Reviews and News:
Germaine Greer reviews Sharon Olds’s flat Odes: “As a graduate student who spent years of her life trying to understand the prosody of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even gave her son Emerson as a middle name, Olds was always going to struggle to get poetry.”
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The English country house between the wars, where “tortoiseshell tea caddies, cordial relations with the vicar, and liveried footmen whose only job was to hand out cigars to guests exist uneasily beside scandalously painted toenails, the automobile, and jazz.”
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London’s lost rivers: “The Fleet is perhaps the most famous of London’s lost rivers; it was once large enough for boats to navigate it, and an anchor has been discovered as far up as Kentish Town. As for the lower stretch of the Fleet, its earliest recorded cargo were the stones that built the old St Paul’s Cathedral in the early 12th century, but by the 18th century it had degenerated into the Fleet Ditch, so filthy that Alexander Pope, in his poem The Dunciad, wrote that children swam ‘where Fleet-ditch, with disemboguing streams/ Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames.’ The innocuous grey tarmac of Farringdon Road covers a wealth of river-related stories and secrets. What makes London’s lost rivers quite so tantalising is that they are not entirely lost — traces remain, offering us clues to what lies beneath. Sometimes, as with Farringdon Road, it is the shape of a street which gives the river away.”
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England’s grammar school debate.
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Dominic Green on Jonathan Safran Foer’s banal novel of ideas: “The characters in Here I Am suffer from the habitual affliction of novels of ideas. Their inner monologues are undifferentiated, their rhythms patterned after their narrator’s. Their speeches arrive in paragraphs, as polished as Irving’s op-eds. Their thoughts are never permitted to be as clever as the intelligence that organizes them. Foer, who won a National Jewish Book Award at 24 for Everything Is Illuminated, remains energetic at the end of his fourth decade. But Here I Am dissipates its drive with puns, poop jokes, and pools of rebarbative wordplay: ‘She was unhappy, although unconvinced that her unhappiness wouldn’t be someone else’s happiness.'”
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Terry Pratchett’s last novel: “An agnostic friend once divided the science fiction novels of Ursula LeGuin into ‘Good Ursula’ and ‘Bad Ursula’—by which he meant whether or not her didacticism hijacked her story. The late Terry Pratchett had similar temptations, to which he increasingly succumbed in his later novels, including the last, The Shepherd’s Crown. It is a testimony to the previous forty tales in the Discworld fantasy universe that the flaws of this story do not completely overshadow its wistful pleasures, at least for the long-time Pratchett reader.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Guardian, Jordan Kisner explains how we might be on the verge of winning the war against rats:
“First, the myths. There are no ‘super rats’. Apart from a specific subtropical breed, they do not get much bigger than 20 inches long, including the tail. They are not blind, nor are they afraid of cats. They do not carry rabies. They do not, as was reported in 1969 regarding an island in Indonesia, fall from the sky. Their communities are not led by elusive, giant “king rats”. Rat skeletons cannot liquefy and reconstitute at will. (For some otherwise rational people, this is a genuine concern.) They are not indestructible, and there are not as many of them as we think. The one-rat-per-human in New York City estimate is pure fiction. Consider this the good news.
“In most other respects, ‘the rat problem’, as it has come to be known, is a perfect nightmare. Wherever humans go, rats follow, forming shadow cities under our metropolises and hollows beneath our farmlands. They thrive in our squalor, making homes of our sewers, abandoned alleys, and neglected parks. They poison food, bite babies, undermine buildings, spread disease, decimate crop yields, and very occasionally eat people alive. A male and female left to their own devices for one year – the average lifespan of a city rat – can beget 15,000 descendants.
“There may be no ‘king rat’, but there are ‘rat kings’, groups of up to 30 rats whose tails have knotted together to form one giant, swirling mass. Rats may be unable to liquefy their bones to slide under doors, but they don’t need to: their skeletons are so flexible that they can squeeze their way through any hole or crack wider than half an inch. They are cannibals, and they sometimes laugh (sort of) – especially when tickled. They can appear en masse, as if from nowhere, moving as fast as seven feet per second. They do not carry rabies, but a 2014 study from Columbia University found that the average New York City subway rat carried 18 viruses previously unknown to science, along with dozens of familiar, dangerous pathogens, such as C difficile and hepatitis C. As recently as 1994 there was a major recurrence of bubonic plague in India, an unpleasant flashback to the 14th century, when that rat-borne illness killed 25 million people in five years. Collectively, rats are responsible for more human death than any other mammal on earth.
“Humans have a peculiar talent for exterminating other species. In the case of rats, we have been pursuing their total demise for centuries. We have invented elaborate, gruesome traps. We have trained dogs, ferrets, and cats to kill them. We have invented ultrasonic machines to drive them away with high-pitched noise. (Those machines, still popular, do not work.) We have poisoned them in their millions. In 1930, faced with a rat infestation on Rikers Island, New York City officials flushed the area with mustard gas. In the late 1940s, scientists developed anticoagulants to treat thrombosis in humans, and some years later supertoxic versions of the drugs were developed in order to kill rats by making them bleed to death from the inside after a single dose. Cityscapes and farmlands were drenched with thousands of tons of these chemicals. During the 1970s, we used DDT. These days, rat poison is not just sown in the earth by the truckload, it is rained from helicopters that track the rats with radar – in 2011 80 metric tonnes of poison-laced bait were dumped on to Henderson Island, home to one of the last untouched coral reefs in the South Pacific. In 2010, Chicago officials went ‘natural’: figuring a natural predator might track and kill rats, they released 60 coyotes wearing radio collars on to the city streets.
“Still, here they are. According to Bobby Corrigan, the world’s leading expert on rodent control, many of the world’s great cities remain totally overcome. “In New York – we’re losing that war in a big way,” he told me. Combat metaphors have become a central feature of rat conversation among pest control professionals. In Robert Sullivan’s 2014 book Rats, he described humanity’s relationship with the species as an “unending and brutish war”, a battle we seem always, always to lose.”
“Why? How is it that we can send robots to Mars, build the internet, keep alive infants born so early that their skin isn’t even fully made – and yet remain unable to keep rats from threatening our food supplies, biting our babies, and appearing in our toilet bowls?”
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Image of the Day: Libraries
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Poem: Pascale Petit, “The Hummingbird Nest”
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