Everyman is a novel by Philip Roth, published by Houghton Mifflin in May 2006.  It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2007.  It is Roth's third novel to receive the prize.  The book begins at the funeral of its protagonist.  The remainder of the book, which ends with his death, looks mournfully back on episodes from his life, including his childhood, where he and his older brother, Howie, worked in his father's shop, Everyman's Jewelry Store.  The unnamed everyman, while an ordinary man and not a famous novelist, has much in common with Philip Roth; he is born, like Roth, in 1933; he grows up in Elizabeth, six miles away from Roth's native Newark; and he recounts a series of medical problems and a history of frequent hospitalization similar to that of the author's.  Everyman is also the title of a fifteenth-century English morality play whose eponymous protagonist is "called" by death and must account for his life on earth before God.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyman_(novel) 

Boston Brown Bread may date back to Colonial America, but eating it now hardly feels like dining with the Pilgrims.  This steamed, molasses-laden comfort food comes in a can.  You’ll need an opener to crack the lid off and thwack or jiggle out the dense roll of bread inside.  For some New Englanders, especially in the Boston area and Portland, Maine, it’s a nostalgic childhood tradition.  The recipe calls for cornmeal mixed with molasses and rye and wheat flours.  Traditionally, the mixture is then poured into a coffee can or small mold and steamed until it rises.  The result?  A bread as sweet and dense as cake.  The legacy of the 17th century recipe has been carried on by companies like B&M (which also sell Boston baked beans).  Locals don’t bat an eye when they have to search for canned bread among stewed peaches and kidney beans in the supermarket.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/canned-bread-new-england

Pan-ethnic labels describing the U.S. population of people tracing their roots to Latin America and Spain have been introduced over the decades, rising and falling in popularity.  Today, the two dominant labels in use are Hispanic and Latino, with origins in the 1970s and 1990s respectively.  More recently, a new, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label, Latinx, has emerged as an alternative that is used by some news and entertainment outlets, corporations, local governments and universities to describe the nation’s Hispanic population.  However, for the population it is meant to describe, only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.  The emergence of Latinx coincides with a global movement to introduce gender-neutral nouns and pronouns into many languages whose grammar has traditionally used male or female constructions.  In the United States, the first uses of Latinx appeared more than a decade ago.  It was added to a widely used English dictionary in 2018, reflecting its greater use.  Yet the use of Latinx is not common practice, and the term’s emergence has generated debate about its appropriateness in a gendered language like Spanish.  Some critics point to its origins among U.S. English speakers, saying it ignores the Spanish language and its gendered form.  Luis Noe-Bustamante, Lauren Mora and Mark Hugo Lopez  https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in-four-u-s-hispanics-have-heard-of-latinx-but-just-3-use-it/

In filmmaking, a long take (also called continuous take or continuous shot) is a shot lasting much longer than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of films in general.  Significant camera movement and elaborate blocking are often elements in long takes, but not necessarily so.  The term "long take" should not be confused with the term "long shot", which refers to the distance between the camera and its subject and not to the temporal length of the shot itself.  The length of a long take was originally limited to how much film the magazine of a motion picture camera could hold, but the advent of digital video has considerably lengthened the maximum potential length of a take.  When filming Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock intended for the film to have the effect of one long continuous take, but the camera magazines available could hold not more than 1000 feet of 35 mm film.  As a result, each take used up to a whole roll of film and lasts up to 10 minutes.  Many takes end with a dolly shot to a featureless surface (such as the back of a character's jacket), with the following take beginning at the same point by zooming out.  The entire film consists of only 11 shots.  Andy Warhol and collaborating avant-garde filmmaker, Jonas Mekas, shot the 485-minute-long experimental film, Empire (1964), on 10 rolls of film using an Auricon camera via 16 mm film which allowed longer takes than its 35 mm counterpart.  "The camera took a 1,200ft roll of film that would shoot for roughly 33 minutes."  Films can be quantitatively analyzed using the "ASL" (average shot length), a statistical measurement which divides the total length of the film by the number of shots.  For example, Béla Tarr's film Werckmeister Harmonies is 149 minutes, and made up of 39 shots.  Thus its ASL is 229.2 seconds.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_take 

