Dame Susan Hill, Lady Wells, DBE (born 5 February 1942) is an English author of fiction and non-fiction works.  Her novels include The Woman in Black, The Mist in the Mirror, and I'm the King of the Castle, for which she received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1971.  Hill was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.  Her home town was later referred to in her novel A Change for the Better (1969) and in some short stories like Cockles and Mussels.  Her first novel, The Enclosure, was published by Hutchinson.   Her next novel Gentleman and Ladies was published in 1968 and was runner-up for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.  This was followed in quick succession by A Change for the Better, I'm the King of the Castle, The Albatross and other stories, Strange Meeting, The Bird of Night, A Bit of Singing and Dancing and In the Springtime of the Year, all written and published between 1968 and 1974.  She relies on suspense and atmosphere, similar to the classic ghost stories by Montague Rhodes James and Daphne du Maurier.  She wrote a sequel to du Maurier's Rebecca entitled Mrs de Winter in 1993.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Hill 

loqu-, -loquence, -loquent, -loquently, -loquy, -iloquent, -iloquently  (Latin:  talk, speak, say)  This loqu unit is directly related to the "talk, speak, say, word, speech" locu- family unit.  Adversus solem ne loquitor.  "Don't speak against the sun."  Also translated as, "Don't waste your time arguing the obvious."  When confronted by an important, irrefutable fact, there is no point in arguing about it any further.  Link to over 100 words using Latin for talk at https://wordinfo.info/unit/2533 

Flax grows in most places, but it thrives where river deposits replenish the soil every year:  the Rhine, the Scheldt and the Meuse, in Holland and Belgium; the Nile valley, with its annual overflow to feed the flax fields of Egypt; and the Oder, the Neman, the Vistula and the Dvina, enriching the soils of the Baltic lands, which until the mid-19th century traditionally supplied most of the flax spinning wheels of Europe.  As it grows, flax is the color of sand on a cloudy day, and it has pale-blue flowers, like distant mountains.  It is so long and thin that it seems to almost have the nature of thread already.  But, unlike cotton (which is pretty much ready for spinning after you remove a few seeds and card it), silk (which often just needs to be reeled and twisted), or wool, which needs to be cleaned and combed but is also essentially itself, for a flax crop to be ready even for basic spinning, some hard work has to happen.  Flax is never cut:  it’s always pulled.  This means that the full length is preserved, root and all.  Then it is gathered into bundles, or “beets,” and dried (in the sun if possible, in barns if not), after which the seeds are removed in a process called rippling.  Victoria Finlay  https://lithub.com/on-the-ancient-mysteries-of-linen/ 

Thomas Perry (born 1947) is an American mystery and thriller novelist.  He received a 1983 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best First Novel.  Perry's work has covered a variety of fictional suspense starting with The Butcher's Boy, which received a 1983 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best First Novel, followed by Metzger's Dog, Big Fish, Island, and Sleeping Dogs.  He then launched the critically acclaimed Jane Whitefield series:  Vanishing Act (chosen as one of the "100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century" by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association), Dance for the Dead, Shadow Woman, The Face Changers, Blood Money, Runner, and Poison Flower.  Perry developed a non-series list of mysteries with Death Benefits, Pursuit (which won a Gumshoe Award in 2002), Dead Aim, Night Life, Fidelity, and Strip.  The New York Times selected Night Life for its best seller selection.  In The Informant, released in 2011, Perry brought back the hit-man character first introduced in The Butcher's Boy and later the protagonist in Sleeping Dogs. The Informant was awarded the 2012 Barry Award for Best Thriller.  Eddie's Boy received the 2021 Barry Award for Best Thriller.  In 2021, Vanishing Act was included in Parade's list of "101 Best Mystery Books of All Time".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Perry_(author)  The Old Man is an American thriller television series based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Thomas Perry.  It was developed by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine and premiered on FX on June 16, 2022.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_(TV_series) 

Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem (Latin for 'argument to the person'), refers to several types of arguments, some but not all of which are fallacious.  Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.  Ad hominem arguments were first studied in ancient Greece.  John Locke revived the examination of ad hominem arguments in the 17th century.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem 

