CITIES THAT DON'T KNOW THEIR PLACE  Venices of the North include Amsterdam, Bruges, Manchester and Stockholm.  Western Venices include Venice, California and Shannon in Ireland.  Venices of the East:  Bandar Seri Begawan, capital of Brunei, Suzhou in China, Osaka in Japan and Udaipur in India.  Venices of the South:  Tigre in Argentina.  Venice of the Pacific:  Nan Madol in the Federated States of Micronesia.  After Venice, the city that most others aspire to be like must be Paris.  Paris of the East:  Baku, Azerbaijan, Shangai.  Paris of the North:  Tromso, Norway.  Paris of the South:  Buenos Aires.  Paris of Siberia:  Irkutsk.  https://www.tourdust.com/blog/posts/paris-of-the-east-venice-of-the-north-where-will-it-end  Paris of the Antilles:  Throughout colonial times Cap-Haïtien was the capital of the French colony Saint-Domingue (now called Haiti and today its second most important city) and was called Cap-Français.  http://www.alekseitrofimov.eu/cap-haitien-once-the-paris-of-the-antilles-and-whats-left-of-it/

Louisiana Shrimp Cornbread  Uses raw, peeled Louisiana shrimp (can be any size; devein, if desired; may substitute peeled, cooked crawfish tails or diced, roasted andouille sausage)  Find recipe for 12 servings at https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/louisiana-shrimp-cornbread/12507/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5c234f614490  Adapted from chef-owner Frank Brigsten of Brigsten's Restaurant in New Orleans.  Tested by Bonnie S. Benwick

Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952) is an American novelist and screenwriter.  He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999.  Cunningham is a senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University.  Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Pasadena, California.  He studied English literature at Stanford University, where he earned his degree.  Later, at the University of Iowa, he received a Michener Fellowship and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.  While studying at Iowa, he had short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review.  His short story "White Angel" was later used as a chapter in his novel A Home at the End of the World.  It was included in "The Best American Short Stories, 1989", published by Houghton Mifflin.  In 1993, Cunningham received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1988 a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.  In 1995 he was awarded a Whiting Award.  Cunningham has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and in the creative writing M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cunningham

June 25, 2018  What happens if you are Cinderella and the prince turns out to be your father?  Jamie Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein’s firstborn daughter, has written a memoir of her family, a family that her overwhelming dad—loving, inspired, and sometimes insufferable—dominated for decades.  The author grew up wriggling inside a paradox, struggling to become a self when so much of her was defined by her brilliant parent. “Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein” (HarperCollins) is unique among classical-music memoirs for its physical intimacy, its humor and tenderness, its ambivalence toward an irrepressible family genius.  After a whirlwind life as a young man, Bernstein married Felicia Montealegre, in 1951.  He was thirty-three; she was twenty-nine.  Montealegre was raised in Chile; her mother was Costa Rican and Catholic; her father, an American Jew, was a wealthy industrialist.  A South American aristocrat who became socially ambitious in America, Felicia was an accomplished actress with an elevated elocutionary style that was losing favor to so-called naturalistic modes; she was good at narrating oratorios.  They had three children:  Jamie, who is now sixty-five; a boy, Alexander, and another girl, Nina, says that her father was an ardent family man, attentive, affectionate, an unending didact who crammed his kids with poetry, music, Hebrew lessons.  The family gatherings were a conspiracy to have fun.  Parents and children created rhyming nonsense songs for special occasions; they made clowning home movies (“What Ever Happened to Felicia Montealegre?,” an overwrought salute to Bette Davis and Joan Crawford).  If Lenny’s effusiveness was sometimes hard to bear, plenty of smart people couldn’t get enough of him, including Mike Nichols, Richard Avedon, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and the young Stephen Sondheim.  Lillian Hellman, terrifying to Jamie, was a growling presence.  With that crew around, however, and L.B. driving the entertainments, the long evenings could become barbed—anagrams and other word games were played as life-and-death matters, and more than one participant, Jamie says, left the room in tears.  After L.B.’s death, chagrin gives way to relief; life resumes its usual shapes of success and failure.  The overwhelmed children try to pull themselves together, and Jamie Bernstein finds a way—many ways, actually—of making a life out of music without being a musician, narrating concert works, creating an equivalent of the Young People’s Concerts (the Bernstein Beat, devoted to his music), making a film about the training of young American instrumentalists.  She and her brother and sister have devoted themselves to their father’s name, his work, and his recordings, and have helped along restorative efforts on his compositions and much else.  David Denby  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/25/leonard-bernstein-through-his-daughters-eyes  See also https://www.jamiebernstein.net/about/

