Like Her, He Really Doesn't Care Do U

     . . . .Response to a fool who thinks all fast food places should be closed even for pick-up, so that during this terrible economic catastrophe, everyone would be forced to buy groceries in a supermarket and cook from scratch, because, you know, cheaper and more healthy, and keep those unhealthy people at home and not infecting others:

The real New York City, in which I live, includes very many people simple have no access to kitchens (or even beds), internet and any storage at all. I cook most days, and a lot of days most of the day, and I do it from scratch from the various food suppliers that I am so fortunate to have within walking distance, and many of them of high quality. I have hardly any room to cook, but I do have a stove-oven, I have a sink and running water. I do really amazing, if I do say so myself. I have been doing this and nothing else since the beginning of March.

But I know a lot of people who do not have anywhere to cook at all, no stove, no oven, no sink. Many others have physical and emotional challenges that prevent them from cooking. Please, what can't you understand about that? Why do you think I'm cooking regularly for so many people, not just us?

That we should have organized all this a lot differently at the very start of the pandemic, nobody's going to argue with you about that. But we didn't, and shoggoth and all his monsters from the hell dimensions did not even care, much less want to alleviate or prevent suffering. They didn't want to do anything about control and confining it. Much less help the ever growing numbers of people who desperately need help of every kind.  For the ilks of shoggoth, the suffering is always the point. Why are you, who say you help the disadvantaged, then aligning yourself with these?

This afternoon in this covid-laden restaurant city, across the street, I saw a very poor old black man, begging, shuffling his feet in rhythm to the rhythm he had going by shaking a paper cup that held a few coins. Actually that rhythm was pretty sharp. He was thin, thin, thin, He had a mask – over -- which which he was scatting and alternately making vocal beats, according to the rhythm of his feet and his cup with a few coins. I had on my medical gloves and mask. I got out a $10 bill and reached far over to give it to him.  This should not be, but it is, everywhere.  And not only in New York City, but in your own city.

That you characterize yourself as a caring, compassionate person who tries to help, yet insist such living conditions don't exist, or if they do, only in NYC, and not in your own, only proves how little you know about the people you say you helping. It also says that like shoggoth's wife, "I don't really care do u." If you really cared, you would have known for many decades already that people live like this.

These fellow NYers should break our hearts.

 

Covid-19 Vaccination(s) Comng Soon To An Undisclosed Location Near You! / Reading Wednesday

      . . . .  Governor announced vaccine arrival in our state  by December 15th, so surely to all the other states too?

The sooner the better, but there's a really long time to go, a really long time.  Also, recall, it seems no matter which Big Pharma created the vaccine one is to receive, two shots are necessary to be protected (nobody knows for how long the protection will be effective, but most likely we'll have to do this at least every 12 months).

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced today that New York's first Pfizer vaccine delivery is expected to come on December 15th, and will be enough doses for 170,000 New Yorkers. [Which means, since each vaccination to be effective must be administered twice, for about 85,000 NYers.]

A second round of 170,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which will constitute the second dosage for those designated people, will arrive 21 days later. The state is expecting additional allocations of the Pfizer vaccine, as well as the Moderna vaccine, later in the month or in early January as well.

Cuomo added that by the end of December, the Trump administration suggests there will be enough to vaccinate another 20 million people with two dosages across the country, making up 6% of the population of the United States.

Per CDC recommendations, New York's vaccination program will prioritize healthcare workers and residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities in phase one. There are approximately 85,000 nursing home residents and 130,000 nursing home staff members in New York, so the first round of vaccines will not cover all of those people. Cuomo hopes that the second round of vaccines later in the month will at least cover that entire group of 210,000+ people....

Keep in mind, please, this date is for arrival of vaccine -- though since it seems necessary it needs to be kept super-cold, They should probably being going to work immediately.

But will they?

 So it not only does distribution mean jabbing people, but paperwork so they can be jabbed three weeks? two weeks? later, again.  Records must be kept!  Recall, my state is still counting ballots from the election last month.  Among the multiple, well, to be honest, uncounted, problems -- piles of ballots from who knows where because the yellow stickies fell off.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It's Reading Wednesday Somebody/ies Say!  Here is a novel I would recommend for those who are interested in King Arthur and historical fiction set during the Dark Ages.  (Which of course I am interested because so little has been known about these years, but, thanks to archeaology and relentless scholarship, we discover a little more history all the time.

