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
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…
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.
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.
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.
There were some surprises last night at the Grammy Awards, and you’ll be surprised that some of the award-winners and their recordings can be found at the Snell Library, too!
In the classical category, you can find the multi-award winning Metropolis Symphony and Deus Ex Machina by Michael Daugherty (Best Engineered Classical, Best Orchestral Performance, Best Classical Contemporary) streaming online from Naxos. I admit I have my issues with contemporary classical but I really liked Metropolis (which is based on the Superman Comics) a lot; it has great energy and is modern in the best sense, with echoes of Gershwin.
