The Library of
Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves
the United States
Congress and is the de facto national library of the
United States. It is the oldest federal
cultural institution in the United States.
The Library is housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.; it also maintains the National
Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia.
The Library's functions are overseen by the Librarian of Congress,
and its buildings are maintained by the Architect of the
Capitol. The Library of
Congress has claims to be the largest library
in the world. Its "collections are universal, not limited
by subject, format, or national boundary, and include research materials from
all parts of the world and in more than 450 languages." The Library of Congress moved to Washington
in 1800 after sitting for 11 years in the temporary national capitals in New York City and Philadelphia.
The small Congressional Library was housed in the United States Capitol for
most of the 19th century until the early 1890s.
Most of the original collection had been destroyed by the British in
1814 during the War of 1812, and the
library sought to restore its collection in 1815. They bought Thomas Jefferson's entire personal collection
of 6,487 books. After a period of slow
growth, another fire struck the Library in its Capitol chambers in 1851, again
destroying a large amount of the collection, including many of Jefferson's
books. After the American Civil War,
the Library of Congress grew rapidly in both size and importance, which sparked
a campaign to purchase replacement copies for volumes that had been
burned. The Library received the right
of transference of all copyrighted works to deposit two copies of books, maps,
illustrations, and diagrams printed in the United States. It also began to build its collections, and
its development culminated between 1888 and 1894 with the construction of a
separate, extensive library building across the street from the Capitol. The Library's primary mission is to research
inquiries made by members of Congress, carried out through the Congressional
Research Service. The Library is open to the public, although only
high-ranking government officials and Library employees may check out books and
materials. The
Library's Capitol Hill buildings are all connected by underground passageways,
so that a library user need pass through security only once in a single
visit. The library also has off-site
storage facilities for less commonly requested materials. Thomas
Jefferson Building is located between Independence Avenue and
East Capitol Street on First Street SE.
It first opened in 1897 as the main building of the Library and is the
oldest of the three buildings. Known
originally as the Library of Congress Building or Main Building, it took its
present name on June 13, 1980. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress See a timeline of Library of Congress history
https://www.loc.gov/about/history-of-the-library/timeline/ See how to use the Library of Congress in
person or online: https://www.loc.gov/
The Law
Library of Congress is the law library of
the United States
Congress. The library contains the complete record
of American law as well as materials from over 240 other global
legal jurisdictions. Established in
1832, its collections are currently housed in the James
Madison Memorial Building of
the Library of Congress. With over 2.8
million volumes, it is the largest law library in the world. The
public may use the collection but may not borrow materials.
In 1923, the nation had a new president in Calvin
Coolidge, and Washington, DC welcomed
a new luxury residential building: The
Jefferson Apartment, a Beaux Arts design by Jules Henri de Sibour that was the
address of choice for savvy Washingtonians.
1955 saw the apartment’s conversion into a historic Washington, DC
hotel, and The Jefferson was born. In
August 2009, The Jefferson re-emerged as Washington, DC’s finest small historic
hotel. The top-to-bottom renovation included:
Upgrades to all 99 guestrooms, the common areas, meeting space, and
restaurants; addition of two specialty suites; discovery of a magnificent 1923
skylight in the lobby--covered for decades, it now allows natural light to
stream into The Greenhouse; antiques, period artifacts, documents signed by
Thomas Jefferson and historic vintage books once again grace the guest rooms
and suites and public spaces. https://www.jeffersondc.com/history-of-the-jefferson/
It was the 1930s, the era of the
Great Depression, a
time when America was facing hopelessness and desperation as the prospects of
war slowly grew to a boiling point over in Europe. And, amidst all that, the automatic
transmission was born. First brought to
market by General Motors and popularized by the Hydra-Matic and its successors, automatic transmissions
differed from their manual counterparts through the addition of a
self-sufficient hydraulic fluid-based automatic shifting system, allowing cars
to shift gears without driver input, versus the classic manual or stick shift
system. Car transmissions are
pretty complicated when you get down to the molecular level, but
superficially, it’s simple stuff.
Fuel and air go into the engine, things go boom, and the energy
generated by the combustion travels through the input shaft into a metal case
filled with differently-sized gears.
The torque from the input shaft
is translated into power through the gears that the transmission currently has
engaged, out through the output shaft and into the rest of the car, depending
on how it’s built. But not all
transmissions are made equal. Some have
clutches, others have torque converters.