The Lost Queen (2018) was the first installment in Signe Pike's projected trilogy.  The Forgotten Kingdom (2020) is the trilogy's middle volume, and writer's second novel. Unlike many middle volumes, this one is more compelling in terms of both character and action, than the first one.  The writer writes vivid descriptions of the natural world of the setting -- as much as possible she's visited her sites, and what remains of them. The result is that I felt I was seeing what the characters are described as seeing. It is composed around the Arthurian origin mythologies that are centered location-wise in what we now call Scotland -- north of The Wall. The chronology is the later 6th century; the Romans are gone, Angles are 'invading', and to my personal historic thinking, Europe and England already have had nearly a century of the Dark Ages.* The Christian persecutions of the Old Religions in the region has been well underway for decades already. Considering this isn't the Victorian re-imagining of the age, as in Idylls of the King, well, yes, this books does contain brutal, bloody, cruel and abusive scenes.  It wouldn't be right if it did not.  Some victims survive, some do not, and others survive but are forever affected. The writer has good instincts, to do justice, but not dwell or revel.  

*    Why do I persist in calling the eras from late in the 5th Century to maybe the 9th Century and Charlemagne, the Dark Ages? It'such an old-fashioned way to view history, mostly considered out of date for any up to date medieval historian -- rather like maintaining the War of the Rebellion of the USA's 19th century wasn't caused by the issue of slavery, or that Rome 'fell' in the 5th century.  I keep calling these years the Dark Ages  because it was in the 5th century that Christianity became definitively official state religion of Rome, East as well as West, the plagues and famines which came relentlessly, until quite some time later, by which time the 'classical' or 'pagan' worlds had been erased for practical purposes, i.e. official, state, political, legal, religious monopoly by the Church., and things started to get crazy due to Christians determing intolerance of anything not determined by authority -- which led to many slaughters of each other, as well as of 'pagans and all the other Others.

These two Romes did build out from all the classical Roman political and administrative structures -- thus to my mind Rome didn't fall either, buy that didn't stop the Dark Ages of plagues, wars, famines and many other catastrophes. What was left was a shell within which cruel intolerance festered -- kind of like the restaurants here that now rule the streets -- they have been built out of the far more stable structures of the indoor restaurants.  Indeed, they have come to be called, "Streeteateries," (even a step down from 'eateries,' a designation NY food reviewers are fond of) --  and are hit by cars -- frequently.  Still as that was still Rome, people still eat and drink in these flimsy pretenses of fine dining.

The Mayor Infuriates A Whole Lot of People

     . . . . The mayor's already taken away ALL the sidewalks from pedestrians for the sake of the goddamned bars and restaurants and churches.  And I do mean all of the sidewalks, and all the sidewalk -- at most we're allowed about 8 inches to walk through blocks and blocks of maskless spewing assholes.  As of this last weekend, additionally, Christmas tree markets stands have taken over the last sidewalk that wasn't now a restaurant.  We can't even go out for exercise as it is! Or to stand or sit outside to make phone calls without driving mad the person who has to hear it. El V's got a medical appointment on Friday.  To get there he has to walk through blocks and blocks and blocks of restaurants on the sidewalks filled with people not wearing masks, seated only inches from where he must walk -- for there is nowhere else to go, except the bumper to bumper street, where the cars rub right up against the so-called walls of these sheds. (The number of cars crashing into these places is rising steadily too, btw.)

Because the mayor will not close the bars and restaurants -- the rest of have suffer further.  As if keeping us indoors while leaving the bars and restaurants and gyms and churches OPEN and filled with assholes without masks will change a goddamned thing about the relentless, increasing numbers and spread. The governor's already begging retired medical professionals to come back to work.

With COVID surging and ICUs filling up, the de Blasio administration is urging older New Yorkers and people with underlying health problems to stay home as much as possible.

A Tuesday advisory from city Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi says they, their household members and caregivers should stay at home “except … to travel to work or school, or for essential purposes including medical care, grocery shopping or pharmacy necessities.”

