A LOST EDITH WHARTON PLAY EMERGES FROM SCHOLARLY
SLEUTHING by Rebecca Mead In February of 1901, Walter Berry, a lawyer
and member of élite society in New York, expressed a regret in a letter written
to his close friend Edith Wharton. “How
I do wish I could run on to see the first rehearsal of the Shadow,” he wrote. At the time, Wharton, who was thirty-nine
years old, was not yet a novelist, having only published shorter fiction and
poetry, as well as co-authoring, with Ogden Codman, “The Decoration of Houses,”
an 1897 book about interior design. But
she was a budding playwright, and, as two scholars have just deduced in an
important bit of detective work, Berry’s glancing reference was to one of her
works: “The Shadow of a Doubt,” a
three-act play that was in production in 1901. It was to star Elsie de Wolfe as Wharton’s
heroine, Kate Derwent, a former nurse married to John Derwent, a gentleman
above her social station. Kate’s role in
assisting the suicide of her husband’s former wife, Agnes, whom she tended to
after an injury, is revealed in the course of the drama. The production was cancelled, however, and
the work slipped into obscurity. It is
not mentioned by any of Wharton’s biographers, nor does Wharton mention it in
her own memoir, “A Backward Glance,” in which, perhaps understandably,
she skates over her brief and not especially successful career as a writer for
the stage. (In the first years of the century, she had written a handful of
plays, but “The Shadow of a Doubt” would have been her first professional
production, had it materialized. Later,
she collaborated on an adaptation of “The House of Mirth,” which proved less
successful than hoped.) It has now come
to light thanks to the sleuthing of two scholars, Laura Rattray, who is a
reader in American literature at the University of Glasgow, and Mary Chinery, a
professor of English at Georgian Court University, in New Jersey. They are publishing their findings in the new issue of the Edith Wharton Review, and hope that the play’s discovery
will shed new light on the period of Wharton’s life before her ascent to
literary fame, as well as illuminating her better known works in previously
unimagined ways. The manuscript, which
is the first full work of Wharton’s to be discovered in twenty-five years, was
not stowed away in an attic, as was the case with another significant Wharton
discovery of the past few years, that of a cache of letters written to her governess, Anna
Bahlmann. Rather, it had been hiding in
plain sight at the Harry Ransom Center, a repository for rare manuscripts in
Austin, Texas, where Rattray and Chinery found two copies of it in the
Playscripts and Promptbooks Collection. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-lost-edith-wharton-play-emerges-from-scholarly-sleuthing
Cepheus is a constellation in the northern sky.
It is named after Cepheus, King
of Aethiopia in Greek mythology. He was married to Cassiopeia and was the father of Andromeda, both of whom are immortalized as modern day constellations
along with Cepheus. It was one of the 48
constellations listed by the second century astronomer Ptolemy, and
remains one of the 88 modern constellations.
Its brightest star is Alpha Cephei with an apparent magnitude of 3.5. Delta Cephei is the prototype of an important class of star known
as a Cepheid variable. RW Cephei,
an orange hypergiant, together with the red supergiants Mu Cephei, VV Cephei,
and V354 Cephei are among the largest
stars known. In addition, Cepheus also has the
hyperluminous quasar S5 0014+81,
and hosts an ultramassive black hole in its core at 40 billion solar masses, about 10,000
times more massive than the central black hole of the Milky Way, making it the most
massive black hole known
in the universe. See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepheus_(constellation)
The Klementinum library, a beautiful example of Baroque architecture, was
first opened in 1722 as part of the Jesuit university, and houses over 20,000
books. The ceiling frescoes were painted
by Jan Hiebl. In 1781, director Karel
Rafael Ungar established Biblioteca Nationalis, a collection of Czech language
literature. Some of the rare historical
books from this collection have been sent to Google for scanning and will
eventually be available on Google Books.
Just as the library is a rare and little-known treasure, so is it
associated with several little-known facts: the Klementinum used to be the
third largest Jesuit college in the world; recording of
local weather began there in 1775 and has continued ever since; it is featured
in a novel by famous Spanish-language writer Jorge Luis Borges.
