Target Margin Theater

On Tuesday, February 16, Target Margin Theater presented readings and discussion of their new work-in-progress The Really Big Once here in Butler Library. This play explores the complex relationship between Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan in the period between 1948 and the early 1950s as they worked on the first production of Camino Real, Williams's "experimental" play that opened on Broadway in 1953 and quickly closed after receiving mostly scathing reviews.

The Really Big Once explores their shared sense of outsider status, for Williams a life-long journey, for Kazan the fallout from his 1952 testimony before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. It has been developed by Target Margin's founder and Artistic Director David Herskovits and his creative team using letters, drafts of Camino Real, and other materials found in Williams and Kazan archives in various libraries around the country, including Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Shown here is one of the letters used in the play, found in the RBML Tennessee Williams Papers. Written by Elia Kazan (Gadg) to Tennessee Williams (Tenn), it is here shown for the first time with permission of the Kazan Estate.

The Really Big Once will run from April 13 to May 8, 2010 at The Ontological Theater, St. Mark's Church, New York City.
Please see Target Margin Theater's web site for more details:
http://www.targetmargin.org/index.htm

Bomb The making of a Gregory Corso poem.

One of the great perks of working in the RBML is not merely being surrounded by the fabulous rare and unique books and manuscripts we care for, but also having colleagues who share their own discoveries. Today was just such a day: while conferring with Carrie Hintz, one of RBML's manuscript processors, about our Beat Collections, Carrie pulled out a letter from City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti to poet Gregory Corso. And not just any letter: this is the one in which Ferlinghetti accepted the poem "BOMB" for publication and included a little sketch of the proposed mise-en-page.


Gregory Corso's poem "BOMB"-- first published by City Lights in San Francisco, 1958--was printed as a calligram, that is, a poem whose typographical characters are spatially arranged in a manner that corresponds to the poem's theme or topic. The letter comes from RBML's Allen Ginsberg Papers.

Ferlinghetti's enthusiastic response also mentions his plan to print the poem as a broadside, or as a single sheet. The format is particularly appropriate for BOMB, graphically reinforcing the impact of Corso's theme. Columbia's copy of the printed poem is shown at left, and can be seen up close in the RBML reading rooms. RBML Call number: B812C818 O5 1958

RBML also has a Gregory Corso collection with correspondence, art works, and the poet's notebooks.

Three's a Charm: “Writing About Coffee, Reading In Cafés: Literature and Coffeehouses in Early Modern France” :03/03/2010

New date! This talk has been rescheduled for March 3, 2010.

The Book History Colloquium at Columbia welcomes Thierry Rigogne from Fordham University's History Department.

His talk, “Writing About Coffee, Reading In Cafés: Literature and Coffeehouses in Early Modern France” will be held March 3, Butler Library room 523, 6PM.

Well before Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Parisian cafés have shared a strong affinity with literature. In the seventeenth century, it was books, from travel accounts to medical treatises, that introduced the French to what was then a new, exotic, Oriental beverage. Writers immediately patronized the first coffeehouses, where they could discuss literature and much else, while regular patrons went to cafés to read newspapers or pamphlets. In this talk, Thierry Rigogne will explore the connections between cafés and literature in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France, a time during which they shaped each other’s development and created the figure of the literary café.

The Colloquium is open to all... for our full schedule, see:

Book History Colloquium at Columbia

On December 18, 2009, the four member Russian delegation led by Aleksandr Pavlovich Vershinin, General Director of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, has visited the Columbia University libraries. This visit was initiated by the Russian side of the team representing the Joint Project between the Library of Congress and the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, the first Presidential Library in Russia.

Russian delegation represents one of five Joint Project Implementation Teams created within the framework of the Russian-American Working Group on Library Cooperation. The focus of these five groups is 1)Technology and Best Practices; 2) Content and Exchange of Materials; 3)Audio-Visual Collections; 4) Copyright and Related Rights; and 5)Specific Joint Digital Projects.

The Russian delegation met with Jim Neal, who introduced them with Columbia Libraries system in general. Then they were hosted by Columbia University Slavic bibliographer, Rob Davies, who made a Powerpoint presentation on the historical background of Columbia’s library, in a national context, 1903-1946.

Tanya Chebotarev, Bakhmeteff Curator, set up a small exhibit of Russian and East European materials which emphasized the vast variety of the Bakhmeteff Archive collecting activities. She also talked about the history and collection development policies of the second largest repository of Russian émigré materials in the United States. See photos.

Patricia Renfro and representatives from RBML, LDPD, Columbia's Center for New Media Teaching & Research, and the Center for Digital Research & Scholarship gave an overview of Columbia's digitization program, special online teaching and learning projects, Courseworks, and other digital initiatives.

The group then had lunch at Faculty House with Jim Neal, Patricia Renfro, and former chair of the Baltic and Slavic Division at the NYPL, Edward Kasinec, who is now a fellow at the Harriman Institute.

Snowing in NYC (and in Flanders)

They closed Columbia this afternoon at 3:00 because of the snow storm. It feels like a sudden gift, a wild moment, normalcy is abandoned. Columbia students threw snow balls in the fields in front of Butler Library, and me, I came home and played with the Digital Scriptorium website. Snow in the Middle Ages? You bet. I went looking at calendar images for the months of January and February. To look at a series of them in a row makes you realize how peculiar, for example, the usual image for January is: a rich man eating dinner. You mean that he doesn't eat dinner in May? or September? Why should that scene be emblematic of January? I don't get it.

But two variations on the scene grabbed my attention, both Flemish, the first dating from the end of the 15th century, the second produced some 15-20 years later: the first is from San Marino, Huntington Library, HM 1157, f. 1: the gentleman is about to sit down to his dinner, but he pauses to warm his little tushie at the fire first. Now that makes sense to me: who can enjoy their dinner if their bottom is cold?


The second image (from the Spencer Collection at New York Public Library) is breathtakingly wonderful in its outdoor details of a snowy, cold day, some January in the early years of the 16th century, in the countryside near Bruges. As he ventures forth from his warm house, where family members are chatting around the fire, this gentleman leaves footprints in the snow; icicles hang from the edge of the thatched roof, the trees are snow-laden, birds soar in the chilly grey-blue sky and another traveller braves the wind, grabbing his hat to keep it from blowing away. Wow.




Both images reproduced here with permission from the holding libraries. If you'd like to see more images from these manuscripts, go to http://www.digital-scriptorium.org, choose Search, and type in their respective shelfmarks: HM 01157 or NYPL Spencer 036.