In the early evening of December 26, 1941, Secret Service agent Harry E. Neal stood alone on the platform at Washington’s Union Station and watched the train disappear into the darkness.  Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish had orchestrated the transfer to Fort Knox of  “the documentary history of freedom in our world.”  In the dry language of a shipping manifest they were described this way:

• Case 1:  Gutenberg Bible (St. Blasius– St. Paul copy), 3 volumes
• Case 2:  Articles of Confederation (original engrossed and signed copy), 1 roll
• Case 3:  Magna Carta (Lincoln Cathedral copy), one parchment leaf in frame; Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (original, autographed copy, 1 volume); Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (first and second autographed drafts, 1 volume)
• Case 4:  Constitution of the United States (original, engrossed and signed copy, five leaves); Declaration of Independence (original, engrossed and signed copy, 1 leaf)  It was the beginning of the largest single relocation of priceless documents, books, and artifacts in American history.  In 1952, following a Congressional act, the original Declaration and Constitution were transferred to the National Archives, where they remain on display today.  Stephen Puleo  https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/world-war-two-protect-national-archives-214257



proleptic (comparative more proleptic, superlative most proleptic)

Of a calendar, extrapolated to dates prior to its first adoption; of those used to adjust to or from the Julian calendar or Gregorian calendar.  Of an event, assigned a date that is too early.  (rhetoric)  Anticipating and answering objections before they have been raised; procataleptic.  See quotations at using proleptic and proleptically at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proleptic



Thursday Next is a literary detective who goes inside books in her futuristic time-travel world.  See list of titles in the series at https://www.goodreads.com/series/43680-thursday-next   Characters in Thursday's world include Harris Tweed, Lola Vavoom, Akrid Snell, Brik Schitt-Hawse, Landen Parke-Laine, Mycroft Next, Victor Analogy, Diana Thuntress, Tiffany Lampe and Millon de Floss.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_in_the_Thursday_Next_series  Croquet is the national sport, and there is a 30,000 seat stadium to watch the action.  Words from Thursday's world:  litjoy, bookjump, jurisfiction, fiction frenzies, booksploring 



The Mill on the Floss is a novel by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), first published in three volumes in 1860 by William Blackwood.  The first American edition was published by Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York.  The story was adapted as a film, The Mill on the Floss, in 1937, and as a BBC series in 1978 starring Christopher Blake, Pippa Guard, Judy Cornwell, Ray Smith and Anton Lesser.  A single-episode television adaptation of the novel first was aired on 1 January 1997.  Maggie Tulliver is portrayed by Emily Watson and Mr Tulliver by Bernard Hill.  In 1994, Helen Edmundson adapted the play for the stage, in a production performed by Shared Experience.  A radio dramatisation in five one-hour parts was broadcast on BBC7 in 2009.  In the Kiran Rao and Aamir Khan film Delhi Belly, one of the main protagonists (Nitin played by Kunal Roy Kapoor) makes a sarcastic reference to "Mill on the floss" when he finds his friends in completely different appearances and surreal whimsical situations.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mill_on_the_Floss 



