Happy December, scholars! Take a break from perishing under the weight of final papers and take a look at this week’s round-up of links.
- Our Natural Science scholars will be interested to know that archaeologists recently discovered a 7,300-year-old human fingerprint, the oldest in the region, on a shard of pottery.
Image via the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters Facebook page.
- Dan Chiasson, reviewer and poet over at the New Yorker and professor at Wellesley College, examines Emily Dickinson’s “envelope poems,” fragments of verse the poet scrawled on scraps of paper.
- A. R. Gurney’s play “Ajax,” which closed earlier last month, concerns a adjunct college professor and a student in her Greek drama class who develop Sophocles’ “Ajax” into a contemporary performance. The interesting part? The student’s original goal is a study of post-traumatic stress disorder among American soldiers. Sound familiar?
- Did you know the Z-Closet Collection in Houghton Library at Harvard contains the death mask of Henry James cast by his brother, American psychologist William James, and a lock of hair from English Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s very head? Maybe Core can, ahem, borrow them.
- Petrarch’s Canzoniere may now boast a Catalan translation, provided by poet Miquel Desclot. The poet also plans on publishing a volume of five Shakespeare plays in translation.
- The Huntington is currently showing Real American Places: Edward Weston and Leaves of Grass, an exhibition of 25 photographs intended to illuminate a deluxe volume of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. On view alongside these photographs are original items related to Whitman. Closes March 20, 2017.
Edward WestonWoodlawn Plantation House, Louisiana, 1941, gelatin silver print, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. 1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
Feeling better? Now get out there and do your best (and send any news of interest that you find along the way to core@bu.edu)!
