Wednesday 4 February 2015

Archive Trip Day 6

Day 6 was much the same, with more information enquiries and 'thank you' letters. There were a couple letters that caught my attention, though:

1) A request for a grant that (in my opinion) had a presumptuous, pompous tone to it, from an American wishing to study James Joyce in England. I checked this to make sure--Joyce's papers are held in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, not England. There was a Fulbright Program with Ireland at the time, too, so it's not as though he couldn't have applied for one to Ireland. The scholar didn't mention the British Library, but maybe that's what he was going for...or maybe I'm giving him too much credit. At any rate, the scholar's pompous tone made the mistake really funny.

2) Italian Fulbrighters Umberto and Marisa Bar named their baby after the Senator. He received a little birth announcement card for "Pierluigi Fulbright Giovanni", and a letter from Umberto:

"As I had always said that if I won this rather difficult competition I would put your name to my son, we finally did, after asking a special permission to the Mayor of Torino, because we wanted a foreign name. When our Italian friends ask to us why we chose the name Fulbright, we tell them why, and when they ask what it means, we say that it is a very meaningful name, since it means 'full of light.'"

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