Prunus spinosa, called blackthorn or sloe, is a species of flowering plant in the rose family Rosaceae.  It is native to Europe, western Asia, and locally in northwest Africa.  It is also locally naturalized in New Zealand, Tasmania and eastern North America.  The fruits are used to make sloe gin in Britain and patxaran in the Navarre autonomous community of Spain.  The wood is used to make walking sticks, including the Irish shillelagh.  Sloes can also be made into jam, chutney, and used in fruit pies.  Sloes preserved in vinegar are similar in taste to Japanese umeboshi.  The juice of the fruits dyes linen a reddish colour that washes out to a durable pale blue.  See pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prunus_spinosa 

The Library of Congress occupies three buildings on Capitol Hill.  The Thomas Jefferson Building (1897) is the original separate Library of Congress building.  (The Library began in 1800 inside the U.S. Capitol.)  The John Adams Building was built in 1938 and the James Madison Memorial Building was completed in 1981.  Other facilities include the High Density Storage Facility (2002) at Fort Meade, Md., and the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation (2007) in Culpeper, Va.  View information for visitors: Library hours, directions, maps and more.  The collection of more than 171 million items includes more than 40 million cataloged books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 74 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America; and the world's largest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music and sound recordings.  Learn more about the Library's collections.  Explore the Library's digital collections.  https://www.loc.gov/about/general-information/ 

Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain, in 1963 to French-Canadians Nicole Perron and Émile Martel who were studying at the University of Salamanca.  The family moved to Coimbra, Portugal, soon after his birth, then to Madrid, Spain, then to Fairbanks, Alaska, and finally to Victoria, British Columbia.   His parents joined the Canadian foreign service, and he was raised in San José, Costa Rica, Paris, France, and Madrid, Spain, with stints in Ottawa, Ontario, in between postings.  Martel completed his final two years of high school at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, and he completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.  Martel's first novel, Self, appeared in 1996.  It was published in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany.  Martel's second novel Life of Pi, was published on 11 September 2001, and was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2002, among other prizes, and became a bestseller in many countries, including spending 61 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller List.  He was inspired in part to write a story about sharing a lifeboat with a wild animal after reading a review of the novella Max and the Cats by Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar in The New York Times Book Review.  Martel initially received some criticism from Brazilian press for failing to consult with Scliar.  Martel pointed out that he could not have stolen from a work he had not at the time read, and he willingly acknowledged being influenced by the New York Times review of Scliar's work and thanked him in the Author's Note of Life of Pi.  Life of Pi was later chosen for the 2003 edition of CBC Radio's Canada Reads competition, where it was championed by author Nancy Lee.  Martel was the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor at the Institute of Comparative Literature, Free University of Berlin in 2002, where he taught a course titled "The Animal in Literature".  He then spent a year in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, from September 2003 as the Saskatoon Public Library's writer-in-residence.  He collaborated with Omar Daniel, composer-in-residence at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, on a piece for piano, string quartet and bass.  The composition, You Are Where You Are, is based on text written by Martel, which includes parts of cellphone conversations taken from moments in an ordinary day.  From 2005 to 2007, Martel was Visiting Scholar at the University of Saskatchewan.  Beatrice and Virgil, his third novel, came out in 2010.  The work is an allegorical take on the Holocaust, attempting to approach this period not through the lens of historical witness, but through imaginative synthesis.  The main characters in the story are a writer, a taxidermist, and two stuffed animals:  a red howler monkey and a donkey.  From 2007 to 2011, Martel ran a book club with the then Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, sending the Prime Minister a book every two weeks for four years, a total of more than a hundred novels, plays, poetry collections, graphic novels and children's books.  The letters were published as a book in 2012, 101 Letters to a Prime Minister.  The Polish magazine Histmag cited him as the inspiration behind their giving of books to the Prime Minister Donald Tusk; this, however, was a one-off with only 10 books involved, which had been donated by their publishers and selected by readers of the magazine.  Martel was invited to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2014.  He sat on the Board of Governors of the Saskatoon Public Library from 2010 to 2015.  His fourth novel, The High Mountains of Portugal, was published on 2 February 2016.  It tells of three characters in Portugal in three different time periods, who cope with love and loss each in their own way.  It made The New York Times Bestseller list within the first month of its release.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann_Martel 

As far as popular fascinations go, few have endured for as long, or created as robust a bibliography, as witches.  While the word “witch” has its etymological roots (wicce) in Old English, the concept has antecedents much older and geographically widespread.  Written accounts of women who practice magic are as old as recorded history and are still popular today.  let us now look at some of literature’s most significant witches:  Hecate, 7th Century B.C.E.  The only daughter of Titans Perseus and Asteria, Hecate was a goddess of Greek mythology with a particularly large wheelhouse, associated variably with magic, witchcraft, the night, the moon, ghosts, and necromancy, as well as lighter fare like athletic games, courts of law, birth, and cattle-tending. In later periods she was often depicted in triple form, in connection with the phases of the moon.  Morgan le Fay, 1150  First referenced in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, Morgan le Fay was an enchantress-cum-antagonist of Arthurian Legend whose name has been rendered in so many different spellings that it practically constitutes an act of witchcraft in itself.  Malleus Maleficarum, 1487  Often translated as Hammer of the Witches, the Malleus Maleficarum was a manifesto by German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer written in defense of the prosecution of witches.  While the Catholic Church officially condemned the Malleus Maleficarum in 1490, it became an important text during the brutal witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries.  The Weird Sisters, 1611  Referred to as the “weyward sisters” in Macbeth’s first folio, this trio of witches delivers the dual prophecies that set the entire play’s course of events into motion:  that the eponymous Scottish general will become king, while his companion, Banquo, will generate a line of kings.  Literary Hub  October 31, 2021 

October 31, 2021  Ado Campeol, dubbed "the father of Tiramisu" by Italian media, has died aged 93.  Campeol was the owner of Le Beccherie, a restaurant in Treviso in northern Italy where the famous dessert was invented by his wife and a chef.  The dish, featuring coffee-soaked biscuits and mascarpone, was added to their menu in 1972 but never patented by the family.  It has since become a staple of Italian cuisine, adapted by chefs worldwide.  According to the dessert's co-inventor, Chef Roberto Linguanotto, the dish was the result of an accident while making vanilla ice cream.  Mr Linguanotto dropped some mascarpone cheese into a bowl of eggs and sugar, and after he noticed the mixture's pleasant taste, he told Campeol's wife Alba.  The pair then perfected the dessert by adding ladyfinger sponges soaked in coffee, and sprinkling it with cocoa--calling it "Tiramisù", which translates into English as "pick me up".  The dish appeared in print in a 1981 issue of Veneto, a local publication dedicated to food and wine, and it is now one of Italy's best known desserts.  Variants of tiramisu feature alcohol like rum or marsala, but the original recipe--certified by the Italian Academy of Cuisine in 2010--was alcohol-free because it was intended to be child-friendly.  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59103658 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2448  November 1, 2021