Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

The words do not have to be perfect.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

I really should read my own blog.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Pandemic Reading – BGinCHI and More

Pandemic Reading – BGinCHI and More

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Bet you thought this would be a Tom Levenson post, didn’t you?

I am so uncool that I had never even heard of PopMatters before today, but BGinCHI has a piece up on PopMatters as part of the Reading Pandemics series his department is doing there.

BG writes about Shakespeare’s “Venus & Adonis”, and then others will run all summer, both from faculty and students.

BGinCHI’s article:

What’s Love Got To Do with It? Shakespeare’s ‘Venus & Adonis’

In case you want to bookmark the whole Reading Pandemics series – there are 4 pieces up so far:

Reading Pandemics

Open thread.

 

Reader Interactions

73Comments

  1. 1.

    jeffreyw

    Pandemic reading?  I’ve had the first 10 of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series for years and have successfully put off reading them till now.  I’m nearing the end of Storm Front – it’s OK.  I hope it gets better.

  2. 2.

    daryljfontaine

    @jeffreyw: The first couple books are a little slow in worldbuilding, after that it ramps up in quality considerably. Butcher does marvelous things with his supporting characters.

    D

  5. 5.

    VeniceRiley

    Reading the recently re-issued “No Priest But Love” by Helena Whitbread.  She lists herself as Editor because so much is straight from the pages of Anne Lister’s diaries.

  7. 7.

    BGinCHI

    Doing another one of these in July on James Welch’s novel Fools Crow.

    If you’ve never read it, highly recommend.

  9. 9.

    Roger Moore

    My most recent pandemic reading has been Grand Canyon Geology, which I bought many years ago while visiting the Grand Canyon and never got around to reading because it was quickly obvious it was pitched to a much more sophisticated reader than I was.  Well, I’ve now read a lot of other geology, so I was able to go back and understand it this time.  It’s an excellent book, though obviously not for someone who isn’t very serious about geology.

  10. 10.

    Nelle

    Is anybody else rethinking…and possibly rereading… lit and history of the 20’s with a better sense of the influence of the pandemic?  I find that I was attributing a lot of the frenetic roaring 20’s to WWI while it might have also included the pandemic.  Mrs. Dalloway, with her heart affected by influenza?  I want to go back and look at Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen and Guy Foster, a very readable history of the 20’s.

  12. 12.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    I mentioned earlier that I’m reading Louise Erdrich’s THE NIGHT WATCHMAN. It’s set in 1953 when the Federal Government tried to dissolve the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe. The central character is based on Erdrich’s grandfather.

  13. 13.

    gene108

    @daryljfontaine: 

    What has impressed me with the Dresden Files is how the characters age.

    The whole series has taken 15+ years, in story time, and the kid at the beginning of the series becomes a 20-something, and so on with all the other characters.

    I just find that a nice touch, which is not often done in such a long running series.

  14. 14.

    BGinCHI

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I love her work. She’s such an amazing writer.

    Not too many American novelists have sustained the quality she’s produced over such a long career.

  16. 16.

    BGinCHI

    @gene108: And this just scratches the surface, as regional accents would have been FAR more pronounced in the EM period. That version of OP is London pronunciation.

  17. 17.

    pamelabrown53

    @BGinCHI:

    Bookmarked your essay, BGinChi. I could use some erudition as I’ve gone the ostrich route and reread, rewatch anything escapist!

    If you and the rest of BJers have any suggestions of quality escapism, I’m all ears.

  18. 18.

    NotMax

    @gene108

    Took some 50 years for Robin to outgrow those short pants.

    ;)

    Then there’s Gasoline Alley. The MAD parody sort of sums it up: #1 – #2.

  19. 19.

    satby

    ok, OT, but the morning thread bees dead:

    Sorry I missed saying thanks to so many of you in the last few hours. I found a lost dog (of course, how else to celebrate my B’day?) and was trying to get her back to her owners. But my delighted thanks for all of your kind birthday wishes!

  20. 20.

    patrick II

    @jeffreyw:

    The SCIFI television version of the Dresden files is on Amazon Prime.  I just finished watching it again the other day.  I didn’t get it when SCIFI canceled it.  They really show some crappy stuff on that channel, and the Dresden files was very well cast, the stories and dialogue were smart.  My favorite scifi shows always seem to get canceled (farewell Firefly).

  21. 21.

    Brachiator

    I’ve been reading bits of The Plague at Athens section of “The Peloponnesian War. ”

    BTW, I recommend the 1938 Bette Davis movie “Jezebel,” which includes a plotline dealing with an outbreak of yellow fever. Pandemic Goes to the Movies. I think this is available on TCM.

  24. 24.

    Brachiator

    OT. Ken Osmond, who played the oily little weasel Eddie Haskell on “Leave It To Beaver,” has passed away at age 76.

    He really nailed that role. He was the kid you loved to hate.

    RIP

  27. 27.

    paradox

    Omg, check out this story on Ken Osmond:

    “Due to his startling resemblance to legendary porn star John Holmes, a rumor started that Ken was actually Holmes and had quit the porn business to become an L.A. cop (supposedly, his superiors in the LAPD weren’t entirely convinced that he actually wasn’t Holmes, and he was called in by the Internal Affairs division to “prove” his identity. Holmes was renowned for the size of his male member, and Osmond stated that he settled once and for all the rumors that he was Holmes by a “visual aids” demonstration). Holmes actually billed himself as “the former Eddie Haskell” in several of his films, and Osmond, an ultra-conservative, was outraged and launched a $25-million suit that went all the way to the California Supreme Court. The court ruled for Holmes, however, stating that the name was protected as a satire. This case set a precedent in the matter, and is still referred to by other cases in California today. The owner of one L.A. adult movie house that had put up his marquee reading “Eddie Haskell of TV in ‘Behind the Green Door’ X-rated,” was asked to remove the billing by none other than Officer Ken Osmond.”

    It’s another shelter at home day, hell there was nothing else to do but read the full bio.

  28. 28.

    Roger Moore

    @gene108:

    TL;DR: We’re pronouncing his works wrong

    We’re pronouncing his works differently from the way they used to be pronounced, but they’d be even less comprehensible if we tried to perform them with his pronunciation.  It would do no good at all to make his works less accessible.

  30. 30.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    I grabbed The Grapes of Wrath from our spare room bookshelf 2 days ago.  I haven’t read it in 30 years or so.  Nothing like a misery book during miserable times.

  32. 32.

    jackson

    @BGinCHI: This is so beautiful. Thank you. I haven’t read his sonnets in decades and never this. I’m going back for more.

  34. 34.

    zhena gogolia

    Since the shutdown, I’ve re-read Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, and now I’m halfway through the final Palliser novel, The Duke’s Children. Happily, it’s very engaging and doesn’t have much about Parliament and horse racing, as I feared when I started. And unlike all the other Palliser novels, I’m not quite sure how it’s going to end, which is fun.

    I’m only happy when I can fool myself into thinking I’m in 19th-century England.

  36. 36.

    Nelle

    @zhena gogolia: I may be far into my own bubble, but just last week I realized that no one in my family knows how much of my brain happily resides in 19th century England.

  38. 38.

    Nelle

    @zhena gogolia: I may be far into my own bubble, but just last week I realized that no one in my family knows how much of my brain happily resides in 19th century England.

    I walk among them but I am not of them.

  39. 39.

    Brachiator

    @paradox:

    Oh, yeah, I remember some of the persistent rumors that Osmond was really John Holmes.

    I guess there was a bit of a resemblance in their faces. But Osmond was a pretty good actor and had quite a career as a child actor before joining “Leave It To Beaver.”

  41. 41.

    zhena gogolia

    @Nelle:

    The weirdest thing to me is that I’ve never been to England! But I spend most of my mental life there, between 19th-century novels and 20th-21st-century murder mystery shows.

  42. 42.

    zhena gogolia

    Is it possible that I threw the stuff away in a panic before I left? I guess it’s possible, but why would I throw away my computer-cleaning cloth?

  45. 45.

    WaterGirl

    @zhena gogolia: The most charitable spin I can put on it is that maybe the cleaning crew was freaked out by the virus and didn’t really want to touch anything, or didn’t know how to clean the stuff you had, so they just swept it into a box and threw it away so they couldn’t catch the virus from your stuff.

    That I can understand, and helps eliminate the outrage and just leaves you with the disappointment of having lost stuff.  Maybe that’s easier to deal with without the outrage?

  46. 46.

    Amir Khalid

    @Roger Moore:

    Actually, if you watch the video at the link, you’ll get that there things — puns, rhymes, emphases, rhythms in speech, and so on — that modern actors and audiences miss, precisely because of the shift in English pronunciation over the past four centuries.

  47. 47.

    zhena gogolia

    @WaterGirl:

    I’m not too outraged — just discombobulated. I don’t think it was anything terribly valuable. It’s just disorienting.

  48. 48.

    Jeffro

    Um I think the orange moron just said on live TV that he’s taking hydroxywhatever…for REALZ!

  50. 50.

    satby

    @zhena gogolia: Thanks! I rewatched the second Sense & Sensibility version and the Colin Firth P&P too, probably going to rewatch A Death in Pemberly tonight. I wouldn’t want to have lived in the 19th century really because disease running amok was normal then, but I enjoy the sanitised versions on the screen.

    @Brachiator: Jezebel is a great movie, one of Bette Davis’  best roles. And the scenes around the epidemic seem pretty realistic.

