How Pynchon once mistook a virus for a metaphor

[Becky Lindroos]

Gag re the Orange Pustule, Laura - yep.  I forget that I’m 72 and not in great health and my kids worry as they live half way across the country.  I also have friends here who check on me. 

Soooo…..   I was in the emergency room last night (8 hours!) and I had a mask because I had symptoms (BUT my symptoms were stomach flu and dehydration).  Most others - (the non-patients) did not have masks. Generic corona-virus testing was somewhere else and the tent for determining that was outside the hospital doors. .  ??? -

Fwiw,  I had lung surgery in September (I don’t know if I mentioned that prior) and although I’m pretty well recovered I’m still weak - vulnerable.  It was stage 1 cancer.

Becky  - a Boomer who will not be Removed - 
So be safe - keep me safe! 
 

> On Mar 18, 2020, at 8:46 AM, Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> And, on cue, there goes the Orange Pustule referring to coronavirus as the
> Chinese Virus.
> My favorite name for it so far: the Boomer Remover.
> 
> Laura, age 62
> 
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2020, 9:14 AM Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> the Spanish Flu is relevant also because it didn't start in Spain; it was
>> called the Spanish Flu because Spain was one of the few countries that was
>> reporting on it truthfully, the others were hiding the pandemic to maintain
>> wartime morale. no one really knows where it started; it might have been
>> Kansas (as per *wikipedia* <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu>)
>> 
>> On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 1:06 PM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
>> lorentzen at hotmail.de>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> The concrete sentence from "Entropy" goes like this:  "Not even the
>>> clean constant winds of Switzerland could cure the GRIPPE ESPAGNOLE:
>>> Stravinsky had had it, they all had had it". Oh well ...
>>> 
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
>>> 
>>> " ... Though it may not be wrong absolutely to make up, as I still do,
>>> what I don't know or am too lazy to find out, phony data are more often
>>> than not deployed in places sensitive enough to make a difference,
>>> thereby losing what marginal charm they may have possessed outside of
>>> the story's context. Witness an example from 'Entropy.' In the character
>>> of Callisto I was trying for a sort of world-weary Middle-European
>>> effect, and put in the phrase GRIPPE ESPAGNOLE, which I had seen on some
>>> liner notes to a recording of Stravinsky's L'HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT. I must
>>> have thought this was some kind of of post-World War I spiritual malaise
>>> or something. Come to find out it means what it says, Spanish influenza,
>>> and the reference I lifted was really to the worldwide flu epidemic that
>>> followed the war.
>>>    The lesson here, obvious but now and then overlooked, is just to
>>> corroborate one's data, in particular those acquired casually, such as
>>> through hearsay or off the backs of record albums ..."
>>> 
>>> Slow Learner (Introduction)
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>> 
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> 
> --
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