It was a queer, pandemic spring,the spring they cancelled all the orgies
March 17, 2020 10:24 AM   Subscribe

 
A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY. It has happened before,
but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre, and anyway people are carefully maintaining their social distance, at least a meter between them.
posted by chavenet at 10:31 AM on March 17, 2020 [5 favorites]


I've been thinking about this.

There's the obvious:

Love in the Time of Cholera COVID-19

And the ridiculous:

One Hundred Years of Solitude Social Distancing
posted by jclarkin at 10:31 AM on March 17, 2020 [7 favorites]


"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. "
posted by logicpunk at 10:34 AM on March 17, 2020 [2 favorites]


I knew Jane eyre would be on there.
I have just returned from a visit to my landlord, the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with. He made me visit and pay rent even though my job shut down and I have no money or healthcare now. - Wuthering Heights
posted by bleep at 10:36 AM on March 17, 2020 [6 favorites]


jclarkin: "Love in the Time of Cholera COVID-19"

Love in the Time of Covfefe
posted by chavenet at 10:41 AM on March 17, 2020 [1 favorite]


It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:50 AM on March 17, 2020 [7 favorites]


It was a bright cold day in March, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

///

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I get my toilet paper, and how long the pizza delivery is taking each night, and how my parents are already practically dead from the virus, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
posted by carsonb at 11:01 AM on March 17, 2020 [20 favorites]


"St. Patrick's Day won't be St. Patrick's Day without any Irish pubs," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug a mandated 6-8 feet away from Beth.
posted by muddgirl at 11:10 AM on March 17, 2020 [20 favorites]


Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father told him to stay home.
posted by antimony at 11:13 AM on March 17, 2020 [13 favorites]


No need to modify the first sentence of the greatest of plague books, guaranteed to take your mind off your troubles:
As often, most gracious ladies, as, taking thought in myself, I mind me how very pitiful you are all by nature, so often do I recognize that this present work will, to your thinking, have a grievous and a weariful beginning, inasmuch as the dolorous remembrance of the late pestiferous mortality, which it beareth on its forefront, is universally irksome to all who saw or otherwise knew it.
posted by No Robots at 11:16 AM on March 17, 2020 [5 favorites]


The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, sedentary and live-streamed; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual pandemic of the Coronavirus which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living as a telecommuter.

P.S. I saw something nasty in the toilet paper shed.
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 11:18 AM on March 17, 2020 [5 favorites]


this is just to say
I have used
the toilet paper
that was in
the bunker

and which
you were probably
saving
for 8 months from now seriously how much are you planning to poop?

forgive me
they were 2-ply
and you have only one butt
posted by Mchelly at 11:26 AM on March 17, 2020 [34 favorites]


"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were very asymptomatic, thank you very much."
posted by Tsuga at 11:27 AM on March 17, 2020 [24 favorites]


It was a bright cold day in March, and the clocks were striking thirteen, echoing across the empty spaces of Victory Plaza.
posted by doctornemo at 11:30 AM on March 17, 2020 [1 favorite]


Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again, but this time nobody was there except one gardener, who kept a respectful distance.
posted by doctornemo at 11:31 AM on March 17, 2020 [7 favorites]


When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin, surrounded by his extended family, most of whom were wearing N-95 masks covered with words he could not read.
posted by doctornemo at 11:41 AM on March 17, 2020 [5 favorites]


A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Dafoe:
It was about the beginning of September March, 1664 2020, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland Hubei; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam Wuhan, in the year 1663 2019, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland the whole damn world again.
That last sentence, lightly adjusted, seems about right.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:42 AM on March 17, 2020 [5 favorites]


The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel, as dead as the port's night life.
posted by doctornemo at 11:42 AM on March 17, 2020 [5 favorites]


it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 11:43 AM on March 17, 2020 [4 favorites]


"COVID-19 had long devastated the country."
(for "The Red Death had long devastated the country")
posted by doctornemo at 11:44 AM on March 17, 2020 [2 favorites]


The shock, the scandal, when it is revealed that Colonel Brandon is secretly buying toilet paper by the skid, the confusion, the questioning of his essential character, followed by the relief when it is revealed he has only done so to give them out as alms and supports for his ailing tenants and retainers.
posted by bonehead at 11:45 AM on March 17, 2020 [3 favorites]


"When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, his doctor strongly advised against it."
posted by Tsuga at 12:02 PM on March 17, 2020 [20 favorites]


And then the murders began.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:11 PM on March 17, 2020 [6 favorites]


Well, Prince, so Seattle and Tacoma are now just family estates of the Bezoses. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist— and I really believe he is Antichrist—I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave', as you call yourself! But how are you? I see I have frightened you—sit down and tell me all the news.
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:19 PM on March 17, 2020


“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its self-isolation.”
posted by Capt. Renault at 12:32 PM on March 17, 2020 [7 favorites]


"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting two meters from her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do."

“Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. I got a text from the ER nurse: 'Mother deceased. Hospital quarantine procedures remain in effect.'"

“All children, except the ones whose parents scoffed at social distancing recommendations, grow up.”

"Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his death was signed by a volunteer at the quarantine hotel."

“True! – nervous – very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am an asymptomatic carrier?”

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think it's a good idea to hang out in bars during a pandemic.”

"Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and entirely forgotten among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, 13 days ago, just like so many others since."
posted by eotvos at 12:34 PM on March 17, 2020 [13 favorites]


It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him. Then the chaplain performed a guerilla pleurodesis on him since all of the surgeons were out sick and he wasn't allowed in the radiology room.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:56 PM on March 17, 2020 [6 favorites]


For sale: face mask, eighty dollars.
posted by mbrubeck at 1:18 PM on March 17, 2020 [14 favorites]


For a long time, I went to bed early. I wasn’t even that tired. It was more like, hey: here’s a good way to pass the time.
Proust spent the last decade of his life in his bed, ruminating. He knew a couple of things about social distanciation.
posted by elgilito at 1:44 PM on March 17, 2020


It's true, though, the local queer-friendly sex club just yesterday said "until further notice..."
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:48 PM on March 17, 2020


"The small boys came early to the testing."
posted by bz at 1:52 PM on March 17, 2020 [1 favorite]


The first sentence of Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book Isn’t particularly drastic, but surely other parts in the intro chapter are. I don’t have a copy here so I can’t verify this— but I am pretty sure no modification is needed.
posted by nat at 2:11 PM on March 17, 2020 [2 favorites]


Stately, plump Buck Mulligan stayed upstairs.
posted by Sterros at 2:20 PM on March 17, 2020 [9 favorites]


“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I -
I ran like Hell down the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
posted by New Frontier at 3:06 PM on March 17, 2020 [2 favorites]


Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think it's a good idea to hang out in bars during a pandemic.

Oh, that one hurts.
posted by trig at 5:06 PM on March 17, 2020 [5 favorites]


All children, except one, grow up.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 5:29 PM on March 17, 2020 [1 favorite]


"It is possible I already had some presentiment of my orders to stay inside The Matachin Tower. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us... remains in my mind now as the symbol of my social distancing."
source
posted by doctornemo at 6:41 PM on March 17, 2020


“The sun did not shine. It was too contagious to play. So we sat in the house. All that long, long school day. I sat there with Sally, distance learning on screen, unable to leave due to Covid-19."
posted by dawg-proud at 8:34 PM on March 17, 2020 [5 favorites]


You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel "If on a winter's night a coughing man awaits his grocery delivery"
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 10:22 PM on March 17, 2020 [7 favorites]


Stately, plump Buck Mulligan stayed upstairs.

came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather in which he proceeded to wash his fleshy digits for a full half minute.

/
/
/

—The aunt thinks you visited your mother, he cried from the next room. That’s why she won’t let me have anything to do with you.

—Someone had to, Stephen said gloomily.

—You could have stayed away, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I’m hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her from a distance instead of approaching her on her deathbed. And you had to go and mop her fevered brow. There is something sinister in you.... Whose noserag am I to borrow now, eh?
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth at 2:19 AM on March 18, 2020 [2 favorites]


It was the year we learned we were washing our hands wrong.

(No classic novel first lines come to mind, but classic SF TV ...)
posted by JawnBigboote at 5:31 AM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]




to wit:

...and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kept a meter back from me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first said to keep on standing over there yes and held him off me so all he could do was look at my breasts from afar yes and I bet his heart was going like mad and yes I said, you stay over there for the time being thanks

posted by chavenet at 2:20 PM on March 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


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