The well-known poet, essayist, and environmental activist Gary Snyder will be speaking on Wednesday at noon in the Terrace Room, Building 460 (Margaret Jacks Hall), and giving a reading and talk Thursday evening at 6:15 in Room 105 of Building 320 (Geology Corner). He is often described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology," and has been linked with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.
A new exhibition in Stanford’s Green Library, co-curated by Stanford Ph.D. candidate in history Hannah Marcus and Curator of Rare Books John Mustain, explores the phenomenon of writing in books from multiple perspectives. Through examples of early print and manuscript hybrids, scholarly annotation, dialogue in the margins, censorship, the use of blank pages and margins for incidental storage, and writers editing their own work post-publication, the exhibit considers the ways in which print and manuscript notation exist symbiotically in books to the benefit of historians and other scholars.
Schumann’s Dichterliebe, op. 48, from 1840 weds music and text into one of the most memorable song cycles of the Romantic period. The cycle consists of sixteen songs on poems from Heinrich Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo. The earliest recordings of the entire cycle were by Dutch baritone, Thom Denijs (1877-1935), who recorded the cycle twice in London with his wife, Emmy Denijs-Kruyt (1878-1964), as pianist, first in an acoustic recording on 5 April 1923 and later as an electrical recording in three sessions in January and July 1928.
From 4:15-6:00 today, Professor Fred Turner will speak on "The Family of Man" and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America," in Room 307 of History Corner (Building 200). This controversial exhibit, curated by photographer Edward Steichen, was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, was considered by many to Cold War propaganda. Professor Turner challenges that view this afternoon.
The sundial from the Terman Engineering Building has been re-mounted on the south side of Huang Engineering Center near the main bike rack area next to the bridge. The sundial was originally installed on the Terman Building in 1997 by Prof. Ronald N. Bracewell. It was built by Prof. Bracewell and his son Mark. Read more about the sundial in the March 1997 Civil Engineering at Stanford Newsletter on page 17.
The Stanford Media Preservation Lab has recently finished reformatting the 440 audiocassettes in the Fred Ross papers, an immense body of audio documenting the training meetings held by labor organizer Fred Ross Sr. Housed in Special Collections, the digitized audio focuses extensively on house meetings in the 1970s and 80s, an organizing technique Ross developed and taught. A small portion of the tapes include Cesar Chavez, who Ross hired and trained in the early 50s. Chavez later went on to form the National Farm Workers Association, but Ross always remained a mentor and strong influence. "As time went on, Fred became sort of my hero," Chavez said. "I saw him organize and I wanted to learn."
Professor Zephyr Frank and his fellow researchers have created a fascinating (and easy to use!) visualization of the slave market in Rio de Janeiro. This web-based visualization was published as part of an article in the Journal of Latin American Geography, but the data itself was not made available.
Anthony Lewis, the great scholar and decorated former columnist of the New York Times, passed away on Monday in Cambridge, Massachusetts.