The Colosseum is the biggest amphitheater ever built in the world and the most visited monument in Italy.  The Colosseum’s arena was completely removed by archaeologists in the 19^th century and has never been totally rebuilt.  Only a very small part of it was reconstructed in order to allow visitors to have a gladiator-like feeling during special tours.  Hypogeum is the Greek word for underground, and therefore is the underground level below the Colosseum’s bleachers and arena.  It was in there that gladiators and animals were kept before the beginning of each battle, and where 36 trap doors for special effects were hidden.  Since there is no longer an arena, part of the hypogeum is beautifully exposed.  The underground level looks like a labyrinth, and you can actually walk through it by booking a special tour.  Archaeologists were not the first ones to remove the Colosseum’s arena.  The wooden floor covered with sand that Romans originally used had already been removed before to have the Colosseum filled with water for mock naval battles.  Botanical studies in the Colosseum date back to 1643, when Domenico Panaroli listed 337 species of plants among the ruins.  In the 1850’s, English botanist Richard Deakin found around 420 species.  Some of them were very common in Italy; others, however, didn’t grow in Europe at all.  Posted by Mariana  https://www.discoverwalks.com/blog/10-reasons-to-visit-the-roman-colosseum/

Autofiction is a term used in literary criticism to refer to a form of fictionalized autobiography. 

Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in 1977 with reference to his novel Fils.  Philippe Vilain distinguishes autofiction from autobiographical novels in that autofiction requires a first-person narrative by a protagonist who has the same name as the author.  Autofiction combines two mutually inconsistent narrative forms, namely autobiography and fiction.  An author may decide to recount his/her life in the third person, to modify significant details or 'characters', using fiction in the service of a search for self.  It has parallels with faction, a genre devised by Truman Capote to describe his novel In Cold Blood.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofiction

October 29, 2019  A year after the unexpected death of its founder, Todd Bol, the Little Free Library nonprofit literacy organization and Bol’s family are at odds, with each side claiming that it is acting to protect Bol’s legacy, and that the other is undermining it.  While Little Free Library sponsors unorthodox literacy initiatives with partners all over the world, it is best known for the first initiative it launched 10 years ago:  weatherproof wooden boxes containing books free for the taking that are placed in people’s front yards and public spaces.  To date, there are 90,000 little library boxes in 90 countries.  Bol, who set up the first book box in front of his mother’s Wisconsin home in 2009, first trademarked the term “Little Free Library” in 2012, about the same time the organization became a 501-c-3 nonprofit.  In June 2019, says Tony Bol, Todd’s brother, the organization filed three separate applications for new trademarks with the U.S. Patent Office regarding the term, “Little Free Library,” used in connection with the words, “wooden boxes with a storage area for books,” and “signs, non-luminous and non-mechanical, of metal,” and “guest books and rubber stamps.”  If approved, these trademarks would allow the organization to, Tony explained, “stake trademark claims over all wooden book boxes, book boxes with signs, and book boxes with guest books, allowing for monopolization of the Little Free Library movement as a marketplace.”  This would mean, he noted, that if any individual or neighborhood organization built and displayed any type of wooden book box, they could be subject to legal action, even if they called the container by another name.  Claire Kirch  https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/people/article/81587-little-free-library-founder-s-family-clash-over-org-s-direction.html

Asteroids are rocky objects smaller than planets that are left over from the formation of our solar system.  Comets are also composed of material left over from the formation of our solar system and formed around the same time as asteroids.  However, asteroids formed toward the inner regions of our solar system where temperatures were hotter and thus only rock or metal could remain solid without melting.  A meteor is simply an asteroid that attempts to land on Earth but is vaporized by the Earth’s atmosphere.  Sabrina Stierwalt  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/asteroid-meteor-meteorite-and-comet-whats-the-difference/

