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46 posts categorized "Events"
Is 'America's National Pastime' Up for Grabs?
Professional baseball heads to London later this month with its sacred status in American culture once more in the spotlight. While the two-day series between the historic rivals, the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, was an instant sell-out in London, back home crowds are declining, television ratings are falling and, despite the best efforts to speed-up play, games are dragging-on for longer than three hours - an eternity in today's era of instant gratification. Those fans that do attend games or watch on TV are older and whiter than America as a whole. On social media Major League Baseball is dwarfed by the sporting behemoths of the NFL and NBA, the fame of baseball's elite players a fraction of that enjoyed by the global superstars of professional football and basketball. It's not surprising that each new season begins with commentators questioning whether the so-called 'national pastime' is in irreversible decline.
Ed Linn, The Great Rivalry: The Yankees and the Red Sox, 1901-1990. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991. British Library Shelfmark: General Reference Collection Mike Ross 281.
And yet this simple contest of pitcher and batter is this year celebrating its 150th anniversary as a professional sport with its role as an emblem for American culture still jealously defended. Indeed, that very longevity is a source of strength: baseball's romanticized all-American creation story, which rejects its origins in the English game of rounders, may now be acknowledged as myth, but it provides the bedrock for its many cultural claims. Ever since 1919, when the philosopher Morris Cohen first declared baseball a 'national religion' which offered 'redemption from the limitations of our petty individual lives and the mystic unity of the larger life of which we are part', baseball-obsessed scholars and multiple purveyors of cultural output have offered the game as a lens through which to view the complexities of American history. It is a rural game popularized in America's industrializing cities; a team sport of democratic instincts soiled by its shameful record of racial and gender exclusion. It captures the essence of American capitalism in the endless struggle between owners and players over the division of its revenues. With baseball's twentieth century expansion south and west, and the suburbanization of its fan base, it mirrors the march of post-war prosperity into new regions of the country; and all the time it demonstrates its capacity to cater simultaneously to two conflicting strains of the national character - unbridled consumerism and anxiety-fueled nostalgia.
Morris Cohen, 1880-1947. Painted by Joseph Margulies. CCNY Library collection. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Re-enforcing these connections, a lively stream of cultural output still flows – in literature, language, film and music – which celebrates the continuity of American life and the mythical role of fathers in the generational transmission of American values. Baseball's story, so the argument goes, is America's story
Of course, not everyone accepts these sweeping metaphorical claims – the baseball historian Daniel Nathan has lamented the sentimentality, ignorance and nationalism that 'becloud our sense of baseball history and reality'. In baseball, Nathan asserts, romance has obscured the reality of the commercial and cultural onslaught from America's other big sporting beasts. Similarly, Edward White has complained of the 'unfounded assertions, rampant over-generalizations and exercises in wish fulfilment', made by baseball's scholarly and media boosters.
So which side is right in this long-running battle over cultural inheritance? Is the label of America's 'national pastime' up for grabs, or was it surrendered long ago? These issues will be debated in a special event at the British Library, Take Me Out to the Ballgame: Baseball and American Culture, on Friday 28 June, 19.00 – 20.15, the eve of the Red Sox-Yankees London series. Taking part in the panel discussion will be distinguished baseball writers, baseball historians and past-practitioners of the game, with the event chaired by Matthew Engel, the eminent cricket writer, now a wholehearted convert to America's game. If you want to join the conversation, book your tickets here: https://www.bl.uk/events/take-me-out-to-the-ball-game-baseball-and-american-culture
Chris Birkett
The British Library is the home to the Mike Ross Collection of baseball books and memorabilia which contains more than 300 items relating to America's national pastime.
Chris Birkett is undertaking postgraduate research on the Clinton presidency and baseball at King's College London, where he is a Professor Sir Richard Trainor Scholar, supported by the Eccles Centre at the British Library
Posted by jean.petrovic@bl.uk at 12:11 PM
#EcclesFellows, Americas, Collections, Eccles Centre, Eccles Fellows, Events, History, Humanities, International, North America, Sports, USA
The Power of Memoir
Where does the personal reside in our understanding of history, social issues and human experience? And what does the form of the memoir distinctively illuminate?
In 2018 novelist Tessa McWatt used her residency as an Eccles British Library Writer's Award holder to work on a memoir on race and story-telling which traced the hybridity of her genetic make-up and the issues of racism she has faced on both sides of the 'divide'. Her practice-based research is engaged in issues of colonialism and the historical and structural underpinnings of the creation of race and how her personal experience has been embedded in those structures.
On 3 June, Tessa will be speaking at the British Library in conversation with two historians, Sarah Knott and Norma Clarke, chaired by Erica Wagner, to talk about how embracing their own experiences and investing in the memoir form has enabled them to develop and extend their work as scholars and writers. In preparation for their event, we asked them to given an example of how an historical item from the archive helped inform their projects: Sarah on maternity, Norma on family and Tessa on race.
Sarah Knott:
Excerpt from Abigail Lewis [Otis Burger], An Interesting Condition (London: Odhams Press Ltd, 1951), pp. 180-181. Shelfmark 8417.cc.29.
1949 New York. Otis Burger wanted to stop each contraction and see what it felt like. It was odd having an entirely new sensation inside. She had been reading the English doctor Grantly Dick-Read, who thought childbirth should be painless ‒ disliking his determination to reduce women to their biology, but appreciating his tenderness. Her fear was the hospital feeling of being naked, and at the mercy of strangers, like a specimen of some sort. Male doctors were condescending; they seemed to think the difficulty was all in the mother's mind and that birth was too much of a commonplace for the mother to make such a silly fuss.
Otis Burger wrote her remarkable maternal memoir, An Interesting Condition, some decades before the women's liberation movement encouraged others to pick up their pens and make maternity properly visible. The book was unusual enough that it was printed not just in her New York but also in London, thus making its way into the hands of ordinary English readers as well as the collections of the British Library. That she published under a pseudonym was some indication of the taboos that needed to be broken.
In writing Mother: An Unconventional History, I plundered personal writings like these to understand past experiences of pregnancy, birth and being with an infant. And I took inspiration, too, from what happens when you think, like Otis Burger, in a memoir form. Blending memoir into history, and history into memoir, I found myself asking questions I might otherwise have overlooked. In bleary sleeplessness and with an infant close at hand, I wondered, what was the history of the maternal night? Or, what were the new sensations of feeling continually interrupted, or hearing the sound of an infant's cry? I found answers not just in past memoirs but in a host of other kinds of materials to be found in libraries and archives, from leather-bound how-to guides to slave narratives and social scientists' surveys, to private letters and scribbled diaries.
