PARAPHRASES from Night School, #21 in the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child   Of course it works.  This is Germany  *  If we don’t live to see it, the future means nothing.  *  Eggs are broken.  Omelet is made.  All is forgiven if it turns out tasty.  *  Two-star generals get medals like frequent flyer miles.   

WATCH: Jazz Pianist Marcus Roberts in Episode Two of the Mighty SONG Writers Video Series  This 24:25 episode continues our video series at Lit Hub to benefit the wonderful Mighty Writers, a Philadelphia-based non-profit that teaches reading and writing to thousands of low-income and marginalized students every year and is seeing more need than ever during the pandemic (head here to learn more).  Over the next few months we’ll be asking singer-songwriters about their writing and reading lives—their influences, writing habits, favorite books—and while they’re at, to play us a song or two.   Check out episode one:  Amanda Shires with Jason Isbell.  This installment features jazz pianist Marcus Roberts.  Roberts performs a handful of favorite songs and discusses reading, writing, and his musical idols.  https://lithub.com/watch-jazz-pianist-marcus-roberts-get-the-blues-and-talks-musical-influences/ 

Aconitum also known as aconite, monkshood, wolf's-bane, leopard's bane, mousebane, women's bane, devil's helmet, queen of poisons, or blue rocket, is a genus of over 250 species of flowering plants belonging to the family Ranunculaceae.  These herbaceous perennial plants are chiefly native to the mountainous parts of the Northern Hemisphere, growing in the moisture-retentive but well-draining soils of mountain meadows.  Most species are extremely poisonous and must be dealt with very carefully.  Several Aconitum hybrids, such as the Arendsii form of Aconitum carmichaelii, have won gardening awards—such as the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit.  Some are used by florists.   The name aconitum comes from the Greek ἀκόνιτον, which may derive from the Greek akon for dart or javelin, the tips of which were poisoned with the substance, or from akonae, because of the rocky ground on which the plant was thought to grow.  The Greek name lycoctonum, which translates literally to "wolf's bane", is thought to indicate the use of its juice to poison arrows or baits used to kill wolves.  The English name monkshood refers to the cylindrical helmet, called the galea, distinguishing the flower.  See graphics at  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aconitum  See also https://carnegiemnh.org/wolfsbane/ 

Grandma's Sweet and Tangy Bean Salad by Christina AB  https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/222573/grandmas-sweet-and-tangy-bean-salad/ 

Kay Dick is a name all but forgotten today, but in the midtwentieth century she was at the heart of the London literary scene.  A list of the guests regularly entertained by her and her partner, the novelist Kathleen Farrell, at their Hampstead home—they lived together from 1940 to 1962—includes a host of successful and popular writers of the era, including C. P. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Brigid Brophy, Muriel Spark, Stevie Smith, Olivia Manning, Angus Wilson, and Francis King.  Her first four novels—By the Lake (1949), Young Man (1951), An Affair of Love (1953), and Solitaire (1958)—which tell stories of romantic or familial entanglements against the backdrop of refined European settings, were elegant but not especially memorable.  Her fifth work, Sunday (1962), proved more absorbing, especially in its psychological astuteness.  It’s a loosely autobiographical novel about her childhood (Dick was born in England in 1915, but educated in Geneva, then at the Lycée Française in London, before leaving home at the age of twenty “to mix with a louche set,” as she later put it in an interview) and her relationship with her glamorous single mother.  “She must have had great courage,” wrote Dick in an autobiographical piece that detailed the story of her birth, “because illegitimacy in the First World War was a very unpleasant business to be mixed up with, especially for a woman brought up in a reasonably privileged fashion.”  Dick’s penultimate novel, They: A Sequence of Unease (1977) a disquieting, lean, pared-back dystopian tale, which won the now defunct South-East Arts Literature Prize, is a complete departure from her previous volumes.  Reading it was like reading the work of an entirely different writer.  At less than a hundred pages, They is either a novella consisting of nine chapters, or a collection of nine interlinked short stories.  The Times’s critic Philip Howard opted to describe it as the latter, and I’m inclined to agree, not least because the final episode, “Hallo Love,” was originally published as a stand-alone piece two years earlier, in 1975.  Set amid the countryside and the beaches of coastal Sussex, They depicts a world in which plundering bands of philistines prowl England destroying art, books, sculpture, musical instruments and scores, punishing those artistically and intellectually inclined outliers who refuse to abide by this new mob rule.  One element that makes the book especially disturbing is that “they,” whoever they are, are not a government-sanctioned group like Bradbury’s firemen or Orwell’s all-pervading government surveillance, but rather an unsanctioned multitude, the strength of which appears to lie not in official mandates, but rather in the swell of their ever-increasing numbers.  “Loners,” as “they” refer to the narrator and her kind, are more at risk than couples or families.  We’re possible sources of contagion,” another character explains.  Television, for example, is compulsory.  In a later episode, great bands of “them” march across the downs, “each one holding a pole to match his height.”  Lucy Scholes  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/08/13/a-lost-dystopian-masterpiece/ 

The International Booker Prize for the year 2020 was announced August 26.  Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld—who uses the pronoun they—won the coveted honour for debut novel, The Discomfort of Evening, translated into English by Michele Hutchison.  The novel had previously won the prestigious ANV Debut Prize.  The 29-year-old works on a dairy farm and is an acclaimed poet.  Their collection, Caulf’s Caul was awarded the C Buddingh’ Prize for best poetry debut in 2015.  https://indianexpress.com/article/books-and-literature/who-is-booker-prize-winner-marieke-lucas-rijneveld-discomfort-of-evening-6571907/ 

WORD OF THE DAY FOR AUGUST 28  emporium  noun  (also figurative) A city or region which is a major trading centre; also, a place within a city for commerce and trading; a marketplace.  (also figurative) A shop that offers a wide variety of goods for sale; a department store; (with a descriptive word) a shop specializing in particular goods.  (historical) A business set up to enable foreign traders to engage in commerce in a country; a factory (now the more common term).  (by extension, obsolete) The brain.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/emporium#English 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue  2250  August 28, 2020