Notebooks: 1936-1947


Book Description

Available for the first time, Victor Serge's intimate account of the last decade of his life gives a vivid look into the Franco-Russian revolutionary's life, from his liberation from Stalin's Russia to his "Mexico Years," when he wrote his greatest works. In 1936, Victor Serge—poet, novelist, and revolutionary—left the Soviet Union for Paris, the rare opponent of Stalin to escape the Terror. In 1940, after the Nazis marched into Paris, Serge fled France for Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his life. His years in Mexico were marked by isolation, poverty, peril, and grief; his Notebooks, however, brim with resilience, curiosity, outrage, a passionate love of life, and superb writing. Serge paints haunting portraits of Osip Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, and “the Old Man” Trotsky; argues with André Breton; and, awaiting his wife’s delayed arrival from Europe, writes her passionate love letters. He describes the sweep of the Mexican landscape, visits an erupting volcano, and immerses himself in the country’s history and culture. He looks back on his life and the fate of the Revolution. He broods on the course of the war and the world to come after. In the darkest of circumstances, he responds imaginatively, thinks critically, feels deeply, and finds reason to hope. Serge’s Notebooks were discovered in 2010 and appear here for the first time in their entirety in English. They are a a message in a bottle from one of the great spirits, and great writers, of our shipwrecked time.




Maya Deren


Book Description

Maya Deren (1917–1961) was a Russian-born American filmmaker, theorist, poet, and photographer working at the forefront of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Influenced by Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, she is best known for her seminal film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a dream-like experiment with time and symbol, looped narrative and provocative imagery, setting the stage for the twentieth-century's groundbreaking aesthetic movements and films. Maya Deren assesses both the filmmaker's completed work and her numerous unfinished projects, arguing Deren's overarching aesthetic is founded on principles of incompletion, contingency, and openness. Combining the contrasting approaches of documentary, experimental, and creative film, Deren created a wholly original experience for film audiences that disrupted the subjectivity of cinema, its standards of continuity, and its dubious facility with promoting categories of realism. This critical retrospective reflects on the development of Deren's career and the productive tensions she initiated that continue to energize film.




Rites of Realism


Book Description

Rites of Realism shifts the discussion of cinematic realism away from the usual focus on verisimilitude and faithfulness of record toward a notion of "performative realism," a realism that does not simply represent a given reality but enacts actual social tensions. These essays by a range of film scholars propose stimulating new approaches to the critical evaluation of modern realist films and such referential genres as reenactment, historical film, adaptation, portrait film, and documentary. By providing close readings of classic and contemporary works, Rites of Realism signals the need to return to a focus on films as the main innovators of realist representation. The collection is inspired by André Bazin's theories on film's inherent heterogeneity and unique ability to register contingency (the singular, one-time event). This volume features two new translations: of Bazin's seminal essay "Death Every Afternoon" and Serge Daney's essay reinterpreting Bazin's defense of the long shot as a way to set the stage for a clash or risky confrontation between man and animal. These pieces evince key concerns—particularly the link between cinematic realism and contingency—that the other essays explore further. Among the topics addressed are the provocative mimesis of Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread; the adaptation of trial documents in Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc; the use of the tableaux vivant by Wim Wenders and Peter Greenaway; and Pier Paolo Pasolini's strategies of analogy in his transposition of The Gospel According to St. Matthew from Palestine to southern Italy. Essays consider the work of filmmakers including Michelangelo Antonioni, Maya Deren, Mike Leigh, Cesare Zavattini, Zhang Yuan, and Abbas Kiarostami. Contributors: Paul Arthur, André Bazin, Mark A. Cohen, Serge Daney, Mary Ann Doane, James F. Lastra, Ivone Margulies, Abé Mark Normes, Brigitte Peucker, Richard Porton, Philip Rosen, Catherine Russell, James Schamus, Noa Steimatsky, Xiaobing Tang




Experimental Cinema


Book Description

Brings together key writings on American avant-garde cinema to explore the long tradition of underground filmmaking from its origins in the 1920s to the work of contemporary film and video artists.




Tripping on Utopia


Book Description

A bold and brilliant revisionist take on the history of psychedelics in the twentieth century, illuminating how a culture of experimental drugs shaped the Cold War and the birth of Silicon Valley. "It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents." Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth. At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists—and star-crossed lovers—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life’s mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, and the founders of the Information Age. As we follow Mead and Bateson’s fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges.




Stars


Book Description

From two distinguished academics, this book includes contributions from top scholars such as Richard Dyer, and brings together key writings and new perspectives on stars and stardom in cinema across the world.




Breaking Through the Clouds


Book Description

An inspiring picture book about the meteorologist whose discoveries helped us understand how weather works When Joanne Simpson (1923-2010) was a girl, she sailed her boat beneath the puffy white clouds of Cape Cod. As a pilot, she flew her plane so high, its wings almost touched them. And when World War II began and Joanne moved to the University of Chicago, a professor asked her to teach Air Force officers about those very clouds and the weather-changing winds. As soon as the war ended, Joanne decided to seriously study the clouds she had grown to love so much. Her professors laughed. They told her to go home. They told her she was no longer needed. They told her, "No woman ever got a doctorate in meteorology. And no woman ever will." But Joanne was stubborn. She sold her boat. She flew her last flight. She saved her money so that she could study clouds. She worked so hard and discovered so much that—despite what the professors said—she received a doctorate in meteorology. She was the first woman in the world to do so. Breaking Through the Clouds tells the story of a trailblazing scientist whose discoveries about clouds and how they work changed everything we know about weather today.




