Reviews and News:
Half earth, half water, and under open skies, bogs were thought to be passageways to the beyond and, therefore, a good place to make sacrifices to pagan gods. They are also very good at preserving the dead: “A wooden post was planted to mark the spot where two brothers, Viggo and Emil Hojgaard, along with Viggo’s wife, Grethe, all from the nearby village of Tollund, struck the body of an adult man while they cut peat with their spades on May 6, 1950. The dead man wore a belt and an odd cap made of skin, but nothing else. Oh yes, there was also a plaited leather thong wrapped tightly around his neck. This is the thing that killed him. His skin was tanned a deep chestnut, and his body appeared rubbery and deflated. Otherwise, Tollund Man, as he would be called, looked pretty much like you and me, which is astonishing considering he lived some 2,300 years ago.”
* *
Was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner prophetic. Malcolm Guite thinks so: “Guite contends that the true source for the Mariner’s arduous odyssey – from degradation to redemption after committing the cosmic crime of killing the albatross that had guided his imperilled ship through the Antarctic mist and ice – was, in fact, the physical, spiritual and psychological torments that Coleridge himself would suffer in the years and decades after he wrote the poem when he was just twenty-five years old. It is Guite’s belief, not that the poet lived his poem after composing it between the autumn of 1797 and spring of 1798; rather, that Coleridge’s work is based on mysterious foreknowledge of his future self. Line by line, symbol by symbol, Guite painstakingly traces the ghostly congruities between the Mariner’s ordeals and its author’s own subsequent travails.”
* *
Wikipedia’s definition of happiness took nearly 6,000 edits by over 3,000 users (including some bots) to create. Most of them were to fix juvenile jokes or ideological rants, but not all.
* *
“Ancient symbols carved into stone at an archaeological site in Turkey tell the story of a devastating comet impact that triggered a mini ice age more than 13,000 years ago.”
* *
An intimate portrait of Harper Lee: “Mr. Flynt, 76, a professor emeritus of history at Auburn University, said he became close with the famously reclusive Ms. Lee. His new book, Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship With Harper Lee, is based on their relationship, on his takeaways from visits to the nursing home where she lived in her last years and from letters she sent that give a full sense of a personality that was one of the great literary enigmas of the last half-century. In one, from March 2006, she declared Truman Capote — her childhood friend and literary rival — a liar.”
* *
Jean Rys’s short stories: “In these spates of impressions and perceptions, Rhys combines sensitivity and dash to bring us the ethnography of a nightclub (‘Tout Montparnasse and a lady’) and a jazz café (‘In a Café’) and a department store staff canteen (‘Mannequin’), each as crowded as a sketchbook page.”
* *
The late Justice Antonin Scalia’s speeches are being collected and edited by Ed Whelan and the Justice’s son, Chris Scalia. Whelan: “I knew that Justice Scalia had delivered brilliant speeches on various aspects of the law and the judicial role, and I was also familiar with two of his outstanding speeches on faith and religion. But I have been dazzled to discover the broad range of topics—including even hunting, sports, and opera—that he addressed in hundreds of speeches across the country and around the world, all with his characteristic wit and wisdom.”
* *
Andrew Ferguson visits new but not very revolutionary Museum of the American Revolution: “The museum itself is a new chapter in this long tradition of special pleading. The lessons being taught to 21st-century visitors to Philadelphia are plain, too, and entirely predictable, given the obsessions of our contemporary historians. True to the conventions of ‘social history,’ the story of the revolution is told more through the lives of ‘ordinary people’ than through the actions of great men. The museum does concede the fragility of the revolution, how easily things could have gone the other way. And we are not discouraged from concluding that the nation’s fate rested at a dark hour on the courage of individual human beings whose names we are obliged to recognize, even today. Yet the visitor is also reminded at every turn of the Founders’ weaknesses—their racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, and their lack of awareness of their own racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism. This has the happy effect of flattering museumgoers for their own sensitivity and virtue, relative to troglodytes like John Adams and James Madison.”
* *
Essay of the Day:
In Popular Mechanics, Caren Chesler explains why the blue blood of the horseshoe crab is so important to modern medicine and why we may be overharvesting:
“Meghan Owings plucks a horseshoe crab out of a tank and bends its helmet-shaped shell in half to reveal a soft white membrane. Owings inserts a needle and draws a bit of blood. ‘See how blue it is,’ she says, holding the syringe up to the light. It really is. The liquid shines cerulean in the tube.
“When she’s done with the show and tell, Owings squirts the contents of the syringe back into the tank. I gasp. ‘That’s thousands of dollars!’ I exclaim, and can’t help but think of the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen is trying cocaine for the first time and accidentally sneezes, blowing the coke everywhere.
“I’m not crazy for my concern. The cost of crab blood has been quoted as high as $14,000 per quart.
“Their distinctive blue blood is used to detect dangerous Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli in injectable drugs such as insulin, implantable medical devices such as knee replacements, and hospital instruments such as scalpels and IVs. Components of this crab blood have a unique and invaluable talent for finding infection, and that has driven up an insatiable demand. Every year the medical testing industry catches a half-million horseshoe crabs to sample their blood.
“But that demand cannot climb forever. There’s a growing concern among scientists that the biomedical industry’s bleeding of these crabs may be endangering a creature that’s been around since dinosaur days. There are currently no quotas on how many crabs one can bleed because biomedical laboratories drain only a third of the crab’s blood, then put them back into the water, alive. But no one really knows what happens to the crabs once they’re slipped back into the sea. Do they survive? Are they ever the same?”
* *
Photos: Iraqi Christians
* *
Poem: Len Krisak, “Larkinesque”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
