Michael Esbin belongs to an outstanding, now mature generation of stone-carving artists, although it must be admitted that this kind of work is not supported as much as it used to be—especially in America.  Esbin moved to Italy some 35 years ago in order to embrace the stone carving there.  He lives in Carrara, a town famous for its white and blue-gray marbles, making deeply satisfying works in a medium whose depth and richness encourage a way of seeing that results in spiritual, emotional, and intellectual insight.  Esbin now travels back and forth between Italy and New York City.  He comes from a medical family on Long Island, where his father was an ophthalmologist and his mother, a medical illustrator.  Somehow his situation has translated into an attitude of extreme openness—to both art and life—as he transforms the difficulties of living into formally engaging sculptures.  https://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag16/julaug_16/julaug16_features2.shtml

“Hate clouds the judgment.”  The Lion (2010), #5 in the John Corey series and direct sequel to #2 in the John Corey series, The Lion’s Game (2000) by Nelson DeMille

Nelson Richard DeMille (born 1943) is an American author of action adventure and suspense novels.  His novels include Plum Island, The Charm School, and The Gold Coast.  DeMille has also written under the pen names Jack Cannon, Kurt Ladner, Ellen Kay and Brad Matthews.  Many of DeMille's books are written in the first person, and as such his books follow a linear plotline in which the reader moves along with the main character.  Although the tone of his writing varies from novel to novel, one consistent tool is DeMille's liberal use of sarcasm and dry humor.  Most DeMille novels, especially the more recent, avoid "Hollywood endings," and instead finish either inconclusively or with the hero successfully exposing the secret/solving the mystery while suffering in his career or personal life as a result.  There are generally loose ends left for the reader to puzzle over.  DeMille spends approximately 16 months creating each of his novels due to the extensive research involved, and because he writes them longhand on legal pads with a number one pencil.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_DeMille

February 13, 2020   “Obama-the-writer came before Obama-the-candidate.”  How the president’s reading shaped his writing. | Lit Hub  A Purple Heart, a Smith Corona, an old icebox:  take a look inside Indianapolis’ Kurt Vonnegut Museum. | Hyperallergic  https://lithub.com/

The first major work in the history of philosophy to bear the title “Metaphysics” was the treatise by Aristotle that we have come to know by that name.  But Aristotle himself did not use that title or even describe his field of study as ‘metaphysics’; the name was evidently coined by the first century C.E. editor who assembled the treatise we know as Aristotle’s Metaphysics out of various smaller selections of Aristotle’s works.  The title ‘metaphysics’—literally, ‘after the Physics’—very likely indicated the place the topics discussed therein were intended to occupy in the philosophical curriculum.  They were to be studied after the treatises dealing with nature (ta phusika).   Find discussions of the ideas that are developed in Aristotle’s treatise at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/.  Copyright © 2016 by S. Marc Cohen 

February 5, 2020  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Amazon is using your Kindle to collect a lot of data about your reading habits. | The Guardian  The University of Saskatchewan has created an interactive app of The Canterbury Tales manuscript (with a little help from the late Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame). | Global News   https://lithub.com/

NO COOKING REQUIRED TO ENTERTAIN WITH FLAIR   The perfect charcuterie plate/board will contain at least 3 to 5 types of charcuterie representing different styles and textures, plus something acidic, like pickles, and something sweet like fruit chutney to complement the flavors.  Start with a large plate, platter, wooden cutting board, or a piece of slate as the base.  Allow two ounces per person, and slice your charcuterie into easily manageable, bite-sized pieces.  Nuts, fresh and dried fruits, bread, and crackers make wonderful accompaniments.  Cheese is a welcome addition to a charcuterie plate; choose 2-3 types of different textures to complement the spread.  https://www.dartagnan.com/how-to-make-a-charcuterie-plate.html

