A Pleasurable Headache - 19th April 2020
Pandemic Notes
Writing and putting these out is hard at the moment. My reading has slowed down a bit in the past few weeks in terms of longform articles. I’m all about short story collections at the moment.
I’m what’s classified as a ‘key worker’ here in Britain. I am still getting up every morning and going into the office. Every day, all day, I am reading government guidelines and directives about Covid-19, all as confusing and contradictory as the last. Day in and day out I’m seeing, and hearing about members of the public not realising just how serious this pandemic is and carrying on regardless.
It is exhausting. I also picked the wrong month to reduce my meds dosage, eh?
There are people far worse off than myself right now. There are people suffering with Covid-19 itself. There are frontline NHS workers doing their best with an incredibly broken system and supply chain, all under a government that has actively sought to carve up the institution they work for. There are other key workers, ridiculously exploited before this crisis, who are now being asked to go above and beyond for a pitiful wage. There are those who live in flats and shared houses who are being asked to self isolate in spaces not conducive to doing so. There are also countless homeless falling through the cracks as they always do, now with even more in the way of dire consequences.
Writing has been getting me through, as always. The non-fiction piece I’ve been working on the last few weeks has morphed beyond its initial remit, but isn’t that always the way? In writing the piece this week I’ve found a little bit of hope and light amongst the grim.
Links
I’ve been using a lot of all this new ‘free time’ to catch up on some movies I missed the first time around. I recently watched the Birds of Prey movie and enjoyed it immensely. Then I read this piece at Tor by Leah Schnelbach and my appreciation grew that little bit more.
The piece argues that BoP shows the consequences of violence in a way that most superhero movies/shows don’t, particularly when it comes to its depictions of female characters.
“Bird of Prey gives us the version of the Widow scene where there’s actual blood, and real danger, and Cathy Yan and Christina Hodson take us into Harley’s mind to show us how she processes her fear and pain—by returning to a couple of especially femme icons. This is how Harley comforts herself.”
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This next piece is niche as f*ck and I apologise. You’ll probably only get something out of the piece if you’re off a certain age and British. Either way, I present to you the strange arcande wonder of using Teletext to find out football scores.
Disclaimer: I am not a Brentford supporter.
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Clive Martin at Vice discusses Britain’s absolute shit show of a response to Covid-19.
“Our illusion of safety, of stability, of political temperance, of “we don’t have that kind of thing here” is coming to an almighty crescendo. We have been dragged – kicking, screaming, nails dug into the soil – into a global nightmare, an all-disrupting storm that makes Brexit look like some quaint problem from a pre-Iraq episode of Question Time.”
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Jacobin interviews Noam Chomsky on the current state of things.
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The ace Mark O’Connell argues, over at The New Statesman that we are living in Ballard’s world now. I’d be inclined to agree.
“Ballard’s oeuvre is filled with enforced quarantines and self-isolations, with riots breaking out among the bored middle classes. His 1982 short story “Having a Wonderful Time” is narrated in the form of brief postcards from a young woman on holiday in the Canary Islands with her husband. As the cards progress over time, stretching out eventually over months, it becomes clear the Canaries have been converted by the governments of Western Europe into a kind of mass detention camp, where members of the managerial classes, for some unspecified reason no longer employable, are to live out their days in a state of suspended leisure. It’s hard to think about this story now without immediately picturing quarantined cruise ships and all those holidaymakers confined to their resorts, lounging by the pools in protective face masks.”
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Back to Britain’s shitshow, all of our minor celebrity/TV presenters are going insane. I’m all for challenging the mainstream media, but maybe fanning the flames of another 5G conspiracy theory whilst lounging on the sofa of one of the most widely watched morning shows in the country isn’t the place to do it? Maybe.
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I’m off to luxuriate with the simple things in life. See you in two!