Ideas, Art, Aesthetics - 5 Books I Love to Share

Sharing books you love with people you like/love/admire/appreciate is one of the most delicious things. You walk around with a shared interior room. You establish an invisible tribe of the heart and head. So, I like/love/admire/appreciate you. Here are the books about ideas, art, aesthetics I want to share with you.

If you want to share with me yours I would be so grateful.


Languages of Art 

by Nelson Goodman

I got this book referred to me by a professor of ancient Chinese calligraphy ( a bit about that experience). It is cerebral and lovely and trusts the reader immensely with discussions of the invisible, the dynamic, the hidden flows that make art move the way it does.

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Kant and the Platypus

by Umberto Eco

With a playful approach Eco gets me to a thoughtful reckoning of the heavy cognitive burden that language bears. 

I have actually bought copies of this book and sent them to friends because I wanted to talk with them about it.

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Twentieth Century Pleasures

by Robert Hass

With a wide range of subjects (from the image/thought of haiku, to contemplations of Tranströmer and Checkov) poet Robert Hass writes clearly and generously about the poetry he has found resources in.

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The Language Instinct

by Steven Pinker

Very much interested in the way we learn and develop language and the way that language overruns the rules we think define it, Pinker puts forth the notion that language isn't a cultural artefact, isn't an invention that set our societies off from their pre-linguistic past through its instrumentality, but instead that language is an inbuilt biological activity that has shaped our evolution as it evolved beside us.

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In Praise of Shadows

by  Junichiro Tanizaki

The way we approach beauty, the things we allow it to say about us, the way it contributes to the moment-to-moment experience of living, this is what Japanese novelist Tanizaki discusses in this brief little discussion on everything from tableware to architecture to space and light.

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Original Pronunciation of Shakespeare - A Short Documentary

Free learning from The Open University http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/english-language --- An introduction by David and Ben Crystal to the 'Original Pronunciation' production of Shakespeare and what they reveal about the history of the English language. --- Study ' Shakespeare: text and performance' at the Open University: http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/u214.htm ---

Linguist David Crystal and his son, actor Ben Crystal explain the differences between English pronunciation now and how it was spoken 400 years ago. 

 

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3 - Vowels: The Short Film

This short film is based on an archival sound recording taken from the 1945 Linguaphone series 'English Pronunciation - A practical handbook for the foreign learner.'

If consonants are the bones of a sound, then vowels are the muscles. And one of the features of English that makes it such a muscular and expressive language is the relatively large array of vowels, shades of vowels available to us. 

​​This poetic and perhaps surprisingly moving film is based on a 1945 Linguaphone instructional recording and brought to us by filmmaker and visual storyteller Temujin Doran.

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