Library Of Congress In Washington Research Articles

An Interview with Edmund White

AN INTERVIEW WITH EDMUND WHITE Edmund White© Thomas Victor Author of The Beautiful Room is Empty (Knopf)· Edmund White's critically acclaimed fiction has earned him a number of honors and awards during his career. He has twice received the Hopwood Awards (1961 and 1962), Ingram Merrill grants (1973 and 1978), was a Guggenheim fellow in 1983, and in that same year received the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction. His major works include five novels, Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, A Boy's Own Story, Caracole, and The Beautiful Room is Empty as well as a short story collection, The Darker Proof, a play, "The Blue Boy in Black," and the nonfiction Argument for a Myth. He is a frequent contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, as well. After being based in Paris for a number of years, Mr. White has returned to join the faculty at Brown University, where he currently teaches. This interview was conducted by Kay Bonetti, Director of the American Audio Prose Library series, on June 2, 1989 at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The Prose Library offers tapes of American authors reading and discussing their work. For information contact AAPL at PO Box 842, Columbia, MO 65205. An Interview with Edmund White /Kay Bonetti Interviewer: Mr. White, can you fiU us in on some background about yourself? Do A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty foUow your own chronology? White: The books fairly reflect where I was and what I was doing. I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My parents got divorced when I was seven and my mother began to move from city to city whUe my father remained in Cincinnati. I was sent to a boarding school in Michigan, near Detroit, a school called Cranbrook, which appears as Eton in my books. Interviewer: And you went to the University of Michigan? White: I studied Chinese there, and when I graduated I moved to New York and worked for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970. Then I moved to Rome for a year, and when I came back, I became a freelance writer and editor, then worked briefly for Saturday Review and Horizon. I started teaching in the mid-seventies, first at Yale, then at Johns Hopkins, finally at Columbia and New York University. In 1981 I was the executive director of The New York Institute for the Humanities, which is an organization of smart people attached to New York University. Then in 1983, I moved to France, where I've been living ever since. Beginning in spring, 1990, I wUl be teaching at Brown University, where I've just been named a Professor of English with tenure. Interviewer: There's a story in The Darker Proof about a couple that move to Paris in an obUque response to the gay community and AIDS. Did you move to Paris for similar reasons? White: In a way I gave some of the events of my Ufe to those characters, but the reasons were different. In my case, I won a The Missouri Review · 91 Guggenheim, which aUowed me to go for one year. I worked for Vogue and other Condé-Nast magazines as a journaüst, so that aUowed me to stay on. I could stay forever I suppose. I have a nice apartment and I make a decent living as a freelance American journaUst writing from Paris. Interviewer: Then why are you coming back to teaching? White: I Uke teaching. I Uke the idea of a secure position. I'm positive for AIDS, and the statistics are rather grim, but if by some chance I do go on living I would Uke to have a retirement plan. I support my mother now, and if I weren't there, she would reaUy be penruless. Interviewer: Does your fiction sustain you economically? White: If I weren't such a spendthrift and if I didn't have other people to support—my mother's not the only one—I could Uve very weU from my fiction, but Tm a terrible spendthrift. I Uke to travel, and that takes money. Interviewer...

The British Library and the Library of Congress: Review of Recent Activities

Some of the recent activities and publications of the British Library in London and the Library of Congress in Washington are outlined. These are reviewed in the context of the aims of national libraries and of the current policy climates in which they operate.

The Secular Cantata in the United States: 1850-1919

r n .HE SECULAR GANTATA was a favorite medium of American composers during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. However, by the first decade of the twentieth century, interest in this form was superseded by a growing attention to opera and symphonic works. The seventy years from 1850 through 1919 were marked by the publication of many secular cantatas for both adults' and children's voices. Those for adults are the subject of this study. Collectively, they reflect their era both musically and sociologically. The large number of these cantatas made some limitations necessary. Consequently, the study was confined to the works of composers of significance during the years under consideration, or those seen as significant in historical perspective. The most important of these composers were Horatio Parker, John K. Paine, Frederick S. Converse George W. Chadwick, Charles W. Cadman, Henry Hadley, Deems TaylorS Dudley Buck, and Victor Herbert. Ninety-four works comprised the published cantata production. The majority of these cantatas were found at the Library of Congress in Washington, O.C., and normally only the piano-vocal edition was available. Forty-three of the cantatas were concerned with either American historical figures or American nationalistic manifestations. The 51 remaining cantatas, the librettos of which ranged in geographical location from Japan westward to Peru (with the British Isles favored), were concerned with love, the supernatural, or the exotic. Such interest was also found in some of the American cantatas as, for example, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Frederick Burton (1900). Of the 94 cantatasS 62 were scored for mixed chorus, 19 for male chorus, and 13 for female chorus.l All composers employed accompaniment, normally piano or orchestra. Solo and small vocal ensemble material varied from a few measures to separate selections, and was found in all but tIoratio Parkerls The Norsemen's Ratd (1911). Theperformance duration of the cantatas varied from 10 minutes to ll/2 hours.

Greek Uncial Fragments in the Library of Congress in Washington

There is preserved in the Rare Book Department of the Library of Congress in Washington a sheet of parchment comprising two folia of a medieval manuscript, each covered on both sides with Greek text in uncial script. Seymour de Ricci, in his Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (N. Y. 1935, I, 211), lists this unique and precious fragment and describes it as follows:‘Library of Congress, ms. no. 60: Sermons, in Greek. Vel. (VIIIth c.), 2 ff. only (27 × 20 cm.), the 2 outer of a quire, 36 lines to a page, written in sloping uncials….Obtained in 1929 … from Casella of Naples (Ms. Ac. 4189, 10, nn. 1–6); certainly of South-Italian origin.’The catalogue does not undertake to identify the author of the text.

Greek Uncial Fragments in the Library of Congress in Washington

There is preserved in the Rare Book Department of the Library of Congress in Washington a sheet of parchment comprising two folia of a medieval manuscript, each covered on both sides with Greek text in uncial script. Seymour de Ricci, in his Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (N. Y. 1935, I, 211), lists this unique and precious fragment and describes it as follows:‘Library of Congress, ms. no. 60: Sermons, in Greek. Vel. (VIIIth c.), 2 ff. only (27 × 20 cm.), the 2 outer of a quire, 36 lines to a page, written in sloping uncials….Obtained in 1929 … from Casella of Naples (Ms. Ac. 4189, 10, nn. 1–6); certainly of South-Italian origin.’The catalogue does not undertake to identify the author of the text.