Tuesday, March 27, 2018


Tarragon Eggs  Melt butter in skillet.  Add 4 eggs.  Pour 1 tbsp. tarragon wine vinegar over eggs.  Cover with lid and continue frying.  Sarah Bertram  Culinary High Notes, a full score of recipes from the Toledo Opera Guild  copyright 1984 

The late 19th-century pairing of crack and jack to form crackerjack topped off a long history for those words.  Cracker is an elongation of crack, an adjective meaning "expert" or "superior" that dates from the 18th century.  Prior to that, crack was a noun meaning "something superior" and a verb meaning "to boast."  (The verb use evolved from the expression "to crack a boast," which came from the sense of crack meaning "to make a loud sharp sound.")  Jack has been used for "man" since the mid-1500s, as in "jack-of-all-trades."  Crackerjack entered English first as a noun referring to "a person or thing of marked excellence," then as an adjective.  You may also know Cracker Jack as a snack of candied popcorn and peanuts.  That trademarked name dates from the 1890s.

Love is blind . . . otherwise, there'd be so very little of it.  The Same River Twice, a novel by Ted Mooney

Born in Dallas, Texas; raised in Washington, D.C.; and now residing in Manhattan, Ted Mooney is a fiction writer, art critic and editor.  His short stories have appeared in American Review, Granta and Esquire, among other places, and he is a frequent contributor to such publications as The Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Bookforum and Artforum.  His first novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets (Farrar, Straus; 1981), was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and was a finalist for the American Book Award. Traffic and Laughter (Knopf, 1990), written with the support of the John Simon Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, was his second novel, and his third, Singing into the Piano, was published, also by Knopf, in 1998.  His fourth novel, The Same River Twice--set mainly in Paris, with side excursions to Moscow, and New York—was published by Knopf in 2010.  Currently, he is working on Shadow and Silhouette, the second volume of a loosely affiliated trilogy that began with The Same River Twice.  His novels have been translated into six languages.  From 1977 to 2008, Mooney was a Senior Editor at Art in America, and he remains intimately involved in the art world, writing critical pieces for such publications as Artforum, Parkett, Flashart and Frieze.  https://www.authorsguild.net/services/members/806

Asunder is a derived term of sunder.  As an adverb, asunder is separate parts or pieces; apart.  As a adjective, sunder is  (dialectal|or|obsolete) sundry; separate; different.  As a verb, sunder is  to break or separate or to break apart, especially with force.  As a noun, sunder is a separation into parts; a division or severance.  https://wikidiff.com/asunder/sunder

The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World  Selected descriptions--A very similar looking library to one of the libraries pictured turned up in Star Wars:  Episode II:  Attack of the Clones.  The makers claimed any similarity was coincidental, but you could hardly blame them if one of the most beautiful libraries in the world had inspired the most beautiful library in a galaxy far, far away.  *  Another library is an amoeba-shaped monolith of etched glass, which lights up magically once the sun goes down.  Inside, the books are housed amid a riot of eye-searing colours.  See many pictures with their descriptions at       

March 24, 2018  After downloading my stored data on Facebook— I've been a member since 2004—I was presented with an enormous amount of personal details that have been collected about me over the years.  It had the phone number of my late grandmother who never had a Facebook account, or even an email address.  It preserved the conversations I had with an ex--someone with whom I thought I had deleted my digital ties.  It even recalled times I was "poked," a feature I had forgotten about.  I also learned that Kate Spade New York and MetLife have me on their advertiser lists.  Facebook emailed me a link to download my data.  The process took about 10 minutes.  The data is segmented into groups:  like ads, contact info, events, messages, timeline, and more.  I started with the ads tab and learned which advertisers possessed my contact information.  They included Bed, Bath and Beyond, Target, and Marriott Rewards . . .  and a few crowdfunding sites I had never heard of.  Sara Ashley O'Brien  Read more at http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/24/technology/facebook-data/index.html

Why did my grandfather translate Mein Kampf?  by John Murphy   My grandfather, Dr James Murphy, lived in Berlin from 1929, before the Nazis came to power.  He was a journalist and translator based in Berlin in the 1930s and that's how he earned his money.  Towards the end of 1936, the Nazis asked James to start work on a full translation of Mein Kampf.  It's not clear why.  Perhaps Berlin's Propaganda Ministry wanted to have an English version which it could release when it felt the time was right.  But at some point during 1937 the Nazis changed their minds.  The Propaganda Ministry sequestered all completed copies of the Murphy manuscript.  He returned to England in September 1938, where he quickly found British publishers keen to print his full translation--but they were worried that the Nazi publishing house, Eher Verlag, hadn't given him the copyright.  And anyway, he had left his completed work behind in Germany.  My grandmother, Mary, remembered that she had previously handed a carbon copy of a first draft of her husband's translation to one of his secretaries, an English woman called Daphne French.  She tracked her down in Berlin and, fortunately, Daphne still had the copy.  Mary brought it back to London.  With an American translation about to be published in the US, the race was on to get my grandfather's translation out as quickly as possible.  In March 1939, Hurst and Blackett/Hutchinson published the first British unexpurgated version of Mein Kampf.  By August 32,000 copies had been sold and they continued to be printed until the presses were destroyed--by a German air raid--in 1942.  A new American version subsequently became the standard translation.  One copyright expert, who has written about Mein Kampf, estimates that between 150,000 to 200,000 copies of the Murphy edition were eventually sold.  The Murphy edition is now out of print but copies are scattered across the world and it can be found online at https://archive.org/details/MeinKampf_483  http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30697262

William Gibson, playwright, writer and poet, born 13 November 1914; died 25 November 2008   After a slow-burning start, William Gibson found worldwide success in his forties.  He did so with two plays--The Miracle Worker (1957) and Two for a Seesaw (1958)--which both have women at their centre, and made a star of Anne Bancroft.  These followed a bestselling novel, The Cobweb (1954), so scandalous that Gibson's widowed mother Florence confessed to her priest after reading it.  Of Irish, French, German, Dutch and Russian ancestry, Gibson was born and grew up in the Bronx, the teeming, dramatic New York neighbourhood later brilliantly evoked in his substantial, unusual memoir A Mass for the Dead (1968).  His mother encouraged William's writing and music, and the local library was addictive--"an opium den", he said later.  After the successes of the 1950s, Gibson's subsequent career was erratic.  His musical based on Clifford Odets's boxing play Golden Boy (1964), with Sammy Davis Jr, has become a cult as a result of Charles Strouse and Lee Adams's unusual score.  Gibson revived an early, effective play about Shakespeare, A Cry of Players--again with Bancroft--while his literary criticism includes A Season in Heaven (1974) and Shakespeare's Game (1978).  Bancroft also took the lead role in his play Golda (1977).  Its large cast, however, did not make the politician's life dramatic, and in 2002 Gibson reduced it to a monologue, Golda's Balcony.  A sequel to The Miracle Worker, Monday After the Miracle (1982), did not have the dramatic urgency of the original.  Christopher Hawtree https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/feb/11/obituary-william-gibson-playwright
           
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1864  March 27, 2018 

No comments: