Streaming Now

Postcards from Pandemica

Laurie Stone

• Publisher: Dottir Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781948340533
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening is a collection of hybrid feminist narratives that perfectly captures the many paradoxes of the COVID-19 pandemic, contrasting the seemingly never-ended public catastrophes we experienced as a collective with the isolated lives we carried out in private.

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Shifting effortless between social commentary and memoir, glimpses of history and threads of fiction, Stone, a lifelong feminist and longtime contributor to the Village Voice and NPR's Fresh Air, unapologetically observes against the backdrop of a Zoom call the evolution of feminism over the years, the gendered sexual politics underlying Jeffrey Toobin's public disgrace, rage and hope on the heels of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death, and the way we continue to pot and maintain our plants amidst the broken narrative of our world's future. As Stone says, It's good this narrative has been broken. In the narrative that has been broken, people ignored the way so many things they wanted required the suffering of others.

In a time when most of us felt more alone than ever before, Laurie Stone's Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening is a retroactive but no less timely reminder that we were less alone in our thoughts than we thought.

PART 1 Pandemica Hudson, New York

HUDSON, New York, March 28, 2020

I bought a forsythia bush in a farm store and was scared all the time. I bought purple pansies for when the frost ends.

Psychoanalysis says you can stop a thing by understanding its origin. The brains of homo sapiens will make up a story with any random things laid out in a row. The brains of homo sapiens will find a plot. That is the brilliance of the jump cut in film. We think we can see where something is going from where it has been, and we think we know where a thing came from because of the way it turned out. We can’t do either of these things.

I asked the man I live with if, to exist, virtue needed a lack of virtue in the picture for comparison. He said, “No.” I said, “The concept of virtue feels Christian to me, and I don’t like it.” He said, “It started with the Greeks.” I said, “I feel vulnerable.” I said, “Saying ‘I feel vulnerable’ adds a layer of vulnerability.”

A friend emails to say he is jealous I still have Lysol when it’s off the shelves in New York. Another friend emails to say, “I don’t want to see pictures of your rocks. I want to move my own rocks.” It’s risky to be happy.

Last fall the man I live with and I bought a house no one else wanted in upstate New York. It wasn’t finished. The trees were tangled up in hairy vines of poison ivy. The former owners were hoarders and used their woods as a dump. The man I live with is a type 1 diabetic. In the event of infection by COVID-19, his chance for pneumonia is ten times higher than the rate for other people. Years ago, when a man I was with was dying of bone marrow cancer, he kept wanting to live, and some people—I could tell from their faces—saw this as a form of gluttony.

The other night I had my first virus dream. I wander into the opening of an art gallery, where there is fancy food and trays of drinks. People urge me to taste everything, and I shovel in hors d’oeuvres as a voice in my head says, “Wash your hands! Get the hell out of there! People are too close!” But the food is free.

We are clearing the woods on our property. We are raking leaves and cutting down sick trees and hauling things to the dump, readying the land for planting. We are watching mysterious green spikes poke up. The other night I noticed a small blister on my wrist. It itched. More blisters rose up. Every time I looked at my body there were more ribbons of blisters. It was like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, lashed by the devil.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease caused when a genetic predisposition meets an environmental trigger. The beta cells in the pancreas stop producing insulin. The man I live with was twenty-three when he was diagnosed, and at that time his life expectancy was many years shorter than the amount he has lived so far. He was told he would likely lose a limb or two and go blind. There were no continuous glucose-monitoring pumps. He had to inject himself with glass hypodermics that had thick needles he would boil in a pan. He had to adjust to the disease or die slowly of organ damage or die quickly of high or low sugars. As new technologies became available, he learned to insert catheters into his body, as well as, in time, a subcutaneous sensor. There is no cure for his disease. There are no treatments, really, other than the tight control of blood sugars. He is less anxious than I am about contracting COVID-19. He has already lived most of his life inside disease.

Books and films that take place before the pandemic seem to be missing a leg or a head, limping along, innocent of what they could not know. The man I live with says, “I want to plant things my father grew in his garden. Did you know rhubarb makes a groaning sound as it grows?” I say, “Let’s go to Agway,” and we put on our gloves and masks and drive there. We look at shovels. The only one the right size feels too heavy. There are boxes of rhubarb kits. I’m not sure what’s inside them. As I approached the counter, a man says to the woman at the register, “Yeah, the bars are open. The problem is the old people, making a big deal for everyone else.” I put down the rhubarb box and say to the man I live with, “Let’s get out of here.”

