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Beat Generation poet Peter Orlovsky’s archive acquired

By Jennifer Tisdale

Peter Orlovsky’s notebook titled Rolling Thunder, Oct. 29, 1975.
Peter Orlovsky’s notebook titled Rolling Thunder, Oct. 29, 1975.

The Harry Ransom Center has acquired the archive of American poet Peter Orlovsky (1933–2010), an important figure in the Beat Generation.

Orlovsky was the companion of fellow poet Allen Ginsberg for more than 40 years, and his papers reflect significant aspects of their relationship. Orlovsky’s collection comprises manuscripts, journals and notebooks, correspondence, tape recordings, photographs, and other personal documents, including unpublished poetry and prose works.

Around the time that Orlovsky met Ginsberg, he began to keep a journal, filling more than 140 notebooks before his death. Some of Orlovsky’s published poems appear in the journals, yet none of the journals have been published.

Correspondence in the collection highlights Orlovsky’s many connections with other poets, authors, and artists. There are more than 1,600 letters written to Orlovsky and/or Ginsberg, including 165 letters written by Ginsberg himself. Some notable correspondents include Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ken Kesey, and Robert LaVigne. Orlovsky also wrote regularly to his parents and siblings, and more than 65 of his letters are included in the archive.

The collection features more than 2,650 photographs taken by or of Orlovsky, documenting the years between 1970 and 2010. Also included are eight reel-to-reel tapes from the 1960s and more than 120 audiocassettes made by Orlovsky during the 1970s and 1980s, some recording conversations with Ginsberg.

The Ransom Center has extensive collections of Beat Generation writers, including materials related to William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Corso , Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.

The Orlovsky materials will be accessible once processed and cataloged.

Related content:
Ransom Center Humanities Coordinator Gregory Curtis writes about a piece of correspondence in the archive, revealing how a misunderstanding began between Allen Ginsberg and Diana Trilling.

Austin Critics' Table Awards recognize two exhibitions

By Jennifer Tisdale

The exhibition "I Have the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America." Photo by Pete Smith.
The exhibition "I Have the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America." Photo by Pete Smith.

The Harry Ransom Center was honored this week by the Austin Critics’ Table Awards in the categories “Museum Exhibition” for I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America and “Touring Show, Art” for Arnold Newman:Masterclass. For more than 20 years, the Austin Critics’ Table Awards have celebrated achievement in the arts disciplines. An informal group of critics annually recognize Austin’s art successes, ranging from visual art to theater.

View a list of the diverse recipients.

More than 65 research fellowships awarded

By Jennifer Tisdale

James H. 'Jimmy' Hare crossing the Piave river, 1918, lantern slide; Gordon Conway, 'Red Cross Girl' illustration for Vanity Fair, 1918; Bob Landry, film still from 'A Farewell to Arms,' 1957; Erich Maria Remarque, 'All Quiet on the Western Front,' 1930; Lucile Patterson, National League for Woman's Service World War I military recruiting poster.
James H. 'Jimmy' Hare crossing the Piave river, 1918, lantern slide; Gordon Conway, 'Red Cross Girl' illustration for Vanity Fair, 1918; Bob Landry, film still from 'A Farewell to Arms,' 1957; Erich Maria Remarque, 'All Quiet on the Western Front,' 1930; Lucile Patterson, National League for Woman's Service World War I military recruiting poster.

The Harry Ransom Center has awarded more than 65 research fellowships for 2013-14.

The fellowships support research projects in the humanities that require substantial on-site use of the Center’s collections of manuscripts, rare books, film, photography, art, and performing arts materials.

The fellowship recipients, half of whom will be coming from abroad, will use Ransom Center materials to support projects with such titles as “Postirony: Countercultural Fictions from Hipster to Coolhunter,” “Elliott Erwitt: Early Work,” “Obsession: The Films of Brian De Palma,” “David Foster Wallace: The Form of His Fiction,” “Matisse’s Illustrations for Ulysses,” and “Doris Lessing’s Intuitive Style.”

“Support of scholarly research is one of the primary goals of the Ransom Center,” said Director Thomas F. Staley. “With what has become one of the largest fellowship programs of its kind, we encourage scholars from around the world to make new discoveries about the writers and artists who have shaped our culture.”

The fellowships range from one to three months in duration and provide $3,000 of support per month. Travel stipends and dissertation fellowships are also awarded.

The stipends are funded by individual donors and organizations, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hobby Family Foundation, the Dorot Foundation, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and The University of Texas at Austin Office of Graduate Studies.

