28 posts tagged “good books”

Shame Attacking Exercises

Nov 12, 2008
Post a comment

When Panic Attacks: The New, Drug-Free Anxiety Therapy That Can Change Your Life

David D. Md Burns

This is such a fun read! One of my favorite parts in this book is how Burns describes a technique called the shame attacking exercise. In short, you do something insane in public in order to deliberately make a fool of yourself and become immune to what other people think of you. In Plutarch's life of Cato, he describes Cato wearing ridiculous clothes around Rome for this same purpose! Here is an excerpt from this book about shame attacking exercises:

"I first learned about Shame Attacking Exercises following a workshop I presented for Dr. Ellis's institute in New york. After my presentation, I went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant with several of his colleagues. It was a popular restaurant, and we had to wait in a long line to be seated. The line curled around inside the restaurant, so we were standing near people who were already eating.

I told one of Dr. Ellis's colleagues that I'd heard about Shame Attacking Exercises, but I didn't know exactly how they worked. He explained that you intentionally do something goofy in public so you can get over the fear of making a fool of yourself. He said that the only way to understand Shame Attacking Exercises was to try one yourself, and explained all the trainees at Dr. Ellis's institute had to do Shame Attacking Exercises as a part of their training.

I asked if he could give me an example of a Shame Attacking Exercise that he'd done. He said it would be even better for me simply to try one while we were standing in line; then i'd know exactly how they worked. I felt a bit uneasy and asked what he had in mind. He said I could walk up to the people at one of the tables and ask them if i could sample their food. This sounded totally bizarre, and a wave of panic gripped my heart. I kicked myself and wished I hadn't asked about Shame attacking Exercises!

However, I felt enormous social pressure from the group I was with. They al jumped in and said they all done Shame Attacking Exercises and that I should do one too. I could see that they weren't going to take no for an answer, so I reluctantly walked over to the table where six people were eating. THeir table was covered with a variety of tasty looking dishes. I commented on how great the food looked and asked if it tasted as good as it looked. They said it was terrific and told me they'd been coming to this restaurant for years. I was hoping they;d spontaneously offer to let me have a taste of one of the dishes, but that didn't happen.

I looked around nervously and noticed that all my colleagues were staring at me. This was my moment of truth! So i swallowed hard, pointed at one of the dishes and said, "i know this sounds incredibly eccentric, but i was wondering what that dish tastes like. I don't suppose you'd let me taste it, would you?"

They didn't seem at all perturbed and said "Sure@ Here, have some@" Much to my surprise they offered me a fork and encouraged me to taste the dish. I tasted it and said it was fabulous. Then they said, "try this one too. it's fantastic." so i tasted another dish, and it was also super. Suddenly all the people from the institute converged around the table and asked if they could try some too. The people at the table started giving all of us samples of their food with great enthusiasm. Soon we were all giggling and having a great time, even though we didn't know the people at the table. It was one of the highlights of my trip to new york.

This experience taught me that you dont always have to take yourself so seriously. most people appreciate a little goodwilled humor or eccentricity. People are bored and looking for something to spice up their day. If you act a little bit goofy, in a good natured way, most people will get a kick out of it. If you're naturally outgoing, this insight may seem trivial or obvious, but if your shy, this discovery can be mind blowing."

Wow. Wouldn't that have made a great college essay???

Harry, a History.

Nov 5, 2008
Post a comment

This is supposed to be a really good book written by the webmistress of the leaky cauldron.

Harry, A History: The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenome

Melissa Anelli

Helen, Siegfried, Tristan, James and Jimmy.

Nov 4, 2008
Post a comment

I just reread All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot. The best thing about these books is the sense of what a wonderful life that must have been, driving around in an old car that can't go more than forty all around the wilderness of the rolling dales of Yorkshire, getting invited to tea and meals with the local characters, stars in the sky, birthing lambs in ancient barns and healing every sick animal you come across. The other good parts are the descriptions of Siegfried and Tristan, his hilarious eccentric business partners, and his beautiful wife dark haired country girl Helen whom he obviously loves a lot and little baby Jimmy. All in all, they are great escapist page-turning reads.

Black and white photo of sheep being judged at Tan Hill Show, North Yorkshire

These last two images are from a very good site called myyorkshire. It collected reminiscences of old timers in audio, video and pictures.

All Things Bright and Beautiful

James Herriot

New Billy Collins Poems From His New Book.

Nov 3, 2008
Post a comment

Ballistics: Poems

Billy Collins

Addendum, by Billy Collins

What I forgot to tell you in that last poem

if you were paying attention at all

was that I really did love her at the time.

The maritime light in the final lines

might have seemed contrived,

as false as any puffed up italian sonnet,

and the same could be said

for the high cliffside flowers

I claimed to have introduced to her hair

and sure, the many imaginary moons

I said were circling our bed as we slept,

the cosmos enclosed by the walls of the room.

