Buzzwords

We’re Teaching Our Sons About History By Owen Booth.       We’re teaching our sons about history Its meaning. Its uses. Its relevance, or otherwise, to current events. We are living, we tell our sons – as other people keep telling us – in interesting times. We’re teaching our sons about wars, and disasters, and tragedy. We’re teaching them about the indomitable human spirit, about people surviving terrible sieges that went on for years, about how everyday life can still continue under constant bombardment and the ever present threat of death. We’re hoping some of it might help. “During

By Tomo é Hill. 36.5, 36.1, 36.4: these numbers are my mornings now. Before I do anything else, I take my temperature. It’s a new routine that reminds me that any old one may well be obsolete. Looking out of the window, it seems almost paranoid to think anything has changed — things appear as they always had been, almost. Almost is control but not quite. Not quite is the same as nothing, sometimes. Isolation, or what most people would have considered it until now, has been a way of life for over fifteen years. I only went from home

Santa Luzia By Julian Hanna. ‘Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.’ – Albert Camus, The Plague This is a serious time, and I am taking it very seriously, reading all the recommended articles and having all the concerns about family and friends and people more vulnerable than myself and what the future might hold

An image of images covering Donari Braxton‘s quarantine over the past three weeks. @donaribraxton

By Gerard Evans. 28 March 2020 6.30am I feel like I’ve woken up in some dark Philip K Dick story. And part of that story is that I feel like that morning after morning. The bad dream that doesn’t end when you wake up. ‘The Seventh Seal’ by Scott Walker keeps playing in my head, particularly the 2nd verse. And this is how it feels, like the Middle Ages. So I consciously replace it with ‘Barbie Girl’ by Aqua, which only feels last century. The dark clouds of coronavirus persist but I’m not playing. I can’t change the cards I’ve

By Toby Litt.     Just about the worst thing for a writer is to believe that someone else has written the thing you want to write. Worse than this, though, is the belief that another, better writer is — right now, at this very moment, somewhere in the world — writing the only thing that you can write, right now. This feeling of being ousted or ghosted by another absent writer is, I think, particularly common when you know something big is happening. Something big is happening, and it’s partly happening online — which means that it’s possible for

Music for Doing Nothing By Joe Milutis.     A few days ago, Italian film composer Ennio Morricone announced that he would not be composing or playing music during quarantine; the absolute value of music was to him meaningless during such a serious crisis and that he felt that Italians who sang on their balconies, while deserving of a little lightness, were perhaps only thinking of themselves. Americans have reacted similarly to the equivalent in celebrities singing, noblesse oblige, John Lennon’s “Imagine” from their compounds after only a week of lockdown (we can only “imagine” what 18 months might bring).

China Viruses By Tom Bradley. I stumbled around in China in the mid- to late-eighties, right around the time America’s beloved president was joining the Republican Party. This was during the height of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, which the natives called “British Bull Disease”. AIDS was just beginning to scare the Celestials of the Flowery Middle Kingdom. To them, it was the “African Sickness,” or, more benignly, ai si ping, “Lovers’ Complaint”. Due to my low pigmentation and generous dimensions, they amended the term. With the effortlessness their homophone-rich language lends to punning, I was given ai shi ping, “Food Lovers’

Fresco By Matthew Turner.       I prefer not to. Instead, I would rather think about the normality, not the difference. I would rather imagine a vast fresco painted on the walls of a small cell, depicting spaces of enormous enclosure. There would be a cloudless sky, a blurred horizon. There would be innumerable cabinets of curiosities; Ole Worm’s museum of fish swimming in mid-air, spears held mid-flight, alligators and tortoises waddling the walls of a rectangular prism; Levinus Vincent’s Wonder Theater of Nature, with its forest of animal cadavers in shimmering spirit, exotic insects, shells and crustaceans, minerals

Inside/Outside By Niven Govinden. @niven_govinden

C-Word By SJ Fowler. I don’t have a lot to say. I vacillate between sensations and have no strong opinion. It is obvious I am fortunate beyond belief or historical precedence, but I often feel this way anyway. No one, that I’ve seen, in literary terms, has anything interesting to say about it because the lockdown is happening to almost everyone. And those who are ill are best not evoked with stupid writing. Does it matter, as the internet is voluntary, that it all switches between patronising and panicking? I’m worried for some people I know. I’m alive to that

Anxiety and the Writers I’ve Been Thinking of in a Time of Crisis… By Lee Rourke. Ever since the Coronavirus Lockdown I’ve been thinking a lot about this quotation from Blaise Pascal: ‘I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.’ Dodgy nouns and personal pronouns aside, there’s a lot of truth in this, when our essential freedoms are taken away all we are left with is ourselves, and our sense of our ‘self’ is a fragile thing. When we are faced with our ‘self’