Girl with Dead Bird

Girl with Dead Bird
Author: Volkmar Mühleis
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2018-03-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9462701377

Life and death in a sixteenth-century masterpiece The portrait we have come to call Little Girl with Dead Bird is an enigma. On the one hand, we hardly know anything about this sixteenth-century masterpiece. But even so, on the other hand, the picture fascinates viewers to this day. This painting's indeterminate yet compelling status provides Volkmar Mühleis grounds to look beyond its historical significance and to explore its anthropological scope as well, from an intercultural perspective and, moreover, against the backdrop of its complex of themes concerning life and death. To do so, Mühleis returns to the conceptual premises that frame the relationship between the history of art and the anthropology of images, along with those that juxtapose Western and Eastern philosophies.

Moved by Love

Moved by Love
Author: Mary D. Sheriff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2004-01-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780226752877

No happy endings, though, were imagined for such inspired women writers as Sappho and Heloise, who burned with an erotomania their art could not quench. Even so, Sheriff demonstrates that the perceived connections among sexuality, creativity, and disease also opened artistic opportunities for women - and creative women took full advantage of them."--BOOK JACKET.

Pictures and Tears

Pictures and Tears
Author: James Elkins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2005-08-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1135950121

Art Does art leave you cold? And is that what it's supposed to do? Or is a painting meant to move you to tears? Hemingway was reduced to tears in the midst of a drinking bout when a painting by James Thurber caught his eye. And what's bad about that? In Pictures and Tears, art historian James Elkins tells the story of paintings that have made people cry. Drawing upon anecdotes related to individual works of art, he provides a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past, and a meditation on the curious tearlessness with which most people approach art in the present. Deeply personal, Pictures and Tears is a history of emotion and vulnerability, and an inquiry into the nature of art. This book is a rare and invaluable treasure for people who love art. Also includes an 8-page color insert.

Star Trek Twin Peaks Wallace Gromit Ed Wood Scissorhands Phantom

Star Trek Twin Peaks Wallace Gromit Ed Wood Scissorhands Phantom
Author: Jim Fenn
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 76
Release: 2014-06-04
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 1312251972

Join the hilarious adventures of Japes Timorous Curt, Doc "Doc Bones" Bones, Speck, Scat, Checkers, Walls & Grout, the plasticine pals, Loathsome Foghorn, Blobby and Auger Horny, Danny DeVito as a werewolf (Are you really surprised?), the black Irish comm officer, Toyota O'Hula, New Speck and Speck Classic, Eel Ann, Crammer, Gorge, Head Wood, te Cat Walker, and many more.

Life Exposed

Life Exposed
Author: Adriana Petryna
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-03-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1400845092

On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, are still suffering the effects. Life Exposed is the first book to comprehensively examine the vexed political, scientific, and social circumstances that followed the disaster. Tracing the story from an initial lack of disclosure to post-Soviet democratizing attempts to compensate sufferers, Adriana Petryna uses anthropological tools to take us into a world whose social realities are far more immediate and stark than those described by policymakers and scientists. She asks: What happens to politics when state officials fail to inform their fellow citizens of real threats to life? What are the moral and political consequences of remedies available in the wake of technological disasters? Through extensive research in state institutions, clinics, laboratories, and with affected families and workers of the so-called Zone, Petryna illustrates how the event and its aftermath have not only shaped the course of an independent nation but have made health a negotiated realm of entitlement. She tracks the emergence of a "biological citizenship" in which assaults on health become the coinage through which sufferers stake claims for biomedical resources, social equity, and human rights. Life Exposed provides an anthropological framework for understanding the politics of emergent democracies, the nature of citizenship claims, and everyday forms of survival as they are interwoven with the profound changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Cruel Delight

Cruel Delight
Author: James A. Steintrager
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780253343673

Cruel Investigation investigates the fascination with joyful malice in 18th-century Europe and how this obsession helped inform the very meaning of humanity. James A. Steintrager reveals how the understanding of cruelty moved from an inexplicable, apparently paradoxical "inhuman" pleasure in the misfortune of others to an eminently human trait stemming from will and freedom

A Doghouse Tale

A Doghouse Tale
Author: Bert Oldenhuis
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 579
Release: 2014-06-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1496978552

