Form-3 Books

Great item. Scott Kurtz is hilarious. I had the pleasure of meeting him. He is a great guy.

I've said it before (this would three times now on Amazon ;)) and I'll say it again: PvP is a wonderful comic strip! If you're an 80's child, gaming nerd, or even just a fan of well produced and genuinely funny comics...you should find a lot to like here. This is another wonderful collection of great strips. If you're followed the comic online, you may run into some storylines that you've gone through before. Personally, I think I've enjoyed reading through them again in the collected format more than I did getting the daily "zing!" comics (not to say that I don't still read it online...). This collection features some great in-jokes that comic book (I'm talking the guys and gals in tights who throw cars variety) and SciFi/Fantasy fans should really enjoy when the cast attempts to make the ultimate FAN FILM. Cat fans (especially those like my wife) will love Scratch Fury the cat.

Comprised of eleven stories, one play, and five poems written in Japan during the first half of the 20th Century, A Rainbow In The Desert: An Anthology of Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Children's Literature presents a seminal and invaluable contribution to the study of Japanese literature for American students. The stories themselves reflect an essential element of Japanese popular culture, while illustrating the evolving concept of children in early 20th Century Japanese thought including such issues as motherhood, education, and gender as applied to childhood. The contributors represent a full spectrum of Japanese literary talent and their work is very ably translated into English by Yukie Ohta. Also available in hardcover ..., Rainbow In The Desert is an exceptional body of work and highly recommended for students of modern Japanese literature, culture, and history.

Comprised of eleven stories, one play, and five poems written in Japan during the first half of the 20th Century, A Rainbow In The Desert: An Anthology of Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Children's Literature presents a seminal and invaluable contribution to the study of Japanese literature for American students. The stories themselves reflect an essential element of Japanese popular culture, while illustrating the evolving concept of children in early 20th Century Japanese thought including such issues as motherhood, education, and gender as applied to childhood. The contributors represent a full spectrum of Japanese literary talent and their work is very ably translated into English by Yukie Ohta. Also available in hardcover ..., Rainbow In The Desert is an exceptional body of work and highly recommended for students of modern Japanese literature, culture, and history.

The book offers a nice introduction to the artist's life and times. Also provides excellent insights regarding the workshop and distinguishing between Rembrandt's art and that of his pupils. The scholarship is indepth and apt, most of the writers being part of the Rembrandt Project. There are 83 separate plates (most in color) with wonderful essays and explanations.

This box set is the most prized possession on my bookshelf. I could not possibly do the pictures and information in this book justice with words. Some of the most amazing detail photographs of Rembrandt's surfaces that I have ever seen.

I have to admit a bit of a bias when it comes to the work of Ron Mueck..I have been a Special effects Make-up artist for over the past few decades and an artist myself...so his work is not only inspirational but also amazing reference for my own work.
this book captures his work with some of the best photography yet, the studio shots are what I have wanted to see since I first discovered his work on the cover of Modern Painter magazine ages ago....the text...well to be honest I have read enough artspeak gobbly gook to last a life time but it is informative although often pretentious to the ninth degree.
I have most of the other publications about his work and this one if by far the most lovingly photographed .
Enjoy,
Anthony
[..]

This is the book to get if you want the behide the sences look in to the live of a great artist it gives you a studio look at how Ron Mueck does it great book and great price.

Indepth studies of the art as well as breath-taking color photographes. An unbelievable collection that is a must have for any sculpture enthusiast. A bargain among art books and art history books alike.

I first saw this set after returning from Florence and was delighted to find the highest quality reproductions of Donatello's work that I had seen. Further examination showed that that this four volume set reviewed sculpture in both breadth and depth, an astonishing success far beyond coffee-table status. In addition, the set has turned out to be a special gift greatly appreciated by all who love art, whether or not sculpture is a special interest to them.

exemplary, the text makes you see all kinds of things that are easily overlooked, the images make you look at the works in unexpected ways

The images in this text are unbelievable! Butterfield draws attention to some remarkable and often overlooked aspects of Verrochio's work, such as details of St. Thomas' (of "The Doubting of St. Thomas" at the Orsanmichele) face and amazingly well articulated hands. Butterfield, also, brings forward Verrocchio's impact on Italian Renaissance art, especially as da Vinci's teacher, by comparing his work to that of those he influenced. This book has greatly impacted my work as a sculptor and given me a new love and appreciation for this Master!

It is far past time that poets of the present pay their dues and recognize the greatness, inhuman resilience, and almost perfectly ideal life of poet-warrior David Gascoyne.

As Kathleen Raine puts it in her introduction to this indispensable work on the life of this authentic seer, Gascoyne's existence consisted of a "total commitment to the role of the poet."

On the fringes of the Surrealist movement because of his unwavering Roman Catholicism and discriminated against, like Artaud, for his refusal to make one concession or compromise to the bureaucracy Breton eventually created (perhaps unwittingly), it is neither exaggeration nor sentimentality to characterize this Promethean figure as a sort of poetic saint.

His unwavering and frenetic pursuit of visionary truth is evidenced by his statements such as the following: "The poet's job is to go on holding on to something like faith, through the darkness of total lack of faith, what Buber calls the eclipse of God."

These days unimaginative poetry is the rule rather than the exception, and even today a giant like Gascoyne might seem curiously out of place in a world that has backed off from the intensity of figures like Poe, Rimbaud, Artaud--a lineage Gascoyne fits in quite well.

His was a life plagued by misfortune: bouts of madness, mostly from the mental overstrain he imposed on himself for the sake of his craft, drove him to long periods of tragic silence more than once.

Few stories are as painful to read as an older Gascoyne crashing the gates of Buckingham Palace, insisting that they listen to the transcendental dictation he had received from another world. Sacrificing himself and the integrity of his rational mind in favor of Rimbaud's derangement of the senses, his amphetamine addiction became a death-grip until there was nothing left to do but flame out.

Gascoyne, however, did more than wait for "The Sun At Midnight" to arrive: he was engaged in the cultural, political, and literary endeavors of his time as much as anyone else. The early essays in this book, most of which were written by a younger and more naive Gascoyne, are seminal to any understanding of the man.

His intuitive understanding of Novalis' thirst for eternal night, his fascination with thinkers like Leon Chestov, and his impassioned theories on the role of the poet are as vital to our survival as poets caught in the throes of capitalism as Shelley's "Defence of Poetry".

As a struggling young poet myself, I have found this text to be the sort I carry around with me everywhere to arm myself against the inevitable onslaught vision suffers everywhere in this world. Like Maldoror, Rimbaud's "Illuminations", and the work of Villon, it is an extra conscience of sorts keeping me from compromise.

Read not for leisure but necessity, that someday this seemingly forgotten "Christ of Revolution and Poetry" might start appearing more in bookstores and warm us by the fire of his Sacred Hearth.

David Gascoyne's elegantly measured prose provides the reader with the rare instance not only of how a visionary poet reads his contemporaries, but of how he blueprints ideas which provide the instructive dynamic informing his poetry.

Gascoyne's mind is awesome. An isolated spiritual journeyer in a materialistic century, Gascoyne's integrity stems from his belief in visionary imagination as inspired interface between conscious and unconscious worlds. From his first youthfully audacious paper, Gascoyne distinguished between poetry as activity-of-the-mind and poetry as means-of-expression. His powerful affirmation of the superior value of an imaginatively alive poetry over one that simply describes was from the start his inspired credo.

This book is a moving human document of what it means to be a poet, and to survive by that means alone, in a society radically unsympathetic to this calling. Having experienced the defenceless vulnerability of being a committed poet in a capitalist ethos, I find Gascoyne's survival heroic, his courage paradigmatic to the poetic calling.

Although David Gascoyne writes warmly of the darker aspects of T.S. Eliot's psyche, Eliot was in large to prove the prototype of the poet deserting his art for the sanctuary of an editor's desk. Many poets have done an injustice to poetry seeking personal security in acceptable professions. They relegate art to the status of a consuming hobby. How can one be fully open to the possibilities of experience if one's days are given over to immersion in establishment values? Gascoyne is among the best antidotes to this duplicitous trend.

