Weeks 10-13: John Ford, Fifth Graders, and John Ford

So, I've been continuing my work on the John Ford exhibit.  The five movies we're focusing on are Stagecoach, Fort Apache, The Searchers, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  When I began work on the exhibit, I had not seen a single John Ford film.  I had to read Becky's books about Ford to know anything about these movies.  I have now seen eight and have enjoyed them all.  The exhibit is meant to go along with the opening of the IU Cinema next term.  As part of its inaugural season next year, the Cinema will be doing a John Ford series, including all five of the films we're featuring in the exhibit.  I may have to go see a few of them on the big screen!  For those who are interested, you can find the Cinema schedule for next year here.

Working on John Ford's Westerns keeps making me think of the M*A*S*H episode "Movie Tonight."  To improve morale, Col. Potter gets a hold of his favorite movie, which he describes as having the three things that make a movie great, "horses, cowboys, and horses."  It's John Ford's My Darling Clementine .  The whole company gets really excited to see it, and they all cheer when Henry Fonda comes up o the screen (see above).  That's always been one of my favorite episodes, but it now give me some perspective on just how influential Ford and his films were.  I don't know if any troops in Korea actually watched Ford films there, but I know that the people who wrote the show did their research.  If they chose a John Ford film, it was likely representative of what was popular at the time.

A surprisingly fun break in my normal round of work came a few Mondays ago.  I gave two tours of the current exhibit to two groups of fifth graders.  I was pretty nervous in advance, not being entirely certain that I would be able to get fifth graders interested in medieval manuscripts.  I was pleasantly surprised.  They were some of the most inquisitive, interested kids I had seen in a long time.  They had heard of a Gutenberg Bible before and were suitably impressed that we had one.  They were astonished by all of the writing done by hand, particularly the really small writing.  A lot of them asked questions, many of them very good questions.  I think all of the students' favorite piece, which I saved for near the end both times, was the giant psalter.  It has the advantage of being both huge and being music.  Both groups were able to give really good answers when I asked them what made it different from modern music.  I have to admit that I am a bit cynical about the modern technology age and children.  These kids restored my faith.  I was so energized after working with both groups that going back to doing work on John Ford was anti-climactic.

It's experiences like that that make working at the Lilly such a treat.  Where else could I show off such rare and valuable items to fifth graders, and be able to tell them that they could come back any time with their parents and actually touch the things they were looking at?  This truly is a special place.

Exhibit Notes: Robert Heinlein

Lilly call number: PS3503.R18

Items in the exhibit:
The Puppet Masters
The Green Hills of Earth
The Man Who Sold the Moon
Letter to Boucher
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag
Stranger in a Strange Land

Robert Heinlein was  famous for a series of short stories called his "future history" stories.  They, along with The Lord of the Rings and Asimov's Foundation trilogy, were nominated for a special Hugo award for best all time series.  Though set in the future, the stories all share a set history of what happened with humanity between Heinlein's present and the times of the stories.  As with most science fiction, it can be amusing and educational to see where they expected humanity to be at various points in their future and now our past.  Heinlein's timeline calls for interplanetary imperialism between 1970 and 2020.  Obviously, that hasn't happened yet.  Man has not yet made it beyond the moon.  But that does not make these stories any less interesting, simply because the timeline was off.  Science fiction tells us more about the time in which it was written than about an potential future.

Heinlein was also a controversial author in his time.  His novel Stranger in a Strange Land, with it's polyamorous views on sexuality, was included in Billy Joel's song "We Didn't Start the Fire" along with Catcher in the Rye and Peyton Place, two other novels that were sensations when they were written.  Another well-known novel of his that I could not put in the exhibit because the Lilly did not have a copy was Starship Troopers, which was also made into a movie.  But science fiction as a genre has always been on the side, so it's authors could more or less write whatever they wanted, because so few of them were taken seriously.  And though some science fiction novels have entered the cannon, genre novels still tend to not be taken as seriously as straight fiction, which is of course grossly unfair.  Sure, Stranger in a Strange Land may present some interesting views about human nature, but it is also a well-written book.  And what good is literature if it doesn't make us think?  I can only hope that visitors to my exhibit will realize that science fiction is as serious a literary genre as straight fiction and leave with a greater respect for it and its authors.