But the truth is we loved

to take long walks on the windy shore

not the shore between the sea of her

and the symbolic land of me,

but the real shore of empty shells,

the sun rising, the water running up and back.

--------------------

I like this poem. I think Billy Collins latest book of poems was written during a divorce. I like this one too:

from "What Love Does" by Billy Collins

Even as the ink is drying

on her name, it is off

to visit someone in another city,

a city with two steeples

rows of brick chimney pots,

and a school with a tree lined entrance.

It will travel through the night to get there

and it will arrive like an archangel

through an iron gate no one ever seemed to notice

before

-------------------

I like the part about the school with a tree lined entrance--love must have been visiting a married couple this time around. A poem with a light touch about missing someone.

Martha Stewart in NYC.

Oct 21, 2008
Post a comment

Martha. tomorrow. Columbus Circle. 6 pm. WOW.

Martha will be promoting her new book "martha's cooking school" at WIlliams and Sonoma!! BE THERE.
From the blog Martha Moments:

On Tuesday, Martha's latest cookbook will be released: Martha Stewart's Cooking School. Tuesday will also mark the first day of Martha's Cooking School series on her television show, co-hosted by Everyday Food editor Sarah Carey, so be sure to tune in to hear the latest details about the program.
Martha recently spoke to the Detroit Free Press about the book and says Cooking School is the most instructional cookbook she has ever written.

"I am a teacher, so I thought this would be a good time to use all of our knowledge and put it down as a cooking school," she said. "We have people coming on the show all the time using some of these techniques, and we've never organized them as we have in this book.

"Here we go through the different techniques -- the braising, the poaching, the steaming, the oven roasting, the sautéing so that you really know what you are doing when you say you are sautéing," she said. "And the recipes we give are really jumpstarts for you to then be able to sauté something else. You are going to sauté a piece of chicken cutlet and you will be able to do veal if you wish, or beef or something else."

The chapters are called 'Lessons' and are built around a particular technique. A chapter on braising will teach readers the technique and then demostrate how that technique can be used in different ways in different recipes. In some ways it's like a textbook, with the lessons numbered 2.1, 2.2, etc. and "extra credit" sections such as making soup garnishes or homemade mayonnaise in the egg lesson. There are plenty of illustrations and pictures along with step-by-step instructions. The book weighs a hefty four pounds, is hardcover and has over 500 pages with 200 recipes: another tome to add to your Martha Stewart book collection!
Martha also says that learning to cook can help families save money in hard economic times. "I think all the how-to's, the do-it-yourselves, are totally reflective of what's going on in the world today," she told the Detroit Free Press. "Paying a lot of attention to nutrition and homemade is exactly where we need to be right now."

Martha will be promoting the book with a short book tour, so be sure to take note of the dates and check your calendar to see if you can make it to one of the book signings.

Moby What?

Oct 4, 2008
Post a comment

"With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales"

for rand: two forgotten kids books

Sep 26, 2008
Post a comment

the other night i reminisced with rand about kids books that were kind of a cut above other kids books. ones that weren't just cute but kind of--great art. illustrations and stories that you can never get out of your head. but we couldn't remember the titles. i got panicky tonight because i thought i would never find out what they were, so i looked through the whole house until i found the one we remembered being about this girl who enters the outside world for the first time through a tapestry. we remembered she gets tied down by these vines which grow over her hands and how creepy and magnetic the book was. then we started talking about this other amazing one where this woman weave a tapestry--with her own blood and tears. turns out they are both by the same person--marilee heyer. wow!! what a cool coincidence. the first one is called "the forbidden door" and the second is the weaving of a dream.

The Weaving of a Dream (Picture Puffins)

Marilee Heyer

tumblr

Sep 15, 2008
Post a comment

tumblr unfortunately seems to be cooler than vox. the layout is so simple and elegant. i love the way it looks. everyone should get a tumblr and ill read it. i finished his dark materials today. the amber spyglass--what a fun filled romp. it was such a mix of bad writing and good writing, moving parts and cheesy melodrama. i definitely enjoyed it but it was definitely messy! i think it shows how well done harry potter is. harry potter will definitely become a classic. but i think both harry potter and his dark materials deserve to be classics, but harry potter more. some thoughts.

The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3)

Philip Pullman

The paintings i liked best from the story of art

Aug 13, 2008
Post a comment

cave paintings at lascaux: gombrich says that the people who painted these thought that the images held magical powers, and if they stuck spears into the paintings the animals would also succumb. he says they are deep down a long way in inaccesible caves...very mysterious.

i liked all the greek and egyptian art. i liked the lindisfarne gospels from the dark ages.

loved the gothic churches.

i liked giotto, who the author says was the first to reject using the old methods of telling bible stories by using picture-writing, the same exact images of the saints etc..that had been passed down like a language, and instead visualize for himself how bible stories might have looked, and imagine everything afresh.

i like renaissance architecture, which combined classical greek and roman architecture in a new way to achieve a totally new feel of lightness and grace.

i liked donatello, who did what giotto did with sculpture--reimagined everything afresh. i like fra angelico, because i remember seeing the frescoes at San Marco and the calm, religious feeling of being there. Photograph:The Annunciation, fresco by Fra Angelico, 1438–45; in the Museum of San Marco, Florence.

