We are excited to continue our online After Hours open houses this semester! Join the Special Collections Research Center on the second Tuesday of each month 4-5 pm for a virtual encounter with our collections. While all the events are online, we have offered an in-person option for the first session in the series. All are welcome to beam in and join us.
Our first event will take place next Tuesday 11 January from 4-5.30 pm EST and will feature a selection of Spanish Treasures at the University of Michigan Library. The Special Collections Research Center holds an extraordinary collection of early printed books published in Spain from the fifteenth century onward. Particularly significant are the holdings illustrating the Golden Age of Spanish literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that is, the so-called “Siglo de Oro,“ which includes world-renowned writers like Garcilaso de la Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, and Francisco de Quevedo. Curator Pablo Alvarez will provide a tour of artifacts as witnesses of how literary masterpieces such as El Lazarillo de Tormes or Don Quixote were published and read centuries ago, as well as additional documents illustrating some of the political and religious anxieties of Spanish society at that time, including books produced by the formidable Holy Inquisition.
vicente aleixandre’s fascination with the sea is so beautiful. it’s like the sea is a part of his senses. like a door to paradise. like a lover. “and the sea, the heart of the sea, is in his pulse”and“the sea breathing like an arm that longs” and “you never go down, you survive, and the sea sighs” and “the sea moans sadly, lip of love,” and“i flew by like a stone and headed toward the sea”and“a sea that never quits, that gasps on its shores, forever” and“the sea exists. heart of a deathless god, throbbing!” i just love him
Agustín Fernández Mallo, The Nocilla Trilogy 1: Dream (2006) (trans. from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead in 2015)
Deserts, like the sick, are objects: though living, they are on the edge of everything, are undergoing a process of consumption, and are fundamentally gaunt. Each has white-yellow skin, and subsists in a state of exhaustion, though each also always finds a genetic oasis to save it in the end. The lack of resources leads them to both fantasize situations of out-and-out abundance and pleasure, even in the most grueling moments reach levels of delirium that border on the lysergic, and gather into their domains all manner of strange creatures, hoping for the feeling that someone loves them, someone cares about them. Also, their gauntness makes them the most aesthetic objects on earth, and this is why Tom, who was born in Little America and who knows he’ll never himself live in the Nevada in which his parents grew up, decided to become a doctor.