Harmonium is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens.  His first book at the age of forty-four, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies.  This collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines ("Life Is Motion") to several hundred ("The Comedian as the Letter C") (see the footnotes for the table of contents).  Harmonium was reissued in 1931 with three poems omitted and fourteen new poems added.  Most of Harmonium's poems were published between 1914 and 1923 in various magazines, so most are now in the public domain in America and similar jurisdictions, as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act affects only works first published after 1922.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonium_(poetry_collection) 

August 13, 2020  Border Cave is a deep gash in a cliff face, high in the Lebombo Mountains of South Africa.  Sheltered from the elements, the spot has yielded bones, tools, and preserved plant material that paint a detailed picture of the lives of human inhabitants for more than 200,000 years.  Now, there’s a new sketch emerging:  Plant remains point to evidence that the cave’s occupants used grass bedding about 200,000 years ago.  Researchers speculate that the cave’s occupants laid their bedding on ash to repel insects.  Cathleen O’Grady  https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/world-s-oldest-camp-bedding-found-south-african-cave 

Pauline Perlmutter Steinem grew up in Germany and moved to Toledo, Ohio in 1887 at the age of 19 with her husband.  Steinem was the first woman elected to the Toledo school board, in 1904, and may have been the first Jewish woman to hold elected office in America.  She was active in the Toledo suffrage efforts and became president of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association in 1908.  As president she wrote to suffrage association chapters across the state, urging them to campaign for pro-suffrage delegates to the 1911 constitutional convention.  After the 1912 Ohio amendment failed, Steinem marched with thousands in the Women's Suffrage Parade in Washington D.C., the day before President-elect Woodrow Wilson's inauguration.  Steinem is the paternal grandmother of feminist Gloria Steinem.  Learn about other activists:  Bettie Wilson of Cincinnati, Hallie Quinn Brown of Wilberforce, Florence E. Allen of Cleveland, Belle Sherwin of Cleveland, and Harriet Taylor Upton of Warren.  On June 16, 1919, the Ohio General Assembly ratified the 19th Amendment--the fifth state to do so.  Jackie Borchardt and Jessie Balmert  https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/14/womens-suffrage-six-ohio-women-who-helped-get-women-vote/1330734001/ 

A.WORD.A.DAY with Anu Garg  vaccinate  (VAK-si-nayt) verb tr., intr.:  1.  To administer a vaccine to produce immunity against a disease.  2.  To immunize against something.  From Latin vacca (cow), because in the beginning the cowpox virus was used against smallpox.  Earliest documented use:  1803. 

A THOUGHT FOR AUGUST 21  There can be a new tomorrow / There can be a brighter day / There  can be a new tomorrow / Love will find a way. - Jackie DeShannon, singer-songwriter (b. 21 Aug 1941)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2246  August 21, 2020

 

Born in 1936, Larry McMurtry has written about Texas relentlessly over the course of six decades in essay collections, memoirs and god knows how many novels.  Even when sub-divided by series the McMurtry oeuvre, with its proliferation of sequels and prequels, can be tricky to navigate.  First published in 1966, The Last Picture Show is available as the final part of an omnibus edition of the so-called Thalia trilogy (Thalia being his fictional version of Archer, Texas) but it is also the opening volume of a five-novel series tracing the life of Duane Moore, one of the secondary characters from The Last Picture Show.  Then there’s Lonesome Dove, published first (in 1985) but coming third if what eventually emerged as a four-volume sequence is arranged by chronological order of events depicted.  It is probably the single most successful book in a career so marked by success that even McMurtry’s first novel Horseman, Pass By--destined, it seemed, to be passed over by the reading public--was turned into a film with the radically abbreviated title Hud, starring Paul Newman in the title role.  Lonesome Dove was itself made into a highly acclaimed mini-series, the popularity of which accounts for the way that the book has been partially eaten by its own adaptation.  Despite Lonesome Dove having received the imprimatur of a Pulitzer Prize, it is also regarded as an extended piece of superior entertainment.  What follows in those pages is an epic, an odyssey of plain and prairie.  McMurtry has said that he “thought of Lonesome Dove as demythicizing, but instead it became a kind of American Arthuriad, overflowing the bounds of genre in many curious ways”.  The myth, in other words, is so entrenched in the real that Brands’s descriptions of the historic cattle drives of the 1860s and 70s initiated by Charles Goodnight, Oliver Loving and Joseph McCoy read like summaries of scenes from the novel by McMurtry--who, in the 1980s, had used the cattle men’s original memoirs and recollections to earth his fiction.  Stephen Harrigan, in the section of his 900-page history of Texas Big Wonderful Thing devoted to Goodnight and Loving, pauses to observe that “if all this is starting to sound familiar, it’s probably because you either read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove or watched the miniseries that was made from it”.  The men and women riding through the fiction are firmly painted and properly fleshed out.  If it’s hard not to cheer inwardly at the hardships endured and surmounted by the characters--the Oxford History dutifully acknowledges “stoic indifference to pain” as a characteristic of the original cowboys--it is all but impossible not to be moved to tears by the things that befall them. (Every reader will remember the words carved on the makeshift memorial:  “CHERFUL IN ALL WEATHERS, NEVER SHERKED A TASK. SPLENDID BEHAVIOUR.”)  Geoff Dyer  https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/geoff-dyer-lonesome-dove-essay/ 

