October 4, 2022  The National Book Foundation announced their finalists for the 2022 National Book Awards in five categories:  Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature.  Five winners will be selected from the twenty-five finalists and announced on Wednesday, November 16th at the 73rd National Book Awards Ceremony, which will be held in person once more in New York City.  Each finalist will receive $1,000 and a bronze medal; each winner will receive $10,000 and a bronze medal and statue.  (In the Translated Literature category, the prizes will be split between author and translator.)  https://lithub.com/here-are-the-2022-national-book-award-finalists/   

October 19, 2022 Wizard of Id by Parker and Hart comic strip:  Witch on a broom with caption “I love a girl who can drive a stick.”  https://www.gocomics.com/wizardofid/2022/10/19?comments=visible#comments   

The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement towards Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time.  The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870.  It takes its name from the village of Barbizon, France, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where many of the artists gathered.  Most of their works were landscape painting, but several of them also painted landscapes with farmworkers, and genre scenes of village life.  Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, color, loose brushwork, and softness of form.  The leaders of the Barbizon school were:  Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jules Dupré, Constant Troyon, Charles Jacque, and Narcisse Virgilio Díaz.  Jean-François Millet lived in Barbizon from 1849, but his interest in figures with a landscape backdrop sets him rather apart from the others.  Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was the earliest on the scene, first painting in the forest in 1829, but British art historian Harold Osborne suggested that "his work has a poetic and literary quality which sets him somewhat apart".  Other artists associated with the school, often pupils of the main group, include:  Henri Harpignies, Albert Charpin, François-Louis Français, and Émile van Marcke.  Many of the artists were also printmakers, mostly in etching but the group also provided the bulk of the artists using the semiphotographic cliché verre technique.  The French etching revival began with the school, in the 1850s.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbizon_school   

The Barbizon (known since 2005 as Barbizon 63), is a building located at 140 East 63rd Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  It was for many decades a female-only residential hotel for young women who came to New York City for professional opportunities, but still wanted a "safe retreat" that felt like the family home.  The Barbizon was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, and was designated a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2012.  The Barbizon was built in 1927, incorporating a blend of Italian Renaissance, Late Gothic Revival, and Islamic decorative elements.  It is a 23-story steel frame building encased in concrete and faced in salmon-colored brick with limestone and terra cotta decorative elements.  For most of its existence, it operated as a residential hotel for women, with no men allowed above the ground floor, and strict dress and conduct rules were enforced.  The hotel became a more standard hotel when it began admitting men as guests in 1981.  In 2002, a $40 million renovation was completed and the name was changed to The Melrose Hotel.  In 2005 the hotel closed and the building was gutted and rebuilt for condominium use and renamed Barbizon 63.  See famous guests and residents at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbizon_63  

Taras Bulba is a romanticized historical novella set in the first half of the 17th century, written by Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852).  It features elderly Zaporozhian Cossack Taras Bulba and his sons Andriy and Ostap.  The sons study at the Kiev Academy and then return home, whereupon the three men set out on a journey to the Zaporizhian Sich (the Zaporizhian Cossack headquarters, located in southern Ukraine) where they join other Cossacks and go to war against Poland.  The story was initially published in 1835 as part of the Mirgorod collection of short stories, but a much expanded version appeared in 1842 with some differences in the storyline.  The character of Taras Bulba, the main hero of this novel, is a composite of several historical personalities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Bulba   

Jinx, a type of curse placed on a person, or a person afflicted with a similar curse, and also a slang term used when two people say the same thing at the same time

Jinks (rapper), a Danish rapper, also known as Ankerstjerne

Jinks, Kentucky

Jinks Island, an island in the Biscoe Islands

Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, a 1975 opera by Jack Beeson

Jinks, an animated orange cat on Pixie and Dixie and Mr. Jinks, a regular segment of the television series The Huckleberry Hound Show  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinks 

Hijinks means playful, mischievous, or rowdy activity.  It is also spelled high jinks.  Both spellings of the word are used with a plural verb.  Hijinks usually imply a combination of fun and mischief.  Activities that are called hijinks are often silly and mischievous and they may be rowdy, but they’re usually not harmful.  They include things like minor pranks or the kinds of activities done during a happily unrestrained celebration.  Sometimes, the term refers to a series of silly or chaotic events or interactions.  Hijinks are sometimes used in a more negative way to refer to mischief or wrongdoing that’s absurd or incompetent.  https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hijinks   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2580  October 21, 2022