Library of Congress's Blog, page 58

Chet Baker

Pam Murrell, a processing technician in the Music Division, posted this the other day on In the Muse. Because we’re Chet fans, we’re posting a slightly adapted version here. 

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Photograph of Chet Baker in spring of 1970. Photo: Unknown. Chet Baker materials, Music Division.

Legendary jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chesney Henry Baker — better known as Chet — died 32 years ago this month in Amsterdam. We pause here just for the length of a solo to remember his passing.

The Library acquired the Chet Baker Materials from the Papers of Diane Vavra in 2015, an intimate cache of 108 items. The majority are photographs featuring Baker, but it also includes deeply personal correspondence with Vavra. They are not yet online, but they will be available when the Library reopens after the COVID-19 closure.

Heralded as the “most gifted trumpeter” by late saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, Baker was a melodic improviser with both his horn and his voice.

The native Oklahoman’s big break came in 1952 after he won the highly coveted spot as Charlie Parker’s trumpeter after an audition. He was just 22. Soon thereafter, he met Mulligan. Along with the other members of their quartet, they pioneered a style of music which critics called West Coast Jazz. The genre’s light rhythms contrasted the hard and heavy drives of its eastern counterpart, making it a musical innovation.

The period of 1953-1960 was the pinnacle of Baker’s popularity. He performed throughout Europe and was invited to tour with jazz luminaries such as Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan. He also was offered roles in domestic and international films, as producers favored his model good looks and irrefutable magnetism which they believed translated well on the big screen. Baker starred in two films (“Hell’s Horizon” in 1955 and “Howlers of the Dock” in 1960) and performed the music for a third (“Fiasco in Milan,”1959).

The frenetic period of the ’60s resulted in a conspicuous vocational lag in Baker’s momentum. National civil unrest manifested in every facet of life, including the realm of music which saw rock gradually push jazz from the main stage. As the decade progressed into the next, the musical landscape continued to shift and become heavily saturated with British pop while simultaneously witnessing the emergence of disco. Consequently, Baker’s professional inertia compelled him to uproot himself from American soil. He headed overseas where jazz was still in vogue and spent the majority of his final decade touring Asia and the European Union. A royalty statement for six months in 1987 documents that he worked in nine countries during that span alone.

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Suicidal note from the Chet Baker materials. Music Division.

It was during this transitional stage in Baker’s career that he met Diane Vavra. While still looking for work in America, he joined Monday-night jam sessions at a California pizza parlor. One such evening, he spotted Vavra at the drums, barefoot and absorbed in the music. Their attraction was instantaneously mutual. Baker’s love for Vavra endured until the end of his life. Fourteen letters in the musician’s hand are infused with expressions of passion, requests for her presence and numerous apologies. Unfortunately, their tumultuous relationship is also tied to the most macabre object in the collection: a suicidal message on yellow legal paper. In the undated note, Baker confesses that he has attempted to kill himself and cites her rejection as the catalyst. Without her, he concluded, music was all he had left to “hang on to.” Mercifully, Baker relented from his baneful decision.

While abroad in 1979, Baker made 11 records and in the following year he recorded 10. These were some of the most prolific years of Baker’s life since the ’50s. When he did make the rare stateside appearance, it was usually to visit friends and relatives or to perform an irresistible gig, as he did in 1983 when Elvis Costello compensated him generously for a solo in his song “Shipbuilding.” Another enticing opportunity was appearing in a documentary about his life. “Let’s Get Lost” was directed by renowned fashion photographer Bruce Weber and chronicled Baker’s life from his time as a ’50s heartthrob to his nomadic existence in the ’80s. Tragically, he died in Amsterdam at age 59 after a fall from a hotel balcony, four months before the film’s release. A calendar brochure from the nonprofit theater Film Forum advertising Weber’s cinematic tribute to Baker as well as postcards featuring stills from the documentary can be found within the Library’s holdings.

The remaining materials include manuscript correspondence, a contract from Weber and a bilingual poster promoting an exhibit featuring images of Baker at the famed Parisian nightclub New Morning. Additional resources pertaining to Baker are in the Mulligan collection.

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Jason Reynolds May 26

Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, is back this week with two writing challenges. One is playful, the other is more thoughtful.

The silly one is to write one of the songs you may (or may not) sing to yourself when in the shower. It doesn’t have to rhyme or have a hook, he points out. It’s just an exercise to get your hand to write out some of silly things that float through your head when you think (hope?) no one is listening. It’s a good way to get the creative juices flowing.

