Endless Knots

A year with 200-year-old Margaret Fuller

As promised, the current roster of events for Maggie, as organized by the the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee in New England. For updated events, see calendar on Bicentennial site. More events organized by the New York group here.

Jan 21, 5:30 PM, Amy Lowell Room, Houghton Library, Harvard University:
"Margaret Fuller: A Woman of the Nineteenth Century," includes lock of her hair, her writing at 9 yrs old in cursive “love your enemies,” copies of one of her letters altered by Emerson, and an introductory talk by exhibition curator Rob Velella.

Feb 2, 7 PM @ Loring-Greenough house, Jamaica Plain Historical Society, Boston:
“Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalists” with Rev. Jenny Rankin, minister, First Parish of Concord, MA.

March 8 – International Women’s Day, Conversation Series:
1 (or 2) PM (TBD): “No Intellect Comparable,” a talk by Rob Velella at Cambridge Center for Adult Education where Fuller and her family lived.

8 PM (time TBD): Talk on general theme of “International Activism and MF,” sponsored by Cambridge Women’s Heritage Project in association with Cambridge Women’s Commission.

March 27-28: programs sponsored by West Roxbury Historical Society, at library on Saturday; tour of Brook Farm on Sunday

April 8-10: "Margaret Fuller and Her Circles,” scholarly conference sponsored by Mass Historical Society

April 21, 11:30 AM, Boston Public Library, opening:
"Why Margaret Fuller Matters," traveling display by Bonnie Hurd Smith, including
Fuller chronology with issue-specific panels.

Sun, April 25, Conversations Series, "MF in Groton," sponsored by Groton Unitarian Universalist Church, worship service followed by tour of The Elms where Fuller and her family lived for three years

May 21-23: Birthday weekend, multiple events:

The Transcendentalism Council at First Parish in Concord sponsors a variety of activities, including guided tours, speakers, and period entertainment, both at First Parish and at sites associated with Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist community in Concord.

May 23, the actual 200th birthday:

8 AM, Annual pilgrimage to MF monument at Mount Auburn Cemetery

Later in morning--Margaret Fuller Sunday at Unitarian Universalist churches around country

Late afternoon--birthday party at Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House, where she was born, 71 Cherry Street, Cambridge

June 17-20, “The Margaret Ghost,” by Carole Braverman, based on MF’s life 1848-50; performed by Theatre@First; special gala reception and program before play involving actors and director and author talking about their experiences; location TBA.

 

June 27, Longfellow House, opening in honor of MF, garden or flower poetry needed from women poets, sponsored by New England Poetry Club; kickoff event for summer festival series – expect 80-90 people

 

Sunday, July 18, honoring MF's death on July 19, 1850:

Wreath laying, performance by MF impersonator, Jessa Piaia, and conversation at Mount Auburn Cemetery, sponsored by Cemetery Association

 

Aug, date TBD, Conversations Series:

“Women and Families,” talk at Brook Farm, sponsors and speaker, TBA.

(September, Nov, Dec--Conversations Series speakers TBA as of this writing)

 

Oct 1, Fri night, sponsored by Providence Athenaeum, "MF in Rhode Island," talk by Robert O, Jones; "MF in Newport," talk by Nancy Austin; Sat, walking tours of MF sites in Providence

 

Related event in Nov at Boston Athenaeum – Barbara Hebard, conservator at Boston College, speaking on early history of women at athenaeum. (MF wrote essay on statuary copies at Athenaeum.)

And Margaret's Bicentennial brrrrrrrrs into being

The very cold here in New England was no impediment to a dozen volunteers taking up most of last Wed, Jan 13, to kick-off the two-hundredth year since Margaret Fuller (complete chronology) was born here.

The Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee in New England--authors, ministers, independent scholars, playwrights, a theatre director, community organization reps--who've been meeting for eighteen months now, got to enjoy the upcoming calendar of events. Here are some faces, calendar in next post.

Rev. Rosemarie Smurzynski, who's developed the "Margaret Fuller Worship Resources Guide," and Lillian Anderson, Transcendentalist Council of First Parish, Concord, MA, sponsoring MF extravaganza on her birthday weekend, May 21-23

Carole Braverman, playwright, "The Margaret Ghost," and Elizabeth Hunter, director, Theatre@First, which will mount the play again in June 2010

Margaret admitted to Harvard, Jan 21, 5:30 PM

It may have taken nearly 200 years but Margaret Fuller has finally gotten into Harvard. Actually, Harvard's Houghton Library, Amy Lowell ("In a pattern called war. Christ, what are patterns for?" - I had to memorize that poem in fifth grade) Room, Thurs, Jan 21, 2010, 5:30 PM for the opening reception, which is the kickoff event for the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial here in New England.

