Friday, April 6, 2018


The Eagle by ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.  The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45322/the-eagle-56d224c9a41d1

Costa Rica Marinated Tomatoes
Arrange 4 peeled and sliced tomatoes in a shallow dish.  Combine 1/4 c. oil, 1 tbsp. lime juice, 1/2 tsp. minced garlic, 1/2 tsp. salt and 1/2 tsp. oregano leaves.  Pour over tomatoes.  Cover and chill.

"That's the thing about scandal:  It doesn't matter if it's all lies, it still sticks to you."  Murder on the Serpentine by Anne Perry, 32nd novel in the Victorian crime series featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt. 

Ferdinand-Sigismond Bach, known as Ferdinand Bac, (1859-1952) was a French cartoonist, artist and writer, son of an illegitimate nephew of the Emperor Napoleon.  As a young man, he mixed in the fashionable world of Paris of the Belle Époque, and was known for his caricatures, which appeared in popular journals.   also traveled widely in Europe and the Mediterranean.  In his fifties, he began a career as a landscape gardener.  The gardens that he created at Les Colombières in Menton on the French Riviera are now designated as a Monument Historique.  He also wrote voluminously about social, historical and political subjects, but his work has been largely forgotten.   Bac was forced into exile in 1940 and saw some of his work go up in smoke in 1944.   Worried by the idea of dying too young, he strove to leave some of his work in numerous museums and libraries, including the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris, Municipal Library in Menton and Bibliothèque Cessole in Nice.  Each paper is annotated with his hand.  Ferdinand Bac died in Compiègne on 18 November 1952, aged 93, surviving his friend Émile Ladan-Bockairy by three days. Ladan-Bockairy's wife lived on for several years.  The tombs of the three friends are contained in a mausoleum in the garden at Les Colombières.  The house and garden were classified as historic monuments on 3 October 1991.  As of 2013 they were privately owned.  The Villa Croisset and its gardens were largely destroyed by 1975.  Some traces of the upper, north-east portion of the garden remains, including an arch and the chapel.  A school in Compiègne bears Bac's name.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Bac  
See also Sotheby's Ferdinand Bac Villa at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EENBl9VEwwQ  3:24

In 2016, comic book artist Phil Hester began a new series called Shipwreck at his home studio in North English, Iowa.  Surrounded by shelves packed with superhero anthologies, caped action figures, and awards spanning a prolific career, he sketched the story of a scientist who survives a mysterious crash and is marooned in a nightmarish new world.  Hester could relate.  For more than 30 years, he had illustrated some of the biggest names in comics—Green Arrow, Batman, and nearly every other masked hero in the DC and Marvel universes.  But now, his shades drawn and lights dimmed, the blue-eyed artist squinted at his drawing board as if through a fog.  Just as Shipwreck’s hero, Dr. Jonathon Shipwright, was trapped in a surreal universe, Hester’s world was increasingly unrecognizable.  A year earlier, Hester had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and made strides to turn his health around.  He stopped working until all hours of the night, made time to exercise, and shed 75 pounds.  Then, another part of his body began to fail him.  A progressive eye disease known as Fuchs’ dystrophy had laid siege to his vision—each day hazier than the last.  It distorted his eyesight and made bright light excruciating.   Fuchs’ dystrophy causes fluid to build up within the cornea, the transparent layer that covers the front of the eye, resulting in the tissue swelling and thickening.  It’s a relatively common condition that affects about 4 percent of people over age 40, and while there’s no cure, it can be treated.  Hester’s case, however, was rapidly advancing, and University of Iowa doctors drew up an aggressive strategy:  a corneal transplant using donor tissue from the Iowa Lions Eye Bank, a nonprofit affiliated with the hospital and the UI Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences.  Once it was clear the initial procedure was a success, UI clinical ophthalmology professor  and medical director of the Iowa Lions Eye Bank Kenneth Goins performed the second transplant that fall.  The results were “magical,” says Hester.  His vision fully restored, he calls drawing the third issue of Shipwreck—and the many comics to follow—a three-person collaboration.  “That includes my two donors,” Hester says.  Read extensive article by Josh O'Leary and see graphics at http://magazine.foriowa.org/story.php?ed=true&storyid=1731

