Rhetoric and Law:  the double life of Richard Posner, America’s most contentious legal reformer by Lincoln Caplan    Judge Richard A. Posner, LL.B. ’62, is a fierce iconoclast who adorns his chambers with icons.  In one corner are photographs of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Judge Henry Friendly.  In the opposite corner is one of Justice Benjamin Cardozo.  In Posner’s words, Holmes is “the most illustrious figure in the history of American law.”  Friendly was “the most powerful legal reasoner in American legal history.”  Cardozo “has no peers” among twentieth-century state court judges and was “a great judge.”  It’s been a generation since Friendly died:  he sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, from 1959 to 1986.  The other two died long before him:  Holmes served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1903 to 1932; Cardozo made his reputation on New York State’s highest court for 18 years and then sat on the U.S. Supreme Court for six until he died in 1938.  But for Posner, they remain alive through their judicial opinions as shapers of legal pragmatism, which he considers the only viable approach to judging in the United States today.  In The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand, Bass professor of English, called the “attitude” of pragmatism “an idea about ideas.”  “They are “not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered,” Menand wrote, “but are tools—like forks and knives and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves.”  Pragmatism holds that people, not individuals, produce ideas, which are social, “entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment.”  The survival of ideas, Menand wrote, “depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.”  Read more at http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/12/rhetoric-and-law

The mission of the LBJ Presidential Library is "to preserve and protect the historical materials in the collections of the library and make them readily accessible; to increase public awareness of the American experience through relevant exhibitions and educational programs; to advance the LBJ Library's standing as a center for intellectual activity and community leadership while meeting the challenges of a changing world."  Situated on a 30-acre site on The University of Texas campus in Austin, Texas, the library houses 45 million pages of historical documents, 650,000 photos and 5,000 hours of recordings from President Johnson's political career, including about 643 hours of his recorded telephone conversations.  The ten-story building was designed by award-winning architect Gordon Bunshaft and features a Great Hall with a stunning four-story, glass-encased view of the archives collection.  A centerpiece in the Great Hall of the LBJ Library is the photo-engraving mural by artist Naomi Savage.  Approximately 100,000 visitors from around the world visit the LBJ Library exhibits each year.  http://www.lbjlibrary.org/page/library-museum/

Haptics (pronounced HAP-tiks) is the science of applying touch (tactile) sensation and control to interaction with computer applications.  (The word derives from the Greek haptein meaning "to fasten.")  By using special input/output devices (joysticks, data gloves, or other devices), users can receive feedback from computer applications in the form of felt sensations in the hand or other parts of the body.  In combination with a visual display, haptics technology can be used to train people for tasks requiring hand-eye coordination, such as surgery and space ship maneuvers.  It can also be used for games in which you feel as well as see your interactions with images.  For example, you might play tennis with another computer user somewhere else in the world.  Both of you can see the moving ball and, using the haptic device, position and swing your tennis racket and feel the impact of the ball.  http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/haptics  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptics

As the first and only facility of its kind, the National First Ladies' Library of Canton, Ohio serves as a unique national resource for patrons from school children to serious scholars.  The National First Ladies’ Library is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that operates and manages the First Ladies National Historic Site in a partnership agreement with the National Park Service.  In October, 2000 President Bill Clinton signed a bill establishing the First Ladies National Site as the 380^th unit of the National Park Service.  The site consists of the Ida Saxton McKinley House, the family home of First Lady Ida Saxton McKinley and the longtime residence of William and Ida McKinley, and the Education and Research Center.  The Ed Center has exhibit space, a Victorian theatre, a research library, conference and seminar rooms, archival storage and processing rooms, and administrative offices.  http://www.firstladies.org/libraryobjective.aspx

Annie Proulx, The Art of Fiction No. 199  Interview by Christopher Cox   Proulx was in her fifties when she published her first short-story collection, Heart Songs (1988), but since then she has worked steadily, publishing four novels and three more story collections.  She often takes as her subject the dissolution of North American rural life:  farmers, laborers, and ranchers whose livelihood is destroyed both by changes in society and their own purblind stubbornness.  Proulx considers her short stories to be a greater accomplishment than her novels, particularly her three volumes of Wyoming stories—Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004), and Fine Just the Way It Is (2008)—which cover broad swaths of Wyoming history, from the earliest trappers and settlers to the ranchers and game wardens and oil men who populate the state today.  Her long story “Brokeback Mountain,” from Close Range, was named an O. Henry Prize Story and won a National Magazine Award, and pieces from all three collections have been anthologized.  “The Wamsutter Wolf,” which appeared in the Fall 2004 issue of The Paris Review, received the magazine’s Aga Khan Prize for fiction and was collected in Bad Dirt.  Both The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain” were made into movies.  Read 2009 interview with Annie Proulx at http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5901/the-art-of-fiction-no-199-annie-proulx  Find  interviews from The Paris Review, 1990s to the 2010s, at http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews 

Quote from Accordion Crimes a novel by Annie Proulx  "You a living example, cast your bread upon the waters, it comes back moldy."  Accordion Crimes, recounts the 100-year journey of a small green accordion and the immigrant experience in America.

Swan House at Atlanta History Center was one of many Georgia set locations used during the filming of the movies The Hunger Games:  Catching Fire, Mockingjay:  Part 1, and Mockingjay:  Part 2.  http://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/swan-house-capitol-tours  See also https://savingplaces.org/stories/atlantas-swan-house-historic-home-hunger-games-set#.VoxXDPkrKUk and http://atlanta.curbed.com/archives/2015/11/23/hunger-games-filming-location-tour-atlanta-swan-house.php

A long-lost Beatrix Potter book, The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, is set to be released fall 2016, 150 years after the beloved author's birth.  The tale about a sharply dressed feline has "all the hallmarks of Potter's best works," editor Jo Hanks, who stumbled upon the story, says in an interview with Penguin U.K., which will publish the book.  At the time Potter was writing Kitty-in-Boots in 1914, she told her publisher that the story was centered on "a well-behaved prime black Kitty cat, who leads rather a double life."  Hanks says she "stumbled on an out-of-print collection of her writings" and saw that reference to the story in a letter from Potter to her publisher.  This led her to the publisher's archive, where she says she found "three manuscripts, two handwritten in children's school notebooks and one typeset and laid out in a dummy book; one rough colour sketch of Kitty-in-Boots and a pencil rough of our favourite arch-villain, Mr Tod."  The tale features a favorite Potter character—Peter Rabbit—"albeit older, slower and portlier," Hanks says.  Because Potter finished only one drawing for the book, it will be illustrated by Quentin Blake, who is best-known for his art in many of Roald Dahl's books.  See a picture of the original Kitty in Boots, which Beatrix Potter illustrated herself.  http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/26/464433143/100-years-later-beatrix-potter-tale-of-sharply-dressed-feline-to-be-published

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1415  January 27, 2016  On this date in 1756,

 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, ( baptized as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart), Austrian composer and musician, was born.  On this date in 1832,  Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), English novelist, poet, and mathematician, was born.