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This 1922 book by poet and sometime cultural critic Vachel Lindsay might have been the first to treat the then-new medium of moving pictures as an art form, one that was potentially as rich, complex, mysterious as far older ones, and whose physical and aesthetic properties were only starting to be understood. The highlight of the book might be “The Motion Picture of Fairy Splendor,” which examines the relationship between film storytelling, magic, myths, legends and bedtime stories. It’s discombobulating, in a good way, to read Lindsay’s attempts to grapple with what, precisely, cinema is. Being supposedly sophisticated 21st century people, we all feel as though we know what cinema is, and don’t need to have the basics explained to us, but this is really just vanity and ignorance talking. Bottom line: You haven’t really, seriously thought about movies — what they are, and what they can and cannot do, and become — until you’ve read this book. (Salon.com)...

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Art

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...A cycle of poems of yes and no, rumors of life dancing on this islet sphere riding the blind career of outward motion. These rhymes are threnodies and hosannas among nurseries and crypts, hummings to fright hants habiting dingy trails through a wilderness, attempts to stay awhile this side the lichgate by becoming a gossip for the ineffable. They are a literary aesthetic concerning the quicksilver bric-a-brac on the shelves of this what-not of becoming, a naming of smoke, a grasping at echoes, that I might hide in posterity's pocket another day, another night, beyond the terrible hunger of the past's insatiable forgetting. They are wild habits of reluctance. ...

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and his sister Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) played important roles in the artistic milieu of Victorian England. Members of a highly cultured Italian immigrant family, they achieved widespread fame and exerted a significant influence upon the poetry and art of their time. Dante Gabriel was a co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters, contributing to a renewed interest in medieval themes and techniques. Both his painting and his poetry anticipated the Aesthetic movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His deep intellect and highly emotional nature are reflected in poems that exhibit a combination of complex symbolism and powerful feeling. He was a master of the sonnet form, as best exemplified in his book The House of Life. Christina served as a model for some of her brother’s early paintings, and she was closely identified with the Pre-Raphaelites. Her poetry is more accessible and displays perhaps a greater felicity of expression than her brother’s. Today she holds a higher reputation, often being ranked (sometimes rather condescendingly) among the leading women...

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Poetry

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Urbanization expanded tremendously, thus brunging about grave and extremely adverse changes to the hydrology, as well as to the water quality and the ecological balance of urbanized areas. In order to deal with flood waters in urban areas, mostly drainage systems were developed. However, the expansion of networks that collect water and transport it to the sea is a classic approach of dealing with rainwater runoff that has grave quantity and environmental consequences and is thus nowadays hydraulically inefficient, technically doubtful, environmentally aggravating and management erroneous. The sustainable approach to the problem is a practice trying to “imitate” nature. This means, among others, that rainwater management is regarded not just as a technical work, but primarily as planning of the area emphasizing on functionality, on making the area more attractive and on conserving biodiversity. In order to manage urban runofff in a aeiphorian manner, numerous structural, as well as regulating techniques, regulations and administrative measures have been developed, all aiming in minimizing urbanization consequences by water saving, ...

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Paradoxism is an avant-garde movement in literature, art, philosophy, science, based on excessive use of antitheses, antinomies, contradictions, parables, odds, paradoxes in creations. It was set up by the editor since 1980’s and promulgates a counter-time/ counter-sense creation. Paradoxism started as an anti-totalitarian protest against a closed society, Romania of 1980’s. Why was the movement based on contradictions? Because we lived in that society a double life: an official one – propagated by the political system, and another one real. In mass-media it was promulgated that “our life is wonderful”, but in reality “our life was miserable”. The paradox flourishing! And then we took the creation in derision, in opposite sense, in a syncretic way. Thus the paradoxism was born....

