Monday, October 15, 2018


The October 2018 Edition of The Big Thrill is Here!  In this issue, we kick off a new column, Tales From the Script,” with an interview by April Snellings with the one and only R. L. Stine and how he navigates the film and television world.  Also in this issue are interviews with Steven JamesJ. D. BarkerKyle MillsLisa UngerBrenda NovakWendy TysonE. M. Powell and 30 more.  In “Author Guided Tour,” J. A. Jance shares the lowdown on Arizona’s classic crime spots and in Trend Report,” Dawn Ius investigates whether the marching orders have changed for today’s military thrillers.  Link to Special Features, Interviews and New Releases at http://www.thebigthrill.org/the-big-thrill/current-issue/

Tapioca is a starchy product made from cassava tubers.  These tubers are native to Brazil and much of South America.  Tapioca is available as flour, meal, flakes, and pearls.  Tapioca pearls are commonly used to make tapioca pudding and bubble teas.  Tapioca is also used as a thickener.  Tapioca is almost entirely starchy carbohydrates (carbs).  People who limit their consumption of carbs or who are concerned about how starches impact blood sugar levels may perceive tapioca as unhealthy.  Tapioca is high on the glycemic index scale.  The glycemic index measures how fast blood sugar levels increase after eating.  Tapioca is known for being easy on the stomach.  Many people find it easier to digest than flours made with grains or nuts.  Read more at "11 healthy nutrition facts about tapioca" by Annette McDermott at https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318411.php

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg
zany  (ZAY-nee)  adjective  Amusingly strange, comical, or clownish.  From French zani, from Italian zanni, a nickname for Giovanni.  The term has its origin in the comedy theater commedia dell’arte popular in 16-18th century Italy.  Giovanni, Italian form of the name John, was originally the generic name of the servant, a stock character who tried to mimic his master, himself a clown.  Earliest documented use:  1596
punchinello  (pun-chuh-NEL-o)  noun  A grotesque or absurd person.  From Italian (Naples dialect) polecenella (a short, fat buffoon, principal character in Italian puppet shows), diminutive of pollecena (turkey pullet), ultimately from Latin pullus (young chicken).  From the resemblance of punchinello’s nose to a turkey’s beak.  Earliest documented use:  1662
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From:  Andrew Pressburger  Subject:  Punchinello  Stravinsky composed the one-act ballet Pulcinella, based on a Neapolitan theme, which had antecedents in the commedia dell’arte and may have been earlier attributed to the 18th c. baroque composer Pergolesi.  Stravinsky tried to imitate the style of this earlier period.  His first symphony, better known as the Classical Symphony, was a similar attempt, in which he used the four-movement symphonic form, but filled it with a modern content, based on dissonant chords and atonal harmonies.
From:  Bruce Colbert   Subject:  Punchinello  Does this bring back the children’s song http://www.songsforteaching.com/folk/punchinella.php for anyone?  Took me all the way back to circa 1979 elementary school!

Across New York City, more than 70 restaurants are tossing their oyster shells not into the trash or composting pile, but into the city's eroded harbor.  It's all part of Billion Oyster Project's restaurant shell-collection program.  The journey from trash to treasure begins after an oyster half shell is turned upside down and left on an icy tray.  Once discarded, it joins hundreds of thousands of other half shells collected in blue bins and picked up (free of charge) from restaurants five days a week by Billion Oyster Project's partner, The Lobster Place, a seafood supplier.  The shells are trucked over to Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood and once a month are brought en masse to Governors Island in the heart of the New York Harbor, just yards away from both Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan.  There, rolling shell hills sparkle in the sun while "curing" out in the elements for one year, a process that rids them of contaminants.  The shells then get a final cleaning and are moved to Billion Oyster Project's hatchery at the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, a public high school on Governors Island that offers technical and vocational training in the marine sciences.  In an aquaculture classroom's hatchery, student-grown oysters produce larvae in an artificially induced springtime environment.  In one to two weeks, each larvae grows a "foot"—a little limb covered in a kind of natural glue—and then is moved to a tank full of the "cured" restaurant shells, which serve as anchors for all of those sticky feet.  This phase is critical:  If larvae can't find a place to attach, they die.  One reclaimed shell can house 10 to 20 new live oysters, depending on shell size.  Once the larvae have a foothold, they're now "spat" and ready to begin their metamorphoses.  Andrea Strong  https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/10/10/654781446/oysters-on-the-half-shell-are-actually-saving-new-yorks-eroding-harbor  Thank you, Muse reader!

