M.J. Rose

Human-caused climate change has claimed its first mammalian victim.  R.I.P. little island dwelling melomys critter.

200 years ago we had a sudden climate change due to an erupting volcano. Nothing went extinct that we know of, but Frankenstein was born….

Detail from a hand-colored engraving of Byron’s Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, by Edward Francis Finden, ca. 1833, after a drawing by William Purser

From The Public Domain Review,

Frankenstein, the Baroness, and the Climate Refugees of 1816

It is 200 years since “The Year Without a Summer”, when a sun-obscuring ash cloud — ejected from one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history — caused temperatures to plummet the world over. Gillen D’Arcy Wood looks at the humanitarian crisis triggered by the unusual weather, and how it offers an alternative lens through which to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a book begun in its midst.

Deep in our cultural memory, in trace form, lies the bleak image of a summer 200 years ago in which the sun never shone, frosts cruelled crops in the fields, and our ancestors, from Europe to North America to Asia, went without bread, rice, or whatever staple food they depended upon for survival. Perhaps they died of famine or fever, or became refugees. More likely, no record remains of what they suffered, except a faintly recalled reference in the tattered rolodex of our minds. 1816 has, for generations, been known as “The Year Without a Summer”: the coldest, wettest, weirdest summer of the last millennium. If you read Frankenstein at school, you probably heard some version of the literary mythology behind that year. Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley), having eloped with her poet-lover Percy Shelley, joins Lord Byron on the shores of Lake Geneva for a summer of love, boating, and Alpine picnics. But the terrible weather forces them inside. They take drugs and fornicate. They grow bored, then kinkily inventive. A ghost story competition is suggested. And boom! Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein.

Given this terrific story behind “The Year Without a Summer”, how strange that interpretations of Shelley’s novel almost entirely avoid the subject of 1816’s extreme weather. Call it English Department climate denial. More tellingly, our too-easy version of Frankenstein — oh, it’s all about technology and scientific hubris, or about industrialization — ignores completely the humanitarian climate disaster unfolding around Mary Shelley as she began drafting the novel. Starving, skeletal climate refugees in the tens of thousands roamed the highways of Europe, within a few miles of where she and her ego-charged friends were driving each other to literary distraction. Moreover, landlocked Alpine Switzerland was the worst hit region in all of Europe, producing scenes of social-ecological breakdown rarely witnessed since the hellscape of the Black Death….”

For the rest, click here to go to The Public Domain Review.

Prediction: These photographs are going to be an elixir for your imagination for the the entire day at least…

From Design You Can Trust,

Bodies Of Strange Creatures Were Found In The Basement Of An Old House In London

“In 1960 in London at the time of clearing the site for construction of a new residential neighborhood, the old long-abandoned mansion belonged to Thomas Theodore Merlin was sent for demolition. In the basement of the home builders have discovered several thousand small wooden boxes tightly sealed. Imagine their surprise when they began to find inside the bodies of strange mythical creatures, which seemed to have been living only in fairy tales.

Thomas Theodore Merrylin was known as Crypto-naturalist, Fringe Zoologist and Xeno-Archeologist. Creatures and artifacts thought to be nothing more than myth. It is a mystery that challenges our understanding of biology, chemistry and the very laws of physics. But this is no fairytale, for he was a scientist, and empirical evidence and rational thought hold sway here. There is a lot to see and read, so please take your time to peruse the website (The Merrylin Cryptid Museum)…”

For more, click here.

As all sleep paralysis or night terror sufferers will tell you, there’s nothing more real than their nightmares…

From Buzzfeed, an excellent piece on the mystery and the terror:

Can You Die From A Nightmare?

by Doree Shafrir

“It is the middle of the night, and there is something very wrong in my apartment. I leap up from my bed and rush to the closet and crouch down and throw aside my shoes, which are arranged on a rack on the floor. I know I must work quickly; I am breathing fast and hard. There?—?there, behind the shoes, I see it: I don’t know what it is, but it needs to come out, or I am going to die. I pull and pull and finally get it out.

But something is still wrong. I am now completely panicked, and I jump back onto my bed and lean over the half-wall that my bed is up against, overlooking the hallway. There, I see what’s causing all the problems, and I push it downward and off the wall with all my might. It shatters loudly, glass flying everywhere.

Then, finally, I wake up. My two dogs are cowering in the corner, and I put on shoes to sweep up the glass. I am confused and embarrassed, though there is no one besides the dogs there to see that I just pushed a framed poster off a wall and broke it. I clean up the glass and go back to sleep, and it is not until the morning, when I see my shoes scattered everywhere, that I look into the closet and realize that I have also ripped the TV cable completely out of the back wall of my closet.

These brief but incredibly vivid nightmares happen for years: they’re never quite so violent as that first one, which happened around 2003, but almost always as scary. I don’t know what to call them, but they become a familiar part of bedtime, and there are times when I am afraid to go to bed because I know that just as I start to fall asleep, I will be jolted aware in a state of sheer terror. Then, just as suddenly as they start, they ebb for a time, and I wonder if I’ve gotten better. But they always come back.

Here are some other things I’ve believed in the middle of the night:

They are monitoring my breathing. If I don’t hold my breath and stay completely still, I am going to die. I am not allowed to move at all, or they will know, and they will kill me…”

For the rest, click here.