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In the history of thought and creation, the decisive events, the great and significant moments, the strongly affirmative stages - then the imposition of the optimizing novelties - have depended on the name and prestige of a personality. Referring to those, we personalize further on. The examples are extremely numerous, even in our nearest past. When we mention a creation - in the largest sense of the term - with the name of the personality who illustrates it most extensively at a given time, we state precisely the specific importance of it; we give it, with other words, the identity to which we can refer continuously with full knowledge and without causing any confusion among the receivers. The facts are called with the name of the man who produced them, and in this way we can compose a parallel onomastic dictionary, in which the work is included in the person’s space, keeping its content. The consecrated proper names evolve through quickly imposed habits, a large range of increments that announce the essential outline of their peak production. No space for ambiguity remains when we address to readers or listeners who are...

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In aesthetics, the paradox means the apparent resolution of an enigmatic situation (the result of such a process is the satisfaction of a distention), the emotional moving force being the unforeseen, the unexpected (which generates and also perturbs a new tension). Therefore, the paradox is simultaneously a conclusion and a provocation, consisting in the concomitance of the opposites, which gives it a real specificity. The paradox is of the nature of an explosive nucleus resulting from the fusion of satisfaction and anxiety. The first situation, during an instant, is derived from the appearance of something with a convincing meaning; the second one, that comes immediately, is the perception of something concealed and absurd. Something, that is dissimulated under the level of the logical acceptance, jumps out abruptly in the main point to consider and constrains to acknowledgment. It looks as if it were an error, but not so big as to take alarm and not even to be clearly inhibited. It is a mechanism of exception in thought, that will accepted with the complicity of a total sympathetic tolerance. The aesthetic behaviour of ...

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Cyclopedia of issues in modern philosophy: The philosophy of science and religion, the cognitive sciences, cultural studies, aesthetics, art and literature, the philosophy of economics, the philosophy of psychology, and ethics....

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Cyclopedia of issues in modern philosophy: The philosophy of science and religion, the cognitive sciences, cultural studies, aesthetics, art and literature, the philosophy of economics, the philosophy of psychology, and ethics....

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Arthur Schopenhauer, an early 19th century philosopher, made significant contributions to metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. His work also informed theories of evolution and psychology, largely through his theory of the will to power – a concept which Nietzsche famously adopted and developed. Despite this, he is today, as he was during his life, overshadowed by his contemporary, Hegel. Schopenhauer's social/psychological views, put forth in this work and in others, are directly derived from his metaphysics, which was strongly influenced by Eastern thought. His pessimism forms an interesting and perhaps questionable contrast with his obvious joy in self-expression, both in the elegance of his prose and in his practice of playing the flute nightly. His brilliance, poetry, and crushing pessimism can be seen immediately in this work, as for example in this claim from the first chapter: The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one ...

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Philosophy

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On preservation of the Western rights, freedoms and quality of life in 21st century and beyond

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Systemic approach to life of the highly cultured people provides them with higher level of happiness simply because their lives are better organized, risks are covered, reserves are maintained, dangers avoided, contacts established and so on so forth. Culture is not something that comes only with DNA, but genetic pre-disposition towards culture exists without doubt. Otherwise there would be no examples of people raising themselves above the scum they were born in and reaching high levels of society. Understanding of the elements of high culture, its systemic approach to organizing one’s life, can be practiced by virtually everybody. One just needs to want to elevate themselves and work towards that goal, which may involve getting better training and education, moving to a different neighborhood, getting a different job, spending time on more important things rather than on leisure, quitting drinking and smoking, refusing drugs, taking care of health, concentrating on the upbringing of the children and helping them in their adult life, babysitting grand-children, watching over quality of food supply and keeping the family ...

Table of Contents Details
Table of Contents Introduction iii Table of Contents iv About this book ix Who should not read this book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Who is this book for? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Response to our critics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x About the authors xiii I What do we want to preserve and why? 1 1 Foreword 3 2 Measuring the quality of life 5 2.1 Individual happiness and self-fulfillment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.2 Individual rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2.3 Social harmony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3 Checks and balances 11 3.1 Acceptable personal risk and responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 4 What is worth to fight for? 15 4.1 Security of the person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 4.2 Personal and societal wealth . . . . . . . . . . . . ....