Basic Clafoutis by John Besh   Approach the clafoutis batter as if you're making waffles!  It's no more complicated than that.  This recipe resonates with me because it is so simple and versatile and, at the same time, elegant.  Most often I make a clafoutis in a black cast iron skillet or heavy pie pan because they retain the heat well.  You can certainly use individual ramekins, a tart mold, or even a crêpe pan.  Find recipe suggesting choppable fruits like mango and banana--to cherries preserved in brandy--plus variations using concord grapes, pears, and milk chocolate with hazlenuts at http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/basic-clafoutis-51208430  See also Julia Child's Cherry Clafouti at http://www.food.com/recipe/julia-childs-cherry-clafouti-239454

Satyajit Ray:  The Music Room by Derek Malcolm   Once, after I had dinner with Satyajit Ray, the great Bengali director, at his Calcutta home, he presented me with his book My Films, Their Films.  Inscribed on the flyleaf was:  'To Derek Malcolm, who sometimes likes my films.'  That was unfair.  In fact, I think five or six of them could claim to rank among the 100 best films of all time.  One is Pather Panchali, the very first film Ray made in 1955 and the initial part of the extraordinary Apu trilogy.  Another is Charulata, a study of middle-class relationships and disappointed love that is as memorable as the tribulations of the peasant Apu.  But the film I would select above both is 1958's Jalsaghar, or The Music Room, which proves beyond doubt that this writer, composer, illustrator and film-maker, who was sometimes accused of being more Western than Indian, was no such thing.  Though influenced by Jean Renoir, whom he aided with his Indian film The River, and bowled over as a young man by De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, Ray owed his chief debt to Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, writer and philosopher with whom he studied as a teenager.  The Music Room is an elaboration of a short story by Tarasankar Banerjee.  The protagonist is an elderly zemindar (the equivalent of one of our landed gentry) who, in the late twenties, tries to stop the march of progress and the destruction of the culture he has grown up with.  His refusal to face facts leads him to organise one last party in his dilapidated music room, although he has to sell his last jewellery to do so.  And so he forges ahead, raising his glass to the portraits of his ancestors as a spider picks its way over a painting of his own florid youth.  Bats fly down the corridor and, in a vast and now tarnished mirror, he confronts himself.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/jan/14/derekmalcolmscenturyoffilm.derekmalcolm

The Music Room:  A Memoir by Namita Devidayal   When Namita is ten years old, her mother takes her to Kennedy Bridge, a seamy neighborhood in Bombay, home to hookers and dance girls.  There, in a cramped one-room apartment lives Dhondutai, the last living disciple of two of the finest Indian classical singers of the twentieth century:  the legendary Alladiya Khan and the great songbird Kesarbai Kerkar.  Namita begins to learn singing from Dhondutai, at first reluctantly and then, as the years pass, with growing passion.   http://us.macmillan.com/themusicroom/namitadevidayal

The Music Room:  A Memoir by William Fiennes  The Music Room defies categorisation:  part family romance, part historical investigation, it is, at its heart, an inquiry into how fundamentally we are defined by the duties of care that we assume or inherit:  care of the land, care of a house, care of ourselves, or care of a difficult and sometimes dangerous son and brother.  John Burnside  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/04/the-music-room-william-fiennes

The Music Room, a novel by Dennis McFarland   Martin Lambert must come to terms with the aftermath of his brother's suicide.  Replaying sad melodies of his affluent youth, Martin embarks on a poignant journey through his family's haunted past--an unforgettable voyage of self-discovery that leads him from a childhood tainted by shocking parental abuse to a present clouded by alcoholic despair and desperate love--and, ultimately, toward a future of understanding, redemption and hope.  http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/327990.The_Music_Room

