Everyman is a novel by Philip Roth, published by Houghton Mifflin in May 2006.  It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2007.  It is Roth's third novel to receive the prize.  The book begins at the funeral of its protagonist.  The remainder of the book, which ends with his death, looks mournfully back on episodes from his life, including his childhood, where he and his older brother, Howie, worked in his father's shop, Everyman's Jewelry Store.  The unnamed everyman, while an ordinary man and not a famous novelist, has much in common with Philip Roth; he is born, like Roth, in 1933; he grows up in Elizabeth, six miles away from Roth's native Newark; and he recounts a series of medical problems and a history of frequent hospitalization similar to that of the author's.  Everyman is also the title of a fifteenth-century English morality play whose eponymous protagonist is "called" by death and must account for his life on earth before God.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyman_(novel) 

Boston Brown Bread may date back to Colonial America, but eating it now hardly feels like dining with the Pilgrims.  This steamed, molasses-laden comfort food comes in a can.  You’ll need an opener to crack the lid off and thwack or jiggle out the dense roll of bread inside.  For some New Englanders, especially in the Boston area and Portland, Maine, it’s a nostalgic childhood tradition.  The recipe calls for cornmeal mixed with molasses and rye and wheat flours.  Traditionally, the mixture is then poured into a coffee can or small mold and steamed until it rises.  The result?  A bread as sweet and dense as cake.  The legacy of the 17th century recipe has been carried on by companies like B&M (which also sell Boston baked beans).  Locals don’t bat an eye when they have to search for canned bread among stewed peaches and kidney beans in the supermarket.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/canned-bread-new-england

Pan-ethnic labels describing the U.S. population of people tracing their roots to Latin America and Spain have been introduced over the decades, rising and falling in popularity.  Today, the two dominant labels in use are Hispanic and Latino, with origins in the 1970s and 1990s respectively.  More recently, a new, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label, Latinx, has emerged as an alternative that is used by some news and entertainment outlets, corporations, local governments and universities to describe the nation’s Hispanic population.  However, for the population it is meant to describe, only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.  The emergence of Latinx coincides with a global movement to introduce gender-neutral nouns and pronouns into many languages whose grammar has traditionally used male or female constructions.  In the United States, the first uses of Latinx appeared more than a decade ago.  It was added to a widely used English dictionary in 2018, reflecting its greater use.  Yet the use of Latinx is not common practice, and the term’s emergence has generated debate about its appropriateness in a gendered language like Spanish.  Some critics point to its origins among U.S. English speakers, saying it ignores the Spanish language and its gendered form.  Luis Noe-Bustamante, Lauren Mora and Mark Hugo Lopez  https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in-four-u-s-hispanics-have-heard-of-latinx-but-just-3-use-it/

In filmmaking, a long take (also called continuous take or continuous shot) is a shot lasting much longer than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of films in general.  Significant camera movement and elaborate blocking are often elements in long takes, but not necessarily so.  The term "long take" should not be confused with the term "long shot", which refers to the distance between the camera and its subject and not to the temporal length of the shot itself.  The length of a long take was originally limited to how much film the magazine of a motion picture camera could hold, but the advent of digital video has considerably lengthened the maximum potential length of a take.  When filming Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock intended for the film to have the effect of one long continuous take, but the camera magazines available could hold not more than 1000 feet of 35 mm film.  As a result, each take used up to a whole roll of film and lasts up to 10 minutes.  Many takes end with a dolly shot to a featureless surface (such as the back of a character's jacket), with the following take beginning at the same point by zooming out.  The entire film consists of only 11 shots.  Andy Warhol and collaborating avant-garde filmmaker, Jonas Mekas, shot the 485-minute-long experimental film, Empire (1964), on 10 rolls of film using an Auricon camera via 16 mm film which allowed longer takes than its 35 mm counterpart.  "The camera took a 1,200ft roll of film that would shoot for roughly 33 minutes."  Films can be quantitatively analyzed using the "ASL" (average shot length), a statistical measurement which divides the total length of the film by the number of shots.  For example, Béla Tarr's film Werckmeister Harmonies is 149 minutes, and made up of 39 shots.  Thus its ASL is 229.2 seconds.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_take 

Harmonium is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens.  His first book at the age of forty-four, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies.  This collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines ("Life Is Motion") to several hundred ("The Comedian as the Letter C") (see the footnotes for the table of contents).  Harmonium was reissued in 1931 with three poems omitted and fourteen new poems added.  Most of Harmonium's poems were published between 1914 and 1923 in various magazines, so most are now in the public domain in America and similar jurisdictions, as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act affects only works first published after 1922.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonium_(poetry_collection) 

August 13, 2020  Border Cave is a deep gash in a cliff face, high in the Lebombo Mountains of South Africa.  Sheltered from the elements, the spot has yielded bones, tools, and preserved plant material that paint a detailed picture of the lives of human inhabitants for more than 200,000 years.  Now, there’s a new sketch emerging:  Plant remains point to evidence that the cave’s occupants used grass bedding about 200,000 years ago.  Researchers speculate that the cave’s occupants laid their bedding on ash to repel insects.  Cathleen O’Grady  https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/world-s-oldest-camp-bedding-found-south-african-cave 

Pauline Perlmutter Steinem grew up in Germany and moved to Toledo, Ohio in 1887 at the age of 19 with her husband.  Steinem was the first woman elected to the Toledo school board, in 1904, and may have been the first Jewish woman to hold elected office in America.  She was active in the Toledo suffrage efforts and became president of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association in 1908.  As president she wrote to suffrage association chapters across the state, urging them to campaign for pro-suffrage delegates to the 1911 constitutional convention.  After the 1912 Ohio amendment failed, Steinem marched with thousands in the Women's Suffrage Parade in Washington D.C., the day before President-elect Woodrow Wilson's inauguration.  Steinem is the paternal grandmother of feminist Gloria Steinem.  Learn about other activists:  Bettie Wilson of Cincinnati, Hallie Quinn Brown of Wilberforce, Florence E. Allen of Cleveland, Belle Sherwin of Cleveland, and Harriet Taylor Upton of Warren.  On June 16, 1919, the Ohio General Assembly ratified the 19th Amendment--the fifth state to do so.  Jackie Borchardt and Jessie Balmert  https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/14/womens-suffrage-six-ohio-women-who-helped-get-women-vote/1330734001/ 

A.WORD.A.DAY with Anu Garg  vaccinate  (VAK-si-nayt) verb tr., intr.:  1.  To administer a vaccine to produce immunity against a disease.  2.  To immunize against something.  From Latin vacca (cow), because in the beginning the cowpox virus was used against smallpox.  Earliest documented use:  1803. 

A THOUGHT FOR AUGUST 21  There can be a new tomorrow / There can be a brighter day / There  can be a new tomorrow / Love will find a way. - Jackie DeShannon, singer-songwriter (b. 21 Aug 1941)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2246  August 21, 2020