Born in 1936, Larry McMurtry has written about Texas relentlessly over the course of six decades in essay collections, memoirs and god knows how many novels.  Even when sub-divided by series the McMurtry oeuvre, with its proliferation of sequels and prequels, can be tricky to navigate.  First published in 1966, The Last Picture Show is available as the final part of an omnibus edition of the so-called Thalia trilogy (Thalia being his fictional version of Archer, Texas) but it is also the opening volume of a five-novel series tracing the life of Duane Moore, one of the secondary characters from The Last Picture Show.  Then there’s Lonesome Dove, published first (in 1985) but coming third if what eventually emerged as a four-volume sequence is arranged by chronological order of events depicted.  It is probably the single most successful book in a career so marked by success that even McMurtry’s first novel Horseman, Pass By--destined, it seemed, to be passed over by the reading public--was turned into a film with the radically abbreviated title Hud, starring Paul Newman in the title role.  Lonesome Dove was itself made into a highly acclaimed mini-series, the popularity of which accounts for the way that the book has been partially eaten by its own adaptation.  Despite Lonesome Dove having received the imprimatur of a Pulitzer Prize, it is also regarded as an extended piece of superior entertainment.  What follows in those pages is an epic, an odyssey of plain and prairie.  McMurtry has said that he “thought of Lonesome Dove as demythicizing, but instead it became a kind of American Arthuriad, overflowing the bounds of genre in many curious ways”.  The myth, in other words, is so entrenched in the real that Brands’s descriptions of the historic cattle drives of the 1860s and 70s initiated by Charles Goodnight, Oliver Loving and Joseph McCoy read like summaries of scenes from the novel by McMurtry--who, in the 1980s, had used the cattle men’s original memoirs and recollections to earth his fiction.  Stephen Harrigan, in the section of his 900-page history of Texas Big Wonderful Thing devoted to Goodnight and Loving, pauses to observe that “if all this is starting to sound familiar, it’s probably because you either read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove or watched the miniseries that was made from it”.  The men and women riding through the fiction are firmly painted and properly fleshed out.  If it’s hard not to cheer inwardly at the hardships endured and surmounted by the characters--the Oxford History dutifully acknowledges “stoic indifference to pain” as a characteristic of the original cowboys--it is all but impossible not to be moved to tears by the things that befall them. (Every reader will remember the words carved on the makeshift memorial:  “CHERFUL IN ALL WEATHERS, NEVER SHERKED A TASK. SPLENDID BEHAVIOUR.”)  Geoff Dyer  https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/geoff-dyer-lonesome-dove-essay/ 

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out.  A home without books is like a room without windows.  A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life.  Henry Ward Beecher  

The Rosenbach Museum and Library is located within two 19th-century townhouses at 2008 and 2010 Delancey Place in Philadelphia.  The historic houses contain the collections and treasures of Philip Rosenbach and his younger brother Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach.  The brothers owned the Rosenbach Company which became the preeminent dealer of rare books, manuscripts and decorative arts during the first half of the 20th century.  Dr. Rosenbach in particular was seminal in the rare book world, helping to build libraries such as the Widener Library at Harvard, The Huntington Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library.  In 2013, the Rosenbach became a subsidiary of the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation, but maintains its own board and operates independently of the public library system.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenbach_Museum_and_Library  See also https://rosenbach.org/about/ 

There is only one deadly sin and all the others follow from it:  Pride.  Clifton Fadiman  1983 letter to Gloria Norris  See also https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/42361.Clifton_Fadiman 

The Gandhara Scroll, originally written about two millennia ago, ranks as one of the oldest Buddhist manuscripts currently known.  You can read the scroll's story at the blog of the Library of Congress, the institution that possesses it and only last year was able to put it online for all to see.  "The scroll originated in Gandhara, an ancient Buddhist kindgom located in what is today the northern border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan," writes the Library's Neely Tucker.  "Surviving manuscripts from the Gandharan realm are rare; only a few hundred are known to still exist."  http://www.openculture.com/2020/08/one-of-the-oldest-buddhist-manuscripts-has-been-digitized-put-online.html 