Ursula K. Le Guin, loved by millions for her fantasy and science-fiction novels, ponders life, death and the vast beyond in “So Far So Good” (Copper Canyon), an astute, charming collection finished weeks before her death in January, 2018.  Fans will recognize some of the motifs here—cats, wind, strong women—as well as her exploration of the intersection between soul and body, the knowable and the unknown.    The writing is clear, artful and reverent as Le Guin looks back at key memories and concerns and looks forward to what is next:  “Spirit, rehearse the journey of the body/ that are to come, the motions/ of the matter that held you.”  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/ursula-k-le-guins-final-poems-and-other-best-collections-to-read-this-month/2018/10/10/46e51c14-c044-11e8-be77-516336a26305_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.72cb2b5c1a70

TWO POEMS BY URSULA K. LE GUINFROM SO FAR SO GOOD, A COLLECTION OF HER FINAL POEMS  https://lithub.com/two-poems-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

Charles White:  A Retrospective  exhibition through January 13, 2019 
10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.  open seven days a week   “Art must be an integral part of the struggle,” Charles White insisted.  “It can’t simply mirror what’s taking place. … It must ally itself with the forces of liberation.”  Over the course of his four-decade career, White’s commitment to creating powerful images of African Americans—what his gallerist and, later, White himself described as “images of dignity”—was unwavering.  Using his virtuoso skills as a draftsman, printmaker, and painter, White developed his style and approach over time to address shifting concerns and new audiences.  https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3930

Arguably a masterpiece by the illustrator Norman Rockwell, “Shuffleton’s Barbershop” (1950), a work he donated to the Norman Rockwell Museum in the Berkshires, was sold privately by the New York auction house Sotheby’s to The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.   While that museum is under construction, the painting is on loan to the Norman Rockwell Museum for 18 months.  Through October 28, 2018  the picture is the centerpiece of a stunning, richly documented, special exhibition Keepers of the Flame:  Parrish, Wyeth, Rockwell and the Narrative Tradition.  This special exhibition includes more than 60 original works by those masters and nearly two dozen other American and European painters.  Maxfield Parrish (July 25, 1870 – March 30, 1966), Newell Convers Wyeth (October 22, 1882 – October 19, 1945), known as N. C. Wyeth, and Norman Perceval Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) were the dominant artists of the golden age of American illustration.  If one picture speaks a thousand words, then the language of these paintings, books, and posters have shaped the American psyche.  Wyeth created over 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books.  Parrish produced almost 900 murals, calendars, greeting cards, and magazine covers.  Rockwell is best known for some 300 covers of Saturday Evening Post.  His “Four Freedoms” a series of 1943 oil paintings, reproduced as posters, were a part of the war effort.  An exhibition and accompanying sales of war bonds raised over $132 million  Charles Giuliano  http://artsfuse.org/171644/visual-arts-commentary-keepers-of-the-flame-the-revenge-of-the-middlebrow/  Read about an unbroken line of pupils and painters and see pictures at https://www.nrm.org/2017/02/parrish-wyeth-rockwell-and-the-narrative-tradition/  Norman Rockwell Museum  9 Glendale Rd, Stockbridge, MA 01262   (413) 298-4100  hours:  10 a.m.-5 p.m.  seven days a week

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1969  October 15, 2018 

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