In truth, Margaret was likely the first woman given Houghton Library privileges but then, in the early 1840s, she was merely allowed to do research there. Now researchers, scholars, and the community of Margaret Fuller enthusiasts, notably those of us organizing her Bicentennial, will be able to study her at an exhibition, described thusly in Harvard College Library News:

“'Margaret Fuller: A Woman of the Nineteenth Century'... [that] includes letters and first editions of her works, including 'Woman [in] the Nineteenth Century.” Rather than try to cover all of her widely varied life and work, the exhibition focuses on Fuller’s relationship to education, with particular emphasis on her groundbreaking offer to conduct research at Harvard’s libraries. The display also includes material related to Fuller’s education, her later work as a teacher and how the public is educated about Fuller."

Among the things I can't wait to see is a lock of her hair, which she sent from Italy to her sister, Ellen Fuller Channing, and a page from her memoirs that Emerson had the audacity to alter. According to Bicentennial committee member, Rob Velella, himself a nineteenth century scholar who did the curation for the exhibit, “Houghton Library has an amazing collection related to Margaret Fuller. The challenge was how to take all that material and pare it down to only a few items which tell a story that does justice to who this woman was and is, what her life’s work was and is still interesting to people who know a lot about her, as well as those who know very little.”

Thanks so much, Rob, for doing this, and thanks hugely to the Houghton staff for being so receptive - and sponsoring the reception!

"The Republic of Letters:" The Electronic Enlightenment Project

Thanks to Tom Stewart, who in turn thanks John Hagel for this network discovery: 18th-century social network of ideas, carried out through letters, and now on YouTube, having been mapped by Stanford's "Mapping the Republic of Letters" study. Assistant French Professor Dan Edelstein, principal investigator, describes how ideas spread via letters. Voltaire, for example, wrote 15,000. Cynthia Haven reports:

Edelstein, principal investigator for "Mapping the Republic of Letters" with history Professor Paula Findlen, has mapped thousands of letters that were exchanged during the period of the Enlightenment to uncover hidden truths about the "Republic of Letters."   The latter is "a shorthand that scholars use to refer to writers and philosophers and clergymen and other early modern intellectuals who corresponded across Europe and even across the world," said Edelstein.

...According to Edelstein, "We tend to think of networks as a modern invention, something that only emerged in the Age of Information. In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have established themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news, find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others."

"We've known about these correspondences for a long time – some of them have been published – but no one has been able to piece together how these individual networks fit into a complete whole, something we call the Republic of Letters."

Popover perfection

The photo's not great but the shape of this popover bears sharing. Don't know how I managed the proper combo of heat, mixing, proportions, and timing but possibly the best shaped I've ever produced. Eaters said it was good too. (Just ran into photo downloading a bunch of pix.)

Take a bow, Boston

Readers of The Boston Globe may not have noticed yesterday's astonishing headline on Page 1 of Metro, even though it occupied prime real estate: "Boston escapes '09 with no fire deaths." John R. Ellement did not bury the lead:

Last year, for the first time in at least 37 years, no one was killed by fire in Boston, a historic accomplishment for the Boston Fire Department whose leaders yesterday credited increased public awareness and “boots on the street’’ for the success.

Fire Commissioner Roderick Fraser said 2009 was the first time since at least 1972, when the Fire Department started keeping detailed information on fatalities, that no one lost their life in a fire-related incident in the city. “We think that’s fantastic,’’ he said.

We spent a number of years working with fire departments around the U.S., promoting fire prevention education (the same program that resulted in the famous Dick Van Dyke commercial memorable for its tag line, "Stop, drop, and roll"), a largely ignored field until the establishment of what's now called the U.S. Fire Administration. While things have improved quite a bit since we trudged around the country, interviewing fire safety officers in such far-flung places as Arlington Heights, Illinois, Riverside, Calif., and Dade County, Florida, the U.S. still has one of the highest fire death rates in the world.

Why? Because our fire safety focus remains on public buildings, not where we live. And devastating fires do happen, even to people who are extremely safety conscious and have the right equipment installed, viz., our close friends who watched as their house burned down recently, the fire likely caused by a wiring problem, while firefighters lost precious time looking for the fire hydrant, buried under snow.