We have been watching season two of My Brilliant Friend, based on the novels of Elena Ferrante. The story, set in Naples and beginning in the 1950s, studies two women who are allies and competitors and whose intimacy is again and again interrupted by men. Men who, without consequences, beat the women in their lives, sell them into disastrous marriages, threaten murder and make good on it. It’s dull. True and relentless and dull. I love looking at the faces of the two young women who play Lila and Lenu, so young and oddly hushed in their delivery. Even speaking to each other alone, they have fashioned a kind of code speech that says: Everything I say to get by in the world is a lie.

I said to the man I live with, “After the age of the virus becomes the age of what that next age will be called, one thing will remain.” He said, “What?” I said, “The hatred of women for being women.” He said, “It’s good to have something to believe in.”

The other day I offered free books to anyone who wanted them. I put two boxes at the end of the driveway with a sign that asked people to wear gloves and take what they wanted. People came by. We spoke at a distance. One box of books was gone. A woman brought her kids, who stayed in the car. It was the first time they’d been out for a while.

When my sister was dying, the room I was sleeping in was hot, and l would slip down to the living room, where the air conditioning was better, and where, from the couch, I could see the piano that had sat in the home of our parents. I think all the time of calling my sister. A few days before she died, she put glaucoma drops in her eyes, saying, “In case I wake up tomorrow and don’t have cancer anymore.”

I said to the man I live with, “We need to have living wills and medical power of attorney.” He said, “Why, is someone going to die?”

A friend writes to say she is looking forward to walking in the city again. A place without streets you cannot walk on for miles is not a city. Another friend is planning to leave the place where she is sheltering in two or three months. People want to believe in an After from which they will be able to grasp the thing they cannot see from the Now. As Game of Thrones moved toward its conclusion, I lost interest. No one cares about the ending of anything.

HUDSON, New York, April 2020

Three things in the moment you love? I’ll start.

The flat, gray sky that is almost the same color as the snow-covered fields. The Chopin impromptu on the radio. A plaster parrot with a green back and yellow breast that is swinging on a tree outside the window. I love this parrot.

Some months ago I was asked to describe a book I’d written in a sentence of any length. I didn’t write the sentence. I thought for a while the reason I didn’t write the sentence was the election and the pandemic. I don’t know the reason I didn’t write the sentence. Instead, I’ve been thinking about writing I want to read. The sentences I want to read are little provocations that mount up like a road accident.

And something else: if I am your reader, and you are reporting a scene of violently ordinary sexism—say, the way males in a particular culture get to walk ahead and females by custom and possibly by law are required to jump over a cliff onto jagged rocks, a different woman every few minutes—and the thing you are talking to me about is the conversation the men are having as they stroll ahead, deaf to the cries of the women on the cliffs, if you report this conversation, full of meaning to the men and to you, if you report this conversation without telling me as well how the rest of the scene is making you feel and what it is making you think about, if you do this, I will cease to be your reader.

This is not an example of cancel culture. The reader needs to fall in love with what the narrator is in love with, and how can you be in love with what the narrator is in love with if the narrator is in love with a world bent on your destruction? Cancel culture is when you arrive at this point and then insist no one else should read what you don’t want to read.

I streamed four shows over the past few weeks, all centering on women—two recently released and two older works I was curious to rewatch—to see how the female characters were understood in their time, and to think about who I was when I first saw them. My selections were random, the way you fall upon things in Pandemica, yet weirdly (or tellingly), all the female characters were made to stand for something—a phenomenon, a type, a cautionary example—apart from being a particular person.

Prime Suspect, for instance, which began airing thirty years ago, stars Helen Mirren as London detective Jane Tennison, a character stunningly aware of other people and truly alive only while solving murders. The men on the force sneer and ma’am her to death, including a doughy, improbable boyfriend, who walks out on her because she’s too busy chasing a serial killer to cook dinner for him. The show is mesmerizing, partly because of Mirren’s stoicism, tenderness, and sexy way of looking people in the eye, and partly because it examines what still goes on—a woman with exceptional ability having to fight against a world that doesn’t want her with as much energy as she pursues criminals.

