Yes, it's bad

Over the past weeks and months, Donald Trump's reactions to the coronavirus pandemic have consistently tracked in lockstep parallel to those of the average minimally-informed member of our society—except with about a twelve day lag-time. At first, it was a scary thing happening far away, and thus somebody else's problem. Then, it was something that was going to reach us, but would basically just be another version of the seasonal flu—bad, but by no means catastrophic. Then, it was something we had to take seriously for a couple weeks, but that would eventually pass.

And now, this week, something changed. He knew someone personally, he told us, who had gotten terribly sick from the virus. Now, it had started to seem real to him. He apprehended the magnitude of it. And he was ready to do what it took to try to slow the spread of the contagion.

Errata and Marginalia 013: Farson

Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (London: Vintage Books, 1994), originally published 1993.

The gilded gutter life, that is, of Francis Bacon the twentieth century figurative painter, not Francis Bacon the Elizabethan philosopher—the latter of whose life may have been no less gilded and gutter-ridden, for all I know, but who is at any rate not the subject of this book (though the family of Bacon the painter alleged descent from the author of the Novum Organum, according to Farson). The book is more personal memoir of a friendship with the painter than artistic monograph. It is, for that reason, a vastly more interesting trove of gossip than one might expect. Gilded Gutter Life is devoted to that most fascinating of all subjects: Artists Behaving Badly.

Think I Could Turn and Live with Animals

I recently read Irish novelist Edna O'Brien's short (and itself quasi-novelistic) 2010 biography of the great Romantic poet Byron in Love. While not adding wholly new dimensions to the classic Byron legend, nor demolishing any aspects of it, it nonetheless makes some of the features of that legend live again for a new generation of readers.

Two familiar features of Byron's life come through strongly in O'Brien's treatment. First: he was utterly abominable to many of the people around him, particularly those who most looked to him for care and support. And second: he surrounded himself, throughout his life, with wild, fierce animals.

Bitter Bread

Trump is madly, disastrously wrong (no surprise) in his threat to reopen the economy sooner than public health experts advise—thereby disrupting what may be humanity's last possible chance to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Besides, the economic damage is going to come from the virus's transmission and its impact on our health system, as much as from trying to shut the economy down—and these effects will be even worse if we end the time of social distancing.

All of that is true and notorious. That does not mean, however, it is entirely false to point out there are costs on both sides of the policy question, where this virus is concerned.

The costs of social distancing will be relatively light for some of us, and easy to bear. If we can work from home without loss of income, the worst we have to face is boredom and loneliness. But for those who are losing paychecks, unable to make rent, unable to find customers, unable to pay utility bills, living precarious existences in the informal economies that support vast sectors of humanity—it is true that recessions, in addition to viruses, take lives.

Errata and Marginalia 012: Trelawny

Edward Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 2000), first published 1858. 

One didn't pick up a copy of Edward Trelawny's memoirs of his time spent with Shelley and Byron because one thought it would have something to tell us about our present coronavirus-dominated existence. And yet that is what one finds there—perhaps because it is what one would find anywhere, with covid on the brain.

All I can say is that mandatory quarantines play a surprisingly large role in Trelawny's iconic account of Shelley's demise—and, in the author's telling, may even have caused or hastened the poet's untimely death.

Journal of a plague year (or week, at any rate)

Obviously with the coronavirus situation we are all confronting in new ways the facts of our mortality—and, less dramatically perhaps, the impermanence of things. Most of us will survive this pandemic. We will all eventually emerge from our various states of quarantine, social distancing, remote working, etc. But the world we come back to may not be the same.

There are obviously any number of horrific ways in which this may prove to be the case. But, selfishly and stupidly perhaps, my thoughts along these lines tend for the moment to fasten onto one bite-sized and manageable idea: used book stores. Will they still be there, when all of this is over?

A Dance to the Music of the News Cycle

Homage to Poussin

Stigma and Genius

Is it just the sheerest romanticism - this old notion that the artist and the stigma go together - that where one finds one, one will soon enough find the other? It is probably just a hallmark of the literature of consolation. But it impresses itself upon the receptive mentality nonetheless. Byron with his clubfoot. Flaubert with his epilepsy. Swift with his mysterious dizzy and giddy spells. And there is if anything the even longer list of those artists whose personal lives marked them out as sexually ambiguous, counter-normative, "queer." Come to think of it, the three just named could be fitted under that heading as well, giving it an expansive reading. Then there is Tchaikovsky, Forster, Gide, Leonardo, Hart Crane, and on and on. And this is not even to mention the list of painters, writers, composers, etc. who have belonged to religious, ethnic, and national minorities within their own society.

Gymnopédie

When I was younger and used to fight against turning on the radio in various contexts, when it was proposed as a way to pass time and fill the silence, I was sometimes accused by friends of disliking music. This, however, was a misunderstanding of the situation. The truth has always been that I run either extremely hot or deathly cold on any specific piece of music. Many bore me. When one does move me, however, it grasps me unspeakably. I will be able to think of little else the rest of the day. My feelings will have been entirely waylaid and held prisoner by a single tune.

Listening to music, therefore, is for me an enterprise fraught with emotional danger. It is very difficult for me to find anything, therefore, that I can safely trust will be "easy listening."

Errata and Marginalia 011: Glendinning

Victoria Glendinning, Jonathan Swift: A Portrait (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,  1998)

One wants very much to make an idol of Jonathan Swift. He has come down to us as a relentless opponent of cruelty, a merciless teller of hard truths, a "champion of liberty"—as the translation of his Latin epitaph puts it—and so on. Besides, he is so very much myself, is he not? His life is among the few in history that has touched so directly and impressively on church, state, and the art of letters—the three domains around which my own obsessions gather (i.e., religion, politics, literature). 

He gives us all hope that you can spend a few short years close to the heart of policymaking, dine out on it for years (though there is a self-deprecating passage cited in the present volume in which he addresses how quickly people start to doubt that he ever was as important a person as he claims), and then be cast back into clerical obscurity— and nevertheless still join the ranks of the immortals through the power of the pen. He is polemicist, prophet, policy analyst, muckraker—in short, all the things I want to be.