Wednesday, February 19, 2020


Thou, inch, foot, yard, chain, furlong, mile, league are units used when measuring length.
thou (th) (0.0254mm in the metric system)
inch (in) is equal to 1000 thou (25.4mm)
foot (ft) is equal to 12 inches (304.8mm)
yard (yd) is equal to 3 feet (914.4mm)
chain (ch) is equal to 22 yards (20.1168m)
furlong (fur) is equal to 10 chains (201.168m)
mile (mi) is equal to 8 furlongs (1 609.344m)
league (lea) is equal to 3 miles (1 828.032m) (no longer an official unit in any nation)

Stefano Secchi's Cacio e Pepe Salad  The chef of Rezdôra restaurant in New York City shares the recipe for one of his most popular appetizers, inspired by the classic Italian cheese-and-pepper pasta dish.  https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/recipes/stefano-secchis-cacio-e-pepe-salad/ar-BBXYSWW  takes ten minutes to prepare--serves four

To gainsay is to declare false or to contradict.  It’s a transitive verb, meaning it has to act upon something.  So you can’t just say “I gainsay,” period; you have to gainsay something.  And what’s gainsaid is not the person you disagree with but the statement you wish to contradict.  For instance, if you disagree with our definition of gainsay, you don’t gainsay us; you gainsay our definition.  Though gainsay has a certain appeal, it can have an archaic ring outside legal contexts, and it often bears replacement with alternatives such as dispute and contradict.  There’s nothing incorrect about it, though, and it does appear occasionally even in mainstream writing from this century.  The word has origins in Old English.  The first syllable, gain, is etymologically related to against (and is unrelated to our modern sense of gain), so we can think of gainsay as a sort of contraction of say against.  https://grammarist.com/words/gainsay/

Why are literary pilgrimages so compelling?  Virginia Woolf explains:  “It would seem to be a fact that writers stamp themselves upon their possessions more indelibly than other people.”  Certainly, each year, thousands of people visit Monk’s House, Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s sixteenth-century cottage, in Rodmell, East Sussex.  It’s set right on the village street, a modest clapboard building with a big garden beyond. Inside, the small, low-ceilinged rooms are peopled with pilgrims.  You move quietly among them; the atmosphere is hushed and meditative, like that in a church.  You are caught up in a silent current, adrift in Woolf’s life:  these are the chairs that were decorated by her sister; here is her narrow bed by the window; here are her books, tightly packed, floor to ceiling.  You are very close to her here.  You are speaking with her in your mind.  As a literary pilgrim, you could go to England and visit Woolf’s houses.  Or you could simply go to New York and visit the Berg Collection.  For decades, the collector William Beekman acquired things related to Woolf:  letters, manuscripts, photographs, postcards, rare editions.  The William Beekman Collection of Virginia Woolf and Her Circle, consisting of a hundred and fifty-three such objects, has been added to the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, at the New York Public Library.  Like any pilgrimage, a journey to the Berg imposes certain exigencies.  Access is restricted, and you must make an appointment.  You must leave your coat and bag downstairs.  The atmosphere is hushed and solemn:  this is the inner sanctum.  Here are words that have changed history, governments, laws, morals, mores, marriages, and minds.  The librarian brings things out to you, one by one.  The Beekman materials are encased in beautiful clothbound slipcases, with gold titles on the spines.  Opening these exquisite cases is like unwrapping treasure.  Roxana Robinson  https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/holding-virginia-woolf-in-your-hands?mbid=social_twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_brand=tny&utm_source=twitter&utm_social-type=owned