In the opening scene of Kaethe Schwehn’s debut novel The Rending and the Nest, the book’s narrator, Mira, scales a towering scrap heap called the Pile to scavenge for useful items in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world.  With 95 percent of Earth’s population having vanished in an event known as the Rending, Mira is a member of a surrogate family fighting for survival in a ramshackle village.  Schwehn’s dystopian setting wasn’t borne entirely from her imagination.  In her early 20s, before she arrived at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the author spent a year living at a Lutheran village in a remote region of the Cascade Mountains in Washington.  In search of an idyllic retreat, Schwehn instead found a landscape scarred by copper mining, a harsh winter that dumped 354 inches of snowfall, and an isolated community of about 65 people who, like her, were grappling with complicated pasts and uncertain futures.  Like the Pile of her fictional village of Zion, the real-life mountain community sat alongside mounds of mining debris that stretched hundreds of feet high.  Schwehn mined that chapter of her life in a 2014 book titled Tailings:  A Memoir.  It also serves as a reference point for her new book, which similarly explores themes of community, faith, and the importance of telling your own story.  http://magazine.foriowa.org/story.php?ed=true&storyid=1718  The Rending and the Nest was published in February 2018 by Bloomsbury USA.

Anguilla is a British overseas territory in the Caribbean.  It is one of the most northerly of the Leeward Islands in the Lesser Antilles, lying east of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and directly north of Saint Martin.  The territory consists of the main island of Anguilla, approximately 16 miles (26 km) long by 3 miles (4.8 km) wide at its widest point, together with a number of much smaller islands and cays with no permanent population.  The island's capital is The Valley.  The total land area of the territory is 35 square miles (91 km2), with a population of approximately 14,764 (2016 estimate).  The name Anguilla is an anglicised or latinate form of earlier Spanish anguila meaning "eel" in reference to the island's shape.  For similar reasons, it was also known as Snake or Snake Island.   Anguilla was first settled by Indigenous Amerindian peoples who migrated from South America.  The earliest Native American artefacts found on Anguilla have been dated to around 1300 bc; remains of settlements date from ad 600.  Sociohistorical information from Anguilla's archives suggest that Africans and Europeans formed two distinct, but perhaps overlapping speech communities in the early phases of the island's colonisation.  "Anguillian" is believed to have emerged as the language of the masses as time passed, slavery was abolished and locals began to see themselves as "belonging" to Anguillian society.   There are six government primary schools, one government secondary school (Albena Lake Hodge Comprehensive School), and two private schools.  There is a single library, the Edison L. Hughes Education & Library Complex of the Anguilla Public Library.  A branch of the Saint James School of Medicine was established in 2011 in Anguilla.  It is a privatefor-profit medical school headquartered in Park Ridge, Illinois.  The island's burgeoning musical community made history with the recording of Sounds of Anguilla (Volume 1), the first album ever composed solely of artists from a single Caribbean island representing multiple musical genres:  pop, reggae, hip-hop, soca music and R&B.  The album, featuring Anguillian musicians such as Bankie Banx, Amalia Watty, True Intentions and Gerswin Lake and The Parables, was released on iTunes in June 2015.   Link to Music of Anguilla article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anguilla

Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, hoping to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.  Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the target and delegitimize the target's belief.  Instances may range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.  The term owes its origin to the 1938 Patrick Hamilton play Gas Light,  known as Angel Street in the United States, and its 1940 and 1944 film adaptations.  The term has been used in clinical and research literature, as well as in political commentary.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslig

If we didn't have apostrophes, how could we tell we'll from well and he'll from hell?  from a poem written by Donna Gallagher

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1870  April 6, 2018 

No comments: