100th post!! Including drafts, that is. Let's make this one count.
To start: I have to admit I only skimmed this n+1 corona dispatch, but there's a reason I put it here, and a reason I didn't drop it entirely after not feeling totally engaged. The author seems to suffer from an unclear "false self" affliction, and they feel as if their life is being lived in response to other people's expectations of them. The reprieve from 'society' caused by COVID-19 has also given the author a chance to reflect on how uncomfortable they feel in normative society, that they don't really want to go back at all. They also feel, however, that even spending time with familiar people in strange circumstances seems to automatically create new norms, despite all of this being totally unprecedented and exceptional. I don't like that, and I feel an uncanny correspondence with everything being described. I don't often hear people talk about life the way I experience it. But it's kind of late and I just don't know if I'm in the mood to really consider this as a whole. So this is a bookmark for now, until I feel up to a closer read.
COVID through the eyes of Jia Zhang-ke. Motivated me to finally watch VISIT, a short film that was oddly fun in a way I don't think most COVID art will be in the future. Even better is Apichatpong's letter, which starts out by proposing that cinema is the art of stopping to stare -- I wouldn't endorse that 100% now, but it definitely was the case for my first, transformative viewing of SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY -- before taking on a speculative turn about cinema slowing to halt, inaugurating an ultra-minimal aesthetic preference built on quarantine-induced sensory deprivation. He's so creative. I really love him.
Nathan Tankus blows up my inbox with his Substack, and I can't pretend to understand much of what he writes, even if I think it's worth trying as a form of mental exercise. But then there are relatively clear posts like this that justify the whole endeavor: how universities might collectively build solidarity to avoid state budget cuts in times of crisis, such as post-'08 and the current COVID one. They are uniquely vulnerable, as Tankus lays out, but they also have some unlikely options available...
I'm also really interested in the implications to his Means Crisis subhead in this post. Tankus makes a good argument for why central planning would have helped allocate resources during the corona crisis, preventing those infamous images of milk being poured down drains and farmers disposing of their food. On the face of it, the logic is simple: having a public plan ahead of time is more responsible than hoping the private sector will respond adaptively. But Tankus argues something more. This is not just a partisan difference of opinions, but a fundamental example of how frail private businesses are in moments of severe crisis. The uncertainty of something like COVID is just completely overwhelming to businesses that count on the conservative assumption of everything running smoothly. They try to bide time until things settle down so that they can resume operations as normal, rather than trying to navigate new circumstances with big, ambitious spending projects (after all, that's what governments are for!). I also suspect this is part of why Trump and the business community are clamoring for us all to get "back to work" and "back to normal." It's because they know this is a cascading series of crises, and the disruptions will profoundly affect an economy in which they've invested so much (literally and figuratively). No more normal means no more illusions of control and certainty. No more private predation on underfunded public services. No more insisting that capitalism is the best economic system for human flourishing when it visibly, manifestly is not.
