I take that back.

About ten days ago, I was suggesting that the new-fangled modern exhibitions cannot match the sites themselves. To some extent, I still believe that, but yesterday I saw an exhibition that complicated my earlier thoughts.

This is the Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland. You can visit an online version of the show here, and it is worth doing, whether you can get to the actual show or not.

The exhibition features an array of W. B. Yeats's printed books, manuscripts, typescripts, and photographs. When you enter, there is a small room made of screens, where an audio track plays recordings of his poems, read by the likes of Seamus Heaney and Sinead O'Connor while slides of the text and accompanying images grace the screens. There are four films about Yeats's life and work, featuring images of Ireland, his notebooks, and commentary from notable scholars. There are well-presented cases of copies of his books, manuscripts of his poems and letters, pages from his occult notebooks, photographs of his family. There is a giant-sized replica of The Tower, perhaps his most important book, that you can walk inside of. In there you find a sort of family tree for the poems, tracing them from manuscript to periodical publication to other books where they were published and finally to The Tower--and of course all these stages are represented by reproductions of the artifacts in question.

It really is a marvel, an example of how multi-modal presentation can be put to excellent use.

And although it has been up for a couple of years, it got an ebullient mention in this weekend's NYTimes.

So I revise what I said before. Done well, these exhibitions do not take away from "the things themselves," but give you a new excitement about what you are seeing.

Does it get better than this?

Right now, I am sitting on a bench, looking out at the college park here at Trinity College in Dublin. If I had not consulted my map, I would have called it the cricket pitch, because it is right next to the rugby pitch, and most days there are cricket games in process here. Just now, one has wrapped up, and the players are changing into drier clothes and making their way to the pub that is the top floor of the next-door pavilion--they call the pub "the Pav"--and where there is an array of outdoor tables for taking your pint.

It turns out Joyce was right, and the cricket bats really do say, "pock, pock." I am always struck by those moments, where I find that something I am seeing or experiencing for the first time really does look or sound just like it does in some work of art. (I felt this way when I first got to Hong Kong, and I found that the mountains there do look like the Chinese ink paintings--and so different from the mountains I had seen in North America.)

Earlier this morning, I had my head immersed in typescripts, trying to figure out at what stage various textual changes were made. It is like detective work, in a way, with some of the glamor and all of the drudgery. But also the moments of "AHA!" which I live for.

But not right now. Right now I am enjoying the sun on my face. And I am enjoying enjoying the sun on my face, because in South Carolina in July, there would be few things I would enjoy less. But here? The last days have been cloudy and rainy, but today there is suddenly blue, up there, in the sky. The wind is blowing, the air is cool, and despite wearing a couple of layers, I am happy for the warmth from the sky. Out in the park there is a young couple running barefoot in the grass, laughing hysterically at something, and also a woman in a bright white skirt walking with her toddler, and a little ways away, people lying on the grass, perhaps feeling the same way I do about the sun.

So what could be better?

Now that I think of it? If I were over at the Pav, with a pint in my hand. So on that note, . . . .

Is this a sign of advancing age?

I was initially going to post this as an update to my post about the British Library, but then it sort of ballooned into its own issue.

UPDATE: Contrary to what I said, the old Round Reading is no longer a museum to itself. I went to pay hommage to it the other day, only to find the door to the Reading Room closed and guarded, with a sign about how it is closed while they install an exhibition. Closed? Now, or at least recently and in just a week or two, it houses blockbuster exhibitions, such as the upcoming Hadrian show, which I will barely miss. However strange it was to go into that room just to see it, without a reader's ticket in my hand, I want it back in its old form! I have been told it will be, after this series of shows about emperors--so where are they storing all the desks?

Anyway, there are activities for children in the Great Court around what had been the Reading Room. Why go see the mummies when you can play with plastic tubing?




I am seeing, though, that this is a larger tendency in museums, seeming to reply to the question: How can we get people interested in our boring old stuff? The answer, typically, is to construct multi-modal shows telling the history of something or another, but without using actual artifacts. Instead, there might be reconstructions of the way rooms worked, complete with "authentic" recreated smells and sounds. Or they might involve flashy films with music of the time rendered techno.

For instance, at Hampton Court Palace, there is the "Young Henry" exhibition, which uses a repeated series of three simple wooden thrones to represent the interactions, roles, and power plays of Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey, and Katherine of Aragon. There are a few authentic paintings on the walls, but the real attention falls on the three thrones, each representing one of the three players, that appear in each room of the exhibition. Their positions and their carvings (which give in a sentence or so the person's situation at that moment) shifts, and they are always set on a carpet with a brief motto for the period in question. Somewhere in every room is an audio track, filling in more detail. As the Palace advertises it, "Historic paintings from the Royal Collection, together with audio-visual and hands-on displays, will help you explore and discover a very different King Henry VIII."

