This month, the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin is launching the Theatre 2020 Project to invite theater artists and organizations to register and submit stories about how the events of 2020 have affected them, from the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent closures and furloughs, to national politics and protests and the experiences of those reckoning with longstanding racial injustices in the industry. [Read more…] about Collecting effort to document theater community’s response to 2020 launched
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Thoughts during a pandemic on Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and what ‘it’ is
by JAMES ARNETT
“Why was it so hard to see while it was happening that that was what was happening?”
—URSULA K. LeGUIN, In and Out [1]
[Read more…] about Thoughts during a pandemic on Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and what ‘it’ is
Taking time to teach hidden histories in the archives
This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation. [Read more…] about Taking time to teach hidden histories in the archives
Archive of ‘The Well of Loneliness’ author offers a view of queer history
In her 2019 memoir, In The Dream House, author Carmen Maria Machado writes about the importance of seeing queer people not as saints, but as full human beings – human beings with complicated and sometimes upsetting ideologies. She writes in her essay, “Dream House as Queer Villainy,” “…it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to…moral complexities of every kind.” [Read more…] about Archive of ‘The Well of Loneliness’ author offers a view of queer history
What is Research? An exercise in Slow Research
On September 11, 2001, the BBC World Service reported the start of a performance titled Organ2/As SLow aS Possible (ASLSP). Originally composed by John Cage in 1987, the posthumous recital in Germany was planned to contribute to “a revolution in slowness”—to be performed chord by chord—over 639 years. [Read more…] about What is Research? An exercise in Slow Research
Preserving fragile phonographs of T. S. Eliot, Paul Bowles, Norman Bel Geddes, and others
Recordings of T. S. Eliot, Paul Bowles, Pablo Picasso, and other notable 20th-century figures have been preserved after the Harry Ransom Center recently digitized 2,800 unique sound recordings in a variety of formats (read more here). Unlocking Sound Stories, a project funded in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities is preserving and providing access to 2800 recordings (click here for more on the grant ). Among the sound formats preserved were cassette tapes, reel-to-reel audio tapes, and phonograph discs. [Read more…] about Preserving fragile phonographs of T. S. Eliot, Paul Bowles, Norman Bel Geddes, and others