Guy Fawkes (1570–1606), also known as Guido Fawkes while fighting for the Spanish, was a member of a group of provincial English Catholics who was involved in the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605.  He was born and educated in York; his father died when Fawkes was eight years old, after which his mother married a recusant Catholic.  Fawkes converted to Catholicism and left for mainland Europe, where he fought for Catholic Spain in the Eighty Years' War against Protestant Dutch reformers in the Low Countries.  He travelled to Spain to seek support for a Catholic rebellion in England without success.  He later met Thomas Wintour, with whom he returned to England.  Wintour introduced him to Robert Catesby, who planned to assassinate King James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne.  The plotters leased an undercroft beneath the House of Lords; Fawkes was placed in charge of the gunpowder that they stockpiled there.  The authorities were prompted by an anonymous letter to search Westminster Palace during the early hours of 5 November, and they found Fawkes guarding the explosives.  He was questioned and tortured over the next few days and confessed to wanting to blow up the House of Lords.  Immediately before his execution on 31 January, Fawkes fell from the scaffold where he was to be hanged and broke his neck, thus avoiding the agony of being hanged, drawn and quartered.  He became synonymous with the Gunpowder Plot, the failure of which has been commemorated in the UK as Guy Fawkes Night since 5 November 1605, when his effigy is traditionally burned on a bonfire, commonly accompanied by fireworks.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes 

What, exactly, is a thrall?  Well, we know what enthralled is used to mean:  “fascinated, entranced, captivated”.  Of those three, “captivated” is most directly accurate to origins, for a thrall was first of all a slave, a prisoner, one in bondage:  the word comes from a Scandinavian root for servitude or drudgery.  From that, thrall came also to mean the condition of bondage or slavery itself.   But, perhaps thanks to the taste of thrill, and to an ethos where love was equated to a sort of ecstatic slavery (as in Shakespeare, for instance Midsummer Night’s Dream:  “So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape”), enthralled has taken on a sense of willing captivation, of an enjoyment beyond enjoyment.   https://sesquiotic.com/tag/enthralled/ 

The Wawel Royal Castle is a castle residency located in central Kraków, Poland, and the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in the world.  Built at the behest of King Casimir III the Great, it consists of a number of structures from different periods situated around the Italian-styled main courtyard.  The castle, being one of the largest in Poland, represents nearly all European architectural styles of medieval, renaissance and baroque periods.  The castle is part of a fortified architectural complex erected atop a limestone outcrop on the left bank of the Vistula River, at an altitude of 228 metres above sea level.  The complex consists of numerous buildings of great historical and national importance, including the Wawel Cathedral where Polish monarchs were crowned and buried.  Some of Wawel's oldest stone buildings can be traced back to 970 AD, in addition to the earliest examples of Romanesque and Gothic architecture in Poland.  The current castle was built in the 14th-century, and expanded over the next hundreds of years.  In 1978 Wawel was declared the first World Heritage Site as part of the Historic Centre of Kraków.  For centuries the residence of the kings of Poland and the symbol of Polish statehood, Wawel Castle is now one of the country's premier art museums.  Established in 1930, the museum encompasses ten curatorial departments responsible for collections of paintings, including an important collection of Italian Renaissance paintings, prints, sculpture, textiles, among them the Sigismund II Augustus tapestry collection, goldsmith's work, arms and armor, ceramics, Meissen porcelain, and period furniture.  The museum's holdings in oriental art include the largest collection of Ottoman tents in Europe.  With seven specialized conservation studios, the museum is also an important center for the conservation of works of art.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wawel_Castle 

rota  noun  borrowed from Latin rota (“wheel”)   (Britain)  A schedule that allocates some task, responsibility or (rarely) privilege between a set of people according to a (possibly periodic) calendar.  quotations ▼ (music)  A kind of zither, played like a guitar, used in the Middle Ages in church music.  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rota and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rota_(island)

Farfel is a tiny, pellet-shaped egg noodle with ingredients similar to German spaetzle or Hungarian nokedli.  Farfel was once a popular side dish in Jewish Ashkenazi cuisine and was served simply seasoned alongside meat or poultry.  The word farfel is Yiddish.  Farfel is sometimes called egg barley, though it contains no barley, and doesn't much look like it, either.  Giora Shimoni  Link to recipe at https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-is-farfel-2121591 

The Nome King is a fictional character created by L. Frank Baum, author and inventor of the Oz legacy.  He is introduced in Baum's third Oz book titled Ozma of Oz, published in 1907.  He is portrayed as the impatient, stubborn and power-hungry ruler of the Nomes (sometimes spelled "Gnomes").  In Baum's writings, the Nome King and his people are a species of immortal beings who have adapted to living hundreds of miles below the earth and rarely surface.  They are from the same continent where the magical Land of Oz lies and the Land of Ev can be found.  There the Kingdom of Nomes neighbors both of these countries.  Interestingly, chicken eggs are highly poisonous to the Nome race, much like how water was fatal to the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900.  https://oz.fandom.com/wiki/Nome_King 

Claes Oldenburg, a Swedish-born artist whose lighthearted caricatures of everyday things—such as monumental renderings of lipstick and binoculars as well as “soft sculptures” of hamburgers and ice cream cones—made him a leading force in pop art, died July 18,2022 at his home in Manhattan.  Fred A. Bernstein  See graphics at https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/18/artist-claes-oldenburg-dead/  See also Claes Oldenburg, Pop Artist Who Monumentalized the Everyday, Dies at 93 by Alex Greenberger at https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/claes-oldenburg-dead-1234634394/ 

Our cavalcade of captivating reviews this week includes Christian Lorentzen on Christopher Hitchens’ A Hitch in Time, Sigrid Nunez on María Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, Molly Young on Liska Jacobs’ The Pink Hotel, Jason Guriel on J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, Michael Ian Black on Isaac Fitzgerald’s Dirtbag, Massachusetts.  https://bookmarks.reviews/5-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-7-21-2022/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2542  July 21, 2022