Exhibit Notes: Ray Bradbury

Lilly call number: PS3503.R18

Items in the exhibit:

• The Halloween Tree
• Fahrenheit 451
• Something Wicked This Way Comes
• I Sing the Body Electric
• The Illustrated Man
• The Martian Chronicles
• A letter and a postcard to Anthony Boucher

Ray Bradbury was a first, obvious choice for my exhibit.  As I sci-fi writer, he is popular and well-known outside of the general science fiction fandom.  That's a pretty impressive feat.  Not surprisingly because of this popularity, the Lilly has a lot of his books.  The difficulty for him was in deciding which books I wanted to put in the exhibit.  There were so many to choose from!  And, two of the ones I chose are not strictly science fiction.  Both The Halloween Tree and Something Wicked This Way Comes are better described as fantasy.  I ended up using them because they demonstrate the breadth of Bradbury's writing style and ability.

"It was a pleasure to burn."

In an earlier post, I mentioned that images are more interesting in an exhibit that words.  For my books, this tended to mean that I needed to use the covers, since not that many novels are illustrated.  But I think visual diversity adds as much interest to an exhibit as images do, and I wanted to open up some books for Bradbury.  Much to my pleased surprise, the first edition of Fahrenheit 451 features an awesome illustration opposite the first page, creating a great opening.  See if you can spot the woman trying to escape from the burning house.

I was encouraged to try and mix books and manuscript materials in my collection, but after seeing the things that these men wrote, I would have done it anyway.  The postcard to Boucher that I've included in the exhibit discusses some publicity plans for Bradbury visiting Berkeley.  Boucher has apparently asked about his interest in a "autograph party" (book signing) and Bradbury finds it surprising that anyone would care about him that much.  The letter I've included is a response to Boucher's criticism of Fahrenheit 451.  He and his fellow editor at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction were less than thrilled with the book.  Bradbury's response to the criticism is humble and gracious.  This is why reading manuscript materials is such a treat.  Seeing what these people were like outside the public eye is quite simply fascinating.  It's also rewarding to see when people on admires prove to be genuinely nice people.

Weeks 8 & 9: Westerns and Science Fiction Totally Go Together, Right?

The past few weeks I finished up the work on my exhibit.  I finished writing my labels, and Becky made a few comments but approved them.  I was given my own shelf and a half in the stacks to place my materials until the exhibit can go up (which ought to be in the Spring semester).  I am very pleased with how the process went, and I cannot wait to see it on display.  Writing the labels was difficult, but I think I managed to make them interesting and informative without having them be too insanely long.  I decided to do a few longer narrative labels instead of having individual labels for each item.  Each author and each theme has a label.  I hope that successfully provide useful overviews of each author's work that can be appreciated by both sci-fi fans and non-fans alike.  The other weekend, my parents came to visit and in addition to seeing some of the exciting items in the collection (such as the Oscar you can now see me holding on the blog sidebar), I also showed them some of the items that will be in my exhibit, as well as items I like but didn't think fit into the exhibit thematically.  They were duly impressed :)

Last week, after I moved my items, Becky decided that, in addition to returning to some reference duties, I could start to help her with an exhibit on John Ford's films that she is curating for the spring.   IU is opening a new film center in January (assuming it doesn't get delayed) and this exhibit will go along with that.  Working with the Ford manuscript collection has been a lot of fun.  My favorite part is looking through the movie stills we have, though the print materials we have are fun, too.  A few of my favorite items are the notices about foreign release and censorship.  Apparently, there were a few complaints from abroad that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance being in black and white hurt its marketability.  The one comment speculated that it was probably for financial reasons, though everything I've read since said that it was a stylistic choice on Ford's part, and one that he had to fight for.  There were also a few letters relating to the fact that Stagecoach's story did not fit well with the Production Code.  Apparently, nice prostitutes and sympathetic revenge killings are bad...

As much as I enjoyed working on my own exhibit, it has been nice to get back to doing some reference work.  One question which Dave passed along to me was from a man coming to do some research on extraterrestrial intelligence, both in non-fiction and fiction.  Finding materials for him was fun.  I was pleased with some of the cool non-fiction items I found, and I hope he enjoys working with them.  I am glad that this internship has confirmed that I enjoy doing reference work (at least, online reference work).  Even if I'm doing something potentially tedious, like pulling items to scan for patrons, I get to go into the stacks and work with the collections, which is always fun.