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Safety in the Time of Covid-19

[written May 23, 2020, barely two months into lockdown for social distancing] The convention is to tell children they are safe, meaning to convey to them that you are protecting them from harm of any kind, and that nothing can come and hurt them (in the words of the Sondheim song, “not while I’m around”).For ourselves of course, it’s long since that “safe” has taken on an increasingly notional…

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Bibliomania Harvard University tells us that its esteemed main library alone, in its system of dozens of libraries—Widener Memorial Library—has stacks of books accessible to those with appropriate ID that measure 57 miles of shelves. They house three million volumes, they say, and occupy ten levels on the five floors, plus subterranean spaces, that comprise the main building. I have appropriate…

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20220203130833 from Janet Malcolm, Diana and Nikon (1980)

”Assorted Characters of Death and Blight” (an essay about Edward Weston)

As one rereads the *Daybooks* and the biography under the weight of these impressions, one’s sense of Weston darkens; one gets the feeling that he didn’t enjoy himself very much. (What artist does?) He was happy at the start of a love affair (“The idea means more to me than the actuality,” he confessed, and pondered, “Is love like art—something always ahead, never quite attained?”); when intoxicated (or *borrachito,* as he liked to call it); when in the presence of beauty (“I received by mail from Cristel a box of lilacs, white and lavender, so exquisite that my eyes filled with tears”); when doing “my work,” in contradistinction to the portrait photography he did to earn his living. (It would be interesting to see examples of the commercial work and compare it to the portraits, done for art’s sake, of his friends and family.) But far more frequently than happiness, the *Daybooks* express the anxiety and loneliness and eccentricity that underlay and undermined the surface exuberance and gregariousness and conventional bohemianism. The entries written during the romantic trip to Mexico are pervaded by with worry about money, housing, equipment; with sorrow about the deadness of his feeling for Tina (which Weston was to feel toward all the women he loved); and with guilt about the three children he had left behind. (In a film based on the *Daybooks* that Robert Katz made for public television in 1965, there is a painfully moving scene in which Neil, the second-youngest son, talks of how he felt during his father’s desertion; the camera, focused on his face, reveals how much it still hurts.)

The *Daybooks* written on Weston’s return from Mexico continue to reflect the alienation from family, friends, and lovers, and from the cultural and political life of the time, that Weston felt—an alienation that seems to be one of the preconditions of producing art in this country. A small, but telling, detail is the repeated reference in the daybooks to the vegetarian meals Weston enjoyed (“supper: *aguacates,* almonds, persimmons, dates, and crisp fresh greens”)—always accompanied by references to the gross steaks or greasy pork chops that other people eat and that he had narrowly escaped from, as if his enjoyment of one depended on the repudiation of the other. A similar though less explicit polarity is set up between the lithe, ever-younger girl Weston fell in love with and the threatening “hog-fat” bourgeoise American woman, into which category his abandoned wife, Flora, apparently fell. (One is reminded of Humbert Humbert’s distaste for grown-up women, like Lolita’s mother, in comparison to nymphets.)

Thoughts and Feelings about Omicron

It’s Yogi Berra, deja vu all over again, time. Even with an almost exclusively rational flow of information, from vetted sources, especially the newsletter of Your Local Epidemiologist, “written by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD— an epidemiologist, biostatistician, professor, researcher, wife, and mom of two little girls. During the day she has a research lab and teaches graduate-level courses,…

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Two Sudden Insights About Covid Vaccination

Suddenly, as I read and heard (on the air) the prevailing stories centering on the persistent anti-vax movement in the news, I had two insights. I demur from calling them epiphanies, but they feel a little like that. For one, it is clear that there is bipartisan approval of the proven and sometimes seemingly miraculous monoclonal antibody treatment as a desired clinical strategy for mitigating…

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Getting vaccinated in Pennsylvania