Sarah Knott, Mother (Penguin Viking, 2019)
Norma Clarke:
Evangelia Callas, My Daughter – Maria Callas, as told to Lawrence G Blochman (London: Leslie Frewin, 1967) Shelfmark W77/5490
Not Speaking tells the story of a family quarrel and it does so partly through conventional narrative, partly through oral history interviews and partly by means of investigations into literary subjects: Homer's Iliad with its quarrelling heroes features throughout, Pope's poem, The Rape of the Lock, has traction (brother hairdressers Nicky and Michael Clarke are at the heart of the story) and Robert Graves and George Sand in Majorca figure because Majorca is one of the settings, along with Athens and London. I had no intention of researching Maria Callas and it was only by accident that she became included. But asking my mother questions about her life as a girl growing up in Athens led me down unexpected byways. The mother of Prince Philip, for example, Princess Alice, had remained in Athens during the war, and spoke very good Greek; my mother admired her. Maria Callas was also in Athens. Maria left Greece in 1945 and turned her back on her mother and sister, declaring that they hated her and she them. The women were no longer on speaking terms. And then I read a quote from Callas that riveted me: 'I know my mother wrote a book about me, but I never read it.'
Her mother wrote a book about her! Books by daughters about mothers are ten a penny, but books by mothers about daughters? I couldn't wait to read it. I rushed to the British Library, and within 70 minutes I had in my hands, My Daughter – Maria Callas, by Evangelia Callas (1960). It's a book that vibrates with fury, and I reflected that Maria was probably right to keep it at a distance, but for me it was revelatory.
Norma Clarke, Not Speaking (Unbound, 2019)
Tessa McWatt:
Shang dynasty characters on fragments of an oracle bone dating between 1600 and 1050 BC. British Library, Or. 7694/1516
"What Are You?"
It's a question I was asked as an eight-year old in a suburban Toronto classroom by my teacher, after the word "Negro" came up in a book the class was reading. It was a word that none of the kids in the room – all 'white' except for me -- knew the meaning of.
Shame on Me began as a journey to understand how to answer the question. It looks at all of the strands of my genetic make-up – Scottish, African, English, Irish, Chinese, South Asian -- to find some kind of meaning in biology. But when I began to research the history of race, of the particular 'miscegenations' that formed me, it occurred to me that it's all down to story-telling. I might as well ask an oracle.
Then I came across the Chinese Oracle Bone (dating from between 1600 BC and 1050 BC) in the British Library. I was hooked. I started to frame my book around the idea that 'knowing' is storytelling. I saw the Chinese oracle bone as an ancient 23&Me. Diviners used them to answer the elite's questions about health, birth and death; about crops, the weather; about the outcome of battles or simply whether a particular ancestor was causing a king's headache. The shoulder blades of ox, sheep, boars, horses and deer, or the shells of tortoises were cleaned of flesh, scraped, polished, and then diviners carved questions into them using a sharp tool. During a divination session, the bone was anointed with blood before questions were posed to ancestors. The diviner then applied such intense heat that the bone or shell cracked, and he interpreted the pattern of the fractures to answer the questions posed.
A bone with the power to provide these kinds of answers would surely provide an answer to 'What are You?'
If only.
Tessa McWatt, Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging (Scribe UK, forthcoming, October 2019)
To find out more, join Sarah, Norma and Tessa in conversation with Erica Wagner at the British Library on Monday 3 June. More details: https://www.bl.uk/events/memoir-identity-experience
#EcclesFellows, Americas, Caribbean, Collections, Eccles Centre, Eccles Fellows, Eccles Writer in Residence, Events, History, Humanities, International, Modern history, North America, USA, Writing
América Latina: Artists' Books at the British Library
In early February the British Library held its third hugely successful Artists' Books Now event: América Latina. The evening brought together artists, collectors, academics and curators to consider the multiple dynamics at work in the creation of Latin American artists' books. It also enabled the audience to handle and explore the works on display and to discuss them with the contributors and each other.
Artists, curators and members of the audience engaging with the artists' books. Image: Jerry Jenkins.
Amongst the items considered were cordel literature and cartonera, both of which are richly represented in the Library's collections. Cordel literature are popular and inexpensively printed booklets or pamphlets containing folk novels, poems and songs which often have decorative covers printed from woodcuts.
Brazilian woodcut prints illustrating cordel publications from Connie Bloomfield's collection. Image: Jerry Jenkins.
Cartonera is a publishing movement which originated in Latin America in the early 2000s and which employs recycled material to make literary works. Historically these works have social, political and artistic significance. The British Library holds cartonera from Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, and Mexico. Beth Cooper, Curator for Latin America and Caribbean collections, has been working with Lucy Bell and Alex Flynn on an AHRC funded cartonera research project 'Precarious Publishing in Latin America: relations, meanings and community in movement'.
The Library also holds works from Ediciones Vigía, an independent publishing house located in Matanzas, Cuba. Vigía originally opened as a space for writers and artists to gather and discuss their work. Participants began creating single-sheet flyers that advertised meeting times for interested artists, and eventually they evolved into a book publishing house. Many of their works are produced in coarse paper from substances including sugar cane, offcuts of cardboard and other leftovers. They are decorated with drawings, cut by hand and enhanced with material objects: scraps of tissue paper, cloth, cord, as well as less likely ornaments including sand, twigs, leaves and nails. The maximum number of any work produced by the house is two hundred. Clearly there is an intersection with the cartonera, although the roots of each movement are differentiated by time, with Vigías being a backlash to the uniformity of Cuban printing and publishing of the 1980s.
Artist Francisca Prieto discussing her work The Antibook [British Library shelfmark: RF.2003.a.233]
América Latina offered a wonderful opportunity to explore and unpick the ways in which artists' books can be seen as a transnational and international medium which does not respect boundaries or borders.
Huge thanks are due to all of the contributors: Michael Wellen, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern; researchers and collectors Lucy Bell and Connie Bloomfield; artist book and zine maker Rafael Morales Cendejas; visual artist Francisca Prieto; and Beth Cooper, Curator, Latin America and the Caribbean, The British Library.
