. . But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky." --James Longenbach, The NationThe poems in Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital consider personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it is invisible. An extreme example is the abandoned newborn. At the Foundling Hospital of eighteenth-century London, in a benign and oddly bureaucratic process, each new infant was identified by a duly recorded token. A minimal, charged particle of meaning, the token might be a coin or brooch or thimble--or sometimes a poem, such as the one quoted in full in Pinsky's poem "The Foundling Tokens." A foundling may inherit less of a past than an orphan, but with a wider set of meanings. The foundling soul needs to be adopted, and it needs to be adaptive.In one poem, French and German appear as originally Creole tongues, invented by the rough needs of conquered peoples and their Roman masters. In another, creators from scorned or excluded groups--among them Irving Berlin, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, and W.E.B. Du Bois--speak, as does the Greek tragic chorus, in the first-person singular.In these poems, a sometimes desperate, perpetual reimagining of identity, on the scale of one life or of human history, is deeply related to music: The quest is lyrical, whether the subject is as specific as "the emanation of a dead star still alive" or as personal as the "pinhole iris of your mortal eye."

    The same family appears in Act Two 25 years older and back in London, only now it’s 1979. Cloud 9 is about relationships between women and men, men and men, women and women. It is about sex, work, mothers, Africa, power, children, grandmothers, politics, money, Queen Victoria, and Sex. Cloud 9 premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre in 1979 and has since been staged all over the world.

    These works are often produced by collectives or come out of a community context; they emphasize participation, dialogue, and action, and appear in situations ranging from theater to activism to urban planning to visual art to health care. Engaged with the texture of living, these art works often blur the line between art and life. This book offers the first global portrait of a complex and exciting mode of cultural production--one that has virtually redefined contemporary art practice. Living as Form grew out of a major exhibition at Creative Time in New York City. Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey of more than 100 projects selected by a thirty-person curatorial advisory team; each project is documented by a selection of color images. The artists include the Danish collective Superflex, who empower communities to challenge corporate interest; Turner Prize nominee Jeremy Deller, creator of socially and politically charged performance works; Women on Waves, who provide abortion services and information to women in regions where the procedure is illegal; and Santiágo Cirugeda, an architect who builds temporary structures to solve housing problems.Living as Form contains commissioned essays from noted critics and theorists who look at this phenomenon from a global perspective and broaden the range of what constitutes this form.

    The author of Composing a Life reveals how the continuation of learning throughout life can add untold pleasure and understanding--and help ensure our future.

    Writing at the height of his career, Rand articulated in his slender volume the pioneering vision that all design should seamlessly integrate form and function. This facsimile edition preserves Rand's original 1947 essay with the adjustments he made to its text and imagery for a revised printing in 1970, and adds only an informative and inspiring new foreword by design luminary Michael Bierut. As relevant today as it was when first published, this classic treatise is an indispensable addition to the library of every designer.

    A painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another, a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. Vermeer's images captivate us with their beauty and mystery: What stories lie behind these stunningly rendered moments? As Timothy Brook shows us, these pictures, which seem so intimate, actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding world. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur, which European explorers got from Native Americans in exchange for weapons. Those beaver pelts, in turn, financed the voyages of sailors seeking new routes to China. There--with silver mined in Peru--Europeans would purchase, by the thousands, the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time. Moving outward from Vermeer's studio, Brook traces the web of trade that was spreading across the globe. The wharves of Holland, wrote a French visitor, were an inventory of the possible. Vermeer's Hat shows just how rich this inventory was, and how the urge to acquire the goods of distant lands was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood.

    Invaluable for students, arts professionals and other aspiring writers, the book first navigates readers through the key elements of style and content, from the aims and structure of a piece to its tone and language. Brimming with practical tips that range across the complete spectrum of art-writing, the second part of the book is organized around its specific forms, including academic essays; press releases and news articles; texts for auction and exhibition catalogues, gallery guides and wall labels; op-ed journalism and exhibition reviews; and writing for websites and blogs.In counseling the reader against common pitfalls—such as jargon and poor structure—Gilda Williams points instead to the power of close looking and research, showing how to deploy language effectively; how to develop new ideas; and how to construct compelling texts. More than 30 illustrations throughout support closely analysed case studies of the best writing, in Source Texts by 64 authors, including Claire Bishop, Thomas Crow, T.J. Demos, Okwui Enwezor, Dave Hickey, John Kelsey, Chris Kraus, Rosalind Krauss, Stuart Morgan, Hito Steyerl, and Adam Szymczyk.Supplemented by a general bibliography, advice on the use and misuse of grammar, and tips on how to construct your own contemporary art library, How to Write About Contemporary Art is the essential handbook for all those interested in communicating about the art of today.

