Digitized selections from the holdings of the Newberry Library, which has one of the largest publicly-accessible postcard collections in the world.  Images in this digital collection are available for any lawful purpose, commercial or non-commercial, without licensing or permission fees to the library, subject to the following terms and conditions:  https://www.newberry.org/rights-and-reproductions   https://archive.org/details/newberrypostcards  Thank you, Muse reader! 

No one is pickier about rice than Guorui Chen.  The 33 year old only accepts rice grains longer than 7 millimeters (1/4 inch), and they have to be white, clear, straight, and undamaged.  Every day, he separates intact grains from broken ones with a winnowing basket and then spends hours examining their transparency under a light.  But Chen won’t cook this rice.  Instead, he turns it into art.  He picks out three grains, glues them end to end into a triangle, and connects hundreds of these basic units to form shapes:  a horse, a lotus flower, a temple.  In his hands, rice turns into aesthetic hollow sculptures. They appear so delicate that every joint looks liable to break, but in fact, they are sturdy enough to be lifted up and moved.  In a country with over a billion people who eat rice almost every day, Guorui Chen is the only one using rice to make Gaolou Rice Strings, a traditional art that had been lost for decades.  “Nowhere else in the world can you find it,” says Chen.  Zeyi Yang  Read much more and see pictures at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/making-art-with-rice-china

landish  adjective  From Middle English londish, londiss, from Old English *lendisċ (attested in inlendisċ, ūtlendisċ, uplendisċ, etc.) equivalent to land +‎ -ish.  landish (comparative more landish, superlative most landish)  Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the land quotations ▼ Related terms:  inlandish, outlandish, uplandish  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/landish

“The years rolled by, one by one, like peaceful uniform wheels.” * “the paradise of simple faith” * “Without cap or helmet, his head is orphaned.” * “They plunged the plow into the rich flesh of the fields.” *  The Radetsky March, a novel by Joseph Roth, translated by Joachim Neugroschel 

For his dark comedy, Joseph Roth might be compared to his contemporary Franz Kafka.  With the writings of Kafka and Robert Musil, Roth’s novels constitute Austria-Hungary’s finest contribution to early-twentieth-century fiction, yet his career was such as to make you wonder that he managed to produce novels at all, let alone sixteen of them in sixteen years.  For most of his adult life, Roth was a hardworking journalist, travelling back and forth between Berlin and Paris, his two home bases, but also reporting from Russia, Poland, Albania, Italy, and southern France.  He didn’t have a home; he lived in hotels.  His novel-writing was done at café tables, between newspaper deadlines, amid the bloody events—strikes, riots, assassinations—that marked Europe’s passage from the First World War to the Second, and which seemed more remarkable than anything a novelist could imagine.  When Roth was born, in 1894, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, presided over by the aging Franz Joseph, consisted of all or part of what we now call Austria, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Italy.  Ethnically, this was a huge ragbag, and separatist movements were already under way, but to many citizens of the empire its heterogeneity was its glory.  He was the first person to inscribe the name of Adolf Hitler in European fiction, and that was in 1923, ten years before Hitler took over Germany.  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/01/19/european-dreams

In Medieval Europe, sawing the top off a well-executed coffin revealed something delicious, rather than disgusting.  A coffin, spelled coffyn in 12th-century English, referred to self-standing pastry made from flour, water, and sometimes fat.  Like a sort of medieval Tupperware, coffins preserved the foods they contained and were rarely eaten.  During the Tudor period, the English loved pastry cases so much that they developed a saying:  “If it’s good, tis better in a Coffyn.”  The barely edible container was the progenitor of pie.  Leigh Chavez-Bush  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/who-made-first-pie

Henry Dunant was a co-founder of the Red Cross (ICRC).  His book, “Un souvenir de Solférino” (A Memory of Solferino), about the decisive battle in the Austro-Sardinian War lay the foundations for more humane conduct in times of war.  The man from Geneva was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this in 1901.  But anyone who now regards Dunant as an absolute humanitarian would be mistaken.  This businessman was spending time in northern Italy due to commercial interests, and it was actually more by chance that he bore witness to the ruthlessness of war there.  Andrej Abplanalp  https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2018/05/henry-dunant-a-tragic-hero/  

A curtsy (also spelled curtsey or incorrectly as courtsey) is a traditional gesture of greeting, in which a girl or woman bends her knees while bowing her head.  It is the female equivalent of male bowing or genuflecting in Western cultures.  Miss Manners characterizes its knee bend as deriving from a "traditional gesture of an inferior to a superior."  The word "curtsy" is a phonological change from "courtesy" known in linguistics as syncope.  According to Desmond Morris, the motions involved in the curtsy and the bow were similar until the 17th century, and the gender differentiation between the actions developed afterwards.  The earlier, combined version is still performed by Restoration comedy actors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtsy   

GRATITUDE QUOTES

“I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.”   Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living.  If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself.”  Tecumseh 

“When eating fruit, remember the one who planted the tree.”  Vietnamese proverb 

"'Enough' is a feast."  Buddhist proverb 

“Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life.”  Rumi

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”  Marcel Proust 

“We must find time to stop and thank the people who make a difference in our lives.”  John F. Kennedy 

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”  Marcus Tullius Cicero

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2290  November 27, 2020