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The American Kaleidoscope
<P><B>Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize (1991)</B><BR><B>Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Award from the Immigration History Society (1993)</B></P><P>Do recent changes in American law and politics mean that our national motto – e pluribus unum – is at last becoming a reality? Lawrence H. Fuchs searches for answers to this question by examining the historical patterns of American ethnicity and the ways in which a national political culture has evolved to accommodate ethnic diversity. Fuchs looks first at white European immigrants, showing how most of them and especially their children became part of a unifying political culture. He also describes the ways in which systems of coercive pluralism kept persons of color from fully participating in the civic culture. He documents the dismantling of those systems and the emergence of a more inclusive and stronger civic culture in which voluntary pluralism flourishes.</P><P>In comparing past patterns of ethnicity in America with those of today, Fuchs finds reasons for optimism. Diversity itself has become a unifying principle, and Americans now celebrate ethnicity. One encouraging result is the acculturation of recent immigrants from Third World countries. But Fuchs also examines the tough issues of racial and ethnic conflict and the problems of the ethno-underclass, the new outsiders. The American Kaleidoscope ends with a searching analysis of public policies that protect individual rights and enable ethnic diversity to prosper.</P><P>Because of his lifelong involvement with issues of race relations and ethnicity, Lawrence H. Fuchs is singularly qualified to write on a grand scale about the interdependence in the United States of the unum and the pluribus. His book helps to clarify some difficult issues that policymakers will surely face in the future, such as those dealing with immigration, language, and affirmative action.</P>
Silence
<P>John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: «Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant.» «He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It's what's happening now.» –;The American Record Guide</P><P>"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away."</P>
MUSICAGE
<P>"I was obliged to find a radical way to work – to get at the real, at the root of the matter," John Cage says in this trio of dialogues, completed just days before his death. His quest for the root of the matter led him beyond the bounds of the conventional in all his musical, written, and visual pieces. The resulting expansion of the definition of art – with its concomitant emphasis on innovation and invention—earned him a reputation as one of America's most influential contemporary artists.</P><P>Joan Retallack's conversations with Cage represent the first consideration of his artistic production in its entirety, across genres. Informed by the perspective of age, Cage's comments range freely from his theories of chance and indeterminate composition to his long-time collaboration with Merce Cunningham to the aesthetics of his multimedia works. A composer for whom the whole world – with its brimming silences and anarchic harmonies – was a source of music, Cage once claimed, «There is no noise, only sounds.» As these interviews attest, that penchant for testing traditions reached far beyond his music. His lifelong project, Retallack writes in her comprehensive introduction, was «dislodging cultural authoritarianism and gridlock by inviting surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes.» Consummate performer to the end, Cage delivers here just such a conjunction – a tour de force that provides new insights into the man and a clearer view of the status of art in the 20th century.</P>
Sonnets to Orpheus
<P>Sonnets to Orpheus is Rainer Maria Rilke's first and only sonnet sequence. It is an undisputed masterpiece by one of the greatest modern poets, translated here by a master of translation, David Young.</P><P>Rilke revived and transformed the traditional sonnet sequence in the Sonnets. Instead of centering on love for a particular person, as has many other sonneteers, he wrote an extended love poem to the world, celebrating such diverse things as mirrors, dogs, fruit, breathing, and childhood. Many of the sonnets are addressed to two recurrent figures: the god Orpheus (prototype of the poet) and a young dancer, whose death is treated elegiacally.</P><P>These ecstatic and meditative lyric poems are a kind of manual on how to approach the world –; how to understand and love it. David Young's is the first most sensitive of the translations of this work, superior to other translations in sound and sense. He captures Rilke's simple, concrete, and colloquial language, writing with a precision close to the original.</P>
Garnet Poems
<P>Connecticut may be a small state, but it is large indeed in its contribution to the nation's literature. Garnet Poems features forty-two poets whose work has a strong connection to Connecticut. The first major anthology of Connecticut poetry to appear since the mid-nineteenth century, it includes the work of such notable poets as Wallace Stevens, Lydia Sigourney, Mark Van Doren, Richard Wilbur, <BR>Susan Howe, and Elizabeth Alexander. Distinguished writer-scholar Dennis Barone has supplemented the poems with an editor's preface, notes that illuminate the poet's (or poem's) relation to the state, and informative biographies. The book also features a foreword by Dick Allen, the current Connecticut state poet laureate.</P>
Alvin Lucier
<P>This small, striking book commemorates the career of experimental music composer Alvin Lucier, and features an interview with Lucier and curator Andrea Miller-Keller, essays by Nicolas Collins, Ronald Kuivila, Michael Roth and Pamela Tatge, and details of a symposium, exhibit and special performances of Lucier's work held at Wesleyan University, November 4-6, 2011. Lucier has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. From 1970 to 2011 he taught at Wesleyan University where he was John Spencer Camp Professor of Music. Lucier performs, lectures and exhibits his sound installations extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia.</P>
Zong!
<P>In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship's owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten. Check for the online reader's companion at http://zong.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>
Best Practices of Catholic Pastoral and Finance Councils
Every Catholic parish has a pastoral council and a finance council, but how many fulfill the mission they were set up to serve? These councils are among the most important but least understood structures in the Catholic Church. Mandated to exist, their roles have become increasingly critical as parishes–both large and small–are stretching personnel and financial resources further and further each year. Add in the need for internal financial controls and human resource management coupled with fewer and fewer parish priests, and the importance of these councils goes way beyond simply filling seats with warm-bodied volunteers. The function of these councils is to provide consultation to the pastor and to promote greater participation of the entire parish in the life and mission of the Church. But in reality, these terms are vague and leave too much room for individual interpretation. In an unprecedented research effort, author Charles Zech explores the very function of these councils in an effort to lay the groundwork for best practices at every parish. It systematically fills the void as both Church leaders and laity strive to better understand the structure and processes needed to improve their effectiveness. Zech's common-sense, straightforward writing style unpacks the extensive data to cover critical issues such as:Parish LeadershipEducation/Formation ProgramsCommunication with Parish and Parish StaffCouncil Guideline ManualsInternal ControlsLong-Term PlanningPrayer and Faith-Sharing A must-read for every pastor, staff member, or committee volunteer, Best Practices of Catholic Pastoral and Finance Councils gives the guidance, support, and how-to that every parish needs–making it helpful for diocesan staff as well. Use it to stay on track, get back on track, or simply realize a track exists for these highly critical leadership councils.