C Levå, Marinmotiv, oil. Collection of the Maritime Museum in Stockholm. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Certain landlocked cities have lighthouses. On such rivers as the Rhine, the Seine, and the Saint Lawrence, lighthouses gave warning of dangerous areas. In London, the Trinity Buoy Wharf light is still in existence. This hexagonal, pale-brown brick structure is located in an area known as Container City. I remember my father telling me about these buildings when I was a child. To my ears, accustomed to the Spanish language, the word container, which I never completely understood, sounded warlike; I imagined gigantic metal constructions, improbably conical or spherical in shape. It never occurred to me that they would be like shoeboxes.

When I visited that shoebox city, the shipping containers, adapted to function as housing, reminded me of the futuristic cities of nineties movies and TV series. The lighthouse on the wharf looked out of place among the container architecture, yet, like all of its kind, it was experimental in origin. For a time the building was used to train lighthouse keepers, and later to trial the lanterns and lenses that would then be transferred to other lights. It was there that the scientist (and bookbinder) Michael Faraday worked on the fixtures for the South Foreland lighthouse in Kent. A tiny museum at the foot of the lighthouse offers a display of Faraday’s instruments and personal effects.

Today the Trinity Buoy Wharf light has no lantern. It doesn’t illume, but it can be heard because it now has a bell.

The lanterns of lighthouses are the bells of churches. As with light, sound waves can also announce and convene. And in this lighthouse there’s a bell that chimes ceaselessly. A bell that will sound for a millennium. It’s made up of many other bells that chime according to an algorithm designed by Jem Finer. Apparently one day, in almost a thousand years’ time, the music of the bells will come into a harmonic alignment, in a process that can be likened to the planets moving into alignment in the heavens. Read More

CDC rendering of SARS-CoV-2

The disease that has put the entire world on pause is easily communicable, capable of stowing silently away in certain hosts and killing others, and, to the human eye, entirely invisible. In media parlance it’s become our  “invisible enemy”: a nightmarish, oneiric force that can’t be seen, heard, or touched. But with the use of modeling software, scientists and illustrators have begun to visualize coronavirus, turning it into something that can be seen, understood, and, hopefully, eventually vanquished by science. Many of us imagine the virus as a sphere radiating red spikes—but why? Certain elements of these visualizations are based on the way coronavirus appears under a microscope, and others are choices that were made, an exercise of artistic license.

On January 21, CDC illustrators Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins were asked to illustrate the novel coronavirus for use in press briefings and other media materials. Eckert came up with what she called a “beauty shot” of the virus molecule (referred to in the scientific community as a “virion”), a round globule with the crown-like array of spiked proteins that give the virus its name. Eckert and Higgins experimented with a number of color schemes until they settled on red and gray with orange and yellow accents. “It just really stood out,” Eckert told the New York Times. Since then, the illustration has saturated news outlets around the world.

“Their illustration kind of looks handsome,” said Dr. Timothy Mastro, former deputy director for science in HIV/AIDS prevention at the CDC. “It has a certain symmetry to it, an appealing design … [a virus like] Ebola’s just this twisted-up piece of spaghetti, not nearly as attractive.” Mastro recalls having seen artistic renderings of the HIV molecule on posters at the conferences he attended and on the covers of journals. The image, a sphere studded with spiked proteins, similar to the CDC rendering of coronavirus, gave a certain “character” to the disease he was researching. But in the lab, Mastro concerned himself exclusively with images of the actual virus taken by means of a process called X-ray crystallography. The process, in which the crystalline structure of the virion causes a beam of X-rays to diffract in many directions, allows researchers to construct an image of the molecule. The result is a ghostly black-and-white tracing of the invisible.

Mastro showed me the basis for all the colorful renderings I’d seen online: an electron micrograph of the virus, obtained by bombarding virions with a finely focused electron beam. The molecules looked like the cartoon amoebas you’d expect to see in a fifties film reel about germs. But they were the virus qua virus, with its spikes and spherical body. Mastro explained that the spiked proteins connect to receptors on the outside of healthy cells so the virus can overtake the cell body and use it to replicate itself. A variation of these proteins, produced over years of replication, enabled the coronavirus to evolve from a harmless common cold into something capable of devastating the upper respiratory system. I asked Mastro why so many of the illustrations of the coronavirus look different from the CDC version, and one another, given that everyone was working off the same micrograph. “Artistic license,” he said. Read More

Jon McGregor. Photo: Jo Wheeler.

I have been thinking lately of a verdict given to the adult world by a young girl in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows. “Mary had once said … that the adjectives which really suited grown-ups were ‘lily-livered’ and ‘chicken-hearted.’ ” At the risk of making a disputable comment, I wonder if, compared to the West characters from a century ago, we may be more than ever afflicted by this disease of lily-livered-ness and chickenheartedness, at least in our literary taste. Oftentimes a reviewer feels the urge to warn the readers that such and such a book is “not for the fainthearted”—as though it’s literature’s job to put a cautious finger on the readers’ pulses. Woe to those sacrificed maidens in Greek tragedies and lopped-off heads in Shakespeare plays that fail to bear a sign: TRIGGER WARNING.

