Sunday Support Group: Readings (OT)

A few reading suggestions for those who are dutifully sheltering...

The first one is just a few paragraphs long. I tried but couldn't secure permission to reprint those paragraphs, so here's what you'll have to do if you want to read them:

First, go to Amazon and look up The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett; then click on the book cover to "Look inside"; then scroll down to the Preface, and read down through the paragraph just before the one that begins "Laurie Garrett has written a pioneering book." I was particularly struck by the opening sentence: "We always want to believe that history happened only to 'them,' 'in the past,' and that somehow we are outside history, rather than enmeshed within it." Got that right.

What will be sobering is the book's date of publication: 1994. The short Preface was written by Jonathan Max Mann, MD, a disease researcher who died, with his wife of only two years, when Swissair Flight 111 crashed into the Atlantic southwest of Halifax International in September of 1998. Trump's dawdling, downplaying, dissembling and diverting for two months are not the only tragic squandering of time so terribly affecting the fix we're in—clearly, we wasted time in a general sense, too. For years. And now we all get to suffer for it.

Next up: The book I'm reading currently was written by Daniel Defoe, most famous for Robinson Crusoe...who some of us might feel kinda like right now! (I can feel marooned in my house.) The publication date of that one is an interesting story too—although presented as a first-person account, Defoe himself was actually only five years old when the events he writes about occurred. The book was published in 1722 about events that took place in 1665. The narrator, identified as H.F., might represent Henry Foe, Defoe's uncle, whose journals might have been one of his nephew's sources. Although scrupulously researched, it's not exactly nonfiction; yet it's not exactly fiction either, because Defoe went to great lengths in the service of verisimilitude. You might call it well reported historical fiction.

Whatever section of the bookstore it belongs in, most agree that it's a remarkably vivid portrayal of life in London during the last great visitation of the bubonic plague, also known as the black death. The parallels to the present contagion make its themes, and the narrator's dilemmas, all the more immediate to present-day readers.

Lastly, a book I've always meant to read, and soon actually might...Giovanni Boccacchio's Decameron. Also written in a plague year, the structure of the Decameron consists of stories told by a group of young people, seven women and three men, who are "sheltering in place" from the black death in a villa outside the city of Florence, Italy, probably during the epidemic of 1348. To amuse themselves, each in turn selects a topic for the day, and each tells the others a story on that topic. They do this five nights a week for two weeks, making 100 stories in all.

So it's essentially a collection of short stories. "Collection" has another meaning, too, because, following the tradition of the time, many of the tales are retellings, and Boccacchio collected these from far and wide, from many lands and many sources. Some of the tales were believed to be centuries old even at the time. The Decameron is considered a masterpiece of early Western literature and was an influence on Chaucer, Shakespeare (who based All's Well That Ends Well on Boccacchio's Tale III, 9) and many others.

In one of those strange little coincidences, in the first picture in Part I of our "Baker's Dozen" the other day, the one by Benjamin Kelley of his little daughter in front of a dramatic painting with sunlight falling on it, the painting is by John White Alexander and is titled "Isabella and the Pot of Basil." It illustrates a poem of that same title by John Keats...and Keats based his poem on Tale IV, 5 of The Decameron.

When we read Defoe we simply read the original but with modernized spellings and punctuation, but for English-speaking people reading a book written in the vernacular Florentine of the 14th century, translations loom large. I surveyed the ones I could (meaning, I read the Kindle samples for a bunch of the ones available on Amazon), and preferred the translation of Wayne A. Rebhorn as being the easiest to follow. Wayne, who is 76 and lives in Austin, is Celanese Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas, where he teaches English, Italian, and comparative literature. His translation came out in 2013. Seeing as the tellers of these tales were also sheltering in place, it seems a perfect time to finally read this. I've got it on deck.

The Decameron is said to be uncommonly bawdy, too.

Cheers to you, and stay safe this Sunday. I'm too stuck in my own head, so I'm going to get out for some exercise.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Frank Booth: "Another book concerning our present situation is The Great Influenza by John Barry. The Afterword written in 2018 is especially interesting."

Q: "For anyone interested in an hour's worth of Laurie Garrett's take on the current situation, she's the guest on this week's Radio Open Source. She's not the type to mince words and the conversation gets a bit political, but it also has a lot of intelligent perspective on what we can do and what we should have done to prevent a local outbreak from becoming a pandemic."

Comments

[Daniel]

Why not support fellow Photographer/Writer we know as John Sandford? Get the list of his books - the Prey series is a good start - and read them in order?
That will keep you occupied for a few days and give a boost to a fellow photography enthusiast.

[Robert Roaldi]

Pasolini made a good film called Decameron in 1971 based on the book. Wikipedia has a page about it. In one segment a gardener enjoys himself with several of the nuns in a convent. One of the noviciates asks the Mother Superior about their vow of chastity, and the mother answers, 'We make so many promises.'

[scott kirkpatrick]

Staged up for me is Neustadt and Fineberg;s "The Epidemic that Never Was -- Policy Making and the Swine Flu Affair." It is an Oren Grad recommendation -- the basic text handed out when he first got into studying health policy. There was lots to learn, and it had a happy ending, of sorts.

[George Davis]

Don't forget Project Gutenberg for free downloadable eBook editions of both the Defoe and Boccaccio works you mention.

[Thanks George. However I doubt the Rebhorn translation is available for free, although I haven't looked. --Mike]

[Jim Arthur]

Q’s comment reminded me of an excellent Youtube video that was released on March 10th. It’s an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience featuring Michael Osterholm who is an epidemiologist and the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota. I really appreciate that Michael Osterholm does not alter his message based on politics and is not worried about alarming parts of the population with accurate information. He just does his thing.

Don’t let Joe Rogan’s crazy logo scare you off. This is a good interview. Joe poses good questions, doesn’t interrupt, and gives his guest all the time he needs. The interview is very long but if you scroll down to the 16th comment you will find a timestamp index.

[Mike Plews]

I am using this time to dive back into The Courage To Be by Paul Tillich. COVID 19 is generating a lot of anxiety and this book is about finding the courage to face it squarely and keep going.
I never expected a 1952 book on Lutheran Exestentialism would feel so timely.

[Richard Parkin]

Many books are available free on https://archive.org/. They appear to be scans of actual books, coffee stains and all, rather than digitised copies.

[Dave Mullen]

I'd also recommend "The Last Town on Earth" by Thomas Mullen (a distant cousin) about a logging community's reaction to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

[Manuel]

And let's not forget Albert Camus' "The Plague."