The Quotation Game

Spurred by a not very Long Island-like deep cold and unusual masses of snow — in short, a long winter indoors — your friendly neighborhood bookseller has started a diverting game, a “literary treasure hunt” called SmartyPants. Every day BookHampton will post a quotation on its website and Facebook page, and then the stabs at identification of both it and the book it’s from can begin.

“Everyone who identifies the quotation wins a prize,” a release said. No strings attached, though players do have to stop in at either the Main Street, East Hampton, or Hampton Road, Southampton, shop to claim winnings — maybe a book, maybe a gift certificate, maybe chocolate.

More Than a Chance to Suck Up

Wednesday brings the Faculty Five to a frozen Stony Brook Southampton campus to read from their work — new, old, whatever they please. The speakers are: Lou Ann Walker, the editor in chief of The Southampton Review and the author of the award-winning memoir “A Loss for Words,” Susan Scarf Merrell, the fiction editor of that journal, whose latest book is “Shirley: A Novel,” Roger Rosenblatt, the esteemed essayist just out with “The Book of Love: Improvisations on a Silly Little Thing,” the novelist Ursula Hegi, and Julie Sheehan, the poet who directs the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature.

That program, of course, sponsors the Writers Speak series, which happens most Wednesdays through May 6 in Chancellors Hall starting at 7 p.m.

“Art in America

1945-1970”

Edited by Jed Perl

The Library of America, $40

Fast-paced changes in the goals of American artists during the quarter-century following World War II were all passionately felt and widely debated, with many creative voices participating in the effort to define modernity.

Jed Perl’s broad, perceptive selection of material reflecting these voices in “Art in America 1945-1970” makes this hefty anthology an illuminating reference to its era. All the major shifts in sensibility are present, so it is fairly easy to pick up the many ways in which contemporaries were addressing the validity of Abstract Expressionism, then Pop, and then Minimalism.

To best capture the spirit of the dialogue, and to suggest what was in the air, Mr. Perl includes material from well-known and now lesser-known periodicals, and also from exhibition catalogs, books, lectures, letters, and artists’ statements. It is a special pleasure to find the carefully weighed language of poetry appearing here too, in the context of its inspiration. Examples include Howard Nemerov responding to an iron sculpture by David Smith and Frank O’Hara responding to a painting by Mike Goldberg.

As might be expected, chronology propels the anthology along. The pattern adjusts, however, to group together multiple selections by an individual author. This allows a fuller view of an often influential figure. Mr. Perl gives every writer a headnote, which is usually a succinct and pithy career assessment. These interpretive and welcome background over­views stem from Mr. Perl’s long career as a respected art critic and art historian. A considerable amount of the documentary research for this anthology seems to relate to his book “New Art City” (2005), a narrative celebrating New York’s history as a magnet for artists.

Mr. Perl is thorough in presenting the era’s intellectuals, who tend to bring in social circumstances or psychological issues as they address the creative process and analyze artistic content. Four essays offer insight into Clement Greenberg’s influence on taste. Another four provide a view of Harold Rosenberg’s important contributions, including “The American Action Paint­ers,” which points to the viewer’s engagement in the artist’s creative act, and “Mobile, Theatrical, Active,” published a dozen years later, which considers emerging developments.

The selections representing Meyer Schapiro’s probing critique — particularly “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art” — underscore his role as a champion of the human imagination and his timely fit into the 1945-1970 psyche. Here, too, is Leo Steinberg’s “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public,” which gave Harper’s readers a keener understanding of Jasper Johns and much else. Susan Sontag discusses materials, objects, and the treatment of time in her significant contribution, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition.” There is also piercing commentary on the social impact of the Museum of Modern Art in Dwight McDonald’s New Yorker profile of Alfred Barr, the museum’s first director.

The breadth and probing spirit animating the selections frequently reveal the way differing ideas launched, then developed further within the popular culture. In photography, for example, six writings, dating from 1946 to 1965, divide between either encouraging audience response to the subject depicted, or encouraging response to the design extracted from the original source. James Agee, in an introduction to Helen Levitt’s photography of children on the streets of New York, emphasizes her way of seeing and understanding a face or an emotion; Jack Kerouac’s essay for Robert Frank’s “The Americans” cites Frank’s way of finding “the everythingness of America,” and Truman Capote, writing about Richard Avedon, notes “the blood-coursing aliveness he could insert in so still an entity as a photograph.”

Among authors intent on emphasizing the invention of new art, there is Robert Creeley’s appreciation of the subtle forms in Harry Callahan’s photographs; Harold Rosenberg noting that he finds Aaron Siskind’s photography has “the dual picture planes, calligraphy, the post-Cubist balances, the free strokes and aerial perspectives, the accidental landscapes, galaxies hinted in stains, of half a dozen vanguard styles,” and Siskind himself writing that when he photographs an object, “it is often unrecognizable; for it has been removed from its usual context, disassociated from its customary neighbors and forced into new relationships.”

Artists’ statements, often originally published in conjunction with an exhibition, appear throughout as primary sources. It is easy to feel the passion and conviction. Some have great resonance, such as Robert Rauschenberg’s comment on trying to act in the gap between art and life, and Ad Reinhardt’s statement on purity, “No confusing painting with everything that is not painting.”

Other artists’ statements are especially treasured for the way in which they bring out sources of inspiration. Anni Albers, for example, wrote of the significance of pre-Columbian textiles, and Jackson Pollock’s reference to Indian sand painting is now legendary. So, too, is Willem de Kooning’s discussion of the old masters and their handling of pictorial space.

It is the carefully reasoned essays illuminating new directions that are likely to be frequently consulted. Barbara Rose’s “ABC Art” is highly prized for its treatment of Minimalism’s shift to a new sensibility and its rejection of the emotional content of Abstract Expressionism. Donald Judd’s “Specific Objects” also adds significantly to the material forming a core reference for Minimalism.

Authors of writings on Pop’s ascendancy frequently establish links between America’s growing materialism and the artists’ celebration of society’s icons. Michael Fried notes that “an art like Warhol’s is necessarily parasitic upon the myths of its time, and indirectly therefore upon the machinery of fame and publicity that markets those myths.” Gene Swenson is especially perceptive, too, in “The New American ‘Sign Painters,’ ” and in “Junk­dump Fair Surveyed” John Bernard Myers connects money, fashion, vanguard art, and the changing social scene in a way that also relates to the earlier days of the struggling Abstract Expressionists.

Anthologies can be a great convenience. Content here from numerous short-lived midcentury periodicals, including It Is, The Tiger’s Eye, Possibilities, trans/formation, and Black Mountain Review, is impressive, and of course extremely useful due to limited availability. For the most part, this content reflects not only the openness to change that prevailed at the end of World War II, but also the dialogue among members of the Abstract Expressionist generation. In an attempt to accurately capture what was in the air, Mr. Perl is careful to direct attention to all sides in this discourse. Bias becomes historical fact.

Criticism itself became a subject of study in the ’60s, as Mr. Perl reminds us in his introduction. “Art in America 1945-1970” is likely to be regarded as a thoughtful and useful product of this development. It highlights issues, and it demonstrates how insightful writings about the visual arts are contributions to the continuous sorting of America’s cultural history.

Phyllis Braff is an art critic, curator, and retired museum administrator who lives in East Hampton.

Montauk at the St. Patrick’s Day parade: It’s not all beer cups and bagpipes. How about the history of the place?

For those interested in such, Carl Fisher, the visionary prewar developer most responsible for the shape the “Miami Beach of the North” was to take, is the subject of a brick-thick biography by Jerry M. Fisher, his grandnephew. “The Pacesetter,” first published in 1998, is just out in a new edition from the Friesen Press, a self-publishing concern out west.

Born in middle-of-the-country obscurity in Greensburg, Ind., in 1874, Fisher was an entrepreneur from his teenage years, moving from brilliant marketing during the bicycle craze to making Prest-o-Lite automobile headlamps to earning “Mr. Miami Beach” status as a developer. He was a co-founder and president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indy 500, hence the book’s title, and the builder of the Lincoln and Dixie Highways, yet partly as a result of declining to name these monumental projects after himself, Jerry Fisher points out in his preface, in 1938 “Who’s Who” didn’t know him from Adam.