Lidia Bastianich was born Lidia Giuliana Matticchio on February 21, 1947, in Pula, Istria, when the city was still part of Italy, before it was assigned to Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (which is now Croatia).  She is the daughter of Erminia (née Pavichievaz, the daughter of Rosaria Smilovich) and Vittorio Matticchio (the son of Antonio Motika and Francesca Lovrecich).  Her family lived nine years under Marshal Tito's Communist regime in Yugoslavia, during which time the government changed her family name Matticchio back to Motika.  In 1956 Lidia's father Vittorio sent his wife and their two children to visit relatives in Trieste, Italy, while he remained in Istria to comply with the government's mandate that one member of a family remain in Yugoslavia to ensure that the rest would return.  About two weeks later, Vittorio himself left Yugoslavia at night and crossed the border into Italy.  Their departure was part of the larger Istrian exodus.  The Matticchio family reunited in Trieste, Italy,  joining other families who had claimed political asylum from Communist Yugoslavia starting in 1947, many of whom remained in refugee camps throughout Italy for years.  For the Matticchio family, the Risiera di San Sabba camp was one that had been an abandoned rice factory in Trieste that had been converted to a Nazi concentration camp during World War II and partially destroyed towards the end of the war, the Risiera di San Sabba.  According to Bastianich in a Public Television documentary, although a wealthy Triestine family hired her mother as a cook–housekeeper and her father as a limousine driver, they remained residents of the refugee camp.  Two years later, their displaced persons application was granted to emigrate to the U.S.  In 1958, the Matticchio family reached New York City.  The 12-year-old Lidia and her family moved to North Bergen, New Jersey, and later Queens, New York.  Bastianich gives credit for the family's new roots in America to their sponsor, Catholic Relief Services:  The Catholic Relief Services brought us here to New York; we had no one.  They found a home for us.  They found a job for my father.  And ultimately, we settled.  And I am the perfect example that if you give somebody a chance, especially here in the United States, one can find the way.  Bastianich started working part-time when she was 14 (the legal age for a work permit), during which time she briefly worked at the Astoria bakery owned by Christopher Walken's father.  After graduating from high school, she began to work full-time at a pizzeria on the upper west side of Manhattan.  At her sweet sixteen birthday party, she was introduced to her future husband, Felice "Felix" Bastianich, a fellow Istrian immigrant and restaurant worker from Labin (Albona), on the eastern coast of Istria, Croatia. The couple married in 1966 and Lidia gave birth to their son, Joseph, in 1968.  Their second child, Tanya, was born in 1972.  In 1971, the Bastianiches opened their first restaurant, the tiny Buonavia, meaning "good road", in the Forest Hills section of Queens, with Bastianich as its hostess.  They created their restaurant's menu by copying recipes from the most popular and successful Italian restaurants of the day, and they hired the best Italian-American chef that they could find.  After a brief break to deliver her second child Tanya, in 1972 Bastianich began training as the assistant chef at Buonavia, gradually learning enough to cook popular   Italian dishes on her own, after which the couple began adding traditional Istrian dishes to their menu.  The success of Buonavia led to the opening of the second restaurant in Queens, Villa Secondo.  It was here that Bastianich gained the attention of local food critics and started to give live cooking demonstrations, a prelude to her future career as a television cooking show hostess.  In 1981, Bastianich's father died, and the family sold their two Queens restaurants and purchased a small Manhattan brownstone containing a pre-existing restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan near the 59th Street Bridge to Queens.  They converted it into what would eventually become their flagship restaurant, Felidia (a contraction of "Felice" and "Lidia").  After liquidating nearly every asset they had to cover $750,000 worth of renovations, Felidia finally opened to near-universal acclaim from their loyal following of food critics, including The New York Times, which gave Felidia three stars.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidia_Bastianich  Lidia and Felice Bastianich married in 1966 and divorced in 1997.



How Julia Child Talked Lidia Bastianich Into Hosting Her Own Cooking Show by Michael Burgi   Julia Child and I, we became friends.  She wanted me to teach her how to make risotto.  So she came over to the house, and we developed a friendship through food.  And she asked me to come on her show [in 1993].  We did two [episodes] and, you know, I was very comfortable because by then I had got to know her.  And it was nominated for an Emmy.  The producer came and said, "Lidia, you're pretty good.  How about a show of your own?"  And so Julia encouraged me:  "You do for Italian food what I did for French."  And that's how I began.  https://www.adweek.com/tv-video/how-julia-child-talked-lidia-bastianich-hosting-her-own-cooking-show-174519/  Lidia's mother, Erminia Motika/Mattiocchi was 96 in 2016. 



North Carolina-based architect Phil Freelon died July 9, 2019.   

Freelon, 66, had been diagnosed with ALS in March 2016, just prior to the debut of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, a signature project he helped design in partnership with Adjaye Associates, Davis Brody Bond, SmithGroupJJR, and Perkins + Will.  Freelon was a graduate of North Carolina State University's College of Design, where he earned a Bachelor of Environmental Design in Architecture; He earned his Master of Architecture degree from MIT.  He founded The Freelon Group in 1990, a practice that took on many culturally and architecturally significant projects, including the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Emancipation Park in Houston, and the MoTown Museum in Memphis.  The Freelon Group was acquired by Perkins + Will in 2014, and Freelon was made managing director of the firm's Durham and Charlotte offices.  In 2016, Harvard's GSD announced the establishment of the Philip Freelon Fellowship Fund designed to "provide expanded academic opportunities to African American and other underrepresented architecture and design students at the GSD."  Antonio Pacheco  https://archinect.com/news/article/150145240/architect-phil-freelon-has-passed-away

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY  Life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements. - Alice Munro, short-story writer and Nobel Prize winner (b. 10 Jul 1931)



http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2122  July 10, 2019