New York is the city that never sleeps, right? In John Lindsay’s day, neither did its government. Lindsay was elected partly on the promise that he would keep City Hall open 24-7. And that he did, hiring a team of “Night Owls” to hold down the fort while he and the rest of the Fun City government slept it off. 

But even Night Owls have their day. 

Attendees to the 1966 City Hall Owl Watch party were wined and dined and honored with speeches from both the night mayor and the mayor himself. But the real gift to the Night Owls was an LP pressing of Lindsay’s Inner Circle “rebuttal” – a special recording of his honor singing, dancing, and telling jokes with Broadway actress and future Mrs. Brady Florence Henderson. While the dancing was unfortunately not captured by WNYC microphones (it was a soft-shoe number), the songs and jokes unfortunately were, and are captured here for your listening pleasure.

My personal favorite:

Florence: “Your honor, what is your favorite form of exercise?”

JVL: “Bowling”

Florence: “Get many spaaares?”

JVL: “No. But I had a hell of a STRIKE!”

It doesn’t get much better than that.

The tune, “Oh It’s Great To Be The Mayor Of New York,” fares a bit better, as it should – it was penned by the songwriting team Bock and Harnick, then reveling in the massive success of their recent hit musical, Fiddler on the Roof.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 92496, (see also 72461)

Municipal archives id: T899

As previous posts have shown, the work of Special Collections & Archives staff is not confined to the walls of the library. We love being able to get out into the community, so Associate Dean of Special Collections Katie McCormick and I jumped at the chance to attend the Burns’ Supper hosted by the St. Andrew Society of Tallahassee on Saturday, January 23rd at Westminster Oaks. The Burns’ Supper is a celebration of the life and works of Scotland’s National Poet, Robert Burns (1759-1796), which was begun by Robert Burns’s friends in 1801 to celebrate the fifth anniversary of his death. It is traditionally held on or around January 25th, Burns’s birthday, and commences with the famous “Address to Haggis,” followed by the eating of haggis with tatties and neeps (mashed potatoes and turnips). It was my first time trying haggis, and, I must say, it was delicious! The evening continued with dinner, toasts and poetry recitations, and a wonderful performance of Scottish music and songs set to Burns’s poetry put on by the FSU School of Music.

FSU Special Collections & Archives has over one-hundred editions of Burns’s poetry in our John MacKay Shaw Childhood Poetry and Scottish Collections, as well as many more volumes on the history, culture, and literature of Scotland. John MacKay Shaw was a founding member of the St. Andrew Society of Tallahassee, and his impressive book collection includes the famous Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s poetry, published in Edinburgh in 1786. Each year, the St. Andrew Society of Tallahassee generously provides us with a donation to support the upkeep and development of our Scottish Collection. At this year’s Burns’ Supper, we received an extra treat when society member Ken Sinclair presented FSU Special Collections & Archives with an 1873 Edinburgh imprint of The Complete Works of Robert Burns which had been passed down in his family for several generations. We look forward to adding this book to our collections, and we’re already looking forward to next year’s Burns Night!

Today’s visual research open hours (Tuesdays, 10:00 – 1:00) offer you an avian extravaganza, an ornithological assemblage, a great number of illustrated birds!

This lovely, bespectacled fellow hails from E. Donovan’s 1794 The Natural History of British Birds; Or, a Selection of the Most Rare, Beautiful, and Interesting Birds Which Inhabit This Country: The Descriptions from the Systema Naturae of Linnaeus; With General Observations, Either Original, or Collected From the Latest and Most Esteemed English Ornithologists; and Embellished with Figures, Drawn, Engraved, and Coloured from the Original Specimens. (Say that five times fast!)

Today’s visitors also can page through this book on “cage and chamber-birds”. It includes information on “their natural history, habits, food, diseases, management, and modes of capture”. (A researcher yesterday deemed this book “kind of awesome and kind of a bummer,” which I find to be entirely accurate.)

Studer’s Popular Ornithology, published in 1881, has beautiful, large-scale, color illustrations of birds, as well as a spectacular title page. (Does the “A” in the word “America” look vaguely masonic to anyone else?)

