Books

A Festival Soldiers On

by | Mar 30, 2017 10:25 pm | Comments (0)

Courtesy A&I

Chad Herzog, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas’s interim co-executive director and director of programming, stood on the stage in a large room on the first floor of Alexion, on College Street. Before him, artists and filmmakers mingled with bankers and civic leaders. A countdown clock projected on the wall that looked more like something for a sports event — maybe a nod to March Madness? — had just run out. Herzog was on stage to announce A&I’s lineup for 2017.

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Dixwell’s History Comes Alive On New Tour

by | Mar 23, 2017 1:39 pm | Comments (0)

Allan Appel Photo

Petaway (inside St. Luke’s) with Zahler and the new guide.

When Diane Petaway visited her grandmother in the 1950s in the Dixwell neighborhood, she never knew about Curry’s Confectionery, a sweet shop whose chocolates were so delicious local white merchants sold them as their own. They carried the subterfuge as far as to require James and Ethel Curry to deliver their candies at night so customers would not know the original candy makers were African-American.

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Art Exhibit Becomes A Card Catalog Of Life

by | Feb 16, 2017 9:11 am | Comments (1)

Brian Slattery Photo

Amy Vensel, Blurt, acrylic on canvas (foreground).

From now until May 31, as you browse the shelves of the Institute Library on Chapel Street, you may find your eye drawn to a bloom of color along the library’s main thoroughfare. A pair of pen-and-ink drawings, one all serenely flowing shapes, the other frenetic activity. Other bright bursts of paint appear at the ends of the library’s stacks, like the last chocolate in the box.

Then, as if your eyes have adjusted to a new light, you start to see ways that the art and the library — one of the vibiest spaces in the city — merge, so that it’s hard to tell sometimes which things are part of the art exhibit and which are just features of the library itself. And that’s when the title of the exhibit — Looking Then Reading” — suddenly makes sense.

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When Poetry And Exploitation Collided

by | Jan 23, 2017 8:44 am | Comments (1)

Beinecke Library

A black novelist was so sick of the portrayal by his fellow writers of the Negro as fundamentally different from other homo sapiens that he wrote a satire, Black No More, starring a doctor who invents a procedure to lighten skin pigment.

A white champion of the new black lit himself penned a novel called Nigger Heaven, featuring sexual promiscuity; it sold well, and he was accused of exploitation.

And one of Langston Hughess earliest blues-inspired poems was called Fine Clothes to de Jew”; it broke new ground but its subject infuriated the black middle class — and, yes, there already was one in the Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s.

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Today On WNHH Radio

by | Jan 6, 2017 11:16 am | Comments (0)

Courtesy Lee van der Voo

Friday’s programs on WNHH Radio take a dip in the Bering Sea to look at sustainable seafood, applaud parental advocacy, bring back the world’s best pundits, and take Talladega College to court for joining Donald J. Trump’s inauguration lineup.

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All The World’s A Stage, And A Book?

by | Dec 7, 2016 8:53 am | Comments (1)

Allan Appel Photo

Detail of two of the seven figures in Tora Bora.

There’s a two-faced CIA agent who wears both faces at the same time.

There’s a desperate villager, a U.S. soldier, and a Soviet general.

And those pretty decorative patterns on the various surfaces? On closer inspection, they just might turn out to be a lovely visual marriage of opium poppies and Kalashnikovs.

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“Miss Librarian” Passes Half-Century Mark

by | Oct 26, 2016 11:56 am | Comments (0)

Allan Appel Photo

Boss Brogan (left) hails Carolla at her 50th annviersary party.

Marianne Carolla remembers when there were eight neighborhood library branches, not only the five current (including the main). In particular she remembers the storefront branch on Chapel at Norton, where the paperbacks hung on spindles as in an old book store window.

Once a man, a library patron, came in and said to her, I want something that’s hot to trot.”

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Today On WNHH Radio

by | Oct 21, 2016 8:05 am | Comments (0)

Courtesy Jim Collins Foundation.

Ferraiolo.

The most recent programs on WNHH radio dive headfirst into trans youth activism and the New Haven Pride Center, question the notion of collective memory and historical narrators, expose listeners to some old films made new, and revel in both local news and the impending fall harvest.

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Why #ChangeTheName

by | Oct 19, 2016 8:02 am | Comments (2)

Lucy Gellman Photo

Should Yale University change the name of Calhoun College?

Adding his voice to a debate that has been raging for over a year, Yale professor and film historian Charlie Musser, director of the five-DVD box set Pioneers of African American Cinema and author of the new Politicking and Emergent Media: US Presidential Elections of the 1890s, says yes. He came on WNHH radio’s The Tom Ficklin Show” to discuss why.

Below is a selection of the interview.

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