  51. 51.

    opiejeanne

    @zhena gogolia: I missed this story. Did someone a well-meaning relative, come in and clean your house?

    We had a gardener whose crew performed a scorched Earth cleanup in our garden, ripped out all sorts of things that we had planted, before I realized. He wasn’t there, just his extended family,  only one of whom knew some English, and I don’t know any Vietnamese, but they did understand STOP!

  55. 55.

    schrodingers_cat

    I am reading History of the Ancient Sanskrit Literature by Friedrich Max Mueller. Since this precisely what is being weaponized by the BJP in India.

  56. 56.

    WaterGirl

    From the Southern Poverty Law Center, just now.  They make it really easy.

    We have good news from Washington, DC, the HEROES Act passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday! Now it’s time for the Senate to vote on protecting our health and our economy.

    The Trump administration’s inaction has put our health, well-being and economic security in serious jeopardy. The HEROES Act is what we need to turn the tide. It’s a strong step toward the COVID-19 relief we need, especially in the South, where communities of color and immigrants, many of whom are working on the frontlines in the healthcare and food industries, have been hit hardest.

    Now we need your help to make sure the HEROES Act overcomes its biggest challenge – passing the Senate. Senate Republicans want to put the brakes on desperately-needed help. Right now, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is saying he won’t even let the Senate vote on it. Click here to tell your senators to support the HEROES Act!

    Here’s a broad look at how the HEROES Act will help us build the fairer future we deserve. The HEROES Act will:

    • Protect our public health by increasing federal funding for COVID-19 testing, contact tracing and treatment
    • Help struggling families by providing second round of stimulus checks, $1,200 per family member up to $6,000
    • End discriminatory treatment that previously excluded individuals married to an undocumented person from receiving tax rebates
    • Create a “Heroes Fund” to disperse hazard pay to healthcare workers, first responders, meat and poultry processing workers, grocery store workers, sanitation workers, and workers at essential businesses
    • Protect essential workers by requiring new standards for maintaining a safe work environment and holding employers accountable
    • Strengthen our democracy by providing crucial funding to states to ensure safe elections and remove administrative roadblocks that disproportionately affect people of color
    • Help those who have lost their jobs during the pandemic by extending the $600 per week federal supplemental unemployment benefits until January, 2021
    • Keep struggling families in their homes by providing critical funding to states to help renters and homeowners, especially those with low or reduced incomes, afford housing costs
    • Help families keep food on their tables by increasing the maximum SNAP benefits by 15 percent
    • Ensure students are able to learn and thrive by providing school districts and universities with additional emergency aid
    • Protect the health of people being held in immigrant detention and the people who work there by requiring, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to provide free soap, hand sanitizer and other necessary hygiene products to people in immigrant detention
    • Protect the health of people who have been incarcerated and those who work in the criminal justice system by expanding testing and decreasing the population of jails, prisons and juvenile detention centers
    • Keep teachers, firefighters and sanitation and other public workers on the job by providing emergency aid to state, local, territorial, and tribal governments

    People living and working in the Deep South, and across the country, urgently need the kind of support and protections the HEROES Act provides. During this public health crisis, we must work together to protect all of our communities and rebuild our economy.

    CONTACT YOUR SENATORS

    We don’t have to settle for the status quo. Let your senators know that you are watching their votes and urge them to protect the health, safety and economic well-being of all of us. Together, we will take this opportunity to build a better future.

    Thank you,

    Your friends at SPLC Action

  58. 58.

    Jeffro

    @Elizabelle:

     

    @zzyzx:

    Whole new ballgame…Fox News is positively SCRAMBLING to warn its viewers not to take it…can’t wait for the hearings about the trumpov family’s stake in hydroxywhatever…

    Love it!  We probably won’t get this kind of entertainment under President Biden, so hey American, enjoy!

  60. 60.

    WaterGirl

    @Raven: I am reading sarcasm into that, not absolutely certain that was intended, but I suspect so.

    It can’t hurt.  Maybe if enough people contact them, they’ll get scared into doing the right thing.

  62. 62.

    Elizabelle

    I am reading Geraldine Brooks’ amazing Year of Wonders.

    Fictional, but fact-based,  account of life in England’s Plague Village, Eyam, which shut itself off in 1666.  Complete quarantine for a year to stop the spread.  Which it did, at the cost of dozens of villagers’ lives (albeit, they were pretty much doomed already).  Plague raged from 1665-November 1666.  Arrived via fleas on cloth brought in from London.

    Would make a great BJ book club selection — lot of parallels with today, and Brooks takes a good hard thwack at the deplorable landed gentry at the top of the social pyramid — one family which was the Trumps of its day.  They proved cowards.  Also the eternal conflict between science, such as it was, and superstition.  Book published in 2001.

    Trivia point:  village made a deal with the Earl of Devonshire, who lived at the great British estate, Chartwell, to provide them with food, which was delivered to the village’s boundary stone by wagon.