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The second, more thoughtful one, is to imagine if your television remote control could manipulate the world around you. It sounds like a film plot — “Click,” a 2006 Adam Sandler movie, played with the idea — but it can be more serious that just fast-forwarding through your chores and homework.

It allows you to create a new world from the reality around you. What if you could mute racism, for example, or change the channel on violence? It doesn’t have to make everything perfect. You could replay unpleasant events so that you could try to get them right this time. (That’s “Groundhog Day.”) It could turn up the noise in your head or turn it down. You could make sunsets linger and make storms more powerful. You could make the cat bark and dog meow.

In short, it would let you create a world that looked like this one but isn’t. That’s the art of fiction: creating a new world from the one we live in.

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As always, you can find all of Jason’s writing challenges on our Engage or Families pages.

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New Dav Pilkey

Author and illustrator Dav Pilkey had a rough time as a kid. His attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia made it difficult for him to sit still in class. He got sent into the hall so often, he tells us, he had his own desk out there!

Here, he explains how he used his own personality to create “Dog Man,” his most popular character:

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And, as a bonus, he introduces us to a new character — Dog Man’s alter ego, Cat Man!

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North Korean Periodicals Now Online

The following is a guest post by Sonya Lee, a reference specialist in the Korean collection of the Asian Division. 

How much do you know about North Korea?

With details on everyday life in the isolated country difficult to come by, how can you learn more about the kind of books children read? Fashion, families and film? Home environments? Social ethics? Now, with the launch of the Library’s North Korean Serials digital collection, some of the most sought-after materials in our North Korean collection are online. It’s a slice of the Asian Division’s holdings in what is one of the world’s largest repositories of North Korean publications.

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“About this Collection” page for the North Korean Serials digital collection.

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Cover of Ch’ŏllima (the title refers to a mythical winged horse that is an important national symbol in North Korea) May 1, 1962. Asian Division.

The first release covers 8 titles and 340 issues published between the years 1948 — when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was established — and 1964, the latest date for which public domain status is clear. Available titles include: Ch’ŏllima, Kyŏngje yŏn’gu, Kodŭng kyoyuk, Chosŏn misul, Chosŏn susan, Tang kanbu dŭl ege chunŭn ch’amgo charyo, Inmin kyoyuk, and Sŏnjŏnwŏndŭl ege chunuŭn tamhwa charyo. Over the next two years, the scope of the digital collection will expand to encompass 146 titles comprising some 4,038 issues published through 1964.

Our print holdings in the nation’s periodicals include 300 serial titles that span the entire period from the DPRK’s founding to the present day. In addition to providing a historical glimpse at the everyday lives of North Koreans, the wide-ranging content covers such topics as economics, law, politics, military affairs, history, agriculture and education. The collection’s particularly strong coverage of the DPRK’s early decades is both rare and especially valuable for providing historical context to contemporary North Korean studies. The launch of the digital collection makes these materials  accessible to readers and researchers around the world.

 

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Cover of Chosŏn misul (Korean art) October 1, 1959. Asian Division.

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Cover of Tang kanbu dŭl ege chunŭn ch’amgo charyo (Reference for party officials) June 1, 1959. Asian Division.

In addition, librarians have developed a unique online research tool, the North Korean Serials Indexing Database (NKSIP). It’s the first indexing resource available in any country to guide researchers in locating articles in North Korean periodicals. The indexed data  allows users to search for articles by author, article title, publisher and so on. The NKSIP has indexed 34,000 articles in 21 of the most frequently requested North Korean serial titles, including seven of the eight titles that have been recently digitized. To learn more about this database, whose coverage will expand as it receives updates, take a look at this blog post detailing its launch in 2018.

We also hold numerous monographs from North Korea. We’re closed for now due to COVID-19 but when we reopen, these and all other print resources will be available for use by registered readers in the Asian Reading Room. To learn more, please use the Asian Division’s Ask-a-Librarian.

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Jason Reynolds: Two Writing Exercises for Young Writers

We’ve got a double shot of writing exercises today for young writers from Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He’s doing a series of these — short, witty, thoughtful — and you can find them on our Engage or Families pages.

The first one is about framing things that are special to you. It’s a way of preserving something you find important as well as making a statement to others that this is part of who you are. Jason tells us he has all sorts of things framed, including  the contents of his grandmother’s wallet. This tells us that his grandmother, and the live she lived, is important to him today. This, in turn, tells us something about him.