Gascoyne's poetry of imploded mystic hallucination sounded a completely new, revolutionary note in British poetics. He found, for the English language, visionary continents already mapped out by Lautreamont, Rimbaud and the surrealists. He was to encounter madness in the process, often the way for those who pursue the journey to the interior. He says: "I am a poet who wrote himself out when young and then went mad. I tried to write poetry again and succeeded to a certain extent but it is not the same as the poetry I wrote before." Gascoyne's greatness hinges on this tragic concept of burning out.

Collateral with the inspired poetry he was writing in the 30's came the equally eventful prose essays which form the early part of this book, chief amongst them being Gascoyne's preface to his book of free translations Hölderlin's Madness (1938). This particular essay is one of the finest ever written on the subject of visionary poetry. It achieved an empathy for its subject's plight prophetic of Gascoyne's own. At only twenty-two his declarative statement in defence of poetic vision was published. Already he inhabits the great night of the German romantics in which the poet anticipates imagination becoming reality."They are poets and philosophers of nostalgia and the night. A disturbed night, whose paths lead far among forgotten things, mysterious dreams and madness. And yet a night that precedes the dawn, and is full of longing for the sun. These poets look forward out of their night: and Hölderlin in his madness wrote always of sunlight and dazzling air, and the islands of the Mediterranean noon."

To have realised this at such a young age was also an initiation experience into the excruciating social isolation which comes of holding these secrets. Gascoyne was not only set apart from the predominantly social concerns of British poetry in the 1930s, but from the main thrust of twentieth-century British poetry, with its attempts either to repress or sanitise the imagination. "Persistence is all" Rilke was to advise, and David Gascoyne, as poet, has never wavered. The price has been high. Lacking any support structure for his undertaking, David Gascoyne the private man has been broken by his quest. He returned home to his parents in middle-age, broke, ill, conceiving himself a failure in their eyes.

In 1965, his Collected Poems were published. He felt it was some sort of justification for having lived, some vindication of an identity denied him by a capitalist ideology. These are the sufferings inherent in pursuing a poetic vocation, as opposed to writing poetry as an avocation to a career. Gascoyne is one of the few who in every generation are prepared to sacrifice their lives in the interests of poetry. In his "Note On Symbolism" Gascoyne further enforces his conviction that the way to apprehending spirit is through the inner evaluation of experience. He writes: 'Each man must undertake alone and in silence the task of objective and empirical reality's changing and uncertain surface.'

Of extreme interest are the two autobiographical essays: "The Most Astonishing Book In The English Language" and "Self-Discharged." In the first of these Gascoyne describes having discovered in the early 1940s at Watkins bookshop an extraordinary book named OAHSPE: A New Bible. Its prophetic contents are subscribed to by a cult called Kosmon, purporting to expound the secrets of the visible and invisible universes. These became inextricably linked to the delusional promptings about apocalypse which eventually led to Gascoyne's confinement. (The poet at one time believed it his mission to break into Buckingham Palace and alert the Royal Family to the coming of a new spiritual awareness.) The consequences of his compulsive actions were to have Gascoyne sectioned, and in 'Self-Discharged' he describes life inside the dystopian precinct of an asylum.

Gascoyne's prose and poetry are of the highest significance, products of an imagination in discourse with the archetypal Kingdom. If both Hölderlin and Rimbaud "believed the poet to be capable of penetrating to a secret world and of receiving the dictation of a transcendental inner-voice," David Gascoyne did, too. The poetry stopped. His continued celebration of the exalted visionary dynamic did not. His later criticism, especially of surrealism, involves a generosity of spirit which is in itself a monumental achievement.

This book represents poetic truth as we seldom encounter it, and as such should be a touchstone for all future poets. A hard-won achievement of a great poet.

I first stumbled across a drawing of one of these unusual stone effigies in a book of horror stories called "The Angry Dead." To see the actual images in Dublin's National Museum, was still a bit of a shock as the anatomical detail proudly displayed by these Sheelas is normally only visible to a gynecologist or lover.