Photograph:The Annunciation, fresco by Fra Angelico, 1438–45; in the Museum of San Marco, Florence.

i liked botticelli, who was trying to make his figures look graceful and form a perfectly harmonious arrangement, by streching out his bodies, like in birth of venus etc..

i like the last phase of the gothic style called the perpendicular style, which is totally over the top with decorations and complicated tracery. like King's college chapel, i.e the great hall in harry potter

i liked leonardo da vinci and the last supper and the mona lisa and everything else he did. leonardo was able to combine correct perspective and also make his paintings look graceful and well balanced, which was something artists up to him had been struggling to do...and the mona lisa was the first painting that looked like living breathing flesh. the mona lisa also captures a very complicated facial expression which seems to change every time you look at her.

i really liked the section on michelangelo and raphael. Michelangelo was the quintessential genius artist. Gombrich talks about how he didn't really want to take on painting the sistine chapel, how he complained he was a sculptor not a painter, and-- "he was convinced that this thankless commission had been palmed off on him through the intrigue of his enemies. When the pope remained firm, he started to work out a modest scheme of twelve apostles in niches..but suddenly he shut himself up in the chapel, let no one come near him, and started to work alone on a plan which has indeed continued to amaze the whole world from the moment it was revealed." i also like when gombrich says, "one can feel how he enjoyed his stupendous mastery and how his disappointment and wrath at being prevented from continuing to work in the material he preferred spurred him on even m ore to show his enemies, real or suspected, that if they forced him to paint--well, he would show them!"

and raphael made such beautiful people in his paintings that they didn't look like anybody real--they were created from his ideal of beauty in his mind. his paintings make you think of a more ideal world. and also his pictures were perfectly balanced in the most simple, unsophisticated, harmonious way.

i like carraci--who along with many others, tried to imitate raphael and paint idealized classical beauty, and caravaggio, who wanted to paint reality, and who was not afraid of ugliness

also velasquez, who wanted to paint the truth like Caravaggio

also rembrandts, self portraits. about which gombrich says: "rembrandt did not write down his observations as leonardo and durer did; he was no admired genius as michelangelo was, whose ssayings were handed down to posterity; he was no diplomatic letter-writer like Rubens, who exchanged ideas with the leading scholars of his age. And yet we feel that we know rembrandt perhaps more intimately than any of these great masters, because he left us an amazing record of his life in a series of self portraits ranging from the time of his youth, when he was a succesful and even fashinable master, to his lonely old age when his face reflected hte tragedy of bankruptcy and the unbroken will of a truly great man."

and most of all probably, vermeer

i like the baroque style, where people were creating fantastic and artificial worlds, like versailles. i like william blake, who drew only his visions. this is called "The Ancient of Days"--it is the evil spirit Urizen ( he created his own mythology) using a compass, like a flash of lightning, to create the world.

the impressionists were all ok. loved rodin. the hand of god:

and whistler

and van gogh

and most of the modern art in the book, like Kandinsky's color music

Wassily Kandinsky, Cossacks, 1910-11 Tate. Presented by Mrs Hazel McKinley 1938

matisse

picasso--i like when Gombrich says this, "maybe it was precsely his amazing facility in draughtmanship, his techinical virtuousity, which made picasso long for the simple and uncomplicated. it must have given him a peculiar satisfaction to make something with his own hands which recalls the works of peasants and children." which is the same reason why i write like i do--lol

also i like mondrian, who also longed "for an art of clairty an discipline that somehow reflected the objective laws of the universe."

and also i like chagall. the birthday:

and henri rousseau, who was an amateur painter, who was discovered and immediately recognized as a master.

also this head , by giacometti--lol

and finally, magritte, who is just cool

and there you have it, people!!! the story of art is 688 pages long and i just read it all! some of these pics are in the story of art, but some aren't. these artists are my faves from the art illustrated in the book--but i did not get a chance to look more deeply into each of this artist's oeuvre and select which of their paintings i like the most via google images...

interior exposure by jessica todd harper

Aug 12, 2008
Post a comment

These seem like interesting old masters paintings. in the story of art which i finished yesterday i learned that photography really changed the story of art, because before it was a revolutionary idea to capture a single moment in paint which expressed a person's character or a beautiful scene, but a camera automatically captures a single moment. so artists had to find other things to do, like modern art.

she takes pictures of her family. hmm....in a way these are like the paintings of the old masters but in a way they are like hipster's photo albums on facebook. still, it's good. here is her website with more of her pictures. here is her book: