A quill is writing tool made from a moulted flight feather (preferably a primary wing-feather) of a large bird.  Quills were used for writing with ink before the invention of the dip pen, the metal-nibbed pen, the fountain pen, and, eventually, the ballpoint pen.  As with the earlier reed pen (and later dip pen), a quill has no internal ink reservoir and therefore needs to periodically be dipped into an inkwell during writing.   Quill pens were used to write the vast majority of medieval manuscripts.  Quill pens were also used to write Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence.  U.S. President Thomas Jefferson bred geese specially at Monticello to supply his tremendous need for quills.  Quill pens are still used today mainly by professional scribes and calligraphers.  Quills are also used as the plectrum material in string instruments, particularly the harpsichord.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quill#:~:text=History,-Sharpening%20a%20quill&text=Quills%20were%20the%20primary%20writing,swan%2C%20and%20later%20turkey%20feathers.   

Israel Joshua Singer (1893-1944) was the second child in a family of Yiddish writers that included his elder sister, Esther Singer Kreitman, and his younger brother, Isaac Bashevis Singer.  Singer received a traditional Jewish education and was influenced by the opposing strains of Jewish thought represented by his Misnagdic mother and his Hasidic father.  When he was 14, the family moved to the Hasidic court at Radzimin and then to Warsaw, where Singer worked as an unskilled laborer and proofreader.  He studied painting and hid in an artists’ atelier to avoid the military.  By 1918, when he traveled to Kiev and Moscow, he had already begun publishing his earliest stories.  When Singer published his most ambitious work to date, a short story titled “Perl” (Pearls) in Ringen (1921), he attracted the attention of Abraham Cahan, the powerful editor of the New York Yiddish daily, the Forverts.  Singer served as a correspondent for the newspaper, reporting on his travels to Galicia in 1924, throughout Poland in 1926, and then once again to the Soviet Union in the same year; in 1931 he met Cahan in Berlin and then visited the United States for several months in 1932, before finally settling there in 1934.  His travelogue, Nay Rusland (New Russia; 1928), as well as his subsequent work, appeared first in the Forverts.  He wrote fiction under his own name and journalistic essays primarily under the pseudonym G. Kuper, his wife’s maiden name.  Anita Norich   https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/singer_israel_joshua#author   

Amy Sherald (born 1973) is an American painter.  She works mostly as a portraitist depicting African Americans in everyday settings.  Her style is simplified realism, involving staged photographs of her subjects.  Since 2012, her work has used grisaille to portray skin tones, a choice she describes as intended to challenge conventions about skin color and race.  In 2016, Sherald became the first woman as well as the first African American ever to win the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition with her painting, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance).  The next year, she and Kehinde Wiley were selected by former President Barack Obama (Wiley) and former First Lady Michelle Obama (Sherald) to paint their official portraits, becoming the first African Americans ever to receive presidential portrait commissions from the National Portrait Gallery.  The portraits were unveiled together in 2018 and have significantly increased attendance at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Sherald    

Val Bird (born 1947) is a children’s book author and columnist.  She was born in Hastings, New Zealand  where she lived until the age of 26, moving next to Rotorua, and later settling in Whakatane.  She has been a full-time writer since 1998, and for 12 years was a caregiver to her intellectually handicapped brother.  Bird’s first book, Wednesday’s Child, was inspired by her experience of caring for her intellectually handicapped brother (Ronald Downes) and was published in 2001 by Random House.  Her subsequent books include, A Birthday in the Life of Ozzie Kingsford (Random House, 2008), which Lorraine Orman describes as, ‘funny, fast-moving,’ with ‘plenty of action.’  Bird’s next book, Five (and a bit) Days in the Life of Ozzie Kingsford (Random House, 2008), and An Electrifying New Year in the Life of Ozzie Kingsford (Random House, 2009) continue Ozzie’s story.  Bird's fourth book in the Ozzie Kingsford series, A Shark-tooth Bay Holiday in the Life of Ozzie Kingsford, was published by Random House in 2009.  https://www.read-nz.org/writers-files/writer/bird-val   

Mark Rothko:  Paintings on Paper through March 31, 2024  National Gallery of Art  Washington, D.C.   Admission is always free.  This exhibition brings together more than 100 of Rothko’s most compelling paintings on paper, many on view for the first time.  They range from early figurative subjects and surrealist works to the soft-edged rectangular fields, often realized at monumental scale, for which Rothko is best known.  Find hours and directions at https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2023/mark-rothko-paintings-on-paper.html   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2756  December 13, 2023