Harrumph. Do you really explore and discover when all you're doing is reading brief synopses of historical moments? Are we all so simple that the only way we can follow palace intrigue is through the shifting of chairs, like chess pieces?

And does anyone going through the show really look at the paintings? And it is a shame, too, because some of them are extremely precious and/or give clear views of the situation--from the perspective of the historical moment itself!

But to look at a painting requires more focus than the play of moving chairs.

Which takes me back to the initial question that I imagine curators asking, How can we get people interested in our boring old stuff?

The answer, sadly, seems to be: don't make them pay attention to our stuff, despite its great historical, artistic, etc. value. Instead, give them new stuff to be distracted by, so that paying the price of admission does not require them to look at the old stuff.

Distracted from distraction by distraction, or so someone said.

From the new BL.

If you are feeling ornery, you might try to point out to me that the British Library at St. Pancras is not that new, but to me it is, and it is my blog, dammit.

About 12 years, I spent a good bit of time working in the old British Library, located under the great dome of the British Museum. It was, after all, once called the British Museum Library, and as an institution it did not separate until 1972. Physically, the two institutions separated in 1997, when the new facility at St. Pancras opened to cheers and boos. This library is the legal deposit library for the United Kingdom , which means that a copy of every single book published in the UK and Ireland (and foreign books distributed in Britain) must be sent here. Talk about shelf space!

To get to the old British Library, you had to pass through the main doors and entryway of the British Museum. That meant climbing the impressive stone steps and making your way through hordes of visiting schoolchildren on your way to show your pass, squeeze your bag into the cloakroom, and search out a good desk, perhaps even with an outlet for your laptop.

Working under that dome was amazing: there you would be, having your serious thoughts and reading serious books in the same room where so many others had before you--Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, and on and on. Looking back on the I spent there, when I was researching for my dissertation, I do not believe I did that much work that I could not have done elsewhere, but to do it there was an experience I would not trade.

Particularly now that it is an experience never to be replicated.

Now they have converted that old space into a sort of replica of the original. The domed library is still there, with books lining it (and the same fake books disguising the doors). The architectural space around the dome, which used to serve as extremely cramped bookstacks (though it was not originally intended to do so--but the library, like so many, ran out of storage space), is now opened up to the light, and it holds a cafe. In the library itself, there are still the rays of numbered desks emanating from the central hub, and there are some books there (mostly samples of writings by important figures who used the library over the years), but it is no longer a true working space. It has become a museum of a museum.

UPDATE: It is worse than I thought.

At the time I was working there (1996 or 1997), the BL was in the process of moving itself to St. Pancras, which meant that the time between calling up a book and having it delivered was even longer than usual--and "usual" was already pretty long. An inevitable part of the BL experience, then, was waiting, and finding ways to use waiting time productively.

The new BL is, relatively speaking anyway, all about efficiency. Catalogues are now online. Materials can be reserved in advance, again online. There are outlets at every desk. There are ample lockers for securing your stuff. Book call time has dropped significantly. There is air conditioning. There is a restaurant in the building. There are limits on the number of little slips you can have at any time, so that you only submit the permitted number at one time. Everything feels spacious and light.

This time I am really using things that I can only use here--the Macmillan Publishing Company's archives, which I am consulting for another volume of my edition.

Some things have not changed. You still have to have a reader's pass to use the reading rooms, and getting such a pass requires "real reason" to use the collection and letters of reference. Getting access to manuscripts takes more letters and proof. There are still the earnest graduate students, and I can so clearly remember what it was like to see something rare or unique for the first time, something you can only see in this one place. I think I see that look on the faces of students around me, as they turn the leaves of an old manuscript.

And in the lobby areas and exhibitions spaces, there are still hordes of school-children, but now instead of being on their way to see Egyptian antiquities, they are looking at a screen that lets them "turn the pages" (virtually) of, say, the Lindesfarne Gospels, seeing larger than life and radiant with screen-light the beautiful images. (New meaning of "illuminated manuscript") Or they are listening on headphones to music from the 1968 on Record: A Year of Revolution audio exhibition.

Now there are also loads of undergraduates, apparently allowed to work here now, though in many cases their "work" looks an awful lot like the "work" students at my home institution do in that library. . . .

In some ways, the BL has become a giant media center, as have so many libraries, with its traditional collections still here for insects like myself who burrow into the past. The King's Library is on show in a giant glass-encased column at the center of the building, so that the spines can be seen, if not touched. Most of the books are in hidden stacks underground. In the summer, there is music on the piazza.

But it is still amazing to work here, to know that just about anything can be found out here. As I look at the pencilled names on the labels on packets of page proofs, and see there one after another eminent Yeatsian, I feel both intimidated and thrilled.

And honsetly? I can hardly wait for the Big Bollywood Dance Class next Tuesday! Yeats was a big fan of India, and I know that if he were alive today, he would join me in my love of Asha Bhosle!