Decommissioned in 1985, Route 66
remains a pop culture icon of titanic proportions.
The lure of the open road draws travelers from around the planet, and
road trip adventures have been popularized in film, fiction, television, and
song. And despite a return to its origins as a hodgepodge of secondary highways and local
routes, a trip down memory lane is still possible for anyone willing to spend
the time mapping out directions.
“Although it is no longer an official U.S. highway,” says Amy Webb, a
senior field director with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, “in
many of the smaller towns, Route 66 is still the biggest economic
generator.” As such, the National Trust
is partnering with Route 66 business owners and enthusiasts, nonprofit
organizations, and state and federal agencies to invigorate this long stretch
of Americana.
Read article by Dennis Hockman and see pictures at https://savingplaces.org/stories/traveling-route-66-reflections-from-one-of-the-worlds-most-fabled-stretches-of-blacktop#.XFofvVVKiUk
"A library is a focal point, a sacred place to a community; and its
sacredness is its accessibility, its publicness. It’s everybody’s place." "Knowledge sets us free, art sets us
free. A great library is
freedom." American writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/11/06/ursula-k-le-guin-libraries/
The End
of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor
Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American
economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995 by Putnam
Publishing Group. In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide
unemployment would increase as information technology
eliminated tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural
and service sectors. He predicted devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees. While a small elite of corporate managers
and knowledge workers would
reap the benefits of the high-tech world economy, the American middle class would
continue to shrink and the workplace become ever more stressful. As the market economy and public sector decline, Rifkin predicted
the growth of a third sector—voluntary
and community-based service organizations—that would create new jobs with
government support to rebuild decaying neighborhoods and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he advocated
scaling down the military budget,
enacting a value added tax on
nonessential goods and services and
redirecting federal and state funds to provide a
"social wage" in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector
workers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work Thank you, Muse reader!
When Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in
1919 in the town of Weimar, by bringing together existing institutions--the old
Academy of Fine Arts and a more recently established School of Applied Arts--he
proclaimed: "Let us conceive,
consider and create together the new building of the future that will bring all
into one simple integrated creation:
architecture, painting and sculpture rising to heaven out of the hand of
a million craftsmen, the crystal symbol of the new faith of the
future." From the beginning the
Bauhaus--which literally means construction house--sought to unify art and
craft, both by bringing these disciplines together (literally) under one roof
and in the nature of the curriculum that was taught. Among the most influential teachers in the
early years of the Bauhaus was Johannes Itten, the expressionist painter, who
led a preliminary course for all students exploring colour, formal
experimentation and the transcendental possibilities of abstraction, which he
saw as connecting to inner mental states.
After this preliminary course, which was at various times taught by such
luminaries as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Josef
Albers, students would graduate to more specialised studies, such as
weaving, metalwork, pottery and cabinet making.
Over the following years, a student at the Bauhaus might encounter
Marcel Breuer leading the cabinet-making department and developing those
radical and iconic furniture designs, Gunta Stölzl revolutionising the art of
textile design and production through abstraction and unorthodox materials,
metalworking with teachers such as Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt producing
designs that would readily translate to mass-production, and Kandinsky and Klee
exploring new ways to consider form. Although the Bauhaus lasted little more than a decade,
a simple measure of its significance is that no school of architecture or
design can legitimately claim not to have been influenced by it in some way. Read more and see many graphics at
"You
have to understand, Detroit is a huge city. Not in terms of population—not anymore, at
least—but it's 140
square miles in area.