In the early 1960s, Julia Child and her husband handed Barbara Ketcham Wheaton the keys to their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  The famous couple was going to California for the summer, but they wanted their young neighbor to be able to continue one of her favorite activities:  perusing Child’s collection of historical cookbooks.  Now an honorary curator of Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library Culinary Collection, Wheaton was then in her early 30s, with young children at home.  She had left an art history PhD program a few years before to marry historian Bob Wheaton, but she still had a passion for the past.  When she discovered her love of cooking, and her neighbor’s trove of unique books, Wheaton wondered:  What if she turned the same methodology she had learned in art-history classes to a more humble text—the cookbook?  During long afternoons, Wheaton buried herself in the Schlesinger Library’s historical-cookbook collection.  And she ventured to her neighbor Julia’s house, to pore over the famous chef’s cookbook collection.  Wheaton didn’t know it at the time, but her curiosity about the books’ stiff pages, full of strange stains and descriptions of vintage sauces, would soon turn her into one of the best-known scholars of culinary history.  “I started looking at old cookbooks and one thing led to another,” says Wheaton.  Now, the public can enjoy the fruits of Wheaton’s 50 years of labor.  In July 2020, Wheaton and a team of scholars, including two of her children, Joe Wheaton and Catherine Wheaton Saines, launched The Sifter.  Part Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced database and part meticulous bibliography, The Sifter is a catalogue of more than a thousand years of European and U.S. cookbooks, from the medieval Latin De Re Culinaria, published in 800, to The Romance of Candy, a 1938 treatise on British sweets.  Reina Gattuso  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-find-historic-cookbooks 

In telecommunications, 5G is the fifth generation technology standard for cellular networks, which cellular phone companies began deploying worldwide in 2019, the planned successor to the 4G networks which provide connectivity to most current cellphones.  Like its predecessors, 5G networks are cellular networks, in which the service area is divided into small geographical areas called cells.  All 5G wireless devices in a cell are connected to the Internet and telephone network by radio waves through a local antenna in the cell.  The main advantage of the new networks is that they will have greater bandwidth, giving higher download speeds, eventually up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbit/s).  Due to the increased bandwidth, it is expected that the new networks will not just serve cellphones like existing cellular networks, but also be used as general internet service providers for laptops and desktop computers, competing with existing ISPs such as cable internet, and also will make possible new applications in internet of things (IoT) and machine to machine areas.  Current 4G cellphones will not be able to use the new networks, which will require new 5G enabled wireless devices.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G 

Being between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology, which has been associated with the proverbial advice "to choose the lesser of two evils".  Several other idioms, such as "on the horns of a dilemma", "between the devil and the deep blue sea", and "between a rock and a hard place" express similar meanings.  The mythical situation also developed a proverbial use in which seeking to choose between equally dangerous extremes is seen as leading inevitably to disaster.  Scylla and Charybdis were mythical sea monsters noted by Homer; Greek mythology sited them on opposite sides of the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Calabria, on the Italian mainland.  Scylla was rationalized as a rock shoal (described as a six-headed sea monster) on the Calabrian side of the strait and Charybdis was a whirlpool off the coast of Sicily.  They were regarded as maritime hazards located close enough to each other that they posed an inescapable threat to passing sailors; avoiding Charybdis meant passing too close to Scylla and vice versa.  According to Homer's account, Odysseus was advised to pass by Scylla and lose only a few sailors, rather than risk the loss of his entire ship in the whirlpool.  Because of such stories, the bad result of having to navigate between the two hazards eventually entered proverbial use.  Erasmus recorded it in his Adagia (1515) under the Latin form of evitata Charybdi in Scyllam incidi (having escaped Charybdis I fell into Scylla) and also provided a Greek equivalent.  In 2014 Graham Waterhouse composed a piano quartet, Skylla and Charybdis, premiered at the Gasteig in Munich.  According to his programme note, though its four movements "do not refer specifically to the protagonists or to events connected with the famous legend", their dynamic is linked subjectively to images connected with it "conjoured up in the composer's mind during the writing".  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Scylla_and_Charybdis 

Residents of a Swiss town got a bit of a shock when it started snowing particles of a fine cocoa powder after the ventilation system at a chocolate factory malfunctioned.  The Lindt & Spruengli company confirmed local reports that there was a minor defect in the cooling ventilation for a line for roasted “cocoa nibs” in its factory in Olten, between Zurich and Basel.  The nibs, fragments of crushed cocoa beans, are the basis of chocolate.  Combined with strong winds on August 14, 2020, the powder spread around the immediate vicinity of the factory, leaving a fine cocoa dusting.  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/chocolate-snow-lindt-factory-switzerland-ventilation-system-a9675611.html 

A THOUGHT FOR AUGUST 19  I dreamt that my hair was kempt. Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it. - Ogden Nash, poet (19 Aug 1902-1971) 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2245  August 19, 2020