Wednesday, September 26, 2018


This herbaceous take on a blondie is crispy, gooey and impossible to stop eating by Becky Krystal   Find recipe for Salted Honey Bars With Thyme at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2018/08/29/this-herbaceous-take-on-a-blondie-is-crispy-gooey-and-impossible-to-stop-eating/?utm_term=.0c024038cc8b

In the works of Jorge Luis Borges, the library appears frequently as a metaphor representative of life and its secrets.  It becomes a metaphysical location, posing questions about the nature of time, life, and the universe itself.  The librarian becomes a metaphysical figure, leading the search for answers to life’s questions.  This article examines the way in which the Borgesian library metaphor has crossed over from the realm of literature into the realm of popular television.  By examining two episodes of the BBC series Doctor Who, the TNT franchise The Librarian, and several episodes of Joss Whedon’s cult television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it demonstrates that the metaphysical questions posed by the library and its librarian in Borges’s short stories are quite similar to the metaphysical questions posed by the library and its librarians in popular television, demonstrating that the Borgesian library has crossed over into the realms of popular culture.  http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol37/iss1/2/  See also Putting Borges’ Infinite Library On the Internet at  https://electricliterature.com/putting-borges-infinite-library-on-the-internet-1e26c286c5a   Read The Library of Babel, originally published in Borges' collection The Garden of Forking Paths in 1944, at https://libraryofbabel.info/Borges/libraryofbabel.pdf or borrow it from a library. 

Jorge Luis Borges notes that his family name, like Burgess in English, means "of the town", "bourgeois".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borges_(surname)   Pronounce Jorge Luis Borges as hor-hay  loo-EESS  BOR-hayss.  https://kutamaka.com/pronunciation/d1055/Jorge_Luis_Borges

Gadsby is a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright written as a lipogram, which does not include words that contain the letter E.  The plot revolves around the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalized as a result of the efforts of protagonist John Gadsby and a youth group he organizes.  Though vanity published and little noticed in its time, the book is a favourite 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".  Despite Wright's claim, published versions of the book may contain a handful of uses of the letter "e".  The version on Project Gutenberg, for example, contains "the" three times and "officers" once.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)   See full text of Gadsby at https://archive.org/stream/Gadsby/Gadsby_djvu.txt
           
The sonnet form, most commonly used for love poems, was created in Italy in the 13th century and made popular by Renaissance poets such as Petrarch.  The Italian sonnet (also called the Petrarchan sonnet) is made up of 14 lines of iambic pentameter (lines of ten syllables in a ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum rhythm).  Its argument is in two parts, an octave (eight lines) outlining a problem or question, followed by a sestet (six lines) offering a resolution; the transition between the two at the start of the ninth line is called the volta or ‘turn’.  The octave rhymes abba abba, while the sestet can have a looser rhyme scheme, often cde cde or cd cd cd.  The sonnet was brought to England in the early 16th century by Sir Thomas Wyatt and was particularly fashionable in the 1590s.  The Elizabethan sonnet (also called the Shakespearean sonnet) is also in iambic pentameter, but it usually follows a structure of three quatrains (four line stanzas) of cross-rhyme followed by a couplet:  abab cdcd efef gg.  The volta usually still comes with the ninth line, but in Shakespeare’s sonnets it often comes with the 13th.  Scholars believe that Shakespeare wrote and revised his sonnets during the 1590s and early 1600s.  They were first printed in 1609 in a quarto volume (Shakes-Speares Sonnets) containing a sequence of 154 sonnets concluded by a longer poem, A Lover’s Complaint.  https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/first-edition-of-shakespeares-sonnets-1609

It’s time to read by flashlight with your kids at the Toledo Lucas County Public Library!  We're partnering with Metroparks Toledo to give out free flashlights (while supplies last) to families who read together at any library location throughout the month of October in 2018.  Pick up a flashlight at any Flashlight Frenzy program (or you can use your own), snap a photo reading by flashlight, then:   Go to toledolibrary.org/librarylove  Upload your Flashlight Frenzy photo and share why you love the Library and/or reading.  Be entered to win a FREE night of camping at Metroparks Toledo  One winner will be chosen and alerted via email each week in October. 

