It’s not exactly a confession, but I have the textbook I used for English in my senior year of high school, England in Literature. It’s not the one I actually used, but a copy I found at a used book fair. And I’ve also held on to the texts from my two courses in English Literature in college – the Norton Anthology of English Literature, published in 1962 and revised in 1968. I’d prefer not to think about how many editions have occurred since then (those recent is 2024).
The Sound of Freedom was definitely the surprise movie hit of the summer. Grossing more than $182 in the U.S. alone, the movie outperformed several better known film franchises. Telling the story of the sexual trafficking of children, the movie was well-written, well-performed, and well-directed. And, of course, the mainstream movie critics hated it, almost unanimously. As Delphine Chui at The Critic Magazine points out, their problems had less to do with the movie and vastly more to do with the culture war.
One of the most moving things I read this past week with the story of a father desperate to connect with his behaviorally challenged son. Steve Salermo at Quillette explains how a pit bull made a huge difference.
The title sounds rather innocuous: “Southwest Border Land Encounters.” It’s a report, full of charts and graphs, just published by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. And it takes some deciphering, but one chart shorts 2021 “encounters” by month. Since February, the number of monthly “encounters” has more than doubled from the pre-February period. Since March, more than 500,000 “undocumented” aliens have crossed the southern border of the United States. It’s getting increasingly difficult to maintain that the United States has a southern border.
It sounds like a story of today: “Dazzled by manias and lured by wild gambling.” Natasha Green at The Critic Magazine discusses the factors which drove the success of Victorian periodical literature and the penny press.
I was seven years old when a late Saturday night television program called “House of Shock” began broadcasting in New Orleans. It was hosted by a character named Morgus the Magnificent, a mad scientist aided by his two assistants, Chopsley (tall, hooded, and never speaking) and Eric, the talking skull. Morgus showed old horror and science fiction movies in between clips of his crazy experiments, and – to a seven-year-old and his older brother – he was just as entertaining as the movies.
One of those movies was the 1931 version of Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff at the monster. That movie framed the Frankenstein legend in my head for more than 50 years. This year, I saw that it was the novel’s 200thbirthday (officially on Jan. 1), and I decided to read the original Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheusby Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
When we
were in London last fall, we tried and failed to get tickets for the play Mosquitoes, produced by the National
Theatre. It was the final weeks for the production, and the shows were sold out.
It starred Olivia Colman,
best known in America as D.S. Ellie Miller in the crime drama Broadchurch and soon to take on the role
of Queen Elizabeth in The Crown.
So, I did
the next best thing. I bought the book form of the play.
Mosquitoes by Lucy Kirkwood is the
story of two sisters, Alice and Jenny. Alice is a physicist working at the CERN Hadron Collider
in Geneva, seeking to find the theoretical Higgs boson particle, and
her team is on the verge of a breakthrough. The most definitive thing you can
say Jenny is that she spends a lot of time on the internet, and especially
Google, and she is susceptible to every fad imaginable. One of those fads (or
widely believed bit of “fake news”) is that vaccinations cause autism. Jenny believes
it, like she believes almost every bit of non-science, and that belief leads to
a tragedy.
The
sisters couldn’t be more unlike. While they represent two philosophical perspectives
of science, they also represent two sisters who love each other but can’t stand
each other, or stand each other for very long. Alice’s teenage son Luke and
their mother Karen also play significant roles, but this is almost a stereotyped
dysfunctional family on several generational levels. And it’s headed for a major
conflict.
Lucy Kirkwood
Kirkwood
is an actress, television screen writer, and playwright. Her television shows
include Skins
(2013), The Smoke
(2014), and The Briny
(2015). Her plays include Tinderbox
or, love amid the liver (2008), NSFW
(2013), Chimerica
(2014), Hedda
(2014), and The
Children (2017). She received a degree in English literature from the University
of Edinburgh, where she also performed for an improve comedy troupe and wrote
for the Edinburgh University Theatre Company. She is writer in residence at the
Clean Break
Theatre Company.
Mosquitoes is full of references to physics,
the work of the CERN collider, and the raft of pseudo-science that exists on
the internet. But science is only the filter through which we watch a family in
self-destruction, engaged in unthinking actions with serious consequences.
Top photograph: Joseph Quinn as
Luke and Olivia Colman as Jenny in
Mosquitoes at the National Theatre,
London.
John Latham is a
research scientist, specializing in cloud formation. He’s received several
medals from the Royal Meteorological Society, founded the Atmospheric Physics
Research Group at the University of Manchester, and has served as a senior
research fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.
John Latham
He is also
a poet and novelist. His latest poetry collection, From
Professor Murasaki’s Notebooks on the Effects of Lightning on the Human Body,
may win the prize for the most unusual poetry title. It’s a title with a
scientific sense; it almost sounds like the title of a research paper published
in Nature. And the first
few poems in the collection suggest a scientific theme – poems with titles about
lightning, the chemistry of fog, and the forms and qualities of ice.
But that’s
not where Latham goes. Where he does go is to the familiar territory of
relationships. But it’s a journey marked by a practiced eye, an intense gaze,
and a sensitive understanding.
