April 3, 2023  Kelly Link is a writer whose work is easy to revere and difficult to explain.  She began her career by publishing stories in sci-fi and fantasy magazines in the mid-nineteen-nineties, just when the boundary between genre fiction and the literary mainstream was beginning to erode, and, in the years since, her work has served to speed that erosion along.  Thirty years into her career, she has received a formidable procession of prizes awarded to genre-fiction writers:  the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, to name just a few.  More recently, she has begun to reap the accolades of the literary mainstream:  in 2016, her collection “Get in Trouble” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and in 2018 she received a MacArthur, for “pushing the boundaries of literary fiction in works that combine the surreal and fantastical with the concerns and emotional realism of contemporary life.”  Through it all, the essential qualities of her work have remained unchanged.  To those familiar with her writing, “Linkian” is as distinct an adjective as “Lynchian,” signifying a stylistic blend of ingenuousness and sophistication, bright flashes of humor alongside dark currents of unease, and a deep engagement with genre tropes that comes off as both sincere and subversive.  Kristen Roupenian  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/white-cat-black-dog-kelly-link-book-review   

First recorded in print in 1914, blue streak probably has its origin in earlier expressions referring to a blue streak such as ‘quick as a blue streak.’  Among other speculations, it has been suggested that this expression was a version of “quick as a blue-tailed skink” which referred to a very fast moving lizard with a blue tail, which moved so fast all you saw was the blue streak of its tail.  A less fanciful explanation is that the expression refers to lighting, which sometimes appears as a blue streak in the sky.  Originally related expressions such as “like a blue streak” were used to describe anything that was very quick. https://www.idioms.online/talk-a-blue-streak/   

Simple side dishes: 

Combine can of black beans and can of corn. 

Pickle veggie or fruit in a solution of vinegar, water and sugar overnight.   

“Detritus” is borrowed directly from the Latin detritus (rubbing away).  It was originally a term in physical geography describing an action—the “wearing away or down by detrition, disintegration, decomposition,” the OED says.  Its first appearance in writing is from James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1795):  “Such materials as might come from the detritus of granite.”  But that usage has since become obsolete.   In the early 19th century, people began using “detritus” to mean the matter produced by the wearing away.  And by mid-century, “detritus” came to mean debris in general, or any kind of waste or disintegrated material.  https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/07/detritus.html   

The Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden, in Bishopville, South Carolina, is a three-acre garden with a purpose.  Self-taught and armed with a hedge trimmer, Fryar worked for more than 20 years to create and maintain remarkable and dazzling topiaries from plants that were often salvaged from a local nursery.  Using a gas-powered hedge trimmer and salvaged plants, Pearl Fryar begins his topiary garden on 3 acres at his home.  After 12-hour shifts in his day job at a factory, this self-taught topiary artist would sometimes work through the night creating what would amount to more than 150 topiaries of extraordinary shapes and sizes.  https://www.gardenconservancy.org/preservation/pearl-fryar  Thank you, Muse reader!   

In the Northern Hemisphere, the June solstice (aka summer solstice) occurs when the Sun travels along its northernmost path in the sky.  This marks the astronomical start of summer in the northern half of the globe.  (In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the opposite:  the June solstice marks the astronomical start of winter when the Sun is at its lowest point in the sky.)  The word “solstice” comes from the Latin solstitium—from sol (Sun) and stitium (still or stopped).  Due to Earth’s tilted axis, the Sun doesn’t rise and set at the same locations on the horizon each morning and evening; its rise and set positions move northward or southward in the sky as Earth travels around the Sun through the year.  After the solstice, the Sun appears to reverse course and head back in the opposite direction.  The motion referred to here is the apparent path of the Sun when one views its position in the sky at the same time each day, for example, at local noon.  Over the year, its path forms a sort of flattened figure eight, called an analemma.  Of course, the Sun itself is not moving (unless you consider its orbit around the Milky Way galaxy); instead, this change in position in the sky that we on Earth notice is caused by the tilt of Earth’s axis as it orbits the Sun, as well as Earth’s elliptical, rather than circular, orbit.  The June solstice occurs on Wednesday, June 21, 2023, at 10:58 A.M. EDT.  Catherine Boeckmann   https://www.almanac.com/content/first-day-summer-summer-solstice

Word of the day for June 21, 2023

Mummerset noun (humorous)  An imaginary rural county in the West Country of England.  (often theater) An invented English language dialect used by actors that mimics a stereotypical West Country rural accent.  The Glastonbury Festival, a festival of contemporary performing arts including cabaret, circus, comedy, dance, music, and theatre, begins in Pilton in Somerset, England.  June 21, 2023.  Wiktionary    

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2686  June 21, 2023