U.S. Pizza Museum, inside the Roosevelt Collection at 1146 S. Delano Court W., Chicago, open 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends.  Admission is free and reservations are required.  Vintage menus, pizza boxes, and pizza-centric pop-culture memorabilia are proudly displayed on the walls and behind glass cases.  It’s a tribute to the many different styles of pizzas across the country and not just reduced to New York versus Chicago.  Founder Kendall Bruns started by collecting menus, but his hobby grew to tracking down toys (a Spider-Man figure comes with a slice of pizza; Peter Parker is from Queens, N.Y.), limited-edition pizza boxes (check out Pizza Hut’s Star Wars promotions), and other vestiges of days of pizzas past.  The pop-up museum has traveled to various pizzerias around Chicago, but Bruns hopes he’s found a permanent home at the Roosevelt Collection.  Officially, the exhibit only runs through October 2018.  The museum will have pizza for special events, but it won’t be regularly available.  Pizza is best enjoyed fresh.  Bruns does want to assemble a map of nearby pizzerias for visitors.  Deep dish from Lou Malnati’s and tavern thin from Pat’s Pizza are both close.  Chicago is the home of the only two Bonci Roman-style pizzerias in the country.  It makes sense for a pizza museum to call Chicago home.  See many pictures at

President Donald Trump’s second address to the United Nations reiterated the same point he made last year:  His America is a sovereign one, and every nation is on its own.  “America is governed by Americans,” he said to the UN General Assembly on September 25, 2018.  “We reject the ideology of globalism and accept the doctrine of patriotism.”  Alex Ward  Read entire speech at https://www.vox.com/2018/9/25/17901082/trump-un-2018-speech-full-text

Americans have been banning books since at least the 1800's, when Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was met with widespread censorship in the south over its abolitionist message. Since then, hundreds of books have been challenged and banned by libraries, school districts, and even federal courts.  Banned Books Week began in 1982 to draw attention to these widespread challenges to the free distribution of literature.  The event was intended to show that banning attempts haven't been levelled only at famously controversial books, but also at beloved titles like Charlotte's Web and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.  Check out some of the banned, challenged, and contested books The Strand has on our Banned Books table below.  Is your favorite book on the list?  https://www.strandbooks.com/banned-books/  Thank you, Muse reader!

Restaurant owner says Maine asked her to stop giving lobsters marijuana by Chris Mills Rodrigo   Charlotte Gill clarified that she had not been selling the "smoked" lobster to customers in a letter published on the restaurant's website September 23, 2018.  “We are not currently selling this meat, (nor have we).  The lobster that we have prepared thus far was purely for our own testing and study as well as to be able to have a conclusive base of information to work from when we were eventually met with these questions,” she said.  While the state has asked Gill to stop the process, they have not mandated that the restaurant stop testing medical cannabis on the lobsters.  Gill wrote on her restaurant's site that she hopes to address concerns and start selling the lobsters by mid-to-late October.  David Heidrich, spokesperson for the Maine Medical Marijuana Program, told the Herald that medical marijuana laws only apply to humans, implying that the state does not find the project to be legal.  “Lobsters are not people,” he said.  https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/408383-maine-asks-restaurant-to-stop-giving-lobsters-weed-before

Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana (1863–1952), was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist.  Originally from Spain, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States from the age of eight and identified himself as an American, although he always kept a valid Spanish passport.  At the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently, never to return to the United States.  Santayana is popularly known for aphorisms, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", "Only the dead have seen the end of war", and the definition of beauty as "pleasure objectified"

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1959  September 26, 2018   Thought for Today  "A child educated only at school is an uneducated child." — George Santayana, (died this date in 1952).  https://www.aikenstandard.com/today-in-history-for-sept/article_4d714dfe-bdfc-11e8-b441-bb385356c386.html

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