Tag Archives: Plague Thoughts

Yesterday I had a long day from the rue Tholozé to my door. Everyone there and here was swimming against the opaque heaviness of this time of fear and alienation. My student friend Cody picked me up at Chicago O’Hare and the drive down to Bloomington-Normal went fast because of our good conversation about working-classContinue reading “Plague Thoughts Upon Returning Home”

During my stay here I have honed my French listening comprehension skills by tuning in YouTube recordings by politicians and public intellectuals on subjects of politics and philosophy (for which I possess the relevant vocabulary).  I got to know Jean-Luc Mélenchon, first as a debater and then as an orator. In the former capacity inspiring,Continue reading “French Oppositional Voices”

In the interval of eight days, I think I have encountered and to a degree studied several of the political and cultural extremes of this city and country. First, I met M-L, my neighbor downstairs, a cultivated and independent-minded artist who lived in the US before returning to her native Paris to devote her lifeContinue reading “The Hidden Extremes of Paris”

In consequence of our recent exchange regarding Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? it dawned on me that the paradigm of opposition has shifted from one based on change and conversion to one based on identity in a more static social-political setting. The immediate clue lay in the fact that I found Eileen’sContinue reading “How did the Paradigm of Change Shift to that of Identity?”

It needs to be said that a pandemic is not just something that invades us from without. A pandemic is a cataclysmic process that reveals what lies within a society. A fire in a public space might seem to be a mainly physical event. But the catastrophe lies not simply in the fire but inContinue reading “Plague is an Alchemical Fire”

I’ve been in Paris since the first of November on a second extended stay in six months. I’m in the same Montmartre apartment and am experiencing the aftermath of the year of isolation and lockdown. In August I couldn’t get the pass sanitaire so I was mostly shut out of public places and could onlyContinue reading “Paris Beyond the Plague”

I was talking with Leo G. about national differences in the use of abstract words like honor, love, or justice. We agreed that in the Hispanic world such words have often been used with less irony than elsewhere. It occurred to me that one could cite Jose Martí in support of this thesis. Martí becameContinue reading “Thoughts on Poetry in Time of Plague”

I agree that what attracts us to the idea of socialist or communist countries is the desire for human solidarity and for the perspective of human beings creating their own world. But the reality of countries like Communist Rumania or East Germany was the mass-scale pitting of citizens against one another. A huge percentage ofContinue reading “Afterthoughts on the Socialist Countries”

Recently I was reminded of Raoul Peck’s film Young Marx, a slightly ludicrous buddy movie about young Karl and Friedrich groping their way to world revolution. But it must be said that Peck did his homework. There is a powerful opening scene in which wood-gathering German poor folk are ridden down in a forest byContinue reading “How the Commons became Commodities”

On a scale of one to ten, I was very satisfied/ totally repulsed by the last leg of my journey. Typical response: “Breaks the scale for bad. Worse than anyone can imagine. Service was ok but conditions were awful.” Would you say that crossing the Styx provided a meaningful conclusion to your journey through theContinue reading “A Client Satisfaction Survey for Passengers Crossing the River Styx and Entering the Land of Shadows”