Dog
by LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
by GEOFFREY S. SMITH
A Fragment Makes History
A few months ago, I received a much-anticipated email that read, “The courier is scheduled to deliver the Willoughby Papyrus to the Ransom Center tomorrow.” The next morning, I anxiously watched as members of the Center’s conservation staff carefully removed from the oversized shipping package a small black archival box, no more than 8 inches square. They slid off its sleeve, opened the protective cover, and placed the object on the table in front of me for inspection. Mounted between two plates of glass was an ancient papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John, no larger than a credit card.
The manuscript was fragmentary, and some of the Greek letters were not easy to make out, but it had not suffered any damage since I had last seen it in person, nearly seven years earlier. I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The “Willoughby Papyrus,” as it is known, had made it to The University of Texas safe and sound.
The Ransom Center’s Radclyffe Hall and Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge Papers Project won the 2022 Archival Award for Excellence from the Texas Historical Records Advisory Board (THRAB) “for outstanding contributions to archives and historical records in the State of Texas.”
Through the project, thousands of records were digitized and published online for researchers. Hall and Troubridge are remembered as LGBTQ pioneers, and Hall’s 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, made lesbianism more visible in English society, despite the banning of the novel in England.
“The Hall-Troubridge project represents the type of multidisciplinary and technologically advanced archival effort that helps make primary sources more accessible and meaningful,” Texas State Archivist Jelain Chubb said.
More than 60,000 digitized items and a new educational resource based on the Hall-Troubridge papers were added to the Center’s online digital collections last year with support provided by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources. The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Created in 2016, the Archival Award of Excellence recognizes significant achievements in preserving and improving access to historical records in Texas. THRAB serves as an advisory body for historical records planning and supports efforts to preserve and provide access to archival collections throughout the state.
Funding for THRAB is provided by the National Historical Publications Records Commission, the grant-making arm of the National Archives and Records Administration. The state archivist is appointed by the governor to preside over the nine-member board.
The Texas State Library and Archives Commission provides Texans access to the information needed to be informed, productive citizens by preserving the archival record of Texas; enhancing the service capacity of public, academic and school libraries; assisting public agencies in the maintenance of their records; and meeting the reading needs of Texans with disabilities.
by JACE WEAVER
The Harry Ransom Center is proud to hold the papers of playwright and poet William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. A member of the Assiniboine Tribe, Yellow Robe was a lecturer at the University of Maine and the award-winning author of Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, Wood Bones, and Better-n-Indins. He died in 2021 at the age of 61. The papers, a recent gift from Yellow Robe’s wife, Jeanne, include drafts, rehearsal scripts, letters, photographs, publicity material, critical reviews, digital files, notebooks and more. We are grateful to Jeanne Domek Yellow Robe and Deborah Murad at DGCM, who is managing the licensing of Yellow Robe’s work.
The following tribute to William Yellow Robe is written by his friend Jace Weaver, founding director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia. Dr. Weaver edited and introduced an anthology of Yellow Robe’s plays, Restless Spirits, with SUNY Press in 2020.
Sometimes you meet someone and you know immediately you’ve met a friend for life. Though I had known Bill Yellow Robe’s work for two decades, we had never met until I went on Facebook about six years ago. I ran across Bill, and we instantly bonded as we improvised a scene in the comments to one of his posts in real time. Bill was trying to bring twenty-four cans of SPAM onto an airliner. I was a TSA agent explaining to him that he couldn’t because the gelatin around the pink meat qualified as liquid.
Shortly after that random encounter, I invited him to come and read from his work at the University of Georgia. He was gentle and genuine, and he was one of the funniest people I’d ever met. Within a day, we hatched the plan for the book that became Restless Spirits, the third anthology of his plays, which I edited.
by CLARE HUTTON
This article is devoted to objects that tell the story of women who supported James Joyce and the publication of his landmark novel, Ulysses (1922). They were previously on display in our exhibit, Women and the Making of Ulysses, curated by Dr Clare Hutton, author of Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review (Oxford University Press, 2019).
[Read more…] about Women and the Making of Ulysses: A History in Ten Objects
Mel Gordon’s Notes on Expressionism with 1917 clipping, Mel Gordon Collection, Box 12, Harry Ransom Center.
by MACAELLA GRAY
In 2018, The New York Times lauded historian, curator, and writer Mel Gordon as a “drama scholar of the fringe.”
At first glance, the so-called “fringe” certainly seems to find a home in the Mel Gordon Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, with materials ranging from anthologies on erotic dance to German and French adult magazines.
Mel Gordon earned his PhD at New York University in performance studies and taught popular classes on theater at UC Berkeley throughout the 1990s. Focusing on histories of 20th-century sex and eroticism, mysticism, horror, and spectacle, Gordon wrote Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin and Horizontal Collaboration: The Erotic World of Paris, 1920-1946—earning him a reputation as a “provocative, risqué storyteller.”
Based on his book titles alone, one can see how Gordon’s language tends to sensationalize 1920s Berlin and Paris—epochs often mythologized with tales of crazed sex and loose morals. However, at the heart of Gordon’s scholarship lies a contradiction: he challenges historical mythologies as much as he contributes to them. Gordon often questions the perceived marginality of the communities and figures he writes about, including the German silent film actress, dancer, and poet Anita Berber.
[Read more…] about Interpreting “Fringe” in the Mel Gordon Papers
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