Stop by to spend some time with these books today, or contact us to make an appointment with these feathered friends.

When Amherst College was founded in the early 19^th century, part of its raison d’être (aside from being a protest against Harvard’s Unitarianism) was to educate young men to go out into the world and preach the gospel.  The College seal illustrates this philosophy: “Terras Irradient” – “let them enlighten the lands.” However, by the end of the century graduates’ interests had evolved to something in addition to religious instruction, or something entirely different.  Graduates of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were still going into the world as missionaries, but by then the work often meant starting schools or becoming medical missionaries.  Other alumni were writers, doctors, teachers, publishers, ambassadors, “industrial barons,” and in many other professions far removed from those of the first Amherst graduates.

From left, Laurens, Dorothea, Kate, and Mary Averett Seelye, ca. December, 1919.

For Laurens Hickok Seelye, Class of 1911, “Terras Irradient” meant that he would teach philosophy at the American University of Beirut (AUB, known at the time as the Syrian Protestant College), where he moved in 1919 with his indefatigable wife Kate Chambers Seelye, daughter of missionaries William and Cornelia Chambers.  For Kate the move was a return home after her college years in the U.S. (Kate was born and raised in Turkey but left to attend Bryn Mawr and Columbia).  For Laurens the Middle East was something entirely new, and he threw himself into its culture unreservedly.  Professor Seelye probably stood out everywhere he went for his height, his humor, and his intense intellect.  And he loved AUB.  He loved it for its diversity, tolerance, and collegiality.  In a memorable letter to an old friend, he described both himself and the college:

In addition to testing boundaries and teaching philosophy, Laurens acted as the director of West Hall, which was and still is the student campus center.  In that position, he came to know more students than he would otherwise have known.  After he had settled in at AUB, Laurens noticed a need for something else – financial assistance for ambitious young Armenian refugees to continue their education beyond what the Near East Relief provided.  This organization had established orphanages to help with Armenian refugees who had flooded into the area during and after World War I.  They provided a basic education to about age 16, at which time the boys left the orphanages to fend for themselves.  Because of Kate’s personal connection with the Armenian community and Laurens’ work at the college, several of these boys came to the Seelyes to ask for help.  Laurens decided to do what he could as a personal project, outside of his work at AUB.

In a letter to Clarence Young, an uncle, Laurens described the situation and his plan to help.  He said that there was no provision to train the Armenian refugees beyond a trade-school education, no resources to train teachers, doctors, dentists, pastors, and other professionals.  “I am right up against young life determined to win out and get an education if given half a chance,” Laurens wrote to Clarence.  The world “can do nothing in the future without an educated and large-minded minority scattered through the races and nations who are willing to stake their lives and reputations on the practice of Good Will.”  Would his uncle share his plea with churches and schools and clubs at home and ask if they might raise funds to support some of these boys?

The plan worked.  Laurens and his donors were able to provide funds for a long list of boys to continue their educations.  The boys were mostly Armenians, but there were also boys of other backgrounds.

In 1923 a few of these boys met with Laurens and came away with the idea  of forming an Armenian Students Cooperative Association.  The club started with the goal of finding an affordable living space that a handful of students could share, splitting the cost of food, rent, and a cook (the latter after one of the boys inadvertently fried up his tie with some eggplants).  The club was sufficiently popular that it had to expand to two clubs and two houses.  A few of its members weren’t even Armenians, which pleased Laurens because it realized his goal of having the students regard themselves as “humans first, Armenians second,” by which he meant that he wanted his students to recognize their common humanity, and to work to improve conditions for all.

Club members lived, worked, and played together. Click below to enlarge the photographs and view them as a gallery.

The club also issued annual reports, three of which (1923-24; 1924-25; and 1926-27) are in the collection.  The reports demonstrate the democratic philosophy they practiced:

First page of 1924-25 report. Click on pdf below for full report.

