The professional pseudonym of Theodor Seuss Geisel is Dr. Seuss, and all the English-speaking world pronounced it “Doctor Soose.”  If you pronounce it “Doctor Zoice,” you’ll sound like a fool.  It is true that the middle name of Theodor Geisel—“Seuss,” which was also his mother’s maiden name—was pronounced “Zoice” by the family, and by Theodor Geisel himself.   So, if you are pronouncing his full given name, saying “Zoice” instead of “Soose” would not be wrong.  You’d have to explain the pronunciation to your listener, but you would be pronouncing it as the family did.  However, if you’re referring to the author of books for children, you pronounce it “Doctor Soose.”  For his pseudonym, Dr. Seuss accepted this pronunciation of his middle name.  I’m the author of Dr. Seuss:  American Icon (2004) and The Annotated Cat:  Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats (2007).  I also wrote the bio and timeline for Random House’s Seussville website.  The beginning of that bio includes the pronunciation information (“Zoice”), which I learned from Judith and Neil Morgan’s excellent Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel (1995).  If you read one secondary source about Seuss, their book is the one to read.  "Geisel” is pronounced “Guy-zell”.  Philip Nel  http://www.philnel.com/2013/02/06/seusswrong/  See also 11 words you're probably mispronouncing by Amanda Green at https://theweek.com/articles/468052/11-words-youre-probably-mispronouncing

Gooseberry Patch Recipes  https://www.myrecipes.com/gooseberry-patch-recipes  Gooseberry Patch philosophy:  Keep it simple.  Make it special.  See recipe for Buckeyes, a chocolate–dipped confection:    http://www.gooseberrypatch.com/gooseberry/recipe.nsf/55e548eeef8c89b9852568d4004c5ffe/324EBD673127E342852579B20050D839  Recipe for no-cook Rah-Rah Buckeye Bars:  https://gooseberrypatch.typepad.com/blog/2011/02/cotw-ffm-special-feature.html#.Xmjcd6hKiUk  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooseberry_Patch

In a short story in the January 2016 issue of the London Review of Books, Hilary Mantel attributes to an adolescent student the peculiar phrase “She is in high dudgeon.”  Readers like me stopped dead at that point.  So did Hilary Mantel.  She paused to explain what might have been going on in the mind of that fictional student, a process as complicated as the English Reformation under Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell that Mantel has narrated in her masterpieces, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.  Mantel points out that phrases like the one about dudgeon seem to emerge from nowhere, perhaps “from schoolbooks their grandparents had.”  Dudgeon means a feeling of offense or deep resentment.  It may have originated as an Italian word for overshadowing, which would make it a sister word to umbrage, a favourite of mine.  Most people, I believe, have read “take umbrage” many times without wondering how this word came to mean what it does.  We guess from the content that it’s a way of saying “feel resentful” or “be angered.”  Well-read horticulturalists and arborists have always known.  It comes from the term for shade trees.  That’s how Charlotte Brontë used it 1849 in Shirley, her second published novel after Jane Eyre:  “She would spend a sunny afternoon in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of friendly umbrage.”  Two centuries earlier, John Milton, in Paradise Lost, referred to “highest woods” that “spread their umbrage broad.”  Gradually, usage (in its ponderous, anonymous and mostly unknowable ways) gave the word another meaning, so that the shadow cast by friendly trees turned into an unfriendly shadow cast over individuals or phrases that might darken someone’s otherwise good name.  Short shrift is a rare case of an ancient companion term that retains its strength although few readers understand its origin.  Originally, it referred to the sacrament of confession, often called shrift.  It was said by some that prisoners who were soon to be executed received only rapid and unsympathetic treatment by priests administering confession:  short shrift.  It passed into general language as curt dismissal.  The Nobel-winning poet, Joseph Brodsky, warned one audience of certain social and cultural evils and then added, “Once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible.”  Robert Fulford  https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/taking-umbrage-with-the-short-shrift-where-do-our-obscure-turns-of-phrase-come-from

To better understand the title of Robert Boswell's gripping and unsettling play, The Long Shrift, you have to consider how reversing the dictionary meaning of the phrase, "getting the short shrift," as it is has been traditionally understood:  "The brief interlude given a condemned prisoner to confess and receive absolution before execution."  Although Boswell, is more renowned for his seven published novels, The Long Shrift is his second play, and it's a humdinger.  In defense of his oft-explored theme—you unwittingly hurt the one you love—it explores aspects of rape and repentance with uncanny insight and a clear-minded compassion for both the victim and the perpetrator.  Simon Saltzman  http://www.curtainup.com/longshrift14.html