“All sorts of things that I love, I have them framed,” he says.

For writers, stories are something special that you frame inside the covers of a book. There’s also a standard narrative technique called a “framing device” to tell stories. This is when, say, an older character begins telling a story about their youth. The narrative then switches to the old days. When that tale is finished, the narrative comes back to the older character, who then reflects on what it all meant and how it shaped them. The end.

Here’s Jason:

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The second exercise is about cooking up a special recipe. It’s another terrific way of thinking about the ingredients we choose to put in stories. Here, he’s talking about a recipe to make young writers both creative and courageous — which are, he says, often the same thing.

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Julia Sand: The Letters to President Arthur, Now Digital

This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It is excerpted from an essay she wrote for the Library’s collection of the Chester Alan Arthur Papers.

“The hours of Garfields life are numbered—before this meets your eye, you may be President. The people are bowed in grief; but—do you realize it?—not so much because he is dying, as because you are his successor.”

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Julia Sand letter to Chester Arthur, Aug. 27, 1881.  Manuscript Division.

With this startlingly frank statement, Julia I. Sand of New York City began her Aug. 27, 1881, letter to Vice President Chester A. Arthur, then in near seclusion at his home in New York City while President James A. Garfield fought for his life in Washington, D.C. It was the first of 23 extraordinary letters Sand wrote to Arthur between 1881 and 1883, which form part of the Chester Alan Arthur Papers at the Library.

On July 2, 1881, a mentally-disturbed office seeker named Charles J. Guiteau shot President Garfield in Washington, D.C. Guiteau’s self-proclaimed motive for shooting Garfield was to remove the reformist Garfield from office to make way for Arthur, who represented the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party dedicated to the status quo, which included political patronage.

“What President ever entered office under circumstances so sad!” Sand continued. “And now your kindest opponents say: ‘Arthur will try to do right’—adding gloomily—‘He wont succeed, though—making a man President cannot change him.’”  “But making a man President can change him!” Sand predicted. “At a time like this, if anything can, that can. Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine.”

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Chester Arthur, 1882. Prints and Photographs Division.

She appealed to his sense of history. “Your name now is on the annals of history. You cannot slink back into obscurity, if you would. A hundred years hence, shool [sic] boys will recite your name in the list of Presidents & tell of your administration. And what shall posterity say? It is for you to choose whether your record shall be written in black or in gold. For the sake of your country, for your own sake & for the sakes of all who have ever loved you, let it be pure & bright.”

Garfield died on Sept. 19, 1881. After taking the oath of office at his home, Arthur became the 21st president. Sand continued to write with unsolicited advice and a sense of humor, hoping to ensure that Arthur’s record would be written in gold.

Born in New York in April 1848, Julia Isabella Sand was educated, witty and exceptionally literate. She was well-versed and opinionated on politics of the day. She was knowledgeable about the reputations of the men with whom Arthur interacted.

Whereas Sand’s mind was expansive, her physical world was confined, and once described herself as an invalid.  “…I have not been in society for years,” she once wrote Arthur. “I rarely go out of the house.”  She made allusions in other letters to physical “disadvantages,” such as “deafness, lameness,” spinal troubles, and headaches.

She asked no favors of Arthur, sought no position for herself and felt free to speak to him with honesty. She referred to herself as his “little dwarf” who served much like a dwarf in a royal court who could tell the king hard truths.

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Sand’s strong opinions on the Chinese exclusion bill, March 1882.

She expressed strong opinions on Chinese exclusion legislation in 1882, for example, and appealed to Arthur to veto the bills passed by Congress. “A congress of ignorant school boys could not devise more idiotic legislation,” she thundered. “It is not only behind the age, but behind several ages—not only opposed to the spirit of American institutions, but opposed to the spirit of civilization all the world over. … It is mean & cowardly—more than that, it is a step back into barbarism.” Arthur’s initial veto of the Chinese Exclusion Bill “delighted” Sand, but his signature on a revised bill brought her wrath down upon him. She reminded him again of his legacy, in that “nothing that you can do after will obliterate your Presidential record. That will stand, for, or against you.”

Arthur apparently never replied to these letters. But on Aug. 20, 1882, the day after she wrote him a plaintive letter, the president arrived at her door “in a very smart brougham with two horses and two men on the box dressed in claret colored livery,” a nephew later recalled.