London-based architects Future
Systems won a
2006 competition to design a new national library for the Czech Republic. It is to be located in Prague on a large
greenfield site on the Letna plateau. The
winning design is unusual not least because it reminds one of, perhaps, an alien
or perhaps a piece of 1970s children's playground furniture, but because it
offers generous natural light via curving windows that are scattered across the
external skin of the building. The
winning team was selected in 2007 from a field of 355 entries by an
international jury of ten, including UK-based architect Zaha Hadid, UNESCO
urbanistic expert Irene Wiese-von Ofen, and the head of the Czech National
Library, Vlastimil Ježek. First prize
was €160,000. Future Systems' team was
led by Czech-born Jan Kaplicky. According
to Future Systems, the 40,000m², curvaceous building is to be placed on a white
unpolished marble platform, with mirror finished stainless steel wings used to
elevate the perimeter edges. This means
the building's own image can be reflected back from different angles. "The architecture of the proposed
building is a three-dimensional object shaped to minimise the volume and to
extend the views over the surrounding tree level," the architects said. The new library is intended to supersede the
16th century former Jesuit college, the Klementinum, which was built on the
site of the 11th century St Kliment's Chapel. The Klementinum has played host
to the Czech national library since the late 19th century.
Czech National Library https://www.jigidi.com/jigsaw-puzzle/L9Q5121C/Czech-National-Library
The U.S. fertility rate is at its
lowest point in history, with 62.5 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. The total fertility rate has been below
replacement level since 1971. Despite
this, the nation’s population is the largest it has ever been. In addition to births, the U.S. population has
been growing due to immigration and longer life expectancy. While
the fertility rate has declined, the mortality rate has declined as well,
increasing the share of Americans who are from a younger generation. To determine
how many people are left from the year you were born, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed
estimates of the 2017 native population by age from the U.S. Census Bureau. These estimates adjust for both naturalized
citizens as well as native-born Americans living outside the United States. The share of people born each year since 1933
alive in 2017 was calculated by comparing these Census population estimates to
the number of births each year from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention’s Vital Statistics of the United States report series. Total U.S. population figures in each year
were from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Find how many people are alive the year you were born starting with the
year 1933, go to http://247wallst.com/special-report/2017/06/01/how-many-people-are-left-from-the-year-you-were-born/2/
Steven Peters and Charles
Stockdale http://247wallst.com/special-report/2017/06/01/how-many-people-are-left-from-the-year-you-were-born/
Jean Sammet,
who died May 20, 2017 at the age of 88, was one of the early pioneers in
computing, and programming languages. She was the inventor of the FORMAC (Formula
Manipulation Compiler) programming language, an extension to FORTRAN
designed for symbolic manipulations of mathematical formulas. Her interest in this area led her to found ACM SIGSAM, the Special Interest Group in Algebraic
Manipulation. Jean also contributed to the development
of COBOL. Jean was
elected Chair of ACM SIGPLAN in 1971, but resigned one year later
after being elected Vice President of ACM. She was elected ACM’s first female President
in 1974. She was elected to the National
Academy of Engineering in 1977, and after many years of service she was awarded
ACM’s Distinguished Service Award in 1985. She has received many other awards as well. She retired from IBM, where she’d worked for
many years, in 1988. A very nice recollection of Jean’s life was recently published in
Communications of the ACM. A recent
issue of Glamour has an interview with her. Her technical biography is detailed in IEEE’s Annals of the History of
Computing (2009). Jean wrote
a retrospective on FORMAC for the The History of Programming
Languages (HOPL) conference
in 1993. It’s an interesting read In Jean’s estimation, FORMAC’s success was
proof that a language, not just a package or library, was important
to programmers in the domain of symbolic computation. This is the sort of argument PL people make
today for domain-specific languages. FORMAC, as an extension to FORTRAN,
embodied the approach that we now refer to as embedded domain-specific languages.
This approach—language extension/embedding—helps with adoption and
code reuse, and is in contrast to standalone languages, which have more freedom
with syntax and computational model. http://www.pl-enthusiast.net/2017/05/24/jean-sammet-a-remembrance/
The Amazing World of Dr. Seuss is a permanent, bilingual museum in Springfield,
Massachussets designed to introduce children and their families to the stories
of Ted Geisel, promote joy in reading, and nurture specific literacy skills. The 3,200-square-foot first floor exhibition
will provide opportunities to explore new sounds and vocabulary, play rhyming
games, invent stories, and engage in activities that encourage teamwork and
creative thinking. The second floor will
be filled with personal memorabilia belonging to Ted Geisel, including original
oil paintings, a collection of zany hats and bowties, the original Geisel Grove
sign which used to hang in Forest Park, and furniture from Ted’s sitting room
and studio, including his drawing board, breakfast table, sofa, and armchair. https://springfieldmuseums.org/about/dr-seuss-museum/
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1718
June 5, 2017 On this date in
1817, the first Great Lakes steamer, the Frontenac, was launched. On this date in 1947, in a speech at Harvard University,
the United
States Secretary of State George Marshall called
for economic aid to war-torn Europe.
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