Little wonder then, that, read now, the lucid logic of Termush feels more like lucid dreaming, imbued with a new relevance in which unseen monsters creep through the same rooms as the narrator, studying his movements. The stark deficiencies of emergency management become hyperreal because of the overlay of self-inflictions in our modern times. For Termush—unlike some vintage classics, cult or otherwise—has waxed, not waned, in relevance. The accuracy in the calm description of becoming undone by disaster, and the anonymity of place and character, ensure the novel’s timelessness. It’s a curious book in this regard, with its dispassionate prose that eschews, in large part, the sensory detail of taste, touch, and smell, yet gets to the heart of living through such a situation. At that heart is the disconnection that occurs, laid bare by a certain level of detail—or lack of detail. Amid the banal recitation of procedure and the understated but sharp satire about privileged people, such a strong sense of feeling about the world rises from these pages.
It wasn’t until 1929 that Russian scientist Nikolai Vavilov first traced the apple genome back to Kazakhstan’s Tian Shan mountains. However, says Spengler, Central Asia’s entire mountain belt was likely flourishing with close relatives of Malus sieversii at one point. Together with his colleagues, Spengler—an affiliate of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany—has found apple seeds in archaeological sites across Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, supporting not only the working theory that these wild apple forests covered much of this region in the past, but also the idea that the ancestors to the modern apple actually originated in these more southern peripheries, where the higher temperatures were more in tune with their growing habits. Over thousands of years, they made their way north into Kazakhstan, adapting to the area’s long, cold winters. It’s these patches of fairly dense woodland that remain, mixings of wild apples alongside feral varieties and interspersed with walnut trees and fruits like pears and apricots. While the exact number of Malus sieversii is unknown, the bulk remaining in Kazakhstan grow freely and untamed, though threatened by encroaching development.
October 7, 1897, was a celebratory day in New York City, unless you happened to be one unfortunate tomcat. On that date, the United States Post Office Department completed the first test of the city’s pneumatic tube system, which used compressed air to send cylindrical containers filled with mail through a series of underground networks. The first mail tube took three minutes to cover the 7,500-foot round-trip journey from the main postal building to the New York Produce Exchange; inside, it held a Bible wrapped in an American flag, as well as copies of the U.S. Constitution and President William McKinley’s inaugural address. Other test shipments on that initial day were more creative.
The holiday season is a good time to stop and consider all of the unnoticed labor that makes a book possible. These people, along with my favorite writers, have my gratitude for the pleasure they’ve brought me this past year, even if their work doesn’t always get the appreciation it deserves.
All my life, I’ve had the sense of being an outsider, watching other people as if through a pane of glass. This feeling has often been a source of pain; I’ve wanted so much to be as bound to a place as others, as certain of my beliefs, as trusting that the language I speak belongs to me.
In 2006, the scientist, artist and community organizer Keiko Honda seemingly had it all. She held a prestigious research position at Columbia University in New York. She was happily married to a successful financier and had recently given birth to a cherished daughter, Maya. And then she suffered a sudden onset of a rare neurological condition known as transverse myelitis, (TM). This acute inflammation of the spinal cord left her confined to a wheelchair for life. Accidental Blooms, Honda’s recently published memoir, tells the moving and impressive story of her recovery and the new life of community, art, motherhood, and service she made for herself after her move to Vancouver in 2009.