"Every language glimmers with sparks of earlier ones . . . Though tiny, the sparks can illuminate a history of invasion, conquest, trade, and the wholesale movement of populations."  "A writing system is a woven fabric, an interlaced network of sounds and symbols."  The Riddle of the Labyrinth:  the Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox

Margalit Fox (born 1961) is an American writer.  She began her career in publishing in the 1980s, before switching to journalism in the 1990s.  She joined the obituary department of The New York Times in 2004, and authored over 1,400 obituaries before her retirement from the paper in 2018.  Fox has written three non-fiction books and plans to pursue book writing full time.  In 2011, The Newswomen's Club of New York awarded Fox its Front Page Award for her collection of work at The New York Times.  In 2014, she won Stanford University's William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her book The Riddle of the Labyrinth:  The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code.  The New York Times also ranked the book as one of the "100 Notable Books of 2013."   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margalit_Fox

Okra is a warm-season vegetable, also known as gumbo or ladies' fingers.  It is a good source of minerals, vitamins, and fiber.  It contains a characteristic viscous juice that can be used to thicken sauces.  Gumbo is popular in the southern United States, parts of Africa and the Middle East, the Caribbean, and South America.  It is considered an important crop in many countries, because of its nutritional value, and because many parts of the plant can be used, including the fresh leaves, buds, flowers, pods, stems, and seeds.  The taste is mild, but it has a unique texture with peach-like fuzz on the outside and small, edible seeds on the inside of the pod.  Megan Ware  https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/311977.php  See also Open Your Mind (And Your Mouth) To Okra (with recipes) by Susan Russo at https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112761034

Okara, soy pulp, or tofu dregs is a pulp consisting of insoluble parts of the soybean that remains after pureed soybeans are filtered in the production of soy milk and tofu.  It is generally white or yellowish in color.  It is part of the traditional cuisines of Japan, Korea, and China.  Since the 20th century, it has been used in the vegetarian cuisines of Western nations.  Okara is the oldest of three basic types of soy fiber.  The other two are soy bran (finely ground soybean hulls) and soy cotyledon/isolate fiber (the fiber that remains after making isolated soy protein, also called "soy protein isolate").  Most okara worldwide is used as feed for livestock—especially hogs and dairy cows.  Most of the rest is used as a natural fertilizer or compost, which is fairly rich in nitrogen.  A small amount is used in cookery.  In Japan it is used in a side dish called unohana which consists of okara cooked with soy sauce, mirin, sliced carrots, burdock root and shiitake mushrooms.  Okara can be used to make tempeh, by fermenting with the fungus Rhizopus oligosporus.  Using a tempeh starter, it can make press cake tempeh using ingredients such as brown rice, bulgur wheat, soybeans and other legume and grain combinations.  The product is sometimes used as an ingredient in vegetarian burger patties.  Additional uses include processing into a granola product, as an ingredient in soysage and as an ingredient in pâtés.  In Japan it is used to make ice cream.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okara_(food)

If you leaf through the pages of one of the tall, puffy black leatherette volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Macropædia (a portmanteau made from the Greek words for “big” and “education), you will find Arthur Koestler’s long essay on “Humour and Wit,” which is the only laugh-out-loud-funny encyclopedia entry anyone is likely to encounter anywhere.  You can’t read the whole thing online, it has been abridged; to see the genuine article, you have to hold the actual book in your hand.  Koestler wrote the essay for the maiden edition of the Macropædia in the 1970s, adapting it from his capacious books Insight and Outlook (1949) and The Act of Creation (1964), which break down the various manifestations of creativity, talent, originality, and genius.  Liesl Schillinger    https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/04/03/what-koestler-knew-about-jokes/  Thank you, Muse reader! 

The Encyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopaedia published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., a privately held company.  The articles in the Britannica are aimed at educated adult readers, and written by a staff of about 100 full-time editors and over 4,000 expert contributors.  It is widely perceived as the most scholarly of encyclopaedias.  The Britannica is the oldest English-language encyclopaedia still in print.  It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland and quickly grew in popularity and size, with its third edition in 1801 reaching over 21 volumes.  Its rising stature helped in recruiting eminent contributors, and the 9th edition (1875–1889) and the 11th edition (1911) are regarded as landmark encyclopaedias for scholarship and literary style.  Beginning with the 11th edition, the Britannica gradually shortened and simplified its articles in order to broaden its North American market.  In 1933, the Britannica became the first encyclopaedia to adopt a "continuous revision" policy, in which the encyclopaedia is continually reprinted and every article is updated on a regular schedule.  The 15th edition has a unique three-part structure:  a 12-volume Micropædia of short articles (generally having fewer than 750 words), a 17-volume Macropædia of long articles (having from two to 310 pages) and a single Propædia volume intended to give a hierarchical outline of human knowledge.  http://oer2go.org/mods/en-wikipedia_for_schools-static/wp/e/Encyclop%25C3%25A6dia_Britannica.htm

Arthur Koestler quotes  “Honor is decency without vanity.”   “The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.”  “The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.”  https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/17219.Arthur_Koestler

ABOUT FIVE THOUSAND YEARS AGO, spoken language had already been in existence for at least fifty thousand years.  Not long afterward, man realized he could set down language in graphic form, using visual symbols to encode speech and store it for later retrieval.  For the first time, people did not have to rely on memory alone.  We call these marvelous storage-and-retrieval systems writing.  One of the foremost inventions in the history of mankind, writing probably developed independently in several places around the same time.  A full symbolic system to record any imaginable text began only with  Sumerian Cuneiform about 3300 B.C.  The hieroglyphs in Egypt arose around the same time.  A writing system is simply a map.  There are three ways in maps representing writing.  The first type in which a symbol stands for a whole word is called logographic or ideographic.  Chinese writing is the best-known example of a logographic script.  In the second type, a symbol stands for a single syllable.  In the third type of writing, symbols stand for individual sounds.  https://serchisbook.com/the-riddle-of-the-labyrinth-by-margalit-fox.html#

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY  Spend the afternoon.  You can't take it with you. - Annie Dillard, author (b. 30 Apr 1945)

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s novel “Call Me Zebra” has won the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.  The book, Van der Vliet Oloomi’s second, is an offbeat, deadpan funny account of the travels of a young Iranian woman, the last in a long line of “autodidacts, anarchists and atheists,” who believe they are the “guardians of the archive of literature.”  The main character takes her legacy seriously, and she reads—and rereads and memorizes—as many books as she can while retracing the journey she took with her father decades earlier when they fled to the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war by way of Kurdistan and Catalonia.  Van der Vliet Oloomi will be awarded the $15,000 prize during the PEN/Faulkner Awards ceremony May 4, 2019 at D.C.’s Arena Stage. (Washington Post critic Ron Charles will be master of ceremonies.)  The four finalists—Richard Powers, who won the Pulitzer Prize earlier this month for “The Overstory”; Blanche McCrary Boyd (“Tomb of the Unknown Racist”); Ivelisse Rodriguez (“Love War Stories”); and Willy Vlautin (“Don’t Skip Out on Me”)—will receive $5,000, and all five authors will read their new writing.  Tickets for the ceremony are $95 and available online at pfaward19.eventbrite.com.  Stephanie Merry  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/azareen-van-der-vliet-oloomis-call-me-zebra-wins-penfaulkner-award-for-fiction/2019/04/29/c03cc98e-6857-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2664f9e787f6

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2089  April 30, 2019