The insatiable fields that swallow
whole snakes and groundhogs, I’ve seen them —
those holes — I’ve seen the swallow
waver in her ether, you mean
we can’t exchange one world for another?
Is it a matter of matter
or space? Are we replacements or ourselves?
When we lie down, are we lying
together, citizens or friends, as souls
or as armor? When we die, do we divide
and are conquered? In the end, are we belittled
or gigantic, pure or fragments of each other
or both, flying forever?

For seven years I fought for the woman of all women, first as a secret admirer in the background, then as a reserved acquaintance, finally as a friend and confidant who accompanied her to restaurants and the cinema or on walks, as a patient listener in whom she confided her loneliness and her fears and her most intimate secrets, until finally this torturous time of deprivation ended when she broke up with her metal-worker and was available and the way seemed clear for me. Naturally I didn’t make my move right away, she needed time to recover from the breakup and to find herself, she needed peace, peace more than anything…

— EXCERPT FROM Turturro
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY
the 2011 Advanced German Through Translation
seminar at Hunter College

Since her dramatic execution by firing squad in 1917, Mata Hari has become an object of fascination in art, pop culture, and academia. She led a scandalous life that contained all the components of a Hollywood spy thriller: aliases, femmes fatales, sex, and espionage. There has been continual debate in the academic community about the espionage accusations; was she was actually a German spy or simply a victim of misogyny? However intriguing, these questions will not be discussed in this essay. They are questions that have come to overshadow the more understated, but equally fascinating, aspects of her life — such as the careful crafting of her self-image.

— EXCERPT FROM Portraits of Mata Hari:
The Creation of an Oriental Identity
BY Jacquelyn White

One day, nothing will remain. The language will again be transformed. If my poems were to still be around in 400 years, nobody would even be able to understand them. Moreover, one day the civilization to which we belong will disappear, just as all the others have disappeared. Having this perspective helps me a lot. The acceptance that comes from this understanding does not make me hopeless, however; it gives grandeur to the ephemeral act of living and writing. It gives it sense within the larger nonsense.

What to do with Eduoard Vuillard? He was an accomplished painter of stunning domestic interiors and their handsome inhabitants, who never made the curve into modernity. His name is absent from most histories of modern French art, possibly through unfortunate luck but also because there was something distinctly un-modern in him, a French painter who lived until 1940 but remained stubbornly allied to Impressionism and the ideals of the Old Masters. His work is perceived as pretty but tangential to the modern project, like an old family album we admire and then abandon on the couch when livelier, immediate matters call us.

— EXCERPT FROM Portraitist and Chronicler —
Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses,
1890-1940 by Stephen Brown
BY Merridawn Duckler

The distinction between “cinema” and “film” is, on the surface, an arbitrary one. One term could just as easily be exchanged for the other in our normative modes of speech (“I’m going to watch a film” / “I’m going to the cinema”). Film could be used in the singular individual case, a film or the film, or it could be used — as “cinema” is used — as an encompassing field of mediational events and practices, the whole social and aesthetic realm of film: as artform, medium, and discipline. The term film, more crucially, derives from the chemically sensitive photographic material that has been used since the golden age of industrial motion-picture cinema, i.e. photographic film.

— EXCERPT FROM Film After Film / Cinema After Deleuze:
Hoberman, Rushton, Deleuze,
and 21st Century Cinema
BY Jose-Luis Moctezuma

I am an historian of science by training. My first book, Le Jardin de l’utopie (2005) concerned the transformation of the old Jardin des Plantes into a Muséum d’histoire naturelle in 1793. So it was natural for me to continue my interest in French history in the eighteenth century. My interest therefore centered on how scientific knowledge about food could grow up among these well-established forms of authority… During the research for that earlier book, I had encountered numerous naturalists and chemists commenting on food and diet. But what most fascinated me was the problem of how scientific knowledge about food rose to importance in eighteenth-century France. My interest therefore centered on how scientific knowledge about food could grow up among these well-established forms of authority so as to rival and even overturn them. The answer to this was not self-evident: at the start of the century the only public food experts were physicians, as they had been since the Renaissance and earlier. By the end of the century the balance had shifted from traditional dietetics towards chemistry. To follow the rise of food experts in French society was therefore to move from one discipline to another.

But it was also to ask questions about how and why new forms of expert could appear on the public stage, in print and before rulers. This was particularly true in France, where by the reign of Louis XIV there already existed an authoritative courtly cuisine. In a general sense it was also the case that in all societies, there existed and still exist well-established culinary traditions and eating preferences, coming from parents, peers and fashion, which are entirely distinct from science and medicine.

— EXCERPT FROM The Science of Taste, A Taste of Science —
French Historian E.C. Spary on the Science of Food in the French Enlightenment
BY Greta Aart AND E.C. Spary

Right from the beginning my sole purpose was to create a forum: an imaginative poetry from all over the contemporary world that could be brought together between two covers. It was the only direction in poetry that inspired me. It generated energy behind passion that grows and deepens. Although I knew I was in for a long journey, my intent was to only publish what I thought to be both engaging and imaginative. There were always flavors of Surrealism, Imagism, The Deep Image, Leaping and Immanentist poetry. The issues were small back then. But as the reputation of the press grew, so did the volume’s size and scope.