There are three major
transmissions: the automatic, the
manual, and the continuously variable transmission. Read more at https://gearstar.com/blog/details/manual-vs-automatic-transmissions-auto-industrys-greatest-rivalry/969/
'The Theatre of the Absurd' is a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin for the
work of a number of playwrights, mostly written in the 1950s and 1960s. The term is derived from an essay by the
French philosopher Albert Camus. In his
'Myth of Sisyphus', written in 1942, he first defined the human situation as
basically meaningless and absurd. The
origins of the Theatre of the Absurd are rooted in the avant-garde experiments
in art of the 1920s and 1930s. At the
same time, it was undoubtedly strongly influenced by the traumatic experience
of the horrors of the Second World War, which showed the total impermanence of
any values, shook the validity of any conventions and highlighted the
precariousness of human life and its fundamental meaninglessness and
arbitrariness. The Theatre of the Absurd
openly rebelled against conventional theatre.
Indeed, it was anti-theatre. It
was surreal, illogical, conflictless and plotless. The dialogue seemed total gobbledygook. Not unexpectedly, the Theatre of the Absurd
first met with incomprehension and rejection.
Absurd drama uses conventionalised speech, clichés, slogans and
technical jargon, which is distorts, parodies and breaks down. Objects are much more important than language
in absurd theatre what happens
transcends what is being said about it. It is the hidden, implied meaning of words
that assume primary importance in absurd theatre. Absurd drama subverts logic. It relishes the unexpected and the logically
impossible. There is no dramatic
conflict in the absurd plays. Dramatic
conflicts, clashes of personalities and powers belong to a world where a rigid,
accepted hierarchy of values forms a permanent establishment. The Absurd Theatre is a theatre of situation,
as against the more conventional theatre of sequential events. It presents a pattern of poetic images. In doing this, it uses visual elements,
movement, light. Unlike conventional
theatre, where language rules supreme, in the Absurd Theatre language is only
one of many components of its multidimensional poetic imagery. The Theatre of the Absurd is totally lyrical
theatre which uses abstract scenic effects, many of which have been taken over
and modified from the popular theatre arts:
mime, ballet, acrobatics, conjuring, music-hall clowning. Much of its inspiration comes from silent
film and comedy, as well as the tradition of verbal nonsense in early sound
film (Laurel and Hardy, W C Fields, the Marx Brothers). It owes a debt to European pre-war
surrealism: its literary influences include the work of Franz Kafka. The Theatre of the Absurd is aiming to create
a ritual-like, mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related to
the world of dreams. Read more at https://blisty.cz/video/Slavonic/Absurd.htm
Frank Robinson,
barrier-breaking Hall of Fame baseball player and manager, dies at 83 by Matt
Crossman Decades before Frank Robinson became the
Washington Nationals’ first manager in 2005, he had already had one of the most
distinguished and trailblazing careers in baseball history. He was the first—and still the only—player to
win the MVP award in both the National and American leagues, and in 1975 he
became major league baseball’s first African American manager. He died February 7, 2019 at his home in
the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. Mr. Robinson burst into the national
consciousness during his first season with the Cincinnati Reds in 1956, winning
the NL’s Rookie of the Year Award. In
1961, he led the Reds to the World Series and won his first MVP award. Mr. Robinson’s big league debut coincided
with the final season of another celebrated Robinson—the Brooklyn Dodgers’
Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 became the first black major league player in
modern times. Read more and see pictures
at https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/frank-robinson-barrier-breaking-hall-of-fame-baseball-player-and-manager-dies-at-83/2019/02/07/06a258ee-20d2-11e9-8e21-59a09ff1e2a1_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0edd35ce60b4
Rosamunde Pilcher, writer, born 22
September 1924; died 6 February 2019 In 1988 the
14th novel by a little-known 63-year-old British author was published in New
York. The Shell Seekers, the 500-page
story of a woman, Penelope Keeling, looking back on her life and loves during
the second world war, took the US by storm. From
the start she was a pro. Her first eight
novels under the pseudonym Jane Fraser each “had five cliff-hangers for a
six-part magazine serial” and were published by Mills & Boon. Her breakthrough came when a young American
editor with St Martin’s Press, Tom Dunne, recognised her sparkling prose
and pitch-perfect dialogue and launched her books in the US. Visiting her in Scotland, Tom suggested an altogether
bolder, “door-stopper” novel that would include her wartime experiences.
Together they mapped out the plot of The Shell Seekers. It took two years to write. Pilcher’s British editor, Sue Fletcher, said: “She attributed its success to her theory that
it gave her readers permission sometimes to dislike their children without ever
ceasing to love them.” Felicity
Bryan Read more and see many graphics at
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/07/rosamunde-pilcher-obituary
A THOUGHT FOR
TODAY In order that people may be happy in their
work, these three things are needed: they
must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense
of success in it. - John Ruskin, author, art critic, and social reformer (8 Feb
1819-1900)
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2039
February 8, 2019
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