I had a few days off this week for the Jewish Holiday of Shavuot & for Memorial Day, so I spent one of them taking a trip to Yale. It was so cute! I've never been there before, and it struck me as looking like a miniature version of Oxford & Cambridge - lots of little castle type buildings, and the Art History building has a bridge over the street that looks a little like the Bridge of Sighs. It's a fairly small campus, and it looks like the town has grown a bit around it - all sorts of little healthy restaurants, very California like.
I went to talk to the Drama Department to get information about their M.F.A. and D.F.A in Dramaturgy - kind of a one stop shop for Drama critics, theater managers, theater researchers, and artistic directors for theaters. The Drama Department has several buildings, so it took me a few tries to locate the right office, but everyone was very friendly and I got a fairly detailed description of the program from the program administrator. I may think about applying (not sure I want to leave New York though!).
My other main reason for being there was that in 1998 the Yale Libraries Rare Books Collection acquired the papers of Polish Dramatist (Author, Theorist, Playwright, etc) Witold Gombrowicz, who I studied intensively at Berkeley. I went to the Beinecke Library, where the collections are housed - terribly ugly building from the outside, but has a really interesting internal structure which shows the book shelves (open only to the librarians & archivists) in a glass column right in the center of the building. The Gombrowicz collection was fairly sizeable - apparently his wife, who was very young when they were married, has done a thorough job of collecting materials and information about him, which the library bought in 1998 and had donated in a second section several years later.
I was able to listen to sound recordings of him speaking as part of a French radio broadcast series about his work several years ago. I just think it is so fantastic to be able to hear the voice of my favorite author who died several years before I was born. I'm not sure what I expected him to sound like, but even though he didn't sound quite like I expected, I could still tell right away it was him the minute I heard it.
It was on a cd (the original tapes are kept in the archive), and there were no markings other than on the case, so I had to listen for a while to the program (in French!) to figure out what was going on. It was also odd to hear him speak French, when I'm so used to reading him in English translation or thinking of his work being in Polish. He did actually speak Polish, French, Spanish and various other things out of necessity, I suppose. I also got to watch segments from several Polish television adaptations of his works, which have never been released in the United States. At some point I would like to go back to the archive, as it has so much material. I spent four hours there yesterday and was only getting started!
It was really a nice day as well - sunny and warm out, and very pleasant to walk around the campus. It looked as though graduations were taking place - all sorts of chairs set up in the common grassy areas near the dormitories (which look like something out of Harry Potter stories!) and UPS stations set up all over the place for students to mail their belongings home (apparently they kick everyone out for the summer quite promptly!).
One of the New York City transit lines (MTA Metro-North) runs to New Haven, so it was not very expensive and a fairly quick trip from New York (2 hours or so). I had a very pleasant time taking a trip there for the day. I ended up walking from the Union station (the railway/bus depot) to the campus, which was not very far away. I had heard before that there were some dangerous or run down areas of New Haven, but I didn't see any. Maybe they've cleaned it up recently.
Hope you're all doing well. Just wanted to share my trip with you.
Love, me
"Pay attention to the difference between the two words: shalom, shalom." - Dan Pagis, "A Lesson In Hebrew Grammar."
"I saw a shadow touch a shadow's hand." - Simon & Garfunkel, "Bleeker Street"
"We have long ago forgotten in our literature such shocking events ... as Witold Gombrowicz's novel FERDYDURKE. What we have here is an unusual manifestation of a writing talent, a new and revolutionary form and method of novel and finally a fundamental discovery, an annexation of a new field of spiritual phenomena, a masterless and no man's field, where only an irresponsible joke, a pun and a nonsense play around", wrote Bruno Schulz in his review of the book.
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