Back to the hamlet at hand, in 1925 Fisher bought more than 9,000 acres from Arthur Benson for $2.5 million and two years later built perhaps his most lasting legacy there, the Montauk Manor. Two years after that, of course, came the Great Crash. By 1934 Fisher had declared personal bankruptcy “as the drinking and womanizing continued unabated,” Peter M. Wolf, who would go on to write “Land Use and Abuse in America,” wrote in a 1998 review in The Star. “When he died at Miami Beach in 1939, his estate was estimated at $52,198, far below his peak net worth, estimated 50 million in 1920 dollars. . . .”

A most American of stories.

A Poetry Tete-a-Tete

“Baseball is portrayed in these radiant new poems by Jill Bialosky as a ‘fierce and feral’ rite of passage in which we’re all held hostage to the always surprising vicissitudes of time and change.” So says Philip Schultz, the East Hampton poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, in a blurb on the back of Ms. Bialosky’s new collection, “The Players,” thus hinting at a subject the two might take up in their conversation Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Ms. Bialosky’s previous book of poems was “Intruder.” An editor at W.W. Norton and part-time Bridgehamptoner, she is also the author of the memoir “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life” and novels including “The Life Room.”

Montauk Thriller

Looking for some fishing action? Or rather action in a fishin’ kind of place? Set at Montauk Point and out in the depths of the Atlantic, “In Secret Waters,” a new novel by Richard Weissmann, involves, for one thing, terrorists (fresh off the ISIS hacking of the Montauk Manor website, no less), but more to the point “a vast fortune in stolen diamonds, lost since World War II,” and said to be somewhere in the wreckage of the sunken Andrea Doria.

Charged with finding it for the purposes of paying restitution to victims of the Holocaust is one Erik Hazen, a charter boat captain and ex-Navy Seal described as “born and raised on the not-so-chic side of the Hamptons” and belonging to a family that for eight generations has made a living “haul seining, trap netting, clamming, and scalloping.”

“Some of the characters were inspired by men I met during the 1980s and 1990s when I was writing feature articles about the local commercial fishing industry for The New York Times,” Mr. Weissmann said. He lives in Bellport. The book is available on Amazon.com.

Rebecca Alexander is a force to be reckoned with. At the writing of this memoir, she is in her early 20s. She is accomplished, vivacious, active, energetic, and derives a great deal of satisfaction from helping others. She has taught in a prison; she has volunteered for Project Open Hand, a nonprofit organization that delivers meals to people living with H.I.V./AIDS.

Ms. Alexander earned a master’s degree in public health and a second master’s in social work, both from Columbia University. In addition, she has trained at a psychoanalytic institute, received a certification in psychodynamic psychotherapy, and works full time as a psychotherapist. She also works as a spin instructor.

She is an extreme athlete who has run with the Olympic torch as a Community Hero and successfully completed a five-mile lake swim and a 600-mile AIDS/LifeCycle bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

As if all of this were not enough (and there is more, much more, far too much to mention in a book review limited to a mere 1,200 words), she has accomplished all of this while becoming steadily deaf and blind. Because of a rare genetic disorder called Usher syndrome, Ms. Alexander is eventually heading toward a condition called deafblindness. Yeah, that’s what Helen Keller had.

At the moment, Usher syndrome is irreversible, untreatable, and there is little, medically, to be done about it, other than await the inevitable decline. This, however, does not stop Rebecca for one instant. She is doing anything but going gentle into that good night.

Her book, “Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found,” is nicely and movingly written (co-written with Sascha Alper) and, surprisingly, possesses tremendous cheerful humor. Despite her downward spiral of lost senses, the memoir contains not a shred of self-pity. Not an iota. None. Really.

Rebecca keeps a positive attitude without sounding in the slightest Pollyanna, saccharine, or unrealistic about what she is experiencing. She allows herself deep sadness at her losses — and at her impending even greater and more final losses — but throughout this impressive memoir she manages to maintain a tone that demonstrates her bravery, defiance, determination, and, yes, even humor.

Ms. Alexander had a pretty normal childhood, though she admits to being unusually klutzy, which may have been an early herald of her syndrome, as her hearing may have already been slightly compromised, and one of the hallmarks of Usher syndrome is vestibular dysfunction, which may cause imbalance and spatial disorientation.

