MQR 51:1 | Winter 2012

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Julian Levinson translates and comments on Moshe-Leyb Halpern; Derek Mong considers English as a second language; Natania Rosenfeld muses on her mother-in-law and Louise Bourgeois; Stefanie Weisman goes in search of E. B. White.

Fiction by Alan Cheuse (with help – a lot of help – from Herman Melville), Bernardine Connelly, Chidalia Edochie, and Peter Levine.

Poetry by Nicolas Born, Victoria Chang, Moshe-Leyb Halpern, A. Van Jordan, Nick Lantz, Margaret Reges, Brian Swann, and Ann Marie Thornburg.

Plus: A review by Raymond McDaniel of Maggie Nelson’s “The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning.”

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To Every Dish, There is a Season

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by Monique Daviau

Plates and bowls are meant to be simple conveyances for food, but now eating at home would possess the burden of memory: each grown-up, lonely dinner of spaghetti with jarred sauce and salad from a bag would be served on plates that screamed in my face COLLEGE! YOUTH! 1998! NORTHAMPTON! NEVER EATING ALONE! Over time, would these thirty-six pieces of cracked, used china simply become my regular old dishes, no longer returning to my mind an amalgam of dusty, distant college memories? Did I want my Madeleine or didn’t I?

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The First Peoples Initiative, “la India Bonita,” and a Few Good Reasons to Decry the Hipster Headdress: An Interview with Natasha Varner

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“I’ve heard a lot of people defend the hipster headdress saying that it’s the same thing as wearing a crown or eating a pizza–that borrowing from and imitating other cultures is part of human nature. However, when you look at the history of genocide and other atrocities that Native Americans have experienced because of white settler colonists, the practice of appropriating their religious and cultural practices suddenly seems much more atrocious.”

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YouTube’s Usefulness

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by A.L. Major

Lev Grossman begins his recent Time article, writing “For every minute that passes in real time, 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube…Sixty hours every minute. That’s five months of video every hour. That’s 10 years of video every day.” How is that possible? Most often YouTube’s content includes movie clips, short films, whole films, television shows, music videos and amateur videos. “Anybody can run [a YouTube channel] easily and for free. That puts individual YouTube users on the same footing with celebrities and major networks.” I don’t know if I’d call them celebrities, but recently, I’ve developed this immense fascination with the people who have video blogs (vlogs).

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Activating Images: On Saskia Olde Wolbers’s “Pareidolia”

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by Nicholas Johnson

Pareidolia refers to the tendency of human perception to discover meaning in random structures where meaning does not exist. It is the perception of an image in a cloud or a pattern on the surface of the moon. It can also refer to an experience of the spiritual. London based artist Saskia Olde Wolbers’ film Pareidolia explores this phenomena through fantastical imagery and a fable that tells of a miscommunication between a professor and a Zen master.

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Reflection, Told by the Glass

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By Gina Balibrera

Just before leaving town for the holidays I paid a visit to Ann Arbor’s subterranean Aardvark antique shop and came upon several boxes of Stereoscopic gold, at a price even the most frugal of treasure-hoarders can celebrate. I stood beholden to the stacks of rectangular cardstock bearing double images–of a gloomy pair of circus lions, or of two doe-eyed Victorian housewives swooning upon identical hand-colored velvet chaises, or of a bank in San Francisco, the twin photographs taken sometime before the 1906 earthquake that broke Market Street in two. A Stereoscope, for the unknowing, is a trick of the mind. The double imaged cards were once created with the intention of being held by elegant machinery. Lenses would cover the eyes, crossing them, to reveal a single image in three stunning dimensions.

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