Like most people during the pandemic, I avoided doctors like the plague. In the first year, when I was already overdue my annual physical, my family doctor sent me a preemptive email saying she was only seeing patients by Zoom and, even then, only for important issues. Respiratory distress was an important issue; an annual…
Tag: Health
Pale Rider & The Pull of the Stars: Two Books on the Spanish Flu
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, Laura Spinney (London: Vintage, 2017) The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2020) Published in 2017, Laura Spinney’s historical investigation of the 1918 pandemic could not have anticipated what was to follow in three years. And yet Spinney notes that…
Does the way we Structure Time Make Us Unkind?
After lunch, I ran across the road to get a few things for supper and as I stepped through the entrance to the mall, I noticed an older man lying on the floor stretched out on his side. In particular, I noted his blue mask which gave an odd splash of colour to an otherwise…
Microbe Hunters Then And Now
Through offhand remarks which strike us today as thoroughly gratuitous, de Kruif allows his own personality to infect his stories with sexism, racism, anti-immigrant sentiments, and a wide assortment of other bigotries that, were he alive today, would make him the darling of Trump’s White House.
Self-Control in the Age of Covid-19
There are 478 new infections in Ontario, the most on a single day since May 2nd. This includes 153 new cases in Toronto.There is something about this I find dispiriting. The number itself is not dispiriting so much as what the number tells me about human nature.
Exercise in the Age of Self-Isolation
The skipping rope was made of green and pink plastic and had tassels at either end. It was long, the kind of skipping rope girls used in the playground at recess.
Story: Dermatitis Herpetiformis
Tom and George sat on the low stone wall and watched how the tear gas, looking for all the world like tufts of cotton, scudded along the street and vanished through the trees in the park.
Migraine Headaches and Transient Aphasia
On two occasions, as I feel the aura coming on, I’ve sat down with pen and paper to document my impressions. I’ve reproduced those episodes below, preserving the spelling exactly as I recorded it. They illustrate the progression from coherence to incoherence.
Covid-19, God, and Aliens
The longer I listened to him, the more I felt like Woody Allen talking to Annie Hall’s younger brother (Christopher Walken) at the family dinner when he cut him off and said: “I’m due back on the planet Earth.”
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
The latest instalment in my pandemic reading list speaks to all arts organization who find themselves in a state of limbo: Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel.
A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe
Already, we engage in public conversations about returning to normal life. More than 350 years ago, the people of London learned a hard lesson which screams to us down the centuries: do not do this!
Trump Bans 3M Export of N-95 Masks to Canada
Canada may end up adopting the province of Québec’s motto: je me souviens. In years to come, we will say to ourselves: I remember the day America betrayed us.
Social Distancing
What will be the longterm consequences of this pandemic. Will it permanently alter the way we gather in public? Will public authorities take greater care to manage crowd control? Will photographers ever again be able to follow Capa’s dictum as we try to document what happens in the streets of our cities?
The Plague, by Albert Camus
To amuse myself during this period of Covid-19 isolation, I have started to work through a reading list of plague-based writings starting with Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague (La Peste).
Covid-19 in Toronto – Early Days
In his 1947 novel, The Plague, Albert Camus writes of an epidemic, probably bubonic plague, that decimates the inhabits of the French Algerian town, Oran. One of the curious observations he makes is that the “[p]lague had killed all colors”.