"Build your defenses strongly enough and they'll
keep everybody out, but they will keep you in as well. ” Everything, a novel by Kevin Canty
October
7, 2017 Kevin Canty is the author of several books,
including the story collections A
Stranger in this World, Honeymoon, and Where the Money Went and the novels Into the Great Wide Open, Everything, Nine Below Zero,
Winslow in Love, and most recently, The Underworld. He is the former Director of Creative Writing
at the University of Montana. Which author do you re-read
most frequently? Weirdly enough, it may be Anthony
Trollope. He has such a sure
sense of the form of the novel, of the way it leads from scene to scene, the
way the threads of plot and ideas converge and separate. And the writing is just bad enough so I’m not
tempted to copy it. Describe your
writing routine. Wake up,
coffee, NY Times online and then to work within an hour of the time I wake
up. I do check my email in the morning
but I don’t engage with or reply to anything. No schoolwork (I teach) until the day’s work
is done. What is your go-to activity
when procrastinating on writing? I
play a lot of guitar. A lot. I don’t let myself touch a guitar until I’m
done writing for the day (see above). At
any rate, my favorite recreation during baseball season is to watch the
Nationals and play my Telecaster. Playing
bad guitar solos is satisfying in a way that writing bad short stories is not. Do you ever listen to music when you write? If so, what’s on your playlist? Dead silence, all the time.
interview
by Matt Borondy Read more at http://www.identitytheory.com/author-interview-kevin-canty-underworld/
American
Association of Retired Persons (AARP) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to address the
needs and interests of middle-aged and elderly people in
the United States. Its membership is open to all persons age 50
or older, whether working or retired.
The AARP was founded in 1958 by a retired teacher, Ethel Percy
Andrus, with the goal of helping older Americans remain physically and
intellectually active by serving others.
In 1982 the AARP merged with the National Retired Teachers Association
(NRTA), an organization that Andrus had founded in 1947 to obtain pension
and health
insurance benefits for retired educators. The AARP offers a broad range of services and
benefits to its members. Among these are
a group health insurance program; special discounts on automobile rental,
airline, and hotel rates; automotive insurance; a credit union; and pharmacy
and travel services. The AARP issues
video programs and printed materials on various health topics and on other
aging-related issues. It publishes a
bimonthly magazine, Modern Maturity, as
well as the monthly AARP Bulletin. Most of the community service and other programs
through the local chapters of the AARP. The AARP’s board of directors serve on
a voluntary basis and are elected at a biennial convention. The steadily rising proportion of elderly in
the American population had given the AARP a membership of more than 30 million
by the late 20th century. This large
membership, coupled with the higher voting rates of elderly Americans, helped
make the AARP one of the most powerful advocacy groups in American politics https://www.britannica.com/topic/American-Association-of-Retired-Persons
AARP is considered a
powerful lobbying group as well as a successful business, selling life and
health insurance, investment products, and other financial and non-financial
services. It is also an independent publisher.
AARP produces roughly $1.5 billion in revenue annual from a variety of
endeavors, including advertising revenue from its publications, and from
royalties for licensing its name and logo, membership fees—its biggest source
of revenue by far. It is registered as a 501(c)(4) non-profit by
the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which means it is permitted to engage in
lobbying. It also administers some
501(c)(3) public charity operations. Some of its operations are also
for-profit. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/aarp.asp
Westsylvania
was an unsuccessful attempt to create a 14th state during the Revolutionary
War period, the successor to several previous attempts to
establish governments in the western mountains. Much of the history of trans-Allegheny
Virginia (now West Virginia) was influenced by competition for control of the
huge expanses of land which had been awarded to speculators. The situation was complicated by grants of the
same land to groups of investors and then further complicated by ‘‘squatters’’
who moved into Western Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and Ohio, made
improvements on the land, and then attempted to file legitimate claims on their
farms. In the 1770s, a large group of
investors had tried to establish control over the region by promoting the
formation of a new colony, Vandalia. That effort failed because Pennsylvania and
Virginia disputed ownership of much of the region and because of the growing
rift between the colonists and England, which led to the Revolutionary War. A new effort to achieve the same goal was put
forth in the summer of 1776 when the Continental Congress was asked to approve
