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
From a master of American letters and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series comes a richly illustrated book of eighteen insightful essays about American art, written while he was the art critic at The New York Review of Books. “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.” —Newsday 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 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 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.”

What Feelings Do When No One’s Looking

Author: Tina Oziewicz
Publisher: Elsewhere Editions
ISBN: 1953861288
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.

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.

Visual Intelligence

Author: Amy E. Herman
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544381068
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description
An engrossing guide to seeing—and communicating—more clearly from the groundbreaking course that helps FBI agents, cops, CEOs, ER docs, and others save money, reputations, and lives. How could looking at Monet’s water lily paintings help save your company millions? How can checking out people’s footwear foil a terrorist attack? How can your choice of adjective win an argument, calm your kid, or catch a thief? In her celebrated seminar, the Art of Perception, art historian Amy Herman has trained experts from many fields how to perceive and communicate better. By showing people how to look closely at images, she helps them hone their “visual intelligence,” a set of skills we all possess but few of us know how to use properly. She has spent more than a decade teaching doctors to observe patients instead of their charts, helping police officers separate facts from opinions when investigating a crime, and training professionals from the FBI, the State Department, Fortune 500 companies, and the military to recognize the most pertinent and useful information. Her lessons highlight far more than the physical objects you may be missing; they teach you how to recognize the talents, opportunities, and dangers that surround you every day. Whether you want to be more effective on the job, more empathetic toward your loved ones, or more alert to the trove of possibilities and threats all around us, this book will show you how to see what matters most to you more clearly than ever before. Please note: this ebook contains full-color art reproductions and photographs, and color is at times essential to the observation and analysis skills discussed in the text. For the best reading experience, this ebook should be viewed on a color device.

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.

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.

On Looking

Author: Alexandra Horowitz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439191271
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog, this “elegant and entertaining” (The Boston Globe) explanation of how humans perceive their environments “does more than open our eyes...opens our hearts and minds, too, gently awakening us to a world—in fact, many worlds—we’ve been missing” (USA TODAY). Alexandra Horowitz shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary—to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, “the observation of trifles.” Structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, On Looking features experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. Horowitz also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it. What they see, how they see it, and why most of us do not see the same things reveal the startling power of human attention and the cognitive aspects of what it means to be an expert observer. Page by page, Horowitz shows how much more there is to see—if only we would really look. Trained as a cognitive scientist, she discovers a feast of fascinating detail, all explained with her generous humor and self-deprecating tone. So turn off the phone and other electronic devices and be in the real world—where strangers communicate by geometry as they walk toward one another, where sounds reveal shadows, where posture can display humility, and the underside of a leaf unveils a Lilliputian universe—where, indeed, there are worlds within worlds within worlds.