Monday, August 31, 2015


Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline.  He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, and was one of the five Fireside Poets.  Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, which was then a part of Massachusetts.  He studied at Bowdoin College.  After spending time in Europe he became a professor at Bowdoin and, later, at Harvard College.  His first major poetry collections were Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841).  Longfellow retired from teaching in 1854, to focus on his writing, living the remainder of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a former headquarters of George Washington.  Longellow was honored in March 2007 when the United States Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating him.  A number of schools are named after him in various states as well.  Neil Diamond's 1974 hit song, "Longfellow Serenade", is a reference to the poet.   He is a protagonist in Matthew Pearl's murder mystery The Dante Club (2003).  See pictures and list of works at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wadsworth_Longfellow

The Fireside Poets (also known as the Schoolroom or Household Poets) were a group of 19th-century American poets from New England.  The group is typically thought to comprise Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who were the first American poets whose popularity rivaled that of British poets, both at home and abroad, nearly surpassing that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireside_Poets

The Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) took up 635 acres of the Marina in San Francisco for more than nine months in 1915.  The main structures were made of a glorified papier-mâché, which anyone who went through elementary school art class knows doesn't last longer than the next rainstorm.  The bulk of buildings were demolished immediately after the fair wrapped up in December 1915.  A few remnants escaped that fate, however.  The Palace of Fine Arts, designed by Bay Area starchitect Bernard Maybeck, remained in place.  During the fair it held exhibits of foreign and American artists, including paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and decorative arts.  Sculptures were grouped on display in the rotunda and the colonnade.  The entirety of the Palace of Fine Arts was supposed to meet its doom at the end of the fair like all the others.  But instead it was saved from demolition by the Palace Preservation League.  For a while the exhibit hall held a permanent art collection, and later it was converted into indoor tennis courts and then a limo motor pool.  It led a weird life as a warehouse, distribution center, storage depot, and fire department headquarters.  All the while, the rotunda and colonnade, the flashy main attraction of the palace, started to decay.  In 1964 philanthropist Walter Johnson championed the idea of rebuilding the Palace with more permanent materials, in what's considered one of the earliest preservation efforts in the city.  Everything but the steel structure of the exhibit hall was torn down and then reconstructed in concrete, with most of the ornate detail replicated (except for the murals on the dome, two ends of the colonnade, and the ornamentation on the exhibit hall).  It's the only structure from the fair that stayed located on its original site.  The fair featured tons of musical performances, complete with a 40-ton, 7,000-pipe organ.  It was originally installed at the Festival Hall, but after the fair it was given to the city and moved to the Bill Graham.  Despite a restoration effort in the 1980s, it was damaged pretty badly in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.  There was a plan to install it on the Embarcadero as part of a new outdoor music concourse, but a lack of funds eventually thwarted the project.  So while a friends group is trying to get it repaired (ideally sometime in 2015 to celebrate its centennial), it lives in storage.  Sausalito's Vina del Mar Park contains two of the original twelve full-size elephant sculptures designed by McKim, Mead & White as flagpole bases at the Court of the Universe.  Sausalito architect William Faville saved two of the elephants and a fountain for the park near the ferry landing—local kids named them Jumbo and Peewee.  The papier-mâché didn't last long, so they were reconstructed out of concrete and eventually converted into light fixtures.  Alex Bevk  See pictures at http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/02/20/tracking_down_the_remnants_of_san_franciscos_worlds_fair.php

The “rule” that a preposition should not end a sentence goes back to the 18th century, when some grammarians believed English should bend to the rules of Latin grammar.  But like the spurious prohibition against starting sentences with conjunctions, this rule goes against the glorious flexibility of English and often leads to unnatural-sounding sentences.  Ending sentences with strong words is a good idea, but not when it means contorting the language away from natural expression.  Winston Churchill (or someone else—the quote has been attributed to many people) provided the best rejoinder to this rule. When criticized for ending a sentence with a preposition, he replied, That is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I shall not put.  Yet the phony rule lives on as an illogical superstition throughout the English-speaking world.

Ancient ziggurats were massive temple structures built in Ancient Mesopotamia to honor a   deity.  Ziggurats were built for hundreds of years in various regions of the ancient Middle East.  One of the first things that usually comes to mind when we think of ancient Egypt is the Great Pyramid at Giza, but did you know the ancient Mesopotamians also built massive structures that were just as impressive? These buildings were called ziggurats.  A ziggurat was basically an enormous temple.  These structures were built in several levels. Although we are unsure of the exact purpose for each level and ziggurat, it is likely that each level was designated for a different type of activity.  The bottom level, for example, may have been a place of social and commercial interaction, while the upper levels may have been reserved for only the head priest to commune with a designated deity.  The ziggurat was the city's center.  It would have been surrounded by a courtyard with homes, storage, and other facilities designated for administrative purposes.  Ziggurats were square or rectangular at their base.  The bricks would have been made of mud.  Unlike step pyramids, these structures would have contained stairs to allow designated people access to upper levels.  Because each city generally had its own patron deity, the local ziggurat was built for that deity.  Mesopotamia spans the area now known as Iraq as well as parts of Turkey and Iran.  Jessica Elam Miller  See picture at http://study.com/academy/lesson/mesopotamian-ziggurat-definition-images-quiz.html

BANNED BOOKS WEEK 2015:  September 27-October 3   Top ten frequently challenged books of 2014 has been released as part of the State of America's Library Report.  A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group.  A banning is the removal of those materials.  Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.  As such, they are a threat to freedom of speech and choice.  Link to lists of the top ten frequently challenged books of the 21st century at http://www.ala.org/bbooks/

Want a great way to get the most out of all your food scraps?  Consider growing plants from trash.  Read about garbage gardening at http://www.gardeningknowhow.com/special/children/garbage-gardening-ideas.htm  See also http://ext100.wsu.edu/benton-franklin/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2013/12/Garbage-Gardening.pdf

Dragon flies were thick in the swampy New Jersey towns where we went for the summer in the 1950s and where we burned dried cattails whose smoke was supposed to keep them and mosquitoes away.  We called dragon flies "dining needles," which didn't make sense but was apparently a dialect version of "darning needles."  I read where others in the Northeast called them "diamond needles" another version, though I never heard this used.  See abstract and beginning of the article "Dragon Fly":  Lexical Change, Local Scatter, and the National Norm by Frank Anshen and Mark Aronoff appearing in Language in Society, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Dec., 1982), pp. 413-417 at
Thank you, Muse reader!
  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1346   August 31, 2015  On this date in 1775, Agnes Bulmer, English poet, was born.  On this date in 1834,  Amilcare Ponchielli, Italian composer and educator, was born.

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