Saprà infonderci emozioni mai provate, il virus sconosciuto in cattedra insediatosi. C’indurrà in estrema confusione, scompigliando la routine e la globalizzazione. Con fascino e carisma ci terrà sotto il suo manto, con la sua conoscenza, c’impartirà di vita nuova lezione. The unknown virus settling in will instil new emotions in us. It will cause us extreme confusion, by disrupting routine and globalisation. It will keep us under its mantle with charm and charisma, it will teach us a new lesson of life with its knowledge.
States of Plague examines Albert Camus’s novel as a palimpsest of pandemic life, an uncannily relevant account of the psychology and politics of a public health crisis. As one of the most discussed books of the COVID-19 crisis, Albert Camus’s classic novel The Plague has become a new kind of literary touchstone. Surrounded by terror and uncertainty, often separated from loved ones or unable to travel, readers sought answers within the pages of Camus’s 1947 tale about an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic. Many found in it a story about their own lives—a book to shed light on a global health crisis. In thirteen linked chapters told in alternating voices, Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris hold the past and present of The Plague in conversation, discovering how the novel has reached people in their current moment. Kaplan’s chapters explore the book’s tangled and vivid history, while Marris’s are drawn to the ecology of landscape and language. Through these pages, they find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Along the way, Kaplan and Marris examine how the novel’s original allegory might resonate with a new generation of readers who have experienced a global pandemic. They describe how they learned to contemplate the skies of a plague spring, to examine the body politic and the politics of immunity. Both personal and eloquently written, States of Plague uncovers for us the mysterious way a novel can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on other possible futures.
My First Pandemic is a collection of drawings, thoughts, poems, comics, anger, happiness, life, and death from a difficult period in our history. Over the last two years, between crises and quarantines, Jamison has had time. Time to reflect, to page through old books of poetry, to draw hundreds of rabbit people (for some reason). The loss of a stepfather, followed by the loss of a good friend, gives cause to contemplate one's own mortality. It's strange how the thoughts of 19th century poets can echo our own. What will we leave behind when our time comes? Sadness, sure, but also wee, silly drawings in honest-to-goodness paper and ink.
The end of the year 2019 brought with it an unprecedented catastrophe that would affect the world for the first five months of 2020. Never before had there been such a collective effort to eradicate a happening that had begun life in a small laboratory in Ma Shan Dong, the capital city of the Wu Xiao province of the Middle Kingdom. The Ebola outbreak of 2013, contained more through luck than Government design, could have seen far more devastation. However, the Happening still had more of an impact that the mass outbreaks that went before it due to the readily available and world wide coverage thanks to global media outlets and social media sites that had previously aided uprisings in Tunisia, which was the catalyst that sparked the so-called Arab Spring that destabilised the Middle East, and from where ISIS allegedly sprouted its deadly roots. These stories are inspired by the reaction to and the effects the Happening brought with it. They explore how people react in different ways in times of crises; from the political stance at the top of the Government views to those on the street - the rag-tag bunch of ordinary and not so ordinary people. They also stretch back to times when pandemics were not so widely reported but were still as deadly, if not more so, than the recent Happening. Considering the scale of world-wide lockdowns, mask wearing and glove donning preventative measures, the Wu Xiao Happening, as it came to be known, was relatively small scale.