Dry embossing, also called relief embossing, is done by tracing a stencil with a special tool called a stylus.  The result is a raised pattern on the object you are embossing.  This project is easy, even if you're new to embossing.  And it's fairly quick, as long as you select a relatively simple stencil.  Hand embossing is ideal only for small projects, such as a greeting card or place cards for a single table setting.  Sherri Osborn   https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/dry-embossing-1251183 

jink  verb  1715, "move nimbly; wheel or fling about in dancing," a Scottish word of unknown origin.  It also came to mean "elude, dodge" (1774); "to trick, cheat" (1785).  As a noun, "act of eluding" (1786).  For high jinks, see hijinks, the date of which suggests this word is older than the record.  https://www.etymonline.com/word/hijinks 

The 2022 Booker Prize Longlist has been announced!  Chosen from 169 novels, this year’s longlist is comprised of 13 novels that span the globe and the decades, and features the youngest and oldest authors ever to be recognized in the award’s history.  The author of Nightcrawling, Leila Mottley is 20 years old and Alan Garner, author of Treacle Walker, is 87 years old.  Other highlights of this year’s longlist include three debut novelists—Maddie Mortimer, Leila Mottley, and Selby Wynn Schwartz—and two new independent presses that seem to dominate this year’s selecton, Influx Press and Sort of Books.  And at 116 pages, Small Things Like These by Irish writer Clare Keegan is the shortest book listed in the prize’s history.  First awarded in 1969, the Booker Prize is open to writers of any nationality writing in English and published in the UK or Ireland.  The shortlist will be announced September 6th and the winner will be announced in a ceremony held in London on October 17^th, 2022.  Pierce Alquist  https://bookriot.com/2022-booker-prize-longlist/

 http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2545  July 29, 2022

Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was one of the most prominent librarians in American history.  She ran the Morgan Library for forty-three years—initially as the private librarian of J. Pierpont Morgan and then his son, Jack, and later as the inaugural director of the Pierpont Morgan Library (now the Morgan Library & Museum).  Not only did Greene build one of the most important collections of rare books and manuscripts in the United States, but she also transformed an exclusive private collection into a major public resource, originating the robust program of exhibitions, lectures, publications, and research services that continues today.  The daughter of Genevieve Ida Fleet Greener (1849–1941) and Richard T. Greener (1844–1922), Belle Greene (named Belle Marion Greener at birth) grew up in a predominantly African American community in Washington, DC.  Her father was the first Black graduate of Harvard College and a prominent educator, diplomat, and racial justice activist.  After Belle’s parents separated during her adolescence, Genevieve changed her surname and that of her children to Greene.  From the time Belle was a teenager, they described themselves as Americans of Portuguese descent and passed as White in a segregated and deeply racist society.  Belle Greene was employed at the Princeton University Library when Junius Spencer Morgan, a nephew of J. Pierpont Morgan and an ardent bibliophile, recommended her to his uncle, whose new library building was nearing completion.  In 1905, Greene began working as an assistant to Junius and ultimately became J. Pierpont Morgan’s private librarian, with her own assistant, Ada Thurston—managing, documenting, and building Morgan's collection of rare books and manuscripts, organizing public exhibitions at outside venues, and establishing relationships with dealers and scholars.  After Morgan’s death in 1913, Greene continued as private librarian to his son, J.P. Morgan Jr., who established the Pierpont Morgan Library as a public institution in 1924.  Greene was named its first director and served in that capacity until her retirement in 1948, two years before her death.  Greene’s legacy is powerful and far-reaching.  While the significant role she played as J. Pierpont Morgan’s librarian is often acknowledged, her tenure in that position lasted a mere seven years.  During her decades-long career as a library executive, she not only acquired countless significant collection items but also made immeasurable contributions to bibliography and scholarship, mentored colleagues at the Morgan and elsewhere, facilitated widespread collection access through object loans and ambitious photographic services, and promoted the work of distinguished women scholars and librarians.  https://www.themorgan.org/belle-greene

