This is a poem by my grandfather, Ganpatsingh Bhandari. He writes and shares his poems over WhatsApp, where I first read this poem. He writes in Hindi.
Autograph letter signed, dated Godmersham, 20-22 June 1808, to Cassandra Austen
My final project text is a letter written by Jane Austen. Officially titled “Autograph letter signed, dated Godmersham, 20-22 June 1808, to Cassandra Austen”, this letter can be found at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. Purchased by J.P. Morgan from a New York dealer in 1920, this letter is part of a $3000 collection of 41 letters and two prints. This letter is personally significant to me because of the context in which I discovered Jane Austen’s writing. On a whim, during my freshman spring here, I decided to take an English class at Harvard that centered around Jane Austen and fandoms. This class ended up being my favorite class of the semester, and it inspired me to study English in a more formal capacity and take more classes in pursuit of an English secondary, in addition to making Jane Austen my new favorite author. One day, this class visited the Houghton, and we saw replicas of Jane Austen’s original letters. Something that I immediately noticed was how every single inch of the paper was used in her letters. The techniques used—from the cross-writing to the style of folding—made it such that a singular sheet of paper could be used as the envelope itself. These techniques, although no longer used in present-day, are interesting to analyze simply because they can provide the reader some context as to the availability of paper and the importance of space in writing at the time. I chose this specific letter from the Morgan Library and Museum because, this letter is an original cross-written Austen, whereas the letters at the Houghton are either authentic or cross-written but not both. In the future, this text may continue to be incredibly important, or it may fall out of relevance. Ultimately, this will depend on both how relevant of an author Jane Austen continues to be and on how many people know of the existence of this text.
Photo = property of the Morgan Library and Museum
Digital (original in print at museum), roughly legal size (8.5x14")
This is a picture of my grandmother's recipe for sweet corn halva. It was typed up by my aunt and is written in Hindi.
L.B. Zelk, a senior studying Philosophy at Yale University, is a prolific writer for an undergraduate, having written two books and submitted several poems for publication. In this exhibit is an edited excerpt from his second book, To Arcadia, a collection of aphorisms, short stories, and poems, inter-connected by themes of death, love, and memory.
Caption: Marina Keegan, was a member of the Class of 2012 at Yale and wrote this essay for a special commencement edition of the Yale Daily News, before tragically passing away just days later. Her essay beautifully touches on themes of belonging and what she calls the opposite of loneliness, feelings that she experienced during her time at Yale. Marina's words are memorialized in the online archives of the Yale Daily News and in a book of her writings published posthumously by her parents. (Since the 90s, back-issues of the YDN have been stored online, and I have not been able to access a print version of this edition.) The images here are screenshots of the online archive page that features her essay. One interesting aspect of this webpage method of archiving is that the comments section is not closed, meaning that, if people wanted to, they could continue to comment on the essay years after she wrote it. Another aspect of the images I uploaded I would like to draw your attention to is the italicized note added beneath the photo of Marina ("The piece below was written by Marina Keegan ’12 for a special edition of the News distributed at the class of 2012’s commencement exercises last week. Keegan died in a car accident on Saturday. She was 22.") This note was added by a member of the Yale Daily News as a message to readers about Marina to contextualize the piece and its author.
Label: Marina Keegan (Yale Class of 2012) was 22 years old when she wrote her essay “The Opposite of Loneliness” for a special 2012 commencement edition of the Yale Daily News. Tragically, Marina died in a car accident just days after commencement. Yet, the memory of her spirit and the legacy of her beautiful prose live on in her written works, shared both via the print and online editions of the News as well as a collection of her essays, poems, and stories published by her parents in 2014. I first encountered “The Opposite of Loneliness” in high school. Although she writes specifically to a Yale audience, Marina’s words burrowed into my mind for days, weeks, months after I read them. She captures so eloquently feelings which I had felt but could not name: that feeling of comfort, safety, and warmth found in relationship and company with others – that opposite of loneliness. Marina writes: “It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together.” Inspired, I described my reactions to her essay in a letter I wrote to her in 2016 for a contest called Letters About Literature. There, I told her: “Thank you, Marina, for giving me the hope, inspiration, and determination to become the writer I one day hope to be.” Marina’s words can speak to all of us, for no matter where we are in life, we all long for that “opposite of loneliness.”
Yale Daily News, https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/05/27/keegan-the-opposite-of-loneliness/
A moment captured in Michael Rosen's lecture as a part of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory lecture series as a part of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory seminar.
This text was created by esteemed choreographer Michel Fokine in order to preserve the nontraditional poses of his original ballet Le Dieu Bleu. Fokine choreographed Le Dieu Bleu for the Paris-based Russian ballet company, Ballet Russes, premiering the work on May 13, 1912. Ballet Russes was internationally recognized for its groundbreaking choreography and avant-garde interpretation of classical ballet. The company was largely comprised of Russian dancers and artists fleeing the conservatism of the Russian art scene for the freedom of expression that Paris allowed. Fokine similarly found his creativity to be stifled as a young dancer in Saint Petersberg’s Imperial Ballet Academy, and he transitioned to choreographing pieces abroad in order to find a more receptive audience for his reinterpretation of ballet. Fokine’s term as choreographer-in-residence for Ballet Russes marked a period of great experimentation for Fokine and the company, catalyzing a Parisian renaissance of ballet. In this text one can see Fokine’s attempts to move past the classical definition of ballet in Le Dieu Bleu. Whereas every step in the ballet canon corresponds to a specifically defined French term, Fokine’s unusual poses must be represented by drawn human silhouettes. Each silhouette in the text corresponds to a number, and each pose would have been taught to the dancers as corresponding to this numbered count in the music. Thus, this text can be directly translated into a phrase of movement. The translation of movement into text was made by Fokine in order to preserve his choreography for future stages of La Dieu Bleu. This transition from dance described in French terminology to figures can be equated to a transition from a modern alphabetic system to a more ancient logographic system, in which a figure corresponds to a certain pose. In Fokine’s transition from classical choreography, which comes complete with its own language, to modern choreography, one can see the attempt to recreate a language of movement from the very beginning.
Currently stored in the Harvard Fine Arts Library
1 page of modern paper with notation in black pen
Advertising poster for Adorno Lecture Series given by Harvard Professor Peter Gordon in Frankfurt
Multipolar traps and modern societal ills
This text is a part sociological work, part neoreligious manifesto about prisoner's dilemmae, multipolar traps (a more general version of such dilemmae), and modern societal ills that stem from endless competition.
Meditations on Moloch, as it would be viewed on blog
This text is a mix between sociological analysis and quasi-religious secular humanist manifesto, and has become a part of the cultural milieu for a specific set of internet subcultures. It alternates in style between being paratext to several modern/postmodern works (Particularly the Apocrypha Discordia, Ginsberg’s Moloch, previous works from SSC, and Capturing Gnon, another blog post from a neoreactionary thinker) and its own independent sociological theorizing. These stylistic shifts are matched with tonal shifts, and the author’s metaphor and idiomatic choices generally shift to match the author he is paratexting from. However, the entire piece is marked by a relatively consistent tonal choice of metaphor -- the author clearly cares more about the message and emotions they are trying to convey than particular precision in the content. This particular image is how an original reader would have viewed this post on the blog.