I like these first two lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Boston Evening Transcript.” I’ve clipped them (sort of) from the issue of Poetry magazine in which the poem first was published. Probably it’s a little strange that I should like them, because I don’t think he meant them to be lovely. Continue reading “A bit of and a bite at “The Boston Evening Transcript””
“If scrapbooks can be distilled to one overarching interpretive theme, it is that of rupture.”
“What could be more emblematic of the fractured narratives of modernity than scrapbooks?”
“[An] excess of fragments that burst the bindings and bulge the pages.”
“How then do we read these fragments as cultural artifacts?”1
Newspaper clippings were frequently pasted into scrapbooks, and sometimes, as in the case of the scrapbook shown here, compose the entirety of the scrapbook’s contents: Continue reading “The Newspaper and Its Disjecta Membra”
This post is the second in a set on the British band Cornershop and their obsession with information. In part two, we examine a song, “Jason Donovan / Tessa Sanderson,” about two libel cases that seem especially to have captured their imaginations: Continue reading “Merry Christmas, Jason Donovan”
Tjinder Singh and his post-punk band Cornershop really, really care about information—its technologies, its media, its creators, its consumers—which, for the 1990s at least, is a little unusual. Why care about anything at all when punk has bequeathed them a license to lunge pell-mell down the abyss of heedless anger, smashing up everything and replacing it with nothing? Continue reading “Where’d You Get Your Information? (Part I)”
Now available: over two hundred digitized Illinois newspapers: https://go.library.illinois.edu/npcom. Access currently restricted to computers with a campus IP address, but will soon be freely available through the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections (IDNC) to researchers everywhere. Continue reading “Over 200 Illinois Newspapers Digitized”
Alan Burns came from one of those families where the children all seem to have been remarkable (in personality or intellect), consequential, and ideologically irreconcilable. The Last Imperialist by Bruce Gilley might have been a nuanced study of one such family (like those captivating Mitford biographies—I think there have been almost a dozen so far). Or it could have been about the devout Roman Catholic and Anglo West Indian, from birth an establishment outsider, who made it his life mission to defend the very establishment that had rejected him. Instead, Gilley chose to write an improbable apologia of the British Empire, and while he does fold some biography into the polemic, he’s so entirely united with Burns in admiration for colonialism that the book devolves into pure encomium somewhere around page three. Continue reading “New Books: The Last Imperialist”
Now available: the second module of the digital collection Colonial Caribbean. Like the first module, Module 2 covers British colonialism in the Caribbean, and comprises documents from the British National Archives, digitized in full color. Continue reading “Colonial Caribbean New Module: Colonial Government and Abolition, 1833-1849”
I thought this book would be a double poison pill, spiced with anise, like all that unwanted Good & Plenty one used to get on Halloween. Good & Plenty it is not; more like Short & Lovely (haha), a pleasing meditation on how to pursue a good life. Continue reading “HPNL Browsings: “In the Presence of Schopenhauer””
[Post by Heather Murphy]
In 2019, the University Library secured trial access to the ProQuest “Access and Build Program” giving faculty, staff, and students at Illinois the ability to search 115 electronic resources. Over the years, the Library supported this evidence-based acquisition program, ProQuest added new databases, and the Library used accumulated credits to purchase those that demonstrated the most use. These multidisciplinary resources spanned the humanities, music and the arts, the social sciences, and some scientific disciplines, and each resource available through the ProQuest Access and Build program was marked in the Library’s catalog as being available on a trial basis. Continue reading “Trial Access to ProQuest’s Electronic Resources Concluding August 2022”