The Blue Flower is a 1995 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald.  It is a fictional treatment of the early life of Friedrich von Hardenberg who, under the pseudonym Novalis, later became a practitioner of German Romanticism.  In 2012 The Observer named The Blue Flower one of "the ten best historical novels".  Fitzgerald first came upon the notion of blue flowers having literary significance in "The Fox", a short story by D. H. Lawrence.  She first became interested in Novalis in the early 1960s, after hearing a musical setting of his mystical Hymns to the Night.  Later she conducted research on Burne-Jones and his language of flowers, and discovered that his father-in-law, George MacDonald, was a Novalis enthusiast.  At the end of Fitzgerald's earlier novel The Bookshop a gentian, a blue flower that has faded into colourlessness, is mentioned as having been pressed into one of two books.  In another of her novels, The Beginning of Spring, Selwyn rhapsodizes about the "blue stream flowing gently over our heads", an unattributed quotation from Novalis.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Flower 

In medieval French, there was a set expression rifle et rafle.  These words are from the verbs rifler, to spoil or strip, and raffler, to carry off.  The phrase referred to the plundering of the bodies of the dead on the battlefield and the carrying off of the booty.  The French phrase moved into English in the forms rif and raf or riffe and raf, which meant at first every scrap, from which we may guess that medieval plunderers were extremely thorough.  It’s known by at least 1338 (it appears in Mannyng’s Chronicle of English of that date).  Later it shifted sense through a series of stages, first referring to one and all, or everybody, and then later taking on the idea of the common people, those of no special social standing.  The phrase was abbreviated to riff-raff and can be found in Gregory’s Chronicle of London of about 1470.  https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-rif1.htm 

John Hubley (1914 –1977) was an American animation director, art director, producer and writer of traditional animation films known for both his formal experimentation and for his emotional realism which stemmed from his tendency to cast his own children as voice actors in his films.  Hubley was born in Marinette, Wisconsin to John Raymond Hubley (1880–1959) and Verena K. Hubley (1891–1978), a painter.  He moved to Los Angeles, California, to study painting at the Art Center School for three years.  In 1935, he gained a job as a background and layout artist at Disney, where he worked on such classic films as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi, as well as "The Rite of Spring" segment from Fantasia.  On February 25, 1939, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited the studio with a copy of the Russian animated movie The Tale of the Czar Durandai (1934), directed by Ivan Ivanov-Vano, which he showed to the artists, among them Hubley.  Wright thought that the different style and design, that was very different from the typical Disney animation, would inspire and give the animators new ideas.  Hubley liked what he saw and was influenced by it.  He was the creator of the Mr. Magoo cartoon character, based on an uncle, and directed the first Magoo cartoon with Jim Backus voicing Magoo.  He moved his studio to New York in 1955, where he switched production over to independent short films.  Hubley married Faith Elliott (1924–2001) the same year as the studio's move.  They began collaborating on films in 1956 with Adventures of an *, commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.  In 1962, the Hubleys completed The Hole, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film that year.  John and Faith continued to collaborate on all of their films through 1977, when John died at age 62 during heart surgery.  Their final production was A Doonesbury Special (with creator Garry Trudeau), which was a co-winner of the Short Film Palme d'Or jury award the year after his death.  Hubley was originally the director of Watership Down, until disagreements with producer Martin Rosen caused the latter to take over.  Some of his work, including the opening sequence, remain in the final version.  The voices of his two other children with Faith Hubley, Mark and Ray Hubley, were used for the Oscar-winning Moonbird.  His widow and their four children carried on his work in the renamed Hubley Studios.  His daughter Georgia Hubley plays drums and sings for the rock band Yo La Tengo and his daughter Emily Hubley is a filmmaker and animator.  The Academy Film Archive has preserved a number of John Hubley's films, including A Smattering of Spots, A Doonesbury Special, and Of Men and Demons.  The Hole was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2013.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hubley 

Lilliput and Blefuscu are two fictional island nations that appear in the first part of the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.  The two islands are neighbours in the South Indian Ocean, separated by a channel 800 yards (730 m) wide.  Both are inhabited by tiny people who are about one-twelfth the height of ordinary human beings.    The novel further describes an intra-Lilliputian quarrel over the practice of breaking eggs.  Traditionally, Lilliputians broke boiled eggs on the larger end; a few generations ago, an Emperor of Lilliput, the Present Emperor's great-grandfather, had decreed that all eggs be broken on the smaller end after his son cut himself breaking the egg on the larger end.  The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to "six rebellions . . . wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown".  The Lilliputian religion says an egg should be broken on the convenient end, which is now interpreted by the Lilliputians as the smaller end.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2544  July 27. 2022