You could fit Boston and San Francisco inside the city
borders, and still have room left over for Manhattan." Let it
Burn, #10 in the Alex McKnight series of novels by Steve Hamilton
One of the telltale signs of spring
in New York is the annual arrival of Rare
Book Week,
going on through March 12, 2019. Besides
the various pearls for sale among the well-stocked stacks at the three book and
ephemera fairs, holding court around Manhattan are a slew of shows and exhibitions dedicated
to celebrating the people and things of the book world. One that serious bibliophiles should not miss
is the Grolier Club’s exhibition of Pat Pistner’s miniature bindings and books,
now on view in the second floor gallery. The 275-item installation--a
misleading number, given that some items, like the 42-volume set of Sherlock
Holmes mysteries is counted as one piece--spans the history of texts written on
a diminutive scale. A miniature
Babylonian cuneiform tablet accounting “plucked” sheep dating from
approximately 2340 BCE shares space with sumptuous illuminated Books of Hours
and contemporary artists’ books by Timothy Ely and Nancy Gifford. From an archive that currently includes 4,000
items, the Naples, Florida-based bibliophile whittled down her selections to
those she said best represented the considerable historical scope of her
collection. Barbara Basbanes Richter See graphics at https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine_books_blog/2019/03/miniature-books-on-display-at-grolier-club-put-on-a-mighty-show.phtml
March 7, 2019 Two and a half years into her 10-year term, Carla D. Hayden is making good on her
promise to throw open the doors of America’s “palace of knowledge” and
invite ordinary citizens to join scholars in exploring its treasures. The former head of Baltimore’s public library
system and an Obama nominee, Hayden is focused on making the Library of
Congress a cultural destination—a museum of American letters that will inspire,
educate and, yes, even entertain.
“People don’t know that the Library of Congress has something for them,”
said Hayden, who became the 14th librarian of Congress in 2016. “We built a palace to knowledge and we wanted
it to rival any palace in any European city.
[But] you have to let people come in and . . . be inspired. That’s what it
was designed for.” Central to Hayden’s goals is a $60 million
makeover of the library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, the historic 1897
architectural wonder known for its Great Hall, which is open to the public, and
the Main Reading Room, the hushed temple where scholars work. “Whatever you want to call yourself, you’re
trying to tell stories, share the collection, help them to understand the
place,” said David Mandel, the library’s director of the Center for Exhibits
and Interpretation. “The library has a
long history of doing exhibitions. This
is trying to do it in a more modern way.”
The changes to the Jefferson Building are intended to attract more
visitors, a Hayden priority. The library
had 1.9 million visitors in 2017, up from 1.6 in 2013. “It isn’t an ivory tower only for select
people. It’s the people’s library,” said
historian and author A. Scott Berg, who is doing research at the library for
his next book. “They are sitting on
hundreds of thousands of amazing objects.
It’s part of [Hayden’s] desire and mission to share that with the
American public.” Peggy McGlone Read more and see many pictures at https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/the-library-of-congress-wants-to-attract-more-visitors-will-that-compromise-its-scholarly-mission/2019/03/07/582d590e-1a90-11e9-8813-cb9dec761e73_story.html?utm_term=.a34db06c0a3a
State legislatures from New England to the West Coast
are considering proposals to end the
leaping, clock-shifting confusion of hours lost or gained, and the conundrums
it can create. “I cannot change the
rotation of the earth and sun,” said Kansen Chu, a California lawmaker who is
sponsoring a bill to keep the state permanently on daylight time — one of at
least 31 states that are addressing some aspect of daylight saving and its
discontents. “But I am hoping to get
more sunlight to the people of California.”
The California proposal, and a similar
bill passed by the Florida Legislature last year, would require an act of
Congress to take effect. When New
York City, having tasted daylight saving as a temporary measure during World
War I, decided to keep it in peacetime, retailers found that people shopped and
spent more on their way home from work when there was more evening light, and
Wall Street investors liked gaining an hour of overlap with trading on the
London financial markets. Supporters
also argued that nudging the clock forward to have more of a summer’s daylight
fall in the evening would save energy by reducing the need for artificial light. Kirk Johnson
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/us/daylight-savings-time.html
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY I refuse to answer that
question on the grounds that I don't know the answer. - Douglas Adams, author
(11 Mar 1952-2001)
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2060
March 11, 2019
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