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out.  A home without books is like a room without windows.  A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life.  Henry Ward Beecher  

The Rosenbach Museum and Library is located within two 19th-century townhouses at 2008 and 2010 Delancey Place in Philadelphia.  The historic houses contain the collections and treasures of Philip Rosenbach and his younger brother Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach.  The brothers owned the Rosenbach Company which became the preeminent dealer of rare books, manuscripts and decorative arts during the first half of the 20th century.  Dr. Rosenbach in particular was seminal in the rare book world, helping to build libraries such as the Widener Library at Harvard, The Huntington Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library.  In 2013, the Rosenbach became a subsidiary of the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation, but maintains its own board and operates independently of the public library system.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenbach_Museum_and_Library  See also https://rosenbach.org/about/ 

There is only one deadly sin and all the others follow from it:  Pride.  Clifton Fadiman  1983 letter to Gloria Norris  See also https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/42361.Clifton_Fadiman 

The Gandhara Scroll, originally written about two millennia ago, ranks as one of the oldest Buddhist manuscripts currently known.  You can read the scroll's story at the blog of the Library of Congress, the institution that possesses it and only last year was able to put it online for all to see.  "The scroll originated in Gandhara, an ancient Buddhist kindgom located in what is today the northern border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan," writes the Library's Neely Tucker.  "Surviving manuscripts from the Gandharan realm are rare; only a few hundred are known to still exist."  http://www.openculture.com/2020/08/one-of-the-oldest-buddhist-manuscripts-has-been-digitized-put-online.html 

In the early 1960s, Julia Child and her husband handed Barbara Ketcham Wheaton the keys to their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  The famous couple was going to California for the summer, but they wanted their young neighbor to be able to continue one of her favorite activities:  perusing Child’s collection of historical cookbooks.  Now an honorary curator of Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library Culinary Collection, Wheaton was then in her early 30s, with young children at home.  She had left an art history PhD program a few years before to marry historian Bob Wheaton, but she still had a passion for the past.  When she discovered her love of cooking, and her neighbor’s trove of unique books, Wheaton wondered:  What if she turned the same methodology she had learned in art-history classes to a more humble text—the cookbook?  During long afternoons, Wheaton buried herself in the Schlesinger Library’s historical-cookbook collection.  And she ventured to her neighbor Julia’s house, to pore over the famous chef’s cookbook collection.  Wheaton didn’t know it at the time, but her curiosity about the books’ stiff pages, full of strange stains and descriptions of vintage sauces, would soon turn her into one of the best-known scholars of culinary history.  “I started looking at old cookbooks and one thing led to another,” says Wheaton.  Now, the public can enjoy the fruits of Wheaton’s 50 years of labor.  In July 2020, Wheaton and a team of scholars, including two of her children, Joe Wheaton and Catherine Wheaton Saines, launched The Sifter.  Part Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced database and part meticulous bibliography, The Sifter is a catalogue of more than a thousand years of European and U.S. cookbooks, from the medieval Latin De Re Culinaria, published in 800, to The Romance of Candy, a 1938 treatise on British sweets.  Reina Gattuso  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-find-historic-cookbooks 