Armenian-Stu-Coop-Club-report-1924-25

The Seelyes were friends with several of these students for decades; in fact, there are letters in the collection from the club’s founder, Dicran Berberian, that date from the 1960s.  The existence of the club is a testament to the industry of the students, but also to Laurens’ teaching.  In his own way, he had realized Amherst’s motto, “Terras Irradiant.”

The material illustrated here is from the Williams-Chambers-Seelye-Blaisdell Family Papers in the Archives and Special Collections.  Contact the department for more details.

This past November I attended iPRES 2015. iPRES is one of the foremost international conferences on digital preservation, and the conference location rotates between North America, Europe, and Asia. iPRES 2015 was hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

UNC Chapel Hill, Louis Round Wilson Library, which houses the university’s archives and special collections. Source: Ildar Sagadejev, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

iPRES 2015 was a great opportunity to learn about recent developments in digital preservation research and practice, and to swap stories and ideas with fellow archivists as well as practitioners of many other stripes. The digital preservation community is highly varied and necessarily involves the expertise of multiple professions, and one of the most satisfying elements of my time at iPRES was the chance to look at familiar problems from new angles.

iPRES Amplified

This year, the iPRES Organizing Committee invited conference attendees and those who couldn’t be present in person to participate in the opening and closing sessions via social media, and to communicate throughout the conference using the hashtag #ipres2015. In addition to the participatory opening and closing sessions, many panels, sessions and workshops at iPRES 2015 generated Google Docs that are now publicly available through the iPRES Amplified page.

Sample conference tweets

Session highlights

Sessions covered topics ranging from high-level long-term preservation and storage architectures to the nitty-gritty of preservation tools and workflows. Recently-completed and ongoing projects to keep an eye on include:

• the release of version 3.0 of the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata. PREMIS is integral to Archivematica and AtoM, the digital preservation and access systems we use here at the City of Vancouver Archives. PREMIS 3.0 contains some significant changes and additions, the most exciting of which (for me!) is the transformation in the way hardware and software rendering environments are modeled. Without going into too much jargon-laden detail, the changes in environment modeling allow the components of a rendering environment (e.g. an operating system, a software application, a piece of hardware) to be described and preserved independently of the digital content that requires them, and independently of one another.

Oh yeah! Excerpt from PREMIS version 3.0

Going forward, this new approach will facilitate the preservation of rendering environments alongside the records that depend on them – a likely necessity for some types of born-digital records.

• BitCurator, which is now receiving ongoing community support and development through a consortium that reached 20 members just before iPRES 2015 kicked off. BitCurator began life as a joint project of UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, with the goal of developing a system that would incorporate digital forensics tools and methods into archival workflows. Among many other things, digital forensics tools can:
  • support processing of born-digital records on legacy media in accordance with the archival principle of original order (keep the records in the order the creator left them);
  • help ensure trustworthiness of the records by documenting all actions performed on them before they are ingested into a repository; and
  • through the use of software-based write-blockers, reduce the risk of accidental changes to data.
  

  Capturing a disk image in the BitCurator environment. Source: BitCurator Consortium, BitCurator Quick Start Guide

  The BitCurator project ran from 2011-2014, and produced a freely downloadable, open-source environment, which is now being managed by the BitCurator Consortium in association with the Educopia Institute. I am looking forward to getting my hands dirty (virtually speaking) with BitCurator this year, setting up a BitCurator workstation and developing workflows with our digital archives team.

• ongoing research toward increasing the viability of emulation as a preservation strategy. Broadly speaking, emulation refers to the ability of a computer program to behave like another program; usually this means getting a modern environment to behave like an older, obsolete environment. For example, the JSMESS emulator used by the Internet Archive’s Console Living Room provides emulations of many early home video game consoles, allowing you to access and play hundreds of games you may not have seen since 1982, if at all.

