Frédéric Bruly Bouabré is one of Africa’s best known and most celebrated 20th-century artists.  Born in 1923 in the Bété village of Zéprégühé, near Daloa, the major city in west-central Côte d’Ivoire, Bouabré is celebrated for his untiring attempts to codify, archive, and share information that connects the human story.  His singular devotion to drawing and his unwavering interest in taxonomy were remarkable, especially among African artists without academic training, but it was his approach to image and language, condensing oral culture into a dizzying multiplicity of visual forms and written annotations, that sets him apart.  In the formative period of his career, Bouabré was concerned with transcribing the history and knowledge of his native Bété ethnic group, and he set out to create the first writing system for the Bété language in the 1950s.  He referred to his pioneering syllabary as a Bété alphabet, and he created an artwork version, Alphabet Bété, in the early 1990s.  In the 1970s Bouabré began making drawings to accompany stories inspired by Bété folktales and proverbs.  Semence de la vie (Seed of Life) (1977) may be his earliest known artwork.  The drawings, which he referred to as tableaux—each measuring around 12 by eight inches and executed with ballpoint pen, pencil, and colored pencil—explore the origin of life, incorporating Bété allegorical tales and other fictional sources.  Frédéric Bruly Bouabré:  World Unbound, organized by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, The Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, with Erica DiBenedetto, Curatorial Assistant, and with support from Damasia Lacroze, Department Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, March 13–August 13, 2022.  See illustrations at https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/707 

Cleopatra’s Needle is the name shared by three ancient Egyptian obelisks--one in New York City, one in London, and one in Paris.  The obelisks were named in honor of Cleopatra because of her famed beauty and connections to well-known Romans.  The obelisks in New York and London are made of red granite from the quarries of Aswan, with each stone weighing approximately 224 tons.  These obelisks were constructed in 1450 BC in the city of Heliopolis for the Pharaoh Thutmose III (1481-1425 BC).  They are 68 feet (21m) tall.  The obelisk in Paris is also known as the Luxor Obelisk and it is made of yellow granite.  Constructed about 3,000 years ago, it was originally situated outside the Luxor Temple in Egypt, where its twin still remains.  The Paris obelisk is 75 feet (23m) tall and weighs over 250 tons.  All three obelisks are inscribed with hieroglyphs glorifying Ramses II.  The Cleopatra’s Needle of New York was erected in Central Park on February 22, 1881.  It had been given to the US Consul General stationed in Cairo as a gift to the United States from the Egyptian Khedive as a gesture of gratitude for the US remaining neutral while Great Britain and France vied for control of the Egyptian government.  The obelisk had been moved from its original home in Heliopolis to Alexandria in 12 BC, where it was set up in the temple built by Cleopatra in honor of Marc Antony.  Sometime later, the obelisk toppled into the sand; however, this had the positive effect of preserving the hieroglyphs for modern researchers.  https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/cleopatra-s-needle-story-behind-obelisks-007051 

Ukrainian poetry has been flourishing in English in recent years, but it’s worth revisiting volumes that appeared in the last three decades of the 20th century.  Although most, if not all, are long out of print, they can still be accessed through public and university libraries or purchased at used bookstores.  These titles present vibrant poetic voices, showcasing a wide array of techniques, forms, and themes, and their translators include a number of significant American poets.  Only one collection of poems featured on this list is by a poet who lived in the interwar period.  The rest are by poets who wrote roughly between the late 1950s and early 1990s. Many of the poets were banned from publication in their native Ukraine throughout most of this period.  Some were official, published poets who had to maneuver carefully in order to stay out of trouble.  Two of the poets moved to the United States after World War II and worked in a totally different environment, with access to various traditions and canons that were completely off limits for Ukrainian Soviet poets.  https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/ukrainian-poetry-from-another-era/ 

The Museo della Cucina, opening in May, 2022 will be dedicated to exploring one of Italy’s great passions.  The institution stands on the spot of Rome’s first legendary meal:  Palatine Hill, where Romulus and Remus were breastfed by the she-wolf Lupa more than 2,700 years ago, according to Roman mythology, and subsequently returned to found the city.  Italian food has come a long way since then, and every twist and turn of the last 500 years is documented by the new museum and library, which features a collection of 120 cookbooks; displays of implements, pastry and chocolate molds, and utensils; and an array of artifacts that will offer visitors food for thought and thoughts on food.  Highlights from the book collection include a copy of the oldest mass-printed cookbook, Bartolemeo Platina’s On Honourable Pleasure and Health (1474); The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570), written by the titular private chef of Pope Pius V; and a valuable first edition of Casa Artusi’s 1891 book Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, which attempted to make Italian cuisine more widely accessible.  Though the library’s books are in Italian, Ghirighini promises that the text will be available in English once the digital collection is up and running—which means that soon, a wider audience will be able to enjoy crispy frog livers fit for a pope, or Artusi’s signature eel pie … or at least read about them.  Other titles explore the influence of French cuisine, disseminated into Northern Italy through their shared border region, and deeply influential to the development of some of the country’s signature flavors.  Sarah Rose Sharp  See graphics at https://hyperallergic.com/716664/museo-della-cucina-rome-italy/ 

Anton Chekhov is often held to be the world’s greatest short story writer, and perhaps second only to Shakespeare in terms of the number of times his plays have been adapted or produced.  Sumy, Ukraine, is proud to have played an important role in his life (Chekov spent two summers with his family in a rented bungalow with his family in the village of Luka, not far from Sumy, in 1888 and 1889) and to have continued to honor his legacy since 1960, the centenary of his birth, when the bungalow, converted into a school library by the Bolsheviks, was restored to its original state and became a museum.  It is set back from the road leading to the river, across from the ruined manor house; it has its own garden with irises and a gazebo.  It is small—six rooms—compared to other Chekhov museums located in Moscow, Melikhovo, and Yalta, but the memories the writer took away from those incomparable summers of his youth resonate to this day beyond any borders—in the stories and plays he passed on to innumerable readers and theater-goers. Alison Anderson  See pictures at https://lithub.com/anton-chekhovs-beloved-summer-home-in-ukraine-is-under-threat/ 

Good fiction creates empathy.  A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life. - Barbara Kingsolver, novelist, essayist, and poet (b. 8 Apr 1955) 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2518  April 8, 2022