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669):  Prints  

Rembrandt created some 300 etchings and drypoints from about 1626 to 1665.  His career as a printmaker ran parallel to his career as a painter—he rarely treated the same themes in both media and only occasionally did he reproduce his paintings in prints.  Above all, he was a great innovator and experimenter in this medium, often handling traditional materials in unconventional ways.  His impact on printmaking is still reflected in etchings produced today.  Rembrandt began etching early in his career while he was still in Leiden.  His own face is a common feature in his earliest prints, which were probably meant as studies of varied expressions rather than self-portraits.  He also often portrayed family and people he knew around him (The Artist’s Mother).  In later years, he still etched unconventional and beautiful introspective portraits like that of the goldsmith Jan Lutma the Elder (1656; ), in which he evoked the shifting play of light on the sitter.  See graphics at https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rembp/hd_rembp.htm 

Using a nom de plume has been common throughout the history of literature.  Some authors fear punishment by strict, controlling governments, while in other cases women have used masculine noms de plume during times when men have had an easier time getting published.  You could also call it a pseudonym or a pen name.  While the phrase nom de plume means "pen name" in French, it doesn't come from French speakers, but was coined in English using French words.  https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/nom%20de%20plume  See also "What's in a name?":  10 noms de plumes of famous authors at https://cafebabel.com/en/article/whats-in-a-name-10-noms-de-plumes-of-famous-authors-5ae00b60f723b35a145e76dc/ 

The great American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler is best known, of course, for his Arrangement in Grey and Black, a.k.a. Whistler’s Mother, an austere portrait of a severe woman in a straight-backed chair.  But judging Whistler only by this dour picture (of a mother said to have been censorious toward her libertine son) is misleading; the artist delighted in color.  One painting that exemplifies Whistler’s vivid palette, The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, constitutes the centerpiece of the Peacock Room at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art.  The work was owned by English shipping magnate Frederick R. Leyland in 1876 and held pride of place in the dining room of his London house, where he displayed an extensive collection of Chinese porcelain—hence the painting’s title.  The subject was Christina Spartali, an Anglo-Greek beauty whom all the artists of the day were clamoring to paint.  In 1920 the Smithsonian acquired the painting and the room (essentially a series of decorated panels and lattice-work shelving attached to a substructure).  Owen Edwards  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-story-behind-the-peacock-rooms-princess-159271229/ 

The Jacobean Era was the period in English and Scottish history that coincides with the reign of James VI of Scotland who also inherited the crown of England in 1603 as James I.   The Jacobean era succeeds the Elizabethan era and precedes the Caroline era.  The term "Jacobean" is often used for the distinctive styles of Jacobean architecture, visual arts, decorative arts, and literature which characterized that period.  The practical if not formal unification of England and Scotland under one ruler was an important shift of order for both nations, and would shape their existence to the present day.  Another development of crucial significance was the foundation of the first British colonies on the North American continent, at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, in Newfoundland in 1610, and at Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts in 1620, which laid the foundation for future British settlement and the eventual formation of both Canada and the United States of America.  The fine arts were dominated by foreign talent in the Jacobean era, as was true of the Tudor and Stuart periods in general, and Sir Nathaniel Bacon (1585–1627).  The decorative arts–furniture, for example–became increasingly rich in color, detail, and design.  Materials from other parts of the world, like mother-of-pearl, were now available by worldwide trade and were used as decoration.  Even familiar materials, such as wood and silver, were worked more deeply in intricate and intensely three-dimensional designs.   Architecture in the Jacobean era was a continuation of the Elizabethan style with increasing emphasis on classical elements like columns and obelisks.  Architectural detail and decorative strapwork patterns derived from continental engravings, especially the prints of Hans Vredeman de Vries, were employed on buildings and furniture.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobean_era 

vortex (n.)  1650s, "whirlpool, eddying mass," from Latin vortex, variant of vertex "an eddy of water, wind, or flame; whirlpool; whirlwind," from stem of vertere "to turn".  Plural form is vortices.  Became prominent in 17c. theories of astrophysics (by Descartes, etc.).  In reference to human affairs, it is attested from 1761.  Vorticism as a movement in British arts and literature is attested from 1914, coined by Ezra Pound.  Related: vortical; vorticist  https://www.etymonline.com/word/vortex 

