The pantoum originated in Malaysia in the fifteenth-century as a short folk poem, typically made up of two rhyming couplets that were recited or sung.  However, as the pantoum spread, and Western writers altered and adapted the form, the importance of rhyming and brevity diminished.  The modern pantoum is a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza.  The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.  The pantoum was especially popular with French and British writers in the nineteenth-century, including Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo, who is credited with introducing the form to European writers.  The pantoum gained popularity among contemporary American writers such as Anne Waldman and Donald Justice after John Ashbery published the form in his 1956 book, Some Trees.  One exciting aspect of the pantoum is its subtle shifts in meaning that can occur as repeated phrases are revised with different punctuation and thereby given a new context.  An incantation is created by a pantoum’s interlocking pattern of rhyme and repetition; as lines reverberate between stanzas, they fill the poem with echoes.  This intense repetition also slows the poem down, halting its advancement.  As Mark Strand and Eavan Boland explained in The Making of a Poem, “the reader takes four steps forward, then two back," making the pantoum a “perfect form for the evocation of a past time.”  https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/pantoum-poetic-form

delineate  verb  adumbrare, block out, blueprint, construct a figure, contour, convey an impression of, define, depict, depingere, describe, describere, detail, diagram, draft, draw, draw a picture, engrave, etch, figure, frame, give the details of, illuminate, illustrate, limn, make a likeness, make apparent, make clear, make vivid, map, mold, outline, paint, paint a picture, particularize, picture, picturize, plot, portray, portray in words, profile, recount, relate, report, represent, represent by diagram, represent by outlines, represent pictorially, set forth, shape, silhouette, sketch, sketch in outline, sketch out, specify, specify the particulars of, survey, tell vividly, trace, trace out, trace the outline of, traverse the outline of  Burton's Legal Thesaurus, 4E.  Copyright © 2007 by William C. Burton.  Used with permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.  https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/delineator

The Delineator was an American women's magazine of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, founded by the Butterick Publishing Company in 1869 under the name The Metropolitan Monthly.  Its name was changed in 1875.  The magazine was published on a monthly basis in New York City.  In November 1926, under the editorship of Mrs. William Brown Meloney, it absorbed The Designer, founded in 1887 and published by the Standard Fashion Company, a Butterick subsidiary.  One of The Delineator's managing editors was writer Theodore Dreiser, who worked with other members of the staff such as Sarah Field Splint (later known for writing cookbooks ) and Arthur Sullivant Hoffman.  It ceased publication in 1937.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Delineator

The Pattern Cook Book, published in 1890, appears to have been Butterick's first attempt at producing a hardback book directed at the cooking public.  The grand success of their sewing patterns is reflected in the title.  No editor or individual author is listed.  It was part of the Metropolitan Culture Series, which included books on manners, social life, housekeeping, beauty, and "physical culture."  The original Butterick CB, edited by Helena Judson, goes back to 1911.  The original edition of The Delineator CB dates to 1928 and was reprinted in 1934.  Read much  more and see pictures of book covers at http://www.friktech.com/cai/cai.htm  NOTE that an easy recipe for baked eggs was in The Delineator, and we still fix them.

Garbage collectors in the Turkish capital of Ankara  have opened a public library comprised entirely of books once destined for the landfills.  The library  was founded after sanitation workers started collecting discarded books.  Today, the library has over 6,000 books ranging from literature to nonfiction.  There is also a popular kid's section with comic books and an entire section for scientific research.  Books in English and French are also available for bilingual visitors.  The library is housed in a previously vacant brick factory at the sanitation department headquarters.  Books are loaned out on a two-week basis, which can be extended if needed, according to state media.  The collection grew so large the library now loans the salvaged books to schools, educational programs, and even prisons.  http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/15/europe/garbage-collectors-open-library-with-abandoned-books/index.html  Thank you, Muse reader!

January 22, 2018  "This list represents Green Power Partners that also appear on the Fortune 500® list.  EPA's list of Fortune 500 Partners consists of 81 companies using nearly 23 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of green power annually, which is equivalent to the electricity use of more than 2.1 million average American homes."  Find rankings at https://www.epa.gov/greenpower/green-power-partnership-fortune-500r-partners-list

After Era That Made It a Verb, Xerox, in a Sale, Is Past Tense by Steve Lohr and Carlos Tejada   When Xerox introduced its popular copying machines in 1959, their wizardry was considered as high tech as the iPhone when Steve Jobs presented it to the world almost 50 years later.  But just as Xerox made carbon paper obsolete, the iPhone, Google Docs and the cloud made Xerox a company of the past.  On January 31, 2018, Xerox said that, after 115 years as an independent business, it would combine operations with Fujifilm Holdings of Japan.  The deal signaled the end of a company that was once an American corporate powerhouse.  “Xerox is the poster child for monopoly technology businesses that cannot make the transition to a new generation of technology,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School.  Xerox joins once formidable tech companies like Kodak and BlackBerry that lost the innovation footrace.  Under the deal, Fujifilm will own just over 50 percent of the Xerox business.  There are plans to cut $1.7 billion in costs in coming years.  Fujifilm said it would cut its payroll by 10,000 workers worldwide.  How Xerox fell so far is a case study in what management experts call the “competency trap”—an organization becomes so good at one thing, it can’t learn to do anything new.  Xerox traces its origins to the founding in 1903 of the M. H. Kuhn Company.  But it was an invention dreamed up in a makeshift Queens lab in the 1930s that changed Xerox’s trajectory.  That invention, by Chester Carlson, a patent lawyer, led to the creation of the modern copy machine.  He even came up with a term for the process:  “xerography.”  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/business/dealbook/xerox-fujifilm.html?hpw&rref=technology&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

Connie Sawyer (born Rosie Cohen; November 27, 1912 – January 21, 2018) was an American stage, film, and television actress, affectionately nicknamed "The Clown Princess of Comedy".  She had over 140 film and television credits to her name, but was best known for her appearances in Pineapple Express, Dumb and Dumber, and When Harry Met Sally... .  At the time of her death, she was the oldest working actress in Hollywood and oldest member of the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_Sawyer

In what’s being hailed as a “major breakthrough” in Maya archaeology, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features that have been hidden for centuries under the jungles of northern Guatemala.  Using a revolutionary technology known as LiDAR (short for “Light Detection And Ranging”), scholars digitally removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the now-unpopulated landscape, revealing the ruins of a sprawling pre-Columbian civilization that was far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed.  Tom Clynes  Read extensive article and see graphics at https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/maya-laser-lidar-guatemala-pacunam/

Looks like an early spring when a polar bear puts his head down a groundhog hole in Non Sequitur comic strip--see at http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2018/02/02

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1836  February 2, 2018  On this date in 1887, in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania the first Groundhog Day was observed.  On this date in 1913, Grand Central Terminal opened in New York City.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_2