Siege of Darkness


Book Description

The conflict between the drow of the Underdark and the dwarves of Mithral Hall comes to a head—and Drizzt Do’Urden and Bruenor find themselves on the frontlines. While Mithral Hall teems with whispers of the war to come, chaos erupts both above and below ground. On the surface of Faerûn, the first signs of the Time of Troubles make themselves known, forcing deities to assume their mortal forms. Beneath them in the Underdark, all but one drow house has lost their magical powers, and Lolth has handed the reins of leadership over to the demon Errtu. But even this turmoil cannot keep the drow from rising up from the black depths of the Underdark to battle the dwarves of Mithral Hall. Bruenor Battlehammer, with Drizzt at his side, will not go down without a fight—but they will have to fight without Wulfgar and Catti-brie at their sides. Siege of Darkness is the third book in the Legacy of the Drow series and the ninth book in the Legend of Drizzt series.




Leaves from an Epigrapher's Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy


Book Description

Preliminary Material -- The Development of the Jewish Scripts -- The Scripts of the Dâliyeh (Samaria) Papyri -- The Palaeographical Dating of the Copper Document -- Palaeography and the Date of the Tell Faḫariyeh Bilingual Inscription -- A Papyrus Recording a Divine Legal Decision and the Root rḥq in Biblical and Near Eastern Legal Usage -- Ammonite Ostraca from Tell Ḥisbān -- Epigraphic Notes on the ʻAmmān Citadel Inscription -- Notes on the Ammonite Inscription from Tell Sīrān -- A Forgotten Seal -- The Seal of Miqnêyaw, Servant of Yahweh -- Epigraphic Notes on Hebrew Documents of the Eighth-Sixth Centuries B.C.: I. A New Reading of a Place Name in the Samaria Ostraca -- Epigraphic Notes on Hebrew Documents of the Eighth-Sixth Centuries B.C.: II. The Murabbaʻât Papyrus and the Letter Found near Yabneh-yam -- Epigraphic Notes on Hebrew Documents of the Eighth-Sixth Centuries B.C.: III. The Inscribed Jar Handles from Gibeon -- A Literate Soldier: Lachish Letter III -- Lachish Letter IV -- An Ostracon in Literary Hebrew from Ḥorvat ʻUza -- Judaean Stamps -- An Inscribed Weight from ʻArâg el-ʾEmîr -- The Hebrew Inscriptions from Sardis -- Inscriptions from Tel Seraʻ -- A Philistine Ostracon from Ashkelon -- The Cave Inscriptions from Ḫirbat Bayt Layy [Khirbet Beit Lei] -- The Stele Dedicated to Melqart by Ben-Hadad of Damascus -- Fragments of the Prayer of Nabonidus -- An Aramaic Inscription from Daskyleion -- A New Aramaic Stele from Taymāʾ -- An Aramaic Ostracon of the Third Century BCE from the Excavations in Jerusalem -- A Note on a Burial Inscription from Mount Scopus -- The Arrow of Suwar, Retainer of ʻAbday -- An Inscribed Arrowhead of the Eleventh Century BCE in the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem -- Newly Discovered Inscribed Arrowheads of the Eleventh Century BCE -- Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Scripts -- A Phoenician Inscription from Idalion: Some Old and New Inscriptions Relating to Child Sacrifice -- The Phoenician Inscription from Brazil: A Nineteenth-Century Forgery -- An Interpretation of the Nora Stone -- Phoenicians in the West: The Early Epigraphic Evidence -- The Oldest Phoenician Inscription from Sardinia: The Fragmentary Stele from Nora -- Phoenician Incantations on a Plaque of the Seventh Century BCE from Arslan Tash in Upper Syria -- A Second Phoenician Incantation Text from Arslan Tash -- The Old Phoenician Inscription from Spain Dedicated to Hurrian Astarte -- The Pronominal Suffixes of the Third Person Singular in Phoenician -- An Ostracon in Greek Bearing the Names of the Gates of Idalion -- A Newly Published Inscription of the Persian Age from Byblos -- Jar Inscriptions from Shiqmona -- Two Offering Dishes with Phoenician Inscriptions from the Sanctuary of ʻArad -- An Old Canaanite Inscription Recently Found at Lachish -- An Inscribed Jar Handle from Raddana by Frank Moore Cross and David Noel Freedman -- An Archaic Inscribed Seal from the Valley of Aijalon [Soreq] -- Inscribed Arrowheads from the Period of the Judges by J. T. Milik and Frank Moore Cross -- The Evolution of the Proto-Canaanite Alphabet -- A Ugaritic Abecedary and the Origins of the Proto-Canaanite Alphabet -- The Origin and Early Evolution of the Alph.




Happiness by Design


Book Description

A cultural history of modern lifestyle viewed through film and multimedia experiments of midcentury designers Charles and Ray Eames For the designers Charles and Ray Eames, happiness was both a technical and ideological problem central to the future of liberal democracy. Being happy demanded new things but also a vanguard life in media that the Eameses modeled as they brought film into their design practice. Midcentury modernism is often considered institutionalized, but Happiness by Design casts Eames-era designers as innovative media artists, technophilic humanists, change managers, and neglected film theorists. Happiness by Design offers a fresh cultural history of midcentury modernism through the film and multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their peers—Will Burtin, László Moholy-Nagy, and György Kepes, among others—at a moment when designers enjoyed a new cultural prestige. Justus Nieland traces how, as representatives of the American Century’s exuberant material culture, Cold War designers engaged in creative activities that spanned disciplines and blended art and technoscience while reckoning with the environmental reach of media at the dawn of the information age. Eames-era modernism, Nieland shows, fueled novel techniques of culture administration, spawning new partnerships between cultural and educational institutions, corporations, and the state. From the studio, showroom floor, or classroom to the stages of world fairs and international conferences, the midcentury multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their circle became key to a liberal democratic lifestyle—and also anticipated the look and feel of our networked present.