Then, at 18, already feeling the beginnings of the decline of her senses, she comes home drunk one night and on her way to the bathroom accidentally tumbles out the window of her second-floor bedroom. She falls “backward more than twenty-seven feet onto the flagstone patio behind our house, landing, miraculously, on my left side, breaking almost everything but my head and neck.”

The fall leaves her needing several surgeries. “Ultimately, the only thing left without a cast would be my right leg and foot.” There follows a two-page description of the difficulties involved in being able to pick up a pen with her foot. Already going blind and deaf, and now this. Can we say “the trials of Job”?

Ms. Alexander describes where she acquired her positive attitude. “When we spend time together now, both with our hearing aids, me with my cane and her with her walking stick, Grandma Faye is a living example of what she taught me then. Nobody wants to hear you complain, so keep the bitching and moaning to yourself. Embrace the world with a positive outlook, and you will get so much more out of life.”

She writes:

. . . I wouldn’t wish what I have on anyone, and would never have chosen it, but it has given me an extraordinary ability to understand profoundly what living in the moment really means and to always try my best to do just that.

I don’t mean living each day as if it were my last. I have been there, done that. I’ve gone bungee jumping and skydiving. There have been times when there were too many guys, too much drinking, a never-ending whirlwind of “let’s grab life by the balls” . . . but never pausing to catch my breath is not the way to appreciate a world that is slowly — and sometimes not so slowly — going silent and dark for me. And while mine is an accelerated decline, one that will leave me with decades of blindness and deafness — many more than I’ll spend with hearing and vision, if I live a long and healthy life — the end is inevitable for all of us. In some ways, I feel lucky to never be able to forget that.

I found myself quite moved when she writes, “Sometimes I can’t help but wonder how it will be at the very end, though I try not to. Will I have a last clear image that I see, before my pinprick of a hole [her vision is blackening inward, contracting toward the center, which is still mostly clear] finally closes up forever? Or will things just blur more and more, an impressionist painting that gets increasingly less recognizable until finally it’s just a swirl of fading color, and then nothing? Will the last authentic sound I hear be a laugh, a cry, a subway rumbling into the station?”

In order to maintain a semblance of normal life, Ms. Alexander has had to learn sign language and Braille. She must use a cane and has three different hearing aids for different environments and a cochlear implant in one ear. Mind you, this does not stop her from being quite active in the New York City dating and singles scene. Talk about valor! Dating is tough enough when you can see and hear most of what is going on.

But as her vision and hearing continue to fade away, she will be unable to see others sign and will at some point be reduced to tactile signing, “the language used by people who are both deaf and blind.” Her description of learning this, and doing it with her best friend, Caroline Kaczor, a 2006 graduate of East Hampton High School, is at once lovely, poignant, intimate, and deeply frightening to me, who is merely facing the normal declines of age.

We’ll lie facing one another, and she’ll take both of my hands and place hers inside them. As her hand begins to take form, I’ll start to sound out the word she is spelling in my hand, listening intently with my palm and fingers, closing my eyes to help me focus. While I hold and follow the movement of her hands, Caroline will bring her pointer finger to her chest, and I’ll speak aloud what she is signing. . . .

At first we were terrible at it, and I would start to giggle at every mistake . . . and though I couldn’t hear Caroline, I knew she was giggling, too, because I could feel the quick little bounces her upper body would make against the bed. . . . Caroline could hear the sound of my laughter loud and clear, but she knew that I couldn’t hear hers, so she would take my hand and place it against her neck right at her vocal cords, so that I could feel her laughing, which made me laugh even harder.

. . . Watching people tactile-sign is like watching two people embrace, an elaborate dance of hands and fingers.

This book, a brave and affecting and funny account of a horrible and frightening illness, made me laugh and cry and feel truly and deeply moved. It does not seem like the kind of book one would enjoy, but I did enjoy it. I also think that I am going to buy several copies and give them to people I know who are facing some tough illness or period in their lives. “Not Fade Away” is a blueprint for handling the ugliest kind of shit life can throw at you, with grace and guts and courage. Bravo, Ms. Alexander!

Michael Z. Jody is a psychoanalyst and couples counselor with a practice in New York City and Amagansett.

“Remember those great Volkswagen ads?”

Alfredo Marcantonio, David Abbott, John O’Driscoll

Merrell, $65

Over 100 million people watched the Super Bowl. A recent survey found that 78 percent of viewers are more interested in watching the commercials than the game itself. Not surprising, then, that companies line up to pay the exorbitant fees to advertise during the game — $4.5 million for a 30-second commercial.

