Good morning. Everyone is quoting a Seamus Heaney line, but it’s not from his poetry. Where does it come from?

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which will receive $25 million from the government, has decided to pay its musicians after all. Bill McMorris: “The center, which did not return a request for comment, caused a firestorm when it informed orchestra members that they would no longer receive paychecks after April 3. Rutter broke the news to the union just hours after President Trump signed a $25 million bailout as part of the $2 trillion CARES Act, a stimulus bill intended to address the economic stagnation caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The union immediately filed a grievance saying that the decision violated federal labor law and its contract, which requires at least six weeks’ notice before paychecks can stop. Lawmakers followed suit by threatening to rescind the bailout.”

In imitation of Eliot: “When Nancy Cunard published her long poem Parallax through the Hogarth Press in 1925, several reviewers noted similarities between it and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, released three years prior. According to the pages of The Nation: ‘Miss Cunard’s poem would never have been conceived without the example of Mr. Eliot. But even when this is recognized, Miss Cunard’s poem shows the individuality of its author.’ Outlook chimed in with a similar sentiment: ‘T.S. Eliot is the first who heard the new music in its full harmony. Miss Cunard has caught strains of it too. She is not piping over again Mr. Eliot’s tune [but] adding her own motifs and orchestration to the general theme.’ Over time, some critics began to argue that the poem’s piping was, in fact, a little too derivative. F.R. Leavis, five years after the poem’s initial publication, dismissed Parallax as a ‘simple imitation’ of The Waste Land. Still, most critics have maintained that the poem holds a complicated relation with Eliot. What scholars have yet to do is pin down the precise nature of her response—what, exactly, she said.”

Peter Fleming’s pathology: “The funniest, and by some way most characteristic, story about Peter Fleming (1907–71) has our man turning up at the Garrick Club in central London sometime in the 1950s clad in full evening dress: white tie, tailcoat, and row of miniature medals. What was he doing togged up like that, an acquaintance duly inquired. ‘Got to help a friend give a hot meal to the Queen,’ the middle-aged exquisite calmly returned. In strict demographic terms, Fleming was an extreme version of a very common type of mid-twentieth-century upper-class Englishman, the type who takes one of the behavioral stanchions of his caste—in this case personal reserve—and converts it into a kind of supercharged variant of the original. To his membership of every top-grade national institution worth the name—Eton; Christ Church, Oxford; the Brigade of Guards; the Country Landowner’s Association—could be added a taciturnity so paralyzing that even similarly buttoned-up convives reeled despairingly in its wake. Anthony Powell, whose war-era novels Fleming read in proof to corroborate abstruse points of military detail, left a judicious paragraph or two in Faces in My Time (1980) about his friend’s obsession with not being seen to ‘show off,’ a fixation so profound, Powell thought, that it might almost have been a form of ostentation in itself.”

Is this a portrait of the woman who inspired Lydia? “A newly discovered portrait of a woman who may have inspired one of Jane Austen’s most gleefully spirited characters has been acquired by a museum devoted to the novelist’s life and work.”

In search of attention: “It was as though she had developed a new superpower overnight. Food and rest – priorities of most 18-year-olds – no longer interested her. Instead, she would ‘study all night, then run ten miles, then breeze that week’s New Yorker’. The science journalist Casey Schwartz, author of a new book, Attention: A Love Story, was only hoping to get through an essay crisis when she took her first Adderall, shortly after arriving at Brown University in 2000. But before long, the stimulant – intended for sufferers of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) – had become a part of her routine. ‘It was attention weaponised, slashing through procrastination and self-doubt, returning me to a place that felt almost like childhood, with its unclouded pleasures of rapt hours, lost in books and imagination,’ she writes.”

Essay of the Day:

In Lapham’s Quarterly, James Stout tells the story of how American Samoa avoided the Spanish Flu entirely:

“Those living in the year 1918 witnessed too much death in a too compressed period of time. War and pandemic had spread so quickly around the globe that life expectancies dropped in developed nations for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. It was even worse for people in less developed nations, where they had little access to care and not much immunity to illnesses from elsewhere. Many young men died on the battlefields of northern France in 1918, but many more people globally died in their beds at home from that year’s deadly strain of the flu.

“The U.S. had entered World War I a year earlier, and soldiers were cramming into barracks and bases across the country to prepare for deployment. At Camp Funston in Kansas, fifty thousand doughboys-to-be got acquainted with sharing mess halls, barracks, and every second of their days with one another. By the time those soldiers boarded the ships that would take them to Europe, they were carrying not only the hopes of a nation but also a new strain of influenza that had first been identified at a hospital on the base in 1917. From January 1918 to December 1920 the pandemic flu killed an estimated fifty million people worldwide, possibly the greatest mortality event in human history. Stray dogs feasted on the deceased victims in remote fishing villages in Alaska. In Illinois, space in morgues was so limited that bodies awaiting burial were piled on top of one another.

“The flu spread rapidly during the spring of 1918, infecting far more people than influenza typically would at that time of year. The next wave of infections began in September 1918 and had a disproportionately high impact on young and otherwise healthy people. The pandemic came to be known as the Spanish flu not because of its origin; Spain’s neutrality in World War I left it lacking a censor to silence reporting on the outbreak, making Spanish newspapers the first to carry news of the deadly flu.

“On September 28, 1918, Philadelphia held the fourth annual Liberty Loan Drive parade to encourage citizens to financially support the Allied war effort by buying government bonds. Two hundred thousand people attended the parade, ready to support the war with their wallets or perhaps just to witness the spectacle. Seventy-two hours later, all thirty-one hospitals in the city were full. The Catholic Church scrambled to create makeshift hospitals, but most infected patients returned home to crowded working-class neighborhoods to cough and die. A week later 2,600 were dead. Two weeks later, the number was 4,500. In Washington, DC, commissioner Louis Brownlow and his Board of Health hijacked two train cars of coffins headed to Pittsburgh and mandated that they be sent to DC hospitals under armed guard. On October 5 the Philadelphia Inquirer urged people to ‘talk of cheerful things instead of disease.’ By the second week of October, death rates in Philadelphia had hit a thousand per day; steam shovels began to dig mass graves when the city could not keep up with the corpses.

“In American Samoa, however, nobody died from the pandemic. Thanks to swift action from the governor, the local population was able to avoid the 1918 flu entirely.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Sumba

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