Jerry Jenkins, Curator Contemporary British Publications, Emerging Media
Posted by jean.petrovic@bl.uk at 10:30 AM
Americas, Artists' Books, Events, Fine Press, History, Humanities, International, Latin America, Literature, Poetry, Publishing, Rare books, Visual Arts, Writing
Event: Doctoral Open Day 2019
Starting a PhD can be a daunting undertaking; and getting to grips with the vast, often idiosyncratic workings of a major research Library with over 200m items can be even more daunting. This is why, for students who have recently embarked on doctoral study on any aspect of the Americas, we are putting on an Open Day on the British Libraries Americas collections and resources on Monday 18 March.
PhD Placement student Daniela Jimenez talks with curator Pardaad Chamsaz
The day will involve a series of general introductions to the British Library, as well as more regionally focussed presentations on Canada, the US, the Caribbean and Latin America – essentially explaining in broad terms what we have and how to find it. There will also be opportunities to ask questions individually of the curators and research teams, and attendees can tell us their topics in advance so everyone can leave the Library that day having opened up some rather promising avenues of enquiry.
We're also very excited and grateful to be able to draw on the expertise of colleagues from other parts of the Library, who will be able to offer insights into some of the approaches and resources available through the Library (such as digital scholarship or manuscript studies) that students might not be so familiar with. There will also be first-hand insights from current PhD students who are working extensively on our collections, who can (hopefully!) confirm that the British Library is both a pleasant and fantastically useful place to spend at least some of your time over the next 3-4 years.
British Library CDP students, including Naomi Oppenheim and Jodie Collins, discuss their work
Finally, as well as introducing the collections, we give students the chance to get to know the Library spatially and architecturally – so we're offering the chance, during the lunchbreak, for students to take 'sound tours' of the main St Pancras building. Not only are these a wonderful opportunity to explore the main building but they will also showcase the breadth of material contained in the Library's Sound Archive, a resource that is often over looked by researchers. As part of last year's excellent Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land exhibition, the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project invited volunteers to use the Library's Sound Archive to curate tours which reflect on black British history within the physical space of the Library. One of the tour guides has kindly agreed to lead our Americas Doctoral Students through this unique experience.
Listening points in the Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land exhibition
These different sessions will all be accompanied by a great deal of tea, coffee, cake and sandwiches, and a lot of very enthusiastic staff who are really passionate about getting PhD students in to work on our Americas collections. The full programme for the day can be found here. To find out more and to book visit the event page. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the Eccles Centre via eccles-centre@bl.uk.
Posted by Philip Hatfield at 8:36 AM
Americas, Canada, Caribbean, Collections, Eccles Centre, Events, USA
Technorati Tags: Collections, Introduction, PhD
'A Triple Threat Woman': The Letters of Sylvia Plath
On Friday 14 December 1962, Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother: 'I can truly say I have never been so happy in my life'. Four days before she had moved to 23 Fitzroy Road in London, a former residence of Yeats, with her two young children Frieda Rebecca and Nicholas. 'I feel Yeats' spirit blessing me', she writes. After her separation from Ted Hughes, Plath had decided to leave their home in rural Devon and start a new life in London. All around she sees good omens: 'The first letter through the door was of my publishers'. Al Alvarez, poetry editor of the Observer, had told her that her next book of poems should win the Pulitzer. She gave him a dedicated fair copy of 'Ariel'.
But this is a letter to her mother, Aurelia Plath, and, like all letters, it is written with the addressee in mind. Reading the second volume of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, recently published by Faber, one is reminded of how collections of letters, more than other biographical genres such as diaries or memoirs, capture the different social selves of a writer. Plath is cheerful and enthusiastic in her letter to her mother, aiming to put Aurelia's mind at rest. Elsewhere in the collection, she is self-assured and witty in her letters to her professional contacts, written in short, sharp sentences. And then there is the correspondence with her psychiatrist Dr Beuscher, where Plath writes openly about her plans for the future, her anger and her fears.
Edited by Plath expert Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, editor of The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962 and Keeper of Plath's collection at Smith, the volume is meticulously annotated and contains a selection of photographs and Plath's own drawings. Among the letters there are several from the British Library's collections of Plath's manuscripts. The editors, together with Plath scholars Heather Clark and Mark Ford, will be discussing Plath's letters on 23 October at the British Library.
Front cover of the Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume II (Faber, 2018)
The letters speak of Plath's efforts to progress her career as a poet while trying to earn enough money and care for her children, particularly in the months after her separation from Hughes. But her anxiety about the future of her career appears much earlier. In a letter written to Marcia B Stern dated 9 April 1957, months after her marriage, she writes: 'If I want to keep on being a triple-threat woman: writer, wife and teacher…I can't be a drudge'. The correspondence also shows the extent to which Plath's and Hughes's literary careers were intertwined, and their mutual encouragement and support, celebrating each poem that gets published. The 1962 and 1963 letters are interesting to read for references to her works, including the autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published under a pseudonym in 1963, and the extraordinary poems that appeared posthumously in the collection Ariel.
Sylvia Plath [via Wikimedia Commons]
The fact that the end of the story is well known doesn't make the last letter in the collection any easier to read. Addressed to her psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher on 4 February 1963, she writes: "What appalls me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst --cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies". Blinded by depression, she continues "being 30 & having let myself slide, studied nothing for years, having mastered no body of objective knowledge is on me like a cold, accusing wind". Plath committed suicide days later, leaving behind the typescript of the poems that would become Ariel. Her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982.
M.Aguirre
Lead Curator, Americas
Posted by Mercedes Aguirre at 8:50 AM
Americas, Collections, Eccles Centre, Events, Literature, Manuscripts, Poetry, USA
Technorati Tags: American poetry, American women poets, Ariel, letters, Letters of Sylvia Plath, literature, manuscripts, modern literature, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, The Bell Jar
Black Power: Reading, Roots, and Rhythm in the British Library
Rowan Hartland is a 2017 Eccles Centre Visiting Postgraduate Fellow and a doctoral candidate at Northumbria University. He will participate in the Eccles Centre Summer Scholars seminar series on 14 August, with a paper titled 'Black Power Culture in the American South 1967-1975'.
I have just finished a successful research trip to the British Library supported by an Eccles Centre Fellowship. The project, Black Power Culture in the American South 1966-1975, examines Black Power organising and activism in the under-researched and often marginalised regions in the American South. Black Power culture, rather than politics in the South, is largely excluded from historiography despite its national and international legacies. I have been able to solidify my argument and conduct research from a range of databases, catalogues, microfilm collections, and magazines at the British Library. Here is a snippet from my week.
