A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

orature  (OR-uh-chuhr)  noun  Songs, poems, stories, etc., transmitted orally across generations.  A blend of oral + literature.  Earliest documented use:  1976.

meta (ME-tuh) adjective:	1. Self-referential.
	2. Relating to members of its own category.
adverb:	In a self-referential manner.
noun:	Something that is self-referential.

From Greek meta (after, beyond, behind, beside, among, etc.).  Earliest documented use: 1838.

From:  Alison Coad  Subject:  Meta  My very favourite “meta” illustration comes from the great Sicilian author Andrea Camilleri, whose long-running police series featuring Chief Inspector Salvo Montalbano came to its end with the 28th book, Riccardino, which was published after Camilleri’s death.  In it, Camilleri himself--introduced as The Author--gets into lots of arguments with his creation, Montalbano, about how best to solve the case.  In addition, in book #15, The Dance of the Seagull (published 2009 in Italy, 2013 in English translation), Montalbano finds himself being portrayed by an actor in a television series being made--when, in fact, there is a terrific television series from Italy called Detective Montalbano, which almost always uses plots from the books.  Montalbano is peeved, as the actor looks nothing like him.  Pretty meta, no?  

From:  Rob Hardy  Subject:  meta  The best source for learning about “meta” and self-reference is the delightful book about mathematics, logic, and thought, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.  The most puzzling meta sentence within it is the shortest:  “This sentence is false.”  Well, is it or isn’t it?

From:  Russell Lott  Subject:  Meta  I remember as a young boy, sitting in the barbershop chair with a wall of mirrors both in front of me and behind me.  Seeing myself seeing myself going back as far as I see was a mind-expanding experience, my first concrete example of infinity.  It occurs to me today that it is a wonderful example of meta.  As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. so famously said “A man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”   

The Morgan Library and Museum has unveiled its full façade restoration and new publicly accessible garden. The $13m project was carried out over six years and marks the first time the institution has restored the exterior of the neoclassical building since it was completed in 1906, a project designed by the architect Charles Follen McKim for J. Pierpont Morgan as his private library.  Beyond the exterior restoration, most notably the project entails the addition of an idyllic 5,000 sq. ft garden that was formerly closed to the public. The garden project entailed the addition of pebblework pavements sourced from the Ionian Sea, flowerbeds and greenspace, the careful restoration of the lionesses at the entrance, designed by the American sculptor Edward Clark Potter, and the installation of several objects from the Morgan’s collection that have not been previously shown, including a stone Roman sarcophagus and a pair of Renaissance corbels.  Gabriella Angeleti  https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/06/17/the-newly-restored-morgan-library-and-museum-opens-a-public-garden-this-week  Morgan Library & Museum, formerly the Pierpont Morgan Library, is a museum and research library in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City.  It is located at 225 Madison Avenue, between 36th Street to the south and 37th Street to the north.   

Northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range may be neatly summarized as a human struggle of digging holes in rare earth with increasingly complicated shovels.  The shovels still turn, now pitting the region deep into a political and cultural rut, and perhaps one day back out again.  But Mesabi, or Missabe, or other variations of the name for this place all refer to the area’s role as a sleeping giant, one that could be awoken.  The long version of the story scrolls back billions of years to the explosion of a distant star, casting out the iron that formed in our nascent planet, a substantial portion of which settled at what would become a rare three-way watershed dead center of the North American continent in northern Minnesota.  This unique formation of land, its surrounding waters, timbers and animals have attracted human settlement since people first flowed south over the continent as the glaciers receded north 10,000 years ago.  The mound-building ancients, whose names we don’t know, arrived first.  We have only their settlements and artifacts to guide us to the conclusion they simply became the native peoples who came later, whose names we do know—the Dakota of Minnesota and, later, the Great Plains among them.  They named the state Minnesota, and the 130-mile earthen iron formation in the North Missabe, or “Big Man Hills,” or “sleeping giant” in other native tongues.  The hill is sacred to Minnesota’s Ojibwe and Dakota.  It delineates three watersheds (the Mississippi River, Hudson Bay and Great Lakes).  A boulder deposited by a glacier rests near the spot where the watersheds diverge.  Photos of the site itself are discouraged by Ojibwe spiritual leaders.  The Ojibwe, or Anishinabe, people of the East would later displace the Dakota from Iron Range region, the “Hill of Three Waters” chief among their strategic and spiritual gathering places.  The Anishinabe refer to this meeting of the Laurentian and St. Lawrence Seaway divides near Hibbing, Minnesota, as the Top of the World, and the name proves apt through the ages.  The Iron Range produced most of the domestic iron ore used to make steel for World War I, World War II, and America’s 20th-century economic boom.   Aaron J. Brown  https://dailyyonder.com/missabe-land-sleeping-giant/2013/09/16/   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2546  August 1, 2022