Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a
collection of short free verse poems that
collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents
of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the real Spoon River that ran near
Masters' home town of Lewistown, Illinois. The
collection includes 212 separate characters, in all providing 244 accounts of
their lives, losses, and manner of death.
Many of the poems contain cross-references that create an unabashed
tapestry of the community. The poems
were originally published in 1914 in the St. Louis, Missouri literary
journal Reedy's Mirror, under the pseudonym Webster Ford. Find a list of twenty adaptations of Spoon
River Anthology including songs, a play, photographs, a documentary and
"Return to Spoon River," a musical at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_River_Anthology
A spoonerism is an error in speech
in which corresponding consonants, vowels,
or morphemes are switched (see Metathesis)
between two words in a phrase. These are named after the Oxford don and
ordained minister William Archibald
Spooner, who reputedly did this.
An example is saying "The Lord is a shoving leopard" instead of
"The Lord is a loving shepherd." While spoonerisms are commonly heard as slips
of the tongue, and getting one's words in a tangle, they can also be used
intentionally as a play on words. See
examples and use in popular culture at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism
The floor of the Colosseum
in Rome, where you might expect to see a smooth ellipse of sand, is instead a
bewildering array of masonry walls shaped in concentric rings, whorls and
chambers, like a huge thumbprint. The
confusion is compounded as you descend a long stairway at the eastern end of
the stadium and enter ruins that were hidden beneath a wooden floor during the
nearly five centuries the arena was in use, beginning with its inauguration in
A.D. 80. Weeds grow waist-high between
flagstones; caper and fig trees sprout from dank walls, which are a patchwork
of travertine slabs, tufa blocks and brickwork.
Heinz-Jürgen Beste of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, the
leading authority on the hypogeum, has spent much of the past 14 years
deciphering the hypogeum—from the Greek word for “underground.” The hypogeum itself had a lot in common
with a huge sailing ship. The
underground staging area had “countless ropes, pulleys and other wood and metal
mechanisms housed in very limited space, all requiring endless training and
drilling to run smoothly during a show.
Like a ship, too, everything could be disassembled and stored neatly
away when it was not being used.” All
that ingenuity served a single purpose: to delight spectators and ensure the
success of shows that both celebrated and embodied the grandeur of Rome. Beyond the thin wooden floor that separated
the dark, stifling hypogeum from the airy stadium above, the crowd of 50,000
Roman citizens sat according to their place in the social hierarchy, ranging from
slaves and women in the upper bleachers to senators and vestal
virgins—priestesses of Vesta, goddess of the hearth—around the arena
floor. A place of honor was reserved for
the editor, the person who organized and paid for the games. Often the editor was the emperor himself, who
sat in the imperial box at the center of the long northern curve of the
stadium, where his every reaction was scrutinized by the audience. The hypogeum played a vital role in these
staged hunts, allowing animals and hunters to enter the arena in countless
ways. Eyewitnesses describe how animals
appeared suddenly from below, as if by magic, sometimes apparently launched
high into the air. “The hypogeum allowed
the organizers of the games to create surprises and build suspense,” Beste
says. “A hunter in the arena wouldn’t
know where the next lion would appear, or whether two or three lions might
emerge instead of just one.” This
uncertainty could be exploited for comic effect. Emperor Gallienus punished a merchant who had
swindled the empress, selling her glass jewels instead of authentic ones, by
setting him in the arena to face a ferocious lion. When the cage opened, however, a chicken
walked out, to the delight of the crowd.
Gallienus then told the herald to proclaim: “He practiced deceit and then had it
practiced on him.” The emperor let the
jeweler go home. At the ludi meridiani, or midday games, criminals,
barbarians, prisoners of war and other unfortunates, called damnati, or “condemned,” were executed. (Despite numerous accounts of saints’ lives
written in the Renaissance and later, there is no reliable evidence that
Christians were killed in the Colosseum for their faith.) Tom
Mueller https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/secrets-of-the-colosseum-75827047/
“A
public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for
the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is
respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them." Mark Twain
[Letter to the Millicent (Rogers) Library, February 22, 1894] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1019165-a-public-library-is-the-most-enduring-of-memorials-the
The first
written case of steganography is found in Histories by Herodotus. He writes that it happened during the Ionian
Revolt, an uprising of some Greek cities against Persian rule at around 500
BC. Histiaeus, the ruler of Miletus was
away from his city, acting as an adviser to the Persian king. He wanted to go back to Miletus, which was
under the control of his son-in-law, Aristagoras, so he planned to stage a
revolt in Ionia as a pretext for his return.
