Category Archives: Plague Thoughts

Reading reviews of Amia Srinivasan’s appealingly entitled essay collection The Right to Sex and her main essay “Does Anyone Have a Right to Sex” (a title and topic that could hardly fail to command the attention of the reading public), I am struck once again, as so often before, by the thematic preponderance of love-as-sexContinue reading “Thinking About Sex in Time of Plague”

I remember the evening last fall spent in conversation with one history professor and several student friends. The professor, a very centrist liberal, was proposing the standard liberal explanation for the alt right: racism pure and simple, an argument that’s been summoned into service on so many occasions of late that it’s as if thereContinue reading “Anomic Plague and the Alt Right”

The other day I drove to Chicago for an appointment with my radiation oncologist. With time to kill, I hung out a bit in the DCAM Center for Care and Discovery, a name that sounds more like a theme park than a hospital and compared it to the other hospitals I’ve spent time in inContinue reading “Hospitals Compared in Light of the Plague”

In recounting how books about death and darkness inoculated me against depression in the plague year, I forgot to mention Victor Serge’s Mexican journals from the last decade of his life. It would be difficult to equal his grounds for depression: a man of boundless energy and deep human sensibility, Serge had experienced the demiseContinue reading “Sources of Lucidity in the Plague Darkness”

My closest friends for whom this blog was intended will have heard much of it before. I tend to repeat myself. I try to boil my inchoate experiences down to the essentials and then plot them out for revealing connections. Why did this or that seemingly insignificant experience mean something? Students of literature acquire theseContinue reading “Retail Politics in Time of Plague”

From his first-hand experience in Luxembourg, Andrew (Pfannkuche) has confirmed my own impression from early in the pandemic. I was dismayed by the implicit sense that students are mainly a threat to their teachers or professors.  It’s too early to judge the success and failure of the pandemic response; but even if governments were right to close schools and restrict social contacts, the public discussion ofContinue reading “Addendum to the “Plague Rat””

I should explain why I sympathize with socialism and have a critical appreciation of Marx. I don’t doubt certain premises of the defenders of capitalism. I don’t question the benefits of enterprise and competition. Yet the great apostle of capitalism himself, Adam Smith, was more critical and perceptive of its flaws than its current apologists.Continue reading “Thoughts on Socialism in Time of Plague”

My student friends and I talked about starting a reading group, but this presented logistical and organizational challenges in the plague year. Then Andrew Pfannkuche (aka “Pancake”) heard about a high-powered intellectual group that met online, a leftist reading group that went by the name of Platypus Society. Their reading syllabus included not only classicsContinue reading “Platypus and the Plague Year”

To me, reading is like a vaccine for the spirit: the difficult, the negative, the choice that others might consider depressing fortifies me against vicissitudes of mood or mental stamina. My (re)reading during the first pandemic months included the Existentialism of my youth: The Plague and “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Camus and the chapterContinue reading “Readings for a Pandemic Winter”

I passed our first pandemic year trying to remain normal in Bloomington-Normal. As a 73-year-old retired professor of German, I needed to stay active and connected. Via Zoom, I took courses in Russian and French and became good friends with my instructors. I drove older or indigent patients to their hospital appointments and heard fromContinue reading “Notes on the Plague Year”