. . . . So much going on, with medical appointments, getting papers notarized, strategizing for a Big Project in the fall, continuing to do production work on the Cuban religious ceremonies and rituals, getting items to make our incarceration rather more comfortable and organized, my phone dying, trying to get the new one activated, which has culminated in our decision to change services (I still have my old 212 number, though I am clueless as to how to use this new one) and ordering me a new computer, which will provide even more fun than my new phone.
A lot of of this has meant Going Out Into Places That Have Other People Present. At the moment NYC still seems to be doing fairly well with the rate of cases and deaths -- though for how much longer as outsiders and so many right here refuse to follow safety protocols at all. Though the Governor has been forced to shut down some places and even pull their liquor licenses as the gatherings were utterly out of control.
So we've been trying to catch up with all the medical check-ups and treatments that got put on hold for so long. I keep feeling this month has been the interregnum of Covid-19 spread in NYC, so we must rush to cram in as much preparation and prevention as possible.
Most of all, we've been working out the protocols and travel for our anniversary party on Saturday. Which will be in the courtyard of uptown friends and include two other people besides our hosts and ourselves -- the recommended maximum of a gathering even outside. They are providing the lite meal. We can enter and go directly to a bathroom to disinfect and wash, and from there a few more steps and we're outside. There will be fans sitting about as well. It will be the first time for us all to be looking on faces that aren't the same faces (presumably masked for at least part of it!) we've been looking at 24/7 since March. That's a party. A real one. O my!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As it has been since 2016, France and her history, prehistoric, Celtic, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance to the present is my real escape. The escape during this interregnum as been the Chief Bruno series by Martin Walker, set in and around Saint-Denis, a small semi-fictional town in the Dordogne of France's Périgord. This region has been host to both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, the Celts, the Romans, the Basques, the Catalans, the Goths, even the Merovingians (though they didn't penetrate meaningfully the south of Gaul, as they did the north and midi). This is the region honey combed with caves, some of which contain prehistoric art, such as in the stunning Lascaux. All this history enters into the series at some point, existing simultaneously with more recent history of WWI, the Resistance of WWII, and what is going on right now, whether the international monerd shenanigans of the wine and real estate corporations, PETA attacks on farmers in order to force France from the making and selling of foie gras -- anciently the cheap, dependable, filling meal of the region's poor farmers and a usual addition to every one else's meals, the theft of antiques, racial and immigration and religious questions. Whatever the contemporary focus is is though, murder is at the fore.
Frequently, Bruno reflects with great satisfaction that he is living where family groups have been successfully living longer than anywhere else in Europe. Thus it is to be expected the people there grow and cook the best food and make the best wine. He loves his town and his life there with an ensemble of equally talented and decent human beings who all know and respect and enjoy each other -- and let us not forget the animals. Like food and wine, animals are all through these books to books' greater delights.
Last night reading along in The Resistance Man I speculated on a Chief Bruno novel of St-Denis and Covid-19. I bet it would be child's play for Martin Walker to pull that one out -- it would work too, in a way that doing a Covid-19 installment for most long established series just, well, cannot. For one thing, Martin, as mentioned, has various strands of the past constantly twining about what is happening in the present of each novel. He fills the new reader in on the past of Bruno and the other characters too, if the reader is not beginning the Brunos at the beginning. He's skilled at 'bridge writing' then, which again not all writers are.
So far the series has 19 entries, at least two of which are Occasional short stories. They are short, and Walker writes fast -- a book a year in this series, starting in 2008 with Bruno, Chief of Police / Death in the Dordogne, the most recent, this year, A Shooting at Chateau Rock. I'm finishing off my 9th Chief Bruno tale tonight, having begun reading this series, at the very end of June.
We continue reading John Quincy Adams's Diaries. We are nearly finished, which has me so upset, because this means JQ will be dead and there will be no more from this entirely unique figure and voice who witnessed, lived through and made this nation's history for his entire life. Every time I think of this being finished I start to cry. Ya, I know. But there it is. So I am forcing postponement of The End.
So currently we're reading aloud Fordlandia: The Failure of Ford's Jungle Utopia (2009) by Greg Grandin. (BTW, if you haven't yet read Greg's The End of the Myth (2019), do it now!)
Fordlandia goes along beautifully too, with the second and third volumes of Edmund Morris's biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex (2001) and Colonel Roosevelt (2011),
as well as The River of Doubt:Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey (2005) by Candice Millard. Both Roosevelt and his son barely escaped death in the Amazon on this final Teddy's Excellent Adventure.
Ford on the other hand, really did die, or at least spectacularly fail, in the Amazon -- another capitalist, USian, racist fantasy that smashed against a reality he never even noticed in his meticulous planning. Just like Roosevelt's hubris, refusing to heed anyone's warnings.
These days, others are running off the cliff just the same way, right this minute, alas, alas, alas. They are taking us, who do heed the warnings, with them. Or more likely, somehow, protected by their wealth, power and lies, they survive. But we don't. Certainly the USA won't.
We never learn.
A lot of of this has meant Going Out Into Places That Have Other People Present. At the moment NYC still seems to be doing fairly well with the rate of cases and deaths -- though for how much longer as outsiders and so many right here refuse to follow safety protocols at all. Though the Governor has been forced to shut down some places and even pull their liquor licenses as the gatherings were utterly out of control.
So we've been trying to catch up with all the medical check-ups and treatments that got put on hold for so long. I keep feeling this month has been the interregnum of Covid-19 spread in NYC, so we must rush to cram in as much preparation and prevention as possible.
Most of all, we've been working out the protocols and travel for our anniversary party on Saturday. Which will be in the courtyard of uptown friends and include two other people besides our hosts and ourselves -- the recommended maximum of a gathering even outside. They are providing the lite meal. We can enter and go directly to a bathroom to disinfect and wash, and from there a few more steps and we're outside. There will be fans sitting about as well. It will be the first time for us all to be looking on faces that aren't the same faces (presumably masked for at least part of it!) we've been looking at 24/7 since March. That's a party. A real one. O my!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As it has been since 2016, France and her history, prehistoric, Celtic, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance to the present is my real escape. The escape during this interregnum as been the Chief Bruno series by Martin Walker, set in and around Saint-Denis, a small semi-fictional town in the Dordogne of France's Périgord. This region has been host to both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, the Celts, the Romans, the Basques, the Catalans, the Goths, even the Merovingians (though they didn't penetrate meaningfully the south of Gaul, as they did the north and midi). This is the region honey combed with caves, some of which contain prehistoric art, such as in the stunning Lascaux. All this history enters into the series at some point, existing simultaneously with more recent history of WWI, the Resistance of WWII, and what is going on right now, whether the international monerd shenanigans of the wine and real estate corporations, PETA attacks on farmers in order to force France from the making and selling of foie gras -- anciently the cheap, dependable, filling meal of the region's poor farmers and a usual addition to every one else's meals, the theft of antiques, racial and immigration and religious questions. Whatever the contemporary focus is is though, murder is at the fore.
Frequently, Bruno reflects with great satisfaction that he is living where family groups have been successfully living longer than anywhere else in Europe. Thus it is to be expected the people there grow and cook the best food and make the best wine. He loves his town and his life there with an ensemble of equally talented and decent human beings who all know and respect and enjoy each other -- and let us not forget the animals. Like food and wine, animals are all through these books to books' greater delights.
Last night reading along in The Resistance Man I speculated on a Chief Bruno novel of St-Denis and Covid-19. I bet it would be child's play for Martin Walker to pull that one out -- it would work too, in a way that doing a Covid-19 installment for most long established series just, well, cannot. For one thing, Martin, as mentioned, has various strands of the past constantly twining about what is happening in the present of each novel. He fills the new reader in on the past of Bruno and the other characters too, if the reader is not beginning the Brunos at the beginning. He's skilled at 'bridge writing' then, which again not all writers are.
So far the series has 19 entries, at least two of which are Occasional short stories. They are short, and Walker writes fast -- a book a year in this series, starting in 2008 with Bruno, Chief of Police / Death in the Dordogne, the most recent, this year, A Shooting at Chateau Rock. I'm finishing off my 9th Chief Bruno tale tonight, having begun reading this series, at the very end of June.
We continue reading John Quincy Adams's Diaries. We are nearly finished, which has me so upset, because this means JQ will be dead and there will be no more from this entirely unique figure and voice who witnessed, lived through and made this nation's history for his entire life. Every time I think of this being finished I start to cry. Ya, I know. But there it is. So I am forcing postponement of The End.
 |
| Fordlandia |
Fordlandia goes along beautifully too, with the second and third volumes of Edmund Morris's biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex (2001) and Colonel Roosevelt (2011),
as well as The River of Doubt:Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey (2005) by Candice Millard. Both Roosevelt and his son barely escaped death in the Amazon on this final Teddy's Excellent Adventure.
Ford on the other hand, really did die, or at least spectacularly fail, in the Amazon -- another capitalist, USian, racist fantasy that smashed against a reality he never even noticed in his meticulous planning. Just like Roosevelt's hubris, refusing to heed anyone's warnings.
These days, others are running off the cliff just the same way, right this minute, alas, alas, alas. They are taking us, who do heed the warnings, with them. Or more likely, somehow, protected by their wealth, power and lies, they survive. But we don't. Certainly the USA won't.
We never learn.
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