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Staff Picks and Suggestions

Marginalia as Scholarly Communication

Although we may think of scholarly communication as the process of disseminating research through formal publication or online distribution, scholars have been communicating with and responding to each other since well before the advent of the Internet or even print journals. One way in which modern scholars can understand earlier processes of communication is through the study of marginalia, or the notes to themselves or others that previous scholars have left in the margins of the texts they read. Works have been published on the marginalia of single writers, such as Voltaire’s Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau (Havens, 1971), or on marginalia as a topic unto itself. H.J. Jackson has published two books on marginalia: (Note: Both titles are available as e-books to members of the NU community.) Recently, the personal library of Charles Darwin was digitized and made available freely online through the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Darwin himself frequently made notes in the margins of his books, and one special feature of this online collection is the full transcription of all his marginalia. Being able to read the notes that Darwin made to himself as he read gives scholars today insight into how his ideas, well, evolved over time. Marginalia were also a way for Darwin and others to share their ideas informally with their contemporaries through exchanging personal copies of their books. Of course, marginalia aren’t only created by the greatest scientific minds – one of my favorite poets, Billy Collins, wrote a poem on the margin notes left by everyday readers:
Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive – “Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” – that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote “Don’t be a ninny” alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. — From “Marginalia” (Billy Collins) (Read the full poem here.)

Midnight Release of Harry Potter

Tonight is the night Harry Potter fans have been waiting for, the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. If you haven’t already purchased your tickets, you better do so quickly, as seats are selling out fast! Regal Fenway Stadium 13 has eleven theaters showing midnght premiers, and the AMC Lowes Theater in the Boston Commons has ten theaters showing the midnight premier, all of which have sold out. “The final chapter begins as Harry, Ron, and Hermione continue their quest of finding and destroying the Dark Lord’s three remaining Horcruxes, the magical items responsible for his immortality. But as the mystical Deathly Hallows are uncovered, and Voldemort finds out about their mission, the biggest battle begins and life as they know it will never be the same again.” -The Internet Movie Database More interested in reading every captivating detail? Come to Snell Library and check out any of the Harry Potter books! http://bit.ly/nGJRW2

Poet Robert Gibbons, Ed '69 featured in Salem

Maria Carpenter and Poet Robert Gibbons

Northeastern Alumnus and prior Snell Library staff member Robert Gibbons, Ed. ’69 read selections from his works alongside Richard Hoffman at the Gathering, as part of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Here is a poem he read. Salem Came Back to Me Before I Came Back to Salem As I said to Bob Silva, who lived there on Rice Street just short of the Beverly Bridge, adjacent to Pilgrim Motel, so that late nights in summer all his brother & he had to do was scale a small fence to swim in the pool, Salem came back to me before I came back to Salem. Also late at night, during a brutal two hour bout with insomnia images arrived, not chronologically, but a montage of streets & workplaces, people & events, transient & permanent. I’ll document it as between 1:45-3:45 a.m., Monday, May 9th, 2011. From the ground up, that’s for sure, where I lived on Proctor Street with Mary & Harold & Aunt Bea, or Cambridge Street with my first wife, or Geneva with Kathleen. Working at Met-Com on Derby, the library on Lafayette, or cataloguing the broadside collection at the museum on Essex. I can’t reorder their non-chronological sequence, but driving down Boston Street one might see, as I did again, those neighborhood toughs Tarqui, or Pelletier, while Snowy & his crew emerged from the woodwork of the Willows’ neon arcades. The image of my father looking through Irish lace curtains to see if anyone bid on the family house on Liberty Hill Ave. during the auction held on the sidewalk outside. It’s not as if the same autobiographical information recently struggled with returned, no, it was geocentric, even if Salem were only a place traversed along the way to Marblehead, or Nahant, or in the opposite direction toward Cape Ann. I was all-eyes for a long time, an empty vessel looking for something to take the place of stark ignorance. I might be conversing with Mr. Roach, the bookseller across from Jerry’s Army & Navy, or eyeing that used copy of Cavafy translations at Murphy’s bookstore behind Old Town Hall, or learning fragment by fragment a bit more about art from the proprietor of Asia House, who also had an association with Weatherhill, then publishers in NYC. One of my labors was to clean out the huge furnace at Salem Hospital. Whenever I burned the trash the older guys warned of amputated limbs, & years before I cut through that myth. Two hours is a long time for images to hover. There’s Grampy Mike shoveling two buckets of coal for his furnace on Winthrop Street, & my other grandfather able to jump in & out of a wooden barrel without using his hands. Those barrels held leather skins for factories across from & at the foot of Proctor, & served as fodder for the annual bonfire atop Gallows Hill, until one year they toppled & rolled down toward spectators running for their lives, me among them. Later, I’d look in awe across from Pattie & David’s condo on Chestnut at Ernest Fenollosa’s former residence, hoping to put principles in his The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry to use: Poetry only does consciously what primitive races did unconsciously. There’s Bobby Leonard & I walking down Orange Street finding two dollar bills face up in the rain as talismans for the upcoming cross-country trip, & journey down to Mexico… http://www.killingfloorboston.com/2011/05/time-capsule-salem-came-back-to-me-before-i-came-back-to-salem.html

Sad Follow-Up to a Prior Snell Author Talk

Those who follow Snell Library’s Meet the Author Series may remember author John Hollway’s discussion of his book, Killing Time, the story of an innocent man’s 14 years on death row and how he came to be found innocent and released. At the time of the talk, the Supreme Court was due to hear a civil case brought by the innocent man, John Thompson, and his attorneys against the New Orleans prosecutor’s office that was found to have withheld evidence in the original case, evidence that would have led to his acquittal but whose suppression meant he lost all those years of his life to unjust prison time. A local jury awarded him $14 million to compensate for the time he spent on death row, and appeals courts upheld the award, all the way to the Supreme Court. A sad update this week, however, as the Supreme Court handed down its 5-4 decision overturning the monetary award, stating the prosecutor’s office could not be held responsible for the “bad actions” of a single person, even though it has been shown that the office had a clear pattern of violations of the rules for handling evidence and was obviously not training its prosecutors in correct procedures — and even though all the lower appeals courts had upheld the local decision that the prosecutor’s office was responsible. Commentators around the news media are outraged by the decision; for examples, see this New York Times op-ed or this piece in Slate.com. According to the Facebook page for the book (which by the way offers more links to additional media coverage of the decision, as well as to the text of the decision itself), “Now the only remedy that any of us has for prosecutorial misconduct is a complaint to the State Bar Association — which, in most states, you can only make if you are admitted to the Bar yourself.” This is a grim outcome for all of us, not just John Thompson.

Go Deeper: Delve into African American Studies

This month and all months, we honor the African diaspora and the many contributions of African-Americans. The Northeastern University community is fortunate to have two related experts to help us to learn more about African American history. Kantigi Camara is the Librarian who runs the John D. O’Bryant African-American Institute Library. And Research & Instruction Librarian Christine Oka designed this research guide. She also provides reference assistance and manages a related collection at Snell Library. Additionally, here is a gorgeous website celebrating Black History Month, which was put together by the Library of Congress.