Nathanael West was born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein, on October 17, 1903, in New York City.  After dropping out of high school, West gained admission into Tufts University by forging his high school transcript.  After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student who was also named Nathan Weinstein.  While at Brown, West became increasingly interested in unusual literary style and the writings of French surrealists and British and Irish poets.  Following graduation, he went to Paris for three months, and it was at this point that he changed his name to Nathanael West.  Shortly thereafter he returned home to work in construction for his father as well as a night manager of the Kenmore Hotel in Manhattan.  He also worked a short while for the magazine Contact with William Carlos Williams.  Though West had been working on his writing since college, it was not until his quiet night job at the hotel that he found the time to put his novel together.  Finally, in 1931, West published The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a novel he had conceived in college.  Then, in 1933, West published Miss Lonelyhearts.  In 1933, West bought a farm in eastern Pennsylvania, but soon got a job as a contract scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures and moved to Hollywood.  In 1934, he published a third novel, A Cool Million.  None of West’s three works were selling well, however, so he spent the mid-1930s in financial difficulty, sporadically collaborating on screenplays. It was during this time that West wrote The Day of the Locust, which would be published in 1939.  Sadly this was the last book West ever wrote.  West died on December 22, 1940, in a car accident.  Ironically, West’s reputation grew after his death, especially with the publication of his collected novels in 1957.  Miss Lonelyhearts is widely regarded as West’s masterpiece, and The Day of the Locust still stands as one of the best novels written about the early years of Hollywood.  Most of West’s fiction is, in one way or another, a response to the Depression that hit America with the stock market crash in October 1929.  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/nathanael-west 

The Code of Hammurabi is a Babylonian legal text from c. 1755–1750 BC.  It is the longest and best-organised legal text from the ancient Near East, as well as the best-preserved.  It is written in the Old Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, purportedly by Hammurabi, sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon.  The primary copy of the text is on a basalt stele 2.25 m (7 ft 4 1⁄2 in) tall.  It was discovered in 1901, at the site of Susa in present-day Iran, where it had been taken as plunder six hundred years after its creation.  However, the text was copied and studied by Mesopotamian scribes for over a millennium.  The stele is now in the Louvre Museum.  At the top of the stele is an image in relief of Hammurabi with Shamash, the Babylonian sun god and god of justice.  Below the relief are about 4,130 lines of cuneiform text:  one fifth contain a prologue and epilogue in poetic style, while the remaining four fifths contain what are generally called the laws.  In the prologue, Hammurabi claims to have been granted his rule by the gods "to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak".  The laws are casuistic, expressed as "if . . . then" conditional sentences.  Their scope is broad, including for example criminal law, family law, property law, and commercial law.  The initial reaction of modern scholars to the Code was one of admiration, at its perceived fairness and respect for the rule of law, and at the complexity of Old Babylonian society. There was also much discussion of its influence on the Mosaic Law.  It was identified early that lex talionis, the "eye for an eye" principle, underlay the two collections.  Debate among Assyriologists since has centred around several aspects of the Code:  its purpose, its underlying principles, its language, and its relation to earlier and later law collections.  Despite the uncertainty surrounding these issues, Hammurabi is regarded outside Assyriology as a figure of great importance in the history of law, and the document as a true legal code.  A relief portrait of Hammurabi hangs with those of other lawgivers in the U.S. Capitol, and there are replicas of the stele in numerous institutions, including the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi  See also https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp 

Emily Carr (1871–1945) was a Canadian artist and writer who was inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast.  One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a Modernist and Post-Impressionist style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her work until she changed subject matter from Aboriginal themes to landscapes—forest scenes in particular.  As a writer Carr was one of the earliest chroniclers of life in British Columbia.  The British Columbia Archives holds the largest collection of Emily Carr artworks, sketches, and archival materials.  A number of the records have been digitized and are available online.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Carr 

Six of our nation’s forty-eight vice presidents have been affiliated with Indiana (second only to New York’s eleven):  Schulyler Colfax (R) – 17th VP from 1869-1873 (Grant); Thomas A. Hendricks (D) – 21st VP in 1885 (Cleveland); Charles W. Fairbanks (R) – 26th VP from 1905-1909 (Teddy Roosevelt); Thomas R. Marshall (D) – 28th VP from 1913-1921 (Wilson); Dan Quayle (R) – 44th VP from 1989-1993 (Bush); and Mike Pence (R) – 48th VP from 2017-2021 (Trump).  Two other men, William English in 1880 and John Kern in 1908 ran unsuccessfully for vice president.  28th Vice President Thomas R. Marshall once quipped that Indiana is known as the “mother of vice presidents” because it is “home of more second-class men than any other state” (Northwest Indiana Times).  https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/lesson-plans/indiana-mother-vice-presidents 

The Slippery Noodle Inn is a large blues bar and restaurant with two performance stages in downtown Indianapolis.  It also has the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating bar in the state of Indiana, having opened in 1850 as the Tremont House.  The Inn served as a stop on the Underground Railroad during the American Civil War.  During prohibition it was called a restaurant, although beer was still being made in the basement, and later it housed a brothel until 1953.  The Inn is the oldest commercial building in the city.  Its tin ceiling dates to 1890 and the oak bar is also over a century old.  The Inn has operated under its current name since 1963.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_Noodle_Inn 

Draco (fl. c. 7th century BC), also called Drako or Drakon, was the first recorded legislator of Athens in Ancient Greece.  He replaced the prevailing system of oral law and blood feud by a written code to be enforced only by a court of law.  Draco was the first democratic legislator requested by the Athenian citizens to be a lawgiver for the city-state, but the citizens had not expected that Draco would establish laws characterized by their harshness.  Since the 19th century, the adjective draconian refers to similarly unforgiving rules or laws, in Greek, English, and other European languages.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_(lawgiver)  Draco Lucius Malfoy is a character in the  Harry Potter series.   

Carrara marble is a type of white or blue-grey marble popular for use in sculpture and building decor.  It is quarried in the city of Carrara in the province of Massa and Carrara in the Lunigiana, the northernmost tip of modern-day Tuscany, Italy.  See list of notable buildings and monuments made of Carrara marble and see graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrara_marble 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2363  May 12, 2021