The Anthropocene Reviewed(74)

Staphylococcus aureus


I’ve wanted to write about staph since my doctor told me about my fascinatingly aggressive colony of them. I was on so many different antibiotics in an attempt to control the infection that, at one point, the doctor needed to confirm I hadn’t previously taken the drug he wanted to prescribe for me. “This pill is yellow,” the doctor said. “Have you taken a yellow pill before?” Maybe, I told him. “This pill is circular. Have you taken a circular pill before?” Again, maybe. “This drug costs $700 per pill,” he then said. “Have you taken a pill—”

“No,” I said. The drug cost me $2,000 even though we had health insurance, but we’re not here to review the U.S.’s one-and-a-half-star healthcare system. The quotes from and about Alexander Ogston in this essay come from the book Alexander Ogston, K.C.V.O.: Memories and Tributes of Relatives, Colleagues and Students, with Some Autobiographical Writings, which was compiled by Ogston’s son Walter. Most interesting to me were the recollections written by Ogston’s daughters, Helen and Constance, and those written by his colleagues. The stat about Boston City Hospital in 1941 came from a 2010 Journal of the Association of Basic Medical Sciences article, “Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) as a Cause of Nosocomial Wound Infections,” by Maida ?i?irak, Amra Zvizdi?, and Mirsada Huki?, which also helped me understand the contemporary disease burden of staph infections. I learned about Albert Alexander and his daughter Sheila (now Sheila LeBlanc) from a 2012 Press-Enterprise newspaper article by Penny Schwartz, “Local Artists Share Childhood Bond,” which is also how I came to see some of LeBlanc’s paintings. Much of the information about the synthesis of penicillin comes from Robert Gaynes’s 2012 article in Emerging Infectious Diseases, “The Discovery of Penicillin—New Insights After More Than 75 Years of Clinical Use.” I also learned a lot about staph and Ogston’s role in discovering it from S. W. B. Newsom’s article in The Journal of Hospital Infection, “Ogston’s Coccus.”





The Internet


The summer of CompuServe was made magical by the presence of my friends there—especially Dean, Marie, and Kevin.





Academic Decathlon


The Terry Tempest Williams quote is from her book Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. The Maya Jasanoff quote about rivers is from her biography of Joseph Conrad, The Dawn Watch. Academic Decathlon still exists; you can learn more about it at usad.org. Todd, I love you. Thank you.





Sunsets


I learned about Claude glass from Sarah, who also introduced me to the Thomas Gray quote, which is from his journal of touring the Lake District in 1769. The Bola?o quote is from 2666 as translated by Natasha Wimmer; the Anna Akhmatova quote is from “A land not mine, still,” as translated by Jane Kenyon. The Eliot line about the Invisible Light is from Choruses from “The Rock.” The Tacita Dean quote is from “The Magic Hour.”

I have been thinking about the Son/Sun thing for a long time, ever since it was first introduced to me by Professor Royal Rhodes. The only short story I ever wrote about my time as a chaplain, which I finished when I was twenty-three, ended with an extremely on-the-nose scene where the chaplain is driving home after a long forty-eight hours in the hospital, “the risen Sun too bright in his losing eyes.” I’d like to say I’ve learned to better resist the urge to put a button on the figurative points I’m trying to make, but The Fault in Our Stars ends with a wedding, so.

But back to the review! I was introduced to that e. e. cummings poem by Jenny Lawton, the brilliant producer who oversaw the podcast version of The Anthropocene Reviewed at WNYC. The Morrison quote about the world’s beauty is from her 1981 novel, Tar Baby. I first read that book because of Professor Ellen Mankoff’s Intro to Lit class at Kenyon College. The Alec Soth quote is from Michael Brown’s 2015 profile of Soth in the Telegraph.





Jerzy Dudek’s Performance on May 25, 2005


The vast majority of the information in this review—the quotes from Dudek and Mirabella, the outline of Dudek’s career, the descriptions of the death of Pope John Paul II—come from Jerzy Dudek’s book A Big Pole in Our Goal. As a Liverpool fan I am admittedly biased, but the book is a fascinating look at a very unlikely career. (Dudek is now in a second unlikely career: He has taken up race car driving.) The Jamie Carragher quotes about his dream turning to dust, and his version of his pressuring Dudek to try the wobbly legs, came from Carra: My Autobiography, which is also a great read. The story of Dudek’s mother visiting the coal mine is told in “Jerzy Dudek: My Secret Vice,” a FourFourTwo article from July 28, 2009, as told to Nick Moore. And then there is the question of whether Pope JP II really said, “Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.” John Paul II did love football (and played goalie as a teenager!), but I could find no firm source for the quotation.





Penguins of Madagascar


I watched Penguins of Madagascar for the first time as a favor to my children; since then, they have watched it many times as a favor to me. I am such a fan of the unshakable earnestness of Werner Herzog’s filmmaking, and also of his simultaneous ability to be self-aware enough to make a hilarious cameo in Penguins of Madagascar. As noted in the review, I learned about White Wilderness first from my dad, and then from watching the film itself, which is widely available. I learned much more about lemmings, including our bygone belief that they rained from the sky, from the Encyclopedia Britannica online article “Do Lemmings Really Commit Mass Suicide?” (Just to say it one more time: No. They don’t.)