Unpublished Siegfried Sassoon Poems Found

Dr Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon‘s biographer, unearthed some unpublished poems at Cambridge University. Follow this link to BBC for a listen!


What she find most noticeable about the poems she discovered is that they aren't the angry war poems one might expect from Sassoon, but rather glorify war at points. 
Professor Sheffield argues against the dominant view that First World War poets presented of the war and Dr Moorcroft Wilson argues in counter to this.

Forthcoming Arnold Dreyblatt Lecture: From the Archives: Installation and Performace 1990-2011

To mark the launch of the new Visual Culture programme at the University of Exeter, the first of five visiting speaker events throughout 2011/12 will be held on Wednesday November 23rd, 2.00-4.00pm. This event will take place on the University’s Streatham Campus, in the Queens Building, LT4.

The event will feature a talk by the artist Arnold Dreyblatt, entitled ‘From the Archives: Installation and Performance 1990-2011’.

Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American media artist and composer. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. In 2007, Dreyblatt was elected to lifetime membership in the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). He is Professor for Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design in Kiel, Germany.
Dreyblatt's visual work creates complex textual and spatial visualizations for memory. His works, which reflect on such themes as recollection and the archive, include permanent works, digital room projections, dynamic textual objects and muti-layered lenticular text panels. His work been exhibited and staged in galleries, museums and public spaces such as the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin; The Jewish Museum in New York; the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Permanent public art works are on display at the HL Holocaust Center in Oslo and the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He has received numerous commissions and awards including the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts and the Förderpreis der Akademie der Künste.

Dreyblatt will be speaking about his work from 1990 – 2011. He will take the audience through his processes and include still and moving image documentation.


The talk is free, but booking is essential, and can be made here: http://www.arnolddreyblattlecture.eventbrite.com/

What would Dazed and Confused have done differently? - They'd archive

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/05/dazed-confused-gang-still-cool

Reading the above article I noticed this paragraph:

"If they could have done anything differently, I ask, what would they change? "We'd archive," says Hack, immediately. "There were these Jake and Dinos Chapman sculptures that they made for one of our events. They all got trashed, of course. No one knew to give a shit. And when Radiohead debuted OK Computer for us nobody thought to record it – there were no smartphones then, nobody took cameras into clubs. Everything felt very … temporary.""

The Black Hours - Online Exhibition of a rare black manuscript

An extraordinary online exhibition of a Book of Hours named The Black Hours, was given this name becase the manuscripts are written and illuminated on vellum that is stained or painted black. The anonymous painter of the Black Hours is an artist whose style depended mainly upon that of Willem Vrelant, one of the dominant illuminators working in Bruges from the late 1450s until his death in 1481. The website describes it as follows:

"The text is written in silver and gold, with gilt initials and line endings composed of chartreuse panels enlivened with yellow filigree. Gold foliage on a monochromatic blue background makes up the borders. The miniatures are executed in a restricted palette of blue, old rose, and light flesh tones, with dashes of green, gray, and white. The solid black background is utilized to great advantage, especially by means of gold highlighting."
Unfortunately the very thing which makes the manuscript so unusual is difficult to preserve:

"The black of its vellum—the very thing that makes the codex so striking—is also the cause of some serious flaking. The carbon used in the black renders the surface of the vellum smooth and shiny—a handsome but less than ideal supporting surface for some of the pigments. The Morgan's Black Hours is awaiting conservation treatment. In the meantime, we are pleased to offer a virtual facsimile."

Manucript - http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/BlackHours/manuscript.asp

Archiving a 100 year history of fan magazines

This October is the 100th anniversary of the film fan magazine!

The publication of the very first issue of ‘The Pictures’ marked the birth of a rich 100 year history of film magazines, and Exeter's Bill Douglas Centre archive holds a copy of this first edition, amidst a wealth of other fan papers spanning the history of cinema.

To commemorate, a short piece offering a brief history of the British fan magazine and my research with these objects in the archive is now up on the University of Exeter homepage news and events section, and also in the Western Morning News.

#libcampuk: special collections

Just a quick post to direct you to an interesting discussion on the role of special collections and how to promote/expand them. Topics covered: issues surrounding outreach, the merits of physical or online exhibitions, hidden special collections etc.


The blog post is a summary of the issues discusses at 'Library Camp UK'.


Here is - the blog post


http://www.librarycamp.co.uk/

"early drafts were locked away for a reason"?

An article in the Telegraph titled "It's exciting to find  manuscripts abandoned by writers or musicians but early drafts were locked away for a reason" posits that newly discovered works "are best consigned to the cutting-room floor of history" as their authors intended. The argument stakes this claim firstly on the fact that many of these pieces were deemed substandard by their creators and secondly that the wishes of many artists are ignored in the publication of works which they desired to be destroyed. 


