12.27.2020
12.10.2020
11.26.2020
Madame Bovary
On the evening when the Bovarys were to arrive at Yonville, Widow Lefrancois, the landlady of this inn, was so very busy that she sweated great drops as she moved her saucepans. To-morrow was market-day. The meat had to be cut beforehand, the fowls drawn, the soup and coffee made. Moreover, she had the boarders’ meal to see to, and that of the doctor, his wife, and their servant; the billiard-room was echoing with bursts of laughter; three millers in a small parlour were calling for brandy; the wood was blazing, the brazen pan was hissing, and on the long kitchen table, amid the quarters of raw mutton, rose piles of plates that rattled with the shaking of the block on which spinach was being chopped.
From the poultry-yard was heard the screaming of the fowls whom the servant was chasing in order to wring their necks.
11.24.2020
11.09.2020
Anna Karenina
A silence followed. She was still drawing with the chalk on the table. Her eyes were shining with a soft light. Under the influence of her mood he felt in all his being a continually growing tension of happiness.
“Ah! I’ve scribbled all over the table!” she said, and, laying down the chalk, she made a movement as though to get up.
“What! shall I be left alone—without her?” he thought with horror, and he took the chalk. “Wait a minute,” he said, sitting down to the table. “I’ve long wanted to ask you one thing.”
He looked straight into her caressing, though frightened eyes.
“Please, ask it.”
“Here,” he said; and he wrote the initial letters, w, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t. These letters meant, “When you told me it could never be, did that mean never, or then?” There seemed no likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; but he looked at her as though his life depended on her understanding the words. She glanced at him seriously, then leaned her puckered brow on her hands and began to read. Once or twice she stole a look at him, as though asking him, “Is it what I think?”
“I understand,” she said, flushing a little.
“What is this word?” he said, pointing to the n that stood for never.
“It means never,” she said; “but that’s not true!”
He quickly rubbed out what he had written, gave her the chalk, and stood up. She wrote, t, i, c, n, a, d.
Dolly was completely comforted in the depression caused by her conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch when she caught sight of the two figures: Kitty with the chalk in her hand, with a shy and happy smile looking upwards at Levin, and his handsome figure bending over the table with glowing eyes fastened one minute on the table and the next on her. He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant, “Then I could not answer differently.”
He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.
“Only then?”
“Yes,” her smile answered.
“And n... and now?” he asked.
“Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like—should like so much!” she wrote the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, f, w, h. This meant, “If you could forget and forgive what happened.”
He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, “I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.”
She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.
“I understand,” she said in a whisper.
He sat down and wrote a long phrase. She understood it all, and without asking him, “Is it this?” took the chalk and at once answered.
For a long while he could not understand what she had written, and often looked into her eyes. He was stupefied with happiness. He could not supply the word she had meant; but in her charming eyes, beaming with happiness, he saw all he needed to know. And he wrote three letters. But he had hardly finished writing when she read them over her arm, and herself finished and wrote the answer, “Yes.”
“You’re playing secrétaire?” said the old prince. “But we must really be getting along if you want to be in time at the theater.”
Levin got up and escorted Kitty to the door.
In their conversation everything had been said; it had been said that she loved him, and that she would tell her father and mother that he would come tomorrow morning.
10.23.2020
9.27.2020
Perhaps I should have expected to feel wildly out of place at Prepper Camp. I am a vegetarian agnostic feminist in a creative field who sits to the left of most American socialists: I want immediate and radical action to halt climate change; Medicare and free public higher education for all; abortion pills offered for pennies in pharmacies and gas stations; the eradication of billionaires; the destruction of capitalism; and the rocketing of all the planet’s firearms into the sun.