    It was a good deal for the Earl, because it kept the Plague off his estate and out of the surrounding villages and towns.  Chartwell mansion has been used in a lot of filming for television and movies.  Including Death Comes to Pemberley, and I think Jane Austen mentioned it by name a few times.

    Eyam was only 7 miles from Chesterfield, today a pretty good sized town, and on the trade routes to Sheffield and Manchester — the major regional cities in their day.  Shutting down the Plague from reaching them was a big fucking deal, and a genuine sacrifice, as the wealthy were fleeing the disease, right and left.  The plague ultimately killed 260 villagers; last death recorded on November 1, 1666.

    BBC article on the Plague Village, Eyam.

  63. 63.

    The Thin Black Duke

    Meanwhile, here in Massachusetts, Governor Baker just announced Phase 1 of his plan to re-open the state and included in that list are churches (!) and hairdressers. And three weeks from now, I’ll betcha that people will be SHOCKED that there’s a spike in infections. This is seriously bumming me out.

  64. 64.

    opiejeanne

    @Elizabelle: I think I read that when it came out, or else a very similar one about the same plague and its effect on the small village.

  65. 65.

    Bumper

    Sorry for the slight change of topic but I just got disturbing news and I need to rage.

    My relative, who is like a sister to me, is now in the hospital on a ventilator, diagnosed with covid. There are so many screwups that my grief and sadness are coming out in screaming anger.

    The local hospital had her in a waiting room for 2+ hours and sent her home 6 hours later with no covid test.  They didn’t take her distress seriously despite her husband’s urging and her health history.  I’m angry that with her high risk she seemed to think it was ok to meet other family members, some of whom live in our state’s highest infected area. And she should have known better, she’s smart, very technologically savvy, and took other precautions like curbside groceries. And she ignored pleas to go back to the hospital. When she finally agreed, the second hospital wasn’t equipped to help her, so she ended up in the big city. At least she’s at a qualified hospital now with a dedicated covid unit.

    Now many other family members are being tested and isolated, a hospital emergency room full of patients and staff has been exposed, she’s seriously ill, and all her loved ones are suffering for her.

    My family is safe. We stayed away exactly because she’s at such high risk, and we’re super isolating anyway.

    But DAMN IT, why have our two nearest hospitals not gotten prepared in the several months they’ve known about this!!  Why are people foolishly taking chances with other people’s lives?  I’m going to stop even though have so much more going on in my head. Writing this has helped.

  66. 66.

    WaterGirl

    @The Thin Black Duke: I am sorry to hear that.  I am not doing anything for a month after they open something up.  If they can open something up, they have a month to prove to me that it’s safe.

    Until then, I don’t care what they open up, I’m not doing it until I can see the results.

  67. 67.

    Elizabelle

    @Bumper:   I hope that your relative survives.  Please keep us posted.

    It’s going to take sad stories, like your own, to wake people up.  Very sorry it hit your loved ones, though.

  69. 69.

    opiejeanne

    @opiejeanne: I did read this book. IIRC, the book talked about the issue of food scarcity. So many died that there weren’t enough laborers to pick the fruit and harvest the grain, causing shortages and starvation, something that I hadn’t considered.

    I already knew a little about the everyday things the various plagues affected negatively, such as the keeping of records in village churches; I was doing some genealogy for my mom’s curiosity ( and also to untangle my husband’s family members), and one line that had been thoroughly investigated from the first family member to set foot in England had a gap in the records of about a hundred years, picking up again several years after that particular plague had ended. The upshot is that we don’t know which Lovejoy survived initially, only which of the later survivors make up the line that led to  the one who came to America in the 1600s

  70. 70.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @WaterGirl: Same here. I’m fortunate in that I’m on SSDI and I collect a small pension, so I can afford to stay put, and my wife is able to work from home. Still, it’s depressing because we have to press the ‘rewind’ button on our lives again because of idiots who refuse to acknowledge that we’re in the middle of a fucking pandemic. How in hell did our species ever crawl out of the primordial ooze in the first place anyway?

  71. 71.

    opiejeanne

    @Elizabelle: It was fascinating. My only quibble with the book was the ending and not the vanishingly small likelihood of the Muslim doctor being so forward thinking, but of her being able to locate one, but there was little chance of putting a happy ending on this story otherwise. The consequences of this for her daughters is left unexplored.  Other than that, it was great and I passed it along to my middle child to read, and I think it has been handed on to several other women since.

  72. 72.

    Elizabelle

    @opiejeanne:   Haven’t gotten there yet!  But very interested in Avicenna, the Musalman doctor.

    Gonna research the actual story more after finishing the novel.  Halfway through now.  She and Mrs. Mompesson have just raided the healers’ cottage for medicinal herbs and potions.

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