“Life was never normal”
Mark Hurst: “Life was never normal, and life certainly isn’t normal now. I’m going to wash hands, sit at home behind this screen, and get on with creating good online. And we will get through this.”
Orange Crate Art
Blinks
I think that Deborah Birx is blinking out a coded message from the podium this morning.
“A fantod when it foamed”
From Robertson Davies’s The Manticore.
Six of them
Asshats.
Social-distancing Q. & A.
“How to Practice Social Distancing,” questions from The New Yorker, answers from Asaf Bitton, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Sleep, or the lack thereof
Messing around with melatonin.
Performance review
I woke up with this sentence: “Performance-wise, Al Capone is at the top of the list.”
Rewriting history
The New York Times: “The president tried to rewrite his history with advising Americans about the coronavirus. His own words prove him wrong.” Or as a non-Times writer once put it, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Two Williams
On this Saint Patrick’s Day, William Butler Yeats reminds us of the importance of social distancing as he holds a volume of William Blake’s poetry to his chest. Stand back, says the Irish William, and don’t you dare try to touch my book.
Hat trick
WAFA.
Wealth, illusion, corruption
From Robertson Davies’s The Manticore.
A last autocorrection
I’m done with iOS and macOS autocorrection, which have messed up my writing again and again. Now on all mistakes will be my own.
A movement for these times
It’s #StayTheFuckHome. Not a joke. With twelve guidelines, in order of increasing difficulty and effectiveness.
Store talk
“Go and buy. Enjoy it. Have a nice dinner. Relax”: Donald Trump*.
“Not a snow day”
“The only strategies that can get us off this concerning trajectory are those that enable us to work together as a community to maintain public health by staying apart.”
Today’s Zippy
Today’s Zippy feels like a cross between Bill Griffith and Roz Chast.
Flattening the curve
“If people are less mobile and interact with each other less, the virus has fewer opportunities to spread.”
“Nancy?” “Sluggo!”
Today’s Zippy is a flurry of choices: column A/column B, blue state/red state, iPhone/Android, Nancy/Sluggo.
Andreas Brown (1933–2020)
A bibliophile since childhood who bought the revered Gotham Book Mart in Midtown Manhattan from its idiosyncratic founder, Frances Steloff, and kept it alive as a frowzy literary shrine for four more decades.”
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“108 Odyssey fellows.”
Unfit
I’m watching Donald Trump* struggle to read what’s been written for him and thinking, Unfit, unfit, unfit. What are those standing behind him thinking?
Recently updated
“By the Book” for the rest of us, now with more childhood reading.
Even in a pandemic
Representative Adam Schiff (D, California-18): “You know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump.”
“The socks-shorts moment”
From Robertson Davies’s The Manticore.
Jon Batiste FTW
As Sanjay Gupta came on stage on The Late Show tonight, Jon Batiste played a bit of Billy Strayhorn’s “U.M.M.G.”
Allegory redux
Why I will vote for Joe Biden.
Shirley’s whom
Shirley Temple: “You saw who — I mean, whom ?”
Miniature Rogers
Miniatures by Lance Cardinal: Mister Rogers’s television house and the making of said house.
Daniel Tiger
A replica, from A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
Some version of pastoral
The New York Times offers an explanation of cottagecore.