How the Hudson River School Became America’s First Art Movement by Jessica Stewart   During the 19th century, a group of American painters dedicated themselves to cultivating a style that would have its roots in the New World, rather than looking back to Europe.  Inspired by the untamed landscape of their surroundings and filled with ideas of exploration, these landscape painters helped create what is now known as the Hudson River School.  In these landscapes, the environment is filled with drama and emotion.  The wide, expansive spaces are dappled with warm color, as depictions of man are eschewed in favor of the terrain.  From 1825 until its popularity began to decline around 1870, the group of artists associated with these heroic landscapes helped shape the way we view early America.  The movement was given its name retrospectively, though there’s a debate on whether it was art critic Clarence Cook or artist Homer Dodge Martin who first used the term.  Initially, it was a disparaging name, meant to trivialize the work of these artists who had fallen out of fashion in favor of the French Barbizon School.  While the name Hudson River School comes from the fact that early paintings depicted the Hudson River Valley and its surroundings, later work includes locations in the American West, New England, and even South America.  Thomas Cole, who is generally known as the father of the movement, spent a significant amount of time in the area after taking a steamboat up the Hudson in 1825.  From there, he hiked the Catskills and the resulting paintings are the first landscapes of the area.  Once Cole died in 1848, the mantel was taken up by a second generation of painters who expanded the locations of the landscapes.  By the time the Centennial was celebrated in 1876, the Hudson River School’s popularity was declining.  Popular taste was turning toward France, where intimate landscapes were taking hold.  Gone were the days where the monumental, larger-than-life paintings of Church and Bierstadt garnered crowds.  After World War I, the style saw a slight revival when the country was undergoing a period of extreme national pride.  Today, the Hudson River School is recognized for its importance in developing a native art culture in America.  The Hudson River Valley prides itself on being the home of this movement, and it’s possible to visit Thomas Cole’s home and hike the areas that inspired his evocative landscapes.  See many illustrations at https://mymodernmet.com/hudson-river-school/

A #1 New York Times bestselling author, Gregg Olsen has written ten nonfiction books, ten novels, and contributed a short story to a collection edited by Lee Child.  The award-winning author has been a guest on dozens of national and local television shows, including educational programs for the History Channel, Learning Channel, and Discovery Channel.  He has also appeared on Good Morning America, The Early Show, The Today Show, FOX News; CNN, Anderson Cooper 360, MSNBC, Entertainment Tonight, CBS 48 Hours, Oxygen’s Snapped, Court TV’s Crier Live, Inside Edition, Extra, Access Hollywood, and A&E’s Biography.  In addition to television and radio appearances, the award-winning author has been featured in Redbook, USA Today, People, Salon magazine, Seattle Times, Los Angeles Times and the New York Post.  The Deep Dark was named Idaho Book of the Year by the ILA and Starvation Heights was honored by Washington’s Secretary of State for the book’s contribution to Washington state history and culture.  Find a list of Gregg Olsen’s books at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15035.Gregg_Olsen

All pepitas are pumpkin seeds, but that doesn’t mean that all pumpkin seeds are pepitas.  Pepitas are a type of pumpkin seed from certain varieties of pumpkin, such as Lady Godiva or the Naked Bear.  These pumpkins produce a “naked seed,” which is a hulled seed that is lighter and nuttier than a traditional pumpkin seed.  If you try to hull your jack-o-lantern pumpkins seeds, you will not find a pepita inside.  Pepitas are more versatile in the kitchen than traditional pumpkin seeds since they’re not as tough.  They aren’t just for garnishing butternut squash soup.  Use them to make pesto, as a crust for meat or fish, as a topping on muffins, mixed into granola, baked into focaccia bread or made into brittle.  Pepitas make a great snack all on their own.  They’re full of heart-healthy fats, protein, fiber and iron.  Store in an airtight container for up to 3 months.  If storing for longer, refrigerate or freeze for up to 12 months.  Posted by Jenna Smith  Find recipe for Pepita Crusted Tilapia at https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/simply-nutritious-quick-and-delicious/2019-10-11-mysterious-pumpkin-seed

Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka on 12 September 1943.  He moved to England in 1954, and in 1962 moved to Canada where he has lived ever since.  He was educated at the University of Toronto and Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and began teaching at York University in Toronto in 1971.  He published a volume of memoir, Running in the Family, in 1983.  His collections of poetry include The Collected Works of Billy the Kid:  Left Handed Poems (1981), which won the Canadian Governor General's Award in 1971; The Cinnamon Peeler:  Selected Poems (1989); and Handwriting: Poems (1998).  His first novel, Coming Through Slaughter (1976), is a fictional portrait of jazz musician Buddy Bolden.  The English Patient (1992), set in Italy at the end of the Second World War, was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction and was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1996.  Anil's Ghost (2000), set in Sri Lanka, tells the story of a young female anthropologist investigating war crimes for an international human rights group.  Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto with his wife, Linda Spalding, with whom he edits the literary journal Brick.  His recent novels include Divisadero (2007), The Cat's Table (2011) and Warlight (2018).  See bibliography and list of awards at https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/michael-ondaatje