In telecommunications, 5G is the fifth generation technology standard for cellular networks, which cellular phone companies began deploying worldwide in 2019, the planned successor to the 4G networks which provide connectivity to most current cellphones.  Like its predecessors, 5G networks are cellular networks, in which the service area is divided into small geographical areas called cells.  All 5G wireless devices in a cell are connected to the Internet and telephone network by radio waves through a local antenna in the cell.  The main advantage of the new networks is that they will have greater bandwidth, giving higher download speeds, eventually up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbit/s).  Due to the increased bandwidth, it is expected that the new networks will not just serve cellphones like existing cellular networks, but also be used as general internet service providers for laptops and desktop computers, competing with existing ISPs such as cable internet, and also will make possible new applications in internet of things (IoT) and machine to machine areas.  Current 4G cellphones will not be able to use the new networks, which will require new 5G enabled wireless devices.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G 

Being between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology, which has been associated with the proverbial advice "to choose the lesser of two evils".  Several other idioms, such as "on the horns of a dilemma", "between the devil and the deep blue sea", and "between a rock and a hard place" express similar meanings.  The mythical situation also developed a proverbial use in which seeking to choose between equally dangerous extremes is seen as leading inevitably to disaster.  Scylla and Charybdis were mythical sea monsters noted by Homer; Greek mythology sited them on opposite sides of the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Calabria, on the Italian mainland.  Scylla was rationalized as a rock shoal (described as a six-headed sea monster) on the Calabrian side of the strait and Charybdis was a whirlpool off the coast of Sicily.  They were regarded as maritime hazards located close enough to each other that they posed an inescapable threat to passing sailors; avoiding Charybdis meant passing too close to Scylla and vice versa.  According to Homer's account, Odysseus was advised to pass by Scylla and lose only a few sailors, rather than risk the loss of his entire ship in the whirlpool.  Because of such stories, the bad result of having to navigate between the two hazards eventually entered proverbial use.  Erasmus recorded it in his Adagia (1515) under the Latin form of evitata Charybdi in Scyllam incidi (having escaped Charybdis I fell into Scylla) and also provided a Greek equivalent.  In 2014 Graham Waterhouse composed a piano quartet, Skylla and Charybdis, premiered at the Gasteig in Munich.  According to his programme note, though its four movements "do not refer specifically to the protagonists or to events connected with the famous legend", their dynamic is linked subjectively to images connected with it "conjoured up in the composer's mind during the writing".  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Scylla_and_Charybdis 

Residents of a Swiss town got a bit of a shock when it started snowing particles of a fine cocoa powder after the ventilation system at a chocolate factory malfunctioned.  The Lindt & Spruengli company confirmed local reports that there was a minor defect in the cooling ventilation for a line for roasted “cocoa nibs” in its factory in Olten, between Zurich and Basel.  The nibs, fragments of crushed cocoa beans, are the basis of chocolate.  Combined with strong winds on August 14, 2020, the powder spread around the immediate vicinity of the factory, leaving a fine cocoa dusting.  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/chocolate-snow-lindt-factory-switzerland-ventilation-system-a9675611.html 

A THOUGHT FOR AUGUST 19  I dreamt that my hair was kempt. Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it. - Ogden Nash, poet (19 Aug 1902-1971) 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2245  August 19, 2020

 

Nautilus (from Greek nautilos, "sailor") is the common name of any marine creatures of the cephalopod family Nautilidae, the sole family of the suborder Nautilina.  Cephalopods generally are divided into three subclasses:  Ammonoidea (extinct ammonoids), Coleoidea (octopuses, squids, cuttlefishes, extinct belemites), and Nautiloidea.  The nautilus is the only extant (living) representatives of the subclass Nautiloidea, a once diverse and abundant group that originated in the Cambrian period 500 million years ago (mya) and flourished during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras.  Nautiluses typically have more tentacles and arms than other cephalopods, up to 90, whereas octopuses have eight arms but no tentacles, and squids and the squid-like cuttlefishes have eight arms and two tentacles.  Nautiluses are only found in the Indo-Pacific.  The Nautilus not only plays a role in food chains—using its strong "beak" to consume shrimp, crabs, and fish, and in turn being eaten by fish, sea mammals, octopuses, and so forth—but they also provide aesthetic value for humans.  Their captivating spiral shells, which grow logarithmically, have been featured as decoration and jewelry, and the chambered nautilus is a focal point of works of art and literature, such as a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes and a painting by Andrew Wyeth.  https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Nautilus 