So I turned to this interesting and well-written book to learn more about the Sheela-Na-Gigs. Oddly enough, they are not fertility figures. Most of them are portrayed as ferocious and gaunt, with the ribs clearly delineated. Here is one of the earliest references to a Sheela found at Barnahealy, County Cork: "This is one of those old Fetish figures often found in Ireland on the fronts of churches as well as castles, they are called 'Hags of the Castle' and when placed above the keystone of the door arch were supposed to possess a tutelary or protective power so that an enemy passing by would be disarmed of evil intent against the building on seeing it."

Typically in Gaelic oral traditions, a central character in many of the stories was a fearsome female figure, typically described as "an old woman with a bald head, cadaverous ribs, sagging abdomen, and small flat breasts." She is the crone, the third aspect of the Earth goddess which also includes a maiden and a woman in her sexual prime.

It is rather delightful to think that the Sheela-na-Gigs migrated from Celtic mythology into Christian iconography and could be found perched above many a monastery or church door where generations of monks filed under her, protected (although they may not have known it) from the evil eye by an exaggerated carving of female pudenda. It's a pity that more recent churchmen (especially since the Reformation and most especially since Victorian times) were more prudish than their early counterparts and destroyed or hid many of these Sheelas.

This book contains drawings of all known Sheela-na-Gigs of Ireland and Britain, and also figures that might be related to them. The authors also list a website where further research on Sheela-Na-Gigs is being published: jharding.demon.co.uk.

You might want to plan your next trip to Britain or Ireland to include viewings of these fascinating, archaic Divine Hags.

I have had a fascination with Sheela Na Gigs for a long time, but to be honest my knowledge on her was scant. I have worked with her as a personal deity for about 8 years (when she first appeared to me), so I had some idea of how I viewed her, but this book has refreshed my connection with Sheela to a profound level.

This book puts fowards some very interesting ideas as to the origins of the Sheelas & her name, and her possible basis in the hag aspect, which is the type of energy that I myself have found her to have. I have also gleaned some new ideas as to possible symbolic interpretations of her physical appearance, which has set me off on new avenuse of thinking.

The end of the book has a catalogue of Sheelas in England, Ireland, Wales & Scotland, and each entry has sketches of them. With this book in hand I have been to see two of them, one in Oxford & another in Fiddington. There is a Sheela about 20 minutes from my house and that will be my next visit!

This pictorial catalogue is extremely useful in that it allows you to see the particular Sheela refferred to in the main body of the text, thus enabling you to make up your own mind as to whether it supports the claims or not.

I must say it's a great shame I'm the first person to write a review of this book, I just wish there were as many people interested in Sheelas & their origins as Green Men, because to be honest Sheela is far more interesting!

I was not expecting to enjoy this book nearly as much as I did. It surprised me at first to discover that the story was written in a poetic form, but this simply enhanced the entire experience. I was truely touched by the simple pure relationships formed between the characters. Herrick doesn't weigh down the plot with too many detailed descriptions. The characters and events of the story speak for themselves. Each 'scene' stands on its own as a glimpse into the lives of the three characters. This book is highly reccomended to any readers who are prepared to sit back and enjoy a heart warming, thoughtful book.

In a counterpoint to THE LORD OF THE FLIES, and other grim tales where a lack of structure or authority leads to chaos and harshness and evil intent, Australian author Steven Herrick has created a world in which a young man striving for autonomy is able to attain an idyllic existence away from the rule makers and the rule breakers.

When sixteen-year-old Billy Luckett packs a few things (including the old man's booze and cigarettes) into his schoolbag, says good-bye to his dog, and walks out of the house, he doesn't know where he will end up. But Billy's certain that anything will beat living with his abusive father.

"Please don't tell what train I'm on
And they won't know what route I've gone"
--Elizabeth Cotton, "Freight Train"

Hopping a westbound freight train in a teeming rain, Billy immediately crosses paths with the first of a series of characters who will each enrich and transform his life with their kindness, and who will each in turn take something away themselves for having been able to see through Billy's exterior.