University appoints new director of the Ransom Center

By Jennifer Tisdale

Photo of Stephen Enniss by Julie Ainsworth/Folger Shakespeare Library.
Photo of Stephen Enniss by Julie Ainsworth/Folger Shakespeare Library.

The University of Texas at Austin has appointed head librarian of the Folger Shakespeare Library Stephen Enniss as the new director of the Ransom Center.

Enniss will take over the duties of current Director Thomas F. Staley, who will retire August 31. Staley, who has been responsible for scores of notable acquisitions and the Center’s enormous growth during his 25-year tenure, had announced plans to retire in 2011, but later agreed to postpone his retirement date. Staley, who is also the Harry Huntt Ransom Chair in Liberal Arts, will remain on faculty and plans to teach in the College of Liberal Arts. Enniss will start at the Ransom Center on August 1.

Enniss will be the seventh director in the Ransom Center’s 56-year history.

J. M. Coetzee’s association with The University of Texas at Austin

By Jennifer Tisdale

April 1, 1965, letter to J. M. Coetzee from C. L. Cline, Chairman of the Department of English at The University of Texas.
April 1, 1965, letter to J. M. Coetzee from C. L. Cline, Chairman of the Department of English at The University of Texas.

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940 and graduated from the University of Cape Town. After working three years as a computer programmer in England, he enrolled in The University of Texas at Austin in 1965 to pursue his Ph.D. in English, linguistics and Germanic languages, which he earned in 1969. While at the University, he conducted research in the Ransom Center’s collections for his dissertation on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett.

Coetzee’s archive now resides in the Ransom Center and is available for research.
Below, Coetzee writes of his association with The University of Texas at Austin.

Somewhere among the boxes of letters included in this collection is one from the Chair of the Department of English at the University of Texas to John M. Coetzee at an address in Surrey, England. It is dated April, 1965; it thanks young John for his application to come and study in Austin and is pleased to offer him a teaching assistantship at a salary of $2,000 per annum while he works toward a graduate degree.

Thus was initiated my association with The University of Texas, an association by now nearly half a century old. In the 1960s the Ransom Center already had a certain fame, worldwide, for having struck out into a new field for collectors, the field of living authors and their manuscripts. The word “brash” tended to find its way into comments on the Ransom Center and its activities, as did the phrase “oil money.”

I am not sure that such supercilious attitudes would find much traction nowadays. The present-day Ransom Center has custody of one of the world’s great collections of twentieth-century manuscripts, a collection that will bring scholars to Texas for many years to come.

It is a privilege to have graduated from being a teaching assistant at The University of Texas to being one of the authors whose papers are conserved here.

I write these words from my home on the south coast of the Australian mainland, an area prone to destructive bushfires. It is a secondary source of satisfaction to me that, even if this house itself goes up in flames, the work of my hands will have been whisked away to a place of safety in the vaults of the Ransom Center.

Ransom Center to offer summer undergraduate internships

By Jennifer Tisdale

Former undergraduate intern Rachel Platis worked on selecting photographs for an exhibition. Photo by Pete Smith.
Former undergraduate intern Rachel Platis worked on selecting photographs for an exhibition. Photo by Pete Smith.

The Harry Ransom Center will support six undergraduate internships during the summer of 2013, four from The University of Texas at Austin and two from another accredited college or university.

The 14-hour-per-week positions will provide undergraduates with a hands-on and behind-the-scenes look at the operation of a humanities research center. Selected interns will choose from a variety of opportunities within the Center, including working with archives, exhibitions, marketing, public affairs, and curatorial departments of art, film, manuscripts, performing arts, photography, and rare books.

Learn more about the internships and application process. March 15 is the deadline to apply.

The internships will begin on June 10 and end August 16, 2013.

The Creekmore and Adele Fath Charitable Foundation has provided generous funding for these internships.

Ransom Center seeks input on draft report about acquisition of born-digital materials

By Jennifer Tisdale

Born-digital materials.
Born-digital materials.

In 2011, Ransom Center Digital Archivist Gabriela Redwine, with Assistant Director Megan Barnard, invited an international team of colleagues to engage in a series of conversations about how born-digital materials are acquired and transferred to archival repositories. Ten archivists and curators from the Beinecke Library at Yale University; the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford; the British Library; the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University (MARBL); and the Rubenstein Library at Duke University joined with the Ransom Center to create the report Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories, which offers recommendations to help ensure the physical and intellectual well being of digital media and files during different stages of the acquisition process.