There is only a sliver semi-positive news to extract for our sorts from these latest updates about the spread of NYC's infection. The only member of our pod now, B, lives alone. El V and I,  we're pretty good, living only with each other -- as opposed to a family of parents and teenagers and middle schoolers.

NYC Health Department Study Identifies Household Contact And Gatherings Of 10 Or More As Major Factors In Virus Transmission - 

The New York City Department of Health has conducted a large-scale study of New Yorkers that shows household contact and gatherings of 10 or more people as the two main drivers of coronavirus.

The data about household infections also underscores the risks and challenges of controlling the virus in a dense city where many residents live in tightly packed quarters either with family members or roommates.

"This is a large part of the spread that we're seeing," Chokshi said. "It also means there's something to be done about it, which is really emphasizing the importance of safe separation."

This means that we need to wear masks and keep a certain Distance, and keep meetings outside brief, again, when we and B do see each other. Sigh. I'd already moved to that protocol last week, if not sooner. Yet, reading these things, it breaks my heart, what it really means personally for so many of us.  All because the mayor and the real estate mafia refuses to shut down the bars and restaurants. because people will not do it, not even for a few months, even though it means the chances of every single one of getting seriously ill or dead.

As Dr. Birx and Fauci have told us -- if a person traveled and met people over the Thanksgiving weekend that person encountered someone who is infect.  Not -- may have met, may have encountered someone positive -- but has encountered someone who was infected.  Period.  But hey who cares when there is gorging on pie to be done!  We're Amurricans and it's our right to put the entire world at risk of death so we can eat pie! With people we often don't even like particularly!  The American way!  We're  #1! Yay!

This species is too stupid to survive.

And yet, I spent four hours making a pea soup from scratch (even longer if taken into account was being mindful last night of putting the dried peas to soak), and washing dishes, drying dishes, putting away dishes, over and over, and cleaning the kitchen floor several times as things spilled, got tracked in etc., and clearning all the appliances.  I didn't get to the workout until after 3.  By the time all the Things (computers) were returned and set-up again in their proper places, by the time I bathed, washed and dried hair,  dressed and the rest -- good lordessa -- it was 7. But trust me, I was furious the entire 7 hours!

'Tis the Holiday Season, Yes?

      . . . . El V walked out for three hours; I worked out at home.  Fairly soon, the winter will shorten these walks.  Not yet though; gonna be warmish again tomorrow, with a lot of rain and wind due the storm coming up out the South and the Gulf, which will bring a lot of snow and wind, They Say, west of us, all the way up into Maine. Thinking of making butternut squash soup for tomorrow as an antidote to the clammy feel of an all-day rain on the verge of December.

Schools Open! No Closed! No! Open -- Wait, Closed! Ooops, Open Again!  the mayor keeps playing covid-19 ping pong with NYC's public schools.

In yet another NY Public School volte face, tomorrow, de Blasio again declared Back to Physical School. He couldn’t maintain keeping restaurants, churches, gyms etc. open when he closed the schools. But all the shoggoth real estate gangs are his masters, so keeping bars and restaurants and big luxury shops open is what matters.

Keeping people from spreading the damned virus doesn't matter -- even when all the people who work in these shops and restaurants are sick -- then make the beyond over-worked, over-stretched, underpaid medical people sick, dead or burned out and just quitting. We’re up to the rates we were in May for cases, positives and hospitalizations, which will make a double, triple, quadruple leap when everyone comes back from Thanksgiving, They Say, as They have been warning since September and what happened with Labor Day.

This Thanksgiving week felt endless, not because one wasn't doing anything -- on the contrary. There is so much to do every day, and it never is finished, it seems. Which contributes to a sense of being driven, but without ever an end point gained, from when one can move to something else.  ... No finitum to be had?

Which is why people's dogs have become even more important to them? Dogs need to be walked several times a day, which does punctuate the day by getting out and moving, away from the endless procession of chores, work and other obligations.

Partly though this sense of never ending is due to the holiday $ea$on being ushered in -- the real e$tate emperor$ are determined the City is to $pend as it always has in re$taurant$ and $hopping and $ocialiazing.

