Crispin Sartwell

Ivy Seidel dreams of becoming a writer, a great American novelist. But running low on money and concerned that her writing might lack a depth and darkness, she takes a job teaching creative writing -- at a maximum-security prison. It is a world she has never experienced before, one ruled by enigmatic codes of honor, ceaseless aggression and absolutely savage violence.But one of the prisoners there is unlike any of the others, and unlike any man she has ever met before. Vance Harrow is unique. He is soft-spoken, charismatic and brilliantly talented. Two things trouble Ivy deeply. First, she suspects that Harrow shouldn't be in prison at all. He possesses an intellect that separates him from the other inmates and a selflessness that might just get him killed. Second, he has at the same time deep reservoirs of rage and brutality that seem perfectly in line with the other prisoners -- a dichotomy Ivy finds difficult to reconcile.Trying to understand the complex picture, perhaps even get some recognition for a writer as gifted as Harrow seems to be, Ivy begins to ask questions. How did such a man end up in prison in the first place? Is he truly guilty? If not, who could have been responsible for putting him there, and why hasn't he tried harder to free himself? But the more questions Ivy asks to free a man she believes to be innocent, the more attention she draws to herself. Soon other people begin to ask questions -- about Ivy Seidel.In the span of just a few days, Ivy's life will be completely turned upside down. What begins as an inquiry into one man's innocence may explode into a love affair, and what begins as an obsession to save one man's life might just end up costing Ivy her own.

"In this meditation on what is beautiful, Crispin Sartwell begins with six words from six different cultures - ancient Greek's "to kalon," the Japanese idea of "wabi-sabi," Hebrew's "yapha," the Navajo concept "hozho," Sanskrit "sundara," and our own English-language "beauty."" "Each word becomes a door onto another way of thinking about, and looking at, what is beautiful in the world, and in our lives. The earthy and the exalted, the imperfect and the ideal: things, spaces, high art, sounds, aromas, nothingness. Sartwell writes about scores of beautiful things - among them, a Japanese teapot and Diana Rigg as Mrs. Emma Peel, the pleasure in a well-used hammer and in pop music and in Vermeer's Girl in a Red Hat."--BOOK JACKET.

Black autobiographical discourses, from the earliest slave narratives to the most contemporary urban raps, have each in their own way gauged and confronted the character of white society. For Crispin Sartwell, as philosopher, cultural critic, and white male, these texts, through their exacting insights and external perspective, provide a rare opportunity to glimpse and gain access to the contents and core of white identity. Throughout this provocative work, Sartwell steadfastly recognizes the many ways in which he too is implicated in the formulation and perpetuation of racial attitudes and discourse. In Act Like You Know, he challenges both himself and others to take a long, hard look in the mirror of African-American autobiography, and to find there, in the light of those narratives, the visible features of white identity.

Examines the consequences of utter affirmations of our world as it is, exploring the themes of transgressive sexuality, political anarchism, addiction, death, and embodiment.

"Beginning with the proposition that not all art is political but all politics is aesthetic, Crispin Sartwell challenges overly sharp distinctions between the domains of art, craft, rhetoric, poetics, and politics. Political Aesthetics is a lively and provocative book highly recommended for all who wish to think deeply about the complex relations between the aesthetic and the political."ùPhilip Alperson, Temple University. "Crispin Sartwell's 'poetics of politics' is a fascinating and refreshingly original study of the interplay of aesthetic values and political values. His balance of theory and application results in a book that deserves a wide audience."ùTheodore Gracyk, author of Listening to Popular Music. "In Political Aesthetics, Crispin Sartwell writes both clearly and wittily, steers away from gratuitous abstraction, and maintains an engagingly direct tone. Sartwell's work on Nazi aesthetics and Riefenstahl, Speer, and Chaplin is sharp and deft, and his consideration of Republican Classicism in early America offers illuminating ideas about aesthetics of harmony, balance, and repose in relation to classical American concepts of politics and government."ùFrederick M. Dolan, California College of the Arts and University of California, Berkeley, author of Allegories of America. Juxtaposing And Connecting the art of states and the art of art historians with vernacular or popular arts such as reggae and hip hop, Crispin Sartwell examines the reach and claims of political aesthetics. Most analysts focus on politics as discursive systems, privileging text and reducing other forms of expression to the merely illustrative. He suggests that we need to take much more seriously the aesthetic environment of political thought and action. Sartwell argues that graphic style, music, and architecture are more than the propaganda arm of political systems; they are its constituents. A noted cultural critic, Sartwell brings together the disciplines of political science and political philosophy, philosophy of art and art history, in a new way, clarifying basic notions of aestheticsùbeauty, sublimity, and representationùand applying them in a political context. A general argument about the fundamental importance of political aesthetics is interspersed with a group of stimulating case studies as disparate as Leni Riefenstahl's films and Black Nationalist aesthetics, the Dead Kennedys and Jeffersonian architecture. --Book Jacket.