The Chambered Nautilus by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!  Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,  Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

Read entire poem at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44379/the-chambered-nautilus

Does your vote count?  The Electoral College explained - Christina Greer  Ted-Ed  Nov 1, 2012  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9H3gvnN468&list=PLmmFnKflufW7J3uy-Bl_Ym2RFg4QZEaCS  

Electoral College - Schoolhouse Rock  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyIFqf3XH24  3:15 

15 Things You Might Not Know About Christina’s World  by Kristy Puchko   Who is the woman in Andrew Wyeth's striking painting Christina's World, and why is she sprawled in a field, looking longingly toward a far-off farmhouse?  For decades, these questions have drawn in viewers, but the true story behind Christina's World makes the 1948 painting even more intriguing.  The 31-year-old Wyeth modeled the painting's frail-looking brunette after his neighbor in South Cushing, Maine.  Anna Christina Olson suffered from a degenerative muscular disorder that prevented her from walking.  Rather than using a wheelchair, Olson crawled around her home and the surrounding grounds, as seen in Christina's World.  Olson's spirit inspired Wyeth's most popular piece.  The neighbors first met in 1939 when Wyeth was just 22 and courting 17-year-old Betsy James, who would later become his wife and muse.  It was James who introduced to Wyeth to the 45-year-old Olson, kicking off a friendship that would last the rest of their lives.  The sight of Olson picking blueberries while crawling through her fields “like a crab on a New England shore” inspired Wyeth to paint Christina’s World.  The concept, title, pink dress, and slim limbs were modeled after Olson, who was in her mid-50s when Christina's World was created.  But Wyeth asked his then 26-year-old wife to sit in as a model for the head and torso.   She was a recurring muse and model for Wyeth, captured in paintings like Miss Olson, Christina Olson, and Anna Christina.  The Olson house has won comparisons to Monet's garden at Giverny because of the plethora of paintings and sketches it inspired.  In the 30 years from their first meeting to Christina's death, Wyeth created over 300 works at the Olson house, thanks to the Olsons allowing him to use their home as his studio.  Explaining the house's hold on him, Wyeth said, "In the portraits of that house, the windows are eyes or pieces of the soul almost.  To me, each window is a different part of Christina's life."  As part of the Farnsworth Museum, the Olson House was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2011.  Down the hill from the Olson house lies a cemetery, where Andrew Wyeth's grave can be found in the family plot of Alvaro and Anna Christina Olson.  Wyeth's tombstone faces up toward the house at an angle that closely resembles that of Christina's World.  According to his surviving family, it was his final wish "to be with Christina."  https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/64001/15-things-you-might-not-know-about-christinas-world 

Andrew Wyeth was the youngest of the five children of illustrator and artist N.C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth and his wife, Carolyn Bockius Wyeth.  He was born July 12, 1917, on the 100th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau's birth.  Due to N.C.'s fond appreciation of Henry David Thoreau, he found this both coincidental and exciting.  N.C. was an attentive father, fostering each of the children's interests and talents.  The family was close, spending time reading together, taking walks, fostering "a closeness with nature" and developing a feeling for Wyeth family history.  Andrew was home-tutored because of his frail health.  Like his father, the young Wyeth read and appreciated the poetry of Robert Frost and the writings of Henry David Thoreau and studied their relationships with nature.  Music and movies also heightened his artistic sensitivity.  One major influence, discussed at length by Wyeth himself, was King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925).  He claimed to have seen the film, which depicted family dynamics similar to his own, "a hundred-and-eighty-times" and believed it had the greatest influence on his work.  Vidor later made a documentary, Metaphor, where he and Wyeth discuss the influence of the film on his paintings, including Winter 1946, Snow Flurries, Portrait of Ralph Kline and Afternoon Flight of a Boy up a Tree.  Wyeth's father was the only teacher that he had.  Due to being schooled at home, he led both a sheltered life and one that was "obsessively focused".  Wyeth recalled of that time:  "Pa kept me almost in a jail, just kept me to himself in my own world, and he wouldn't let anyone in on it.  I was almost made to stay in Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest with Maid Marion and the rebels."  N.C. Wyeth was an illustrator known for his work in magazines, posters and advertisements.  He created illustrations for books such as Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans.  By the 1920s, Wyeth senior had become a celebrity, and the family often had celebrities as guests, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mary Pickford.  The home bustled with creative activity and competition.  N.C. and Carolyn's five children were all talented.  Henriette Wyeth Hurd, the eldest, became a painter of portraits and still lifes.  Carolyn, the second child, was also a painter.  Nathaniel Wyeth, the third child, was a successful inventor.  Ann was a musician at a young age and became a composer as an adult.  Andrew was the youngest child.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wyeth 

