The varied forms of Leonard Bernstein's musical creativity have been recognized and enjoyed by millions. These lectures, Mr. Bernstein's most recent venture in musical explication, will make fascinating reading as well. Virgil Thomson says of the lectures: "Nobody anywhere presents this material so warmly, so sincerely, so skillfully. As musical mind-openers they are first class; as pedagogy they are matchless". Mr. Bernstein considers music ranging from Hindu ragas through Mozart and Ravel, to Copland, suggesting a worldwide, innate musical grammar. Folk music, pop songs, symphonies, modal, tonal, atonal, well-tempered and ill-tempered works all find a place in these discussions. Each, Mr. Bernstein suggests, has roots in a universal language central to all artistic creation. Using certain linguistic analogies, he explores the ways in which this language developed and can be understood as an aesthetic surface. Drawing on his insights as a master composer and conductor, Mr. Bernstein also explores what music means below the surface: the symbols and metaphors which exist in every musical piece, of whatever sort. And, finally, Mr. Bernstein analyzes twentieth century crises in the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, finding even here a transformation of all that has gone before, as part of the poetry of expression, through its roots in the earth of human experience. Phonograph records are included in this book, with Mr. Bernstein's own speaking and playing of certain sections, in which musical sounds are crucial for understanding. These talks, written and delivered when Leonard Bernstein was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, are the newest of the author's literary achievements. In addition to a distinguished career as conductor, pianist, and composer, Mr. Bernstein is the recipient of many television Emmys for the scripts of his Young People's Concerts, Omnibus programs, and others, and is the author of The Infinite Variety of Music and The Joy of Music, for which he received the Christopher Award.

The drama of consciousness and maturation in the growth of a poet's mind is traced from Wordsworth's earliest poems to The Excursion of 1814. Mr. Hartman follows Wordsworth's growth into self-consciousness, his realization of the autonomy of the spirit, and his turning back to nature. The apocalyptic bias is brought out, perhaps for the first time since Bradley's Oxford Lectures , and without slighting in any way his greatness as a nature poet. Rather, a dialectical relation is established between his visionary temper and the slow and vacillating growth of the humanized or sympathetic imagination. Mr. Hartman presents a phenomenology of the mind with important bearings on the Romantic movement as a whole and as confirmation of Wordsworth's crucial position in the history of English poetry. Mr. Hartman is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. "A most distinguished book, subtle, penetrating, profound."--Rene Wellek. "If it is the purpose of criticism to illuminate, to evaluate, and to send the reader back to the text for a fresh reading, Hartman has succeeded in establishing the grounds for such a renewal of appreciation of Wordsworth."--Donald Weeks, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

A re-publication of DOrtothy Parker'spoems in Enough Rope

In linked pieces Patti Smith tells the story of a man on a journey to see the Southern Cross, who is reflecting on his life and fighting the illness that is consuming him. Metaphoric and dreamy, this tale of transformation arises from Smith's knowledge of Mapplethorpe as a young man and as a mature artist, his close relationship with his patron and friend, Sam Wagstaff, and his years surviving AIDS and his ascent into death. Rich in detail, it is filled with references to Mapplethorpe's work and shows the man beneath the persona. Set against photographs by Mapplethorpe, the work emerges as a hymn, a prayer, a fable wishing him Godspeed on his latest journey."She was once our savage Rimbaud, but suffering has turned her into our St. John of the Cross, a mystic full of compassion."--Edmund White

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Film. Jewish Studies. Edited by Julian Kabza. Translated by Ian Thompson, Anna O'Meara, Julian Kabza, Nadege LeJeune, and Charles Penwarden. Introduction by Adrian Martin. Forward by Frédérique Devaux. Interview with Isou by Roland Sabatier. Afterword by Erik Bullot. "Who is Isou? Some may know that he was the founder and leader of a movement in art and thought named Lettrism. Some may know the remarkable film he made a year before he wrote his manifesto, the Treatise on Slime and Eternity, a breakthrough work of feature-length experimentation that was to win fans including Stan Brakhage--Isou himself would coldly remark, many years later, that Jean-Luc Godard and Guy Debord (to name only two luminaries whom he considered his mortal enemies) stole everything from it. Some might have come to the legend of Isou through the fond passage devoted to him in Greil Marcus' book on the distant origins of punk, Lipstick Traces--a book whose subtitle evokes 'a secret history of the 20th century.' In that book, Marcus tells the fine story of his teenage niece stumbling upon the photos on his desk of a young Isou in the late 1940s, and mistaking the artist for a contemporary pop star. And Isou did indeed look the part--especially in a self-portrait which was an example of what the Lettrists called hypergraphics, a work mixing the media of photography, painting, drawing, and Lettrist poetry."--Adrian Martin, from the introduction "Isou chipped language down to the bone that it might build its flesh up again, fresh and new. It is one of the grand aesthetic visions of the late twentieth century. His cinema, in particular, is a marvelous document of the secret history of our times. Here at last is the book that, for Anglophone readers and beyond, cements his fleeting presence for all time."--McKenzie Wark "Long-overdue, this translation of Isou's masterpiece--together with its contextual essays and interviews by Martin, Devaux, Sabatier, and Bullot--will be a monumental resource for international research into the origins of the Lettrist movement along with postwar Experimental Film and Media Art."--Andrew V. Uroskie

A one-man think-tank for the New Left, Paul Goodman wrote over thirty books, most of them before his decade of fame as a social critic in the Sixties. A Paul Goodman Reader that does him justice must be a compendious volume, with excerpts not only from best-sellers like Growing Up Absurd, but also from his landmark books on education, community planning, anarchism, psychotherapy, language theory, and poetics. Samples as well from The Empire City, a comic novel reviewers compared to Don Quixote, prize-winning short stories, and scores of poems that led America's most respected poetry reviewer, Hayden Carruth, to exclaim, "Not one dull page. It's almost unbelievable." Goodman called himself as an old-fashioned man of letters, which meant that all these various disciplines and occasions added up to a single abiding concern for the human plight in perilous times, and for human promise and achieved grandeur, love and hope.

Originally published in 1897, this early works is a fascinating novel of the period and still an interesting read today. Contents include; The function of Latin, Chansons De Geste, The Matter of Britain, Antiquity in Romance, The making of English and the settlement of European Prosody, Middle High German Poetry, The 'Fox, ' The 'Rose, ' and the minor Contributions of France, Icelandic and Provencal, The Literature of the Peninsulas, and Conclusion..... Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwor