The Panama Hotel opened in
August of 1910, a five-story brick building of single-occupancy rooms for
laborers built at 605 South Main Street in Seattle’s International District,
which was then known as the city’s nihonmachi—Japan Town (literally translated
to “Japanese street”). Designed by
Seattle’s first architect of Japanese ancestry, Sabro Ozasa, with the intention
of housing Japanese laborers who lived and worked in the area, its ground-level
businesses included a laundry, a tailor, a dentist, a bookstore, a billiards
room, and a sushi restaurant. It also
catered to fisherman en route or returning from Alaska. Ozasa was a graduate of the University of
Washington and built several other commercial buildings in the neighborhood,
such as the local branch of the now-defunct Yokohama
Specie Bank, which was demolished to make way for Hing Hay Park in
1975. The Panama Hotel also provided a
full-service traditional Japanese-style sento or public bathhouse, which is
still intact in the building’s basement to this day—and is the only surviving
such bathhouse in the United States.
Because most homes didn’t have private bathing facilities, the
Hashidate-Yu, as this sento was named, provided an important resource for
families in the area, with a separate bath for men and another for women and
children. It also served as a place for
social gatherings—a kind of community center.
The sento is unusually well preserved today, to a high degree of
integrity. Takashi Hori was the owner of
the Panama Hotel in 1942, when, just months after Pearl Harbor was bombed, some
120,000 of the West Coast’s Japanese and Japanese-American residents were given
weeks or sometimes days to pack before they were sent to internment camps, per
President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066.
Limits were severe on what they were allowed to take with them. As Seattle’s Nikkei—immigrants from
Japan and their descendants—were forced to leave their entire lives behind,
many approached Hori and asked if they could keep their important possessions
in the basement of his hotel, and he agreed.
Soon, the space was filled with these people’s steamer trunks. Hori
himself was incarcerated later the same year at the Minidoka
Relocation Center in Idaho until the war ended in 1945, when he returned to
Seattle to continue operating his hotel—with more than 50 trunks still stored
in the basement. (An acquaintance of
Hori’s had kept an eye on the property in his absence.) Some Nikkei came back for their
belongings. Others never did. Hori made several attempts to try to locate
their owners, to varying degrees of success.
The building was designated a National
Historic Landmark in 2006 and declared a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a distinction
that only 60 sites in the United States can boast. Read more and see pictures at https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/4/30/17303288/panama-hotel-seattle-history-preservation See also 5 facts
about Seattle's Panama Hotel by Michelle Li at https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/5-facts-about-seattles-panama-hotel/281-be201af5-a0d2-42e5-952d-b965ae524f32
Term used in art
conservation: Inherent vice, also known
as inherent fault, is the tendency in an object or material to deteriorate or
self-destruct because of its intrinsic "internal characteristics,"
including weak construction, "poor quality or unstable materials,"
and "incompatibility of different materials" within an object. This weakness or defect may lead to natural
deterioration or make an object more susceptible to external agents of
deterioration. A material may naturally
break down chemically over time, organic materials may be susceptible to pests
and mold, and different materials within an object may have "dissimilar
rates of expansion and contraction" that can lead to damage. https://www.conservation-wiki.com/wiki/Inherent_vice Thank you, Muse reader!
Egg-and-dart is a
repetitive design that today is most often found on molding (e.g., crown
molding) or trim. The pattern is
characterized by a repetition of oval shapes, like an egg split lengthwise,
with various non-curved patterns, like "darts," repeated between the
egg pattern. In three-dimensional
sculpting of wood or stone, the pattern is in bas-relief,
but the pattern can also be found in two-dimensional painting and stencil. The curved and non-curved pattern has been
pleasing to the eye for centuries. It is
often found in ancient Greek and Roman architecture and, so, is considered
a Classical design element. Other Names for Egg and Dart (with and
without hyphens): egg and
anchor, egg and arrow, egg and tongue, and echinus. Jackie Craven
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-egg-and-dart-design-177272
Timothy Irving
Frederick Findley was born in Toronto, Ontario, on October 30, 1930. Findley’s health was poor throughout his
childhood; his attendance and interest in school was erratic, and he did not
finish grade ten. He subsequently studied
dance and then turned to acting. He
joined the original acting ensemble of the Stratford Festival in 1953, where he
met and worked alongside Alec Guinness. He
accepted Guinness’s offer to sponsor his attendance at the Central School of
Speech and Drama in London. In London he
befriended Ruth Gordon and playwright Thornton Wilder while acting in
Wilder’s The Matchmaker in 1954. He published his first short story,
"About Effie," in The Tamarack Review in 1956
(reprinted in Dinner Along the Amazon [1984]), and began to
consider a career in writing under the encouragement of his friends Gordon and
Wilder. Through 1956 he toured North
America and Europe in minor acting roles, and after living in Los Angeles,
California, in 1957, he returned to Canada in 1958. He wrote for the CBC television
adaptation of Mazo de la Roche’s The Whiteoaks of Jalna (1971-72)
and for Pierre Berton’s The National Dream (1974), the
latter for which he won a 1975 ACTRA award for scriptwriting with his
partner William Whitehead. In 1974 he
became the first playwright in residence at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
His first two novels—The Last of the
Crazy People (1967) and The Butterfly Plague (1969)—were
published outside of Canada; his third novel, The Wars (1977),
won the 1977 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. He published eight more novels, three
short-story collections, and two memoirs (not including the posthumous Journeyman [2003]),
in addition to numerous pieces in periodicals. Findley was active in the Canadian writing
community—he helped found the Writers' Union of Canada in 1973 and served as
its chair from 1977 to 1978. He was
president of the English-Canadian chapter of P.E.N. International
(1986-87), and in 2002 the Writer’s Trust of Canada named an award after him
(for male fiction writers in mid-career). He died in Provence on June 20, 2002. In addition to the ACTRA for The
National Dream and Governor General’s Award for The Wars,
Findley won the 1985 CAA Award for Fiction for Not Wanted on
the Voyage (1984), Ontario’s 1988 Trillium Book Award for Stones (1988),
the Mystery Writers of America’s 1989 Edgar award for best paperback original
for The Telling of Lies (1986), the 1991 CAA Award
for Non-fiction for Inside Memory (1990), the 1994 CAA Award
for Drama and 1996 Floyd S. Chalmers Award for The Stillborn
Lover (1993), and the 2000 Governor General’s Award for Drama
for Elizabeth Rex (2000). He was a member of the Order of Ontario
(1991), an officer of the Order of Canada (1986) and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des
Arts et des Lettres (France, 1996). His
name was added to Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2002. Findley is considered a postmodern writer,
because his work tampers with traditionally conceived notions of history and
genre. http://canadian-writers.athabascau.ca/english/writers/tfindley/tfindley.php
Ten lovely Scottish
locations that inspired the settings of well-known novels https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/10-stunning-scottish-literary-locations-from-famous-novels-1-5046201?page=2
Illusion is used as a
noun which means an instance of
a wrong or misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience. The word delusion is
used as a noun which means an idiosyncratic belief or impression maintained despite being contradicted by reality or rational argument, typically as a symptom of mental disorder. https://www.grammar.com/illusion_vs._delusion
31 literary icons of
Greenwich Village posted by Andrew Berman
2019 marks the 50th anniversary of
the designation of the Greenwich Village Historic District. One of Manhattan’s oldest and largest
landmark districts, it’s a treasure trove of history, culture, and
architecture. A few literary lions
mentioned are: James Baldwin, Margaret
Wise Brown, William S. Burroughs, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Khalil Gibran,
Edgar Allan Poe and Maurice Sendak. See pictures and link to: 17 legendary musicians who called Greenwich Village home,
11 landmarks of immigration in Greenwich Village, and 13 places in Greenwich Village where the course of history was
changed at
December 11, 2019 Portrait of a Lady by Viennese artist Gustav
Klimt was stolen on 22 February 1997 from the Ricci-Oddi modern art gallery in Piacenza,
northern Italy. There seemed little
prospect of the masterpiece, valued at €60m (£50m; $66m), ever being found. That was until a worker clearing ivy from the
wall of the gallery where it was stolen stumbled on a metal panel. Behind it lay a recess, within which was a
black bag containing what appeared to be the missing painting. Checks are still being carried out on the
recovered work, which has been handed to police. But gallery director Massimo Ferrari is
confident the original has been found, because it has the same stamps and
sealing wax on the back of the painting. What was extraordinary about Portrait
of a Lady was that, 10 months before it was stolen, art student Claudia Maga
spotted that it had been painted over another Klimt painting, Portrait of a
Young Lady, which had not been seen since 1912.
She managed to prove her theory by persuading the Piacenza gallery's
former director to have it X-rayed. The
original painting was of a young girl from Vienna who had died. Klimt had
painted over the portrait when the girl died suddenly, to forget the pain of
her death. See pictures at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50743143
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY The
walls of books around me, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation
against the present world and its disasters. - Ross Macdonald, novelist (13 Dec
1915-1983)
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2196
December 13, 2019
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