Easter Eggs 003: Williams

A series dedicated to the strange and interesting things that can be uncovered by closely reading books. 

Easter Eggs 002: Bell

A series dedicated to the strange and interesting things that can be uncovered by closely reading books. 

From Julian Bell's Van Gogh: A Power Seething:

Easter Eggs 001: Theroux

A series dedicated to the strange and interesting things that can be uncovered by closely reading books. 

From Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania:

A Poem

Reading biographies
  Of famous people
    It's like, wow
      Who didn't have syphilis?

If Trump had stabbed their mothers...

Last week, we watched with horror the spread of a bizarre and inexplicable contagion—and it was not the coronavirus itself. Somehow, in spite of all evidence and reason, Trump's approval rating for his handling of the COVID-19 crisis was trending up!

Since that time, the rate of infection of this social delusion has stabilized. People seem to have remembered that they dislike Trump, and his approval rating has started to move back toward where it was pre-crisis (though it's certainly not evident that he's losing support, on net). As a friend put it to me in an email: "There are two curves I'm watching right now... thankfully this one's finally starting to bend down."

Transcending Death

Walking outside the other day to fetch a take-out dinner from a place where the employees were all wearing masks and gloves, dodging as I went every other human being I could spot, usually by crossing over to the other sidewalk whenever I saw them coming from a block away, and holding my breath whenever there seemed a possibility of our sharing air, however fleetingly, I passed a local meditation center with a message on its road-side pulpit. "Transending Death" it said. It was missing a "c" but I took its point. The message was timely.

Without overdramatizing my own relatively privileged experience of the pandemic, in which I have so far been insulated from the worst losses many people are feeling, it is nonetheless safe to say that mortality has been somewhat more prevalent in all our minds in recent weeks than it was before. A friend was recently talking to me over video chat, and he declared, with semi-seriousness, "If I die from coronavirus I want you to be my literary executor." I instantly replied that he must be mine in turn.