In case you haven’t heard, the President has made a nomination…for the 14th Librarian of Congress. The nominee in question is none other than Dr. Carla D. Hayden, currently the CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. If nominated, Dr. Hayden will become the first female and the first African-American Librarian of Congress, but she’s already made her mark for all the patrons with and for whom she has worked.
Courtesy of AP
Dr. Hayden is widely described as one of the most experienced librarians in the country, and has spent her years at the Enoch Pratt Free Library connecting patrons with books and electronic resources, making vital connections with local schools, and creating a safe, engaging space for all patrons in a city that can often seem deeply divided.
Above all things, Dr. Hayden is a good librarian, which is something the Library of Congress desperately needs. Though James Billington, the soon-to-be previous Librarian, was devoted to the job, his training is that of an historian. There is nothing wrong with historians, mind–they are very good at taking care of things. But the Library of Congress needs to be dragged into the 21st century, and made accessible to readers and researchers around the world–and that kind of job requires a good librarian. Think about all the neat stuff you can do at our Library…all the programs and classes and technology available to patrons…you can thank Librarians for all of those. So just think what Dr. Hayden will be able to do with the Library of Congress!
She is also an outspoken proponent of user privacy and rights, and the vital importance of libraries to functioning democracies. In a 2003 interview with Ms. Magazine, she gave the following stellar quote:
Libraries are a cornerstone of democracy—where information is free and equally available to everyone. People tend to take that for granted, and they don’t realize what is at stake when that is put at risk.
I’ll let you meet the good Dr. Hayden for yourself in the video below, with hopes you enjoy!
As I’ve mentioned before, I lived in London for about two years while getting a degree. During this time, I was lucky enough to rent a room from one of the greatest families in the United Kingdom, who dubbed me their “Rental Daughter”. I went from being an only child to having a Rental Brother and Sister who not only thought I was cool and funny (mostly because of my accent), but who loved reading and telling stories, to boot.
That September, we heard that Roald Dahl‘s family were opening his home, Gipsy House in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, in honor of his birthday, my Rental Family decided to pay a visit–and asked me to come, too. The day was a pure adventure from start to finish, starting with my first ever visit to a British rest stop, and concluding with a walk through the gardens of the writer who helped shaped by childhood imagination.
The “gipsy caravan” that Dahl acquired, and the reason for his house’s name.
One of the best parts of the day was seeing parents and children walking together, reminiscing together about reading Roald Dahl’s books, how scared they were by the Witches, how exciting they were about finding a Golden Ticket, or how much they wanted to meet a real BFG of their very own. My Rental Sister and I talked about how much we both loved Matilda, while sneaking ripe blackberries off the bushes that lined the garden when no one was looking. For each person walking around Gipsy House that day, the world of each of Dahl’s stories was very real, and very present, and that allowed adults and children alike find a magical common ground where they could walk together.
What I remember really clearly was that we spent the entire drive back to London telling stories. Each of my Rental Siblings and I took turns adding to some thoroughly outlandish story about Constantine, the Blue Sorcerer who defeated the Red Lady with a petal found in the flower at the World’s End, and a former Circus Strongman who was covered in tattoos (among other similarly noteworthy characters). Even the Rental Parents got into it, unwilling to let a day of stories and imaginings go too quickly.
Today, a dear friend sent along this editorial, published in The Daily Mail, by Roald Dahl’s daughter, Lucy, describing her childhood with her father in the world that he created. It’s a lovely piece, not only because it confirmed all the wonderful, charming, and ever-surprising stories I had heard about Dahl, but because it reminded me how infectious his sense of wonder, joy, and imagination were, not only to Lucy, but to all of us who were lucky enough to spend some time at Gipsy House. In describing her home, Lucy writes, “I am from a land of magic and witches, giants and Minpins, woods and fields, four-leaf clovers and dandelion wishes – I am from the imagination of my father, Roald Dahl.”
Not only was this childhood one full of wild adventures and magic, but a place where stories were constantly being created, crafted, and told. “The BFG had not yet been written, nor had Matilda or The Witches,” Lucy recalls, “Dad was developing his characters with each bedtime story; watching our reactions, carefully noticing what made us laugh or sit up or even sometimes yawn.” I can’t describe how much happiness it brought to read through these reminiscences and realize that stories really did grow at Gispy House alongside the flowers.
So I thought that I would, in turn, pass this article on to you to enjoy, along with the hope that your day is full of dreams and stories, as well. You can read Lucy’s full article here–enjoy!
I captioned this photo “Taken while talking about Trunchbull”. Not really sure why, but it’s a good memory nevertheless.