Two common ingredients in Hungarian cuisine are paprika spice and tomato sauce and they are what put a Hungarian spin on this version of stuffed peppers known as toltott paprika.  It definitely wouldn't be Hungarian without the ever-present, but optional, garnish of sour cream.  Paprika in Hungarian also refers to the peppers from which the spice is made.  The peppers are native to the Americas and were taken to Hungary by merchants where it flourished.  Hungarian paprika is revered the world over because it is said the soil the peppers are grown in lends a flavor like no other.  The Spanish, however, will argue that their paprika, especially smoked paprika, is superior to Hungarian paprika.  It's all a matter of taste.  Barbara Rolek   See recipe for Hungarian stuffed cabbage and link to video, plus link to  recipes including, nokedli, stuffed cabbage, and stuffed kohlrabi bulbs at https://www.thespruceeats.com/hungarian-stuffed-peppers-toltott-paprika-recipe-1136772

Nokedli are fluffy Hungarian egg noodle dumplings.  In German cooking they are known as “spaetzle“ or “Spätzle.”

Libraries are an example of what I call “social infrastructure”:  the physical spaces and organizations that shape the way people interact.  Libraries don’t just provide free access to books and other cultural materials, they also offer things like companionship for older adults, de facto child care for busy parents, language instruction for immigrants and welcoming public spaces for the poor, the homeless and young people.  For older people, especially widows, widowers and those who live alone, libraries are places for culture and company, through book clubs, movie nights, sewing circles and classes in art, current events and computing.  For many, the library is the main place they interact with people from other generations.  For children and teenagers, libraries help instill an ethic of responsibility, to themselves and to their neighbors, by teaching them what it means to borrow and take care of something public, and to return it so others can have it too.  For new parents, grandparents and caretakers who feel overwhelmed when watching an infant or a toddler by themselves, libraries are a godsend.  In many neighborhoods, particularly those where young people aren’t hyper-scheduled in formal after-school programs, libraries are highly popular among adolescents and teenagers who want to spend time with other people their age.  One reason is that they’re open, accessible and free. Another is that the library staff members welcome them; in many branches, they even assign areas for teenagers to be with one another.  To appreciate why this matters, compare the social space of the library with the social space of commercial establishments like Starbucks or McDonald’s.  These are valuable parts of the social infrastructure, but not everyone can afford to frequent them, and not all paying customers are welcome to stay for long.  Eric Klinenberg  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/opinion/sunday/civil-society-library.html

Since 2002, Medina County Law Library (Ohio) has contracted with LexisNexis to provide search services for approximately 100 private practitioners (attorneys who are not employed by the County).  The access privilege for the private attorneys was paid by the law library.  In 2018, LexisNexis informed the law library that it was cancelling this license mid-term because the listed subscribers were not government professional users employed by the subscriber.  Of course LexisNexis was fully aware that the 100 or so subscribers were private sector attorneys when the company entered and repeatedly renewed its license with the law library.  So why the change?  Probably because the Company thinks it would make more money by forcing the private practitioners to contract directly and individually with LexisNexis.  On Sept. 6th, 2018 the Medina County Law Library sued LexisNexis for breach of contract.  Here’s the text of the Motion for Temporary Injunction https://lawlibrarianblog2.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/time-stamped-motion-for-temporary-injunction-lexisnexis-case.pdf  and the LexisNexis Complaint  https://lawlibrarianblog2.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/time-stamped-lexisnexis-complaint-with-exhibits-final-6-sep-2018-1.pdf  Thank you, Muse reader!

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1951  September 12, 2018