the creation of Westsylvania as a new commonwealth, a step toward the creation
of a 14th state. The proposed state
would have included all of trans-Allegheny Virginia and substantial parts of
western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. According
to historian Otis K. Rice, prime movers in the scheme were likely Benjamin
Franklin, George Morgan, and Samuel and Thomas Wharton. While such investors were politically
powerful, they were opposed by equally powerful interests, and once again
conflicting claims from Virginia and Pennsylvania doomed the proposal. Kenneth R. Bailey
Tattersall Distilling, near downtown Minneapolis, has earned a national
reputation over the last few years for its award-winning gins, bitters and
liqueurs. Soon, it may also be known for
its plague water. An alcoholic
concoction of angelica root, gentian and about a dozen other herbs, plague
water was popular among medieval apothecaries as a tonic to ward off a variety
of diseases. Centuries later, it is one
of eight forgotten spirits that Tattersall has resurrected in collaboration with the University of Minnesota and
the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The company
will introduce the spirits including tastings, cocktails and food pairings, and
offer at least one of them for sale in summer 2019. Tattersall’s project draws on the vast
holdings of the Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine at
the University of Minnesota, one of the nation’s premier collections of
medieval and early modern medical texts. Among its 72,000 volumes, some dating back to
1430, are hundreds of books detailing the curative properties of roots, weeds,
seeds, metals and even animal parts like skins and horn. Medieval medicine was largely about mixing
and matching those ingredients for their curative properties, said Amy Stewart,
the author of “The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great
Drinks.” As distilling
technology spread into Europe from the Middle East, apothecaries realized they
could use high-proof alcohol to make those potions last longer. “Herbs were the only medicine you had—there
were no pills,” Ms. Stewart said. “But
plants are ephemeral and seasonal, so you’d put them in alcohol to have
something shelf-stable.” Over time,
roughly standard recipes emerged, with names that evoke a Hogwartsian blend of
early herbology and outright alchemy: aqua mirabilis, water of flowers, saffron
bitters, aqua vitae. The Wangensteen
library is full of recipe books for those, too.
Not everything in these preparations turned out to be good for what ails
you, said Emily Beck, an assistant curator at the library—mercury was a
not-uncommon ingredient. But many of the
recipes were probably at least partly effective. “Through trial and error, they learned which
ingredients were good for you,” she said.
Eventually people combined those spirits, often bitter and herbal, with
sugar and other mixers to create shrubs, punches and, of course, cocktails. As they did, and as distilling became an
industrial enterprise, hundreds of once-common recipes disappeared. “A lot of amazing spirits went by the
wayside,” Mr. Kreidler said. Clay Risen Read
more and see many pictures at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/dining/drinks/medieval-drinks-alcohol.html Thank you, Muse reader!
André George Previn (Andreas Ludwig Prewin), pianist,
conductor and composer, born 6 April 1929; died 28 February 2019 Previn’s
first publicly performed composition was a water ballet in the 1948 Esther
Williams musical On An Island With You. His first full score was for a bizarre
combination of stars--the dog Lassie and the soprano Jeanette MacDonald--in the
film The Sun Comes Up (1949). David Patrick Stearns Read lengthy
article and link to videos at https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/28/andre-previn-obituary
"Dr. Seuss' Horse Museum" will be released on September 3, 2019, with a first
printing of 250,000 copies. The original
manuscript was discovered in the home of the late author, whose real name was
Theodor Seuss Geisel. The book is about
a friendly horse who takes a group of students on a tour of an art museum. "Artists and non-artists alike will
appreciate the timeless theme in Dr. Seuss' Horse Museum that there is no one
right way to interpret the beauty we encounter every day," the press
release says. The unfinished manuscript has since been finished by
acclaimed illustrator Andrew Joyner, who took inspiration from Seuss' original
sketches to complete the book. The
illustrations accompany photographic reproductions of famous horse artwork by
Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock and many other artists. Dr. Seuss characters from other stories—including
the Cat in the Hat, the Grinch and Horton the Elephant—also make cameos
throughout. Sophie Lewis https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dr-seuss-book-to-be-released-fall-2019-28-years-after-his-death-random-house-childrens-books-2019-02-28/
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2054
March 1, 2019 March 1, the 60th
day of the year, is Beer Day in
Iceland and National Pig Day in
the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1
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