Keats’s first book of poetry was published when he was 21; Mary Shelley was 18 when she started writing Frankenstein.  But both of their youthful achievements are dwarfed by the newest star in the UK’s poetry firmament:  four-year-old Nadim Shamma-Sourgen, who has just landed a book deal.  Nadim’s poems range from Coming Home (“Take our gloves off / Take our shoes off / Put them where they’re supposed to go. / You take off your brave feeling / Because there’s nothing / to be scared of in the house”), to Love (“Everyone has love / Even baddies”).  In Baddies, the young poet explores the inner life of villains a little further:  “Baddies love their baddie friends / Even very baddie ones // Policemen might arrest them / But they’ll still have their love”.  Nadim was discovered by 2020’s Orwell prize winner, the poet and teacher Kate Clanchy, who met his mother, Yasmine Shamma, a lecturer in literature at the University of Reading through a shared interest in teaching refugees to write poetry.  The deal will make Nadim one of the youngest-ever writers to land a book deal.  According to Guinness World Records, the youngest commercially published female author is Dorothy Straight, who wrote How the World Began in 1962, aged four.  It was published in 1964, when she was six.  The Guinness record for the youngest published male author is held by Sri Lankan Thanuwana Serasinghe, who was four years and 356 days old when he released his book Junk Food on 5 January 2017, after writing it in three days.  Alison Flood  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/22/four-year-old-lands-book-deal-poetry-nadim-shamma-sourgen-kate-clanchy 

The verb bedeck means decorate.  Synonyms are:  bedight; deck.   Example of use:  Deck the halls with holly.  https://www.tititudorancea.com/z/bedeck.htm

Cloves are the aromatic flower buds of a tree in the family Myrtaceae, Syzygium aromaticum.  They are native to the Maluku Islands (or Moluccas) in Indonesia, and are commonly used as a spice.  Cloves are available throughout the year due to different harvest seasons in different countries.  The clove tree is an evergreen that grows up to 8–12 metres (26–39 ft) tall, with large leaves and crimson flowers grouped in terminal clusters.  The flower buds initially have a pale hue, gradually turn green, then transition to a bright red when ready for harvest.  Cloves are used in the cuisine of Asian, African, Mediterranean, and the Near and Middle East countries, lending flavor to meats, curries, and marinades, as well as fruit such as apples, pears, and rhubarb.  Cloves may be used to give aromatic and flavor qualities to hot beverages, often combined with other ingredients such as lemon and sugar.  They are a common element in spice blends like pumpkin pie spice and speculoos spices.  In Mexican cuisine, cloves are best known as clavos de olor, and often accompany cumin and cinnamon.  They are also used in Peruvian cuisine, in a wide variety of dishes such as carapulcra and arroz con leche.  A major component of clove taste is imparted by the chemical eugenol, and the quantity of the spice required is typically small.  It pairs well with cinnamon, allspice, vanilla, red wine, basil, onion, citrus peel, star anise, and peppercorns.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clove 

The Nullifier Party, which was also known as the Independent Democratic Party, was a short-lived political party based in South Carolina in the 1830s.  Started by John C. Calhoun sometime in May-December of 1828, it was a states' rights party that supported the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, holding that States could nullify federal laws within their borders.  The Nullifier Party narrowly missed claiming the unofficial title of being the first ever third party to be created within the U.S.; that title is for the Anti-Masonic Party, which was created in New York in February of 1828.  The Nullifier Party had several members in both houses of the United States Congress between 1831 and 1839.  Calhoun outlined the principles of the party in his South Carolina Exposition and Protest (1828), a reaction to the "Tariff of Abominations" passed by Congress and signed into law by President John Quincy Adams.  http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/eng/Nullifier_Party?View=embedded 

Halva is a sweet treat found across the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Central Asia.  Many types of halva are made with sesame or nut butter, but each area has its own version of halva and often flavors it with regional products.  Soft halva can be enjoyed right out of the container with a spoon.  Spread soft halva on your toast.  Because of its intense sweet flavor, it's best to spread it on blander foods like baguettes, crackers, or biscuits.  Sprinkle halva over your cereal.  It's easy to add small slices or strips of halva into your favorite cereal, or add it to your granola.  Read more at https://www.wikihow.com/Eat-Halva 

One branch of the popular Dutch bookstore chain Selexyz can be found right inside of a 13th century Dominican church in Maastricht, Holland.  The project known as Selexyz Dominicanen Maastricht, designed by architecture firm Merkx + Girod, exemplifies a brilliant union between the opposing aesthetics.  The space maintains the church’s architectural structure and definitive design attributes while inviting the contemporary stylings of a modern bookstore.  Built in 1294, the cathedral features large open spaces boasting three-story bookshelves.  Being that the church contains 1,200 square meters of shopping space with only 750 square meters of floor space, the architects decided to design vertically.  They incorporate the modern scheme of the shop without obstructing the religious motifs or structure of the ancient venue.  Within the space, there is also a cafe.  As a nod to the bookstore’s past-life, there is a long table shaped like a cross in the eating area, which is conveniently located where the choir formerly situated themselves.  Pinar Noorata  See gorgeous pictures at https://mymodernmet.com/merkx-girod-selexyz-dominicanen-maastricht-bookstore-church/  Thank you, Muse reader!  

In 1913, a character in Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon bitterly complains, “We’re hornswoggled.  We’re backed to a standstill.  We’re double-crossed to a fare-you-well”.  Seven years later the young P G Wodehouse employed it in Little Warrior:  “Would she have the generosity to realize that a man ought not to be held accountable for what he says in the moment when he discovers that he has been cheated, deceived, robbed—in a word, hornswoggled?”  By then, the word had been in the language with that meaning for more than half a century, and even then it had been around for some decades with an older sense of “embarrass, disconcert or confuse”.  People had long since turned it into an exclamation of surprise or amazement:  “Well, I’ll be hornswoggled!”  Peter Watts argues in A Dictionary of the Old West that it comes from cowpunching.  A steer that has been lassoed around the neck will “hornswoggle”, wag and twist its head around frantically to try to slip free of the rope.  A cowboy who lets the animal get away with this is said to have been “hornswoggled”.  A nice idea, but nobody seems to have heard of hornswoggle in the cattle sense, and it may be a guess based on horn.  Nobody else has much idea either, though it’s often assumed to be one of those highfalutin words like absquatulate and rambunctious that frontier Americans were so fond of creating.  It’s sad to have to tag a word as “origin unknown” yet again, but that’s the long and the short of it.  http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-hor1.htm 

The Dinner Party That Served Up 50,000-Year-Old Bison Stew--when life gives you frozen bison, make dinner by Paula Mejia  One night in 1984, a handful of lucky guests gathered at the Alaska home of paleontologist Dale Guthrie to eat stew crafted from a once-in-a-lifetime delicacy:  the neck meat of an ancient, recently-discovered bison nicknamed Blue Babe.  Since state law bans the buying, bartering, and selling of game meats, you can’t find local favorites such as caribou stew at restaurants.  Those dishes are enjoyed when hunters host a gathering.  But their meat source is usually the moose population—not a preserved piece of biological history.  Blue Babe had been discovered just five years earlier by gold miners, who noticed that a hydraulic mining hose melted part of the gunk that had kept the bison frozen.  They reported their findings to the nearby University of Alaska Fairbanks.  Concerned that it would decompose, Guthrie—then a professor and researcher at the university—opted to dig out Blue Babe immediately.  To make the stew for roughly eight people, Guthrie cut off a small part of the bison’s neck, where the meat had frozen while fresh.  “When it thawed, it gave off an unmistakable beef aroma, not unpleasantly mixed with a faint smell of the earth in which it was found, with a touch of mushroom,” he once wrote.  They then added a generous amount of garlic and onions, along with carrots and potatoes, to the aged meat.  Couple that with wine, and it became a full-fledged dinner.  Thankfully, everyone present lived to tell the tale (and the bison remains on display at the University of Alaska Museum of the North).  The Blue Babe stew wasn’t unpalatable, either, according to Guthrie.  “It tasted a little bit like what I would have expected, with a little bit of wring of mud,” he says.  “But it wasn’t that bad.  Not so bad that we couldn’t each have a bowl.”  He can’t remember if anyone present had seconds, though.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-bison-stew-blue-babe-alaska?utm_source=Gastro+Obscura+Weekly+E-mail&utm_campaign=da0f1c1381-GASTRO_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_07_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2418498528-da0f1c1381-71793902&mc_cid=da0f1c1381&mc_eid=aef0869a63 

A THOUGHT FOR JULY 31  Trust is the first step to love. - Premchand, novelist and poet (31 Jul 1880-1936) 

 http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2236  July 31, 2020