Free Southern Theater publicity image, c. 1970.
My first point of reference were two bibliographical booklets; the invaluable resource created by Jean Petrovic from the Eccles centre, United States and Canadian holdings in the British Library Newspaper Library [2719.k.1795]; and the online resource also created by Petrovic, African American History and Life: 1877-1954 [m02/16735]. The latter resource did expand chronologically to include early 1960s works, which were useful for a framework for my Black Power study, and also provided a geographical index of published works- useful for my work on the South. The United States and Canadian Holdings resource led me to the Mississippi Free Press and Inside New Orleans newspapers (located in the 'African American Newspaper Series 1827-1998' section on the e-resources) which I delved into whilst on the computers in the Reading Rooms. For anyone working on African American history pre-1966 or post-1978, these collections will provide fruitful material; and I hope to utilize these in the future.
Second, the vast Tuskegee Institute News Clippings File [MFM.MA410] spanning the turn of the twentieth century to 1966 (reference book in the Newsroom). This microfilm collection provided a range of themes and locations for research- prolific in 1930s and 40s material, as well as Civil Rights material and introductory Black Power news reports. The themes, ranging from Race Relations and Organisations, to Juvenile Delinquency and Riots, cover the whole of the US and are rich in Southern material. I spent close to two days glancing through these slides and found dozens of articles portraying the roots and articulations of Black Power culture (N.B. ask the folks in the Newsroom- they are super helpful).
After engaging with sources on race riots, southern police brutality, armed defence, and Black Power ideology a lot earlier than 1966, I moved into some research of magazines and ephemera. Whilst trundling through the main catalogue can be both daunting and arduous, it can provide some gems (advice- do all the sifting before you come to the BL!). Using the online databases to build a framework of search terms, then using the multi-functional filters on the sidebars makes life a lot easier. One magazine, which has left me with more questions about Black Power in the South than answers, is Rhythm. Whilst the BL only retains one volume (I am sourcing more), it is a rich piece of history with spasms of visual delight. It tells the story of the commitment of 'revolutionary Pan-Africanism' in the South whilst looking eagerly towards a new Africa of the twenty-first century. It is truly the personification of the heights of Black Power Culture in the South- 'Rhythm sees African people as having no moral or legal responsibility to the west except to oversee its destruction.' There are many newspaper and magazine titles available for those interested in mainstream and Northern Civil rights and Black Power, to name a few- Negro Digest, The Crusader, and The Menard Times (an interesting collection of prison newspapers).
The 'Archive of Americana', 'History and Life' online databases, and 'African American Newspaper Series' have provided an abundance of material for my project, from Black Power's violence and rioting, to singing, poetry, performance and art. I intend to further delve into magazines and newspapers including Life, Billboard, The Chicago Defender, and Amsterdam News on my next trip for more mainstream perceptions, in addition to well-planned catalogue trawling and possible examinations of the databases 'Underground and Independent Comics Collection' (online) and 'HAPI' (online). The first-hand accounts provided in the magazines, newspapers, and records are invaluable evidence of Black Power in the South. This initial research has provided foundations for my research in the US and further research at the BL, and has provided sources for my Summer Series talk at the BL in August. Finally, a special thank you to Mercedes Aguirre and those at the Eccles Centre. I would not be able to research so efficiently and proficiently without their support and wonderful insights.
Rowan Hartland
#EcclesFellows, Eccles Centre, Eccles Fellows, Events, Guides, Research, USA
Technorati Tags: Black Power, Collection guides, Online Resources, United States
Canada and slavery in literature
Ahead of her talk for the British Library's Feed the Mind lunchtime lecture series (31 October, 12.30-13.30), Collaborative PhD student Ellie Bird delves into the Americas collections to discuss her research into the complicated relationship between Canada and slavery. Tickets for Ellie's talk can be purchased online, or at the box office.
As a PhD student in English Literature at the University of Sheffield, with a collaborative doctoral award with the British Library, I get to work closely with the Library's collections in my research.
My PhD research looks at Canada and its relationship to slavery. There is a dominant national narrative for Canadians today that Canada was an anti-slavery haven for American slaves in the mid nineteenth century. This reflects a part of Canada's history in that thousands of former American slaves escaped to Canada in the nineteenth century. However, the privileging of this history is also problematic as Canada has an earlier history of enslavement of individuals from Indian nations and of African origin slaves until at least the early nineteenth century. What literary works can we examine to find out more about Canada's history of slavery and slaveholding? What collection items does the British Library have for exploring Canada's relationship to American slavery?
Looking at Solomon Northup's slave narrative Twelve Years a Slave [10881.b.38.] we get one version of Canada's relationship to American slavery. The Canadian carpenter Bass engages in a verbal spar with plantation owner Epps about American slavery in which Bass argues that American slavery is 'an iniquity and ought to be abolished' (268). By Solomon's own admission the Canadian plays a key role in helping him secure his liberty 'Only for him, in all probability I should have ended my days in slavery.'
Canada plays an important role in the first conversation between Solomon and the Canadian carpenter Bass. This dialogue is significant because it is a turning point in the plot that ultimately results in Solomon securing his freedom. By the end of this conversation Solomon has revealed his true identity as a free man to Bass, and Bass has agreed to help him send letters to Saratoga to ask for his free papers. Solomon begins by questioning Bass about the country of his birth, and what follows is a dialogue through which Solomon demonstrates his knowledge of Canadian places, which makes Bass start to ask questions about how Solomon came to be at Epps' plantation. When Solomon claims he has been to Canada Bass laughs 'incredulously' (270), and he anticipates that Solomon would not know of Canada: 'You wouldn't know if I should tell you', but Solomon lists the places he has been in Canada:
I have been there. I have been in Montreal and Kingston, and Queenston, and a great many places in Canada, and I have been in York State, too—in Buffalo, and Rochester, and Albany, and can tell you the names of the villages on the Erie canal and the Champlain canal.
Bass's response to this, related by Solomon in the narrative, reflects that Solomon's knowledge of Canada has ignited his interest in Solomon's story:
Bass turned round and gazed at me a long time without uttering a syllable.
"How came you here?" he inquired, at length,
"Well, how's this?" said he. "Who are you? You have been in Canada sure enough; I know all the places you mention. How did you happen to get here? Come, tell me all about it."
