May 30, 2017  Before she become a novelist, Edith Wharton tried her hand at writing plays, and two scholars discovered one of her forgotten dramatic works hiding in an archive in Austin, Texas, Rebecca Mead reports in The New Yorker.  Wharton’s literary fame came later in life, and she wrote a number of unproduced plays in her 30s.  In 1901, her play The Shadow of a Doubt was slated to be produced, and a famous actress was cast in the lead role.  The producer pulled out before the premier, though, and the play faded into obscurity.  Laura Rattray, of the University of Glasgow, and Mary Chinery, of Georgian Court University, had discovered an article referencing The Shadow of a Doubt.  While attending a conference in Austin they searched the Harry Ransom Center’s holdings for the manuscript.  They came up with two copies and have published the text in the Edith Wharton Review.  It’s the first previously undiscovered work by the author found in 25 years.  Sarah Laskow  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-lost-play-edith-wharton    

Ordinal numbers are numbers that show position or order in a sequence.  For example, the words first and twentieth are ordinal numbers, as are numerals with suffixes at the end like 1st and 20th.  Cardinal numbers depict quantities or amounts and are used in mathematics and counting.  They are typically depicted as Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.) but can also be written as words (one, two, three, etc.)   Matt Ellis  https://www.grammarly.com/blog/how-to-write-ordinal-numbers-correctly/   

John La Farge (1835–1910) was an American artist whose career spanned illustration, murals, interior design, painting, and popular books on his Asian travels and other art-related topics.  La Farge made stained glass windows, mainly for churches on the American east coast, beginning with a large commission for Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston in 1878, and continuing for thirty years.  La Farge designed stained glass as an artist, as a specialist in color, and as a technical innovator, holding a patent granted in 1880 for superimposing panes of glass.  That patent would be key in his dispute with contemporary and rival Louis Comfort Tiffany.  La Farge rented space in the Tenth Street Studio Building at its opening in 1858, and he became a longtime presence in Greenwich Village.  In 1863 he was elected into the National Academy of Design; in 1877 he co-founded the Society of American Artists in frustration at the National Academy's conservatism.  In 1892 La Farge was brought on as an instructor with the Metropolitan Museum of Art Schools to provide vocational training to students in New York City.  He served as president of the National Society of Mural Painters from 1899 to 1904.  In 1904, he was one of the first seven artists chosen for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_La_Farge  See also https://library.bc.edu/lafargeglass/biography and https://artvee.com/artist/john-la-farge/  

A leaky heart valve is a common form of heart valve disease.  It’s when one of the four valves in your heart doesn’t close tightly.  This allows some blood to flow in the wrong direction each time the valve closes.  The severity of your condition depends on how much blood leaks backward.  If it’s just a trace amount, you’ll likely have no symptoms or problems with heart function.  But moderate to severe leakiness may cause symptoms and/or need treatment to prevent damage to your heart.  https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21484-leaky-heart-valve 

August 15, 2023  Nonnative grasses spread easily during the rainy season and dry out during droughts.  At a time such as this summer, when the landscape is arid, the plants’ desiccated and dormant state makes them highly flammable. And after a fire burns through, some of these species are adapted to recover quickly—as a result, they are first to repopulate the scorched Earth, crowding out native plants as they proliferate.  Less rainfall and thinner cloud cover—on top of higher temperatures in today’s era of global warming—have made wildfires in a tropical island like Hawaii not just a possibility, but a probability.  A good first step for fire mitigation is to reduce the fuel for future blazes.  That means reverting the overrun plantations back into tended agricultural lands.  Grazing animals can also be valuable allies to tamp down these invasive grasses.  This method is as simple as letting sheep, cattle or goats do what they do best on grass-dominated spaces, so they can trim the unruly kindling.  Moreover, fire breaks, or gaps between flammable vegetation, can also help contain a blaze once it gets going.  Instead of allowing fires to spread untrammeled on grasslands, University of Hawaii plant ecologist Clay Trauernicht recommends planting rows of pineapples, bananas, dragon fruit or taro to cut off a fire’s potential path of spread.  “Just like with climate change, we know what steps will reduce the risk of wildfire,” Trauernicht wrote in 2018.  “But actually taking these steps will require reinvesting in and, frankly, reimagining our individual and collective responsibility for the larger landscape.”  Shi En Kim  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-swaths-of-invasive-grass-made-mauis-fires-so-devastating-180982729/ 

bumbershoot (plural bumbershoots) noun  (originally and chiefly US, slang, humorous)  An umbrella [from late 19th c.] quotations ▼synonyms ▲ (Australia, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, informal) brolly  The musical film Mary Poppins, about the eponymous nanny with a magical umbrella, premiered in Los Angeles, California on August 27, 1964.  Wiktionary 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2712  August 28, 2023