A parachute candidate (also known as a "carpetbagger" in the United States) is a pejorative term for an election candidate who does not live in, and has little connection to, the area they are running to represent.  The allegation is thus that the candidate is being “parachuted in” for the job by a desperate political party that has no reliable talent local to the district or state or that the party (or the candidate himself/herself) wishes to give a candidate an easier election than would happen in one's own home area.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute_candidate 

On July 25, 1897, a 21-year-old ex-oyster pirate named Jack London boarded a ship to the Yukon to join the Klondike Gold Rush, hoping, like tens of thousands of other prospectors, to find his fortune—and perhaps a little bit of adventure while he was at it.  But six months later, he was discouraged, to say the least.  “All he’d found,” wrote Joy Lanzendorfer, “was a small amount of dust worth $4.50.  A diet of bacon, beans, and bread had given him scurvy.  His gums bled, his joints ached, and his teeth were loose.  London decided that, if he lived, he would no longer try to rise above poverty through physical labor.   Instead, he would become a writer.  So he carved into the cabin wall the words ‘Jack London Miner Author Jan 27, 1898.’”   He began submitting stories to magazines while still in Alaska, and his experiences there would inspire much of his work, including his famous novel The Call of the Wild and one of his best known short stories, “To Build a Fire.”  “When London returned from the Klondike, he dove into writing, churning out thousands of words,” Lanzendorfer writes.  “For months, he got nothing for his efforts but rejection letters—over 600 of them.  Everything I possessed was in pawn, and I did not have enough to eat,’ he wrote of that time.  ‘I was at the end of my tether, beaten out, starved, ready to go back to coal-shoveling or ahead to suicide.’  Then he sold two short stories, one for $5 and another for $40.  Slowly, he began publishing, and in 1903 he wrote three books, including The Call of the Wild.  He followed up with more hits—White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, and Martin Eden, among others.  By his late 20s, he was the highest-paid writer in the United States.”  What did he spend his money on?  A thousand-acre ranch in Sonoma County, a boat he named The Snark, and a personal library of some 15,000 volumes.  Seems like he made his fortune in the gold rush after all.  Literary Hub  July 24. 2022  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2543  July 25, 2022   

Guy Fawkes (1570–1606), also known as Guido Fawkes while fighting for the Spanish, was a member of a group of provincial English Catholics who was involved in the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605.  He was born and educated in York; his father died when Fawkes was eight years old, after which his mother married a recusant Catholic.  Fawkes converted to Catholicism and left for mainland Europe, where he fought for Catholic Spain in the Eighty Years' War against Protestant Dutch reformers in the Low Countries.  He travelled to Spain to seek support for a Catholic rebellion in England without success.  He later met Thomas Wintour, with whom he returned to England.  Wintour introduced him to Robert Catesby, who planned to assassinate King James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne.  The plotters leased an undercroft beneath the House of Lords; Fawkes was placed in charge of the gunpowder that they stockpiled there.  The authorities were prompted by an anonymous letter to search Westminster Palace during the early hours of 5 November, and they found Fawkes guarding the explosives.  He was questioned and tortured over the next few days and confessed to wanting to blow up the House of Lords.  Immediately before his execution on 31 January, Fawkes fell from the scaffold where he was to be hanged and broke his neck, thus avoiding the agony of being hanged, drawn and quartered.  He became synonymous with the Gunpowder Plot, the failure of which has been commemorated in the UK as Guy Fawkes Night since 5 November 1605, when his effigy is traditionally burned on a bonfire, commonly accompanied by fireworks.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes 

What, exactly, is a thrall?  Well, we know what enthralled is used to mean:  “fascinated, entranced, captivated”.  Of those three, “captivated” is most directly accurate to origins, for a thrall was first of all a slave, a prisoner, one in bondage:  the word comes from a Scandinavian root for servitude or drudgery.  From that, thrall came also to mean the condition of bondage or slavery itself.   But, perhaps thanks to the taste of thrill, and to an ethos where love was equated to a sort of ecstatic slavery (as in Shakespeare, for instance Midsummer Night’s Dream:  “So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape”), enthralled has taken on a sense of willing captivation, of an enjoyment beyond enjoyment.   https://sesquiotic.com/tag/enthralled/ 

