Pandemic’s Path
A conversation with the journalist Laurie Garrett about the coronavirus pandemic. Listen at 2 pm today or anytime at our site.
Laurie Garrett is the Pulitzer-winning journalist who over decades has acquired keen insight into pandemics and our responses to them. Her prophetic book, The Coming Plague, is both a chronicle of pandemics in the twentieth century and a warning of the worsening conditions to come (and that have since overrun humanity). That book was published in 1994. Now she’s trying to bring similar lucidity to the coronavirus crisis as it immobilizes the U.S. and is projected to kill over 100,000 here (it’s been estimated that there would actually be over a million deaths without the mitigation efforts such as those we’re now making).
Among the questions prompted lately: why is the pandemic worse in the U.S. than in so many other places? Why did we react so slowly? We’re notoriously the country of climate change skeptics and Wall Street interests; perhaps that culture of climate change denialism sustained coronavirus-skepticism or -denialism.There was, in any case, a significant culture of corona-skepticism that included the president, who until recently compared the virus to seasonal influenza. It wasn’t long ago that skeptics in the U.S. even questioned whether the coronavirus fatality rate would be somehow lower than seasonal flu. Fast forward about two weeks: 630 people died in New York yesterday, due to coronavirus. In just a few weeks, coronavirus has killed over 3,500 people there, where COVID fatalities will at this rate surpass quickly all of New York State’s influenza fatalities in an entire typical year.
All of this is to say that we’re long overdue to listen to Laurie Garrett, who’s been trying to warn us about the threat of pandemics for decades. She saw something developing early:
I’m always paying attention, trying to see what’s going on. And we started getting rumors before Christmas out of Wuhan of, some kind of an incident, some kind of disease. There’s certain services now that didn’t exist back when I started doing all this that track these things. One of them is called ProMED and it’s run by the Federation of American Scientists, and they track media reports and social media to see what rumors are flying that may be relevant. And they were all over this Wuhan thing.
They seemed to see quite a number of claims that there were people with an unusual pneumonia. Well, the last time we had a really serious, unusual pneumonia was SARS . . . And then I’d gone back and looked at what happened with SARS in Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore. So I was very immediately tuned in. If this is SARS we have a real problem on our hands.
But even when the U.S. became generally aware of what was happening, as the president reversed himself and acknowledged that we are dealing with something significantly worse than influenza, we still have a system that allows for breakdown:
Unlike our counterparts in, say, the UK or in Canada or in France or in China or in Japan, or pick any country you wish, our federal government has limited authority. Now, what do we expect from our federal government in a crisis like this? Well, we expect them to adjudicate disputes between states and to recommend and set guidelines that all the states can start to follow, to assist states in receiving justly distributed supplies and to not pit the states against each other.
Trump has done just the opposite of that. He’s told every state you are all separate purchasers of masks, separate purchasers of ventilators. You set your own health standards. You decide what you want to do. And . . . based on whether or not I like your state and I like your governor . . . we may or may not provide you with assistance and supplies as requested.
Watch: Andrei Rublev
It seems that many of us isolatoes are watching Tiger King on Netflix, but if this time of fear and isolation and chilling news updates—a time that seems both frozen and terrifyingly not frozen—makes you want to reflect on time itself, or on spiritualism, or on the human capacity to do anything, you could subscribe to the streaming Criterion collection and watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, the masterpiece about the medieval Russian icon painter.
Andrei Rublev is about more than Andrei Rublev, though. Throughout the film, different creators, artists, or makers flow between spiritual abstraction or transcendence and material abjection. The contemplative back-and-forth between those two conditions pulses throughout Rublev, indicating a glorious, painful way in which our thinking and being extend and vary across time.
Tarkovsky is the author of the cinema manifesto Sculpting in Time, which does a lot to explain the artistic scheme in Andrei Rublev, in which scenes of delight and misery merge across frames, from one point in time to another, to create a peculiar cinematic melody. Here’s a quote from Tarkovsky’s book:
What is the essence of the director’s work? We could define it as sculpting in time. Just as a sculptor takes a lump of marble, and, inwardly conscious of the features of his finished piece, removes everything that is not part of it — so the film-maker, from a ‘lump of time’ made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film, what will prove to be integral to the cinematic image . . .
The point is to pick out and join together the bits of sequential fact, knowing, seeing and hearing precisely what lies between them and what kind of chain
holds them together. That is cinema . . . The cinema has to be free to pick out and join up facts taken from a ‘lump of time’ of any width or length. Nor do I think that it’s necessary to follow one particular person. On the screen the logic of a person’s behaviour can transfer into the rationale of quite different — apparently irrelevant — facts and phenomena, and the person you started with can vanish from the screen, replaced by something quite different, if that is what is required by the author’s guiding principle . . .Cinema is capable of operating with any fact diffused in time . . .
Listen: Drone music
You’ve watched Andrei Rublev, and now you’re still inside, looking for more works of meditative art. It may be time to seek out musical options. Hearing a sustained sound — drone music — can feel like staring at a monochromatic field without form, or like walking into a James Turrell room that’s lit in a predominant color, whose subtle gradations become a landscape that’s both simple and suggestive of variation-in-uniformity that might emanate far beyond that Turrell room.
This encompassing, simplified focus on sensory experience can comfort, and it can also transport. Maybe, while stuck at home, you might want to experiment with listening to drone music on good headphones.
There are a lot of options. There’s Pauline Oliveros:
And drone music goes back in history much further than this. From The Atlantic:
What we now call “drone music” long predates the word drone. Aboriginal customs on many continents centered around a drone: a sustained, hypnotic pitch that channels something powerful and possibly divine. The Australian didgeridoo, now the provenance of stoners and drum circles, is the best-known example, but Japanese Gagaku, Scottish bagpipe music, and arguably even western Europe’s sacred organum center themselves around a supported sine wave.
Read: Emily Gould’s PERFECT TUNES
For our Patreon subscribers, producer Adam Colman has begun interviewing writers on what books and writing might do or not do in a time of intense social isolation. He’s talking to people by Skype, by Zoom, by phone, by whatever will work. Next up will be Emily Gould, whose new novel is Perfect Tunes.
From Bookforum:
In the past twelve years, Gould has achieved plenty on her own terms, including cofounding the vital (recently defunct) literary imprint Emily Books, which published the likes of Jade Sharma, Barbara Browning, and Nell Zink. Perfect Tunes suggests that Gould has learned something from these uncompromising women about the importance of female self-expression in a world that still too often devalues it.
This week’s ephemeral library:
Dickens and Orwell: which way will we go? Remnick on New York without New Yorkers. Hoberman on films to watch at home. The NYT’s list of the 30 best International TV shows of the decade. A Bolero flashmob, WaPo’s investigation: The U.S.Was Beset y Denial and Dysfunction as the Coronavirus Raged. Michael Lewis on the Coronavirus Smell Test. An Amazon hack that helps indie bookstores. Bob Dylan’s latest tune. And here’s two from our Sinologist friend Geremie Barme: a fantastic reading of the Chinese folk tale “The Stone Monkey”: and an essay by his friend Yangyang Cheng: Of the Virus and God, Orange Peels and the Party
MM: And before we go…we hope you’re supporting all your favorite shows and pods, and we hope you’ll include us. This newsletter, which Adam Colman has mostly taken over, is full of great quarantine diversions. We follow all of his suggestions!
Til next week, be well!
Your OS Quarantinos!
