Herman Melville (1819 –1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd. His first three books gained much contemporary attention (the first, Typee, becoming a bestseller), but after a fast-blooming literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime. When he died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the "Melville Revival" in the early 20th century that his work won recognition, especially Moby-Dick, which was hailed as one of the literary masterpieces of both American and world literature. He was the first writer to have his works collected and published by the Library of America. Most of Melville's novels were published first in the United Kingdom and then in the U.S. Sometimes the editions contain substantial differences; at other times different printings were either bowdlerized or restored to their pre-bowdlerized state. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale has become Melville's most famous work and is often considered one of the greatest literary works of all time. It was dedicated to Melville's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. It did not, however, make Melville rich. The book never sold its initial printing of 3,000 copies in his lifetime, and total earnings from the American edition amounted to just $556.37 from his publisher, Harper & Brothers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville

Sooner or later, everyone who writes about John Marin gets around to mentioning the 1948 Look magazine poll of 68 critics, curators and museum directors who, when asked to name America's greatest living painters, put him at the top of the list. So why does Marin so often get the "John Who?" treatment? For it's better than even money that unless you happen to be a connoisseur of American modernism or an art-history major, his name is unknown to you. It's been 21 years since a major American museum last put together a full-scale retrospective of his work. New York's Museum of Modern Art owns 25 Marins--but not a single one of them is currently on view. To be sure, Marin has his share of passionate admirers. I love his work so much that I even bought one of his etchings. And important Marin exhibitions have just been simultaneously mounted by two medium-sized American museums, Maine's Portland Museum of Art (up through Oct. 10) and Atlanta's High Museum (up through Sept. 11). The catalogues of both shows are highly impressive pieces of work, and between them they make a powerful case for taking a second look at Marin--but their authors are quick to admit that such a look is now necessary, since Marin has in recent years fallen into something not far removed from obscurity. http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2011/08/tt_whatever_happened_to_john_m.html

The Library of Congress will announce on August 10 that Philip Levine, best known for his big-hearted, Whitmanesque poems about working-class Detroit, is to be the next poet laureate, succeeding W. S. Merwin. The author of some 20 collections of poems and the winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for his book “The Simple Truth,” Mr. Levine is 83, making him one of the oldest laureates. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/books/philip-levine-is-to-be-us-poet-laureate.html?_r=1

Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter "E" is a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright. The plot revolves around the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalized thanks to the efforts of protagonist John Gadsby and a youth group he organizes. The novel is written as a lipogram and does not include words that contain the letter "e". Though self-published and little-noticed in its time, the book is a favorite of fans of constrained writing and is a sought-after rarity among some book collectors. Later editions of the book have sometimes carried the alternative subtitle: 50,000 Word Novel Without the Letter "E". La Disparition (A Void) is a lipogrammatic book inspired by Gadsby. The French novel not only omits the letter "e" in its entirety, but is also 50,000 words long. Its author, Georges Perec, was introduced to Wright's book by a friend of his in Oulipo, a multinational constrained writing group. Wright's lack of success with Gadsby made Perec aware that publication of such a work "was taking a risk" of finishing up "with nothing [but] a Gadsby." As a nod to Wright, La Disparition contains a character named "Lord Gadsby V. Wright", a tutor to protagonist Anton Voyl; in addition, a composition attributed to Voyl in La Disparition is actually a quotation from Gadsby. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)

More than 1,300 years ago in England, small groups of Anglo-Saxons lived in rural communities similar to modern day towns. Often at war, they decided to better organize themselves for defense. Sometime before the year 700, they formed a system of local self-government based on groups of ten. Each of the towns divided into groups of ten families, called tithings. Each tithing elected a leader called a tithingman. The next level of government was a group of ten tithings (or 100 families), and this group elected its own chief. The Anglo-Saxon word for chief was gerefa, later shortened to reeve. During the next two centuries, groups of hundreds banded together to form a new, higher unit of government called the shire. The shire was the forerunner of the modern county. Each shire had a chief (reeve) as well, and the more powerful official became known as a shire-reeve. The word shire-reeve became the modern English word sheriff—the chief of the county. http://www.indianasheriffs.org/ns/whatis.php