In this exchange, Solomon, who has already heard the Canadian Bass making arguments that American slavery is morally wrong, brings up the topic of Canada and this provides him a way to develop a rapport and trusting relationship with Bass as he asks him to help him to secure his liberty. The exchange functions as a way for Solomon to lead Bass to enquire after his story and to question his status as an enslaved man on the plantation. Following this opening, Bass believes Solomon's account that he is a free man and offers to help him secure his freedom. Earlier in the narrative Solomon underscores the role that his time spent in Canada has had in helping him secure his freedom: noting that it has given him 'a knowledge of localities which was also of service to me afterwards' (23).
Is it surprising that Canada plays an important role in this pivotal exchange between Solomon and Bass? I would answer no; as even a quick scout at the US slave narratives in the Library's collections attests, the geography of Canada is very much part of the African American slave narrative. Its use in the passage I examined above as a short hand for freedom (it encourages Bass to question Solomon's history and how he has arrived at the plantation as a slave because of the strong association of Canada in this period with anti-slavery) reflects how Canada is presented in many slave narratives in this period:
Canada was so associated with freedom for American slaves within literature in this period that it was described as having no 'footprint of a slave' (51) in former slave Henry Bibb's slave narrative first published in New York in 1849 [YC.2002.a.13700].
Slave narratives by American slaves were also written and circulated in Canada, although this has been overlooked in Canadian anthologies of its literature (Clarke, 2006, 14 and 7-9). In slave narratives in the 1850s Canada is often a part of the story as many former slaves reflect on their experiences of slavery and as free black men and women living in Canada. The British Library holds rare copies of several of these narratives, and examples are: The Life of Josiah Henson [10882.a.21.3.], A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Mic.F.232 [no. 64728], and Samuel Ringgold Ward's Autobiography [10881.b.40.] These narratives all contain accounts of former slaves living as free men in Canada.
Other items in the Library collections present an earlier history of enslavement in Canada which problematises Bibb's suggestion that Canada has no 'footprint' of a slave: The Quebec newspapers published in the eighteenth century contain many runaway slave notices. Two such newspapers are the Quebec Gazette and the Montreal Gazette [MFM.MC271B] and [MFM.MC270]. Slavery in Quebec existed under French colonial rule and later, after 1760, under the British. Indeed, the 47th article of the 1763 Treaty in which the French ceded Canada to the British stated that French Canadians could maintain their property rights in their black and indigenous slaves.
The Quebec Gazette, 26 June, 1788, p.2
The runaway slave notices in the bilingual Quebec newspapers often appear in both English and French, and this makes them quite distinctive compared to those elsewhere in the Americas. During this period there was at least one enslaved man working at the Quebec Gazette, a man called Joe who was owned by the newspaper editor William Brown.
By Eleanor Lucy Bird
Clarke, George Elliott, 'This is no hearsay: Reading the Canadian Slave Narratives', Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 43.1 (2005)
Cooper, Afua, The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2007
Rushforth, Brett, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012
Winks, Robin W., The Blacks in Canada: A History, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997
Posted by Mercedes Aguirre at 4:07 PM
Canada, Collections, Events, History, Literature, North America
Technorati Tags: Canada, literature, slavery
Goodbye, and stay tuned for the Cold War symposium!
The last three months of my PhD placement at the Eccles Centre here at the British Library have flown by. There is much I will miss about being here on a daily basis – and not just the very good, helpfully subsidised, staff canteen! Hopefully this blog post will shed some light on what I have been doing and prompt others to apply for the placement scheme in the future.
In all honesty, probably the greatest benefit of the placement has been working so closely with the Americas collections. Before coming to the British Library, I had what I thought was a good understanding of the collections. Having used them daily for three months, I now realise that I was only aware of a fraction of what exists. In particular, whilst I knew that there would be some useful American foreign policy documents available, it was only when I explored the Social Sciences Reading Room that I began to realise just how vast an archival collection was available. From Presidential papers through to specific primary collections on everything from Civil Rights to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, there is a treasure trove of material for researchers and it's all available without those costly flights to the United States!
[General Reference Collection OPL 973.0076]
[General Reference Collection OPL 973.03]
Aside from archival collections, there wasn't one secondary text which I searched for that I couldn't gain access to in under 48 hours. Finally, the digital collections which the Library has access to are unparalleled compared to any of the university libraries' I have used. In particular, the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) and Readex Congressional Records are invaluable resources and well worth a trip to the Library to access.
The vastness of the collections led to the first project I undertook during the placement. Realising that, like me, most researchers only knew of a few of the Americas collections available, I compiled two guides to make the collections more accessible for future researchers. The first guide is on the political archival collections the Library holds, such as Presidential papers, whilst the second is a guide dedicated to the Congressional documents available. As well as telling readers how to access the collections, the guides provide examples of what materials can be found in each collection to illustrate the utility of said collection. Hopefully these guides will help fellow researchers take as much from the collections as I have.
A second project I have undertaken involved the organisation of an academic symposium. One of the Eccles Centre's key roles is to promote the Americas collections to the academic community; often this is done through the hosting of specific events, which are sometimes linked to the Library's public exhibitions. The British Library's next major exhibition, which opens on 4 November, is titled 'Maps of the Twentieth Century: Drawing the Line.' As the American-Soviet Cold War dominated the geography of the twentieth century, this offers an excellent opportunity to host an event focusing on the geography of the Cold War. The 'Cold War Geographies' symposium in January 2017 will bring together international academics to explore and assess how the Cold War changed boundaries, restructured terrain and redefined concepts of space and place.
The placement at the British Library also exposed me to the practicalities of working in a large cultural institution. In particular, this occurred with a planned digital exhibition I was hoping to curate. The Library is going through some significant changes to improve its website and digital exhibitions. This meant that the three short months I was at the Library was not enough time to implement the project. The matter was also complicated by my desire to focus on twentieth century materials which brought in a whole raft of issues relating to copyright! Whilst the project did not materialise in the way I envisioned, I was able to gain access to excellent research material and develop a more practical understanding of the processes involved in curating an online exhibition within a large cultural institution
That said, I feel that the three month placement at the British Library has been an unqualified success. I have developed a far greater understanding of the collections, both for my own research and produced materials to assist others with their future research. Unexpected benefits also emerged in the form of using these blog pages to further disseminate my work, as well as taking part in Eccles Centre events which have greatly enhanced my academic networks. These new connections look likely to lead to positive future collaborations. Fortunately, the end of this placement is not the end of my affiliation with the Library. The symposium in January means that I will remain in contact for the foreseeable future, providing longer-term benefits of undertaking the placement.
