Showing posts with label Diaries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Diaries. Show all posts
Monday, May 26, 2014
Wednesday, June 05, 2013
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Lost W.H. Auden Journal Found
The Independent unearths the story of it being discovered.
From the article...
It is one of only three journals that the poet is known to have kept and covers the period shortly after what he described as the “eleven happiest weeks of my life” – the honeymoon period of his relationship with the American poet Chester Kallman.
The frank details of his personal life are set against the build-up to the Second World War. He wrote: “I am happy, but in debt… I have no job. My [US] visa is out of order. There may be a war. But I have an epithalamion to write and cannot worry much.”
The journal is 96 pages long and covers the background to his feted poem September 1, 1939, written at the outbreak of the Second World War.
Friday, November 30, 2012
The Diaries of the Civil War
The Library of Congress is displaying some of them.
From a story on CBS News...
Letters and diaries from those who lived through the Civil War offer a new glimpse at the arguments that split the nation 150 years ago and some of the festering debates that survive today.
The Library of Congress, which holds the largest collection of Civil War documents, pulled 200 items from its holdings to reveal both private and public thoughts from dozens of famous and ordinary citizens who lived in the North and the South. Many are being shown for the first time.
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, for one, was grappling with divided federal and state allegiances. He believed his greater allegiance was to his native Virginia, as he wrote to a friend about resigning his U.S. Army commission.
"Sympathizing with you in the troubles that are pressing so heavily upon our beloved country & entirely agreeing with you in your notions of allegiance, I have been unable to make up my mind to raise my hand against my native state, my relatives, my children & my home," he wrote in 1861. "I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army."
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Queen Victoria's Journals Online
For the first time, the complete on-line collection of Queen Victoria's journals from the Royal Archives are available, here.
From a letter written by Queen Elizabeth II:
These diaries cover the period from Queen Victoria's childhood days to her Accession to the Throne, marriage to Prince Albert, and later, her Golden and Diamond Jubilees.
Thirteen volumes in Victoria's own hand survive, and the majority of the remaining volumes were transcribed after Queen Victoria's death by her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, on her mother's instructions.
It seems fitting that the subject of the first major public release of material from the Royal Archives is Queen Victoria, who was the first Monarch to celebrate a Diamond Jubilee.
It is hoped that this historic collection will make a valuable addition to the unique material already held by the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University, and will be used to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the past.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Dr. Livingstone's Lost Diary, I Presume?
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Awesome.
From a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer...
A field diary partially written with berry juice on old newsprint, paper scraps, and book margins in the last years of the life of British explorer David Livingstone is legible for the first time in 141 years with the help of modern spectral-imaging technology and the old-fashioned sleuthing of a professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Adrian S. Wisnicki, an assistant professor of 19th-century British literature, studies the works of Victorian-era explorers and novelists, including Livingstone, Richard Burton, and Joseph Conrad, based on their travels to Africa and across the British Empire.
Recognizing a big void in Livingstone's history, Wisnicki decided to seek a long-lost 1871 diary that detailed the explorer's whereabouts and experiences during his arduous and final travels in central Africa, when he was out of contact with the Western world for two years. New York Herald newsman Henry M. Stanley finally tracked him down in early November 1871, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, where legend says he greeted him with the famous, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Collectible Diaries
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AbeBooks celebrates them, here.
From the piece...
Writing a diary is a very personal experience and yet they are a staple of the publishing world. Reading somebody else’s diary is supposed to be a heinous crime but bookshops are full of them. Despite this apparent conundrum, diaries from notable figures and ordinary people become highly collectible.
Of course, the most famous diary from an ordinary person was written by a mere schoolgirl - Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. But how can you ignore a diary penned by a doctor describing the bombing of Hiroshima and the subsequent seven weeks?
This selection of rare diaries contains many notable names, including adventurer Lawrence of Arabia, revolutionary Che Guevara, avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau, silent movie star Rudolph Valentino, and the green-fingered author who created Biggles.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
A Dogged Diarist's Dos and Don'ts
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Monty Python’s Michael Palin, for Vanity Fair, writes on proper diary-keeping etiquette.
From the piece...
Don’t try and make your life interesting when it isn’t. Diaries must be brutally honest. If you had only one egg for breakfast, write “Had egg for breakfast.” Don’t feel you have to have had 12 eggs for breakfast just to get in the diary. And leave celebrity diaries to the celebrities. If you don’t know anyone famous, don’t try and pretend you do. “At the airport that Bruce Springsteen’s drummer once used” isn’t good enough. Similarly, “At the hairdresser’s. Saw someone reading about Bruce Springsteen’s drummer” just sounds desperate. On the other hand, “Bruce Springsteen’s drummer is the father of three of my children” is perfectly legitimate.
Monday, December 20, 2010
In Whitman's Pocket, an Imagined Lincoln
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The New York Times has an interesting piece about poet Walt Whitman's notebook.
From the article...
Still, as I sit in the manuscript room at the Library of Congress, turning those pages, it soon becomes easy to imagine them traveling inside Walt Whitman’s coat pocket on the Broadway omnibuses, in Pfaff’s beer cellar or crossing the ferry to Brooklyn. The entries, scribbled hastily in pencil, are a jumble of the immortal and the ephemeral: snatches of verse and strange political visions alongside the name of a patent-medicine brand and the addresses of men and women whom the poet met on his rambles around the city. Here and there are traces of these other hands. One page is filled up with the name “Arthur Henry,” crudely repeated; it is believed that Whitman was teaching a workingman or street tough to write his name. Others contain mysterious sketches by an unidentified artist.
And in this little book, sometime during the late fall or winter of 1860-61, the writer began an imaginary conversation that would continue for decades to come, inspiring several of the most famous poems in American literature. There has never been another relationship quite like the one Walt Whitman had with Abraham Lincoln. A poet’s job is to speak the truth; a politician’s is … well, not to. Yet almost from the moment Lincoln appeared on the national political stage, something in Whitman responded. Abe Lincoln, Walt Whitman: the metrical rhyme hinted at grander consonances.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
Lincoln Memorial Diary
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After news of President Lincoln's assassination reached New York, in all arteries and capillaries of the city, shopkeepers designed makeshift shrines to the martyred president. An anonymous diarist walked for miles, drawing sketches of as many storefronts as he could (evidence suggests, but does not confirm, that the diarist was a man). Through his relentless activity this nameless reporter made the news a bit more comprehensible. Here are selections from the diary entries, given to us from the illustrious New York Times.
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