This kind of argument draws on the idea of the perfect, completed text as was intended by the author-god of that textual world. This calls into question the place of archival materials in scholarship at all, if  Peter Stanford is unsure about making unpublished 'completed texts' available, then it would follow that the use of manuscript drafts (especially of a work with a final published version) is entirely put of the question. Giving the shade of the author final control over what they intended to be published must also exclude volumes of letters and journals being published. And so on. 


As an example of poor literary executors Stanford uses Max Brod, who is responsible for the crime of not destroying Kafka's manuscripts. This is perhaps a poor choice of example as Stanford does acknowledge that Brod's actions mean that we have texts that are "now regarded as classics of 20th-century literature". He finds, however, that preserving a literary heritage is secondary to the "thrill" of rooting through papers and the money to which this can lead.  


The legal tangles aside, Stanford's article betrays interesting sentimental attachment to the idea of the perfect, published text intended by its author. The stability of this idea is is being constantly challenged by the use of draft material in scholarship. Whilst there certainly is money to be made in lost works and archives, these works are important to scholarship despite, or even because of, their unfinished nature.

Lost Hitchcock Film Found in Garden Shed

From a garden shed ‘archive’ to preservation for future generation of film historians and eager audiences… Non literary, but interesting archive related news nonetheless: a lost early Hitchcock film has been discovered in New Zealand and screened for the first time in Hollywood.

The 1923 silent feature titled The White Shadow was found in a garden shed after being lost for some 80 years. The film represents the earliest known feature from the infamous British director of such film history classics as Vertigo, Psycho and early features Sabotage and The Lodger.

The print was found in a garden shed in Hastings, part of a collection assembled by film fanatic Jack Murtagh. Peter Jackson's Park Road studio worked on the degraded reels, making a new print to enable the film to be screened at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Samuel Goldwyn Theatre last week.

The Telegraph’s coverage of the find can be found here.

Dead Sea Scrolls Digitized

It's a bit of a tongue twister. but the Dead Sea Scrolls have been digitized and are now available online - http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/ as part of the Israel Museum.

The website records the initial discovery of the scrolls:

"The first seven Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by chance in 1947 by Bedouin of the Ta'amra tribe, in a cave (later given the name "Cave 1") near Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. Three of the scrolls were immediately purchased by archaeologist Eliezer Lipa Sukenik on behalf of the Hebrew University; the others were bought by the Metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, Mar Athanasius Samuel. In 1948 Samuel smuggled the four scrolls in his possession to the United States; it was only in 1954 that Sukenik's son, Yigael Yadin, also an archaeologist, was able to return them to Israel, and they were ultimately entrusted to the Shrine of the Book Foundation. They have been on display in the Shrine of the Book at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, since 1965.
Over the next few years, from 1949 to 1956, additional fragments of some 950 different scrolls were discovered in ten nearby caves, both by Bedouins and by a joint archaeological expedition of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française and the Rockefeller Museum, under the direction of Professor Father Roland de Vaux. The richest yield, from Cave 4, just opposite the site of Qumran, consisted of some 15,000 fragments. The last cave, Cave 11, was discovered in 1956, and the scrolls found there were in a reasonable state of preservation. Since then, only a few small scraps of parchment have been found in the Judean Desert (though not in the close vicinity of Qumran)."

As the Official Google Blog explains, the digitization allows you to click on the Hebrew text and see an English translation (see below) and that:

"The scroll text is also discoverable via web search. If you search for phrases from the scrolls, a link to that text within the scroll viewers on the Dead Sea Scrolls collections site may surface in your search results. For example, search for [Dead Sea Scrolls "In the day of thy planting thou didst make it to grow"], and you may see a link to Chapter 17:Verse 11 within the Great Isaiah Scroll."

British Library ebook treasures

The British Library has digitized and made available for ipad various handwritten notebooks from their collection - William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Leonardo da Vinci, Jane Austen and Gerardus Mercator .
http://www.ebooktreasures.org/category/books-by-institution/british-library/

For a limited time Alice's Adventures Underground - Lewis Carroll's notebook is available free!



Sample of page from Blake's notebook

From the BL website: "This small notebook, which came into Blake’s possession in 1787 following his brother’s death, was used by Blake for over thirty years to record sketches and to work on drafts of his poems. The dense, closely-filled pages provide a fascinating insight into Blake’s compositional process, and allow us to follow, line by line, correction by correction, the genesis of some of his best-known work, including poems such as ‘London’ and ‘The Tyger' This eBookTreasures version contains the complete manuscript along with commentary on selected pages."

Sample Page from Lewis Carroll's notebook

From the BL website:

"Later known as Alice in Wonderland, this is the original manuscript given by Lewis Carroll to Alice Liddell for Christmas 1864. One summer’s day in 1862, he took Alice and her sisters on a boat trip on the Thames by Oxford, where he taught as a mathematician. Along the way he entertained them with a fabulous story of Alice’s adventures in a magical world entered through a rabbit hole. Ten year-old Alice begged him to write it down, and eventually he did, giving her this meticulous manuscript of the tale for Christmas.

This eBookTreasures version has transcription throughout as well as superb narration by Miriam Margoyles."