Plague, pestilence

What was the plague that hit Athens in the summer of 430 BCE?

Hot zone update

Sitting at my desk in New York and trying to gear up to write a letter of recommendation that's due today - fortunately I don't need to be on campus until three, as I still have quite a bit of reading to finish before class as well.

Dublin was excellent but phenomenally tiring - any time I was not actually seeing people and doing conference things, I was essentially huddled in bed in my hotel room (fortunately it was quite a nice room - I put up the Do Not Disturb sign and just left it up!).

Interesting interview with Richard Preston at the New York Times about current plans to update his thriller-like account of Ebola as of the early 1990s, The Hot Zone. I vividly remember reading this during my first year of grad school - my roommate LeeAnn had the hardcover and I devoured it! I have been following Ebola developments closely and with interest: my two main fantasy alternate careers are neurologist and epidemiologist, and I am a little sorry that I am not involved in planning and organizing ways to contain the epidemic.

I am relieved to see that Preston admits that one bit of the book is especially in need of correction (I always wondered!):

In the original “Hot Zone,” I have a description of a nurse weeping tears of blood. That almost certainly didn’t happen. When a person has Ebola, the eyes can turn brilliant red from blood vessels leaking and blood oozing out of the eyelid. That’s horrifying, but it’s not someone with tears of blood running down their face. I want to fix that.

Here's his piece in this week's New Yorker.

Catch-up/closing tabs

Oh dear, it is now officially the time in the semester when I admit that I am never going to get on top of all this work and that I'd better just stay calm and ride it out!

So busy this week that (most unusually!) I have not even had a chance to write my race report from the Princeton 70.3 on Sunday. (Short description: fun but hot; bicycle woes, ultimately transcended; sore feet!)

About to head out of town again to see friends and family but more particularly to go to the memorial concert for my mother's dear friend and longtime colleague Don Kawash.

Next two weekends will be mercifully at home, then on Oct. 15 I head to Dublin for the Swift symposium (paper not yet written - that, the overdue tenure letter and a letter of recommendation due Oct. 1 are the three work bits most immediately and guiltily on my mind!).

I'm teaching a graduate seminar this semester that basically features a novel a week, so less light reading than usual (on the bright side, work I can do on trains). Up Monday: Godwin's Caleb Williams, a favorite of mine. Train reading?

Symptom of being overly busy: huge number of unclosed tabs!

Here goes:

Manhattan swimmer replicates fictional Cheever feat! (Sort of.)

Heath Lowrance's ten favorite Westerns.

Lavie Tidhar's selfie horror story.

What makes for a brilliant book cover?

A conference I really would be keen to go to!

Helen DeWitt's library on display at the Artists Space on Greene St. through early November.

"Go to Work on an Egg."

Coach David's wife Megan takes the 50K trail championship!

Anna Deveare Smith on artists' discipline.

Eighteenth-century maven Devoney Looser (a.k.a. "Stone Cold Jane Austen) on the roller derby revival.

Good tip from Nico about an upcoming Britten performance: I have a ticket for Oct. 30.

Ebola watch: we ain't seen nothin' yet.... (More Ebola - that story's from a couple weeks ago and already feels ominously out of date.)

Meager light reading around the edges of an extremely busy September: Willy Voet, Breaking the Chain: Drugs and Cycling - The True Story (Voet is a remarkably unsympathetic character, but it is a fascinating account regardless); Darryl Gregory, We Are All Completely Fine (I really like this guy's books!); M. M. Kaye's The Ordinary Princess, which Katharine Beutner made me think of; and Lauren Beukes, Broken Monsters. Was alternating this week between Kipling's stories and the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (shuttling back and forth between different bits of light reading is pretty invariably a sign of deep fatigue), but fell back last night in state of utter exhaustion on Seanan McGuire's new October Daye novel, which was more what I was in the mood for.

Wonderful but overly busy schedule has also included breakfast with the author of a favorite book of mine, a black-tie Johnsonian gala at the Knickerbocker Club, a class visit from and dinner with the excellent author of an excellent book I taught last week in LTCM and the second meeting of the Manhattan Supper Club (we convene at G.'s place on Greene St. - we being me and my brother, sister-in-law and niece - and dine on pizza and associated delicacies at Arturo's, with optional add-on ice-cream module to follow!).

Outbreak

MSF nurse Anja Wolz on life and death in a Sierra Leone Ebola case management center. (Via Seth Mnookin.)

Zip-detachment strategies

Via Tyler Cowen, the epidemiology of zipper-related genital injuries:

Zip-related genital injuries affect both paediatric and adult cohorts. Practitioners should be familiar with various zip-detachment strategies for these populations.

Charterhouse Square

"[S]torage is becoming a problem."

(This book arrived with me recently, though I regretfully remember that the story when it first broke struck me with a kind of Grand Guignol Swift/Celine hilarity, not funny at all of course but with something of the pathos of the scene in Billy Liar where he has procrastinated delivering letters to the extent of wrecking his life and his home with their stored undelivered verbiage - now feel I must read the book in order to think about it from the more serious perspective of those whose loved ones (Evelyn Waugh, Jessica Mitford!) were mistreated there.)

Triffids!

Defoe's zombie apocalypse.

Tokens

Not open to the public, but in the slightly unlikely event that you happen to be reading this and are also in the class, come up and introduce yourself after the lecture: I'm speaking tomorrow to Siddhartha Deb's fiction students at the New School on Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year.  It really is the most extraordinary book (I started rereading it an hour or two ago - I have an old lecture that can probably be 50% recycled but I thought I had better read as much as I could and think about what the appropriate frame will be for this context).

"A cheese-and-tomato sandwich, a slice of cake and an orange juice"

Simon Kuper has a rather wonderful piece at the FT on epidemiologist Jerry Morris and the "invention" of exercise:

Clearly, if modern humans were going to exercise, it would have to be in their spare time. But would they? After his initial studies of occupations and heart attacks, Morris embarked on a large-scale study of British civil servants, to find out whether they did.

This was in the days before computers. Morris remembers: “I think of a room in this school, with the floor consisting of piles of documents. Men of this age, men of that age, men doing this kind of exercise or that. Going through all of these documents to extract the cyclists, then going through all the cyclists to extract those who cycle to work. Three very respectable ladies would spend days and days, and another lady would check they were not cutting corners. Changing a hypothesis now, in the computer age, is a matter of a twiddle on the knobs. Changing a hypothesis when we were doing important work was a major enterprise.”