February 6 @ 7pm ♦ Tim Spears

Middlebury professor Tim Spears looks at the 1941 publication of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Depicting the lives of southern sharecroppers, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans resisted journalistic conventions and raised important questions about the nature of documentary work and art.

Underwriter: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in partnership with Pulitzer Prizes

The Friends of Brooks Memorial Library play an instrumental role in funding many library services that are unusual for a community our size.

The Commons recently ran a story highlighting several of these services, with special mention of the film service Kanopy, which provides free streaming of indie films, Hollywood films, British mysteries, foreign films and a host of other titles. All it takes is a library card!

Thanks to The Commons and especially Richard Henke for the fine write-up (accessible here).

 

March 6 @ 7pm ♦ Huck Gutman

William Wordsworth was a strange yet pathbreaking poet who resisted writing poems that preened in being poems. UVM professor emeritus Huck Gutman discusses how someone so “plain” and “simple” became the most revolutionary, and probably most influential, poet of the past 250 years.

Underwriter: Chroma Technology