The Alex Awards are given to ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18. The winning titles are selected from the previous year's publishing. The Alex Awards were first given annually beginning in 1998 and became an official ALA award in 2002. The award is sponsored by the Margaret A. Edwards Trust. Edwards pioneered young adult library services and worked for many years at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore. Her work is described in her book Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts, and over the years she has served as an inspiration to many librarians who serve young adults. The Alex Awards are named after Edwards, who was called “Alex” by her friends. See the winners from 1998-2011 at: http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/booklistsawards/alexawards/alexawards.cfm
The trivia (singular trivium, adjective trivial) are the three lower Artes Liberales, i.e. grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the topics of basic education, foundational to the quadrivia of higher education, and hence the material of basic education, of interest only to undergraduates. The word trivia was also used to describe a place where three roads met in Ancient Rome. The term had become, during the 20th Century, as forgotten as the system of education it pertained to when it was ironically appropriated to mean something very new. In the 1960s, nostalgic college students and others began to informally trade questions and answers about the popular culture of their youth. Since the 1960s, the plural trivia in particular has widened to include knowledge that is nice to have but not essential, specifically detailed knowledge on topics of popular culture. The expression has also come to suggest information of the kind useful almost exclusively for answering quiz questions, hence the brand name Trivial Pursuit (1982). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivia

Wizard of Oz Trivia
The name for Oz was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence "Oz." The music and vocal tracks for all the deleted sequences have survived and can all be heard on Rhino Records' Deluxe 2-CD soundtrack edition of the film's songs and score. Every track on that album is heard in the exact order in which it would have appeared in the film had the movie never been edited to its final release length. MGM paid $75,000 for the film rights to L. Frank Baum's book, a towering sum at the time. Glinda's gown was first used by Jeanette MacDonald in San Francisco. The ruby slippers were silver (like in the book) until MGM chief Louis B. Mayer realized that the Technicolor production would benefit from the slippers being colored.
See much more at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032138/trivia

The Department of Justice and four states on August 8 filed a multibillion-dollar fraud suit against the Education Management Corporation, the nation’s second-largest for-profit college company, charging that it was not eligible for the $11 billion in state and federal financial aid it had received from July 2003 through June 2011. While the civil lawsuit is one of many raising similar charges against the expanding for-profit college industry, the case is the first in which the government intervened to back whistle-blowers’ claims that a company consistently violated federal law by paying recruiters based on how many students it enrolled. The suit said that each year, Education Management falsely certified that it was complying with the law, making it eligible to receive student financial aid. “The depth and breadth of the fraud laid out in the complaint are astonishing,” said Harry Litman, a lawyer in Pittsburgh and former federal prosecutor who is one of those representing the two whistle-blowers whose 2007 complaints spurred the suit. “It spans the entire company — from the ground level in over 100 separate institutions up to the most senior management — and accounts for nearly all the revenues the company has realized since 2003.” Education Management, which is based in Pittsburgh and is 41 percent owned by Goldman Sachs, enrolls about 150,000 students in 105 schools operating under four names: Art Institute, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College and South University. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/education/09forprofit.html

Scientists at Oregon State University discovered a new eruption of undersea volcano Axial Seamount, 250 miles off the Oregon coast. The Axial Seamount is one of the most active and heavily studied seamounts in the world. In the eruption, which scientists say occurred in early April, the undersea volcano spewed a layer of lava more than 12 feet (4 meters) thick in places. It also opened up deep vents that continue to belch hot water and microbes from deep inside the earth into the ocean. What makes the find even more intriguing is that scientists had forecast the eruption starting five years ago. That makes this the first successful forecast of an undersea volcano. Up until now, predicting when volcanoes would erupt has been a mix of science and educated guesses. However, in this study, scientists were able to forecast the Axial Seamount's eruption based on actions leading up to a 1998 blast. Read much more at: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/195208/20110809/undersea-volcano-eruption-oregon-coast-axial-seamount-bill-chadwick.htm

Website of the Day The Society for American Baseball Research www.sabr.org
Baseball is all about statistics, and no one recognizes the value of the history and record of baseball more than SABR. There’s an extensive list of online resources at this site--perfect for anyone interested in baseball research.
Number to Know 1971: Year when the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) was born. As the baseball stats and information society celebrates its 40th birthday, it has about 6,000 members, according to the group.
http://www.wellsvilledaily.com/newsnow/x2014919564/Morning-Minutes-Aug-10