Hunter Biden’s New York art debut, months in the making, is a hushed and intense affair.  Titled “The Journey Home,” the show includes 25 works on canvas, metal, and Japanese Yupo paper.  It may be one of the most talked-about and controversial art exhibitions in recent memory.  Concerns over conflicts of interest have reached the White House and the Capitol.  The artist—the 51-year-old son of U.S. President Joe Biden—has been criticized and ridiculed by the conservative media and former President Donald Trump.  His dealer, Georges Bergès, 42, has received death threats and the gallery was vandalized in July.  The show runs through November 15, 2021 and Hunter Biden is expected to attend towards the end.  Katya Kazakina  See graphics at https://news.artnet.com/market/hunter-biden-art-show-sneak-peek-2027731

Born William Frederick Cody in Iowa in 1846, he rose to international fame as a showman.  Cody left home around age 11 to become a cattle herder, and then joined the Pony Express as a rider in 1860.  His resume also includes stints with the Army as a private in the 7^th Kansas Calvary, and later as a scout.  But his legend really began to grow as his buffalo-hunting skills became renowned, earning him the nickname Buffalo Bill.  With the buzz about his exploits on the plains spreading—thanks to newspapers and dime novels, exaggerated as they may have been—Cody parlayed his status as a national folk hero into a show-business career.  Starting off as an actor in a stage production, Cody went on to create "Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show," a circus-like traveling outdoor spectacle.  Real-life ropers and wranglers joined the troupe, helping to popularize the term “cowboy” and serving as a forerunner to modern-day rodeos.  Performers like Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull also became household names as the show spanned 30 years in one form or another and made stops in more than 1,400 communities across North America and Europe.  https://www.colorado.com/articles/experience-legacy-buffalo-bill-colorado  See also https://www.uncovercolorado.com/museums/buffalo-bill-museum/

The Stone of Scone is an ancient symbol of Scottish sovereignty.  According to legend, the sandstone slab was used by the biblical figure Jacob as a pillow when he dreamed of a ladder reaching to heaven and then brought to Scotland by way of Egypt, Spain and Ireland.  The rock, also known as the Stone of Destiny, was used for centuries in the coronation ceremonies of Scottish monarchs.  Following his victory at the Battle of Dunbar in 1296, England’s King Edward I seized the stone from Scotland’s Scone Abbey and had it fitted into the base of a specially crafted wooden Coronation Chair on which English—and later British—monarchs have been crowned inside London’s Westminster Abbey ever since.  The Stone of Scone was secretly buried underneath the historic abbey for safekeeping during World War II, and a plan for locating it was sent to the Canadian prime minister.  German bombs never damaged the stone, but four University of Glasgow students who broke into Westminster Abbey on Christmas Eve in 1950 did.  The nearly 400-pound Stone of Scone split in two as the Scottish nationalists dislodged it from the Coronation Chair and brought it back to Scotland in the trunk of a car.  Four months after its disappearance, the repaired stone was discovered draped in a Scottish national flag on the high altar of the ruined Arbroath Abbey.  No charges were ever brought against the students, and the stone was returned to Westminster Abbey.  Seven hundred years after King Edward I removed the Stone of Scone from Scottish soil, British Prime Minister John Major unexpectedly announced its return, which occurred on November 15, 1996.  It now resides in Edinburgh Castle but will be made available for future coronation ceremonies at Westminster Abbey.  Christopher Klein  https://www.history.com/news/what-is-the-stone-of-scone 

A firth is a long, narrow indentation of the seacoast.  The Firth of Forth (near the Stone of Scone is the estuary (firth) of several Scottish rivers including the River Forth. 

 The origin of the word scone is obscure and may derive from different sources.  That is, the classic Scottish scone, the Dutch schoonbrood or "spoonbread" (very similar to the drop scone), and possibly other similarly-named quick breads may have made their way onto the British tea table, where their similar names merged into one.  Thus, scone may derive from the Middle Dutch schoonbrood (fine white bread), from schoon (pure, clean) and brood (bread), or it may derive from the Scots Gaelic term sgonn meaning a shapeless mass or large mouthful.  The Middle Low German term schöne meaning fine bread may also have played a role in the origination of this word. And, if the explanation put forward by Sheila MacNiven Cameron is true, the word may also be based on the town of Scone.  The difference in pronouncing scone is alluded to in a poem:  I asked the maid in dulcet tone To order me a buttered scone;  The silly girl has been and gone And ordered me a buttered scone.  The Oxford English Dictionary reports that the first mention of the word was in 1513.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scone 

Simple Scones  Copyright 2006 USA WEEKEND and columnist Pam Anderson  https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/79470/simple-scones/ 

What I Learned While Cataloguing an Entire Library of 19th-Century Schoolbooks by Kim Beil  November  4, 2021  This spring I started writing about every book in the library.  Not a large library, nor a public one.  Just a trunk full of 19th-century schoolbooks that my mother found in an old farmhouse in the 1960s.  There are pasteboard readers and parsers and dictionaries, a few arithmetic texts and leather-bound volumes on public speaking.  Nothing special, owned by no one famous.  My plan had been, at first, to photograph the books and then sell them on eBay.  I took the pictures, but couldn’t bear to sell the books.  Read more and see pictures at https://lithub.com/what-i-learned-while-cataloguing-an-entire-library-of-19th-century-schoolbooks/ 

In August 2021, filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley spent two weeks deep in the Berkshires at Chesterwood, the former home of the sculptor Daniel Chester French and a National Trust Historic Site.  French may not be nearly as well-known as his crowning achievement—the monumental sculpture of our 16th president at the Lincoln Memorial.  During his artist residency, Montes-Bradley lived in one of French’s studios and prepared to make a documentary about the sculptor, for which Chesterwood is currently raising funds.  Amy Sutherland  https://savingplaces.org/stories/filmmaker-eduardo-montes-bradley-spotlights-the-lincoln-memorials-sculptor#.YYRd0WDMKUk 

November 3, 2021  Damon Galgut has won the Booker prize for his portrait of a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid.  The judges praised The Promise as “a spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh”, and compared it to the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.  This is the first time Galgut will be walking away with the £50,000 prize, despite having been shortlisted twice before.  The Promise is his ninth novel, and his first in seven years.  He becomes the third South African to win the prestigious fiction prize, after JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer.  Alison Flood  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/03/damon-galgut-wins-booker-prize-the-promise 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2452  November 8, 2021