To Sand’s chagrin, most of her family was at home and she felt too flustered to have the substantive, private conversation with Arthur she desired. A comment Arthur made to her, however, confirms that he had read her letters. “You said you would like sometime to tell me the real truth on several points, in regard to which I had fake impressions.” (Julia relied heavily on newspapers for information, and she eagerly wished to hear Arthur’s perspective on what the media had gotten wrong.)

Though she continued to write him, she never saw or heard from him again. He served out his presidency and died of a kidney ailment in 1886. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Sand was committed to a “lunatic asylum” that same year, and appears to have remained institutionalized until her death in 1933.

Her relationship with the president might have been lost to history if not for one odd detail. Though Arthur had ordered the burning of most of his personal papers shortly before his death, her letters were spared. Were her letters just overlooked? Or did Arthur want later generations to know of her influence on him?

For Sand’s sake, let us think President Arthur intended for her letters to be read someday. “If I could think that I had influenced you in the smallest degree” in following “the path of duty,” she wrote him in May 1882, “I should feel that I had not lived in vain.”

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Dav Pilkey Introduces a New Character!

Today, two special treats!

Dav Pilkey stops by every Friday to let us into the creative world in which he creates “Dog Man” or “Captain Underpants” or any of his other comic adventures. You can tap into the complete series on our Engage or Families pages.

In the first video, Dav reads a section of “Dog Man: Lord of the Fleas.” Books are great because you get to add your own imagination to flesh out characters, sounds or situations — but it’s also a treat to hear how the author themselves portray it all.

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Dav is always generous with his how-to drawing lessons and this week is no different. Here, he shows us how to draw Snug, a new character in the series. Get your drawing stuff ready and hit “play” when you’re set!

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Color Your World with the Library

Break out your crayons, markers, colored pens and pencils! The Library has new images, adapted from our collections, for you to color as you wish. Staying within the lines is totally optional.

The coloring pages are part of the Library’s growing package of school activities and learn-from-home material — and just fun stuff to do — that we’ve adapted from our collections since COVID-19. They can be found on the Library’s Families page, along with how-to-draw sessions from Dav Pilkey (of “Dog Man” fame); writing tips from Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature; and tutorials on how to make a mini book, among others. There’s more on the Engage page, too.

Ready to color? Check out this lovely photo of the Jefferson Building:

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The Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Presto, you can color it on this page. Click on the link, print out the image and you’re set![image error]

If you have my (lack of) fine motor skills, you might want to take on something simpler, such as this Works Progress Administration poster advertising a pet show. The coloring book page is all yours. (There are two images on the link; the pooch is the second one.)

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“Pet Show,” WPA poster, between 1936-39. Drawing: Arlington Gregg. Prints and Photographs Division.

There are plenty of other pictures to choose from, but perhaps none more challenging than the Library’s mosaic of Minerva. The coloring book page has plenty of room for all the detail you can muster, so don’t rush.

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Mosaic of Minerva by Elihu Vedder in the Thomas Jefferson Building. Photo: Carol Highsmith.

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Free to Use and Reuse: Maps of Cities

Cities grow, adapt and change, like all living things. The Library’s map collections show this in all sorts of unexpected ways, offering a vision of days gone by, of what “normal” once looked like.  We present you with some fascinating glimpses of the cities of yesteryear in this edition of the Library’s Free to Use and Reuse sets of copyright-free images.

The good news about these, if you haven’t seen them before, is that they are yours for the taking — print them out, blow them up into huge posters, use them for laptop screensavers. It’s your choice. In the past few months, we’ve highlighted classic movie theaters, genealogy, maps of discovery and exploration and so on, but there are lots more.

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Panoramic map of Yerba Buena, 1846-47. Bosqui Eng. & Print. Co. Geography and Maps Division.

In this edition, let’s start where Tony Bennett left his heart — San Francisco. It looked a little different in 1846, the scene this map depicts, before the gold rush that gave the hometown football team its mascot (the ’49ers). It was Mexican-held territory and known as Yerba Buena for the aromatic herbs that grew in the area. Sleepy, not much doing, a long way from anywhere.  Then, gold was discovered in the nearby foothills. Four years later, California was a state. Mark Twain, who rose to fame in the city’s rough-and-tumble journalism and literature scene, was still two two decades away. The city’s architectural icon, the Golden Gate Bridge, wasn’t built for another nine decades.