And yet I am also, in the darkest corners of my heart, a doomsday prepper myself. I live in Florida, where hurricane season runs officially from June through November, and both the Gulf and the Atlantic are regularly beset by calamitous storms. It just makes sense, living on that vulnerable spit of land between two roiling, unpredictable bodies of water, to ensure that one’s house has at least a two-month supply of food and at least nine modes of procuring drinking water in case society breaks and city services are cut off. (My family’s are: a rain barrel [1]; filtration straws [2]; a sun oven to pasteurize water with solar heat [3]; a Sawyer Squeeze water-filtration system [4]; a hundred-gallon airtight bladder, to be filled at the first sign of trouble [5]; a gas grill for boiling [6] and, in a pinch, dew collection [7]; iodine tablets [8]; and a tub with a tarp over it to let evaporation run off into a clean bowl [9].) We have medical kits in both of our cars and bug-out bags prepared for each family member, in case we have to flee in minutes. This kind of preparation is all still somewhat in the realm of the normal. Less so: I have negotiated for my family a hideout in New England with a fully stocked tiny house that has a woodstove and solar heat, with forests around it for firewood and cleared land for gardening. There are established fruit trees, water sources, and plenty of wildlife, if necessity forces us to set aside our moral revulsion and kill our fellow creatures for sustenance. In both Florida and New England, I have libraries of foraging and food-storage books; if I don’t always have direct knowledge, I know where to find it. I take boxing classes for self-defense; I have made my children learn archery. I have signed them up, for years, with the Boy Scouts so they will know how to build fires and handle knives safely, even though its soft-focus, quasi–Hitler Youth nationalism makes me queasy.
It is not that I have horrendous visions of an electromagnetic pulse taking out the world’s power grids, or of oil and gas production ceasing and leaving seven billion humans to revert to the pre-industrial era, or even of World War III being launched on an otherwise normal day because Trump can’t resist the urge to push the big red button. But I can see how fragile the institutions of society are and how ever-more frayed they are becoming under the weight of late-stage capitalism. I see in vivid near-hallucinations how climate change will exacerbate every human-rights issue until we cannibalize ourselves. There will be mass displacement, pandemics, tribalist violence, genocide, food and water scarcity, deforestation, desertification, cities underwater. The warming planet, the mass extinction that has already begun, the fact that I need my children to live at least beyond the span of my own life: these things murmur in my ears, give me waking nightmares. Such profound eschatological horror can only be slain by action. I ready myself for as many possibilities as I can so that I may keep my raging anxiety under control.
https://legacy.harpers.org/archive/2020/03/waiting-for-the-end-of-the-world-lauren-groff/
9.20.2020
Humanity's strengths and weaknesses
Humanity's strengths and weaknesses
Covid Reflections
Covid Reflections
Folks have done a lot of reflecting through Covid. Here are some of my takeaways, brain farts:
Neanderthal theory: Trump is a dinosaur. We can proactively decide, based on science, who is fit to lead a nation of 330 million and who is not. Our politicians, our senators, our process is a dinosaur that needs to be modernized, else we will get eaten alive by other nations.
What did we learn from Covid
1. We need leaders and processes and governance that is results oriented.
8.30.2020
8.26.2020
8.03.2020
7.27.2020
7.07.2020
7.01.2020
6.29.2020
6.28.2020
6.17.2020
6.16.2020
Do the Right Thing: Systemic Racism and Covid
It’s not too late to do the right thing. While Instagram activity is crazy high, black and brown people are still getting infected with Covid, right this minute. Let’s reform our police departments, and educate our parents, and set city budgets right, but what can we do right this minute to take down the silent killer that already taken 56 Durham lives and who knows how many more until a vaccine is found and administered.
6.11.2020
5.31.2020
5.23.2020
5.18.2020
CVS
5.14.2020
5.08.2020
4.30.2020
The long middle
4.27.2020
Aggregate Public Health
- Obesity
- Cigarettes
- Weed
- Alcohol
- Domestic abuse
- Suicide
- Opioid Addiction
- Other plagues?
4.22.2020
4.19.2020
asterisks
4.12.2020
4.05.2020
The Long Emergency
The week that the shit hit the fan in Durham, March 16th, I woke up every day as if waking up from a nightmare, a nightmare where everyone lost their job, and a vague specter of death moved through our community. Every day was like going to war with an imaginary demon. Every day was like going to war, but the army you were commanding was losing badly.
Our potential demise as a modern civilization was rendered far closer than we ever imagined. Suddenly, many bourgeois privileges, like going to bars and restaurants, were spoken of in the past tense as if we were speaking of the one-time wealth of ancient Rome.