The series comes off dated at times, especially in the extra amount of punishment meted out to Jane, something the creators seem unaware of—showing her frustrated, starved, and denied less because of sexism than because it’s how women are understood to exist in the world, fairly or unfairly. Whenever female characters get screwed and screwed again, despite their efforts individually or collectively, it tells the viewer not to worry; the world you woke up in remains intact. I don’t think this undermining of a show’s own analysis is standard practice anymore, but it was the case for a very long time when I covered film and TV in the eighties and nineties that denying female characters gratification with a sadistic edge—in movies like Broadcast News (1987) and As Good as It Gets (1997)—was a glaring trend that didn’t often get named.

Watching Prime Suspect, I kept wondering what it would be like to speak the way Mirren does—softly and with almost no visible emotion. Then I remembered there is freedom in knowing you won’t change. The other day the man I live with said, “I probably won’t shovel snow in my late eighties.” I said, “Why not?”

For no reason I can point to, we watched the Criterion Collection edition of Darling, directed by John Schlesinger and with a screenplay by Frederic Raphael. In 1965, when the movie was released, it was something everyone talked about, said to be charting the cynicism of the world and the headlong, icy way modern women went after what they wanted. (They did?) Seeing it now, the question you can’t help asking is: Why does Julie Christie wear so many scarves over her bouffant ’do? Julie’s character, Diana Scott, is looking for a way to dodge domesticity and get to the party, and her way is through men, which leads back to some house or other, although she doesn’t foresee this.

To be honest, the movie did stir memories of the time we all married Italian princes we had had, like, no conversations with and dressed up in gowns to eat alone when our husbands went to Rome to visit Mama. We were bored. So bored. Bored, bored, bored. Everyone adjusted their voices to the clipped, crackly, fake upper-class accent of Audrey Hepburn. Even Julie Christie! We represented the fallen world and the vacuousness of the vacuum that had opened between drab, postwar England and the swinging whatever poking up from the dead land. We girls represented vacuousness in every movie made because that’s what we were made to represent. (Maybe not every movie. Don’t quote me.) Directors looked at us with distaste and fascination. Obviously.

The best moment in the film: Julie beginning her affair with Dirk Bogarde by sticking a finger in his mouth as he sleeps on a train. Bogarde is beautiful and great to watch. Laurence Harvey, also a love interest in the film, ghouls around, his mouth an unbroken line. And there we were, pacing the ancient stone paths of the castle we’d finally moved into, breaking hearts like the porcelain figurines we smashed to the floor and wondering how in hell we were going to get out of this one. Julie received an Academy Award that year for Best Actress.

The past few days I’ve been thinking about my teacher Morris Dickstein, who died recently, and who in 1968 taught a seminar on Blake at Columbia University. 1968 is only a few years after 1965, but they might as well have been different eras. The Blake seminar so vibrated with the love Morris felt for the great poet of freedom and rebellion, and with the love he felt for the students who came each week to watch ideas shoot from his forehead, we would never forget the feeling of being there. Everyone in the class moved toward each other. One was Lenny Davis, and in this setting, I think we could foresee that in all the decades to come, we’d find ourselves from time to time at a bar, talking as if it would always be 1968.

In the seminar, we read every word Blake wrote. We were invited to Morris’s apartment. It was a time when students and faculty mixed, and if you were a student, you were in awe of everything about your professors. Over the years, I would cross paths with Morris at screenings and book events, and I would always be happy to see him. No one knows the resonances they produce when they teach a class and the class becomes a thing. No one knows these resonances can last nearly a lifetime.

If not for the women’s movement—fully up and running by 1968—we might all have become Diana Scotts. I had friends who didn’t eat in their apartments as a way to be anorexic. I would open their refrigerators, and there would be leftovers from expensive restaurants I was jealous they’d gone to, and on top of bits of this and that they’d scooped into aluminum tins would grow lovely, mossy topiaries of mold. Because they didn’t eat in their apartments.

Watching the four-part documentary Allen v. Farrow (2021), the Diana Scott approach to going places floated to mind. The way Mia tucked herself into the lives of men with mastery in their work while remaining insecure about her own: Frank Sinatra, André Previn, Woody Allen. Maybe in the life of every Diana Scott eventually arrives a boyfriend who will marry your daughter.

Farrow’s face, bathed in light in the interviews, is still amazed at the way the world works, as if she’s remained the perfect late-sixties gamine she played all those years ago in such movies as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). There’s no evidence in her comments of irony or a sense of humor, except for the deadpan delivery of the fact that Previn f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Part 1: Pandemica, Hudson, New York
• Part 2: Elsewhere, Elsewhen
• Denouement: New York City
• Acknowledgments