I don’t know about you, Beloved Patrons, but this season can be lovely and happy and frolicksome..but it can also be pretty stressful, too. For all the “most wonderful time of the year”-ness of it all, for many, there just comes a point where you need a little escape, and some respite from the muchness of it all.
Mercifully, for those of us who need a little moment of reflection, and a bit of an escape, the Almeida Theatre has put the entirety of its marathon reading of Homer’s The Odyssey online. This is happiness. In more ways than one.
On Wednesday, one of our favorite guest bloggers discussed the beauty and the joy that can be found in poetry, and encouraged us all to face it without fear. It also turns out that poetry has added health benefits outside of engaging our sense of wonder. In the second century BC Greek physician named Soranus used poetry as a supplemental treatment for patients who were exhibiting symptoms of depression. This was, in fact, one of the earliest known cases of Bibliotherapy, a topic we’ve touched on previously. Today, doctors are once again prescribing books to patients with mild to moderate depression–naturally, this is no cure, but it has been proved as a helpful addition to professional therapy. A beautiful article from The Guardian observes how reading during troublesome times “makes you view the world through new eyes, and in doing so rediscover your own place in it”.
But The Odyssey has some added benefits. According to several big, intimidating scientific studies like this one, it has been proven that the rhythm of poetry, particularly hexameter verse, like The Odyssey, can significantly regulate our breathing and our heartbeat. This is the case whether a poem is read, or read to you–our remarkable brains thrive on rhythm, and poetry and music provide some of the best metronomes on earth.
Also, when you watch the Odyssey, you get an unparalleled visual escape…you can see the London Eye and the Thames, walk down some bustling High Streets, join Bertie Carvel in a cab, and enjoy Ian McKellan wearing a lovely scarf. To make things even better, the lovely people at the Almeida put the full list of their tweets from the day online, which are some of the funniest bits of literary analysis I have ever read:
HOW TO CHEER UP ODYSSEUS: 1. Games 2. Dancing. 3. Gifts (cloaks, shirts, bars of gold, swords). #odyssey
So might I recommend a dose of reading–and been read to–this weekend to calm your Sunday? I hope it brings you a little peace, a little comfort, and a little adventure today–and for as long as the lovely people at the Almeida keep these videos online.
This week, The Guardian published an article reporting that the city of Moscow had finally (finally) approved a monument to one of it’s most under-appreciated, and controversial, authors: the great Mikhail Bulgakov.
The proposed memorial
Bulgakov was born on May 15, 1891 in Kiev (then part of the Russian Empire, now the capital of Ukraine), and originally trained to be a doctor, a job he performed well until he nearly died of typhus was working as an army doctor during the Russian Civil War.
Following Stalin’s rise to power, Bulgakov was living in Moscow, eking out a living as a playwright. Though he always favored science fiction, and tended toward the weird in his writing, he was also a ruthless satirist, which earned him a good deal of criticism, including from Stalin himself, who alternatively condemned Bulgakov’s work and praised it. Truthfully, this wasn’t an uncommon tactic–Stalin may have been brutal and ruthless, but he was also demoniacally clever, and delighted in keeping those under his thumb guessing, often for years on end.
Stalin’s intervention meant that nothing Bulgakov wrote would ever be published or performed for the rest of his life. Haunted and heartbroken, Bulgakov began writing the book that would make him immortal. Inspired by his third wife, Yelena Shilovskaya, he began penning The Master and Margarita, a book about the arrival of the Devil in Moscow.
It is physically impossible to sum up this book properly in this space, but, essentially, there are two plotlines–one is the story of the Master, a writer who, after composing a novel about the interrogation of Christ by Pontius Pilate, casts his book into the stove and is eventually incarcerated in a lunatic asylum. His beloved, Margarita, decides to risk everything–life, limb, and soul–in a conspiracy with the Devil and his enormous talking cat, Behemoth. The second plotline is that of the Master’s book, which features Christ and Pilate locked in an eternal struggle over truth.
Every scene in the book is a thinly veiled critique of Stalin’s purges, described in a way that brings out the real, personal, emotional agony of this time, and emphasizing the near inhuman courage it took simply to get up and live your life everyday. Indeed, the Devil (who, in this book, goes by the name of Woland) isn’t the villain of this piece. His justice is perverted to be sure, but even he bewildered by the petty, inane levels of evil that persists in Moscow everywhere he looks. Though his meddling brings total chaos to the city, it also brings retribution is some of the most satisfying, heart-rending, and blood-chilling scenes you’ll read.
