Thursday, March 7, 2019


The small village of Hayesville (pop. 400) in Ashland County, Ohio  has experienced several recent preservation projects, including two which have utilized historic tax credits.  Hayesville was the onetime home to Vermillion Institute, a college founded in 1843, which, for a brief period before the Civil War, grew to become one of the larger institutions of higher education in the country.  But the Presbyterian-affiliated college moved to Wooster after the Civil War and the 1845 three-story brick Greek Revival style building used as their preparatory school became the Hayesville High School until a new building opened in 1929.  Since then years of abandonment I purchased the property in 2011.  The building was so far gone that only its massive brick walls could be saved, the roof and interiors having to be entirely rebuilt.  This Ohio preservation tax credit-funded project was completed in late 2015.  Its ground floor former chapel is used for community, educational and social events and the upper floors are used as my residence and offices.  Hayesville is also known for its wonderful 1886 opera house at the town center.  Its initial rehabilitation and listing on the National Register was a community project for the nation's Bicentennial.  Other efforts have continued its operation as a theatre for first-run movies. But, recently, with the ending of movie distribution on actual film, a digital projector was needed.  Theatre operator and restoration buff Dave Roepke, who lives nearby in an 1840s-era brick house, undertook fundraising such that the facility was able to reopen.  Steve McQuillin  Read more at https://www.heritageohio.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/RO_Winter_Digital.pdf

box canyon/box-canyon  canyon which has a single access for entrance and exit, being otherwise enclosed on all sides by steep walls  quotations ▼
bothie/bothy  A shelter, usually left unlocked for anyone to use free of charge
bothie  photo or video using split screen format

Brioche is a pastry of French origin that is similar to a highly enriched bread, and whose high egg and butter content give it a rich and tender crumb.  Chef Joël Robuchon describes it as "light and slightly puffy, more or less fine, according to the proportion of butter and eggs."  It has a dark, golden, and flaky crust, frequently accentuated by an egg wash applied after proofing.   Brioche is considered a Viennoiserie, in that it is made in the same basic way as bread, but has the richer aspect of a pastry because of the extra addition of eggs, butter, liquid (milk, water, cream, and, sometimes, brandy) and occasionally a bit of sugar.  Brioche, along with pain au lait and pain aux raisins—which are commonly eaten at breakfast or as a snack—form a leavened subgroup of Viennoiserie.  Brioche is often cooked with fruit or chocolate chips and served on its own, or as the basis of a dessert with many local variations in added ingredients, fillings or toppings.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his autobiography Confessions (published posthumously in 1782, but completed in 1769), relates that "a great princess" is said to have advised, with regard to peasants who had no bread, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", commonly translated inaccurately as "Let them eat cake".  This saying is commonly mis-attributed to Queen Marie-Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI.  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brioche

Homemade hamburger buns are easier to make than you think!  This quick brioche bun recipe takes just one hour from start to finish.  https://kristineskitchenblog.com/brioche-bun-recipe/

upskill  (transitive) To teach (someone) additional skills, especially as an alternative to redundancy  (intransitive) To acquire such additional skills  Related terms:  upskilling, reskill
Upskill  a company building enterprise software for augmented reality devices

Richard Purdy Wilbur (1921-2017) was an American poet, translator, librettist, illustrator and educator.  Wilbur is generally considered to be one of the very best contemporary poets who worked primarily in traditional meters and forms.  His highly polished work is marked by "wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance."  And yet the urbane poet spent two summers as a hobo "riding the rails across Depression-era America" and his early poems were greatly influenced by his experience as a World War II infantryman.  After the war ended, Wilbur took advantage of the G.I. Bill to study English at Harvard, where he became good friends with the poet Robert Frost.  (But Wilbur had been a poet from the get-go, publishing his first poem at age eight, in John Martin's Magazine.  He was even paid a dollar, and thus became a professional or "hired" poet, as he put it during an interview.)  In 1957 he accepted a professorship at Wesleyan University, where he taught for the next twenty years while writing "on the side."  Wilbur's translations of Voltaire, Moliere, Racine and Brodsky have been called either the best, or among the best, in the English language.  His translation of Moliere’s Tartuffe won the 1971 Bollingen Prize, and royalties from his translations would one day allow him to work half-time as a teacher, giving him more time to write.  According to Dana Gioia, "It would be hard to overpraise Wilbur's special genius for translation.  He has no equal among his contemporaries and stands with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ezra Pound, and Robert Fitzgerald as one of the four greatest translators in the history of American poetry."  Such acclaim for his translations led to Wilbur becoming the primary librettist for Leonard Bernstein's 1956 musical version of Voltaire's Candide.  Wilbur provided the lyrics to a number of the show's songs, including "Glitter and Be Gay," which has been performed by singers from Madeline Kahn to Kristin Chenoweth and is still going strong.  Highly regarded by the literary world and by many of his peers, Wilbur was made the second American poet laureate, following Robert Penn Warren, and he was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and 1989.  See samples of Richard Wilbur's poems at http://www.thehypertexts.com/Richard%20Wilbur%20Poet%20Poetry%20Picture%20Bio.htm

"The HyperTexts is an on-line poetry journal with a simple goal:  to showcase the best poetry, literary prose and art available to us.  We are not a "formal" journal or a "free verse" journal; we simply publish the best poetry we can find.  We ask our poets to provide us with their career-defining work (that is, career-defining in their opinion, not someone else's); thus, most of our poems have been published elsewhere.  While other poetry journals seem to quail at the thought of their poems having been read elsewhere, we sincerely doubt that anyone has ever been harmed by reading good poems twice!  Are we making a difference?  Well, not long ago we passed 11 million page views and just recently we noticed that two less-well-known poems that we've been touting for years—"Wulf and Eadwacer" and "The Highwayman"—are now in Google's top 25 for searches like "the most popular poems of all time."  So it's quite possible that we've helped increase readership of two of our most-mentioned poems.  "Tom o' Bedlam's Song," a third poem in Google's top 25, may also be a beneficiary of our labor.  Around twenty years ago we noticed that there was not a single correct version of the poem online; all the versions we found contained serious errors.  To our knowledge, we were the first website to publish this magnificent poem without glaring errors.  We have also been touting the work of outstanding-but-obscure poets like The Archpoet, Thomas Chatterton, Digby Dolben, Anne Reeve Aldrich and Agnes Wathall.  If they get more recognition in the future, our efforts may have helped.  In any case, we're certainly trying!  Furthermore, a number of poems that we've published have "gone viral" in big ways, getting republished hundreds of times or more.  So we do think we're making a difference, by helping poets and readers connect."  Editor in Arrears Michael R. Burch has been published more than 3,000 times in literary journals, websites, blogs and sundry publications around the globe.  His poetry appears at the bottom of the Contemporary Poets section, befitting, he says, his station in life and the arts.  But things have been looking up recently, he says, with his poems having been set to music by three composers and translated into eleven languages.  http://www.thehypertexts.com/About_The_Hypertexts.htm

pandemonium   mass noun  Wild and noisy disorder or confusion; uproar.  Mid 17th century:  modern Latin (denoting the place of all demons, in Milton's Paradise Lost), from pan- ‘all’ + Greek daimōn ‘demon’.  https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/pandemonium  Link to information on uses in literature, film and television, gaming and amusements, technology and science, and music at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemonium

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2058  March 7, 2019

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