The oldest of three siblings, Jacob Lawrence and his brother and sister were placed in foster care in Philadelphia from 1927 to 1930 while his mother worked in New York City.  By 1930, at the age of thirteen, Lawrence and his siblings were reunited with their mother, who relocated the family to the Harlem.  It was in Harlem that Lawrence first began to experiment with art, creating non-figurative designs and objects in an arts and crafts workshop operated by the local settlement house.  Lawrence turned to art less out of a sense of creative "calling" and more as a way to keep himself occupied in the tenement neighborhood of his younger days.  Though Lawrence's mother had hoped that Lawrence would become a postman, Lawrence dropped out of high school at age 17 to pursue an artistic career.  He was unable to join Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA), an integral source of income to artists during the Great Depression, until the age of 21, and so supported himself and his family through turns as a printer, newspaper deliverer, and construction laborer until 1938, when he secured a position in the WPA and Federal Art Project (FAP)'s easel division.  Lawrence was, in art historian Leslie King-Hammond's words, the "first major artist of the 20th-century who was technically trained and artistically educated within the art community in Harlem," and she described Lawrence as Harlem's "biographer."  Charles Henry Alston, Lawrence's first mentor and his teacher at the WPA's Harlem Art Workshop, who came to view Lawrence like his own son, was an artist who came of age embracing the teachings of Alain Locke, whose 1925 The New Negro articulated the Harlem Renaissance artistic philosophy whereby African-American artists should seek inspiration from an African, ancestral past.  Lawrence also trained with and was significantly influenced by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage, who instructed Lawrence both at her Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts and at the Harlem Art Workshop.  Lawrence's interest in depicting scenes from black American history and from the Harlem world around him, as well as the Egyptian-like angularity of his figures and his later visual references to African art, ultimately reflect the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.  In his early years, Lawrence was so keen to learn about the history of art, that he would walk from his home in Harlem to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  In 1935, Lawrence met Charles Seifert, lecturer and historian, who allowed Lawrence access to his personal library of African and African-American literature and encouraged Lawrence to seek out the textual resources on African history in the Arthur Schomburg collection at the 135th street branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture).  Sources Lawrence studied in the Schomburg collection became the basis for his most well-known and best-regarded works:  his historical works in series.  In each series, such as his Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and The Migration of the Negro, Lawrence coupled panel paintings with descriptive captions which collectively narrated either the biography of a notable historical figure or a significant historical event.  Lawrence maintained that neither money nor a prominent museum acquisition drove his historical panels, but rather a desire to tell, display, and celebrate the depicted historical events.   https://www.theartstory.org/artist/lawrence-jacob/life-and-legacy/#biography_header  See also http://www.dcmooregallery.com/artists/jacob-lawrence

A small Pennsylvania museum has declared that a 17th-century portrait, long considered the work of someone in Rembrandt's studio, is in fact by the Dutch master himself.  After sending the painting away for routine restoration, the Allentown Art Museum said that advanced imaging and conservation techniques had unveiled "clear evidence" that the artwork is a genuine masterpiece.  Created in 1632, "Portrait of a Young Woman" depicts a young female subject who is pictured in a number of Rembrandt's other paintings.  "Portrait of a Young Woman" is expected to go back on display in Allentown June 7, 2020.  Oscar Holland  Read more and see pictures at https://www.cnn.com/style/article/rembrandt-allentown-pennsylvania-portrait/index.html

Beverly Pepper, a sculptor of elegantly crafted steel works that appear to gently rise upward, died February 5, 2020 in Todi, Italy.  She was 97.  At venues around the world, but primarily in Europe and the United States, Pepper exhibited her majestic, abstract steel works in outdoor settings.  They are typically monumental in scale, with some even extending hundreds of feet long, and they appear to swoop, arc, and spiral, often transforming viewers’ perception of the surrounding landscape in the process.  Her sculptures are now permanently installed in locations as diverse as Barcelona, Milwaukee, Dallas, Todi, and Vilnius, Lithuania, among other places.  Beverly Stoll was born in 1922 in Brooklyn, New York.  When she was a child, her mother created a space where she could make art.  But her ambitions of becoming an artist were dashed when she was six years old—her father beat her for bringing home crayons.  Instead, she went on to pursue a career in graphic design.  (In college, at New York’s Pratt Institute, she was dissuaded from working with welding—a process that has since become integral to her work.)  When she was in her 20s, she traveled to Paris, where she went on to study at the prestigious Académie de la Grande Chaumière.  Painter Fernand Léger, the famed modernist who envisioned humans constructed from forms that looked like industrial objects, was among her teachers.  After graduating, she moved to Rome, where she met Bill Pepper, who later became her husband.  Having effectively remade herself as an artist, she started painting socialist realist pictures in Italy.  Everything changed when she was 37 years old, however.  In 1960, on a trip across America and Asia with her daughter, Jorie Graham, she visited the Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and she found herself moved by its architecture.  She knew she had to become a sculptor, and pursued that line of art-making as soon as she returned to Italy.  Alex Greenberger  https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/beverly-pepper-dead-97-1202677146/

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY  There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished.  Or an old address book. - Carson McCullers, writer (19 Feb 1917-1967)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2227  February 19, 2020 

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