Writing is rewriting—a lot of rewriting.  Most of us understand the desire to be clear and articulate, respected and maybe adored.  Fiction reveals to us how impossible and irrelevant these desires are.  Our characters are searching for equilibrium in a little dinghy in the aftermath of that metaphysical tsunami.  They are looking for meaning that resonates with their desire to understand.  Words are the major tools for survival in the human realm.  Elements of Fiction by Walter Mosley 

The verb “puzzle”—to perplex or confuse, bewilder or bemuse—is of unknown origin.  “That kind of fits,” said Martin Demaine, an artist in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  “It’s a puzzle where the word ‘puzzle’ comes from.”  His son, Erik Demaine, an M.I.T. computer scientist, agreed.  “It’s a self-describing etymology,” he said.  The father-son duo is most famous for mathematical investigations into paper folding, with “curved-crease sculptures”—swirling loops of pleated paper that resemble intergalactic interchanges.  Curved origami dates to late 1920s Bauhaus; a classic specimen starts as a circular piece of paper, which, when folded along concentric circles, automatically twists into a saddle curve.  The Demaines’ trio of pieces, “Computational Origami,” was part of the 2008 “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and now resides in its permanent collection.  In a 2015 paper, “Fun With Fonts: Algorithmic Typography,” the Demaines explained their motivations:  “Scientists use fonts every day to express their research through the written word.  But what if the font itself communicated (the spirit of) the research?  What if the way text is written, and not just the text itself, engages the reader in the science?”   Take, for instance, a new font in their collection that debuts June 25, 2021:  the Sudoku Font.  The inspiration came in the fall of 2019, when Erik Demaine co-taught the course “Fundamentals of Programming” (with the computer scientist Srini Devadas).  During one class, Dr. Demaine and his 400 freshmen and sophomores programmed a Sudoku solve —they wrote code that solved a Sudoku puzzle.  The Demaines began this puzzle-font experiganza around the turn of the century with a dissection puzzle—a puzzle whereby one shape, or polygon, is sliced up and reassembled into other geometric shapes.  Their motivation was a problem posed in 1964 by Harry Lindgren, a British-Australian engineer and amateur mathematician:  Can every letter of the alphabet be dissected into pieces that rearrange to form a square?  Siobhan Roberts  See graphics at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/science/puzzles-fonts-math-demaine.html 

The Ohio Literary Trail celebrates the Buckeye State's role in shaping culture and literature worldwide.  Along the trail, developed by the Ohioana Library Association, lie historic homes, museums, library collections and historical markers honoring great authors, poets and influencers of the literary landscape.  Following the state's five geographic regions for convenient self-guided tours, curious explorers can walk in the footsteps of Harriet Beecher Stowe and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.  They can view renowned collections of comics, picture book art and Nancy Drew-themed artifacts.  Or they can tour the home and farm of Pulitzer Prize winner and conservationist Louis Bromfield.   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56790079-the-ohio-literary-trail 

For around two hundred years, investigators ranging from John Hunter (in the 1700s) to Audrey Smith and James Lovelock (in the 1950s) attempted to suspend the animacy of living beings—from frogs to hamsters—in hopes of reviving them upon thawing.  Hunter was determined to discover the essence of life—and also to bag a fortune in creating a means of time travel into the future by freezing oneself to stop the clock on aging and then eventually reanimating.  Smith and Lovelock, more practically, aimed to advance medical practices.  Regardless, in key respects the process was the same:  freeze, wait, reanimate.  Success, however, was never achieved.  Smith and Lovelock’s failure in the 1950s to freeze and revive rabbits and monkeys marked formal science’s latest attempt to reanimate frozen mammals.  The Life Extension Society was founded in 1964.  (It wasn’t until 1965, however, that an industrial engineer and cryonicist in New York by the name of Karl Werner invented the term “cryonics” by fusing cryo- and bionics.)  Other groups formed in California and Michigan, where Ettinger was president of the Cryonics Society of Michigan.  Yet something crucial was missing:  the first patient!  Evan Cooper, who founded the Life Extension Society after reading Ettinger’s book, made extensive efforts to promote cryonics to both scientists and the public at large.  Dismayed by the lack of appeal generated after two years, he wrote, “Are we shouting in the abyss?  How could 110 million go to their deaths without one, at least trying for a life in the future via freezing?  Where is the individualism, scientific curiosity, and even eccentricity we hear so much about?”  The Life Extension Society even offered to freeze the first volunteer free of charge.  In 1967, a golden opportunity presented itself.  A series of events that would generate worldwide news about cryonics was about to unfold.  The first volunteer had arrived. A patient diagnosed with terminal cancer expressed interest in being frozen.  The stage was set with a call between Robert Nelson, an ex-TV repairman who was president of the Life Extension Society, and Robert Ettinger.  Nelson recalled, “Well, I called Robert Ettinger that night, and I told him what had happened. And he said, oh my god, this is the biggest thing that’s happened in the cryonics program.  Out Cold: A Chilling Descent into the Macabre, Controversial, Lifesaving History of Hypothermia by Philip Jaekl, copyright © 2021.  https://lithub.com/the-science-and-science-fiction-of-cryonic-preservation/ 

Korean food is often characterized by the Five Cardinal Colors, or Obangsaek; which represents the five natural elements in yellow, blue, white, red, and black.  Obangsaek is based on ‘yin & yang’ and the ‘five movements’ principle, which says the spirits of yin and yang gave birth to Heaven and Earth, creating the five elements of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.  It also refers to the five cardinal points of north, south, east, west, and center.  In Korean cuisine, many dishes strive to include all of the five colors, such as Bibimbap.  Suji Park  See pictures at https://sujiskorean.com/korean-101/   See also https://harindabama.com/2018/08/04/korean-food-colors-and-textures/ 

The early editions of Henry David Thoreau’s posthumous publications listed no editors.  Later, early Thoreau biographers credited Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ellery Channing with putting these editions together and seeing them through publication.  But actually, as literature scholar Kathy Fedorko tells us, this work was accomplished by Thoreau’s executor: his sister, Sophia Thoreau.  “Sophia’s most demanding task after Henry’s death [1862] involved dealing with his manuscripts left in three trunks,” Fedorko writes.  “Most importantly to posterity, and contrary to critical disdain about her ability to do so, Sophia kept these manuscripts in meticulous order, selected an editor for her brother’s Journal, and, on her own, edited four posthumous volumes of Henry’s essays.”  During his life, Henry published two books, Walden and a Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  This makes the great majority of his work posthumous.   https://daily.jstor.org/sophia-thoreau-to-the-rescue/  See also The Myth of Henry David Thoreau’s Isolation at https://daily.jstor.org/myth-henry-david-thoreaus-isolation/ 

We denizens of Earth have a common vice:  We take what we're offered, whether we need it or not.  You can get into a lot of trouble that way. - Robert Sheckley, science-fiction author (16 Jul 1928-2005) 

http://librariansmuse.com  Issue 2391  July 16, 2021