Perhaps this was a fluke and city officials knew where every other hydrant was situated...not the point I'm trying to make. Just want to laud Boston firefighters and the residents of Boston for a year of no deaths from fire. Truly worthy of a very big headline. Meanwhile, check your smoke detectors, know where your closest hydrants are, and be sure you and everyone in your family knows how to get out of the house if you do have a fire. As our friends, whose equanimity in the face of having lost all their possessions is beyond inspiring, continue to remind those who console them, "It's just stuff." They were not harmed and their loss allows all who love them to give in myriad ways, which makes us all a little larger.

MS interview on The Exchange now up!

Take a listen to Ben Kieffer's interview with three of us authors whose essays appear in Voices of Multiple Sclerosis on The Exchange, a program on Iowa Public Radio.

NB: This is the first time I've ever spoken publicly about MS. Please let me know what you think. There's a lot to learn from this show, including Dr. Terry Wahls's scientific research that supports what seems evident to anyone with serious illness: eat right (lots of dark green veggies) and exercise. Her research and findings are, of course, more complex but if you're ill today and looking to get better, start at least with these two sine qua nons.

Thrill your bookclub: Import Roy Kesey from Lima

The world-famous (well, among us) Fiction Book Club conference called last night with Roy Kesey pummeling him with questions about his stunning novella, Nothing in the World. That the book won a literary award (Bullfight Little Book Prize) is little surprise when you read it; that it's short means you can prove me right in one long sitting.

Here's how we did it: First the book club members met to talk as we typically do, discussing what we liked, what we wondered about, and, but not in this case, what we didn't like. Our overall opinion of the book was unanimous: everyone loved it.

This story about the war that consumed most of the Balkans during the 1990s is hair-raising, horrific, mythic, and supremely well written. Gorgeous. Such exquisite language that one of our members read out a section that he called poetry.

About an hour later, Roy called us from Lima, Peru, where he and his family are living. (His wife, Lu, is a Peruvian diplomat.) Each person did a self-introduction while I snapped pictures and emailed them to Roy. Then we fired questions at him: Why did he write this book? How much time transpired from the beginning of the story to the end? How did he go about writing it? What was the meaning of a particular character? How did the book come to be published? What role did the vignettes play in the story? Why did he choose the title? And all kinds of other intrusive-none-of-our-business queries whose answers I'm not going to give away in hopes that you'll ask them yourselves.

Graciously, with humor and diffidence, Roy explained everything, including his telling us that in fact some of the prose began as poetry, that he had visited the area both before and during the war, that he knew some of the stories, variously, first, second, and third hand, and that it took much courage (he didn't use the word) to throw out some 40,000 words that were once in the draft.

It was a great evening and I recommend that you do the same with your book club. Read this book, invite Roy to attend by conference call, and you'll have an evening you never forget.

And, thanks, Roy. We'll be delighted to host you when you come to Boston on your next book tour.

Almost forgot! How do I know Roy? Zoetrope, of course. One aspect of being part of the Zoe writer community is critiquing the work of other writers. (In exchange for every five stories you critique, you can submit one of your own.) I was in the business of amassing critiques when Roy posted a story, which I loved--and wrote many notes back to him about, suggesting this that and the other thing. What I remember most was my feeling after reading it - that he must have written it, then fallen over in an exhausted heap. Such energy in his writing. And now having read more of his work, such range. We decided to read this book at the suggestion of our December '09 author-guest, Ron Currie Jr., who calls Roy "the best unknown writer in America." Not for long, both Ron and I wager.

Merullo: "Letting in light on a disease of darkness"

Roland Merullo's op-ed in today's Boston Globe is required reading for anyone with depression as well as their family and friends, i.e. everyone on earth. He mentions "William Styron’s 'Darkness Visible' and Andrew Solomon’s 'The Noonday Demon.'’’ Having read Styron's brave memoir of his struggle with this illness, I can agree with Roland's assessment that the "popularity of books" like these is indicative of how pervasive the problem truly is. Anyone struggling with depression wants to shake off the demon; any writer willing to put words together deserves our thanks. So, again, Roland, thanks for tromping into such difficult waters.

Now this is origami

Again, thanks to Ian Lamont, the amazing folds of Brian Chan. With Brian's permission, I'm posting a few here not yet available on his site, and leading off, because we're so close to The 'Tute, this one, the logo of MIT, which is on his site.