Americans weren’t always so enamored of advertisements. For much of the 20th century, ads were a humdrum affair. It was only toward the end of the 1960s that ads made people sit up and take notice. A few upstart advertising agencies shook up the white-collar Madison Avenue establishment with irreverent, in-your-face campaigns like Alka Seltzer’s “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” Avis’s “We try harder,” and Wisk’s “Ring around the collar.”

The agency leading the pack was Doyle Dane Bernbach. DDB achieved notoriety with a series of print advertisements for the Volkswagen Beetle. The Beetle wasn’t much to look at, nor was it terribly comfortable or speedy. So DDB poked fun at the car’s demerits. Copy like “Lemon,” “Ugly,” and “Think small” sat alongside a simple picture of the car itself. Campaigns for other VW cars soon followed, all of them quirky and as likely to promote the negative features of the car.

“Remember those great Volkswagen ads?” takes us back to this transformative period in American industry. Filled with hundreds of ads for the Beetle, the VW van, and other cars, the book chronicles DDB’s decades of work on behalf of VW.

We don’t normally think of the 1960s counterculture revolution as a time of upheaval within corporate America. But consumers were growing bored with conventional advertising. Advertising campaigns treated the audience as dupes who would respond to simplistic images and slogans. Mostly white men educated at elite schools and colleges were producing homogenous, cookie-cutter campaigns.

Bill Bernbach, Ned Doyle, and Mac Dane saw an opening. Soon, nothing was sacred. They put copywriters and artists in the same room, they made fun of products, and they took pleasure in surprising clients with unorthodox approaches.

“The irony was, the big agencies’ upright Harvard and Yale graduates were increasingly out of touch with the very people they were trying to influence,” the authors write. “Suddenly, it was the streetwise not the book-wise who were best equipped to communicate with the man on the street.”

VW came calling and DDB broke the rules again. In some VW ads, the viewer could barely make out the car, which was small and tucked away in the corner. Other ads made fun of the company or just presented a list of all the reasons not to buy its products. But there was a method to the madness. Viewers came to expect a consistent aesthetic. The simplicity of the ads gave the impression that the company was transparent and honest. If VW wanted to create a connection with the consumer, they found the right agency to lead the way.

“Remember those great Volkswagen ads?” is an art book, not a history of advertising or even a detailed look at DDB. Don’t expect pages of text or lengthy interviews. A brief introduction gives way to chapters filled with smartly produced advertisements. The well-designed layout and the crisp photos will take you back to a time when ads were smart, thoughtful, and entertaining.

Sudhir Venkatesh is a professor of sociology at Columbia University who lives part time in East Hampton. His books include “Gang Leader for a Day” and, most recently, “Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy.”

“Remember those great Volkswagen ads?” is out in a new edition. It features the late Julian Koenig of Bridgehampton, the copywriter on the “Think small” ad campaign, voted the best of the 20th century by Advertising Age magazine.

Fifteen short stories by Al Burrelli, a frequent contributor to The Star who died in 2014, have been collected in “Nuggets: Short Story Treasures.” The volume was self-published by his wife, Louise Burrelli, who wrote a foreword to the book.

A retired public school teacher who turned to writing during the last five years of his life, Mr. Burrelli was awarded a literary prize for his first short story, “The Bride Wore Red,” and had a number of stories published by The Star over several years.

“Death by Pastrami,” a short-story collection by Leonard S. Bernstein, another contributor to The Star, who lives part time in Amagansett, received a positive review in a piece on the NPR radio program “Fresh Air” on Dec. 31. Maureen Corrigan called Mr. Bernstein’s stories, which mostly center on life in New York City’s garment district, “both quaint and timeless,” and said the author has “a flair for crafting parables about the comic futility of life.”

The book is a University of New Orleans Press reissue of Mr. Bernstein’s “The Man Who Wanted to Buy a Heart,” from 2012, with the addition of a new story, “Kessler and the Grand Scheme,” which appeared in these pages in November.

