When Puccini Came, Saw and Conquered

Michael Cooper, "When Puccini Came, Saw and Conquered," New York Times, November 18, 2018, p. AR15-.

The Met Opera's archives contain a copy of the contact that brought Puccini back to New York in 1910 for the premier of "la Fanciulla del West." To promises of pay, expenses, and room and board, one more is added in handwriting: "cars." 

COMMENT

   This article is full of references to  historical documents-- letters, news reports and playbills that must have been found at a library or archive. However, the writer makes only direct reference to the research method in describing a handwritten note on a contract in the Metropolitan Opera archives. That single word "cars" is one of those spooky contacts with history because it affirms an impression of Puccini's personality.  It's clear that the writer  found the discovery of this hidden treasure so thrilling that he couldn't resist including it in the final article.

     The article also mentions that Puccini attended a shocking production of Richard Strauss' opera Salome based on the Oscar Wilde text. When we read about historical people getting all hot under the collar about some opera we think they were just being prudish and old-fashioned. I saw it at the Utah Opera a few years ago. It's really shocking.  Seriously.  Prudish people will not like it one bit. I am still surprised that Utah opera fans didn't riot.

Hidden Traces

Sam Knight, "Hidden Traces: How Historical Manuscripts are Giving Up Their Secrets" (Annals of Science), New Yorker,  November 26, 2018, pp. 38-45.

Melloni is the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Sciences, an institute in Bologna dedicated to the history of the Church.  He had heard of the Marco Polo Bible, but he was unaware of its poor condition until a colleague spotted the crumbling book at an exhibition at the library in 2008, and pitched a project to restore it a find out more about its past.  "It was like a sort of Cinderella among the beautiful sisters," Melloni said.  Like other people accustomed to handling old texts or precious historical objects, Melloni has a special regard for what Walter Benjamin called their aura; "a strange weave of space and time" that allows for an intimation of the world in which they  were made.  "You have in your hand the manuscript,: Melloni said, "But also the stories that the manuscript is carrying.

....

Collins cautioned that historical proteomic techniques are still in their infancy.  "We still need to learn what these things mean," he said. But when you realize that the surface of any old object might be bearing newly discernible biological information -- that you are holding a manuscript and you are also holding the stories that the manuscript is carrying-- it makes you look again at the world's libraries and archives, and wonder what secrets they contain.  

Comment

     Books as physical objects are of the subject of  this article which describes scientific investigation of  the traces of protein left behind by people handling books and manuscripts.  Rather than using textual information, the researchers are looking for chemical clues about past authors and readers.  In the case of the Marco Polo bible, there were questions of whether the artifact was really the right age?  Did it really travel to China? "A manuscript's text is only part of it's story," Knight writes

     In order to test books, proteomic researchers need to get permission from librarians and archivists.  In some cases they use "destructive testing" which requires taking a small sample, a definite no-no for rare and valuable books.  Some libraries like the Bodleian Library and British Library have refused to permit even nondestructive testing which takes molecular samples.

      The author of the article realizes that his own notebook will forever carry traces of the fish he ate for lunch, but so what? Is that information important enough to be worth saving the physical object?  Probably not for the notebook, but for other paper objects proteomics can determine provenance or prove that certain conditions (like bubonic plague) were epidemic.  The information in libraries is not limited to what is recorded in text.

   

   

[[there.]]

Lance Olsen. [[there.]], Anti-Oedipus Press, 2014.

:::: My first excursion upon arriving in Iowa City to begin work on what would strike me in retrospect as nothing if not a fraught M.F.A. was into the corner of library stacks housing these by previous Workshop graduates.
     I touched the heavy spines protecting Flannery O'Connor's writing, John Irving's, T. Coraghessan Boyle's, hoping some of their prose would rub off on my hands.
     It's the same electric gratitude I feel walking the halls of the American Academy.
     Hello Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Jeff Eugenides. 

COMMENT

[[there.]] is a travel journal about displacement in time and space.  Olsen uses eccentric punctuation:

:::: for what cannot be articulated accurately.

[[ ]] for what must be removed from the chronic to be experienced.

The MFA theses in the library would have been signed by the now famous students who wrote them.  In this passage Olsen explicitly describes a physical experience, visiting books, powerful objects that might rub off some of their magic. He mentions touching the spines but not reading the text, though he might have and just didn't write about it.  In context it becomes clear that Olsen is conscious of visiting a  kind of book museum, a literary Wunderkammer.

