The 100th Anniversary of Virgina Woolf’s “On Being Ill”

Author Darcey Steinke writes about the world of pain and how it affects those who suffer and those who love them.

I was lying in my attic bedroom reading a book, when my husband came up to speak with me. I wriggled over to make room for him and heard a muffled sound like a wet branch snapping. As I stood up, an electric bolt of pain shot down my leg.

Time suspended. After an x-ray, I learned that the disc between L5 and S1 in my lumbar spine had burst, the gelatinous core herniated out, pinning down the nerve root and driving pain down my right hip into my leg. My physiatrist kept insisting that if I used the elliptical on its most difficult setting and did my clam shells, I’d improve.

My life shrunk. 

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RIP Marjane Satrapi

“Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French author whose graphic novel series “Persepolis” introduced millions of readers to the struggles of ordinary Iranians during the turbulent years around the Islamic Revolution, has died at 56.

With the publication of “Persepolis” in the early 2000s, Ms. Satrapi became one of the best-known exponents of a form of graphic novel — influenced by Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” — that combined political history and memoir.”

Read more: NYT Gift Link

Lost 1,200-year-old manuscript contains the first English poem

Hidden for decades and once believed lost, the 1,200-year-old manuscript contains Caedmon’s Hymn — a nine-line Old English poem said to have been miraculously composed by a Northumbrian cowherd after a divine dream. Scholars date the manuscript to between 800 and 830, making it the third oldest surviving copy of the poem ever identified.

Caedmon's Hymn

By Caedmon

Translated By Roy M. Liuzza

Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom's guardian,

the Maker's might and his mind's thoughts,

the work of the glory-father—of every wonder,

eternal Lord. He established a beginning.

He first shaped for men's sons

Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator;

then middle-earth mankind's guardian,

eternal Lord, afterwards prepared

the earth for men, the Lord almighty.

Read More: ScienceDaily

The Largest Bookshelf Tour Ever Filmed

Tour the 20,000 book library of professional classicist, David Butterfield, with Timothy Kenny.

London Falling : A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by David Radden Keefe

When I read that David Radden Keefe had written a new book I immediately bought it. I had no idea what it was about but I had read Say Nothing, his book about The Troubles in Northern  Ireland, in 2020 and it was my favourite book that year.  London Falling tells the story of Zac Brettler, a 19-year-old boy who leapt to his death from the balcony of a luxury highrise apartment on the Thames in 2019. The apartment was occupied by gangland debt collector, drug trafficker and serious grifter, Verinder Sharma. After his death, it was revealed that Zac had been living a double life. He had been born into a loving, affluent British family and attended private schools where he met the children of foreign business tycoons. Somehow he became entangled with a group of dangerous criminals and managed to convince them that he was Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch, and someday heir to a gigantic fortune. Verinder Sharma and his criminal colleagues wanted a piece of that fortune. When he realized that Zac did not have the money he said he did, Sharma began to threaten Zac.  It sounds too preposterous to be real but this book has been meticulously researched and it is all true. 

Keefe draws on transcripts of police interrogations, emails, letters, and security camera recordings. He also describes in great detail how post Soviet oligarchs parked approximately £100 billion in London’s luxury property and financial markets transforming the city into a hub for offshore wealth. At one point I put the book down because I found the financial wheelings and dealings hard to follow. 

Zac’s grieving parents were devastated to learn about the double life that their son had kept hidden for years. They were apparently unaware that he had a heroin addiction and had been negotiating high-profile business deals. How could they have missed the signs? They attempted to determine what led him to this secret life and his tragic death and whether Zac jumped because he wanted to die or because he wanted to live. But by 2022 the investigation stalled, due in part to startlingly sloppy police work. The investigation concluded with the Crown Prosecution Service deciding there was insufficient evidence to bring charges for murder and perverting the course of justice.

It was a fascinating read and I learned a lot about London's underworld, the corruption that drives the city’s wealth and the actual ineptitude of the once esteemed Scotland Yard. 

The Moon and The Zoo

British Poet Laureate Simon Armitage has written a new nature poem to mark the 200th anniversary of international conservation charity ZSL. It imagines the moon as a nocturnal keeper of the London Zoo after dark. It hands back the future of the natural world to humanity at dawn.

 

 

The Moon and The Zoo  

  

It slides in under the turnstile after dark,  

moves in a silent arc at an ancient pace,  

dabs its ointment on the gibbon’s paw,  

nitpicks its way through the troop of gorillas,  

smooths the silverback’s fur.    

The moon  

puts a crystalline glint in the tiger’s eye,  

makes a zebra flicker like old film,  

shushes the two-toed sloth when it stirs.   

On it goes, incognito keeper and carer  

wheeling through tunnels, passing through fences,  

casting the black kite in a platinum glow,  

mending cracked hide with its soft flux   

and welding the armadillo’s chainmail coat.  

A restless otter slips out of its holt   

and rolls the ball of the moon in its feet;  

the full moon smears its milky smile  

on the lips of pups and kittens and cubs.  

It crowns the giraffe in its standing sleep,  

draws out the aye aye’s ET fingers  

for a midnight manicure, blesses a tortoise,   

lifts up its lamp to check on the lions,  

sharpens the warthog’s tusks, brushes the strings  

of the cupboard spider’s jittery web   

without sounding a note, then makes  

a final sweep of the nests and dens.  

 

But there’s still work to do before dawn,  

spreading out through the city, leafleting streets,   

leaving animal dreams under pillows   

and conjuring tundra, rain forest, swamp  

or savannah from gardens and parks,   

lighting up waking minds with wild thoughts.  

Then morning breaks; the moon hands over   

the keys of the world and trusts them to us.  

©Simon Armitage

Link 

On the Run and Underground: When Your Mom’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted List

 

An excerpt from Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn.

One cold night in December, when I was not yet four years old, my mother woke me while it was still dark, pressing her face against my cheek and whispering, “We have to leave. Right away.”

I rolled off my mattress, stumbled blindly across our tiny apartment to pee, pulled on my jeans and sneakers, and followed her down the five flights of stairs without a word, walking on tiptoes so I didn’t wake the neighbors.

We stopped in the foyer. Outside, my father was already working under the streetlights, breath steaming through his beard as he chipped ice off the windshield and loaded our bags and boxes into the hatchback of a rusted blue station wagon.

I glanced up at my mom again. Under the bare bulb she looked pale, though her skin was still much darker than mine. Her hair, which she’d kept short and dyed red as part of her disguise, was finally starting to grow out, straight and dark, nearly black, down to her shoulders.

She stood still in the doorway, cradling my baby brother in one arm and holding my hand with the other, but her eyes kept flickering to the intersection—­following each car that passed, tracing the shadows of the men outside the bodega by the corner, keeping a close eye on anything that moved.

My father whistled twice, and my mom led me out through the glass door into the cold air of the street and into the back seat of our car, arranging the baby on her lap, turning to see that I was settled, and then cranking the heat up as high as it could go to coax us both back to sleep.

You grow up and you start to see how much you don’t know about your own family….You begin to see your parents’ flaws and contradictions. You understand that not everything they told you could be true.

She nodded that we were ready. My father glanced back to see if anyone was following, winked at me in the rearview mirror, and swung our car onto Broadway, toward Interstate 80, heading west.

I was used to this routine. It wasn’t the first time we’d had to pack up all our things in the middle of the night and take off on another long cross-­country drive. We ditched cars and apartments constantly, kept everything we owned in a few plastic milk crates by the door, and I carried my prized possessions in a backpack: a stack of comics, some crayons and paper, a couple of Star Wars action figures.

I liked to read comics while we drove—­I couldn’t understand all the words yet, but I could at least look at the pictures—­but that night, for some reason, my dad said it was too early to turn on the overhead lights; he couldn’t see through the glare on the windshield and had to watch for deer and hitchhikers by the side of the road. So the lights stayed off.

I lay back and looked out the window instead, the yellow lane markers swallowed up behind us, the tree line blurring over by the edge of the road, while my parents whispered to each other across the dark front seat of our car:

“Who should we call? Who’s going to meet us there?”

“They know where we’re headed now.”

“They don’t know where we are.”

The hum of the engine, the hiss of tires on asphalt, the warm air inside, and the constant sense of forward momentum made me feel like we were our own little world, sealed off from the outside—­and if we just kept going, kept driving, no one would ever catch us.

It was the closest I ever came to feeling totally safe in my family.

But we had to stop eventually, for food and gas, to use the bathroom and to stretch our legs. So, the next morning, I found myself standing in a long line with my dad at a rest-­stop Burger King, watching a group of kids my age roughhouse on the indoor playground of a Kids Club Fun Center, when a nice elderly couple started talking to me, just making conversation.

“Hey sweetheart,” the old man smiled down at me—­I had shoulder-­length blond hair at the time, and everyone always assumed I was a girl—­“you all on a road trip?”

I nodded. I knew enough not to talk to strangers.

“Chicago?”

I nodded again.

“Visiting family? Or just on vacation?”

I looked up at my dad. He wasn’t paying attention now; he was busy ordering our food, and I felt like I had to say something, just to put an end to this awkward conversation.

“We’re going to Chicago,” I told them, “for my mom to turn herself in.”

I was half-­distracted, watching the other kids in their gold paper crowns running around the Kid’s Club gym, hanging from the bright plastic monkey bars. But I noticed the woman was looking at me now more closely, a bit confused.

“How do you mean, hon?”

“We made a deal,” I tried again. “With the FBI. So I can go to school.”

This was so.mething I’d been told in passing, or overheard, without ever fully understanding what it meant, but as soon as I said it I knew—­from the way the couple glanced at each other, and then over at my father’s back—­that I’d made a terrible mistake.

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Edith Wharton’s Affair Set To Music

In 1907 Edith Wharton had a tumultuous affair that ended badly after which she wrote a break-up letter and a cycle of eight sonnets called The Mortal Lease. In 2023, Finnish jazz vocalist and composer Josefiina Vannesluoma released an album where she set those sonnets to music. (MetaFilter) 

Edition Of Fahrenheit 451 Was Made To Thwart Book Burners

Ray Bradbury issued a special 200 copy edition of his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 in 1953. It was covered in asbestos, making the books resistant to burning. Copies are rare - and expensive. This one was priced at US $45,000.

Via Neatorama 

Welcome to Anxietyland

“Gemma Correll has suffered from anxiety and depression disorders since childhood, and at 16 she discovered a magical elixir that promised to make her feel better. In this extract from her new book, she shows how that promise was broken.”

Read more: The Guardian