Opening screen from Adventures of Tron for the Atari 2600, accessible via emulation at the Internet Archive’s Console Living Room

The relative merits and drawbacks of emulation versus migration have been vigorously debated for many years; while emulation is valued for preserving the original look and feel of content, it has generally been both very expensive and very complex to provision, and migration – the continual transfer of data to new file formats, and sufficiently expensive and complex in its own right! – is currently the approach taken in the vast majority of institutions. Emulation projects presented include:

• Project EMiL, a joint project of the University of Freiburg, the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, the German National Library, and the Bavarian State Library, which focuses on emulation of complex interactive multimedia objects such as internet-based artworks and scientific simulations. EMiL’s goal is to develop a prototype system for provisioning emulated environments that is optimized for the needs of memory institutions. At a session titled “Preservation Strategies and Workflows,” Project EMiL researchers spoke about the challenges involved in determining appropriate emulation environments for CD-ROMs (remember those?) that are already inaccessible through current systems and lack the technical metadata that would be used as guideposts. Their solution involves the development of a CD-ROM characterization tool to ‘guess’ at the most suitable environment based on characteristics of the CD-ROM. If this sounds as exciting to you as it does to me, the full paper can be found here.

• Rhizome and the New Museum’s project to make artist Theresa Duncan’s CD-ROM games from the 1990s playable online through the University of Freiburg’s bwFLA Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) platform, which allows a web browser to connect the user to a cloud-based emulated environment. Emulation is particularly valuable for the preservation and continued accessibility of games, where maintaining the look, feel, and behaviour of the original environment is key.

Case for Zero Zero by Theresa Duncan (Nicholson Associates, 1997). Source: Rhizome

• BitCurator Access, a project undertaken at UNC Chapel Hill following the end of the first BitCurator project. Where the first BitCurator project focused on capture of disk images from legacy media, BitCurator Access is exploring methods for providing web-based and local access to the extracted disk images, and will include the bwFLA Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) platform mentioned above in its assessment.

Post-conference workshop on open-source digital preservation tools and workflows

The day after the official close of the conference, I attended a full-day workshop where participants (most of whom were already open-source users, like us) had the opportunity to share their experiences with various open-source tools, discuss the opportunities and challenges associated with going open-source, identify gaps among existing tools, and brainstorm on wish-lists for tool integrations and features. A number of common themes emerged, most of which were familiar to me from my own work. Some of these were:

• the current gap in tool integrations and workflows for the “pre-ingest” phase of processing digital records. Taken broadly, pre-ingest refers to all the work done from the time of transfer by a donor to the time the records are ingested into the digital preservation system (for us, that’s Archivematica). This work can include performing fixity checks on received content to ensure files were not corrupted during transfer, performing archival appraisal (determining what will be kept and what will not), and analysis of file formats present to inform workflow decisions.

• the need to re-ingest archival information packages (the ‘preservation master’ files and associated metadata) when updates are made to the metadata. Happily for Archivematica users, lead developers Artefactual will be rolling out support for re-ingest with the release of Archivematica 1.5.0.

Metadata re-ingest process in Archivematica 1.5.0

• the open-source digital preservation community is full of dedicated, generous, collaborative folk, and the need for non-developers to participate in projects through, for example, contribution of use cases, documentation, and bug reports was continually emphasized. A diversity of contributions from different sizes and types of institutions can encourage development of scalable tools and systems, and mitigate the possibility that projects only suit one segment of the community.

The chance to assess as a group the current state of open-source digital preservation was a great conclusion to my conference week. For those interested in looking under the hood, the collaboratively-edited workshop notes are available in the Workshops & Tutorials folder in the iPRES 2015 Google Drive.

Digital preservation is, like all technology-heavy fields, given to rapid change and iterative refinement of processes, and keeping current is a necessity for practitioners like me. iPRES 2015 left me feeling refreshed and inspired to tackle some the City’s digital records coming my way in 2016. Thanks to the conference organizers for a great event!

Commissioner of Licenses Joel Tyler calls the signing of this bill, colorfully and enigmatically referred to on an ancient Municipal Archives catalog card as a Theatrical Fingerprinting Bill, “one of the truly significant moments in New York City’s history.”