    At kitchen tables all across the country, parents agonize over whether to burden their children with loans or to sacrifice their own financial security by taking out a second mortgage or draining their retirement savings. Indebted takes readers into the homes of middle-class families throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life.Caitlin Zaloom gained the confidence of numerous parents and their college-age children, who talked candidly with her about stressful and intensely personal financial matters that are usually kept private. In this remarkable book, Zaloom describes the profound moral conflicts for parents as they try to honor what they see as their highest parental duty--providing their children with opportunity--and shows how parents and students alike are forced to take on enormous debts and gamble on an investment that might not pay off. What emerges is a troubling portrait of an American middle class fettered by the student finance complex--the bewildering labyrinth of government-sponsored institutions, profit-seeking firms, and university offices that collect information on household earnings and assets, assess family needs, and decide who is eligible for aid and who is not.Superbly written and unflinchingly honest, Indebted breaks through the culture of silence surrounding the student debt crisis, revealing the unspoken costs of sending our kids to college.

    She has a crew of close girlfriends to keep her social calendar active, and is celebrating finally securing employment in her chosen field. While always free-spirited, Kristy is getting tired of the revolving door – or more accurately, bed – of random guys and failed dates, and comes up with a plan to get her act together when it comes to the opposite sex. That idea is quickly shot down by her bestie Breely Laver and replaced with a bet she can’t refuse – a free trip to Paris with her yoga instructor BFF if she can go six months without sex.Enter in charming, sexy, delicious Grey Grahl. Kristy tries to navigate a spicy new relationship without giving away her bet, while also dealing with an incredibly sensitive crisis at her job. Her first year as a full-time elementary school guidance counselor starts off with a devastating situation with a young student, and Kristy finds herself struggling to stay above water in both her professional and personal life. With her girlfriends as a support system, Kristy navigates troubled times at the school and agrees to come clean with Grey. This first book in a six-part girlfriend series introduces you to Kristy, Breely, Nora, Lauren, Tinsley and Scarlett, and takes readers on six individual stories about relationships, career choices, personal conflict and the bond of friendship.

    Associating freely, they took a psychoanalytical perspective for a lengthy exploration of Abramovic’s biography and art and their interrelation. ​Abramovic went into this discussion in hopes of reaching a better understanding of herself, her personality, and her work. Conversations with artists are widely available, she notes, but a chance to use psychoanalysis to put an artist’s life and work in context is much rarer. The resulting book is neither a therapist’s report nor a Fischer’s analysis of Abramovic. Rather, it is a search for understanding conducted by the pair, looking for the structures and dynamics that underlie Abramovic’s life and art. The dialogues are presented along with Fischer’s comments on them and images of some of Abramovic’s performances that are referred to in the discussion.

    Building off of the strengths and insights of her work as a scholar and a teacher, Kellerman critically reexamines our most strongly-held assumptions about the role of leadership in driving success. Revealing which of our beliefs have become dangerously out-of-date thanks to advances in social media culture, she also calls into question the value of the so-called “leadership industry” itself. Asking whether leadership can truly be taught, Kellerman forces us to think critically and expansively about how to thrive as leaders in a global information age.

    The text investigates all aspects of photography - aesthetic, documentary, commercial and technical - while placing it in historical context. It includes three technical sections with detailed information about equipment and processes. This edition also updates important new international work from the 1980s and 1990s.

    Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush warned her countrymen from taking the bait and emigrating to Canada; Catharine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada and Life in the Clearings celebrated her new-found freedom in Canada's classless society, and the spirit of industry. Both women had great influence on England's understanding of colonial Canada, as well as on Canada's own vision of its young self. Their writings have become central to all Canadian studies courses and are considered classic examples of pioneer memoirs.

    Thundering down through the centuries comes the legend of chivalry carved out by EXCALIBUR - the magic sword of Arthur Pendragon - with all the mysticism and heroic courage of the Arthurian legend transmuted to a time and a place remote from Camelot - but linked to it in the still desperate struggle against evil.

    Sara Davidson follows the three—Susie, Tasha, and Sara herself—from their first meeting in 1962, through the events that "radicalized" them in unexpected ways in the decade after the years in Berkeley. Susie navigates through the Free Speech Movement and the early women's movement in Berkeley, and Tasha enters the trendy New York art and society scene. Sara, a journalist, travels the country reporting on the stories of the sixties.The private lives that Davidson reconstructs are set against the public background of the time. Figures such as Timothy Leary, Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, and Joan Baez are here, as are the many young people who sought alternatives to "the establishment" through whatever means seemed worth exploring: radical politics, meditation, drugs, group sex, or dropping out. Davidson's honest and detailed chronicle reveals the hopes, confusion, and disillusionment of a generation whose rites of passage defined one of the most contentious decades of this century.