From both a research and experience perspective, the PhD placement has been a highly rewarding and beneficial one. I hope that the outputs produced during this placement will be as beneficial to my fellow researchers.
Mark Eastwood
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text:
Home Art & Culture
The artistic expression - Painting with time and space
Mohammad Eunus steps into 65 today
Takir Hossain
"Painting is an art. And art is a power that should be aimed at developing the soul. If art does not do this job, the abyss that separates us from God is left without a bridge," said internationally acclaimed Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. Art generates spiritual power, contemplation and eternal truth. Art always lives with time and space and without those, art will not exist enduringly. Art enriches and broadens our soul. It develops the aesthetic sense and enriches the quality of human beings. Art helps us to live and makes our life more meaningful; it develops our cultural and social level. Art is greatly connected to our economic and cultural ambiance. The soul is always modified by the revolutionary changes of cultural, social, political and economic structure.
Feted artist Mohammad Eunus' paintings hit me like waves of power, truth and revelation. He paints romantic landscapes, nostalgia, social turmoil emblematically and primeval mythological motifs before he sets his canvases on the floor or easel, throw and flick and drip paint on them. Then he minimises the amorphous forms and shapes and added an aesthetically balanced appearance. As an intense onlooker, Eunus closely scrutinises the changing socio-political and economic conditions of the country. His manipulation of forms, scattered muted drawings and cognizant brush strokes create a language simultaneously natural and contrived. His palette swings between mellow and bold, strokes between rugged and controlled conjuring up a visual playground for joy and ecstasy. His paintings are of inner and outer space. They intuit a complex reality that cannot be put into words. This makes Eunus one of the most dynamic artists in Bangladesh art milieu.
Presently his modes of expression are pure abstraction and abstract expressionism. He frequently changes the arrangement of his forms and compositions as well as the overall structure of his paintings (included oil, acrylic and mixed mediums on hardboard, canvas and paper). Oil is one of the finest and toughest medium which has been rarely used by our painters but Eunus successfully runs the medium with its all hurdles. From the onset of his career, he has worked in the oil for bringing up the media's effect steadily. The medium also allows an artist to create a sense of serenity. For Eunus, oil provides more flexibility and creative freedom than any other type of paint.
At his works, a harmonic relationship is visible through his lines, forms and textures marking an individual mode. He also frequently searches the boundaries of expressions with diverse geometric and architectural shapes. Squiggles, uneven lines, arrows, broken lines, loops and curls, squares, oval and other aspects are also included in the artist's works. He has meticulously gone through various phases of experimentation with colours, textures, lines, and tones. For Eunus, media is very significant in his mode of expression. He likes to experiment with different mediums.
It is very apparent that Eunus has now hooked himself with bright colours for bringing the internal articulations of concrete formations of paintings. Besides this, the painter also constantly experiments with materials. Using of lots of materials is the key element in his paintings. One of the prime causes for his experimentation is for exploring the dimension of the materials. The artist enjoys his liberty to recognise himself with his using of the materials that are apparently harmonised and technically phenomenal. He strives to proceed with a certain style that has become a personal hallmark for his works. He intermingles sensation and intelligence, believed to utilise abstract expressionism, in his paintings. His paintings emerge to be sparkling and dynamic because of the use of profuse shades and evocative textures.
Eunus bears witness to the insanity of current times in an eruption of vicious colours in different layers. The eruption of colours is accompanied by contrast, and the reality of texture is created in his abstract expression. It has also been observed that the artist meticulously blended the essential elements of his paintings. His paintings can be explained in many ways where one can find the touch of mysticism; some can get the taste of harmony, melancholy or despair. His mode of expression have been changed a number of times, but the painter successfully established his personal trademark through all his creations. His style is unquestionably unique, individualised and expressive. In his paintings, one feels the lament of a lonely soul, an underlying sorrow or a feeling of bareness.
Eunus always feels that drawings are an appearance of the thoughts, the inner world and what literally makes the daily life of an artist. His works show the world the way he sees it, and manifest the essence of the things he has seen. His paintings are also mirror of his mind frame. His lines signify the modern mode of expression.
His expression features varied structures, oval, encircled and doodle forms, symbols, triangular and rectangular shapes and lines that appear to be taking over the canvas. Geometric structures and architectural views also give a new perspective to his works. Cracked columns, wrecked pillars, ruined walls, rusted pipes, wrecked guitars, wheels, broken windows, slabs, scattered papers are recurring objects in his works. Some of the other motifs in Eunus' paintings are ancient edifice, cactus, vessels, hills and sky. Some of his paintings clearly highlight pure composition.
Despite living in Japan for a long time in pursuit of higher studies, Eunus has not been directly influenced by Japanese art. Japanese art is known for its soft colours, minimal expressions and meticulous lines and forms. His colours and forms clearly voice the dilemmas of our times. Melancholy, bliss, conflict, instable emotional states are often highlighted in his paintings. He tries to provide a psychological narrative. He wants to produce paintings that not only describe how we look physically but also capture mental, emotional and spiritual states.
When Eunus gets immersed with his paintings, he loses himself. He is recognised for nurturing enough gallantry to destroy his labourious productions if he finds them unsatisfactory and therefore to create a new pattern, as the world of painting surrounds him from all possible dimensions. He most certainly does not seem to relent and on the contrary cannot help but breathe life into each painting. In this very way Eunus applies colours and creates forms, lines and compositions. He puts layers upon layers of paint and draws forms and objects continuously, until he feels that he has achieved what he has been striving for. The outcome is a contemplative, subtly balanced arrangement of colours and space that does not fail to draw an art enthusiast's eyes.
A thoughtful and cerebral painter, Eunus has taken his colours, forms and materials from various ingredients of our surroundings and different aspects of environments. He likes to experiment with both colour and material in all its various facets. As an experimentalist, Eunus is fond of discovering the characteristics of the materials. Use of different materials helps him to create something novel and refreshing. He makes the ground of a canvas in a certain way. He applies colour directly, piling up both thick and thin layers according to the requirements on the canvas. Sometimes he etches the canvas with different tools and nails for creating uneven surface and amorphous forms. Rough ground assists to absorb colour and helps to create desired texture. Then he applies colour and again engraves the ground for finding his right imagery.
