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Plagues comes with Reason and Romance
Apr. 8th, 2020 08:11 amI have been continuing with my daily updates on COVID-19 on Facebook with some summaries on Twitter, rhetorically asking whether the now-infected British PM will properly fund the NHS (wasn't that an election promise?). I drew what is comparison between per capita tests and confirmed cases, some comments on the debate over masks, and the stunning expansion of intensive care beds in Victoria. As a whole, Australia (and New Zealand) is doing remarkably well compared to much of the world, but thankfully our state governments recognised the concerns well before the federal governments pulled their finger out. The same cannot be said for the United States which is going from bad to worse which, again, was unfortunately predictable.
Among all this, I have been continuing with my turn the aesthetic, watching The Periwig-Maker (hat tip to Mal J Brown), a delightful and sad short film based on Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, which much a more a factual narrative than a work of fiction. Adding to this was re-watching Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, a brilliant film, but which did not sit well with my readings how emergency powers tend to become permanent. I've also been powering through Edwina Grey's Prismatic, an Australian-set horror-contagion novel which won the Aurealis Award for Best Horror in 2006. I met the author many years ago and purchased the book; it is to my shame it is only now that the pages have been turned.
But surely at the top of my current aesthetic indulgences must be Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. I first read this in the mid-90s and was immediately taken by the highly evocative style, the genuine passion, consistency in complexity, and plenty of dry humour. There are clever elaborations between secret affairs and open hearts, the remote and the proximal, of physical promiscuities and spiritual sincerity, and the classic contradiction between rationality and romance. The title itself is a meaningful pun, more obvious in the native Spanish (El amor en los tiempos del cólera); love as a type of sickness, with passion playing a central ambiguous role. The use of an accessible plot is clever, as it feigns simplicity. But this is a complex, multi-layered text, which ultimately celebrates the all-too-human experience of love without trite sentimentality. This is what great literature looks like. Los síntomas del amor son los mismos del cólera.
Among all this, I have been continuing with my turn the aesthetic, watching The Periwig-Maker (hat tip to Mal J Brown), a delightful and sad short film based on Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, which much a more a factual narrative than a work of fiction. Adding to this was re-watching Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, a brilliant film, but which did not sit well with my readings how emergency powers tend to become permanent. I've also been powering through Edwina Grey's Prismatic, an Australian-set horror-contagion novel which won the Aurealis Award for Best Horror in 2006. I met the author many years ago and purchased the book; it is to my shame it is only now that the pages have been turned.
But surely at the top of my current aesthetic indulgences must be Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. I first read this in the mid-90s and was immediately taken by the highly evocative style, the genuine passion, consistency in complexity, and plenty of dry humour. There are clever elaborations between secret affairs and open hearts, the remote and the proximal, of physical promiscuities and spiritual sincerity, and the classic contradiction between rationality and romance. The title itself is a meaningful pun, more obvious in the native Spanish (El amor en los tiempos del cólera); love as a type of sickness, with passion playing a central ambiguous role. The use of an accessible plot is clever, as it feigns simplicity. But this is a complex, multi-layered text, which ultimately celebrates the all-too-human experience of love without trite sentimentality. This is what great literature looks like. Los síntomas del amor son los mismos del cólera.
