"You must read, you must persevere"

Scene from Decameron (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

    Facebook gets a lot of grief, but I find it helpful. Not only do you see the news stories your friends are tossing up, with a cry of alarm, increasingly nowadays, but also sharing warm and encouraging human moments—some choice ones that I solicited are the basis for my Monday column.
     On Friday I was tired, so rather than read, I began listening to a new book on Audible. Well, not a new book—it's The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, completed in 1353. I would have never thought to read it, but was reminded of it, on Facebook, by my friend Michelle Durpetti, which just goes to show that running a steakhouse and being well-read are not mutually exclusive.  
     This was her post Friday at 8:07 a.m.:

”You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark... —Giovanni Boccaccio
     I have had the privilege of reading this twice in English and three times in Italian. Looking for a truly special read, especially now?
     Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron was the first great masterpiece of European storytelling.
     In the summer of 1348, with the plague ravaging Florence, ten young men and women take refuge in the countryside, where they entertain themselves with tales of love, death, and corruption, featuring a host of characters, from lascivious clergymen and mad kings to devious lovers and false miracle-makers. Named after the Greek for “ten days,” Boccaccio’s book of stories draws on ancient mythology, contemporary history, and everyday life.

      That was good enough for me. I probably should wait until I'm done—28 hours of listening on Audible—and make my report, but frankly I don't see the need for delay. The Decameron is laugh-out loud funny—particularly the second story, where two Parisian merchants are friends, one Giannotto di Civignì, a 'thoroughly honest, upright man," a cloth merchant, who "entertained a singular friendship" with a wealthy Jew, Abraham, who was also a very good man. 

    Giannotto feels distressed that Abraham should be consigned to hell "for not possessing the faith, so he took to urging him in friendly fashion to forsake the errors of the Jewish faith and turn instead to the truth of Christianity."
    The Jew "remains obstinate and would not be converted." Giannotto perseveres in his efforts. Eventually he wears Abraham down, and he says that yes, he will convert. But first he wants to go to Rome and see the man Giannotto calls "the vicar of God on earth."
   "I wish to acquaint myself to his style of living and that of his brother cardinals," says Abraham.
    This news devastates Giannotto, who suspects that a visit to the Vatican would sour the strongest believer. "All my efforts gone to waste," he broods. "If he goes to the Court of Rome and observes the impious and disgusting lifestyle of the clergy, far from turning to Christianity from Judaism, he'd revert to being a Jew if he'd already turned Christian."
    But Abraham persists, as Jews tend to do, goes to Rome, where he sees the utter corruption of the papal authority.

     "Every one of them from the greatest to the least was given over to the worst sort of lechery. Not merely the kind which accorded with nature, but also that practiced by sodomites. They did so, moreover, without a scrap of shame or conscience, and the courtesans and pretty boys could ask the earth in exchange for their favors. Aside from their lechery, they were one and all gluttons, he discovered, topers forever at the bottle and like brute beasts more concerned with stuffing their paunches than anything else. On further scrutiny he found that they were all so grasping and money grubbing that they would buy and sell human, nay Christian, blood,  and by the same token sacred objects of whatever sort."

      There's more, but you get the idea. That brought a smile, to remember that while we consider ourselves apostates for questioning our religious leaders, that tradition goes way back, dwelling at the heart of our culture.
      But that wasn't the laugh-out-loud part. The truly funny moment is Abraham's conclusion. 
     "A sober and temperate man," he surveys the corruption and debauch, "grieves not a little," and returns to Paris. 
     "What an unspeakable lot," Abraham tells his friend all about it, not only the lack of the smallest degree of holiness or mercy, but also "lust, greed, gluttony, deceit, envy arrogance, and worse." 
    The Holy See, he continues, seems to be putting all their effort and skill in expunging the Christian religion rather than preserving it.  Then Abraham reaches a surprising conclusion.
     Despite the best efforts of its leadership, he observes, Christianity "continues to spread and acquire ever brighter radiance. I think I'm right to see the Holy spirit at work in it."
     In other words: only the direct intercession of God Almighty and His continuing favor could bring success to a religion otherwise so thoroughly undermined by the evil of its leaders. Abraham declares "nothing will stop" him from joining such a mighty faith.
    "Let us go to church and have me baptized," Abraham insists. Together they proceed to Notre Dame. Giannotto is his godfather.

You can learn more about the version I'm listening to on Audible here. 



 

Metamorphosis

    When the butterfly-shaped Rush University Medical Center opened in 2012 on the near West Side, I took a tour. I'm not sure why; they must have invited me, and I went, having a professional interest in hospitals. I've been inside most hospitals in the city, and watched surgical procedures at quite a few of them.
     Eight years later I only remember one thing about the tour, because I've repeated it over the years, as an interesting factoid. That the lobby of Rush is cleverly designed to be turned into a field hospital, with oxygen outlets and power sources hidden in the pillars for instance, so that should disaster strike the city, they could immediately fill the place with beds and start treating a large number of patients in the large space.
     What kind of a disaster could that be? I mused at the time. A 9/11 attack of some sorts. I tried to wrap my head around the possibilities, but gave up. I really couldn't.
     Now we know. On March 11, the hospital announced it's going into "Surge Mode," "as preparations for a potential sharp increase in patients with COVID-19 move into a new phase." Since much of the hospital is designed to handle airborne infectious disease—their emergency room bays have doors, for instance, instead of the usual curtains, and whole wards can be negatively pressurized to keep contaminated air from leaking out—the lobby ward will be used to handle non-COVID-19 cases, to free up hospital space for those battling the virus.
     Maybe because eight years ago it seems such a distant, improbable, end-of-the-world possibility, that it gave me an extra jolt this week to realize that the long-planned for calamity is upon us now, and as of Friday Rush is now ramping up their lobby field hospital for the very worst, which might arrive within the next few weeks.

The cost of lies; coronavirus death toll could top Vietnam

     The Vietnam War raged for the first 15 years of my life. I’d sprawl coloring as Uncle Walt read the death toll on TV. When I was older, the war became my benchmark for presidential folly: sacrificing thousands of American lives to avoid admitting the obvious: We lost.
     During the first three years of the Trump administration, I kept pulling out Vietnam like a talisman. Sure, things are bad, but look: They’ve been much worse. We’re lucky.
     When fellow Dems swooned, wailing that we’d reached rock bottom — America broken, democracy dead — I’d try to cheer them up by dangling my lucky token. See this? Within our lifetime Lyndon B. Johnson — a Democratic president, for those unfamiliar — also lied, followed by Richard Nixon, a Republican, and their lies led to the deaths of 58,000 Americans. While Trump is certainly affecting lives, he isn’t taking many. There isn’t a growing body count to lay at his feet.
     I didn’t think to add: “Yet.”
     Citing the awful past was a way to feel good about the present, about our beloved country even as it enshrined idiocy and error. We’ve been here before and recovered. We will do so again.
     That seems like giddy optimism now that we are facing a crisis that Donald Trump can’t lie away. We have no idea how many American lives will be sacrificed on the altar of his ego. A thousand? We’ve passed that already. Ten thousand could be dead next week. A hundred thousand? Easily. A million? Some epidemic experts fear more, warning that as many as 1.7 million Americans could die if we continue bungling our response. The final figure will depend in part on whether Trump really declares the crisis over in mid-April and sends Americans packing their churches at Easter.

