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Tuesday, January 8, 2019

A Girl's Murder In Peking And A Literary Feud, by Stephen McDonell, BBC

There was every reason for the killing of Pamela Werner to simply fade into history until a book introduced the case to a modern audience in 2011. But Paul French's best-seller Midnight in Peking also dug up old ghosts and animosities which ran much deeper than the writer could have envisaged.

A retired British policeman, Graeme Sheppard, has now written a rival book challenging French's version of events.

The result: a literary stand-off revolving around family pride, bizarre events now lost in the past and a grisly murder still unsolved.

Could A Daily Poetry Podcast Save Your Mental Health?, by Eric Silver, Electric Lit

Why produce a daily podcast? If your subject matter is the news, it’s the only time frame that can keep up with the snowball-rolling-down-Mt.-Everest pace of what’s going on. If your subject matter is poetry, the point is to slow everything down and keep slowing everything down.

That’s the goal of The Slowdown, from U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and American Public Media. For five minutes every weekday, Smith introduces a new poem, explains why she selected that poem, and reads it. That’s the whole podcast. It’s a REAL THING. You can actually subscribe to a show that gives you permission to listen to a poem for five minutes read by the woman who was nominated twice to spread poetry all over the country. This is a literary once-a-day multivitamin to keep your body going a little bit longer.

The History Of Blood, by Jerome Groopman, New Yorker

During my training as a hematologist at U.C.L.A., forty years ago, a senior faculty member introduced the program of study by citing a verse from Leviticus: “The life of the flesh is in the blood.” For the assembled young physicians, this was a biological truth. Red cells carry oxygen, required for our heart to beat and our brain to function. White cells defend us against invasion by lethal pathogens. Platelets and proteins in plasma form clots that can prevent fatal hemorrhages. Blood is constantly being renewed by stem cells in our bone marrow: red cells turn over every few months, platelets and most white cells every few days. Since marrow stem cells spawn every kind of blood cell, they can, when transplanted, restore life to a dying host.

In a wide-ranging and energetic new book, “Nine Pints” (Metropolitan), the British journalist Rose George examines not only the unique biology of this substance but also the lore and tradition surrounding it, and even its connections to the origins of the earth and of life itself. “The iron in our blood comes from the death of supernovas, like all iron on our planet,” she writes. “This bright red liquid . . . contains salt and water, like the sea we possibly came from.” George charts the distance that our blood (as her title suggests, we contain, on average, between nine and eleven pints of it) travels in the body every day: some twelve thousand miles, “three times the distance from my front door to Novosibirsk.” Our network of veins, arteries, and capillaries is about sixty thousand miles long—“twice the circumference of the earth and more.”

The Mysterious Life (And Death) Of Africa’s Oldest Trees, by Jaime Lowe, Topic

The baobab trunks are thick and bulbous and fat. The bark is shiny and red. The trees don’t sway. They don’t whistle with the wind. Movement is slow and barely perceptible, if they move at all. Baobabs can grow to 100 feet tall; their diameters can reach up to 40 feet. For the most part their leaves appear for just a few months during the wet season and look like the unnatural hair that emerges from a chia pet. Their most dynamic motions are during the roughly five minutes at dusk when their night-blooming flowers open for the bats and moths who drink their pollen, and in death, when they topple suddenly and dramatically in just a few hours.

In June 2018, a study was published by the scientific journal Nature Plants; it stated simply that the baobabs are dying. The scientists involved do not know why, but they suspect increased drought and climate change. For decades, villagers in Botswana have witnessed the depletion of baobabs because of human encroachment—cattle grazing and farmland have taken over areas once roamed by hunter-gatherers. The introduction of agriculture and changes to the soil have produced a negative effect on the trees. These trees, which are some of the oldest on the planet, are rooted so solidly into the African horizon, they appear invincible, as if the sun couldn’t set without the silhouettes of their gnarly branches reshaping the line where land meets sky.

The Death Of “The Death Of”, by Jared Marcel Pollen, 3AM Magazine

Thus, it would seem that reading has become at once more populous and less popular––statistically strong, but much more cloistered, academic, and remote from everyday life. The students ordering Mann and Joyce for their master class in modernism do not represent the culture’s pulse––its living, breathing interest in narrative art. They are caretakers. Some of them will go on to become professors, or creative writing teachers, hired hands that will work on semesterly contracts for the rest of their lives––because even teaching literature is no longer a stable profession. And these teachers will, in turn, hand down the same works and erect a new generation of literary custodians, who will live out their lives in the offices they borrow on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, forever bemoaning the good ol’ days when one could see people like Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer on the cover of magazines, or fighting it out on late night television. This is exactly the kind of bitching you can expect to hear when writers get around each other. And it’s all true. All of it. So, can they be blamed for the flurry of pamphlets they’ve been dropping from the ivory tower before they’re forced to vacate it?

Hollow Words, by Laura Leavitt, The Smart Set

Sometimes, an idea can be so arresting that, for a time at least, we care more about the fascinating nature of the idea than we do about its feasibility or reality. This was how I felt when I discovered that one man (and a few others before and after him) firmly believed that the Earth is “hollow and habitable within.” The idea of a concave inner world that was as yet unexplored captivated me initially, but in the end, it was the man who believed this theory so doggedly who captured my attention.

John Cleves Symmes Jr. lived 200 years or so ago; I discovered a monument in his honor in a park in Hamilton, Ohio, a small city north of Cincinnati. I first learned of it when I was surfing Atlas Obscura and went to check out the monument.

Off The Chart: The Big Comeback Of Paper Maps, by Kevin Rushby, The Guardian

In a time when facts are to be treasured, perhaps paper maps have real significance, recording as they do a version of the truth less susceptible to tampering and fakery.

Hobo Mom By Charles Forsman And Max De Radiguès – Home Is Where The Hurt Is, by Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

Forsman and Radiguès seem to understand instinctively that while one person’s search for happiness may be the cause of another’s deep pain, accepting daily sadness as a kind of life tax won’t, in the end, make things better for anyone. Also, that an absent parent is not necessarily an unloving one. Some people – some women, even – do this sort of thing better at a distance. Their survival may even depend on it.

Walter Kempowski’s All For Nothing: An Unlikely Comedy Set In The Collapse Of The Third Reich, by Oscar Mardell, 3AM Magazine

On the face of it, Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing is void of even the blackest humour. The novel is set against the disastrous evacuation of East Prussia in the closing months of World War II. As the Red Army advances westward, the roads fill with some 750,000 German refugees, nearly half of whom will perish in their desperate flight. In the middle of the chaos stands the decaying manor house of the von Globigs, a newly-aristocratic family trying obstinately to preserve the tedium of domestic normality – that is, until midway through the novel, when the front arrives at the von Globigs’ doorstep and forces them to join the caravan. The first half of All for Nothing, then, is deliberately dull; the second, with its unflinching depiction of German suffering, unrepentantly bleak. And yet, its function approximates that of Ifans’ paedophilia gag. By temporarily positing the German view of WWII as the norm and not the aberration, All for Nothing allows us to sustain both our disgust for the crimes of the Third Reich and our enjoyment of those parts of German kultur which that regime might otherwise have ruined.

Suspenseful 'Water Cure' Dips Into 2019's Dystopian Zeitgeist, by Maureen Corrigan, NPR

The Water Cure is both otherworldly and very much of this world in its deep pessimism about the fate of the planet, as well as the fate of equitable relations between men and women. It's not a pretty or uplifting novel, but it's effective — and clearly it's the kind of story that Mackintosh and a lot of other authors feel they need to be writing — and we need to be reading — right now.