On Looking

Author: Alexandra Horowitz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471126226
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Book Description
You are missing at least eighty percent of what is happening around you right now. You are missing what is happening in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. In marshalling your attention to these words, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses. This ignorance is useful: indeed, we compliment it and call it concentration. It enables us to not just notice the shapes on the page, but to absorb them as intelligible words, phrases, ideas. Alas, we tend to bring this focus to every activity we do. In so doing, it is inevitable that we also bring along attention's companion: inattention to everything else. This book begins with that inattention. It is not a book about how to bring more focus to your reading of Tolstoy; it is not about how to multitask, attending to two or three or four tasks at once. It is not about how to avoid falling asleep at a public lecture, or at your grandfather's tales of boyhood misadventures. It is about attending to the joys of the unattended, the perceived 'ordinary'. Even when engaged in the simplest of activities - taking a walk around the block - we pay so little attention to most of what is right before us that we are sleepwalkers in our own lives. This book is about that walk around the block, and how to rediscover the extraordinary things that we are missing in our ordinary activities.

On Looking

Author: Lia Purpura
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1936747219
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
“These pieces are not so much essays as prose poems, lyrical hymns to beauty and aesthetics.” —Publishers Weekly Lia Purpura’s daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura’s hand is clearly guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit instance, sugar eggs, binoculars, and Emerson’s words: “I like the silent church before the sermon begins.” In “Autopsy Report,” Purpura takes an intimate look at the ruin of our bodies after death, examining the “dripping fruits” of organs and the spine in its “wet, red earth.” A similar reverence is held for the alien jellyfish in “On Form,” where she notes that “in order to see their particular beauty . . . we have to suspend our fear, we have to love contradiction.” Her essays question art and its responses as well as its responsibilities, challenge familiar and familial relationships, and alter the borders between the violent and the luminous, the harrowing and the sensual. Above all, Purpura’s essays are a call to notice. She is writer-as-telescope, kaleidoscope, microscope, and mirror. As she says: “By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare.” This is, indeed, a rare and startling treasure of a book from a recipient of numerous awards for both prose and poetry. “Purpura is the real deal, and so is every successive sentence in this collection. A cornucopiac vocabulary is married to a strict economy of expression; an offbeat curiosity is married to the courage of difficult witnessing.” —Albert Goldbarth “Purpura’s prose is a system of delicate shocks—leaps and connections and syncopated revelations, all in the service of the spirit negotiating the truth of its experience.” —Sven Birkerts

Still Looking

Author: John Updike
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1400044189
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
When, in 1989, a collection of John Updike’s writings on art appeared under the title Just Looking, a reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle commented, “He refreshes for us the sense of prose opportunity that makes art a sustaining subject to people who write about it.” In the sixteen years since Just Looking was published, he has continued to serve as an art critic, mostly for The New York Review of Books, and from fifty or so articles has selected, for this richly illustrated book, eighteen that deal with American art. After beginning with early American portraits, landscapes, and the transatlantic career of John Singleton Copley, Still Looking then considers the curious case of Martin Johnson Heade and extols two late-nineteenth-century masters, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. Next, it discusses the eccentric pre-moderns James McNeill Whistler and Albert Pinkham Ryder, the competing American Impressionists and Realists in the early twentieth century, and such now-historic avant-garde figures as Alfred Stieglitz, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Elie Nadelman. Two appreciations of Edward Hopper and appraisals of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol round out the volume. America speaks through its artists. As Updike states in his introduction, “The dots can be connected from Copley to Pollock: the same tense engagement with materials, the same demand for a morality of representation, can be discerned in both.” On Just Looking “Some of these essays are marvelous examples of critical explanation, in which the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from work to work in an exhibition until a deep understanding of the art emerges.” —Arthur Danto, The New York Times Book Review “These are remarkably elegant little essays, dense in thought and perception but offhandedly casual in style. Their brevity makes more acute the sense of regret one feels to see them end.” —Jeremy Strick, Newsday

What Feelings Do When No One’s Looking

Author: Tina Oziewicz
Publisher: Elsewhere Editions
ISBN: 1953861296
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 72

Book Description
An unruly cast of emotions come alive in this romping dreamworld, a place Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things could call home Curiosity, a lithe and floppy-eared creature, perches above the open world and gazes out with a zippy blend of hope, wonder, and longing. From the tip of a chimney, we bound into the quiet and mischievous world of feelings, meeting a troupe of tufted creatures as we go. Sympathy helps snails cross a sidewalk to safety, fear pirouettes in an attempt to camouflage with wallflowers, and pleasure reclines across a doily-donned reading chair, sipping a cup of tea. Elsewhere, our insecurities – pesky, cavorting beings – build intricate cages and stride about with clattering sets of keys. Tina Oziewicz’s words hum with truth, and Aleksandra Zajac’s illustrations bloom and burst with charming details like a sail constructed out of a pair of billowing long johns or a red slipper falling from a contented paw. Taking in the perfect harmony of this book is like taking a long gulp from a trusty thermos and filling up with warmth. What Feelings Do When No One’s Looking surprises and soothes, inspires us to feel.