Nevertheless, in the past, we have loved this annual interregnum in which we weren't so tightly tethered to deadlines and schedules, with instead a calendar marked with events social and relaxed – not professional. It was a bubble in the year, within which we sort of floated above the usual and mundane -- followed, since January 2015-2016, by Postmambo taking a group of Travelers to Cuba. But we are denied all of that  this year by way of a gang of evil thugs who have for four years sent an army to beat wrecking balls into the nation at every point as hard and completely as possible before January 20th, 2021, while keeping us imprisoned within a virulent pandemic and cynical changing the rules yet again -- de Blasio even, has nothing on their sorts.

Yes, I've begun watching BBC1- PBS’s The Rise of the Nazis, the political history of  Hitler and the nazi party take over Austria and Germany (there are serious criticisms as to both its talking heads and some of its claims). It happened very fast, which I hadn’t quite realized -- I thought it took about ten years. The very first lines of the first episode tell us "In 1930 Germany was democracy, had a free press and was recovering economically. Within four years all that was gone, and the first concentration camps had prisoners." We literally see blood and violence throwing up in the streets and people being herded at gunpoint out of their homes and jobs, taken away.

I kind of knew all this Before.  But prior to these last four years, never had this knowledge felt urgent, threatening and filled with the understanding that this is our last chance to turn back our own version, emerged out of what used to be the democracy of the United States of America, from setting the entire world on fire as on September 1st, 1939.

Yet, here we are, thinking o yes, tomorrow I can dash to Mille-Feuille and get one of 

their heavenly baguettes to go with the squash soup. Can there be greater cognitive dissonance than fear of white supremacist, anti-women, neo nazism in company with a pandemic determined upon the same evil, deliberately cruel, destruction of climate, economy, infrastructure and genocides of all kinds, with -- "O, I can get a genuine French baguette -- even croissants if I want -- made by genuine French people"?

Yes, our lives are generally surreal now, completed the day after Thanksgiving by an acre of evergreens set up as a Christmas Tree market on what had been the only uncolonized-by-restaurants sidewalk block within miles of us. All that's left of that now is a bare 8 inches for the pedestrian to squeeze through.

Thanksgiving TV Dinner

      . . . .The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, "Pangs". from season 4, the Thanksgiving episode, of course.  Watched it last night after our really successful dinner a deux.  Moroccan Lamb Pilaf will have to become a permanent part of the meal repetoire.

“Pangs”  has been one of my favorite Buffy episodes all along.  It still remains very good – and, making it all the more pertinent watching this Thanksgiving, "Pangs" includes ‘plague.’ Or syphilis.  Something microbial that kills released by the Native sorcerer who was executed by Spaniards of California's Mission era. Of course the character infected is perennial butt, Xander. But it does get in history, which is another reason this has always been  one of my favorite episodes.

The episode gets in everything that people dream to be the Traditional Family Thanksgiving they want it to be, to how Thanksgiving generally works in reality, when it is family-centered: the insufferable instruction from the newly clued in kid home from college for the holiday, political arguments about history, while Mom, determined to save her perfect Thanksgiving with all the people at the table behaving just as she wants them to. Which means she manages to find a place for the unexpected guest but squeezes a place for that guest at the table anyway.

This is the Buffy family, so Things Untoward Happen. But what's always been most notable for me in this episode, which is ultimately about family, was who wasn’t present at this meal.  Riley, who’d gone home to Iowa for his Saturday Evening Post  cover traditional country Thanksgiving with great big family.

Thus it is equally notable as to who was there, for Buffy's Thanksgiving.   Spike – who had nothing to eat on this day of gorging.  But he was there, as he was even through the very end, and on into the Angel universe. Gads Marsters plays his character so very well throughout all his permutations.  What's even more impressive is at this time no one involved with the series could know there was a season 6, much less what was going to happen in season 6 -- or season 7.  To me this has been a turning point episode in the Buffy verse.

This is also, in spite of Big Matters, one of the funnier episodes, with Buffy as Mom who is going to have Thanksgiving as she pictures it or kill everyone trying, and Giles as reluctant Dad who has no choice but to go down before Bulldozer Thanksgiving Buffy.  Marsters contributes a great deal to the comedy.