If this bold statement trips your skepticism, it’s to be expected. We’re by now well acquainted with the rehearsed hyperbole of the elected and the hopeful, and we’ve all learned to correct intuitively the tendency many pols have to fool themselves, overestimating the importance of their own little corners with a pride stemming as much from outsized ego as from an inbuilt solipsism. Political rhetoric seldom navigates this Scylla and Charybdis of junk talk to emerge successfully scanned as genuine; is this occasion any different? And sure, it’s a big day for the Commissioner of Licenses, but is it “truly significant?”

Yes. It is.

Listen to his voice. Don’t listen to the words; don’t listen to the tone; don’t scan for emotion. You won’t hear anything new there.

Listen to his voice distort. Listen to it sharpen and crackle. This is his tell.

The Greeks thought of inspiration as drawing in the divine breath of the Muses. Modern methods of public address and sound recording offer a curious reversal of the process – carrying the levelest voice through the air at unprecedented amplitude to be heard and felt and inspire anew. But the process suffers from an Achilles’ heel: waves that reach beyond a certain threshold get squared off at the margins, yielding a warm but unwelcome and unnatural distortion. Tyler, all too eager to have his voice heard and captured marking the moment, stands a little too close to his microphone, temporarily overwhelming the capabilities of the system in front of him, offering a subtle reveal of what the occasion really means.

The “truly significant moment” is the signing of the September 25, 1967, bill that would end cabaret cards.

New York’s cabaret laws had been on the books since 1927, born in the wanton days of the jazz age, but only really hit their damaging stride in 1943, when all musicians working in New York City were made to carry a “cabaret card” to perform in its nightclubs and bars, a license which could be, and was, snatched away or denied renewal at the slightest offense, effectively blacklisting an artist from performing in the City for years at authority’s whim. New York’s cabaret card provisions were intended to be a force in the fight against the City’s criminal element, but the licensing requirement had the effect of undermining New York’s capacity as an incubator of art for decades. 

Take for instance jazz great Thelonious Sphere Monk (pictured above), who three times had his cabaret card revoked through the 40s and 50s, coming up for air all too briefly for his famous engagement with John Coltrane at the Five Spot in 1957. Thelonious saw some successes emerge during his intermittent ban, but only in spite of the unduly harsh law – Brilliant Corners, his classic recording from the period and one of the greatest jazz recordings ever made, one that was recently added to the Library of Congress’ esteemed National Recording Registry, was cobbled together with an underprepared makeshift band at a time when he could not legally perform in the City. Only in the 60s did he establish a stable band and commercial success, when he was arguably past his prime. Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and many other famous performers seeking a narcotic muse fell victim to the cabaret card law, but consider too, how many talents were rendered obscure or snuffed out entirely by the law’s Draconian demands. Frank Sinatra, in an act of kind solidarity with his fellow artists (and perhaps some underworld friends), famously refused to perform in New York during at least part of the law’s damaging run.

But perhaps jazz isn’t your bag. Consider instead The Ramones’ predilection for sniffing glue and violence against brats, or the band Television, bidden by “Venus” to impersonate New York’s Finest, or even nerdiest of the bunch, The Talking Heads, whose quasi-autistic psychotic visions would have read differently in the wake of Son of Sam. It is debatable whether any of these groups would have been able to hold on to such licenses for long in the dingy, dangerous, and paranoid New York of the 70s, particularly in the seedy confines of the Bowery. No CBGBs, no scene. No scene, no punk. No punk, no Pistols, no Clash (no future indeed). And it’s tough to say what would have happened to hip hop, which largely found its gestation in more informal atmospheres, but it’s development as an artform would have likely suffered as well, especially given the law’s moralizing aims.

It is thankful then that these laws did not remain in the books (though others lingered on). And that thanks is due to Lindsay, Tyler, and others, all present on this recording, for striking down a foolish decades-old law on September 25, 1967.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 92378
Municipal archives id: T2049

Today’s terrible young folks are taken from Randolph Caldecott’s Gleanings from the “Graphic” (London: Routledge, 1889). (Yes, this is the Caldecott of the annual Caldecott Medal; he was an influential 19th century children’s book illustrator, and also illustrated novels and magazines and made “humorous drawings”.)

