848273Publication Date: 1997-10-17
Room Where I Get What I Want by
Poetry. A house echoes with the footfalls of wild men running behind the walls in S. Whitney Holmes's debut collection, ROOM WHERE I GET WHAT I WANT. Here in the house that is not a house, Holmes destabilizes the architectural structure by relishing in the details: a German man builds a mnemonic castle, a hero swallows a tulip bulb, and a woman opens a book to place in its hollowed center a gun. Debating space and intimacy, power and pleasure, Holmes constructs a spellbinding education as erotically charged as it is dangerous.
Call Number: PS3608.O4943556 A6 201ISBN: 9781939568106Publication Date: 2015-04-14