Browse the U.S. Code at https://uscode.house.gov/browse/prelim@title52&edition=prelim  Voting and Elections are in Title 52.  Postal Service is Title 39.  Social Security is in Chapter 7, Title 42.   Find table of contents and index to the Social Security Act at https://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/ssact/ssact-toc.htm 

LET US CELEBRATE the tenacity of our grandmothers and other fearless women who agitated for the right to vote.  August 18, 2020 is the 100^th anniversary of the adoption of the 19^th Amendment, granting women’s right to vote.  Pay tribute to them by voting in the 2020 election.  THINK BACK to your grandmothers or great-grandmothers.  Were they born before or after August 18, 1920?  VOTE in November 2020 when—if women turn out in great numbers—they should determine the outcome of the presidential election.  

As has been the case in the last five midterm elections dating back to 1998, women turned out to vote at slightly higher rates than men.  Over half of women (55%) who were eligible to vote cast ballots in the 2018 midterms in November, as did 51.8% of men, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau.  The 3.2 percentage point gender gap in turnout is similar to the gap in the 2014 (2.2 points), and slightly bigger than the gap in 2010 (less than 1 point).  In 2018, women made up about the same share of the electorate as they did in the previous five midterms; 53% were women and 47% were men.  https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/03/in-year-of-record-midterm-turnout-women-continued-to-vote-at-higher-rates-than-men/ 

The 19th Amendment guarantees American women the right to vote.  Achieving this milestone required a lengthy and difficult struggle; victory took decades of agitation.  Beginning in the mid-19th century, woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered radical change.  Between 1878, when the amendment was first introduced in Congress, and 1920, when it was ratified, champions of voting rights for women worked tirelessly, but their strategies varied.  Some tried to pass suffrage acts in each state—nine western states adopted woman suffrage legislation by 1912.  Others challenged male-only voting laws in the courts.  More public tactics included parades, silent vigils, and hunger strikes.  Supporters were heckled, jailed, and sometimes physically abused.  By 1916, most of the major suffrage organizations united behind the goal of a constitutional amendment.  When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917, and President Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift.  On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the amendment, and two weeks later, the Senate followed.  When Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment on August 18, 1920, the amendment was adopted.  While decades of struggle to include African Americans and other minority women in the promise of voting rights remained, the face of the American electorate had changed forever.  https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/amendment-19 

Congratulate the winners of the 2020 Caty Armstrong Memorial Law Day Essay Contest sponsored by the Toledo Bar Association.  The year's theme is “Your Vote, Your Voice, Our Democracy:  The 19th Amendment at 100.”  First place winners in each division will have their essays published in The Blade and all winners receive a cash prize.  Find names at http://www.findglocal.com/US/Toledo/129790180389277/Toledo-Bar-Association 

Americans across the U.S. sing national anthem to kick off 2020 Democratic National Convention  August 17, 2020  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9oijBHCBv0  2:32

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2244  August 18, 2020 

 