The Wawel Royal Castle is a castle residency located in central Kraków, Poland, and the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in the world.  Built at the behest of King Casimir III the Great, it consists of a number of structures from different periods situated around the Italian-styled main courtyard.  The castle, being one of the largest in Poland, represents nearly all European architectural styles of medieval, renaissance and baroque periods.  The castle is part of a fortified architectural complex erected atop a limestone outcrop on the left bank of the Vistula River, at an altitude of 228 metres above sea level.  The complex consists of numerous buildings of great historical and national importance, including the Wawel Cathedral where Polish monarchs were crowned and buried.  Some of Wawel's oldest stone buildings can be traced back to 970 AD, in addition to the earliest examples of Romanesque and Gothic architecture in Poland.  The current castle was built in the 14th-century, and expanded over the next hundreds of years.  In 1978 Wawel was declared the first World Heritage Site as part of the Historic Centre of Kraków.  For centuries the residence of the kings of Poland and the symbol of Polish statehood, Wawel Castle is now one of the country's premier art museums.  Established in 1930, the museum encompasses ten curatorial departments responsible for collections of paintings, including an important collection of Italian Renaissance paintings, prints, sculpture, textiles, among them the Sigismund II Augustus tapestry collection, goldsmith's work, arms and armor, ceramics, Meissen porcelain, and period furniture.  The museum's holdings in oriental art include the largest collection of Ottoman tents in Europe.  With seven specialized conservation studios, the museum is also an important center for the conservation of works of art.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wawel_Castle 

rota  noun  borrowed from Latin rota (“wheel”)   (Britain)  A schedule that allocates some task, responsibility or (rarely) privilege between a set of people according to a (possibly periodic) calendar.  quotations ▼ (music)  A kind of zither, played like a guitar, used in the Middle Ages in church music.  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rota and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rota_(island)

Farfel is a tiny, pellet-shaped egg noodle with ingredients similar to German spaetzle or Hungarian nokedli.  Farfel was once a popular side dish in Jewish Ashkenazi cuisine and was served simply seasoned alongside meat or poultry.  The word farfel is Yiddish.  Farfel is sometimes called egg barley, though it contains no barley, and doesn't much look like it, either.  Giora Shimoni  Link to recipe at https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-is-farfel-2121591 

The Nome King is a fictional character created by L. Frank Baum, author and inventor of the Oz legacy.  He is introduced in Baum's third Oz book titled Ozma of Oz, published in 1907.  He is portrayed as the impatient, stubborn and power-hungry ruler of the Nomes (sometimes spelled "Gnomes").  In Baum's writings, the Nome King and his people are a species of immortal beings who have adapted to living hundreds of miles below the earth and rarely surface.  They are from the same continent where the magical Land of Oz lies and the Land of Ev can be found.  There the Kingdom of Nomes neighbors both of these countries.  Interestingly, chicken eggs are highly poisonous to the Nome race, much like how water was fatal to the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900.  https://oz.fandom.com/wiki/Nome_King 

Claes Oldenburg, a Swedish-born artist whose lighthearted caricatures of everyday things—such as monumental renderings of lipstick and binoculars as well as “soft sculptures” of hamburgers and ice cream cones—made him a leading force in pop art, died July 18,2022 at his home in Manhattan.  Fred A. Bernstein  See graphics at https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/07/18/artist-claes-oldenburg-dead/  See also Claes Oldenburg, Pop Artist Who Monumentalized the Everyday, Dies at 93 by Alex Greenberger at https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/claes-oldenburg-dead-1234634394/ 

Our cavalcade of captivating reviews this week includes Christian Lorentzen on Christopher Hitchens’ A Hitch in Time, Sigrid Nunez on María Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, Molly Young on Liska Jacobs’ The Pink Hotel, Jason Guriel on J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, Michael Ian Black on Isaac Fitzgerald’s Dirtbag, Massachusetts.  https://bookmarks.reviews/5-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-7-21-2022/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2542  July 21, 2022