You marvel, looking at these houses in 1846, at how quiet the nights would have been, how starry the skies.

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Detail of panoramic map of D.C., c 1888. E. K. Johnson. Geography and Map Division.

Speaking of bucolic backwaters…how about the nation’s capital? (We kid because we love, D.C.!) The District of Columbia was few people’s idea of paradise in the late 19th century. Swampy, hot, with nothing like the sophistication of Philadelphia, New York or Boston, the city still had ambitions, though. The above map shows part of the city’s proposal to host the “World Exposition of 1892 and the Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas.”

The 1892 World’s Fair, as it was commonly known, was a big deal. It was to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus landing in the Americas. D.C. was game for it, entering an ambitious bid that included much of what is now the National Mall for a strip of permanent exhibits.

To get oriented, you’ll see the Capitol Building off to the far right and the Washington Monument dead center. But the Lincoln Memorial, which should be at the map’s far left, is not there, as it wouldn’t be built for another three decades. The Jefferson Memorial, today somewhere around those four lakes at bottom right, wouldn’t be built for another five.

Instead, where the Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool are today, developers proposed permanent exhibits for the “Three Americas,” a middle one devoted to “Working Models of  Great American Inventions” and the third, closest to the Washington Monument, devoted to a “State and Territorial Exhibit.”

It never happened. The World Exposition picked Chicago. It opened in 1893, covered nearly 700 acres, drew more than 25 million people and is famous for the debut of, among other things, the Ferris Wheel. Also, of course, there was the small matter of serial killer H.H. Holmes living nearby, which gave us Erik Larson’s terrific 2002 book, “The Devil in the White City.” So maybe D.C. was better off all the way around missing this thing.

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New York City. Currier & Ives, 1883. Geography and Maps Division.

And of course, New York, New York, big city of dreams. In 1883, it was easier to see that Manhattan really is an island, boats thereby being essential transport. Books, loading docks, wharves, piers — they’re everywhere. A few years earlier in this era, Walt Whitman (whose papers are at the Library) penned his immortal “Crossing Brookyn Ferry.” Here he is, catching that view in a verse:

“Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide?
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?”


A city of poetry, in any era.

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Jason Reynolds: A Book Cover For Your Life

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Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, is back with another weekly writing challenge. This time? Create a book cover. Any book cover. If you’re stuck, make a cover for a book about your own life.

It’s a great exercise, particularly the last one. It makes you think on a couple of different levels.

One, you have to consider your life in visual terms — one or two pictures, symbols or shapes. Two, the colors you choose are critical. A black and red cover, you’ll agree, is much different than a blue and yellow one. Three, the title? The industry standard is five or fewer words; a couple more for an explanatory subhead.

As someone who has written about other people for years — and written a memoir — I can tell you it’s much easier to do this for other people than it is for ourselves.

In part, this is because we’re accustomed to summing up other people in shorthand. We do it all the time. For famous people, it’s simple. Elton John, pop star? His bestselling memoir of last year was named “Me.” Plus a picture of him on the cover. Easy! People loved it!

But what about the rest of us, who are not world-famous pop stars? How do we convey the heart of our story to readers?

In 2018, an unknown historian named Tara Westover published a memoir. She told a colorful tale of growing up in a remote part of Idaho with a survivalist family. Her parents did not send her to school. Still, she went on to obtain many academic degrees, including a Ph.D. from University of Cambridge University in England.

[image error]She called her memoir “Educated.” The cover was a drawing of a sharpened pencil (like students use in school). The color scheme was warm, red and amber and yellow. Within the outline of the pencil was an image of a mountain peak, part of the landscape that had dominated Westover’s childhood. And within that was a tiny image of a woman hiking, looking at the peak (the writing tip of the pencil) in the distance.

What does that image say? A young woman on an adventure. The one-word title tells the goal of that adventure. The subhead, “A Memoir,” clarifies the type of story she’s telling. Brilliant.

This gets complicated when we turn our gaze inward, though. While we don’t know much about the interior lives of other people, we know ourselves to be a swirling, contradictory mass of thoughts, emotions, fears and dreams. These can’t be easily expressed, much less in a couple of words and images. Plus, you have to decide on one mood or idea you want this cover to convey — which means you have to exclude all the others that are also important to you. That’s the last lesson the exercise teaches — editing your thoughts and making tough decisions.

So, what’ll it be for the story of your life?

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