The layers provide a distinctive touch to Eunus' work and he has always deeply concentrated on applying colours and using materials. Deep layers of colours provide a unique feature to his canvas and his paintings create an expression building up on the essence of a colour and what the colours really mean. Over the years, Eunus has developed this technique, which is very expensive and time consuming, requiring immense effort and devotion.
Eunus' intention has been to hold the neglected or ignored sight of our surroundings and splendour of nature in transitory moments. He has used nature's distinctive colour as his principal source for motifs and forms. For example, many of his paintings feature damp or salt contaminated walls and sometimes feature cactus or blossoming flowers growing from moisture walls, which articulate volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, harsh reality, inhumanity and social and political disorders in the universe.
It is noticeable that Eunus is extremely meticulous about using space and the painter superbly demonstrates texture according to the aesthetic requirement of the paintings. The paintings represent emotion and sentiment in a manner which clearly outline the fact that the artist wants to be universally understood, but in a non-figurative mode. The painter works with bright colours - azure, yellow, emerald green, mauve and crimson. It is clear that his observation is on the colours influenced by nature which is a very enthralling feature in his works where there are colours present in all kinds of mind-puzzling forms. Many of his images are abound with his use of deep droplets and various sprinkled forms, marked by the strong backdrop of colourful images that cannot be explained and rather have to be felt. For every single line, dot, sprinkle and profound colour on Eunus' canvas exude different moods and feelings.
In recent times, Eunus has readopted collage as a medium which lends him a fresh avenue. He has used golden paper and silver coated metal for brining a novel look to his collage. He engaged himself with the medium in different periods of his career. He did several collages in the mid '90s of the last century. After a long hiatus, he has again resorted to the medium with a repertoire that has exhibited technical excellence so far. Many of Eunus' collages have materials in different sizes like rectangular, vertical, horizontal, oval, half-curved and oval-curved. The artist has brought many symbols into his collages. Space division in his compositions is dramatic; with big spaces kept flat and smaller areas left in several tiny patterns. It is obvious that the artist has spent a considerable time to create the illusion of space.
Eunus shuffles between mediums intermittently, each time returning to his subject with renewed interest and deeper enquiry, and each time striving to bring a novel vision to the subject. For the last several years, Eunus has been experimenting with varied kinds of papers, coarse clothes, pieces of tin, and materials in his collages. He has used corrugated boards, fragments of canvas, rag paper, decorative papers, pieces of wood, sand paper to name a few.
Collage in the modernist sense began with cubist painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Picasso was the first to use the collage technique in oil painting. Braque took up the concept of collage before Picasso, applying it to charcoal drawings. Surrealist artists have also made extensive use of collage. Eunus' collages are meticulously executed and have opened a new window of visual experience for the viewer. The molding paste has added textured relief to many of his collages and has helped create thick impasto layers, especially when it intertwines with other stuffs.
Many of Eunus' collages have materials in different sizes like rectangular, vertical, horizontal, oval, half-curved and oval-curved. The artist has brought many symbols into his collages. Space division in his compositions is dramatic; with big spaces kept flat and smaller areas left in several tiny patterns. It is obvious that the artist has spent a considerable time to create the illusion of space.
Eunus is simultaneously workaholic and scholarly sound. Over the course of years, he has been doggedly experimenting. He gives a precise explanation to his forms and compositions which make a new meaning for his paintings. He always provides a new look for each of his new expositions. The painter is always driven to explore something novel. It breaks boredom for him and he believes art can be enriched through experimentation.
The writer is an art critic and curator.
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text:
King of the One-Liners: Bill Matthews and the Volta
by Bradley Paul
My students love Bill Matthews' "One Liner" poems, especially these:
border with no country
Why I Didn't Notice It
The moss on the milk is white
Lust Acts
But desire is a kind of leisure
or especially
I'm sorry this poem's already finished
Why do they like them? "They're witty," "they're smart" — interestingly, two adjectives that were commonly employed to describe Matthews himself —and, "I don't know, there's, like, a sort of twist at the end."
A "twist?" Like in a movie, where the cop turns out to be the killer? No, nothing that silly. Like in a joke? well yeah, that's closer, but not exactly a joke, because they're still "poem-like" or "poem-y" or "poem-ish." But in some of the poems there's a punchline-like feel.
But how can there be a punchline in a one-line poem? Punchlines respond ironically to some antecedent in the joke: it's funny that the secretary put Wite-Out on her computer screen because we know she's blonde. It's funny that there are skidmarks in front of the dead dog but not in front of the dead man, because we know the man is a lawyer.
Which brings us to a basic truth about these poems: they are not one-line poems. They're two-line poems, because the title interacts in a specific and ironic way with the subsequent line of poetry to create the poem's meaning and its effect, whether humorous or languorous or "poetic." The titles do more than provide a context of setting or tell us what inspired the poem or sum up the sentiment, and they are not at all arbitrary or replaceable. They are an active part of the mechanism by which the poems operate.
And that mechanism is the volta.
Most poetry readers know the concept of the volta from studying the sonnet. The volta typically occurs between the octave and the sestet, though in some of Shakespeare's sonnets it occurs as late as the thirteenth line, and it represents a fundamental "turn of thought": my love isn't so pretty, but at least she's still precious to me. Life is sad, but when I think of you, I'm happy. It's appropriate that the volta in many sonnets is typically signified by words like but, yet, still, then. The loudest volta one might hear is in the recording of John Berryman reading from the Dream Songs (which — don't be fooled — are 18-line sonnets) on Halloween, 1963 at the Guggenheim. When, in Dream Song #29, he gets to the line "But never did Henry…" he pauses, then literally SCREAMS the word "but," then pauses again, as the turn of thought, coming at a point when Henry tries to rationalize the feelings of guilt he's just described, echoes over what we imagine is a stunned and perhaps frightened New York audience.
But the volta doesn't always have to announce itself, and it doesn't have to be in a sonnet. As a matter of fact, it is one of the fundamental units of poetic thought, and most of the poems where it occurs aren't sonnets. But we typically don't recognize the volta as such because we are trained to associate it with the change in a sonnet's rhyme scheme or to identify it by a blatant transition like "but." If we divorce ourselves from a formulaic definition of the term, though, and look at it just in terms of what it itself does (it "turns" as, the etymology of the word tells us, a dancer turns) and if we allow a certain amount of subtlety in the poems we read, it becomes apparent that the volta is present and necessary in a wide variety of poetry.
