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BAND

BAND

A Transcription Puzzle: “then She bore Pale desire”, Part 1

8 May 2014

I am currently in the process of transcribing some of Blake’s manuscript material beginning “then She bore Pale desire” and have run into some difficulty. At the bottom of object 5, Blake adds additional text in a rough hand using pencil. (The majority of the object is covered in brown ink.) I can read the text at the bottom right (which is an addition, the placement of which is indicated by a line). However, there is also what appears to be an abbreviation at the bottom left. I cannot make it out with certainty, and it is not connected to the rest of the text (in any obvious way, at least).

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BAND

Frankenstein’s Proofing Form

30 April 2014

By Margaret Speer In my January 15th 2014 blog post, I mentioned that a goal of mine since relatively early in my time as a Project Assistant to the William Blake Archive (sounds so fancy, doesn’t it?) has been to improve upon the Letters Proofing Form. Side by side with this idea was to maybe even create a generalized proofing form that could be useful for all projects, something to be the Queen Mother Proofing Form. This comment caught the attention of the lovely Laura, and thus the monster was born.

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BAND, Uncategorized

“till the Cold is gone”: Blake, Rochester NY and talking about the weather

17 April 2014

Being British, one of my favourite pastimes is talking about the weather (usually in a tone of complaint whilst drinking a cup of tea, of course), and I’ve always considered myself to be rather good at it — that is, until I moved to western New York. The Rochester snow makes a bit of British rain seem like a pleasant shower, a February blizzard makes London fog charmingly atmospheric and the dramatic temperature fluctuations make grabbing your coat in the morning as simple as remembering to brush your teeth. This week, for example, has seen alterations in weather from 80 degrees and sunshine to 25 degrees and snow (27° to -3° for our Celsius-loving readers). Anyway, as I was thinking this over, I started wondering what Blake thought about the weather.

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BAND

Finding Funding: Grant Writing for Undergrads

19 March 2014

By Margaret Speer

Recently, Megan and I (the undergraduate Project Assistants to the Blake Archive at the University of Rochester) applied for Discover Grant funding to support our continued work this coming summer. Without funding, we really won’t be able to participate as much as we do during the fall and spring semesters—possibly not at all.

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BAND, XML

To the Letters

5 March 2014

Since re-grouping in January, the members of BAND have been working earnestly on a variety of new and ongoing projects, including Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue, Receipts, The French Revolution, Chaucer, Prospectus, The Four Zoas, Genesis, Tiriel, and additional groups of Blake’s letters. In an effort to do more shameless plugging for our imminent letters publication, I’d like to share why I decided to continue with the letters project.

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BAND

Making Lists, Checking Twice

26 February 2014

Soon, the Blake Archive will publish its second batch of Blake’s correspondence, making the bulk of Blake’s ninety or so letters available online. One of the side projects that I’ve been working on has been a Master List of all of Blake’s correspondence. I’m compiling the most recent provenance information about Blake’s letters into a big spreadsheet, which will give us a sense of the future work to be done on Blake’s letters, especially regarding:

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