The children’s book team of Jim and Kate McMullan of Sag Harbor has branched out with a pilot for an Amazon Original Series that can be seen for free at the website of the retailer turned budding network. Episode one of “The Stinky & Dirty Show,” based on the McMullans’ “I Stink” and “I’m Dirty” books, is a 12-minute excursion into a Utah-like desert landscape a la Chuck Jones’s immortal Road Runner and Coyote cartoons for Warner Brothers, where, as then, towering rock formations figure in the plot.

Repeatedly asking out loud “What if?” Stinky the Garbage Truck and Dirty the Backhoe put their metal heads together to attack the problem of a boulder blocking an intersection. “What if we threw melons at it?” Stinky, a chipper and fun-loving sort despite his trash-hauling lot in life, says more than once.

Short story shorter, the two almost literally reinvent the wheel before bringing in their friend Chip, who hints at his mechanical prowess when he says, “I know the drill.”

“Nothing is just garbage,” as Stinky puts it, and so the giant rock winds up at his personal dump. Where he can throw melons at it.

The McMullans are executive producers on this Brown Bag Films production, which is written, directed, and animated by others. But fear not, the artwork is true to Jim, as it were, with big, bold characters richly textured, resembling paper cutouts.

“Polishing the Mirror”

Ram Dass and Rameshwar Das

Sounds True, $16.95

I well remember thinking it curious that, having traveled 7,000 miles to Leh, the Himalayan capital city of Ladakh in India’s Jammu and Kashmir state, the instructors in both the meditation and yoga classes at the Mahabodhi International Meditation Center were not tiny, white-bearded Indian gurus but young Englishmen. Nonetheless, they were learned and eminently qualified, and led strenuous and bracing workouts for mind and body. Perhaps it was their Western-ness that made them adept in conveying Eastern wisdom to foreigners like me.

Decades earlier, Richard Alpert, a privileged Harvard professor, had glimpsed an expansion of consciousness and alternate reality through the use of psychedelics. Along with a colleague, Timothy Leary, Mr. Alpert was dismissed from Harvard. He traveled to India in 1966 and became a disciple of Neem Karoli Baba, a Hindu guru also known as Maharaj-ji who gave Mr. Alpert the spiritual name Ram Dass. He returned to the United States the following year, where he began to share what he had learned.

Mr. Dass’s 1971 book, “Be Here Now,” quickly became a sort of spiritual guidebook for Westerners in which he shared the guru’s teachings on attaining God consciousness and identification with one’s soul through meditation, yoga, and renunciation. Subsequent books included “Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita,” “The Only Dance There Is,” “How Can I Help?” and “Be Love Now: The Path of the Heart,” the latter written with Rameshwar Das, a writer and photographer who lives in Springs.

“Polishing the Mirror: How to Live From Your Spiritual Heart” is another collaboration of Mr. Dass and Mr. Das. In it, they recount many teachings and experiences with Maharaj-ji, many of them deceptively simple statements that offer an alternate way of looking at life and its purpose. Many other historical figures, from Jesus and Buddha to Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi, are referenced, and experiences both ordinary and extraordinary are recounted.

“The essential work of developing a spiritual consciousness is quieting the mind and opening the heart,” the authors write. The key is to awaken from ego consciousness, “your limited self,” to “the Self, the universal spirit present in each of us, the God consciousness.” Many pathways are laid out, particularly in the final chapter, in which methods of creating a daily spiritual practice — polishing the mirror — are detailed. Meditation, not surprisingly, along with recitation of a mantra, reflection, chanting, and silence, are recommended and described.

Mr. Dass, who suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke in 1997, a life-threatening infection in 2004, and a broken hip in 2009, encourages readers to embrace change, including aging and death. He describes extensive experience sitting with terminally ill people in the West and observation of suffering in India that may be impossible for Westerners to imagine, let alone comprehend. He and Mr. Das also offer meditations and other techniques for opening the heart to unconditional love, serving selflessly, accepting fear and suffering, and realizing that you are neither your body nor your ego, but your ever-present soul.

The art of life, the authors write, “is to stay wide open and be vulnerable, yet at the same time to sit with the mystery and the awe and the unbearable pain — to just be with it all.” Mr. Dass has been “growing into that wonderful catchphrase, ‘be here now,’ for the last forty years. Here and now has within it a great richness that is just enough.”