The illustration above comes from a series called Christmas Visitors. The “old folks” are playing cards in a previous drawing, while these “young folks” are taking part in a jumble of juvenile antics: aggressively kissing a lass’s cheek beneath the mistletoe, crying and/or somersaulting backwards, pushing a blindfolded old man in knee socks, crab-walking away from the blindfolded old man in knee socks, and tickling the back of the knee of the old man in knee socks.

Nothing–and I mean nothing–says Christmas like a blindfolded old man in knee socks.

Like many teaching institutions, we have a huge 35mm teaching slide collection. It was once in constant use, but now 35mm slides are a redundant technology, and questions have to be asked about whether the collection is worth the space it occupies.

We are not alone in asking this question: there is a lively debate about the issue across museums, libraries, art galleries and universities.

Most of the guidelines on slide libraries seem to start with the assumption the problem is one of how to identify which slides to dispose of. The Guidelines for the Evaluation, Retention, and Deaccessioning of 35mm Slide Collections in Educational and Cultural Institutions, prepared by the Visual Resources Association’s Slide and Transitional Media Task Force, September 2014 begins with: ‘Our purpose here is to raise awareness of the issues associated with reducing the size of a 35mm teaching collection, and to provide general guidelines for evaluating and weeding.’

Reading through the VRA guidelines and its appendix of institutional guidelines, there is a consensus that ‘weeds’ are duplicates, images taken from books, and slides that are damaged, mouldy, out-of-focus, fading or otherwise imperfect, unless they are originals. However, the work of identifying ‘originals’ in a massive slide collection is no simple task, especially where there is no source data – a common issue with teaching slide collections, and certainly one we face. Weeding is an interesting word. Weeds are unwelcome intrusive plants in a garden that take up space and choke desirable plants. Does taking out unwanted slides make a collection more accessible and more likely to be used?

The answer depends on what teaching slide collections are, and why they are worth retaining. We are developing new research directions through an archaeological approach which identifies the Institute’s teaching slide collection as an assemblage: “a group of artifacts recurring together at a particular time and place, and representing the sum of human activities” (Renfrew and Bahn, 2008, 578).

Thinking about the collection as an assemblage has raised new questions about purpose, function, research value and relevance, while setting the idea of ‘weeding’ to one side. Assemblages have interest because of their component parts – to take some of these parts out, or to assign different values based on current cultural perceptions is to distort the assemblage and compromise its archaeological integrity.

While we’re writing about these issues and setting up a 35mm slide digitisation project, we’re looking at what has happened to comparable 35mm collections. This one from the Visual Resources Centre at Manchester Art School particularly caught our eye. Worried that their collection was at threat of disposal, ‘Pick-a-slide’ began as a student-led collaboration. People are invited to browse the images, pick one, and write a short response about it. It is a fascinating project, and the good news is that the entire archive has been transferred to the University Special Collections.

——————————————————————–

Renfrew, C. and Bahn, P. (2008) Archaeology: Theories,  Methods, and Practice London: Thames and Hudson

Much of the Eastern Seaboard is bracing for a major snow/ice event this weekend. Are you prepared? Looking for indoor activities?

Even if you can’t make it out to the research rooms, you can still do something fun and good for the country from the comfort of your own home as you tag and transcribe records from the National Archives. Your tags and transcriptions will help make our catalog easier to search.

With snow on our minds, we’ve created a few winter-themed tagging missions on our Citizen Archivist Dashboard.

Agent’s House. Department of Commerce. Bureau of Fisheries. Division of Alaska Fisheries. 1913-7/1/1939. Series: Pribilof Islands Glass Plate Negatives, 1913 – 1921. National Archives Identifier: 23853701

And while you are on the Dashboard, take a look at the many other ways you can get involved. From tagging missions to transcribing documents, scanning photos to joining the conversation on History Hub, there is a way for everyone to participate and contribute.