The Greeks and Shakespeare, of course, are still being read, perhaps for the reason that it’s easy to forget that they wrote about real people who once lived. Thank goodness we have books like Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs, a reminder that true literature does not avert its eyes from anything difficult.

The novel is narrated by a group of characters, some named, others unseen but to themselves. Together they are known—because society must offer a label for them—as drug addicts, alcoholics, and homeless people. It may be easy to compare the group “we” to the chorus in a Greek tragedy, but the novel does not allow the readers to find a retreat in the realm of myths, fairy tales, or fantasies. We are, of course, familiar with the gritty and gory images, which are often seen these days on screen—with perfect makeup and the right music so well done that the audience can keep an aesthetic and psychological distance. But McGregor’s novel, with its uncompromising gaze at unadorned details of life and death, eliminates that safe distance between the characters and the readers. Who can say he or she is guaranteed to be free from the characters’ fates? A reader who waves a white flag of lily-livered-ness and chickenheartedness even before opening the book, perhaps. Read More

Hugh Thomson, illustration from Pride and Prejudice, 1894. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

One day you wake up, and your sister is a Janeite. You think it might be a coincidence about her name, Jane, but as Emma says, this does not signify. Friends and family hover between amused and clueless since maybe, like you, they’ve seen the movies but probably never actually read Jane Austen. And now that Austen’s become a pop phenomenon, folks figure itfinally got easy to get your sister a gi­ft; you name it—Jane Austen doll, mug, puzzle, Post-its, apron, newest rip-off zombie bodice ripper. Just to be clear, your sister sneers at this consumerist appropriation; she’s moved on to a higher level of Janeitism. This is a serious field of inquiry. She’s a gentlewoman and a scholar. She’s also become an haute couture Regency seamstress, fashioning with meticulous attention to outward authenticity (the Velcro and metal hooks are hidden) the most extravagant gowns with matching headgear and purses. And you thought it was all about the empire dress fashioned aft­er some Greek goddess. Someone asked about your sister’s interest in cosplay, but you think if Austen became a Disney princess, it also wouldn’t signify.

You love your sister; she has her thing, and you have yours. But isn’t it time you read Jane Austen, at least one book? You’ve read Edward Said’s essay “Jane Austen and Empire,” but not Mansfield Park. You agree with Said, but then aren’t you a fraud? So you buy the complete novels of Jane Austen with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler. Hey, KJ is a fan; couldn’t hurt to crack it open. To be honest, you don’t read any of them, but you do listen on audio. You cook and clean, pay bills, answer email, write syllabi, oft­en fall asleep, and listen to one novel a­fter another. Does this count? The English accents are authentic. It’s true that imperialism and colonialism are alive and fueling the second-tier aristocracy and the nouveau landowners; guys disappear to the New World, the Middle Passage, and Indian assignments, and return eligibly wealthy. Someone has got to fund all those balls, concerts, carriages, and month a­fter month living on the considerable resources in the many rooms and extensive gardens of those grand estates. Austen isn’t telling; she’s just showing. When home gets reproduced in other worlds, you figure that this is the memory that builds those plantations. If there are six main characters, there has to be sixty servants who pretty much never appear or speak, but this is not their story. And this is not the point. Read More

Stephen Tennant’s letters, thought Stephen Spender, were “the essence of English retention—objects for private consumption, deluxe samizdats.” Tennant also wrote poems, painted pictures, and worked on a novel, never to be completed. His most significant published work was his 1949 foreword to his friend Willa Cather’s essay collection, commended by Cather scholars and still in print today.

Cecil Barton, Stephen Tennant (©The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s)

By the time of its reclusive occupant’s death in 1987, the faux-Elizabethan country manor Wilsford, in Wiltshire near Stonehenge, overflowed with a dusty mishmash of valuable antiques, ephemeral gewgaws, and exotic objets d’art. Outside, ivy shrouded the gables and moss thickened on the roof tiles. In the overgrown gardens stood a myriad of neglected statuary, marble urns, stone columns, and rococo fountains. To disperse it all, Sotheby’s hosted hundreds of potential bidders, over four days, at what they described as an “English eccentric’s dream house.” Said eccentric was Stephen Tennant, who was born at Wilsford in 1906 and died there, aged eighty-one. According to his devoted housekeeper and nurse, Sylvia Blandford, he’d have turned in his grave at the spectacle of his possessions being pawed over and auctioned off piece by piece. But he had left no will. Death was not, perhaps, a notion permitted within Tennant’s elaborate fantasy world, into which he had retreated ever deeper as the decades passed.

Like a fairy-tale character magically granted every conceivable blessing, only to discover those blessings carry a curse, the Honorary Stephen James Napier Tennant began life arrayed with sublime advantage. His father, Sir Edward Tennant, came from a family who owed their vast wealth to a Scottish ancestor’s invention and patenting of bleach powder in 1799. Edward’s blue-blooded wife, Pamela Wyndham, was a socialite who courted the leading artists and writers of the day. Pamela doted on Stephen, her youngest child of five, and encouraged him in his creative pursuits. As he was turning fifteen, she even arranged for his first art exhibition, at a respected London gallery. All the biggest national newspapers covered the event, offering fawning praise of the artist and his work. It must have been intoxicating indeed. And yet, as any former child star will attest, nothing warps one’s sense of self like youthful celebrity. Read More