"Men...........Billy

There are men like Ernie,
the train driver, in this world.
Men who don't boss you around
and don't ask prying questions
and don't get bitter
at anyone different from them.
Men who share a drink and food
and a warm cabin
when they don't have to.
Men who know the value of things
like an old boat
built for long weekends on a lake.
Men who see something happening
and know if it's right
or wrong
and aren't afraid to make that call.
There are men like Ernie
and
there are other men,
men like my dad."

"When we came to the station all the trains were rusty
The doors were open and the windows broken in
There was grass in all the cracks and the air hung musty
The travel posters were flapping in the wind"
--Al Stewart, "Apple Cider Re Constitution

Billy reaches the end of the run at an old railroad town named Bendarat, and takes refuge in a lovely old abandoned train car. When he purchases a lemonade at the McDonald's in town, and proceeds to gather himself a fine meal from what fellow diners leave behind, he meets Caitlin, a well-off teenage schoolgirl who is working for The Clown as a way to gain her own measure of independence, in her case, from doting parents.

"Caitlin and mopping...Caitlin

When I first saw what he did
I wanted to go up
and say,
'Put that food back.'
But how stupid is that?
It was going in the rubbish
until he claimed it.
So I watched him.
He was very calm.
He didn't look worried
about being caught
or ashamed of stealing scraps.
He looked relaxed,
as though he knew he had to eat
and this was the easiest way.
I had work to do,
mopping the floor,
which I hate,
so I mopped slowly
and watched.
He read the paper
until the family left,
then helped himself to dessert,
and as he walked back to his table,
holding the apple pie,
he looked up and saw me
watching him.
He stood over his table
waiting for me to do something.
He stood there
almost daring me to get the Manager,
who I hate
almost as much as I hate mopping.
So I smiled at him.
I smiled and said,
'I hate mopping.'
He sat in his chair
and smiled back
and I felt good
that I hadn't called the Manager.
I kept mopping.
He finished his dessert,
came over to me,
looked at my badge,
looked straight at me,
and said, 'Goodnight, Caitlin,'
and he walked out,
slow and steady,
and so calm, so calm."

The story's third principal voice and pivotal character is Old Bill, an alcohol-dependent hobo with long grey hair and beard who inhabits a nearby train carriage along the string he facetiously refers to as 'The Bendarat Hilton.'

"Sorry..........Old Bill

I feel sorry
for swearing at the kid,
abusing him for bringing me breakfast,
Breakfast! Of all things.
A good kid,
living like a bum
and I knew he'd need money,
even bums need money to live.
So this morning, early,
far too bloody early for me,
I knock on his door
to return the bowl and spoon
and he opens it slowly,
invites me in,
and I tell him
about the Cannery and work.
How every Monday during the season
they offer work,
and if he needs money
that's the place to go,
and he says,
'Sure, great. Let's go.'
And because I'm still sorry
about swearing at him
I find myself
walking to the Cannery
with the kid
looking for work,
work I don't need,
or want.
Walking with the kid
early Monday morning."

"Every happy ending needs to have a start."
--The Moody Blues "You Can Never Go Home"

As we're uncovering the tales of how they got to those bad spaces in which we first meet them, Billy and Old Bill are moving inexorably forward and upward as a result of their relationship with each other. Caitlin is a genuinely likable girl whose difficulties--while not in the same league with those of Billy and Old Bill--will ring true to teen readers who desire, like she does, to be accepted for who they really are. I have great affection for THE SIMPLE GIFT's fairy tale-like sensibilities and for the story's message (that harkens back to the Sixties) about avoiding the rule breakers and rule makers and, instead, paying attention to treating people kindly. A quick and enjoyable easy-reading verse novel imported from Australia and published in paperback, THE SIMPLE GIFT is a Great Escape Package I can highly recommend.

An indispensable volume of Native American writing. Every library, home, and school should have a copy.

This anthology of contemporary Native women's voices is the first of its kind to weave a plethora of voices and visions together. Many great authors and works in the book. A worthwhile purchase!