This is where the steganography comes in: He shaved the head of one of his slaves and
tattooed a message on his scalp.
Histiaeus then waited for the slave’s hair to grow back and hide the
message, then sent him to Aristagoras with instructions to shave the slave’s
head once more and read the message. The
concealed text told him to rise up against the Persian rule, which kicked-off
the uprising against their conquerors.
Herodotus tells another story about steganography that occurred several
years later, when the Spartan king Demaratus sent a seemingly blank wax tablet
back to Sparta. Hidden beneath the wax
was a message that warned the Spartans of Xerxes’ planned invasion. Herodotus is known for his tall tales, so we
can’t be sure of how truthful these stories are, but they’re the earliest
records of steganography we have. It
wasn’t long before more sophisticated forms of steganography were
recorded. In the 4th century BC, Aeneas
Tacticus made mention of a hole punching technique. Philo of Byzantium was the first to discuss
invisible inks, writing about them in the third century BC. His recipe used gall nuts to write text and a
copper sulfate solution to reveal it.
The term steganography was first used in a book called Steganographia by
Johannes Trithemius. The word combined
the Greek steganos, which means concealed, with graphein, which means
writing. Steganographia was a clever book that was
purportedly about magic and the occult, but used cryptography and steganography
to hide its real subject matter, which centered around cryptography and
steganography. Steganographia was
followed up by Polygraphia, which was first published after Trithemius’ death
in 1518. This was a more straightforward
book about steganography and its practice. Another key development in steganography came in
1605, when Francis Bacon devised Bacon’s cipher. This technique used two different typefaces to
code a secret message into a seemingly innocent text. Microdots were first developed in the latter
half of the 19th century, but they weren’t used heavily for steganography until
World War I. They involve shrinking a
message or image down to the size of a dot, which allows people to communicate
and pass on information without their adversaries knowing. Josh Lake
http://www.crime-research.org/articles/Stegano26/
The British bookseller Waterstones, the chemist Boots,
and the media organisation Reuters are among the many brands that have dropped
their apostrophe over the years. When
Waterstones ditched it in 2012, its then managing director James
Daunt said it was doing so
to make its name more 'versatile' for online use. By contrast, the US clothing company Lands’
End is an example of a company that has maintained the use of an incorrect
apostrophe and built it into its heritage.
The apostrophe
probably originated in the early 16th Century–either in 1509, in an Italian
edition of Petrarch, or in 1529, courtesy of French printer Geoffroy Tory, who
seemingly had a fondness for creating linguistic marks, as he is also credited
with inventing the accent and the cedilla.
It came from the Greek apostrophē, meaning 'the act of turning away',
and before it was used in a grammatical context, it was a rhetorical term used
to describe the moment when a speaker would turn from the audience to address,
typically, an absent person. Grammatical
apostrophes originally denoted absence of a different kind, signalling that
something had been removed from a word, usually a vowel that was not
pronounced. They were also used to show
that several letters were missing, not just one. And sometimes they were added in for no
obvious reason, for example in this line, by 17th Century poet Robert
Herrick: “What fate decreed, time now
ha's made us see." Hélène Schumacher Read
more and see pictures at http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20200217-have-we-murdered-the-apostrophe
Hatch
green chillies come from a town called Hatch in New Mexico. You can add them to soups, stews, salsas or
use as toppings for burgers or pizzas for a great depth of flavour. They range in heat level (and also offer a
subtle sweetness to them), so buy whichever are better for your palate.
You can add white beans and use the back of a wooden spoon to mash the
beans against the side of the pan to thicken this 30-Minute Green Chili by
Yasmin Fahr. https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/30-minute-green-chicken-chili serves 2 or 4
for sharing
The Hatch chile is the
holy grail of chile peppers. The little
village of Hatch, New Mexico is the self-proclaimed Chile Capital of the
World. See pictures at https://www.roadunraveled.com/blog/hatch-chile-new-mexico/ See also http://www.hatchchilefest.com/
Coronavirus
Means Everyone Wants Jigsaw Puzzles. Good
Luck Buying One. The Wall
Street Journal March 30, 2020 p.A1 The Muser is working puzzles, then will take
them to Goodwill.
A THOUGHT FOR March 26 The more I think it over, the more I feel
that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. - Vincent van
Gogh, painter (30 Mar 1853-1890)
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2248
March 30, 2020