Oslen writes:

     Travel removes us from clock time, from the capitalist insistence that minutes are money, our lives meant to be segmented, regulated, reified.  Travel serves as compelled dislocation and temporal smear. When that is no longer true, it is no longer travel: you have arrived somewhere.
      The same being the case with innovative writing practices.

By this definition, the library shelf of MFA theses is "somewhere," while the process of writing them involved a kind of dislocation.  Olsen is writing about an experience of library-as-place, not an interior facility of tables and chairs, but "somewhere" expressed in the collection of other writers who occupied the same place at different points in time.

Dance With Us

 Ann Dils & Rosalind Pierson. "Dance With Us: Virginia Tanner, Mormonism, and Humphrey's Utah Legacy." Dance Research Journal 32, no. 2 (2000): 7-13. 

Pierson and I both seek to explain the magic of and produced by Tanner's teaching, but our texts--a memoir and a research paper--are distinct. Pierson writes from the warmth and certainty of her own experience, her memories perhaps stimulated or affirmed by research (see pp 14-16). Her account makes it clear that a memory is not just a mental picture but a remembering (derived from the Latin membrum, rather than memor) of experience, a calling up and inner restatement of sensory, somatic, and emotional experience. I write from the more distanced perspective of a researcher struggling with several kinds of documentation. I include more voices in my text, especially those of the Tanner students I interviewed or whose words are preserved in letters to her, now housed in the Virginia Tanner Papers, 1945-1979, in the Special Collections of the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

COMMENT

     Scholarly articles seldom  mention library interactions even though scholars are heavy library users judging from the typical extensive, well-researched reference lists. The erasure of personal experience is intended  to keep scholarly research objective.  I've noticed, though,  that when scholarly authors write for popular news media they love to relate their library adventures and the thrilling discovery of hidden treasure in the archives. 

     This is a rare scholarly article that does  mention the library. It's because the co-authors used an uncommon research strategy that combines personal memory with historical library research. This proved to be so confusing to whomever constructed the JSTOR online database where I found the article that they misinterpreted it as two separate articles. The digital copy of the article cut me off in the middle.  I had to locate a link to the entire scanned issue in order to read the whole article.

 

   

   
     

Deep in Time

Holly Haworth. “Deep in Time: Standing Still in the Age of Oil.” Orion. 37(2), 2018, pp. 36-47.

Along the trail I bend and squint to look at the fossils. I am carrying the Guide to the Permian Reef Geology Trail that I picked up in the park library. The book’s authors, who represent the oil companies ARCO, Marathon, Texaco and Chevron, have documented the types of rocks and fossils within the reef at several stops on the trail. I match the shapes that I see with the photos in the guide. [p.42]

COMMENT

     A few years ago I did a quick-and-dirty citation analysis in order to see what kind of materials students in our new Environmental Humanities program were using for their Masters theses. I found that their citations fit a normal humanities research profile (lots of books, relatively fewer journal articles) with the notable addition of some unusual types of research materials -- local newspaper articles, government land use plans, photographs, maps and guidebooks.  It made sense because Environmental Humanities explores the relationship between people and place. These types of resources are all ways to associate information with a particular geography.

    Conventional instruction for information literacy tends to ignore place-based research. Librarians focus on a universal kind of knowledge that's contained in books and scholarly journal articles. However, the old style of inquiry is  not working out as well in an age when sustainable change requires engagement with place. One way librarians can help build resilient communities is by developing place-based information literacy courses.  Environmental Humanities research provides a  model for what place-based research could look like.

     Popular guidebooks don't just report on what's there; they can generate a kind of feedback loop that in a way creates a sense of place.  Roger Tory Peterson’s Guide to the Birds (1934), for example, or the Powell Expedition reports that inadvertently became the first recreational guidebook to the Colorado River. Some guidebooks become controversial when they draw crowds into formerly peaceful areas, for example, or reveal the location of fragile archaeological sites. One author of Utah hiking guidebooks became notorious for overambitious agendas that lure ill-prepared novices into trouble. Guidebooks like Atlas Obscura expose undiscovered places and are accused of contributing to overtourism. One hazard for library copies of guidebooks is that patrons are likely to take them out into the field.  I’ve done it myself, most recently with a library copy of  Guide to the Green and Yampa Rivers in Dinosaur National Monument. 

     Librarians should keep an eye out for unique local guidebooks that record  a sense of place. One of my favorites is a guidebook to the trees growing by the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City, Utah. [1].  With the guidebook in hand, the trees appear in a whole new light. Another recently published treasure is Jordan River Water Trail & Bike Path by Elliott R. Mott [2]who hopes his guide to a neglected urban river will help create change. He writes, "It is hoped this book will accelerate the transformation and pave the way to developing a first class pollution free, wildlife rich, urban water trail." 

[1] Jenifer Baguley, Trees, Spirituality and Science: A Guide to the Trees of the First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City, U of U Center for Science and Mathematics Education, 2013.

[2] Elliott R. Mott, Jordan River Water Trail & Bike Path, Roosevelt & Torrey LLC, 2018. 

A Tasting Menu of Seamus Heaney's Poetry

Jim Dwyer, "A Tasting Menu of Seamus Heaney’s Poetry: An Exhibition Offers an Archive of a Productive Literary Life," New York Times, Oct. 31, 2018, p. C6.

DUBLIN— On a December day several years ago, the poet Seamus Heaney drove up to the back door of the National Library of Ireland, his car packed with 12 boxes of attic. The haul was more than 10,000 pieces of paper—drafts of poems on envelopes and halfway-there typescripts, even a clipping of one he first published in a newspaper and later reworked in pen and pencil on the printed page. Now that collection has been harvested to create a tasting menu of Heaney, young to old, in “Listen Now Again,” an exhibit to be housed for three years in a cultural space at the Bank of Ireland on college Green, here in Dublin.

COMMENT

     Heaney was a Nobel laureate poet and therefore his paper debris was deemed worthy of archival space. In the digital age many writers no longer leave behind this kind of paper trail.  There are no longer any typescripts. Revisions done on a computer leave no trace of previous versions.  Nonetheless, the thought process of famous people is thought to provide insight into their writing.  

     
     The library must have asked Heaney for the papers which he delivered himself. It occurs to me that if by some unlikely turn I ever became a famous poet I would have no papers to give.  I don’t save anything.  It all goes in the recycle bin as soon as I’m done marking it up and typing the revisions.  In fact, I find early drafts deeply dismaying with their sloppy word choice and poorly-expressed ideas.  

    
     While Heaney used the library to store a record of his work, the exhibit curator used it as source material for a museum museum display. Dusty boxes, however exciting the contents, are not very visually appealing.  The challenge for the curator was to find a way to give textual information some kind of visual impact.  In this case a nod to Irish history with a circle of pillars that resemble Neolithic standing stones and the progress of revisions shown through multimedia displays.  For ordinary poets, the best we librarians can do is just to keep the pretty dust jackets on and set up some book displays. 

A Famous Nude Gets a Face and an Identity

Adam Nossiter, "A Famous Nude gets a Face and an Identity: Historian Solves Mystery of a Gustave Courbet Painting," New York Times, Oct 2. 2018, p.C1;C6.

     The feminist art historian Linda Nochlin called the work "pornography" but also "a little masterpiece of overt sexuality."
     And now finally the matter of its sitter seems to have been solved, thanks to a chance discovery by a mild-mannered French historian toiling in the archives.
...
     Mr Schopp's breakthrough came innocently enough.  He had been working on annotation the letters between Dumas and the writer George Sand, and had long been perplexed by a passage in the old typewritten copies, where Dumas inveigh against the  "insolent" and "cowardly" Courbet, who had committed an artistic heresy, in the view of Dumas:
     "One doesn't paint with one's most delicate and sonorous brush the interview of Mademoiselle Queniault of the Opera, for the Turk who took refuge inside it from time to time -- all of it life-size, and life-size also two women passing for men."
...
     But what about that world "interview" in the typescript, and the other painting referred to?  Mr. Schopp went back to the source -- the manuscript of the Dumas letter at the National Library.
The word Dumas had actually written was "interior," not interview.  He underlined it, to emphasize that he was playing with worlds.
     "I dared to utter an inner 'Eureka,'' Mr. Schopp writes in a new book about the affair, "The Origin of the World: Life of the Model," which will be published in France this week. 

COMMENT 

The first rule of research is, when in doubt consult the original source. The name of the model for a famous (and famously risqué) painting by Gustave Courbet was unknown, even though the answer to the mystery was hiding in plain sight.  It took a researcher brave enough to admit that the transcription made no sense to go back and investigate what the original manuscript actually said.  It didn't help that Dumas had misspelled the name of Constance Queniaux, foiling a keyword search strategy.  The journalist is pleased to report that the sexy Ms. Queniaux lived long and prospered.