Why MacDowell NOW? Whitman, Melville, the Virus by Vijay Seshadri  April 2, 2020  Decades ago, someone said in a literature seminar I attended that while America’s founders built the edifice of American democracy it was Walt Whitman who gave America its inner meaning and created the American social bond.  As expansive and Whitmanesque as this claim seems, I thought it was true the moment I heard it, and true not just as a statement of historical fact (one that some people might dispute) but also because of what it revealed about the relationship between American identity and imagination.  Imagination can survive in terrible political systems—in autocracies and tyrannies, under totalitarianism.  (I once heard Jorge Luis Borges say, jokingly, in an on-stage interview, that censorship is good for writers because it forces them to be ingenious.)  But the political system we call democracy can’t survive without imagination, which makes it possible to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves; and a particularly strong and vital current of imaginativeness needs to be generated to jump the wide gaps between people in a society that is, and has been since its beginnings, as diverse as America.  https://www.macdowellcolony.org/news/whitman-melville-the-virus?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Why%20MacDowell%20NOW%3F%20Whitman%2C%20Melville%2C%20the%20Virus&utm_campaign=2020Mar_eNews  Vijay Seshadri is a MacDowell Fellow (1998, 2004), board member and is a Brooklyn, New York-based Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist, and literary critic.

An international team of specialists, led by the University of Bristol, is closer to cracking a 5,000-year-old mystery surrounding the ancient trade and production of decorated ostrich eggs.  Long before Fabergé, ornate ostrich eggs were highly prized by the elites of Mediterranean civilisations during the Bronze and Iron Ages, but to date little has been known about the complex supply chain behind these luxury goods.  Examining ostrich eggs from the British Museum's collection, the team, led by Bristol's Dr. Tamar Hodos, were able to reveal secrets about their origin and how and where they were made. Using state-of-the-art scanning electron microscopy, Dr. Caroline Cartwright, Senior Scientist at the British Museum was able to investigate the eggs' chemical makeup to pinpoint their origins and study minute marks that reveal how they were made.  In the study, published April 9, 2020 in the journal Antiquity, the researchers describe for the first time the surprisingly complex system behind ostrich egg production.  This includes evidence about where the ostrich eggs were sourced, if the ostriches were captive or wild, and how the manufacture methods can be related to techniques and materials used by artisans in specific areas.  Read more and see graphics at https://phys.org/news/2020-04-year-old-egg-reveals-complexity-ancient.html

Seismologists have discovered that there is less seismic noise around the world, which means there are less vibrations from trains, cars and buses throughout the world because so many people are staying home and social distancing, CNN reports.  The lack of noise means “Earth’s upper crust is moving just a little less,” according to CNN.  Thomas Lecocq, a geologist and seismologist at the Royal Observatory in Belgium, was one of the first to discover the change in sound in Belgium, where vibrations have decreased about one-third because of new social distancing and quarantine restrictions, according to CBS News.  Lecocq and other researchers told CNN they’ve picked up on smaller earthquakes and shakes because there’s less general seismic noise from transportation.  Herb Scribner  https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2020/4/7/21209641/coronavirus-covid-19-earthquake-shake-seismic

One of the world’s oldest films, “Sneeze,” is a gift that keeps on giving.  Shot in 1894 and about as long as an achoo, it shows a mustachioed gent emitting a single sneeze, a kerchief clutched in one hand.  The film was made by W.K.L. Dickson and the sneeze delivered by Fred Ott.  Sneeze is one of more than 7000 videos you can stream courtesy of the Library of Congress at https://loc.gov/collections/national-screening-room  Manohla Dargis  The New York Times  April 4, 2020

Phone calls have made a comeback in the pandemic.  While the nation’s biggest telecommunications providers prepared for a huge shift toward more internet use from home, what they didn’t expect was an even greater surge in plain old voice calls, a medium that had been going out of fashion for years.  Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day, historically one of the busiest call days of the year.  Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33 percent from an average day before the outbreak.  AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35 percent and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times.  In contrast, internet traffic is up around 20 percent to 25 percent from typical daily patterns, AT&T and Verizon said.  The rise is stunning given how voice calls have long been on the decline.  Some 90 million households in the United States have ceased using landline phones since 2000, according to USTelecom.  Cecilia Kang  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/technology/phone-calls-voice-virus.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

With restaurants, hotels and cafeterias closed by the coronavirus, American farmers stuck with vast quantities of food they cannot sell are dumping milk, throwing out chicken-hatching eggs and rendering pork bellies into lard instead of bacon.  The Wall Street Journal  April 10, 2020

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2253  April 10, 2020