The notions of “I” and “me,” the meditation instructor at the Mahabodhi center used to tell us, inevitably give rise to the notions of “you” and “yours.” This, Mr. Dass and Mr. Das write, is maya, the illusion of subject and objects, of separateness. In a discourse on bhakti, or religious devotion, they explain that “Love has a built-in power to carry us beyond the limitations of our separate being, our ego, to the atman, our higher being,” or soul. “Our personal emotional love gets absorbed into the all-encompassing unconditional love of the One.”

Turn to any page of “Polishing the Mirror” and receive wisdom through the easy-to-comprehend sensibility of Westerners who found it at its source. To our great fortune, they returned to share it freely.

“Polishing the Mirror” is now out in paperback.

“The Book of Love”

Roger Rosenblatt

Ecco Press, $22.99

Attention, lovers, hop out of bed! 

Valentine’s Day is upon you. Time to dig up a gift for your beloved, who will surely not be your beloved if you forget.

You have only a matter of hours to fix this. But in your haste why not skip the usual chocolates or flowers or Hallmark card (yawn) and spin over to Canio’s or BookHampton and pick up a copy (or more) of Roger Rosenblatt’s just published in the nick of time “The Book of Love.”

And by the way forget about ordering from Amazon on your bedroom computer. It’s important that you get out of bed for this one. Besides if you and your computer and your beloved are all in bed together, your beloved will know what to expect on V-Day and what’s the fun of that? Forget about an e-book too. You can’t inscribe that with pretty words.

But what about this book, Mr. Rosenblatt’s latest? Is it any good? He writes essays for Time and “PBS NewsHour” and has won a Polk and a Peabody and an Emmy and written six Off Broadway plays and 16 books including national best sellers like “Making Toast” and “Lapham Rising” and he was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and is professor of English and writing at Stony Brook University and . . . you get the idea. They all say he’s pretty good. But what about this book? Well, here’s what they all say.

O, The Oprah Magazine — “This year’s ultimate Valentine’s Day treat.”

Vanity Fair — “A symphony of amore.”

Kirkus Reviews — “. . . like Coltrane at the Village Vanguard.”

Booklist — “Rosenblatt — wittily, urbanely, wholeheartedly — is in love.”

But what do I think? Well, where to start? In the middle of the book maybe, or maybe at the end, or maybe it makes no difference. Mr. Rosenblatt is all over the place on love.

We used to call this sort of literature “stream of consciousness” — think of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Or how about a smorgasbord? Or maybe the Coltrane remark is on the mark? Or how about a handful of lit firecrackers? In fact, one can’t really precisely review Mr. Rosenblatt’s book or his mind. Both book and mind are moving at light speed in short paragraphs and long, in quotes and quips and puns and poems. It’s about love — all kinds of love — of family, friends, home, country, work, writing, solitude, art, nature, self — indeed of Life. And sexually induced love in all its variations — romantic love, courtship, heartbreak, fury, confusion, melancholy, hysteria, delirium, ecstasy — you name a nuance and Mr. Rosenblatt has it covered.

Here are a few of my favorites —

On married love: “People sometimes get married for the same reasons poets sometimes write sonnets. Form rescues content.”

On statistics: “Of the six marriages announced on page eighty-three of the Sunday paper, 2.2 will fail, 2.3 will last, 1.5 will fail and last.”

On friendship: “Love is hysteria. But friendship is a peaceful little thing.”

On God’s love: “Before you tell me God is love, let me tell you, Mike, too, is love. So are a dozen other friends whom I can think of, off the top of my head. I can count on the love of my friends. But the love of God? . . . too flighty for my taste.”

On his father’s love: “He showed no affection for his parents, who showed no affection for him. . . . I was never sure if he loved me or some of the things I did.”

On J.F.K. and Bill Clinton: “This is the way of the unloved child. You can make up for practically any other deficiency, but that particular omission runs through you like a spear. . . . They could never get enough, because early on, they got too little.”

The list of Mr. Rosenblatt’s ponderings and pirouettes is simply amazing. There is no valid way to review a collection as wacky and wonderful as this. Hurry off to your independent bookstore. Your beloved will think more highly of you and your sex life might improve too. Statistics prove it.

Bill Henderson’s latest book is “Cathedral.” He is publisher of Pushcart Press in Springs.

Roger Rosenblatt lives in Quogue.