Find something interesting? Share your contributions with us on Twitter @USNatArchives #ITaggedIt

The ostensible purpose of this talk is to plug his recently published book, Curtains, a compilation of reviews from both The New Yorker and his earlier stint as theater critic for The Observer newspaper of London. But Tynan’s universally acknowledged position as the leading authority on contemporary drama leads to a more wide-ranging discussion. His main objection to most American plays is a “strong tendency among American audiences to expect a show to come out and cause them to love it.” This over-reliance on pleasing “tends to remove from the playhouse the atmosphere of critical attention.” Broadway now skews either towards over-commercialization or becoming “private fantasy.” He (quite presciently) predicts an “impasse,” with avant-garde theater retreating to off-Broadway and the larger houses becoming over-reliant on shallow blockbusters.

One ray of hope is offered by the proposed non-profit repertory theater to be based in the then newly-constructed Lincoln Center.

Tynan’s well-known acid wit is much in evidence here. Asked to choose America’s two best playwrights he names “Tennessee Williams of about five years ago and Arthur Miller of about six years ago.” (Interestingly, he calls A Streetcar Named Desire “the female side of Death of a Salesman.”) Eugene O’Neill he dismisses as “that superb thing: the artist who can’t write.”

He finds American directors, while fabulously talented, distracted by the lure of Hollywood and so not able to develop the same working relationship with a company that was so notable in the Group Theater of the 30’s. As for American critics, while praising the “overnight critics” as better than their English counterparts, he feels that in general the critical community suffers from being parochial. Here too he displays his typically eye for the cutting edge, singling out the young Robert Brustein and Eric Bentley for their “vivacity and knowledge.”

Born in 1927, Tynan quickly established himself as the wunderkind of English theater criticism. He was fortunate to arrive just as major changes were taking place. Michael Billington notes in The Guardian,

…a series of eruptions that took place within an extraordinary year in British theatre from August 1955 to August 1956: the premieres of Waiting for Godot and Look Back in Anger, the flowering of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop with Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow, and the arrival of the Berliner Ensemble with a three-play Brecht season. From being a night-nurse at the bedside…Tynan suddenly turned into a midwife. Instead of wringing his hands he was able to raise his voice in salutation of a theatre that at last seemed in touch with human pain and social issues.”

What made Tynan unique among critics, though, was his bravura style and a complete identification with the stage. The noted director Harold Clurman, reviewing Curtains in The New York Times, explains,

“What makes Tynan that rare phenomenon, a genuine theatre critic, is that he is disposed toward the theatre in the sense that we speak of certain people being naturally musical. Tynan experiences the theatre with his nerves, body, mind and spirit. He possesses in regard to the theatre something like absolute pitch.”

Curiously, this devotion may have led to his undoing. Succumbing to the well-known temptation of “crossing over,” Tynan relinquished his post to become dramaturge for the National Theater. This did not prove congenial to his talents. Perhaps, though, burnout was inevitable for a writer who invested his persona with such an air of precocious youth. As Charles Spencer laments in The Telegraph:

“It was a great loss when Olivier lured him to the National in 1963, on the principle that it was better to have him inside the tent, pissing out, rather than outside, pissing in. “God – anything to get you off that Observer,” he said. …Once he’d left the National, things got worse. He became blocked as a writer, jaded, weary, and more obsessed with sado-masochism. He couldn’t stop chugging down cigarettes and coughing up phlegm as his emphysema worsened. There was a late second flowering with a few fine profiles for The New Yorker, but for the most part one is left with a terrible sense of waste. ‘I don’t even enjoy enjoying myself any more,’ he moaned.”

Tynan did manage one bizarrely successful dramatic foray. He organized and wrote a sketch for Oh! Calcutta!, a sex revue that was quite controversial and ran for years in both New York and London. One is left with the sense, though, of a talent looking for a form through which to shine. Tynan himself ruefully noted, “A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.” Yet in his criticism there is much excellent writing, humor, striking perception, and genuine passion. Perhaps he couldn’t drive, but he could soar.

Kenneth Tynan died in 1980, at the age of fifty-three.

Sunday 14th February, 3pm, Dunblane Cathedral

Concert by the Edinburgh Renaissance Band 

The concert has been organised to raise funds for the Leighton Library in Dunblane, with which the University has a friendly relationship.

