The Need, by Helen Phillips: This book is fucking amazing. It’s my last read of the ten books long-listed for the National Book Award in fiction, and I definitely would have made it a finalist…it’s so amazingly odd in its beats. It’s also hard to discuss without giving too much away. I think I’ve heard people describe it as being “a trick,” “about a child,” and “the story of a paleobotanist,” and when someone asked me about it I wavered… Read more »
Posts By: Claire
Plan-demic
Two really excellent decisions that took place with no pandemic in sight but now seem as if they were perfectly planned: My boyfriend gave me an Aerogarden for my birthday last year, and now there are salad greens growing in my bedroom Two Christmases ago I had all of my middle-grade and young adult fiction shipped to my Brooklyn apartment (it was…a large number of pounds of books, because as a kid I never wanted anything but books, and my… Read more »
Day 30
I think I intended to title a post “28 Days Later” (original, I know) but time is so stretchy that 28 days came and went and I didn’t have this tab open, so I forgot. Then I started it again on day 30. Now it’s day…37? 30 days. That’s a whole unlimited metro card. My brain is not moving seamlessly anymore, but thinking only in discrete units of time. One month. How many more? We are of course lucky. We’re… Read more »
Back to Nature
Back in Manhattan, 250 square feet. We go to Rite Aide wearing masks and scarfs, goggles or sunglasses even though it’s 1:30 am (we’re trying to go when no one else is there). It turns out the Rite Aide cleans their floors at that time, which is generally good but specifically bad because it’s kicking up mist and we have a fear of aerosols (I know about the floor-cleaning Zamboni only secondhand, because my role was to wait outside of… Read more »
Time cube
We walked from the East Village over the Manhattan bridge back to my apartment in Brooklyn on Tuesday. It was heartening to see most people doing as we were – moving to the side of the road/sidewalk when other people were approaching, avoiding stopping to wait for traffic lights in the same spot as others, etc. We managed to frogger our way through downtown Brooklyn pretty easily, though there was one woman who walked directly at us while crossing the… Read more »
Ages and Stages
City-mandated social distancing is technically only three days old, although we’ve been doing it for more than a week now since we were fortunate enough to be able to work from home starting then. To stay spirited, we’ve developed series of actions that functions both as a routine to “keep us sane” and a way to measure just how much that sanity has slipped. A coded system that doesn’t rely on colors or numbers. Roughly in order of plot-based to… Read more »
Ides-le days
…you know, like idle… Why no, I have not done reams of writing and editing this weekend, but I have probably read several fathoms of Twitter feed. I’m working on a short story that takes place during the August 2017 eclipse, and what I wouldn’t give for that to be the collective event everyone’s talking about right now! And growing salad greens. And trying to keep up with exercising; I was so proud that my resting heart rate had dropped… Read more »
Notes from Home, Day 2
I was supposed to go to Philadelphia yesterday to visit my cousin, and even yesterday morning I thought for sure I would still go. I’d be taking the train, not flying; my cousin is my age, not older, and not high risk; I was still working and taking the subway as of Tuesday, so it wouldn’t be much different; it would be easy to come back to NYC if needed. Also, I was only going for 48 hours and it… Read more »
Covid
Covid sounds close to co-morbid. Co-morvid? What are the afflictions that come, hand in (thoroughly washed) hand, with Coronavirus? Malaise, both physical (quarantine, avoidance of gyms as petrie dishes even in the healthiest of times, lack of movement beyond a certain safe-feeling radius) and mental: we’re in a holding pattern, as if the entire globe is a single plane circling above its destination indefinitely, uncertain of when we’ll land, what the landing will feel like, or if we’ll run out… Read more »
Coronavirus
On January 27th, I wrote: “The other day I heard someone ask a friend, “So are you really worried about the Wuhan virus?” The reply of “No, I haven’t been a hypochondriac in at least a decade,” made me laugh with recognition. I was the child terrified by the movie Outbreak and the real-life Ebola outbreak, the child who was constantly afraid of contracting HIV even though there were virtually no ways in which I risked doing so, the child… Read more »