A meteor is the flash of light that we see in the night sky when a small chunk of interplanetary debris burns up as it passes through our atmosphere, also known as a shooting star.  Most meteoroids that enter the Earth's atmosphere are so small that they vaporise completely and never reach the planet's surface.  These meteors come from meteoroids, there are three main sources of meteoroids.  Many are left over from the dust that formed the Solar System.  Others are fragments of asteroids, broken off in collisions.  Huge meteor showers, caused by many meteoroids entering the atmosphere in one go, are caused by comets.  They occur when the Earth’s atmosphere passes through a stream of small particles left behind in the comet’s tail.  If any part of a meteoroid survives the fall through the atmosphere and lands on Earth, it is called a meteorite.  Although majority of the meteorites are very small, their size can range from about a fraction of a gram (the size of a pebble) to 100 kilograms or more (the size of a huge, life-destroying boulder).  https://astroedu.iau.org/en/activities/1638/meteoroids-meteors-and-meteorites/

“The Maine Mineral and Gem Museum showcases our geological history, displays renowned mineral and rock collections, provides educational opportunities for the novice and expert alike, conducts historical and geological research and is a Maine travel destination for residents and visitors.  MMGM will house the finest collection of Maine minerals and gems.  It will include the famous Perham Collection, viewed by generations in a local mineral store that operated for ninety years.  MMGM will display one of the world’s foremost collections of extraterrestrial rocks—meteorites from Mars, the Moon and the Asteroid Belt that teach us about the origins of our Solar System.”  Find location and hours at https://mainemineralmuseum.org/about/

Goatherd, Storyteller, Master   Little is known about Paulé Bartón.  According to Howard Norman’s introduction to The Woe Shirt: Caribbean Folk Tales, the book in which this and twelve other of his tiny fables originally appeared, Barton was born in Haiti in 1916 and earned a living as a goatherd—though he, like many on the island at the time, aspired to work as a storyteller, peddling tales in the markets of Port-au-Prince.  At some point, he was arrested and later exiled by the violent, repressive Duvalier regime, likely for violating Haiti’s loosely defined, and thus incredibly restrictive, law against “polluting the minds of tourists with information about Haiti not sanctioned by the government.”  He spent the rest of his life skipping across the Caribbean, settling down for a time on one island before packing up with his wife and children and goats and heading to another.  The fifteenth episode of The Paris Review Podcast features the singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart’s reading of “The Woe Shirt.”  What a gift it is to hear a favorite story brought to life.  Banhart delivers the tale as it was meant to be experienced, lifting us out of our office lives and into the strange, capacious imagination of Paulé Bartón.  Brian Ransom  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/11/22/goatherd-storyteller-master/

Balsam wreaths and visions of sugarplums had barely faded in the first weeks of 1939, but thoughts inside the Chicago headquarters of retail giant Montgomery Ward had already turned to the next Christmas 11 months away.  The retailer had traditionally purchased and distributed coloring books to children as a holiday promotion, but the advertising department decided it would be cheaper and more effective instead to develop its own Christmas-themed book in-house.  The assignment fell to Robert May, a copywriter with a knack for turning a limerick at the company’s holiday party.  As he peered out at the thick fog that had drifted off Lake Michigan, May came up with the idea of a misfit reindeer ostracized because of his luminescent nose who used his physical abnormality to guide Santa’s sleigh and save Christmas.  Seeking an alliterative name, May scribbled possibilities on a scrap of paper—Rollo, Reginald, Rodney and Romeo were among the choices—before circling his favorite, Rudolph.  The 89 rhyming couplets in “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” borrow from Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” right from the story’s opening line:  “Twas the day before Christmas, and all through the hills/The reindeer were playing . . . enjoying the spills.”  Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling” also inspired the storyline as did May’s own childhood when he endured taunts from schoolmates for being small and shy.  Christopher Klein  https://www.history.com/news/rudolph-the-red-nosed-reindeer-turns-75

We're happy to share this holiday menu from one of the year’s best books, 365:  A Year of Everyday Cooking and Baking by Meike Peters.  Her first book, Eat in My Kitchen, was awarded the 2017 James Beard General Cookbook of the Year.  In 365, she presents a plan for a year of home cooking, with a recipe for every day of the year.  We asked Meike to build a holiday menu from the book, and she sent along a few of her favorites to please both the meat and non-meat eaters in your life:  Christmassy Braised Beef Shanks with Spices and Red Wine, the amazing Potato and Apple-Stuffed Cabbage Rolls with Walnut Butter and Gruyere and her Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Honey, Apples and Marjoram.  Happy Holidays, everyone!  https://www.splendidtable.org/story/a-three-dish-holiday-menu-from-meike-peters-365

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2200  December 23, 2019