How Pynchon once mistook a virus for a metaphor

[Mark Kohut]

Hey Girl, (appropriating that meme because the plist is all brother and
sisterhood, right?)

You keep on taking care. You stay inside and read and write about it, them.
YOU can check in
here a little more often if YOU want, since we all like it and we aren't
doing much else. You can post your reviews
since we have become a misc book and movie club here as you've seen. Social
connection in the age
of social sequestration.

All my Best and even more than that.

Mark



On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 12:38 PM Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
wrote:

> 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
> >>
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>