Looking at the Overlooked

Author: Norman Bryson
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780232527
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
In this, the only up-to-date critical work on still life painting in any language, Norman Bryson analyzes the origins, history and logic of still life, one of the most enduring forms of Western painting. The first essay is devoted to Roman wall-painting while in the second the author surveys a major segment in the history of still life, from seventeenth-century Spanish painting to Cubism. The third essay tackles the controversial field of seventeenth-century Dutch still life. Bryson concludes in the final essay that the persisting tendency to downgrade the genre of still life is profoundly rooted in the historical oppression of women. In Looking at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson is at his most brilliant. These superbly written essays will stimulate us to look at the entire tradition of still life with new and critical eyes.

Inside of a Dog

Author: Alexandra Horowitz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1847379575
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
As an unabashed dog lover, Alexandra Horowitz is naturally curious about what her dog thinks and what she knows. As a cognitive scientist she is intent on understanding the minds of animals who cannot say what they know or feel. This is a fresh look at the world of dogs -- from the dog's point of view. The book introduces the reader to the science of the dog -- their perceptual and cognitive Abilities -- and uses that introduction to draw a picture of what it might be like to bea dog. It answers questions no other dog book can -- such as: What is a dog's sense of time? Does she miss me? Want friends? Know when she's been bad? Horowitz's journey, and the insights she uncovered from studying her own dog, Pumpernickel, allowed her to understand her dog better, and appreciate her more through that understanding. The reader will be able to do the same with their own dog. This is not another dog training book. Instead, Inside of a Dogwill allow dog owners to look at their pets' behaviour in a different, and revealing light, enabling them to understand their dogs and enjoy their relationship even more.

Looking Back

Author: Lois Lowry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Two-time Newbery Medalist Lois Lowry offers an intimate look at pivotal moments that affected her life, inspired her writing, and often evolved into her rich novels.

Our Dogs, Ourselves

Author: Alexandra Horowitz
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1982137622
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
From Alexandra Horowitz, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Inside of a Dog, an eye-opening, informative, and wholly entertaining examination and celebration of the human-canine relationship for the curious dog owner and science-lover alike. We keep dogs and are kept by them. We love dogs and (we assume) we are loved by them. We buy them sweaters, toys, shoes; we are concerned with their social lives, their food, and their health. The story of humans and dogs is thousands of years old but is far from understood. In Our Dogs, Ourselves, Alexandra Horowitz explores all aspects of this unique and complex interspecies pairing. As Horowitz considers the current culture of dogdom, she reveals the odd, surprising, and contradictory ways we live with dogs. We celebrate their individuality but breed them for sameness. Despite our deep emotional relationships with dogs, legally they are property to be bought, sold, abandoned, or euthanized as we wish. Even the way we speak to our dogs is at once perplexing and delightful. In thirteen thoughtful and charming chapters, Our Dogs, Ourselves affirms our profound affection for this most charismatic of animals—and opens our eyes to the companions at our sides as never before.

Looking on the Bright Side with Elmo

Author: Jill Colella
Publisher: Lerner Publications
ISBN: 9781728423791
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 24

Book Description
Elmo and other familiar faces from Sesame Street learn about positivity and how thoughts impact us. Kids will discover that all feelings are valid, what it means to be an optimist, and how to look on the bright side.

Looking Back on the End of the World

Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have surpassed history. First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have surpassed history. Unlike recent works that make history end with the consumer, or project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essays perform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the end of the world. The idea of a unified world, they claim, has given way to new sensibilities about history. The essays evaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offer positive approaches to the gamble of thinking required in a society without traditional subjects and institutions. Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules of the game, and any nostalgia for starting from the familiar in terms of intellectual critique is doomed. Collectively, the authors sketch the unfamiliarity of the new, those moments when our categories dissolve in the face of connections and relations that announce all sorts of ends. And other things besides. Contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Gunter Gebauer, Dieter Lenzen, Edgar Morin, Gerburg Treusch-Dieter, Paul Virilio