Posts Tagged ‘Poet Laureate’
“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, / And all the sweet serenity of books”*…
Righteous recycling: garbage collectors in Ankara started “reclaiming” discarded books and ended up opening a library….
It all started when sanitation worker Durson Ipek found a bag of cast-off books when he was working and then it snowballed from there. Ipek and other garbage men started gathering the books they found on the streets that were destined for landfills and as their collection started to grow, so did word of mouth. Soon, local residents started donating books directly.
The library that originally contained 200 books is located in the Cankaya district of the capital city in a previously vacant brick factory at the sanitation department headquarters. The library was initially available only to the sanitation employees and their families to use but as the collection grew, so did public interest and the library was opened to the public in December 2017…
All the books that are found are sorted and checked for condition, if they pass, they go on the shelves. In fact, everything in the library was also rescued including the bookshelves and the artwork that adorns the walls…
Today, the library has over 6,000 books that range from fiction to nonfiction and there’s a very popular children’s section that even has a collection of comic books. An entire section is devoted to scientific research and there are also books available in English and French…
The full story at: “Turkish Garbage Collectors Open a Library from Books Rescued from the Trash“
* Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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As we check it out, we might spare a thought for James Billington; he died on this date in 2018. A historian at Harvard and Princeton, who went on to hold the directorship of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Billington is probably best remembered for his final post, Librarian of Congress, a position he held from 1987 to 2015.
The Library of Congress, the oldest federal cultural institution in the U.S., is the nation’s de facto national library. As librarian, Billington oversaw that resource and appointed the U.S. poet laureate and awarded the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song each year. Billington undertook during his tenure to broaden and deepen public access to the LoC’s remarkable holdings, introducing a series of no-fee access services.
As Librarian, he also oversaw the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In 2010, Billington’s decision to open new DMCA loopholes resulted in his being described as “the most important person you never heard of.”
“When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change”*…
Louise E. Jefferson, “Americans of Negro Lineage,” Friendship Press, 1946. (Used by permission of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. All rights reserved worldwide, 2016.) Larger version here.
Women have been making maps for centuries. They have developed and applied new technologies, data collection techniques, and visual presentations to their maps as they charted new terrain, illustrated historical narratives, and pushed political and social agendas. In the 20th century, women mapmakers continued this work in larger numbers than ever—and no short post can account sufficiently for all of their contributions over a century that saw technological and social revolutions, one after another.
Examining just a small sample of the many compelling maps made by North American women in the 20th century, a theme emerges: aesthetic mastery.
In the days before the women’s liberation movement (except for a brief moment during World War II), most women didn’t have access to technical training in cartography. “Civil engineering, where topographic drafting was taught, was not a ‘girls’ subject,” writes Judith Tyner, a professor emerita of geography at California State University, Long Beach, in a presentation given at mapping conference earlier this year. But this didn’t stop women from participating in cartography. It simply meant that many who did started with a background in the arts…
More of the story– and several beautiful examples– at “How 20th-Century Women Put the ‘Art’ in Cartography,” the third installment in a series on women and maps; see also Part 1 and Part 2.
* Ursula Le Guin
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As we contemplate cartography, we might spare a thought for Francesco Petrarca– Petrarch: on this date in 1341, he became the first poet laureate since antiquity, crowned by Roman Senatori Giordano Orsini and Orso dell’Anguillara on the holy grounds of Rome’s Capitol. Considered by many to have been “the Father of Humanism,” and reputed to have coined the term “Renaissance,” Petrarch was famous for his paeans to his idealized lover “Laura” (modeled, many scholars believe, on the wife of Hugues de Sade, Laura de Noves, whom he met in Avignon in 1327, and who died in 1348). But Petrarch’s more fundamental and lasting contribution to culture came via Pietro Bembo, who created the model for the modern Italian language in the 16th century based largely on the works of Petrarch (and to a lesser degree, those of Dante and Petrarch’s frequent correspondent, Boccaccio).
Judd the facts, ma’am…
Donald Judd, was an artist, designer, and teacher whose work (largely grouped with the Minimalists, though Judd hated that label) has been featured at the Tate Modern and other museums around the world, and is on display at the Judd Foundation, in both Manhattan and Marfa, Texas.
In addition to Judd’s art, the Foundation displays, and via a “subsidiary” sells, furniture manufactured to Judd designs… and it displays Judd’s library.
And even cooler (especially for readers who can’t make it to the Spring Street location), the library is searchable online. One simply clicks on a shelf in the diagram of the layout…
… and sees the shelf in question….
… Mouse over a shelf (on the site), and a tab pops up identifying the theme of that part of the collection; click on a volume to see the bibliographical details of that book.
As remind ourselves of Groucho Marx’s insight: “outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend; inside of a dog it’s too dark to read,” we might recall that this is a bid date in the annals of English letters… It was on this date in 1842, that Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published Poems. While the future Poet Laureate had been writing for a decade, it was this two-volume release (which included “Ulysses” and Morte d’Arthur”) that made his name.
And on this date in 1925, Virginia Wolfe published the story of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway– one of Time‘s “100 Best Novels since 1923” (2005).
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