The Five Books of Moses Nersesian

Arthur Nersesian's The Five Books of (Robert) Moses arrives in July!

"Bucket List" Books

According to The Guardian, "bucket list" novels have seen a surge in sales.

the knight of deliverance

“If the [virus] is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

~~ from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

Grey is the Color of Hope 5

"We made no attempts to reform them, we merely tried to understand them and their world. Vitebsky wrote that he was a thief 'by calling,' and would have been a thief in any country and any social class, 'even in America' (he thought of America as the epitome of well-being and legality)."

~~ from Grey is the Color of Hope by Irina Ratushinskaya

thank you, Alexander Chee

Part of the problem is that "the reading public" is likely unaware that even "successful" authors who have mainstream bookstore exposure may have extremely limited income from their writing and support themselves through some combination of adjunct teaching, freelance writing, and other gig-economy "opportunities." Authors are well represented among the millions who have lost their income and are navigating a "new normal" of heightened insecurity.

Grey is the Color of Hope 4

"Raya has very definite ideas about poets: she's married to one, after all, and it was her devotion to him that landed her in the camps. To her, poets are like small children who are incapable of looking after themselves. She is convinced that if food is not placed before them, they will forget to eat, or that if they are not forced to go to bed at a reasonable hour, they will sit up all night communing with their Muse. . . She was like a nursemaid to me in the years we spent together in the camp. Also, she liked my poetry, and we would spend hours reciting to each other; she would read her husband's poems, and I would read mine. . ."

~~ from Grey is the Color of Hope by Irina Ratushinskaya

we interrupt this gulag with a message from our virus

"In contrast to hand-washing and other personal measures, social distancing measures are not about individuals, they are about societies working in unison. These measures also take a long time to see the results. It is hard (even for me) to conceptualize how ‘one quick little get together’ can undermine the entire framework of a public health intervention, but it does. I promise you it does. I promise. I promise. I promise. You can’t cheat it. People are already itching to cheat on the social distancing precautions just a 'little'- a playdate, a haircut, or picking up a needless item at the store, etc. From a transmission dynamics standpoint, this very quickly recreates a highly connected social network that undermines all of the work the community has done so far."

Grey is the Color of Hope 3

"When everyone who is in any way connected with your imprisonment--from the supervising procurator through to the censor and the doctor--persists in lying day in, day out, you begin to feel as though you are in some huge lunatic asylum. The only difference is that it is the overseers who are psychopaths, who try to incorporate you into a hideous, contrived reality. Shalin's insistence that we do not exist is a case in point: 'There are no political prisoners in this camp,' he would aver. Yet at the same time, he and all his colleagues invariably referred to us as the 'politicals.' The pots in which our skilly was delivered from the kitchen had the words "Polit. Zone" marked on them with brown paint. And Shalin himself, in an attempt to make us see reason, would say: 'Everyone in the men's political zone wears identity tags, so why can't you!'"

~~ from Grey is the Color of Hope by Irina Ratushinskaya

Grey is the Color of Hope 2

"What a mixed bunch we are: a Catholic, a Pentecostal, several Orthodox, an unbeliever. . . later we were to be joined by a Baptist. Yet we were always deeply respectful of one another's convictions. And God did not turn His face away from our small patch of Mordovian soil."

~~ from Grey is the Color of Hope by Irina Ratushinskaya

A Fake F. Scott. . .

"Fitzgerald's words, now often featuring a GIF of a beating heart or a ray of sunshine over them, feel like a letter of hope sent a hundred years into the future. His dark humour as bars close and he stocks up on, 'red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and lord, if we need it, brandy', is the amusement we all need.

"The problem is that it isn't written by Fitzgerald, nor was it penned in 1920. The parody letter in fact first appeared a week ago on the humour website McSweeney's, written by Nick Farriella."

~~ from Olivia Ovenden at Esquire

Grey is the Color of Hope

"Natasha is from Leningrad. She is serving a sentence for producing a samizdat journal, Maria, which was devoted to feminist issues. The problems raised in this journal, such as the double workload of Soviet women--eight hours at work followed by five to six hours queuing for food, the horrors of communal kitchens, doing the entire family wash in a hand basin--were to appear in the official Soviet press also, but much later, in 1986. In 1982, when Natasha was arrested, talking about such matters was classed as 'anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.'"

~~ from Grey is the Color of Hope by Irina Ratushinskaya

in The New Yorker

Kate Folk, a Stegner Fellow and star of much more than literary twitter, has published her first story in The New Yorker. Although I'm out of articles and suffering under conditions of self-quarantine, I found the first three sentences of "Out There" to be engaging, and I wished that I could read more right away.

what passed for "normal". . .

"But my journey wasn’t just a financial awakening. I had learned about subsistence living in Arctic villages, and worked with a 74-year-old maintenance man who lived in his 1980 Chevy Suburban year-round. I began to bring into question what passed for “normal” down in the lower 48, especially when it often led to a lifetime of work, bills and Bed Bath & Beyond purchases. Out of debt, I felt for the first time that my life was my own, and that I could do whatever I wished with it."

~~ from "When Home is a Campus Parking Lot" by Ken Ilgunas

a pause in our programming for this message from our virus

"Even if there is virus in the inanimate environment, it's not going to jump off the seat and bite you in the ankle," says Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of medicine in Vanderbilt University's division of infectious diseases.

"You've got to touch it, and then touch your nose or your mouth. So it's those hands we have that are the important intermediary. And that's where I would put the emphasis," he said.

Or turn to Johns Hopkins for the latest statistics on Global Cases. . . 

The McCandless Mecca

I enjoyed The McCandless Mecca by Ken Ilgunas. It's not quite a novella, or not by yesterday's standards, but it includes the Ilgunas humor and thoughtfulness I remember well from Walden on Wheels. It certainly made me want to read Into the Wild, even if author Jon Krakauer has already rejected the conclusions he offered in that book. From Krakauer's article in The New Yorker, I enjoyed learning that Chris McCandless had Nikolai Gogol on hand during his final days:

Taped to the door was a note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol:

attention possible visitors.
s.o.s.
i need your help. i am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. i am all alone, this is no joke. in the name of god, please remain to save me. i am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. thank you,
chris mccandless
august ?

Mind of Winter

Donating a copy of Auggie's Revenge to the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt Library reminded me of a Penn undergrad finding Fight for Your Long Day and reading from it at a university event. It was a thrill to find a video of his reading early in my life as a "published author."