The gymnasium at Montgomery County Community College set up as a vaccination center, winter 2021. “[Yesterday, President] Biden announced that by April 19, more than 90% of Americans over the age of 16 will be eligible for a vaccine and will live within five miles of a vaccination site, including 40,000 pharmacies.” —Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 30 March 2021 This is great,…

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It All Comes Down to Words

Greek icon, ca. 1700 of The Second Coming As it will surprise no one who knows me, I am firmly of the camp that says when all is – to tap one of the larger clichés – said and done, all of what we spend so much time contemplating, analyzing, and sending one another alerts to heed (replete with links to videos, audios, articles, tweets, re-tweets, comments, and every permutation of the mechanisms…

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Doomed to Work

Lunch Rush I just read the Jill Lepore essay in the January 18 issue of The New Yorker, “What’s Wrong with the Way We Work.” It’s yet another semi-sweeping assessment of the sort I get to see and choose to read periodically about what has decayed about the relationship of Americans – ordinary Americans, the 99% – to work. The conclusion I reach is always the same. We are doomed. Increasingly,…

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Resetting the Normalcy Index

It’s close to, but not quite, the time to press the start-button of the internal clock we’re all blessed with. It’s a memory timer, a special one. It doesn’t make it harder or easier to remember things. It’s a device that measures the time it takes for us to lose our sensory experience at the moment of an occurrence – be it a thought, a visceral reaction, or a conditioned response to some action…

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Paranoia Porn

Detail from Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” at the Museo del Prado

The germ of this thought comes from listening to an interview on Fresh Air yesterday, Thursday, November 12, recorded the day before, which would have been Wednesday, a week and a day since the still officially unresolved electoin, and at least two news cycles previous. I point it out using this commonplace…

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Like Tiresias Throbbing

Of course he won’t go quietly

I’m thinking as we all, in some corner of our consciousness, fidget and distract ourselves awaiting an outcome, suffer the condition of Tiresias in The Waste Land, not so much throbbing between two lives, as vibrating between, what I’ll call two civic states of being. Is it the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end?

The more that suddenly positivist…

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Nothing Changes, 1879 Edition

Mark Twain, 1909. By Photographer: A.F. Bradley in his studio. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Mark Twain wrote the following piece the year previous to the tumultuous and critical election year for President of 1880. Only 15 years after the Civil War had ended. The incumbent, Rutherford B. Hayes, had run in 1876 with the promise that he would not seek re-election – a promise he kept……

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#Twain

Suburban Station, Sunday Morning, Late Summer, Pandemic: “Looking Away Won’t Solve the Problem”

#summer #suburban #train station #eyes

Adventures in Breadmaking, Part 1

With the long distance assistance of my bread-making friend turned temporary sensei (which included about 20g of his precious “goo” (sourdough starter), sent by mail) I’ve embarked on a bread making phase. This is after a hiatus of I’d guess about 40 years, the last time I tried baking my own, long before the days of the surge in sourdough seriousness (they’ve been serious about it in other…

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Just Another Covid-19 Day

For far too much of my life so far, in far too many ways and moments, dealing with feelings has been no more and no less than an either/or proposition. Too often I have to decide consciously whether to let something pass by as simply as my teeming consciousness will allow, or do I allow myself to embroider intellectually along the same lines as some unbalanced intrusion of active thought about…

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Sanitation in Real Life

I went out to shop for groceries. Our county has been declared the epicenter of Covid-19 contagion for all of Pennsylvania. Hence only stores that serve the public with vital household necessities are permitted to remain open: groceries, pharmacies, etc. Even the state liquor stores in Montgomery County must close their doors (online ordering for shipping to one’s home is still possible)…

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Corona Fever

“Social distancing? Hey! No big deal. I never really liked you anyway.” From the rear of the store, to the front, Bath Tissue and Facial Tissue (and, note, Paper Towel as well). Appropriately, Aisle 13. Friday the 13th, March 2020, 10 am. Giant Supermarket, Wynnewood PA

It’s mid-morning. About 10:30am. The store, a suburban Whole Foods Market, opens at 8. I exit the store with my two reusable…

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