Friday, April 03, 2020

Journal of the Plague Year 4-2-2020


No posts for several days. This is not because I am sick with COVID-19, but because the days under isolation are so similar that there is literally nothing to report. We have almost completed Better Call Saul. It’s getting increasingly dark and violent. We streamed several performances of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra—Schubert, Bach, and Schumann. The wonderful pianist Jeremy Denk performed Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor. 


I am reading the Ronan Farrow book about his effort to develop a story about the sexual predations of film producer Harvey Weinstein. The book, Catch and Kill, is exhaustive and suspenseful, but IMHO is not as well-written as some of the gushing reviewers would have it. It might make a better movie along the lines of the film Spotlight, which chronicled the story of the Boston Globe’s investigation into the archdiocese’s effort to cover up its own sex scandal. 

Decluttering has ground to a stop. I feel as if there is all the time in the world—this is going to go on for a while, and I will get to it when I get to it. I try to get in some exercise every day, whether it is a short walk or a stint on the almost functioning exercise bike. My forays into continuing with Hungarian are episodic—I have significant trouble with adverbs and the accusative. Since I will probably never visit Hungary again, it is an intellectual exercise.

Mitzi the Cat now goes out at night—she can sense the feeble Minnesota spring trying to emerge. She doesn’t stay out long. I read somewhere that cats can either get or transmit the virus. Since she spends most of her time underneath the parked car and never interacts with any other beasts (human or feline), I suspect that she is virus-free. But I cannot know for sure, so it’s just one of the many unknowns that are the new-normal. We need to get used to ambiguity.
 

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