A draft of Born Digital has been published with MediaCommons Press, an online publisher that allows readers to offer feedback via an easy-to-use commenting interface. The authors of the report encourage manuscript dealers, writers, special collections professionals, and other custodians of archival materials to read the report, offer feedback and suggestions, and take part in a discussion with the larger community of individuals concerned about the acquisition and preservation of born-digital materials. The authors will closely review comments posted by readers and carefully consider this feedback when they revise Born Digital for final publication in the coming months.

The main body of the report surveys the primary issues and concerns related to born-digital acquisitions and is intended for a broad audience with varying levels of interest and expertise in the subject. Appendices provide information about how to prepare for the unexpected and possible staffing costs to repositories, as well as ready-to-use checklists that incorporate recommendations from throughout the report. These recommendations are not meant to be universal and do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the authors’ institutions. Rather, they offer broad, useful guidance for donors, dealers, and repository staff involved in the acquisition and transfer of born-digital materials.

TIME's LightBox lists 'Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews' as one of photobooks of the year

By Jennifer Tisdale

LightBox, TIME’s photography blog, included the anthology Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews (University of Texas Press, 2012) as one of its “2012 photobooks of the year.”

Jessica S. McDonald, the Ransom Center’s Nancy Inman and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Curator of Photography, edited the anthology, which provided the first comprehensive overview of Lyons’s career as one of the most important voices in American photography.

In anticipation of Lyons’s November 8, 2012, visit to the Ransom Center, McDonald shared insight about the photographer, curator, and educator.

Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Interviews is available online through University of Texas Press.

Final days to see "I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America"

By Jennifer Tisdale

Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933. Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Photo by Pete Smith.
Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933. Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Photo by Pete Smith.
Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933. Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Photo by Pete Smith.
Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933. Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Photo by Pete Smith.

The exhibition I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America runs through January 6, 2013, and explores the life and career of American stage and industrial designer, futurist, and urban planner Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958).

The Ransom Center Galleries are closed Mondays and on Christmas Eve Day, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended Thursday hours until 7 p.m. On Saturdays and Sundays the galleries are open from noon to 5 p.m.

Docent-led gallery tours are also available.

More than 300 items in the exhibition reflect the broad range of Bel Geddes’s interests and work and demonstrate how he shaped and continues to influence American culture and lifestyle. A polymath who had little academic or professional training in the areas he mastered, Bel Geddes had the ability to look at trends and the contemporary environment and envision how they could affect and alter the future.

“When you drive on an interstate highway, attend a multimedia Broadway show, dine in a sky-high revolving restaurant or watch a football game in an all-weather stadium, you owe a debt of gratitude to Norman Bel Geddes,” said exhibition organizer Donald Albrecht, an independent curator and curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York.

All but two loaned items in the exhibition come from the Norman Bel Geddes archive at the Ransom Center.

Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933. Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Photo by Pete Smith.
Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933. Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Photo by Pete Smith.
Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933. Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Photo by Pete Smith.
Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933. Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Photo by Pete Smith.
Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933. Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Photo by Pete Smith.
Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933. Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Photo by Pete Smith.
Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933. Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Photo by Pete Smith.
Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin), ca. 1933. Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Photo by Pete Smith.

"Norman Bel Geddes Designs America" receives media attention

By Jennifer Tisdale

Norman Bel Geddes Designs America (Abrams) is the first book to explore the entire scope of American designer, urban planner, and futurist Norman Bel Geddes’s life, career, and projects.

Media outlets, including the New York Times Book Review, Fortune, the Telegraph, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Austin Chronicle, Wallpaper and the New York Post, have made note of this publication.

Edited by Donald Albrecht, an independent curator and curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York, Norman Bel Geddes Designs America reveals the astonishing breadth of Bel Geddes’s work.

Complementing the book is the Ransom Center’s exhibition I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America, which runs through January 6, 2013.

Enjoy a preview of Norman Bel Geddes Designs America through Albrecht’s introduction to the volume, which includes images of Bel Geddes’s varied work, from construction of the stage set for The Eternal Road to his design for an all-weather, all-purpose, never-built stadium for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Essays by more than 15 leading scholars explore Bel Geddes’s work in theater, housing, graphic design, and work place design, as well as his famous Futurama installation and his working process. More than 400 illustrations from the Bel Geddes archive at the Ransom Center reveal and showcase Bel Geddes’s extensive interests and talents. Essay contributors include Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Christina Cogdell, Christin Essin, Christopher Innes, Sandy Isenstadt, Christopher Long, Jeffrey L. Meikle, Lawrence Speck, and others.

Norman Bel Geddes Designs America is available for purchase at the Ransom Center’s visitor desk during gallery hours and online. Members receive a discount.

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