Tempera, also known as egg tempera, is a permanent, fast-drying painting medium consisting of colored pigments mixed with a water-soluble binder medium, usually glutinous material such as egg yolk.  Tempera also refers to the paintings done in this medium.  Tempera paintings are very long-lasting, and examples from the first century AD still exist.  Egg tempera was a primary method of painting until after 1500 when it was superseded by the invention of oil painting.  A paint consisting of pigment and binder commonly used in the United States as poster paint is also often referred to as "tempera paint", although the binders in this paint are different from traditional tempera paint.  The tempera medium was used by American artists such as the Regionalists Andrew Wyeth, Thomas Hart Benton and his student Roger Medearis; expressionists Ben Shahn, Mitchell Siporin and John Langley Howard, magic realists George Tooker, Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Julia Thecla and Louise E. Marianetti; Art Students League of New York instructors Kenneth Hayes Miller and William C. Palmer, Social Realists Kyra Markham, Isabel Bishop, Reginald Marsh, and Noel Rockmore, Edward Laning, Anton Refregier, Jacob Lawrence, Rudolph F. Zallinger, Robert Vickrey, Peter Hurd, and science fiction artist John Schoenherr, notable as the cover artist of Dune.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempera 

The Lost Lingo of New York City’s Soda Jerks by Natasha Frost    In one soda fountain, an order of “Black and white” meant a chocolate soda with vanilla ice cream.  But in another, it signified black coffee with cream—and in yet another, a chocolate malted milk.  A simple glass of milk might variously be called “cow juice,” “bovine extract,” or “canned cow,” while water went by everything from “aqua pura” to “city cocktail” to the deeply unappetizing “Hudson River ale.”  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soda-jerk-slang?utm_source=Gastro+Obscura+Weekly+E-mail&utm_campaign=8c66115832-GASTRO_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_07_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2418498528-8c66115832-71793902&mc_cid=8c66115832&mc_eid=aef0869a63 

When beloved artists pass away they leave behind a legacy of change.  Those of us moved by the artists’ work are changed.  Those of us who grow wiser from their teachings, richer from their ideas, more empathetic because of their renderings, and more loving because they showed us beauty when we couldn’t see it, we are all changed.  And when someone—often a family member—builds upon that legacy by preserving and sharing the artist’s home—the very space where the art was created—the potential for significant change can extend deep into a community and well into future generations.  “Always leave a place better than how you found it,” the award-winning poet Lucille Clifton used to tell her daughter, Sidney.  Sidney Clifton, now an Emmy-nominated producer with over 20 years of experience in the animation industry, grew up in a 100-year-old house in Baltimore, Maryland, that her parents purchased in 1968.  Her father, Fred Clifton, was a sculptor, philosophy professor, and community activist who, along with Lucille, raised their six children in that house until 1979, when it was lost to foreclosure.  “I remember looking out the window and seeing the house being auctioned,” said Sidney.  Lucille Clifton built her writing career in that house.  She wrote six books of poetry and one memoir there, including her first collection, Good Times, published in 1969.  She won two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, one in 1970 and the second in 1973.  And she served as the state of Maryland’s poet laureate from 1974 until 1985.  In 2019, on the ninth anniversary of Lucille’s death, Sidney reached out to the owners of the house.  She learned that the same family had remained in the house all of those years since 1979—and to her amazement, that they had put the house on the market the very day she called.  “It was beautiful, and gut-wrenching to walk through, but in good shape,” Sidney said.  When she opened the door to what had been the game closet, she was astonished to find her name still on the wall in the place where she had scribbled it so many years ago.  “My mom’s presence is very strong in the house,” she said.  Sidney recalls how, back in the day, the house had acted as a “sanctuary for young artists,” and her aim now is to recreate that space, to support young artists and writers through in-person and virtual workshops, classes, seminars, residencies, and a gallery.  Plans are underway for 2021.  It is of chief importance to Sidney that the space be used to help model to young people what the artist’s life can look like.  As her monther once wrote, “We cannot create what we cannot imagine.”  To support Sidney’s vision for her childhood home, the Clifton House recently received preservation funding through the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.  Given Lucille Clifton’s pre-eminence as a culture bearer of the Black experience in America, it seems particularly fitting that the poet’s house is recognized among a group of grantees that includes the homes of two other iconic culture bearers, Paul Robeson and Muddy Waters.  For more quotes by Lucille Clifton, check out this homage.  And to read some of Lucille Clifton’s poetry, watch out for How To Carry Water:  Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton, a new collection of poems with both familiar and lesser-known works, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been published.  Edited and with a foreword by Aracelis Girmay (a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow), the collection is due out on September 8th, 2020, from BOA Editions, with support from a National Endowment for the Arts grant.  Amy Stolls and Jessica Flynn  https://www.arts.gov/art-works/2020/clifton-house-labor-love-and-legacy?utm_source=SM&utm_medium=TW&utm_campaign=BLOG_CliftonHouse_TW 

