Uranie


Book Description

I WAS seventeen. She was called Uranie. Was Uranie, then, a young girl, fair, with blue eyes, innocent, but eager for knowledge? No, she was simply what she has always been, one of the nine muses; she who presided over astronomy, and whose celestial glance animated and directed the spheral choir; she was the heavenly idea hovering above earthly dullness; she had neither the palpitating flesh, nor the heart whose pulsations can be transmitted through space, nor the soft warmth of humanity; but she existed, nevertheless, in a sort of ideal world, superior to humanity, and always pure; and yet she was human enough in name and form to produce in the soul of a youth a vivid and profound impression; to awaken in that soul an undefined and undefinable sentiment of admiration: almost of love.




Terra 2008


Book Description

Earthen architecture constitutes one of the most diverse forms of cultural heritage and one of the most challenging to preserve. It dates from all periods and is found on all continents but is particularly prevalent in Africa, where it has been a building tradition for centuries. Sites range from ancestral cities in Mali to the palaces of Abomey in Benin, from monuments and mosques in Iran and Buddhist temples on the Silk Road to Spanish missions in California. This volume's sixty-four papers address such themes as earthen architecture in Mali, the conservation of living sites, local knowledge systems and intangible aspects, seismic and other natural forces, the conservation and management of archaeological sites, research advances, and training.







Le Tumulte Noir


Book Description

Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates.




The Calendar in Revolutionary France


Book Description

One of the most unusual decisions of the leaders of the French Revolution - and one that had immense practical as well as symbolic impact - was to abandon customarily-accepted ways of calculating date and time to create a Revolutionary calendar. The experiment lasted from 1793 to 1805, and prompted all sorts of questions about the nature of time, ways of measuring it and its relationship to individual, community, communication and creative life. This study traces the course of the Revolutionary Calendar, from its cultural origins to its decline and fall. Tracing the parallel stories of the calendar and the literary genius of its creator, Sylvain Maréchal, from the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic era, Sanja Perovic reconsiders the status of the French Revolution as the purported 'origin' of modernity, the modern experience of time, and the relationship between the imagination and political action.




Guernsey Folk Lore


Book Description




Divagations


Book Description

"This is a book just the way I don't like them," the father of French Symbolism, StŽphane MallarmŽ, informs the reader in his preface to Divagations: "scattered and with no architecture." On the heels of this caveat, MallarmŽ's diverting, discursive, and gorgeously disordered 1897 masterpiece tumbles forth--and proves itself to be just the sort of book his readers like most. The salmagundi of prose poems, prose-poetic musings, criticism, and reflections that is Divagations has long been considered a treasure trove by students of aesthetics and modern poetry. If MallarmŽ captured the tone and very feel of fin-de-sicle Paris, he went on to captivate the minds of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--from ValŽry and Eliot to Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. This was the only book of prose he published in his lifetime and, in a new translation by Barbara Johnson, is now available for the first time in English as MallarmŽ arranged it. The result is an entrancing work through which a notoriously difficult-to-translate voice shines in all of its languor and musicality. Whether contemplating the poetry of Tennyson, the possibilities of language, a masturbating priest, or the transporting power of dance, MallarmŽ remains a fascinating companion--charming, opinionated, and pedantic by turns. As an expression of the Symbolist movement and as a contribution to literary studies, Divagations is vitally important. But it is also, in Johnson's masterful translation, endlessly mesmerizing.




Incubus Dreams


Book Description

Vampire hunter Anita Blake finds her life is more complicated than ever, caught as she is between her obligations to the living-and the undead.







Gurlitt


Book Description

"The present volume reflects the documentary approach of both exhibitions. At the same time, it also reflects the current state of the scholarly and journalistic examination of Hildebrand Gurlitt and the art collection he compiled"--Page 11.