In addition to writing novels, plays, and poetry collections, Michael Ondaatje has edited several books, including The Faber Book of Contemporary Canadian Short Stories (1990).  His memoir, Running in the Family (1982), complements stories about his family with poems and photographs.  He has also written books of nonfiction, including The Conversations:  Walter Murch and the Art of Film Editing (2002), which was highly praised by reviewers for its insight into the creative process.  Both Ondaatje and Murch, who has worked with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, talk about the task of revealing hidden themes and patterns in existing creative works.  As Ondaatje noted in an interview with Maclean’s, editing—whether of film or one’s written work, is “the only place where you’re on your own.  Where you can be one person and govern it.  The only time you control making a movie is in the editing stage.”  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/michael-ondaatje

How Did Writers Survive the First Great Depression? by Jason Boog  April 20, 2020  When the stock market crashed in 2008, the offices closed at the legal publication where I worked.  I lost my benefits, my office space, and my security, all in a single meeting.  I holed up in the New York University Bobst Library for a couple of weeks as a freelance writer, scribbling reports and watching my health insurance expire.  I was a single speck in a national catastrophe for writers.  According to the Department of Labor, the printing and traditional publishing sector shed well over 134,000 jobs during the Great Recession.  This was part of a much larger set of losses as digital technology disrupted traditional publishing.   Between 1998 and 2013, the book publishing industry lost 21,000 jobs, periodical publishing cut 56,000 jobs, and the newspaper industry shed a staggering 217,000 jobs.  After my old job folded, I camped out on the seventh floor of the library, tucked away among the American Literature shelves.  I started looking for clues on how writers survived the Great Depression.  In the stacks, I found You Can’t Sleep Here, a novel written in 1932 by a 20-year-old Hungarian immigrant named Edward Newhouse.  His book tells the story of a young newspaper reporter fired during the early days of the Great Depression who sleeps in a tent city along the East River and who showers in a bathroom at the New York Public Library.  The reporter paces up and down the side of Central Park at sunrise, hoping to get the first look at the want ads before thousands of other unemployed people.  “I had to walk till 55th Street before one of the newsstand men would let me look into the want ads.”  We officially emerged from our nationwide recession in 2009, but the situation facing contemporary writers has not changed.  The newspaper and magazine jobs that disappeared were never replaced.  The bookstore chain Borders closed for good in 2011, erasing nearly 10,700 bookselling jobs.  The American Library Association noted that 55 percent of urban libraries, 36 percent of suburban libraries, and 26 percent of rural libraries cut their budgets in 2011.  In the same survey, librarians said that job-search services were most in demand at the library, but that 56 percent of the libraries didn’t have enough resources to meet the demand.  When Franklin Roosevelt took office in March 1933, his inaugural address blamed failed banking leadership, unjust distribution of national resources, and ruthless businessmen for the Great Depression.  He made an urgent plea that still resonates in our own time:  The rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated.  Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.  True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition.  Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence.  They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.  They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.  The line which is remembered from Roosevelt’s speech today is, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but the president also called for new business ethics, job reform, and redistribution of resources.  Newhouse deconstructed the world around him, rewriting his own career as he took part in historic events.  But he was also part of a larger literary movement.  Before the Great Depression, Mike Gold called on writers at The New Masses to produce a new kind of fiction, an idea he labeled “proletarian literature.”  In his essay, he described the range of work he hoped to include:  letters from hoboes, peddlers, small town atheists, unfrocked clergymen and schoolteachers.  Everyone has a great tragicomic story to tell.  Almost everyone in America feels oppressed and wants to speak out somewhere.  Tell us your story.  It is sure to be significant … Let America know the heart and mind of its workers.  His letter to readers spawned an entire literary movement.  In The Radical Novel in the United States, the literary scholar Walter Rideout counted 70 such novels published between 1930 and 1939.  Almost all these novels have been forgotten today, but Rideout’s book counted novels by Henry Roth, Josephine Herbst, James Farrell, and Richard Wright.  For a few years during the Great Depression, Newhouse’s You Can’t Sleep Here became one of the most well-known examples of the genre, though the book has been out of print ever since.  https://lithub.com/how-did-writers-survive-the-first-great-depression/

A couple of fun reading suggestions:  The Cockroaches of Staymore by Donald Harington; Mistress Masham’s Repose by T.H. White; any of the “Lucia” novels by E.F. Benson.  Thank you, Muse reader!

April 22 is Earth Day; Administrative Professionals Day in various countries (2020)  Wikipedia 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2258  April 22, 2020