Welcome to Reality Farm, where your humble screechwriter is farming from home.
A few changes to the newsletter: I’ve added a section at the top (PESTILENCE & PESTICIDES) to act as a temporary clearinghouse for my running observations on coronavirus. I’m going to cut the number of suggested articles in the CONTENT CROP section down to three, so as to not overwhelm you with content. I will also keep the CONTENT CROP section free of coronavirus-related articles.
PESTILENCE & PESTICIDES 🦟
“The situation with this virus changes every time I take a shit” — my brother
Quick hits:
When I woke up two days ago, my throat hurt. Given the circumstances (coronavirus) I was rather alarmed until I remembered I’d eaten a family-sized bag of veggie straws the night before and washed it down with whisky. I’m still alarmed but it’s a different kind of alarmed.
Finally, the great gray lump of the 20th century has come to an end. All hail the long-awaited start of the 21st century.
People have asked me to verify rumors about a national lockdown, similar to what Italy and Spain are going through right now. I haven’t heard anything to suggest that such an announcement is coming soon but it seems like the logical next step. San Francisco ordered its citizens to shelter in place. New York City may soon follow. The measures to contain the coronavirus have finally caught up in exponentiality to the spread of the virus itself. When friends and old coworkers texted me about national lockdown rumors on Monday morning, the notion seemed laughable. By the time I went to bed, it seemed inevitable.
I do not fear catching the virus. I fear the maw of an exhausted and overwhelmed medical bureaucracy.
Everyone I know is having nightmares.
The social mobilization required to fight coronavirus is as close as my generation may ever get to war-time footing. A victory mindset is not visiting your grandparents and washing your hands until they bleed.
If you want to keep abreast of coronavirus developments, I’ve found a number of Twitter accounts to be clear-sighted about the situation and far nimbler in forecasting and preparation than our legacy media and political institutions. Here are a few of those folks:
I also subscribe to a Twitter list named “Epidemiology & Pub Health,” which is made up of 159 Twitter users with expertise in epidemiology and public health. Feel free to check it out.
CONTENT CROP 🌾
It’s All So … Premiocre || The Atlantic
The presence of many nice-enough choices without any meaningful way to distinguish among them is a fundamental dysphoria of modern consumerism. Anybody can track in intimate detail how the wealthy and stylish spend their money via social media, and just when you’ve learned exactly what you can’t have, the internet swoops in to offer a look-for-less utopia of counterfeits, rip-offs, and discount cashmere sweaters, perfectly keyed to the performance of a lifestyle that young Americans desperately want but can’t afford.
note: … the late-capitalism
millennial consumerism beat … amanda mull … the atlantic … you knew this was coming
Remember You Will Be Buried || Lapham’s Quarterly
Behold and See as you Pass By
As you are Now so Once was I
As I am Now you Soon will Be
Prepare for Death and Follow Me.
note: . . . relevant. article gets bonus points for mentioning Mt. Auburn Cemetery — the strangest date spot in Cambridge and a perennial favorite for psychedelic enthusiasts (with apologies to my brother, who I once dragged to the cemetery for an unbelievably bleak and depressing two hours in the drizzling rain)
The Church Forests of Ethiopia: A Mystical Geography || Emergence Magazine
Until roughly a hundred years ago, Ethiopia’s northern highlands were one continuous forest, but over time that forest has been continually bisected, eaten up by agriculture and the pressures of a growing population. Now the entire region has become a dry hinterland taken over almost entirely by farm fields. From the air it looks similar to Haiti. Less than three percent of primary forest remains. And nearly all of that three percent, Alemayehu discovered, was only found in forests protected by the church.
note: this essay is long as fuck but very cool. it comes in podcast form for you audio people and there is a short film for you visual people. tactile peeps must lick the screen
SUGAR CUBES 📷
The American (2016) by Bo Bartlett
The Day Everything Changed Forever (2016) by Bo Bartlett
The Promised Land (2015) by Bo Bartlett
WALKING THE FENCELINE 🕸
The lockdown in Italy has produced a new fake DJ video.
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
Christ, what isn’t weird and uncanny nowadays? Here’s an article from 2015 about a baby seal that ended up in a cow field in England: BBC: Seal rescued from field of cows in Lincolnshire after being separated from mum
THE GOVERNMENT OBSERVATORY ON THE HILL ABOVE MY FARM 👁
I’m looking out of windows a lot lately. Such is the condition of life in quarantine.
I’m no voyeur, I get no kick out of observing my neighbors or watching cars go back and forth. The one thing I’m interested in is the quality of light. Around 6:30pm, on clear days, the light outside my bedroom window is just unbelievable. I look out on three rowhouses painted pale yellow, brick red, and a muted pink, separated from our building by about 20 feet of back patios and alleyways. If I open my window, sit on the edge of my bed, and leave my phone across the room, I can comfortably watch the light fade across these buildings over the course of an hour.
I love this window. In the summer, our back alleyway forms a sort of henge, through which the setting sun shines onto my bedroom wall.
By late fall, the phenomenon ends. Now, as I sit at the window and watch the light on this strange spring, I feel the sun slowly shifting its weight across the sky, once again lining up to shine through my window, and I wonder if the occasion doesn’t deserve some celestial rite.
Looking out of windows is just about the only peaceful thing I’ve discovered about life in quarantine. It’s laughably stereotypical, but no less enjoyable for being so.
On a windy, sunny morning at my girlfriend’s apartment, I looked out her window and saw a calico cat sitting on a brick patio. Whoever lives there tied what looks like multi-colored Tibetan prayer flags across the patio, and as these fluttered about in the wind, the cat sat — eyes closed, completely still — in the one sunny patch of patio unbothered by the watery shadows of the flags and the trees high above.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
The New Testament read by Johnny Cash
(Sacred text, 1st century. Fifteen dollars with an Audible subscription.)
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” (James 4:13-15)
Last month, I read a New Yorker article reviewing a new book about Johnny Cash. Casey Cep writes, “Gospel music changed Cash’s career, and the gospel of Jesus Christ changed his life. . . For decades, his mother begged him to record himself reading the Bible, and when he finally did, he read the whole of the New Testament—nearly nineteen hours of the King James Version, released in 2004.”
The recording is astonishing. Listening to Johnny Cash’s deep baritone voice is like freebasing Americana. Unused as I am to hearing his voice in anything other than “Folsom Prison Blues”, “I Walk the Line”, or “A Boy Named Sue”, nineteen hours of Cash simply reading the Bible feels strangely indulgent.
Cash approached the recording with "fear, respect, awe, and reverence for the subject matter." In just the first hour of listening, I realized how much the Gospels deal with the apocalypse — in simple, matter-of-fact terms, with none of the hysteria of our current moment or extravagant imagery of Revelation. It’s not what I’d call comforting, but it gives perspective. The end times have been with us since the beginning. Ourselves, now, is not so different from ourselves two thousand years ago.
I bought the audiobook using an Audible credit, but you can also listen to it for free on YouTube.
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
“There are no libertarians in a pandemic.”
Lefties are using this line to dunk on libertarians. Libertarians are using this line to (try to) prove they aren’t heartless psychopaths after all.
Cliff Asness — billionaire investor, libertarian — recently returned to Twitter to make clear just how much he thinks this pandemic requires wide-ranging government intervention and even coercion.