I haven't watched any Buffy in years, but I easily could get sucked back into the Buffy verse.  I have the complete boxed set of seasons sitting right here, to hand, by the dvd player.

~~~~~~~~~

More new books arrived today. We are hunkered now, isolating as much as possible. Thus all the phone calls made and received from friends all over who are in the same situation were so precious.  We talked, we zoomed, we emailed.  We're all determined to make through to the other side.  So we all stayed home yesterday and ate by ourselves. 

Read, Watch, Eat: Thanksgiving 2020

      . . . . Ordered a newly published book today, first in quite a while; I'd put a hold on it from the NYPL, but it is still on order and there are 18 holds ahead of mine, so I gave in to temptation: The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams by David S. Brown.

It's a harsh assessment --

The Last American Aristocrat,” a new biography by David S. Brown, “reveals how dynastic burden shaped the personality and career of the brilliant, bitter and thoroughly unlikable man who brought the prominence of the Adams family, and expectations for the endurance of political legacies, to an ignominious end.

Plus, how strongly Henry Adams despised and resented President Grant! Gore Vidal went right along with that, lifting (almost) entire paragraphs from Adams's presentation of Grant, in his novel, 1876.  (Yes, Henry and Gore shared unlimited reservoirs of vitriole, malice and envy of others' successes.)

This pairs nicely with the just finished, frustrating, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders At the Helm of American Foreign Policy (2016) by Marthew Karp.  Karp quotes Adams frequently throughout. 

Brown's Last Aristocrat will go equally well with my most recent biography of a 19th century New England aristocrat, The Civil Wars of Juliet Ward Howe (2016) by Elaine Showalter.  Never mind that Julia Ward was from New York City, known both as "the Diva" and "the Belle" of her generation of wealthy heiresses.  She foolishly married Samuel Gridley Howe, a Bostonian, and suffered for that until he died. In fact, Howe didn't even live in Boston per se, but South Boston, surrounded by rough, laboring sorts, that was two and half miles away from anyone in their own social circles. Despite his intimate relationship with Charles Sumner, one of the most famous of Abolitionists, he didn't even like Julia participating in that movement. Already, during their honeymoon, Julia concluded Howe should have married Sumner, as "she" was more suited to him than she was.

Howe, an intimate of the intimate circles around Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which included Sumner, kept the future author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" fairly locked up in his school school quarters for his Perkins Institution, the first school for the blind and deaf in the US.  He believed with every fiber of his being that women were only wives and mothers, and had no desire for doing anything else except caring for her family -- and certainly no desire for sex or sexual feelings at all, much less a desire for personal fulfillment in work.  In fact, this much older husband, was remarkably like Julia's vastly wealthy banker father, whose more than handsome legacy to his daughter Howe busied himself in losing as fast as possible. Hawthorne and Longfellow, and Sumner too -- and so did William Wordsworth -- thought Julia was 'forward' and heartily disapproved of her having opinions and speaking them.

Julia's husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, was as wrong a husband for her -- or just about any woman as could be. He even (unlike Longfellow) objected to women using ether to escape the dreadful, prolonged agony of child birth. He was as wrong for Julia as Henry Adams was the wrong husband for Clover (and  would have been for just about any woman).  But Julia was of sterner stuff than Marian 'Clover' Hooper Adams.  Julia persisted.  She did not kill herself. She did become famous in the public sphere. and she outlived the appalling, Samuel Gridley Howe, with a reputation in U.S. history at least as well-known as his.

It's interesting, while the Longfellow biography I read earlier this year, was filled with so many loving, happy marriages in the circles around the poet, both these books feature deeply miserable, failed marriages.

~~~~~~~~~

When it comes to watching, some nights, as briefly as it happens in my dreams too, I soar and fly!  There are scenes in Nirvana In Fire episodes in which martial artists from the Pugilist World evoke what it must feel like for a human to fly -- that purposed weightlessness. This is as much a contrast with the scenes of Saraphina Pekkala flying in HBO's His Dark Materials, as we can get; Serafina straining to hold to her position, flying against the massive weight of air.  This is the best stuff in Nirvana In Fire; most of the productions scenes are pedestrian talking heads, in the way the BBC's early foray into historic, period drama was with I, Claudius.

I'm only up to episode 18 of 54. But at this point, the Turkish Ertugrul: Resurrection, has much more sophisticated, active cameras and a large variety of locations, many of them landscapes. The plotting is at least as intricate, but a lot more specific.  Nirvana In Fire can get claustrophobic at times.

~~~~~~~~

Busy days at home, trying to keep going, while we ascend upon wafts of hope, and then crash painfully again, smashed against the impermeable boulders of the idiocy of nearly half the nation's population when it comes to shoggoth and his equally cruel, determined to-destroy-the-country-and-its people, minions -- and the even larger portion of the nation's population determined that they are exempt from following guidelines and regulations, about covid-19 -- particularly about traveling, mingling, wearing masks and keeping Distance.  So many infected, hospitals and morgues overwhelmed, yet even otherwise smart people insist they will fly and drive across the country to, o, Minnesota, to spend the holiday weekend with their children, grandchildren, siblings and grandparents (including our own relatives). 

The white supremacist conspiracists and the flouting of Covid-19 sorts, merge with our state and city politicians who decided to lose the city yet another bunch of money by shutting down the public schools, but obeying the real estate moguls by leaving that travesty of  'outdoor' dining and restaurants OPEN. A construction with roof and ceiling, closed windows and walls and doors with heat lamps on the floor pumping out dry hot air is neither outdoors nor ventilated. Nor is it Distanced, as groups of 10 and more, without masks, dance to their own party around their 'own' table. Depressing. Distressing. Frightening.

We too are fighting off being depressed because for the first time in our lives we will not be spending this day with others whom we love, respect and admire, all of whom enjoy the company of each other socially and professionally.  But not possible this year.

Thus I spent a great deal of time fretting about dinner for tomorrow.  We are eating so well all the time.  What could I possibly come up with that we haven't done, if not frequently, still, not that long ago? Though it feels much longer, it hasn't even been a full year of Distance and constant anxiety and adjustment to this way of life, which starts with eating everything at home.  The stuffed refrigerator and freezer hasn't space for a turkey; the ten lb ones are running well over $50 (also, organic, free-ranged and local, so actually that's a good price, considering).  I like turkey but not $50 worth, not in These Times!

Ah ha! it came to me in the night: Moroccan CousCous Pilaf.  Have all the necessary ingredients including the almonds and pine nuts, lamb in the freezer, el V brought home fresh mint and parsley from the GG the other day.  I've never made this, though have enjoyed it in restaurants.  It will go well with bread, olives, salad and a bottle of a particularly nice Spanish wine that was stored away a couple of years ago.

Lost Empire's Lost Magic

      . . . . This morning, with tea, reading a London Review of Books's "Diverted Traffic" piece, was struck by this, as was the author:

Warren Hastings's Calcutta 1789

"... how little enduring fiction emanated from British India, despite its commanding hold on the imperial imagination. With the exception of Kipling, many novels about colonial India have fallen between the cracks: who reads Meadows Taylor or Flora Annie Steel now?"

-- Maya Jasanoff; "So Much for Staying Single" / LRB, Vol. 30 No. 6 · 20 / March 2008

However, that leaves out the most well known fiction* of all, out of the British Indian Empire, which, these days, I'd argue, is even better known than Kipling's, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. Though, strictly speaking, this fiction isn't 'about' India, but India and the scent of the far-off, the exotic, including the exotic right at home to the middle-class reader in the twilight of the British Empire, permeates The Secret Garden. Without India and the very idea of 'magic' Mary Lenox brings with her from India to Dickon's Yorkshire, this novel couldn't have exerted the spell upon generations of readers, which it still does, even now.

The magic of the British Isles' North in fiction -- has endured, from Sir Walter Scott, right to Ann Cleeves and beyond.

* Or would that be Paul Scott's The Jewel In the Crown, thanks to the BBC (1984)? Though those books were about the end of the Empire -- which Mary Lenox and Colin Craven would witness, while probably having lost a son or two to WWI, while one of them, if not both, may have succumbed to the Great Influenza.