Like many literary works from antiquity, the poems of Catullus survived by the slenderest of threads. After his death at a young age in the late 50s BCE, his poems certainly had an afterlife. They were read by Ovid, Horace, Virgil, and Propertius and were a strong influence on Martial, who died at the beginning of the second century CE. Two Latin writers in the later second century knew Catullus’ work—Aulus Gellius and Apuleius—but thereafter the poems, all 116 or so of them, seem gradually to disappear and might easily have been effaced from literary history, as so much of ancient literature was. That this did not in fact happen is suggested by the sudden appearance of a single poem, an epithalamium, in an anthology constructed in the ninth century, a manuscript which miraculously still survives in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Hundreds of years later, a single complete codex surfaced in the early fourteenth century in Verona—Catullus’ hometown—but like many manuscripts it subsequently disappeared too. Fortunately it had been copied, by whom and how often is unclear, but the three earliest surviving codices all bear some relationship to it, directly or through an intermediary, now also lost. We have to imagine also that at one time in the early transmission of the Catullan corpus, some scribe, in an increasingly Christian culture, thought well enough of the poems to copy them from scrolls into a codex, dirty words, out-of-date political invective, antiquarian vocabulary, homosexual verse and all. That broad-minded scribe and undoubtedly many others after him allowed Catullus to “last . . . beyond one lifetime,” as he expressed it in the dedicatory poem to his book, a destiny not shared by any of the other poets in his circle, whose works are entirely lost. In 1472 the poems were printed for the first time, by a Venetian printer, assuring them permanence in the literary record. They have been edited, printed, and translated into many languages—a few even into Esperanto—hundreds of times since then and are now on every educated person’s canonical list of the poetry that will never be out of favor.
Discovered more than 160 years ago, the fungus’s actions are as mind-boggling as they are macabre. Scientists have long wondered: How does the fungus manage to control the fly’s brain? How does it “know” to do it at a specific time of day? What genes within its genome help it to become a master manipulator?
Today, a flurry of experiments is starting to unravel the science behind this eerie mind control.
It is a cold, autumnal wee hour of the morning in Istanbul and I am sipping a sweet, orchid-root-flavoured drink called sahlep and smoking a water pipe. I’m lurking outside a nargile (hookah pipe) joint on a small road called Ticarethane Sokak in what is known as the Old City or Historic Peninsula. This is where many of the city’s great monuments are, including the Hagia Sophia mosque, Topkapi Palace and the Hippodrome. This is also where Inspector Cetin Ikmen, the central character of my novels and subsequent BBC TV series The Turkish Detective lives. Like Ikmen, I enjoy wandering the city in the dark early hours of the morning. When only the hardiest, the mad, the bad and the protectors of the city roam the streets, so also do the phantoms appear.
Coe’s subject may be inertia and nostalgia, but The Proof of My Innocence is full of energy. It’s a madcap caper, a sideways memoir, a tricksy jeu d’esprit that is also a quiet defence of fiction in a post-truth age, and enormous fun to read.
Somewhere between a cosy mystery and Sam Wiebe, Barcelona Red Metallic keeps readers riveted, curious, and unnerved — just the things we crave from a murder mystery.
Eschewing gossip and speculation, Max Dupain: A Portrait focuses on the work, which, when considered as a whole, is diverse, brave, not always successful, but yearns for something that might be considered the truth. It isn’t all about a young man lying face-down on a beach.