Forest therapy, also called forest bathing, is just spending time in the woods as an antidote to the sometimes-jarring sounds, sights, and smells of city life.  Of course, you can get that kind of respite on your own, but a more organized version of forest therapy has now been introduced in the U.S.  The Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides and Programs, founded in 2012, is currently training forest therapy guides.  It appears that forest therapy does have measurable health benefits; for example, it can lower levels of salivary cortisol, the hormone that rises when we’re under stress.  One Japanese study showed that gazing at forest scenery for as little as 20 minutes reduced salivary cortisol levels by 13.4 percent.  Forest therapy can also lower blood pressure and heart rate and trigger a dramatic increase in the activity of natural killer (NK) cells (produced by the immune system to ward off infection and fight cancer).  Andrew Weil  https://www.drweil.com/health-wellness/body-mind-spirit/stress-anxiety/is-forest-therapy-for-real/

The doughnut proper (if that's the right word) supposedly came to Manhattan (then still New Amsterdam) under the unappetizing Dutch name of olykoeks--"oily cakes."  Fast-forward to the mid-19th century and Elizabeth Gregory, a New England ship captain's mother who made a deep-fried dough that cleverly used her son's spice cargo of nutmeg and cinnamon, along with lemon rind.  Some say she made it so son Hanson and his crew could store a pastry on long voyages, one that might help ward off scurvy and colds.  In any case, Mrs. Gregory put hazelnuts or walnuts in the center, where the dough might not cook through, and in a literal-minded way called them doughnuts.  Doughnuts didn't come into their own until World War I, when millions of homesick American doughboys met millions of doughnuts in the trenches of France.  They were served up by women volunteers who even brought them to the front lines to give soldiers a tasty touch of home.   When the doughboys came back from the war they had a natural yen for more doughnuts.  The name "doughboy," though, didn't derive from doughnuts.  It goes back to the relatively doughnutless Civil War, when the cavalry derided foot soldiers as doughboys, perhaps because their globular brass buttons resembled flour dumplings or because soldiers used flour to polish their white belts.  The first doughnut machine did not come along until 1920, in New York City, when Adolph Levitt, an enterprising refugee from czarist Russia, began selling fried doughnuts from his bakery.  Hungry theater crowds pushed him to make a gadget that churned out the tasty rings faster, and he did.  Levitt's doughnut machine was the first sign that the doughnut, till then merely a taste sensation, could, in production, become a public spectacle.  There before them a circle of dough, shaped like a perfect smoke ring, and about the diameter of a baseball, dropped off into a vat of boiling oil, circulated, got turned over to brown on the other side, and emerged from the oil on a moving ramp, one by one like ducks in a row.  In the 1934 film It Happened One Night, rugged newspaperman Clark Gable actually has to teach runaway heiress Claudette Colbert how to dunk.  Often, doughnuts were sold with their own can-do philosophy.  In 1936, a popular song was proclaiming that you can live on doughnuts and coffee if "you're in love."  David A. Taylor  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-history-of-the-doughnut-150405177/

Reader feedback on long shots in film:  The article on long shots was about the length in time.  How about the length in distance?  In 1966’s This Property is Condemned, an amazing camera shot is just outside the window of a moving passenger train showing Natalie Wood staring into space, with her window filling about half the frame.  The camera then pulls slowly back and moves up in one continuous shot to show that the steam locomotive and train are on a trestle across Lake Pontchartrain, and keeps climbing up and slowly spiraling until it is directly over the train, with the length of the train being perhaps one-eighth of the field of view.  An absolutely amazing continuous shot for its time—must have been a steady-cam on a helicopter.  The most amazing long shot was from 1939’s Gone With the Wind when Scarlett is in the train yard walking past a few wounded soldiers, and you hear the cries around her, and the camera slowly pulls back and up (on a construction crane) to show a sea of wounded soldiers and a cacophony of anguished pleas.  I understand they used 1500 extras and 1000 dummies.

91% of California farm workers are immigrants.  What’s Eating America with Andrew Zimmern MSNBC February 16, 2020 

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY  It's not a business with me. . . .  I'm not a professional of poetry; I'm a farmer of poetry. - Jack Gilbert, poet (18 Feb 1925-2012)  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2226  February 18, 2020