Tickets: £10 for adults and £5 for children/students. Available from Helen Beardsley; or Smallprint, Beech Road, Dunblane; or at the door.

See you there!

One of the best parts about working in archives is getting to “discover” things – maybe a first edition in a box of uncataloged books, or fascinating images in a box only labeled “negatives” – things that weren’t lost, exactly, but whose awesomeness went previously unrecognized.

A few months ago, I was gathering together all of our material on the Amherst College student radio station, WAMH (previously WAMF). They had recently donated a couple boxes of records and I wanted to integrate and make a finding aid for all the material they have given us over the years (WAMH/WAMF Records). I found three boxes of reel to reel audio tapes of shows that had been broadcast in the 1950s-70s and given to us in 1989. The tapes included all kinds of intriguing topics from Neils Bohr lecturing on Atomic Theory in 1957 to students protesting the Vietnam War. Most interesting was one reel reading: Martin Luther King, Pres. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, speaking at the New School for Social Research on “The Summer of Our Discontent” from February 1964. An internet search quickly revealed that the New School Archives holds a recording of the question and answer session from this lecture, but not a recording of the lecture itself, and that this is most likely a unique recording of the speech. We had the tape digitized and got in touch with our colleagues at The New School Archives, who were pleased to learn that we had found this additional documentation from an important event in their history.

LISTEN TO THE SPEECH HERE

Dr. King speaking at The New School

In the Spring of 1964, The New School hosted a 15 lecture series, The American Race Crisis Lecture Series, featuring 15 civil rights leaders in the United States and attended by hundreds of students. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. opened the series on February 6 with a lecture on the tumultuous summer of 1963. King began by asking the question, why 1963? The answers included disillusionment with progress in desegregation, the failure of political parties to live up to their promises, administrative action focused solely on voting rights and the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation highlighting the paucity of progress since 1863. After a review of the history of African American political action since the Emancipation Proclamation, finishing with the events of 1963 in Birmingham, King brought to the fore the value of nonviolent tactics to the movement. In closing, King called for continued action in 1964, including the passage of the Civil Rights Bill (which happened four days after the speech). The bulk of the speech was published, revised and much expanded, in the first two chapters of King’s 1964 book, Why We Can’t Wait.

The question and answer period following the speech (available in The New School Digital Collections) is just as fascinating as the speech itself. King responds to questions about the Black Muslim movement, a perceived “bog down” in civil rights activity following the March on Washington, and affirmative action (although not by that name). The story of the initial discovery of The New School’s recording and their subsequent exhibition on the American Race Crisis Lecture Series can be found in the following articles:

• Listen: After 48 Years of Silence, a Lost King Speech Finds New Life, by The New School Free Press
• Found After Decades, a Forgotten Tape of King “Thinking on his Feet”, by The New York Times
• MLK Returns to the New School, by The New School News

On December 8th, 1964, at 6pm, Amherst College students could have tuned in to WAMF and heard Dr. King’s speech rebroadcast on the Lecture Hall program. The Lecture Hall was a twice weekly program of pre-recorded lectures, some given at Amherst College and some obtained through agreements with other institutions. Les Black, class of 1966, was the program manager of WAMF in 1964 and hosted the Lecture Hall program. It is his voice that you hear at the beginning and end of the recording linked above. He recalls that at the time, “a lot was going on and there was no Facebook, no YouTube, not much alternative media yet. College radio stations like WAMF played a key role by giving students a way to hear about it.”

While it is very exciting to be able to add this small piece to the documentation of the rich and important life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this recording can be heard not just as an historical artifact, but as a call to reflect on current events. 2014 and 2015 have also been years of turmoil, protest and nonviolent action against racism. And while the terrain has shifted, many of King’s analyses and calls to action are still relevant today.

Many thanks to Wendy Scheir of The New School Archives for generously sharing her experience and background materials, Les Black for his recollections of WAMF and the Lecture Hall program, SceneSavers in Covington, KY for digitizing the audio reel, and WAMH for starting this whole thing off!