In a typing room at the UCLA Library, there was a device under each typewriter to shove dimes against the clock.  In nine days I wrote Fahrenheit 451.  It cost me $9.80 and I called it my dime novel.  Ray Bradbury  See https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/527650/16-surprising-facts-about-ray-bradburys-fahrenheit-451 or https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/451/ or https://interestingliterature.com/2013/07/a-short-analysis-of-ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451/

Charlotta Bass strode onto a stage in Chicago and gave a speech as the first Black female candidate for Vice President.  As a candidate for the nation's second highest office under the Progressive Party ticket in 1952, she addressed convention attendees on March 30 that year.  "I stand before you with great pride," she said.  "This is a historic moment in American political life.   Historic for myself, for my people, for all women.   For the first time in the history of this nation a political party has chosen a Negro woman for the second highest office in the land."  Bass started making history long before she ran for office.  The activist turned politician was born in South Carolina in 1874.  She later moved to the West Coast, where she became one of the first African American women to own and operate a newspaper—the California Eagle.  Her fight against injustice started decades before her political bid.  She used her newspaper as a platform to highlight issues such as police brutality, restrictive housing, the Ku Klax Klan and civil liberties.  She was such a major advocate for civil liberties, women's rights and immigration, she received death threats.  The FBI also placed her under surveillance after she was labeled a communist, government records show.  Faith Karimi  https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/14/us/charlotta-bass-kamala-harris-trnd/index.html 

During an interview on “The View” in January 2019, Kamala Harris provided a mnemonic device when Whoopi Goldberg asked her how to pronounce her name correctly.  “Just think like ‘comma,’ and add a ‘la.’”  The name Kamala is derived from the Sanskrit word for “lotus.”  The vice presidential nominee explained the symbolism behind the name at a book event in 2018.  “The symbolism is that the lotus flower sits on water, but never really gets wet,” Harris said, according to The Washington Post.  “Its roots are in the mud, meaning it is grounded.  One must always know where they come from.”  Kyle Hicks  https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/election-2020/how-to-pronounce-kamala-harris-name 

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic of Polish-Belarusian descent.  Apollinaire is considered one of the foremost poets of the early 20th century, as well as one of the most impassioned defenders of Cubism and a forefather of Surrealism.  He is credited with coining the term "Cubism" in 1911 to describe the emerging art movement, and the term "surrealism" in 1917 to describe the works of Erik Satie.  The term Orphism (1912) is also his.  He wrote poems without punctuation attempting to be resolutely modern in both form and subject.  Apollinaire wrote one of the earliest Surrealist literary works, the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917), which became the basis for Francis Poulenc's 1947 opera Les mamelles de Tirésias.  Apollinaire was active as a journalist and art critic for Le Matin, L'Intransigeant, L'Esprit nouveau, Mercure de France, and Paris Journal.  In 1912 Apollinaire cofounded Les Soirées de Paris,an artistic and literary magazine.  The term Orphism was coined by Apollinaire at the Salon de la Section d'Or in 1912, referring to the works of Robert Delaunay and František Kupka.  During his lecture at the Section d'Or exhibit Apollinaire presented three of Kupka's abstract works as perfect examples of pure painting, as anti-figurative as music.  The term Surrealism was first used by Apollinaire concerning the ballet Parade in 1917.  He described Parade as "a kind of surrealism" (une sorte de surréalisme) when he wrote the program note the following week, thus coining the word three years before Surrealism emerged as an art movement in Paris.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Apollinaire

Read about museums in Honfleur, France including Les Maisons Satie and Musée Eugène Boudin at https://www.lonelyplanet.com/france/honfleur/attractions/a/poi-sig/1003169

 http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2243  August 17, 2020