We had been so blind, and Covid-19, like a biblical Tower of Babel, or an actual literal plague, laid us bare. The orange-tinted emperor had no clothes. The economy, reliant on consumer spending like a perpetual motion machine, had no clothes. The city officials, teachers, school administrators, health officials, were left listless, wholly unprepared to react to a crisis of this magnitude and scope. There was no reaction. All we could muster was "stay at home".
And stay at home we did, or at least those that could afford to. While time slipped through our fingers, Latinx families were expected to follow English website instruction for homeschooling. (Was this really the most creative solution to this problem? Why weren't teachers reaching out? Even using Google Translate for assignments for grade-schoolers would have been better than nothing.) This was the stratification of information access in its most obvious, blatant, and unsparing form. In an attempt to social distance and for lack of beds, homeless folks slept outside at the shelter in March.
I like to use something I call emetic theory as a way to understand the value, if any, in what is happening. In the Winter of 2014/2015, only a year after I had taken ownership, the Bakery hired an employee who proved to be toxic in the most stereotypical sense. She caused long-serving employees to leave. She was mean to staff and to management. She was resentful and disagreeable to put it mildly. To make matters worse, before things came to a head with her, I hired her partner as well, and the toxin spread. When the fireworks were over, they had both quit in a span of three weeks, and I had lost 1/3 of my staff. The way the Bakery was coming apart, it was as if it had swallowed an emetic and was throwing up; literally every day felt like possibly the last we could go on together. The Bakery at the time was barely staying afloat financially. It was at that point that I realized I needed either to step up as a manager, or I was going to go bankrupt. I began thinking more as a manager, and less as a staff member and worker, which had been my role since I joined Ninth Street Bakery as a bread mixer in 2009. I needed to think about what a leader would do. It was an uncomfortable role for me. I was quiet. I was humble. I wasn't good with people. I wasn't particularly good at giving praise, or letting people know they were appreciated on a regular basis, especially when I was feeling stress, which was every day. All those things needed to change if I wasn't going to go down with the ship. Painful as it was, the emetic the Bakery swallowed as a result of those two toxic employees was positive in the long run, both for the Bakery, and for me as a manager. Covid-19 is not comparable in scope, magnitude, or severity, but a blind man can see the fissures, cracks, and outright canyons laid bare by the unequal distribution of suffering dispersed by this emetic, whether it be access to health care, education, basic goods and services, or something as simple as health education on the risk and pathway of viral transmission. This may actually be a chance to take a look at the dysfunctional things in our economy and fix them, to trim fat and excess, and to redistribute wealth more equitably. A twilight of the idols so to speak.
Trump's reaction to Covid from the get-go has had all the overtones of an alchemist trying to convince a scientist that they can transform shit into gold. The fact that we give him or his administration or the (elected) officials that answer to him hand and foot any credence is a shameful reflection on us all. The idea that we can do very smart things in the field of global capitalism, yet and leave a nation of 320 million to be governed via systemic corruption, racism, monied influence, and willful ignorance hurts my soul and boils my blood. In a world of Covid, or perhaps post-Covid, complacency and ignorance will no longer be tolerated. Why is South Korea so much better than us at this? And Hong Kong? And Singapore? As my Nana would say, "You’re not so great. You’re not so terrific."
In many ways, Covid has brought everything to fore that Trump always wanted. He wanted the borders closed. He saw international trade come to a screeching halt. Like Trump, we no longer shake hands anymore. Like Trump, everyone is socially isolated in their "tower". His disputed claims of wealth and ostentatious bombast now fall hollow like never before amid severe economic crisis. He is the loneliest man, and as Deleuze would say, "the ugliest man". And he still hasn't released his taxes. And with his xenophobic race taunting of the "Chinese virus", he opens the door for an international race war. He is so dumb and misguided I can literally see the wheels of cognition turning.
I call Trump "racist grandpa". I had a grand-uncle who survived Auschwitz, and like many persecuted minorities, was subsequently racist to other minorities, having heard him use the n-word once. It was the kind of thing that as a young adult in the late 90's, I tolerated and chalked up to the ignorance of having been a Polish immigrant in a new and often hostile world (he lived and raised a family in Brooklyn when being from Brooklyn meant something). Like my grand-uncle, we somehow allow Trump to continue being racist, as well as classist, sexist, homophobic, etc. How he is not impeached for misconduct and abuse of power has as much to say about his inability to see plain facts and string them together as it does our inability to depose him. He is an embarrassment.
To win at a public health intervention like Covid takes conformity. We all need to move like a school of fish to win at social distancing. But to win at a political intervention like new civil rights (read upending structural racism, gerrymandering, expanding Medicaid, installing Medicare for all, fighting environmental racism, removing insider trading, lying Senator Burr, etc.) takes concerted and sustained action, both at the national and state level. When you look at a relief package like the CARES Act, it turns out that all along we had the money, lots of money apparently, to give direct payments to poor and working class people, we just didn't have the political will to stomach it. As with massive outlays for wars of deception and interference, the money is there and has been there to lift people out of poverty, just not the political will. It's abysmal. I didn't realize that the government had 2T dollars to give to poor and working class people, it just took a global pandemic to show it. And the amount of that actually going to actual folks is like 230B. It's so wrong. We could actually lift every poor person out of poverty tomorrow if we wanted. I think what this shows is that all the time we had the money to provide direct payments to citizens. We just didn’t have the political will. We willingly and voluntarily let people live in poverty. We could raise the living standards of millions of people and create a generation of voters that believe justice means bringing everyone up to a basic level of safety, security, and well being. Do we keep growing, or do we redistribute what we have? Ironically, Covid is a virus built on stratification. The first people to transmit and fall victim to Covid and transmit it internationally were the folks that have the income to travel by plane regionally and internationally: NBA stars, movie stars, health ministry officials, international soccer players and coaches, for example. The next tier of people to get it were those bourgeois who fly in planes, go to bars, restaurants, clubs, concerts. A lack of discretionary income to be in places where people gather for leisure meant that the poor and the working class, the 3rd world, were both the last to get it, and also the least prepared to perform behaviors like social distancing or to get adequate health care or health information. At Wholefoods, only 25 people at a time can be in the store. At Compare Foods, there are no limits and people confusedly negotiate and ignore the blue taped Xes on the ground near checkout meant to indicate appropriate social distance.
I wish I had right now:
Better information!
Information is the foe of panic and fear of the unknown.
I wish I had:
1. Confidence that contact tracing is happening for all hospitalized and non-hospitalized cases. How many public health workers are intersecting with the community to do this work?
2. Where are the hotspots in your community? How is the community being messaged about this?
3. Public health advisories. How are we communicating about health behaviors to all communities?
This is a public health crisis, and it has already proven fatal in communities where information is not shared effectively about risks and behaviors.
Leaders need to step up and think as hard about the transmission of information as the transmission of the virus. Leaders will step up through this crisis, and pretenders will step out or step aside or step down or be deposed.
If there is any opportunity in Covid, it is to think twice about getting back on the capitalism treadmill if and when things return to normal. Covid effectively pulled the Andon cord on our economy. The question is what and how we will fix what was broken. What if we didn't keep growing and instead redistributed what we have? If we base wealth on growing GDP quarter after quarter, we are doomed to fail eventually as a society and as a civilization. What would it mean to clean the slate? What type of people are we going to be when we return to the capitalist treadmill, how are we going to be changed by this? What will we demand of our leaders? Covid has taken the wheels off of the capitalism train, and not eager to get up back on that treadmill, I see the pain in the eyes of all who have been laid off or affected; there must be a 3rd Way, a way to distribute wealth equitably without these extremes and lack of safety nets. What would I do if I got off this treadmill?
Addendum: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/opinion/climate-change-covid-economy.html
Virus culture
The blame.
The resentment.
The guilt.
The confusion.
The feelings of invincibility that it can't happen to you.
Axioms of Viral Culture
1. Information is often insufficient, inadequate, and untimely.
2. No one tries to give someone else a virus.
3. You can blame others, but it won’t be as half as bad as the blame you hang on yourself.