Case Devries, a cadet at the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, is earning some beer money by working in Eugene Steins textile warehouse on Saturday afternoons. Rosanne, Eugenes sexy little secretary, picks him up from the academy gate and drops him off each Saturday. This leads to the inevitablea relationship doomed to fail. Or does it? It is, in any case, the upbeat to an adventure that, years later, takes Case and his buddy Brian OMalley from their home away from home, the Seamens Church Instituteotherwise known as the Doghouseto India, aboard a ramshackle rust bucket of a freighter called the SS Flower Power. Aptly named for the era in which this adventure takes place and even more so the termination of the era, the Flower Power meets its final destination at the close of the sixties. The crew manning the good ship Flower Power couldnt be more colorful if they had been handpicked by a madman. They range from the utterly chaotic Captain Peachfuzz to the forty-five-year-old, three-hundred-pound John Aruda, an able-bodied seaman and a flower child who rises to every occasion, including arranging a marriage on the high seas. And then there is the mysterious container stowed aboard and buried beneath a load of chemical fertilizer that the Flower Power is carrying to India. The wheeling and dealing he has to do to get the container back where it belongs eventually brings Case into contact with Eugene and Rosanne, the two people he least expected to cross paths with ever again. A Doghouse Tale is the hilarious story of a motley crew sailing a ship held together by baling wire, paint, and a prayer. It touches on the deplorable condition of the US Merchant Marines in the 1960s, when a nation at war pressed old battle wagons such as the Flower Power into service, making those ships the laughingstock of the maritime world. It is also a moving story, showing that when the chips are down, a multicultural crew bands together as one to come to the aid of a shipmate.

Professor Lundy's Guide to Rock Music Connoisseurship

Professor Lundy's Guide to Rock Music Connoisseurship
Author: Duane Emerson Lundy
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2023-10-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 162734456X

This empirical and theoretical book should be of interest to anyone who dares to consider the contentious topic of measuring and justifying aesthetic value in music, as well as the issue of how experts compare to nonexperts in terms of aesthetic fluency, aesthetic sensitivity and aesthetic judgment in appraising music. The book should be both practical and personal for anyone who has a music collection and loves to see it grow continuously but wisely. What makes someone an expert? The key issue tackled here is how one develops into such a connoisseur of music. Overall, the book should spark much healthy debate about rock music quality and aesthetics in general, both among scholars of aesthetics and the musically passionate general public. Many of the ideas for connoisseur development for music could also be applied to appraisal in other areas of aesthetics beyond music, such as films, visual art, or literature. Words of Praise Professor Lundy's Guide to Rock Music Connoisseurship is simply fantastic. It is written with elegance, eloquence, and passion. His vast knowledge of rock’n’roll will enlighten every reader, and his enthusiasm for this topic is infectious. The book is designed to be comprehensible to any reader, but also carefully cited to please the most demanding scholar. He successfully aims to teach the reader how to become expert in evaluating the aesthetic quality of music, using a precision system to guide us into deeper and defensible judgements on what pieces of music are the best and which are the worst. This is a beautiful book that enriches the heart and brightens the mind. --Rhett Diessner, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Lewis-Clark State College, author of Understanding the Beauty Appreciation Trait: Empirical Research on Seeking Beauty in All Things Aesthetic judgments of music are important, but poorly understood. To the everyday listener, they may seem arbitrary or otherwise inexplicable. In this book, Professor Lundy offers an unashamedly positive view on aesthetic judgments, emphasizing their rational nature and showing how various non-aesthetic biases that do exist can be minimized. The result is a joyful celebration of music, science, and connoisseurship, which is sure to spark further interest and debate on this fascinating topic. --Professor Patrik N. Juslin, Music Psychology Group, Uppsala University, Sweden

Esthetics of the Moment

Esthetics of the Moment
Author: Thomas M. Kavanagh
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015-11-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812202449

The literature and art of the French Enlightenment is everywhere marked by an intense awareness of the moment. The parallel projects of living in, representing, and learning from the moment run through the Enlightenment's endeavors as tokens of an ambition and a heritage imposing its only and ultimately impossible cohesion. In this illuminating study, Thomas M. Kavanagh argues that Enlightenment culture and its tensions, contradictions, and achievements flow from a subversive attention to the present as present, freed from the weight of past and future. Examining a wide sweep of literary and artistic culture, Kavanagh argues against the traditional view of the Age of Reason as one of coherent, recognizable ideology expressed in a structured narrative form. In literature, he analyzes the moment at work in the inebriating lightness of Marivaux's repartee; the new-found freedom of Lahontan's and Rousseau's ideals of a consciousness limited to the present; Diderot's championing of Epicurean epistemology; Graffigny's portrayal of abrupt cultural displacement; and Casanova's penchant for chance's redefining moment. The moment in art theory and practice is explored in such forms as de Piles's defense of color; Du Bos's foregrounding of perception; Watteau's indulgence in a corporeal present; Chardin's dismantling of mimesis; and Boucher's and Fragonard's thematics of desire.