The divisions that mark my subject are three. The first is that point where the world begins--where it appears from out of the mystery of non-being. The second lies somewhere between its progeny and its future--the times between beginnings and ends where we, the beneficiaries of our being-here, come together to sing a celebration of the wonder that it happened at all, and then intone the fear of its ending. The third division is a speculation on ends--our own and the ending of the world. I use these divisions to locate a something that comes from nothing onto a historical tradition that imposes a value on the progression of that something, and so requires a judgment on all that has passed. I first discuss these through religious attempts to invest life and history with purpose--for they form the major explanatory traditions of Western culture and are a thematic source of much of its greatest art. I continue with an art-critical approach where themes of process and purpose are located in artworks through their stylistic histories and ambitions. I indicate how present art, when open to reconstitute such themes, could change the nature of today's efforts to give art polemical purposes, and so provide new reasons for its making. I conclude with some stories, unevenly biographical, partly fictional, which I offer as parables for the developed themes and their transformations. This last aim is to elucidate a view of art as providing specific symbols for a cosmology of beginning, living, and ending.

Written by one of the most well-regarded practitioners in the field this book is packed full of photocopiable exercises and suggestions for strategies and techniques that are instantly transferable to classroom environments.

Updated edition -- Astronomical Phenomena for the Year 2018 is alswo available here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-054-00246-3 This small, useful booklet contains general interest material preprinted from The Astronomical Almanac. It is published jointly by the U.S. Naval Observatory and Her Majesty's Nautical Almanac Office two years in advance of its date. It includes such things as: •dates for Solar equinoxes, solstices, phases of the Moon •eclipse maps •dates for various planetary phenomena •visibility and magnitudes of the planets •dates for some religious and civil holidays •chronological eras and cycles •the equation of time and declination of the Sun •sunrise/set, moonrise/set times •the position of Polaris. Other related products: Almanacs and Navigation Guides can be found here:https://bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/transportation-navigation/almanacs-nav... Light Lists product collection can be found here:https://bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/transportation-navigation/almanacs-nav... USACE Navigational Charts can be found here:https://bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/transportation-navigation/almanacs-nav... Other products produced by the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/agency/927

For over 150 years the United States Nautical Almanac Office has published The Nautical Almanac, first as part of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, and then on its own, to provide the US Navy with a convenient form of the astronomical data used for celestial navigation. This book is still the standard resource for marine celestial navigation for the U.S. Navy. The book is produced in collaboration with Her Majesty's Nautical Almanac Office, part of the U.K. Hydrographic Office. That Office maintains the copyright on the material it produces. The Nautical Almanac contains the following data tabulated at hourly intervals to a precision of 0.1 arcminute: the Greenwich hour angle and declination of the Sun, Moon, and navigational planets; the Greenwich hour angle of Aries; positions of the navigational stars; rise and set times of the Sun and Moon for a range of latitudes; and other data. Each edition also contains a sight reduction table; sight reduction formulas; and various correction tables for sight reduction. There is a useful concise sight reduction form at the back of the book. The Nautical Almanac is available several months in advance of its edition date.

'Life-writing' is a generic term meant to encompass a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, marginalia, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms (including blogs, tweets, Facebook entries). On Life-Writing offers a sampling of approaches to the study of life-writing, introducing readers to something of the range of forms the term encompasses, their changing fortunes and features, the notions of 'life,' 'self' and 'story' which help to explain these changing fortunes and features, recent attempts to group forms, the permeability of the boundaries between forms, the moral problems raised by life-writing in all forms, but particularly in fictional forms, and the relations between life-writing and history, life-writing and psychoanalysis, life-writing and philosophy. The essays mostly focus on individual instances rather than fields, whether historical, theoretical or generic. Generalizations are grounded in particulars. For example, the role of the 'life-changing encounter,' a frequent trope in literary life-writing, is pondered by Hermione Lee through an account of a much-storied first meeting between the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova; James Shapiro examines the history of the 'cradle to grave' life-narrative, as well as the potential distortions it breeds, by focusing on Shakespeare biography, in particular attempts to explain Shakespeare's so-called 'lost years'.