Production for 'Silence of the Lambs' prequel comes to JHU

If impending finals weren't scary enough, students may be fearful that the silver-tongued serial killer Hannibal Lecter is lurking around Johns Hopkins these days.

The production crew for the upcoming major motion picture Red Dragon invaded the Johns Hopkins at Eastern campus last week, using the site's vast parking deck as a base of operations for three days while filming nearby. Roughly 20 trailers were parked at Eastern, where cast and crew lunched.

Red Dragon, based on the book by Thomas Harris, is the prequel to Silence of the Lambs and once again stars Anthony Hopkins. Set to be released in October, it also stars Ralph Fiennes, Philip Seymour-Hoffman, Harvey Keitel and Emily Watson.

Today, the production moves over to the Homewood campus, where nine parking spaces in K-Lot, located behind Shriver Hall, are needed to accommodate a light-equipped Condor, described by a crew member as "a cherry picker on steroids." The machinery will be used for scenes shot that day in the adjacent Baltimore Museum of Art.

Miniature manuscripts on display at MSE Library

Some 250 miniature books, including a copy of the smallest book ever printed with movable type, have been brought together in "A Modest Collection," an exhibit on display through June on A-level of the MSE Library at Homewood.

Comprised largely of works donated to the Sheridan Libraries, including a sizable number from the Garrett family, the exhibit includes two sets of the works of Shakespeare, a psalter printed in Hebrew, a miniature manuscript breviary and an Italian copy of Galileo's letter of 1615 to Duchess Christine of Lorena, printed in 1897 in two-point type and said to be the smallest ever printed with movable type.

Of that book, Percy Edwin Spielman wrote that "one compositor went mad and ... several of those concerned with the production suffered from eye-strain for long afterwards. To print 30 pages took a month, and new type was required for every new form."

Miniature books became popular for their portability, but they are prized today for the way they encapsulate the art of bookmaking on a minuscule scale.

For more information, call 410-516-6506.

W.S. Merwin to give Turnbull Memorial Poetry Lecture

W.S. Merwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, literary translator and former poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, will give the upcoming Percy Graeme Turnbull Memorial Poetry Lecture. The event will be held at 8 p.m. on Monday, April 22, in 111 Mergenthaler Hall on the Homewood campus.

During Merwin's 50-year career, he has become one of the most widely read and imitated poets in America. He won a Pulitzer in 1970 for his book of poems The Carrier of Ladders and has won a number of other poetry prizes. Latest works include the poetry collections The River Sound and The Pupil and a new translation of Dante's Purgatorio.

The Turnbull Poetry Lecture, given through the generosity of a gift made in 1889 in memory of Percy Graeme Turnbull (1878-87), has brought to Homewood some of the most distinguished voices in American poetry and criticism, including Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Charles Eliot Norton, R.P. Blackmur and Northrop Frye.

After his reading, Merwin will host a book-signing session at 9:15 p.m. For more information, call the Writing Seminars at 410-516-6286.

'Pygmalion' opens for month-long run at Theatre Hopkins

Theatre Hopkins' production of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, the classic comedy on which the musical My Fair Lady is based, will open on Friday, April 19, for a monthlong run at the Merrick Barn on the Homewood campus. The production will run weekends through May 19.

Pygmalion focuses on the clash between the ultimate male chauvinist and the young woman he unwittingly liberates. Although the issues of proper speech and class barriers may seem to belong to another time, the savage wit of Henry Higgins, satiric eloquence of Doolittle and courage of Eliza never cease to touch and amuse.

For curtain times and ticket prices, see Calendar, this issue. For reservations or other information, call 410-516-7159.

Talk marks 15th anniversary of book on the English novel

Michael McKeon, author of The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, will give a lecture by the same name at noon on Wednesday, April 17, in Homewood's Shriver Hall. First published by JHU Press in 1988, the book was recently released in a 15th-anniversary edition, which will be available at the event.

McKeon, the Board of Governors Professor of Literature at Rutgers University, is the author of several publications and winner of the 1987 James Russell Lowell Prize and the 1991-92 Rutgers University Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research.

While some literature experts tie the origins of the English novel to the rise of realism and the middle class, McKeon argues that the genesis lies in the upheavals of secularization and reform that transformed early modern Europe between 1600 and 1740. The novel emerged, McKeon contends, as a cultural instrument designed to engage the theories of knowledge and social crises of the age.

The Wednesday Noon Series lecture, co-sponsored with JHU Press, is presented by the university's Office of Special Events. For more information, call 410-516-7157.

Engineering's Wenk lecturer to address 'Disasters by Design'

Natural and related technological hazards and disasters are not problems that can be solved in isolation, according to Dennis S. Mileti of the University of Colorado. The occurrence of a disaster, he says, is a symptom of broader and more basic problems.

Mileti, chair of Colorado's Sociology Department and director of the Natural Hazards Center at the Institute of Behavioral Science, recently completed a five-year project in which 130 experts assessed knowledge, research and policy needs for natural and related technological hazards in the United States. The summary of the work was published in 1999 as a book titled Disasters by Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States.

On Friday, April 19, Mileti will give the Whiting School's Carolyn and Edward Wenk Jr. Lecture in Technology and Public Policy, hosted by the Department of Civil Engineering. The lecture addresses diverse topics affecting all engineering fields, and each year a different department chooses the speaker. Mileti's talk, titled "Disasters by Design," begins at 2 p.m. in 205 Krieger Hall, Homewood campus.