[One of the sketches for an unrealised animated feature based on Bulgakov’s novel by Sergei Alimov]Despite all this, Master and Margarita is a funny book…pitch-black funny, admittedly–and it’s one of the most uplifting, redemptive, hopeful books you will ever read. It is also mind-bendingly bizarre, with a number of scenes feeling like a hallucinatory fever-dream of color and shadow. I have read this book five times in English, and once in Russia, and I’ve cried every time. I’ve also laughed. And told random strangers on the Commuter Rail to read the book before they did anything else with their lives….
When Bulgakov read the manuscript to his closest friends, they knew that even hinting about it to anyone in authority would get him killed. As a result, he hid it in his desk, editing it whenever an idea struck, until his death in 1940 of hereditary kidney disease (by which time, he had been working on the book for twelve years). It would remain unpublished for over 25 years, and even then, Bulgakov’s wife (the model for Margarita) wasn’t sure which edits were the ones Bulgakov wanted. As a result, both editions were printed, leading to any number of complications between people who decide to read the book. It wasn’t until 1973 that the book appeared in Russia, and it was only added to school curriculums in the late 1990’s.
There have been attempts to get a monument to Bulgakov around Patriarch’s Pond (near his house, and also a crucially important setting for Master and Margarita) for years and years. But Nikolai Golubev, the artist commissioned to create the memorial wants to include characters from the book in his art. “Life is short, art is long, Golubev is quoted as saying, “Bulgakov didn’t have children, his children are his books. We want to put up a monument to these works, which will outlast me and you.”
….And no one wants to put a statue of the Devil in Moscow.
Woland and Behemoth, from the 2005 Russian film adaptation
Nor do they want a state of the primus stove, into which the Master threw his manuscript in a fit of despair. In an open letter to the author, this element was called “a symbol of devildom”…but the truth is, that is perhaps the most hopeful aspect of Bulgakov’s book. Because, as Woland reminds us “manuscripts don’t burn”. No matter how hard we humans try to quash each other’s voices, no matter how brutal is the world in which we live, Bulgakov’s book is a reminder that ideas live a life of their own, and that they endure long after we are dust…or statues. And even if, for now, Bulgakov’s memorial is only a likeness of the man himself, seated on a broken bench, it is a start. “Everything passes away,” Bulgakov wrote early in his career, “suffering,pain, blood, hunger,pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the Earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?”
“Manuscripts don’t burn”, written on the wall of the Bulgakov House Museum
We’ve talked about about the National Book Awards here at the Free For All, and today, we are overjoyed to bring you the winners, (almost) live from the Cipriani in Manhattan….
(drum roll, please?)…..
Congratulations to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Adam Johnson, Robin Coste Lewis, and Neal Shusterman!!
Ta-Nehisi Coates has been having quite a banner year, strining together accolades and praise for his memoir Between the World and Me, including receiving a MacArthur ‘genius’ in September, which is awarded for “exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work”. His book is dedicated to his friend, Prince Jones, who was killed by a police officer in 2000, and whose death sits at the heart of this work of being black in America, and carrying the weight of history on one’s shoulders every single day.
Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles, which won the award for fiction, is another success from a writer who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Orphan Master’s Sonin 2012. As Publisher’s Weekly puts it, ““How do you follow a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel? For [Adam] Johnson, the answer is a story collection, and the tales are hefty and memorable. . . . Often funny, even when they’re wrenchingly sad, the stories provide one of the truest satisfactions of reading: the opportunity to sink into worlds we otherwise would know little or nothing about.” Interestingly, his book was actually not among the favorites to win the prize (that distinction apparently went to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies).
Robin Coste Lewis took the award for poetry for her debut collection Voyage of the Sable Venus, which, sadly, NOBLE doesn’t have (yet!), but which deals with the perception of the black female figure in art, and in the world. In one poem, titled “Venus of Compton”, Lewis presents the title of works depicting black women through forty thousand years of human history in a manner that The New Yorkercalled “magical…All those women made into serviceable, mute paddles and spoons, missing their limbs and heads, are, by the miracle of verbal art, restored.” Just as memorable: Lewis dedicated the poem to “the legacy of black librarianship, and black librarians, worldwide” for opening up the world to her, once upon a time.
Last, but by no mean least, we have Neal Shusterman, whose novel Challenger Deep won the American Book Award for ‘young people’s literature’. His work focuses on a teen who is dealing with the onset of schizophrenia, and trying desperately to balance the worlds inside and outside his head. Booklist gave it a starred review, saying it is “Haunting, unforgettable, and life-affirming all at once”. What makes this particular book remarkable, though, is what a personal piece it is–Shusterman based his hero, Caleb, on his son, Brendan, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 16. Brendan illustrated this book, as well, making this book a beautiful and truly meaningful piece of collaboration.