It is the volta that students are responding to when they say a one-liner is like a joke, but not a joke because it is "poem-like." I believe that what they see as "poem-like" is the fact that the result of the "twist" isn't irony, as in a joke, but emotional revelation. One could say that each one-liner is itself essentially a volta on display: say one thing, then a twist that makes it interesting. But the volta is also the source of much of what we think of as Matthew's emotional smartness in all of his poems, his ability, after speaking casually about some topic, to suddenly end with a line that "hits home." Matthews' last lines typically make a sudden turn away from intellectual wordplay to clearly express a striking emotional fact. For example, at the end of "Search Party," when, after a lot of poetic musing, we discover the basic fact that the missing child is alive, and Matthews tells us to "Admit you're glad." Or at the end of "Black Box," when what has seemed like chatter about planes cruising and crashing is subverted by the doomed pilots' simple and incontrovertible realization: "'We're going down.' 'I know.'" To read a Mattthews poem is to think one is cruising through a pleasant and witty chat and then, just as you think your host is handing you your coat, to instead get punched in the face.
It's no surprise that Matthews was such a fan of Martial, whose epigrams rely on puns or stabs in the last line to create their humor or poignancy. I frequently show students Matthews' translations of Martial after we've looked at the one-liners, then have them write their own one-liners and epigrams. Recognizing and using this little twist, this little turn, starts off as a fun exercise, but quickly gets serious, especially as students begin to write longer, more serious poems. Taking the one-liners as a starting point, they see that in their lives, as in Matthews' poems and the poems of many great poets, there are two kinds of speaking: the articulate, stylized speech of the brain and the simple, shattering facts of the heart. And just a small dance step leads you from one to the other.
Bradley Paul was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1972. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review,Smartish Pace, Fence, Pleiades, Iowa Review, and numerous other journals. In 2004 his first book of poetry, The Obvious, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the New Issues Poetry Prize. His second book, The Animals All Are Gathering, won AWP'S Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, and was published in 2010 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Paul taught a variety of film, literature and writing classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Towson University before relocating to the West Coast. He has also directed, written, line produced, and edited several short and feature films and commercials. A graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, he currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter and writer Karri Paul.
To check out Paul's website, click here.
This essay first appeared in Poetry International, 2005 (issue 9). Reprinted by permission.
For more on surprising turns in short (one- to two-lined) poems, click here.
For more on the volta, click here, and here, and here. Aw, heck: explore this whole blog–where we aim to give the volta its star turn!
« Writing a Metaphor-to-Meaning Poem Voltappreciation »
Date : May 31, 2012
Tags: Bradley Paul, poetic turn, volta
Categories : poetic turn, volta
The Structure and Surprise Blog Turns 100! | Structure & Surprise (10:04:55) :
[…] It's also been my great pleasure to publish or republish work by colleagues–such as Bradley Paul and Erin Stalcup–and former students–including Vera Miller, Emily Susina, and Anjelica […]


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The most neglected part of security is the human factor – and yet it's also the most vulnerable. Several of the speakers at the recently held IRISSCON cyber crime conference riffed on this recurring theme throughout the day–long event. "Social engineering a human is more effective than getting malware onto a computer," said Bob McArdle, manager of Trend Micro's forward looking threat team.
Now in its seventh year, the conference gathered close to 300 delegates in Dublin – testament to the growing interest in security among Irish technology decision makers. They heard Lance Spitzner, training director at the SANS Securing the Human initiative, make a compelling case that although Microsoft has made improvements to its operating system with the aim of improving security, businesses haven't made similar progress with the human operating system.
Training people to take more precautions with their organisation's data is a very effective way of strengthening security, but many businesses don't raise user awareness in the right way. Spitzner poked fun at a classic infosec attitude – "People say 'Lance, you can't patch stupid'," he joked – but he contended most people are in fact motivated to do the right thing where security is concerned. "Motivation in general is not the issue, it's ability. Passwords is the classic example," he said.
Instead, Spitzner said security professionals are "doing it all wrong" in how they're delivering the message. Many security pros suffer from what he called "the curse of knowledge", where their expertise works against their ability to articulate security messages clearly to non–technical colleagues. "Most awareness programmes fail not because of what we communicate but how we communicate it," he said.
He said once–a–year awareness efforts might satisfy compliance requirements but they aren't sufficient to embed a security mindset in an organisation's culture. "It needs to be ongoing. A lot of times, awareness programmes seem random. A mascot, logo, tagline or an emblem can help create a sense of a whole campaign – that it's part of something larger," he said.
One step Spitzner suggested was to hand over the communication role to non-technical individuals like marketing executives or salespeople, who he said are best placed to talk about the importance of good online behaviour and safeguarding vital data in a way that people can understand.
Ferguson said he also expects to see an increase in the threat of identity theft as Virtual and Augmented Reality take hold. The Internet of Things is another evolving area of attack. Ferguson's company Trend Micro has forecast that an IoT-related compromise will result in a death by 2016.
The problem is that these technologies make their way into the mainstream without having been developed with security in mind. "It's a huge can of worms – how do we retrofit security into that world?" Ferguson asked.
Expanding on this idea, Claus Cramon Houmann, the security blogger and backer of the I Am The Cavalry movement, said: "Our dependence on technology is growing faster than our ability to secure it. When you hear the word 'connected', you can replace it with 'vulnerable' and 'soon to be hacked'." I Am The Cavalry is a volunteer movement that aims to promote better security practice not just within IT circles but to encourage greater sharing of ideas between researchers, thinkers, lawyers, policy makers and makers of connected devices. "We want to achieve built-in security, not bolt-on security," Houmann said.
DDoS attacks fell firmly into the 'commodity' category in the latest annual results from Irisscert, Ireland's voluntary computer emergency response team. Announcing the findings at the conference, Irisscert founder Brian Honan revealed there was a massive spike in reported incidents during 2015: 26,137 compared to 6,534 in 2014. More than a quarter of these incidents (26%) involved criminals compromising systems belonging to Irish organisations in order to attack servers in other countries. Ransomware was also very prevalent, and Honan urged organisations not to pay the criminals who attempt to extort money.
Whatever the combination of risk management, technology and security awareness training, the increase in threats outlined at IRISSCON 2015 suggests more busy times ahead for security professionals.