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Dry dock

     My father was a sailor. He often entertained me as a boy with tales of the sea, of adventures in exotic ports: Bermuda, Oslo, Copenhagen, Majorca, Naples, Venice. His voyages at sea were only 10 years in the past and still tangible to us both: I played with the shoulder boards from his uniform, worked the knob on his shortwave, tapped his telegraph key. Dah-dah-dah, dit dit dit, dah dah dah.
     He'd also talk about the more practical aspects of sailing, how ships would have to be occasionally hauled out of the water and repainted, the barnacles scraped from their sides.
     "If you can figure out a way to keep barnacles off ships," he say, "you'll make a fortune." And I'd grab a crayon and a pad of paper and design systems for peeling the tenacious little crustaceans off the hulls of my triangular vessels, with scrapers and nets and such. It passed the time.
     I thought of dry dock Wednesday, passing the Landmark Inn, Northbrook's downtown bar. They were taking advantage of this enforced idleness to replace their old deck—why not? No worry about customers blundering into the work, and a way to keep busy, not to mention a vote of confidence in the future. We'll need the deck by summer.
      With our 24 hour, global economy, we've lost the natural rhythm of voyage and port, work and repair, sailors and farmers. We don't spend the winter mending nets and sharpening plows. I don't want to romanticize that life, a hard life, I imagine, but there were fallow times when everything shut down and you did repairs and carved scrimshaw and told stories, resting and waiting.
    We are in such a time now.
    So we wash our hands and swab questionable surfaces with antiseptic wipes, keep track of The Situation and monitor The Crisis , which feels, to me, as if it is just beginning, rather than just ending, as the president imagines and would like us to believe. I'd say come Easter he'll look like a fool, but he looks like a fool now, to those with eyes to see.
    While hunkered down—I'm going to prepare a post on that word, "hunker," I've been hearing it so much—waiting out the storm, listening to the wind pick up, there is only so much news you can absorb—I haven't watched a second of the president's endless propaganda sessions, some reaching 90 minutes, rants that edge into Castro territory. Just seeing the aftershocks through social media is enough. Why gaze directly at it?
      "Teach us to care, and not to care," T.S. Eliot writes. "Teach us to sit still."
      I like the idea of dry dock, of off-season and hibernation. We are instructed to keep to our homes, and I largely do that, with breaks to walk the dog and, today, to walk one of the lovely Dominican Republic cigars my son brought me—save your lectures.
    Yes, it's scary. Only a fool wouldn't be scared, and we see those aplenty. My gut tells me they will be scared too, eventually, as understanding dawns, too late, gasping for air in the parking lot of a besieged hospital.
     Before that sets in, we are all suddenly rich in time. Why not use it, best we can? The temperature hit the 50s today and I went outside and put on my elk skin linesman's gloves and started to finish clearing out the garden, a task I abandoned last October.  I don't have an expanse of hull to scrape, but there are leaves to rake and branches to clear, a winter's worth of trash that has blown into the woods alongside my yard to be picked up. There are things to do in every household, and why not pull yourself away from this social media thing and do them? That's an order.
   

‘It hurts’ — Food pantries shut by coronavirus crisis

Homeless men crowd around Night Ministry worker handing out toiletries, 2016.

     It isn’t just restaurants and bars, museums and stores.
     Organizations that provide food to the poorest and most vulnerable Illinoisans are shutting down in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Other social service agencies, like homeless shelters, are struggling to adjust.
     In the past two weeks, 112 Chicago-area food pantries have closed; 82 in Cook County — almost a quarter of the 370 food pantries served by the Greater Chicago Food Depository.
     “The number is shocking” said Greg Trotter, spokesman for depository. “It hurts and it has an impact.” 
     In the 13 collar counties, another 30 food pantries closed in the past week, according to the Northern Illinois Food Bank, mostly because those who run them don’t want to risk exposure to COVID-19.   
     “Our pantries largely rely upon the help from volunteers, and a lot of our volunteers tend to be older folks, seniors who have time to spare,” said Liz Gartman, communications manager for the food bank. ”Many of those same folks are taking health precautions very seriously, as they should, so they don’t feel comfortable coming in.”

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Fuck You Monster: I'm Not Afraid of You.

  
     I very rarely welcome a guest writer to the blog. But then Tony Fitzpatrick is no ordinary jamoke. Extraordinary in so many regards, he's the most Chicago guy I've ever met (and I've met Studs Terkel, Mike Royko and Saul Bellow). A fantastic artist, star of stage and screen, both movies and TV—he was great as Jack Birdbath in the recent Amazon series, "Patriot." I consider myself lucky to have spent as many hours as I have in his company, lucky to call him friend and hang his art on my walls. Monday was a very full day tracking down a hard news story—rare for me, I know—that will be, I believe, fairly eye catching when it hits the paper on Wednesday. To keep you groundlings happy in the meantime, I asked Tony if I could reprint this essay he posted on Facebook, and he graciously agreed:

This is an essay I wrote on the 7th day of the Coronavirus crisis in Chicago:

     Walking through Humboldt park on Wednesday, I sat down on a bench after a loop around the Boathouse and the Bird Sanctuary part of the park. I'd been trying to keep from freaking out about the enormous changes in our world manifested in the last week. I quit my health club because of expenses and shuttered both of the galleries.As I sat there I realized that they might never re-open. That walking this park in the morning would be the new normal; and this was more than okay.
     For the first time since this whole mess started. I was somewhere ... Quiet. There was Green—trees grasses, marsh weeds , and water. It was the stillness of solitude. I needed to think and this was a place to do it. I looked at the Water and saw Canadian Geese, Mallards, and Wood Ducks; and around me in the park I'd noticed Robins, Red Winged Blackbirds and Grackles as well as copious Gulls.This place was perfect for all I had to think about which was how to remain calm.How to accept what I could not change. How to go forward with the sometimes arduous business of living one day at a time and being grateful for it.
I grew up watching Monster Movies as a kid: Giant Gila Monster, Creature From the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein, Willard (bunch of Rats eat Earnest Borgnine),The Abominable Dr. Phibes. You name it--I saw every gruesome mutation the movie racket could concoct in the relatively naive age of 1960's America-- where there were plenty of societal horrors, wars and assassinations-- but THOSE were too real. Those were things one heard on the news.      
     Those were somebody else's Monsters. Mine were out of the Comics—Creepy, Eerie, and pulp novels. The one that scared the shit out of me was "I am Legion" by Richard Mathissen it became an equally scary movie with Charlton Heston and Anthony Zerbe. Heston plays the last man alive, or so he thinks, he is holed up in a building in what I think is Downtown L.A. or SanFrancisco, not sure which; and he is surrounded by an Army of Zombie-Like mutants who can only come out at night.Led by the amazing Zerbe (an underrated character actor his whole life) who plays a former news anchor gone mad after becoming a mutant from an unnamed plague.
     That was the truly frightening part—the Un-named plague. The one that wiped most of humanity out and made the rest into mindless fanatical Zombies who practice some inane religion. Led by a psychologically stunted leering Madman. Actually ?—A lot like Trump voters. I would SAY that—but Zerbe's Mathias is infinitely smarter and more likable than Trump—which is still to say: Not at all. The real monster is the plague itself—Heston survives it because he is injured while bringing the vaccine for this back to America—he injects himself—and he is cured. This , by the way, in NO way portends a happy ending.
I could not stop thinking of this movie while walking an empty Park yesterday—while able to hear every sound of every bird in that park. It centered me --I sat down and was able to cobble together something like a plan B. I was also able to accept that life was changing in a tidal way. That nothing that comes after this; If I live through it, will be the same. I'm 61 years old-- I've lived longer than anyone ever thought I would . I've been lucky in my life, my wife and kids, my work,I've got no complaints.
     While this thing descends upon us I'm going to try to be the best version of human that I can be. I make sense of the world by making pictures about it . One of the things or devices I relied on. as a kid was drawing giant creatures taking revenge on us—Lizards, Locusts, Eagles, Cicadas, and Wolves. All of them opening giant cans of Whoop-Ass on whichever segment of humanity I thought needed a good Ass-Kicking that day...Mostly? ...It was Nuns and Christian Brothers-- who took turns playing tether-ball with my head as a kid. Hell—I learned how to throw a left-hook from a Nun--she would pretend she was going to smack me with her right hand?...then?... she would hammer me with her left.I made a note to myself:         In case of a rematch? Punch the Nun FIRST...
     These drawings were great fun . They allowed me to get a little Karmic revenge on the Nuns, Teachers, Cops ,and anyone else I considered a pain in the ass who ought to mind their own fucking business.
     This Drawing is a bit like that. It's a way of saying: "Fuck You Monster—I'm not afraid of You". The only thing I know about the coming days is that we have the best weapon known to mankind. We have each other.

Toilet paper gives strength to face crisis

     As the COVID-19 global pandemic unfolds, and the confusing whir of current events slowly gives way to the certainties of history, one question will echo down the years, fascinating scholars yet unborn:
     What was the deal with toilet paper?
     With a deadly plague spreading everywhere, consumers stripped stores, not of batteries or booze, coffee or toothpaste.
     But toilet paper. In enormous, cart-filling mega-packs.
     And not just in the United States. Australian media described a toilet paper “frenzy” where shoppers pulled knives on each other. In Hong Kong, armed robbers stole pallets of TP. Shelves were stripped in Singapore and Taiwan.
     Journalists quizzed those buying the paper for their perspective.
     “If everyone’s doing it, I’m doing it, too,” one Sydney shopper reasoned.
     The world seemed divided into people either loading up on what was called “therapeutic paper” when it was first patented in 1857, or condemning those who did so for panicking.
     It struck me there had to be a third path to understanding. There had to be someone wise. Someone oracular. Someone who knows toilet paper.
     “It has been a crazy couple of weeks as related to toilet paper purchasing,” said Kim Sackey. She is consumer knowledge leader at Georgia-Pacific and was speaking from the global headquarters in Atlanta of one of the world’s leading manufacturers of what the company demurely calls “bath tissue.”

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