Sunday This and That
#MeToo in Winter, Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Nightmare, Don DeLillo
Hello Sunday readers. On the chance that anyone else is experiencing what my daughter says she hears is a new strain of Covid called “razor blade throat,” I can confirm that Streptococcus agalactiae is going around New York, or at least going around my body. I learned today that “S. agalactiae is a major cause of severe neonatal infections like meningitis and bacteremia, while S. pyogenes is more commonly associated with infections of the throat in both children and adults.” While I am not a baby, I’ve been about as helpless as one. If you are feeling rotten and as though your throat is made of raw hamburger, go get checked!
There are several things being home sick is good for. You get to watch the NBA playoffs and, alas, the Knicks again take it in the shorts from Indiana. Funny story: I was asked this week if I knew about the Reggie game. What am I, dead?
No such drama last night, just the Pacers on younger legs. Onto Oklahoma. Sick-week bonus #2: you get to read a ton, I already tucked away a memoir whose author will be on the Smoke ‘Em podcast this week, and moved onto Don DeLillo’s Libra. Is it the case that I’ve been on something of a JFK-Oswald book bender, having read King’s 11/22/63 earlier this year? Sure. And I did enjoy the King, which is a doorstopper. But DeLillo, how do you even start to talk about what he can do as a fiction writer, how deep he dives, how he comes back with these lapidary bits and arranges them into constellations with a precision that is dazzling and bracing, jewels and bullets, there is nothing out of place in the structures he creates and you just move through them, amazed. DeLillo writes with a Cold War sensibility - I kind of feel bad for anyone too young to understand what that feels like - and, while the styles are different, the animating information reminds me of Didion.
Bonus #3, when one needs something to listen to while walking to the CVS to pick up the antibiotics and discovers the 2018 podcast “In the Shadows of Utopia: The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Nightmare” a tremendous work of scholarship. Wow.
Any of you reading this today, Sunday, please consider joining Sarah Hepola and me for our monthly Zoom hang. Today’s topic: “#MeToo in Winter.” 8pmET/5pmPT xx
And if you’re not a paid subscriber here, please consider that too!
So sorry you have been afflicted by Group. B strep. It is a bad bug. Be sure to take the full course of antibiotics even if you feel better. It’s great that they did cultures.
It’s good now to be a mature age in an immature world. Boomers that didn’t have to go through a big boom but watched the suffering of the Vietnam war evert night on the news. The youngsters may not know the graphic coverage we experienced. We’re going to be saved by God and it’s a message worth repeating!