What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year - Hardcover

Finch, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593319079 ISBN 13: 9780593319079

Verlag: Knopf, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • With unwavering humanity and light-footed humor, this intimate account of the interminable year of 2020 offers commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic, protests for racial justice, the U.S. presidential election, and more, all with a miraculous dose of groundedness in head-spinning times.

"This book is so funny and so true. Charles Finch unpacks a year of plague, fear, shameless venality, and dizzying stupidity with an irrepressible wit and surgically precise cultural observations. I didn't know how badly I needed exactly this. Maybe you do too?" —Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box
 
In March 2020, at the request of the Los Angeles Times, Charles Finch became a reluctant diarist: As California sheltered in place, he began to write daily notes about the odd ambient changes in his own life and in the lives around him. The result is What Just Happened.
 
In a warm, candid, welcoming voice, and in the tradition of Woolf and Orwell, Finch brings us into his own world: taking long evening walks near his home in L.A., listening to music, and keeping virtual connections with friends across the country as they each experience the crisis. And drawing on his remarkable acuity as a cultural critic, he chronicles one endless year with delightful commentary on current events, and the things that distract him from current events: Murakami’s novels, reality television, the Beatles. 
 
What Just Happened is a work of empathy and insight, at once of-the-moment and timeless—a gift from one of our culture's most original thinkers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CHARLES FINCH is a book critic and essayist as well as the author of fifteen novels. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and the recipient of the 2017 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Los Angeles.

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MARCH

March 11

There’s an emotional chill in the streets today for the first time. People are suddenly thinking and planning, which are not always part of the normal duties of life. You can see it in their expressions. Coronavirus has been a story for a month or so, but only in the last ten days has it seemed like an immediate problem, and not until today did it seem much more alarming than the various deadly flus that have been arriving here by bird and swine (is swine just pigs?) since my childhood.

It now seems inevitable that in certain places where the virus is spreading, people will have to quarantine for a week or two. I tell my mom I think it will be okay. That doesn’t completely reflect what my friend Nathan, a doctor in New York, has been saying, but at least it sort of does. The best news of the past few days was his confirmation that the virus doesn’t seem to affect children. It’s the first thing you would wish for in a pandemic. But nearly everything else is an educated guess. We still don’t even know how you get it. According to Rush Limbaugh, it’s “like the common cold” and “panic is just not warranted,” so presumably we’re fucked.

However serious it ends up, the virus is already being politicized. A reporter asks GOP senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who’s a sprightly 85, what precautions he’s taking about this illness, which is reportedly particularly deadly for the old, and he responds “Want to shake hands?”

March 12

I drove just to take a drive today. No traffic anywhere. In Los Angeles.

A consensus is firming up hour by hour, and it seems more likely that we will all have to lock in for a few weeks to slow the spread of the virus, not just people with symptoms. Ten days ago it would have been an unthinkable suggestion. But the directives to work remotely are cascading down—­people guiltily excited for a week or two at home—­and in big cities, stores and restaurants are closed, with cheerful signs in their windows that they’ll reopen as soon as it’s safe. For better or worse, retail gives our world its texture. When it’s gone you feel it.

Most museums around the world closed today too, and this evening, in the actual midst of games I think, the NBA suspended its season, which was maybe the biggest jolt yet. It came after the 7′1″ Rudy Gobert (who made the not especially well-­received covid joke of touching every microphone at a press conference a couple days ago) tested positive.

Since Trump won, we’ve congratulated ourselves on our luck that he hasn’t had to face a crisis. This is how bad he is with things going okay! people would say and chuckle. Well, here we go. So far he’s lurching around in search of an alibi, his focus mostly by minimizing the threat of the virus. Almost every day he says some variation of the phrase “It will go away,” which is how children think about bad stuff, down to refusing to say the bad word out loud. But it’s worked on us, at least to some degree—­we were asleep too long. In part that’s probably because even in the most liberal mind, if you could strip every veneer of politeness away, there was a sense that the virus was happening in China, where stuff sort of always seems to be happening. Their economy is expanding so quickly that we’ve learned it fires off these kinds of externalities at random, besides which they have egregiously limited freedom of press, so all news about the virus has seemed uncertain.

But now “the whole of Italy is closed,” as a headline making its way around Twitter from the Corriere della Sera says, and no one sensible thinks coronavirus is a regional problem any more. The Italian lockdowns are the most severe restriction on movement in a western democracy since World War II, apparently. (Anyway, as Nathan said, if we’re comparing countries, by the time China was at this stage of their outbreak—­20 deaths—­they had already built two new hospitals. We can’t even test people yet.) On the news from Italy, the number has suddenly shot up: as many as 20,000 people may die in America, a number so big it’s laced with a certain grim comedy for those of us who can reach deep into the mists of autocrat time, six days ago, and remember when Trump refused to let a few hundred people get off the cruise ship Grand Princess. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault,” as he put it.

There are long sections of shelving at the grocery store that are empty; enough sauerkraut and maraschino cherries left to feed an army on the march, but no milk, no bread, no meat, and only the most homely non-­perishable items (I pass a lone can that says Unsalted Asparagus Spears, in glum resignation to its contents). In truth, if you’ve spent your life wandering like a docile cow through supermarket aisles stocked with an array of food that would humble an ancient emperor, it’s not a great feeling. “Will we see canned peas again?” That’s a terrifying question to ask your friends even 80% jest. And people are terrified. That’s the main thing. Everyone seems so scared.

I think I was naively sure that something would judder into motion in our creaky old government—­some lifelong bureaucrat on the fifth floor of an overflow office in Alexandria would get an unusual fax from a colleague at the CDC about the numbers in Wuhan, the city in China where this new, fifth strain of corona­virus seems to have originated, and at that moment a long chain of rote superpower stuff would develop, labs unmothballed, production lines whipping into life. America is such an enormous enter­prise that up until this moment it’s still seemed that even if our government has been starved down to its bones by Republicans and big business (except the military, of course, which is fattened up by profiteers) it would have some reflexive memory of capability lurking in it, which would be triggered and creak meaningfully forward while the meaningless theater of Trump played out overhead. Maybe it will still happen.

March 13

Locked in. The shelf-­stable foods I ordered last week have started to arrive, today lentils and oats. I contemplate them and feel like a farmer in the Baltics receiving state rations.

Sarah Palin has been revealed as Bear Mask on The Masked Singer.

March 15

A day of rain among days of rain, eaves dripping hard, adding to the sense of strangeness and interiority these numb hours already have. I love the rain, and having grown up on the east coast, I miss it. You can be inside and rain makes you more inside. And any weather in L.A. except sunshine seems vaguely sacred too. At around six I put on a soft sweatshirt and go out into our tiny high-­hedged yard, which is just big enough for a few chairs and tables and a single small tree. I sit in a wooden armchair with a green cushion and carefully roll and light a joint, an indulgence on a Sunday, but to hell with it, there’s a virus. I listen to Fleetwood Mac on my headphones and feel my body soften away from its anxieties. Beneath the gray sky, the stout California trees, swaying in the wind, look suddenly both greener and less sure of themselves. Everything feels sad and witchy and possible.

I debate making spaghetti for dinner, my favorite food, but it’s one of the things that’s been scarcest on the shelves. (Only lasagna noodles last time I went to Albertson’s.) Finally, with a reckless feeling, I go inside and make it anyway, adding butter, pepper, salt, and cheap parmesan cheese, and eat it extremely hot, with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593319079
• ISBN 13: 9780593319079
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland