I am staggered that my Introduction has passed its latest grilling, been tweaked yet again, and finalised as version 8. Deep down, though, I know I can’t write this sort of thing. To quote another favourite tag of Chekhovians, from Three Sisters: Feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes (I have done what I can, may those capable of better do so). In this case, ‘those capable of better’ will be editors…
The Afterword has been written, too. It will doubtless be rewritten over the next month, but my main job now is compiling the Bibliography (which will contain the first one ever of George’s publications) and the Acknowledgements, which as far as I can see must thank by name about eighty people! The plan is then to tackle publishers in the New Year. I will discuss the strategy and the problems, but I can say that the intention is by hook or by crook to get the book out in 2017.
Meanwhile, we have decided to create a new genre of guest posts. I have been hugely honoured and gratified by those who have offered to write guest posts for Calderonia, and I know that they find the word limit of 1500 congenial. Please continue to contact me if there is anything you would like to air on Calderonia, with images, that would come out at about that length. The possibility has also arisen of posting longer pieces of actual research, or memoir literature for example, that relate directly to George’s biography. I am delighted to announce that the first of these (next week) will be by Clare Hopkins, Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, where George Calderon was an undergraduate, and will be entitled ‘One Man and his College’. As followers will know from Clare’s Comments on Calderonia, she is a vigorous writer, and you can expect what Grant Richards, advertising George’s Introduction to Chekhov in the TLS, called ‘a deuce of a piece’!
We know from the statistics that one of the search terms that leads visitors to Calderonia is ‘Chekhov’. It seems that the site is accessed by university drama courses, for instance. I was particularly pleased, therefore, to receive Harvey Pitcher’s guest post ‘Calderon on Chekhov’ of 21 October. Pitcher wrote that ‘Calderon touches on most of the subjects that critics have written about at great length subsequently, but he does so with a much lighter touch’. Pitcher himself wrote about George with a deceptively light touch, and joins luminaries like the American professors William Lyon Phelps and Laurence Senelick in praising the Introduction and encouraging people to read it.
Related
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Captain of the 11
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
George Calderon, 1912
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George Calderon c.1901
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Some ‘announcements’
I am staggered that my Introduction has passed its latest grilling, been tweaked yet again, and finalised as version 8. Deep down, though, I know I can’t write this sort of thing. To quote another favourite tag of Chekhovians, from Three Sisters: Feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes (I have done what I can, may those capable of better do so). In this case, ‘those capable of better’ will be editors…
The Afterword has been written, too. It will doubtless be rewritten over the next month, but my main job now is compiling the Bibliography (which will contain the first one ever of George’s publications) and the Acknowledgements, which as far as I can see must thank by name about eighty people! The plan is then to tackle publishers in the New Year. I will discuss the strategy and the problems, but I can say that the intention is by hook or by crook to get the book out in 2017.
Meanwhile, we have decided to create a new genre of guest posts. I have been hugely honoured and gratified by those who have offered to write guest posts for Calderonia, and I know that they find the word limit of 1500 congenial. Please continue to contact me if there is anything you would like to air on Calderonia, with images, that would come out at about that length. The possibility has also arisen of posting longer pieces of actual research, or memoir literature for example, that relate directly to George’s biography. I am delighted to announce that the first of these (next week) will be by Clare Hopkins, Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, where George Calderon was an undergraduate, and will be entitled ‘One Man and his College’. As followers will know from Clare’s Comments on Calderonia, she is a vigorous writer, and you can expect what Grant Richards, advertising George’s Introduction to Chekhov in the TLS, called ‘a deuce of a piece’!
We know from the statistics that one of the search terms that leads visitors to Calderonia is ‘Chekhov’. It seems that the site is accessed by university drama courses, for instance. I was particularly pleased, therefore, to receive Harvey Pitcher’s guest post ‘Calderon on Chekhov’ of 21 October. Pitcher wrote that ‘Calderon touches on most of the subjects that critics have written about at great length subsequently, but he does so with a much lighter touch’. Pitcher himself wrote about George with a deceptively light touch, and joins luminaries like the American professors William Lyon Phelps and Laurence Senelick in praising the Introduction and encouraging people to read it.
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