Pandesal, a plush and pillowy yeast roll coated in breadcrumbs, is an everyday staple in the Philippines, humble and iconic.  The word pandesal means salt bread in Spanish, but it’s really more sweet than salty.  Many enjoy it for breakfast, dunking it into black coffee, warm milk or tsokolate (a thick and grainy hot chocolate).  It’s complete on its own, but frequently enhanced with butter, coconut jam, chocolate spread, peanut butter or sweetened condensed milk.  Every bite collapses softly in your mouth and sends crumbs sprinkling onto your lap.  Arlyn Osborne  Find recipe at https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/04/27/pandesal-recipe-philippine-bread/ 

“Small talk functions as a crucial social ritual,” says Jessica Methot, a behavioural scientist at Rutgers University who studies social networks.  “It’s a way to grease the wheels.”  Methot has co-authored a number of papers that have found several benefits for small talk in work settings—work being one of the most common venues for chit-chat.  In one study, she and her team found that, on days employees had more small talk with coworkers or supervisors, their mood improved, they had more energy, and there was a decrease in burnout.  Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Essex, conducted one study that found that, when people engaged more with a barista—smiling, making eye contact, conversing—they felt a greater sense of community belonging.  In another, her data showed that, the more people mingled with acquaintances or strangers in a day, the better their mood and sense of connection.  Sandstrom observed that, in a normal prepandemic day, people interacted with an average of eleven acquaintances; university students interacted with sixteen.  But, now, talking with more than two or three people a day seems inconceivable.  Small talk is also an equalizer.  Andrew Guydish, a PhD student of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, found in his research that, without space for off-task communication, people in “directing” roles at work spoke much more than those in “following” roles.  In our pandemic world, casual conversation has been all but eliminated.  And it’s not just work small talk that we’re missing out on.  Chatting with strangers out in public can also prove valuable—though it’s now increasingly rare.  Hannah Seo  https://thewalrus.ca/blah-blah-blah-the-lack-of-small-talk-is-breaking-our-brains/  

An “incredibly rare” handwritten manuscript of Emily Brontë’s poems, with pencil corrections by her sister Charlotte, is going up for auction as part of a “lost library” that has been out of public view for nearly a century.  The collection was put together by Arthur Bell Nicholls, the widower of Charlotte, who of the six Brontë children lived the longest, dying in 1855 at the age of 38.  Nicholls sold the majority of the surviving Brontë manuscripts in 1895 to the notorious bibliophile and literary forger Thomas James Wise.  The collectors and brothers Alfred and William Law, who grew up 20 miles from the Brontë family home in Haworth, then acquired some of the family’s heirlooms from Wise, including the manuscript of Emily’s poems, and the family’s much-annotated copy of A History of British Birds, a book immortalised in Jane Eyre.  The Law brothers’ library at Honresfield House disappeared from public view when their nephew and heir Alfred Law died in 1939, and was inaccessible even to academics.  Alison Flood  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/25/emily-brontes-handwritten-poems-are-highlight-of-lost-library-auction 

May 4, 2021  Stacey Abrams, who solidified herself this past election season as one of the most powerful women in American politics, has another job:  She’s a writer.  And not just about politics.  She’s a master of fiction, with eight romance and suspense novels written under the name Selena Montgomery.  Now she’s back to Stacey Abrams, with While Justice Sleeps, which is both her first novel written under her real name and her first legal thriller.  Abrams hopped on Zoom with veteran thriller writer Michael Connelly, author of The Lincoln Lawyer and the Harry Bosch series, to talk shop.  MC:  You mentioned that writing is a part of your core.  What was your experience?  How did storytelling and reading inspire you?  SA:  Until I was 15, my mom was a librarian.  When we moved from Mississippi to Georgia, my father complained that with six kids and two adults, we had more boxes of books than boxes of clothes.  We would later throw out a box of clothes, but books were sacrosanct—you could not touch them.  We grew up with my mom just always encouraging us to read and literally having the run of a library to find the works that we wanted to read.  Read extensive interview at https://www.elle.com/culture/a36318872/stacey-abrams-michael-connelly-conversation/ 

The Peanuts comic strip character Snoopy, in his imagined persona as the World Famous Author, sometimes begins his novels with the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night."  Cartoonist Charles Schulz made Snoopy use this phrase because "it was a cliché, and had been one for a very long time".  A book by Schulz, titled It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, Snoopy, and credited to Snoopy as author, was published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1971.  Janet and Allan Ahlberg wrote a book titled It Was A Dark and Stormy Night in which a kidnapped boy must keep his captors entertained with his storytelling.  It is the opening line in the popular 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle:  It was a dark and stormy night.  L'Engle biographer Leonard Marcus notes that "With a wink to the reader, she chose for the opening line of A Wrinkle in Time, her most audaciously original work of fiction, that hoariest of clichés . . . L'Engle herself was certainly aware of old warhorse's literary provenance as . . . Edward Bulwer-Lytton's much maligned much parodied repository of Victorian purple prose, Paul Clifford."  While discussing the importance of establishing the tone of voice at the beginning of fiction, Judy Morris notes that L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time opens with "Snoopy's signature phrase".  MUSIC:  Kerry Turner:  Twas a Dark and Stormy Night, Op. 12 (1987, rev. 2019), different versions.  Joni Mitchell's song "Crazy Cries of Love" on her album Taming the Tiger opens with "It was a dark and stormy night".  In the December 1998 issue of Musician, Mitchell discusses her idea of using several cliche lines in the lyrics of multiple songs on the album, such as "the old man is snoring" in the title song Taming the Tiger.  Her co-lyricist, Don Fried, had read of a competition in The New Yorker to write a story opening with "It was a dark and stormy night" and was inspired to put it in the song lyrics.  Christian rock/ska band Five Iron Frenzy announced their reunion in 2011 by releasing the song "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night," which opens with the line.  The song was included on their 2013 album, Engine of a Million Plots.  Board game.  In the board game titled It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, contestants are given first lines of various famous novels and must guess their origin.  Originally sold independently in bookstores in the Chicago area, it was later picked up by the online book reading club Goodreads.com.  The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was formed in 1982.  The contest, sponsored by the English Department at San Jose State University, recognizes the worst examples of "dark and stormy night" writing.  It challenges entrants to compose "the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels."  The "best" of the resulting entries have been published in a series of paperback books, starting with It Was a Dark and Stormy Night in 1984.  SOFTWARE:  Version 3.6.2 of the statistical programming language, R, has the codename "Dark and Stormy Night."  R release names appear to be Peanuts references, in this instance to the character Snoopy's abortive attempts to write a novel and his hackneyed opening sentence of choice.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night  See also 100 best first lines from novels at http://americanbookreview.org/100bestlines.asp                                       

Chamomile (American English) or camomile (British English; see spelling differences) is the common name for several daisy-like plants of the family Asteraceae.  Two of the species, Matricaria recutita and Anthemis nobilis, are commonly used to make herbal infusions for traditional medicine.  There is insufficient scientific evidence that consuming chamomile in foods or beverages has any effect on health.  The spelling "camomile" is a British derivation from the French.  In The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (1902), Peter is given chamomile tea after being chased by Mr. McGregor.  Mary Wesley's 1984 novel The Camomile Lawn features a house in Cornwall with a lawn planted with chamomile rather than grass.  See pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamomile  See also How to Grow Chamomile by Marie Iannotti at https://www.thespruce.com/how-to-grow-chamomile-1402627 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2372  June 2, 2021