In an essay published in 1942, the writer Jorge Luis Borges captured the absurdity and scope of list-making with his own fictional taxonomy, supposedly found in an ancient Chinese encyclopedia titled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.   In it, an unknown scribe orders all the animals of the world into fourteen categories.  These include “those that belong to the emperor;” “trained ones;” “suckling pigs;” “mermaids;” “those included in this classification;” and, my personal favorite, “those that tremble as if they were mad.”  The divisions are precise, elegant, and incongruous.  As the French philosopher Michel Foucault noted, the celestial emporium shows that lists require subtle thought; the ability to segment, categorize, and compare.  These characteristics are a little hidden in ancient texts like the Onomasticon of Amenopĕ, but Borges hauls them to their feet and sets them dancing.  As Foucault says:  “there is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical (superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among things; nothing that demands a sharper eye or a surer, better-articulated language.”  https://lithub.com/what-if-listicles-are-actually-an-ancient-form-of-writing-and-narrative/  Excerpted from Beyond Measure:  The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants by James Vincent.  © 2022   

The first retail Christmas tree lot was established in 1851 by Mark Carr who brought trees from the Catskill Mountains to New York City.  The first president to set a Christmas tree in the White House was Franklin Pierce.  Folklore, Fun Facts, & Traditions from The Old Farmer’s 2022 Almanac   

During the 2021-2022 school year, more than 1,600 books were banned from school libraries.  The bans affected 138 school districts in 32 states, according to a report from PEN America, an organization dedicated to protecting free expression in literature.  And the number of bans are only increasing yearly.  Texas and Florida lead the nation in book bans—a revelation that recently spurred Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot to call her city a "book sanctuary."  But what are the most commonly banned books in America, and why are they considered controversial?  Find a list of the 50 most commonly banned books in America from the 2021-2022 school year, with data supplied by PEN America. 

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-50-most-banned-books-in-america/

 

What to Cook Between Christmas and New Year’s by Helen Rosner  December 26, 2018   I’m going to make lemon curd.  Lemon curd is the sort of thing that you can decant into little jars and tie up with a ribbon for a fussy little gift, or bake over a shortbread base to make lemon bars, or just spoon over buttered toast with a sprinkle of salt.  I’m also going to make rainbow cookies, those almond-scented confections that I buy whenever I go into an Italian bakery.  Dips:  The first is the chef Alex Stupak’s miraculous two-ingredient cashew salsa, in which a combo of smoked cashews and canned chipotle peppers  The second is my friend Martha’s smoked-trout dip—it’s a tin of smoked trout flaked with a tablespoon of mayonnaise, a tablespoon of spicy mustard, and a fistful of finely minced pickled red onion.  At the end of the week, if you’ve cooked a bone-in ham, and timed your eating right, you can throw the picked-over remains into a pot for Hoppin’ John, a stew of black-eyed peas and rice that, in the South, is served for luck on New Year’s Day.  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/kitchen-notes/what-to-cook-between-christmas-and-new-years   

“Approach! Commit! Execute!” Daniel Brush told CBS Sunday Morning in 2004 while doing a sort of dance when he was describing his process.  The moment captures Daniel, who died on November 26 at age 75, to perfection. Re-watching the segment brought back a flood of memories for me from the late 1990s and early 2000s when I knew Daniel best.  The self-described hermit was beginning to come out of his shell at the encouragement of Ralph Esmerian, the gem dealer and jewelry collector, who had an enormous number of Daniel’s creations.  Daniel was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1947.  His father was a merchant and his mother was a writer and photographer who took him on expeditions to museums.  When Daniel was 12, they went to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and he saw his first display of Etruscan goldwork.  It was a defining moment in his life.  “My heart pounded the way it has not since then,” explained Daniel.  “I was insane to learn how it was made.”  After a foray into academia at Georgetown University, Daniel took up goldwork and learned how to do granulation like none other.  Granulation is a high-wire act of technical bravura.  For the dome Daniel arranged 78,000 granules in a geometric pattern over the curved surface.  Brush said working up the courage to do the final stage—heating the gold granules and gold background, coaxing both to a uniform temperature and then firing the object with a swift sweep of the torch took almost as long as preparing the piece.  If anything goes wrong—say, the granules fall off—months of work are gone in a flash.  Describing the odds of failure, Daniel said, “At 30 seconds it succeeds, at 29 it fails and at 31 it melts.”    Brush’s restless imagination led him to other arcane areas of craftsmanship during the 1990s.  He was a master of the art of turning.  A pursuit of royalty during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Brush scoured the world to assemble a large collection of antique lathes to conduct the turning in a traditional way.  In order to work them he read historic “How To” guides.  Marion Fasel  See beautiful pictures at https://theadventurine.com/jewelry/profiles/in-memoriam-daniel-brush/   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com   Issue 2613  December 29, 2022