Book Artist Didier Mutel

A Conversation with Contemporary Book Artist Didier Mutel
Thursday, September 24, 2009, 4:00 pm
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 121 Wall Street
Free and open to the public

Didier Mutel, artist, author, and bookmaker, has been experimenting with graphic modes of storytelling for the past two decades. Working in one of the last surviving 18th-century printers’ ateliers in Paris, Mutel uses old methods and new technologies to re-envision classic texts.

The Beinecke Library and the Special Collections of the Haas Family Arts Library hold a selection of his book works, including his latest opus, the multi-part “The Out Side”, in which Guy de Maupassant’s classic science fiction tale “Horla” is explored facet by facet – creating a work of art and printing finesse.

Mutel will discuss his work techniques and his inspiration in a conversation with Beinecke curator, Timothy Young.

[image: ink pots in Didier Mutel’s studio; credit: Kathy Martinson, 2007]

To view details of this event online, please click here.

Living Theatre at Yale

Forty‐one years after The Living Theatre’s now legendary performance of Paradise Now at Yale Repertory Theatre in September 1968, which ended in the arrest of ten performers and audience members for public indecency, co‐founder and Artistic Director Judith Malina returns to New Haven for a two‐day residency at Yale School of Drama, September 14‐15. Free public screenings of Signals Through the Flames and Resist!, documentaries about the work of The Living Theatre, will be held at Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel Street, at York Street) on September 14 and 15 respectively at 7:30PM. The screenings will be followed by discussions and book signings with Judith Malina, Tom Walker, and Brad Burgess.

The Beinecke Library acquired the Living Theatre Archive in 2008. Among the largest archives ever acquired by the Yale Collection of American Literature, the Living Theatre archive includes some 300 boxes of records, correspondence, scripts, photographs, journals, diaries, audio-visual materials, personal papers, and publicity materials documenting the influential theater company and its founders and principal figures, Julian Beck and Judith Malina.

The archive documents in detail the Living Theatre’s development of imaginative alternatives to the commercial theater, including pioneering the unconventional staging of poetic drama, including works by Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams among many others, and various experiments in public and political theater and collective arts. This will be a premier archive for the study of 20th century American theater.

More information about the Living Theatre at the Yale School of Drama is available online:  The Living Theatre at the Yale; a description of the archive can be found here: Living Theatre Records.  (Images courtesy of the Living Theatre: Living Theatre productions including Paradise Now, The Brig, and Maudie).

H.D. on Flickr

A scrapbook complied by modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) can now be viewed in its entirety on Flickr: H. D. Scrapbook. Scholars are invited to tag, annotate, and comment on these images using the tools available through Flickr (free Flickr registration is required to access these tools: http://www.flickr.com/).

Detailed descriptions of the poet’s literary archive (YCAL MSS 24) and various related materials in the Beinecke’s collections–including the archives of Bryher (Gen Mss 97), Ezra Pound (YCAL MSS 43), William Carlos Williams (YCAL MSS 116), Viola Baxter Jordan (YCAL MSS 175) and others–can be found by searching the Library’s Finding Aid Database and Orbis, the Library’s catalog for books and printed materials.  Images from the collections are available through the Beinecke’s Digital Library.

New Poetry Podcasts

New podcasts from the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series are now available. These readings, by poets Jennifer Moxley, Evie Shockley, Douglas Kearney, and Amaud Jamaul Johnson are available at the Beinecke Library’s website or through Yale University on iTunes U. Additional readings in the series are also availble: http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/brblevents/poetry.html.

Jennifer Moxley is the author of four books of poetry: The Line, Often Capital, The Sense Record ; and Imagination Verses. Her memoir The Middle Room was published  in 2007. She has translated two books by the French poet Jacqueline Risset, The Translation Begins and The Powers of Sleep. She is poetry editor of The Baffler, and contributing editor of The Poker. She works as an Associate Professor at the University of Maine.

Evie Shockley is the author of a chapbook, The Gorgon Goddess (2001), and the collection a half-red sea (2006). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Fascicle, Hambone, HOW2, and Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University.

Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, and teacher. His work has appeared in Callaloo, jubilat, Ninth Letter, and other journals. His first full-length collection of poetry, Fear, Some, was published in October 2006.

Amaud Jamaul Johnson is a former Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His poems have appeared in New England Review, Poetry Daily, From the Fishouse, and other journals. He teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His first book, Red Summer, was the winner of the 2004 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press.