American author Dennis McFarland   A 1975 Brooklyn College graduate, McFarland also attended and later taught at Goddard College and Stanford University.  At Stanford, McFarland worked as teacher of creative writing from 1981 to 1986.  His fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and The New Yorker.  http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/43855.Dennis_McFarland  See Dennis McFarland's Top Ten List at http://www.toptenbooks.net/authors/dennis-mcfarland

CLIFFHOUSES  Located at 16 Chittenden Avenue in Manhattan's Hudson Heights neighborhood is a home that's been dubbed "The Pumpkin House."  The property extends out over a cliff just north of the George Washington Bridge, and some observers on the other side of the Hudson River see a jack-o-lantern face at night when the lights are on.  At certain hours the sun also casts an orange glow on the facade.  The 3,144-square-foot cliffside home is still a two-family building, with a separate one-bedroom rental unit.  The home was built around 1925, and the WSJ noted in 2010 that at the time it had only ever had four owners.  "The house was built in the 1920s on a steel foundation sunk into a steep cliff at West 186th Street . . .  It was commissioned by Cleveland Walcutt, an engineer, on land purchased from the estate of James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the New York Herald."  (Walcutt foreclosed on the house in 1927.)  In those early days, the home looked even more dramatic given the lack of development in the area at the time.  In the late 1930s, however, Castle Village was built up around the home.  Jen Carlson  See two photos of the cliffside house before development grew up around it at http://gothamist.com/2016/08/15/pumpkin_house_4_sale.php#photo-1   

Graycliff, a summer home Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Isabelle and Darwin Martin in the 1920s, is on the shores of Lake Erie about 20 miles southwest of downtown Buffalo.  In one corner, flower boxes are mounted on the inside, and the sunken flower garden beyond the front porch makes the porch appear almost like another room of the house.  At several inside corners, panels of glass are separated only by a thin metal rod.  This is thought to be a precursor to Fallingwater's famous corner windows.  All of the stone used on the chimney and at various places throughout the property is original and found on the shores of Lake Erie.  The sandstone has a naturally occurring orange stain from iron oxide within it.  Wright apparently liked it and requested that the stone masons leave it exposed.  It fits well with the orange/red color scheme of the roofs and walls.  Monica Disare http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/art-architecture/2013/08/04/Graycliff-Secret-Frank-Lloyd-Wright-house-on-the-Lake/stories/201308040214  

Fallingwater, built in 1936 in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, thrusts out over the waterfall of Bear Run, seeming at first to challenge nature.  It is all sliding horizontal planes, balanced there over the falls, as if to prove that modern man is not bound by natural forces, that he can suspend himself at the edge of a cliff and feel as if he could keep going, flying out into open space.  Fallingwater is virtually as intact as any Frank Lloyd Wright house anywhere.  Its integrity is complete, even down to the presence of most of the original furnishings and the Kaufmann family books that are still on the shelves--supplemented, on occasion, by current books that Edgar Kaufmann Jr. ships over whenever he prunes his own library shelves in New York.  Paul Goldberger   http://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/30/arts/architecture-view-fallingwater-at-50-still-sums-up-the-20th-century.html?pagewanted=all

Influences of the few:  One person suggested the first Columbus Day state holiday in 1905.  One person and an organization lobbied to make Columbus Day a federal holiday in 1934.  The head of a department store is credited with convincing Roosevelt to push Thanksgiving to a week earlier (from the last Thursday to the fourth Thursday in November) to expand the shopping season in 1939, and within two years the change passed through Congress into law.  Private laws apply only to the person named in the law and grant a benefit from the government to that person, not otherwise authorized by law.  Private laws have been with us from the very first Congress, with the first private bill passed by Congress on September 24, 1789, and signed into law by President George Washington.  See http://www.aallnet.org/mm/Publications/llj/LLJ-Archives/Vol-99/pub_llj_v99n01/2007-05.pdf

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1536  October 12, 2016  On this date in 1955, Jane Siberry, Canadian singer-songwriter and producer, was born.  On this date in 1979, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the first of five books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comedy science fiction series by Douglas Adams was published.