Congratulations to all these marvelous National Book Award winners, and thank you for sharing your brilliance with us!
We live in interesting times, Beloved Patrons…but there are times when that can actually be a good thing. In an effort to keep our spirits up and hearts engaged, I thought I’d tell you about one of those Good Things here…the discovery and release of an unknown poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Nice collar, Percy.
Our story begins with Peter Finnerty, an Irish journalist, was tried and found guilty of seditious libel. Finnerty was a member of the United Irishmen, a group dedicated to liberating Ireland from British rule, and one of its members, a man named William Orr, was executed for treason after attempting to recruit a British soldier to the United Irishmen. It’s very clear that the British government wanted to make an example of Orr, and journalist Peter Finnerty was not about to let anyone forget that. As a result, he was treated with the same heavy hand as his comrade, and was sentenced to a two-year prison sentence, and a session in the pillory.
When the seventeen-year-old Shelley began his studies at Oxford, was incensed to learn of Finnerty’s treatment–indeed, it seems he was infuriated that William Orr had been executed, as well, which is pretty surprising, especially given Shelley’s affluent, British upbringing. But in Finnerty’s case, there was something Shelley could do to help. Prisons in Britain at this time charged their inmates for room and board, and for anything else they could legitimize. The result was often that a prison stay of any duration could bankrupt a prisoner, in addition to ruining his health. Thus, Shelley decided to help Finnerty with the costs of his incarceration by writing a poem.
His work, titled “A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things”, was published by a printer on Oxford High Street in 1811. The poem itself is a 172-rhymed tirade not only against the hypocrisy of governments and bureaucrats, but against British imperialism, and the cruelty of dominance, as well; he mentions how “The fainting Indian, on his native plains; / Writhes to superior power’s unnumbered pains”, which, for the time, is a remarkably bold commentary on British actions in India, and displays an incredibly human response to the plight of natives, who the British government continued to see as less-than-human. Shelley was not advocating violence to replace violence, though–he expressly mourns the “Millions to fight compell’d, to fight or die / In mangled heaps on War’s red altar lie”. His argument is for rational thought and humanity, which he realized at the time was even more dangerous to tyranny than violence.
Ultimately, though, Shelley’s poem is one of hope and encouragement, urging that without freedom for all, no one can claim to be free. He ends his poem with the verse:
Oppressive law no more shall power retain,
Peace, love, and concord, once shall rule again
And heal the anguish of a suffering world;
Then, then shall things, which now confusedly hurled,
Seem Chaos, be resolved to order’s sway,
And error’s night be turned to virtuous day.
The poem was not attributed to Shelley until some fifty years after his death, and, by then, it was assumed that no copies of the 20-page pamphlet existed. In 2006, however, a copy was discovered amidst a private collection, and quickly bought by the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Since then, only a handful of scholars have been allowed to see it–until Michael Rosen, who also championed the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, advocated for its release to the general public. In a statement to The Guardian, Rosen explained: “This is someone who from a young age… in spite of his position in the class system, chose to champion the poor, the exploited, the oppressed and the victimised…he sees that the poor afflicted by ‘indigence’ and ‘persecution’ are ‘deprived of the power to exert those mental capabilities which alone can distinguish them from the brutes’.”
And last week, the world got to meet “A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things” by Percy Bysshe Shelley for the first time. Not only is the pamphlet on display at the Bodleian, but they have digitized it, as well, so you can read it for yourself, wherever you might be! The link is here, complete with flippable-pages and transcribed text.
Be sure to have a look at this newly-discovered treasure, and here’s hoping it brings a little light to your day.
~~~~~~~
Shelley’s memorial at Oxford
For those looking for more of the story…Shelley was expelled from Oxford in April of 1811 after publishing another pamphlet, this one titled “The Necessity of Atheism”. He eloped with a sixteen-year-old poet named Harriet Westbrook, and in 1813, eloped again with Mary Godwin, who was the daughter of early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and anarchist poet (Harriet committed suicide in 1816). Shelley would go on to write a wealth of powerful poems, while Mary wrote Frankenstein, after she and Percy whiled away a rainy vacation with Lord Byron and his doctor, John Polidori. Shelley grew increasingly revolutionary as the years went on, and following his death from drowning on july 8, 1822, onboard his boat, named the Don Juan in honor of Byron, rumors floated around that he was murdered for political reasons–though a freak storm and Shelley’s poor skills as a navigator may have played a larger role. He is buried in Rome, and has a place in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey in London.
![[One of the sketches for an unrealised animated feature based on Bulgakov’s novel by Sergei Alimov]](http://www.peabodylibrary.org/freeforall/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/07.jpg)
