Recent titles at Project MUSE

September 4, 2024 5:33 PM

What's Hidden Inside Planets? (interview with Sabine Stanley) and What if Fungi Win? (interview with Arturo Casadevall) are open access titles launched at Project MUSE in the past few years. Miscellany of the South Seas: A Chinese Scholar's Chronicle of Shipwreck and Travel through 1830s Vietnam is a remarkable shipwreck narrative there too. The "Deities, Spirits, and Clergy" chapter in A Ming Confucian's World has an interesting complement in a reissue of much earlier stories: Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic. The Georgia Open History Library reprints texts on colonial America. And in media studies, a reissue of Film Makers on Film Making has recent counterparts in books on Ultima and a bunch of Landmark Video Games--plus I Know You Are, but What Am I?: On Pee-wee Herman.
posted by Wobbuffet (3 comments total)

“Cut out all scenes and just leave titles. We will get a literary skeleton of the picture. To this literary skeleton we can add new footage—realistic, symbolical, expressionist—any kind.
…
It is all a matter of juxtaposition of one visual moment with another, all a matter of intervals.
…
Starting with this or that combination of relations, the author of the montage determines: the duration of each piece in meters for each of the images, the duration of projection of each distinct image. Moreover, at the same time that we perceive the movement which determines the relation between images, we also take into consideration, between two adjoining images, the spectacular value of each distinct image in its relations to all the others engaged in the “montage battle” which begins

To find the most convenient itinerary for the eyes of the spectator in the midst of all these mutual reactions, of these mutual attractions, of these mutual repulsions of images among themselves, to reduce this whole multiplicity of intervals (of movements from one image to the other) to a simple spectacular equation: to a spectacular formula expressing in the best possible manner the essential theme of the cine-thing, such is the most difficult and important task of the author of montage”

~ dziga vertov ~
posted by HearHere at 6:10 PM on September 4 [2 favorites]

I was thinking "do I have time to read an entire book about a shipwreck?" and then I made the further mistake of clicking the previously link.
posted by tofu_crouton at 3:21 PM on September 5 [1 favorite]

Honestly, many of those previously shipwreck narratives are among the most gripping things I've ever read. I started by skimming like a hundred of them in search of ones worth spending more time on, and some are just wow. The shipwreck narrative in this post though focuses mostly on the experiences the author had afterward--even more interesting in many ways.
posted by Wobbuffet at 3:43 PM on September 5 [1 favorite]