Covid-19 and The Pursuit of Love
May. 14th, 2021 08:03 amIn the last part of my dream, I was running to catch an elevator. Except I was running slow-motion, and the elevator was filling up.
Maybe I should just throw myself into the elevator, I thought. I’d come down on my stomach. And then I’d crawl the rest of the way in, and they’d have to let me on.
Except my shoes were coming off. They were my much-loved black canvas ballerina flats. I wanted to run away from the elevator’s doors, reclaim the shoes. If I took the time to grab the shoes, though, I’d never get back on the elevator.
Fortunately, that’s when I woke up.
###
The CDC announced yesterday that if you’re vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask outdoors or even indoors under most circumstances.
Except I keep reading about fully vaccinated people who test positive for Covid.
They’re not just Yankees baseball team management.
An LJ connection just posted today that two of the (fully vaccinated) people she works with tested positive.
It would be interesting to find out which vaccine these people got. Are all four of the vaccines currently in use throughout the U.S.equally implicated? Both Pfizer and Moderna are supposed to have 94% effectiveness according to hastily conducted clinical trials. But do they have 94% effectiveness?
And do these people get sick, or do they remain (mostly) asymptomatic?
And do they develop long-haul Covid, which seems to me the most awful of the Covid outcomes, including death?
Katherine, my kinda, sorta cousin, who caught Covid last March and went on to develop symptoms that mimic chronic fatigue syndrome, still can’t get out of bed. Before Covid, she was an internationally famous urban planner, a mother in her mid-thirties with three young children.
She’s taken up art. She’s not bad, considering that she never drew a lick before she got sick:
I’m sure she’d rather be planning cities, though.
###
Neighbor Ed sent me this report from the Dutchess County Ground Vaccine POD (Point of Distribution):
We vaccinated 983 2nd doses yesterday and 87 single doses. The no show rate for 2nd doses was under 4% which is relatively high. The no show rate for J&J was higher. More than half the available J&J appointments, including walk-ins, went unfilled.
I was not working during the J&J sign in, but a colleague observed that most of the J&J people seemed to be appearing under duress, either family or work pressure, unenthused about getting vaccinated.
We hear unofficially that the state is going to keep all the Pfizer, so we won’t be doing anyone under 18 in the near future.
###
I was very regimented yesterday and in consequence, got an enormous number of things done.
Not the anxiety-producing administrative stuff though. I didn’t even put those on the To Do list because I didn’t want to deal with them.
I still have a couple of days before they must be dealt with.
In the evening,![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mexpatriot sent me word that Emily Mortimer had written and directed a new adaptation of The Pursuit of Love, a novel I love. Her father, Robert Mortimer, has the screenwriting credit on Brideshead Revisited, which is simply one of the best novel-to-screen adaptations ever made.
So, I watched it.
And it was awful.
First of all, any movie or TV show that has to rely upon a running voiceover to tell the story is an abject failure since film is essentially a visual medium. If all the dialogue is removed from a film, if it's a good film, you will still be able to figure out what's going on. Emily Mortimer has no sense whatsoever of the visual.
Second, attempts to turn The Pursuit of Love into a contemporary narrative—21st century music! Weird Studio 54 tableaux—kind of miss one of the main points of the book, which is that every generation spawns its own Bright Young Things. Like June bugs, they have their day, flitter in the sun. And then they wither, and the next generation of insects comes along. The morbidly self-involved Linda Radlett is no more the heroine of The Pursuit of Love than the detached and sensible Fanny Logan. They’re both aspects of Nancy Mitford.
Third, the casting is uniformly horrible. And the acting is uniformly horrible. I get that Lily James is a great contemporary beauty. Once you get over thinking, Gosh, she’s pretty! she's a total bore to watch. Dominic West is beyond awful as Uncle Matthew. And don’t get me started on how terrible Andrew Scott is as Lord Merlin. The biggest blooper, though, is the Tony Kroesig character whom Mortimer makes totally incomprehensible and inconsistent, presumably so that she can showcase Freddie Fox whom one assumes is the talentless offspring of a family friend.
Absolutely the worst thing about this adaptation, though, is that it is utterly humorless and removes as if by surgical scalpel all the charming status detail that makes the novel and previous adaptations of the novel so enchanting.
In fact, after watching the complete first episode and half of the second episode, I had to stop. And hunt down the very excellent 1980 adaptation of the novel, entitled Love in a Cold Climate, and watch two episodes of that.
Maybe I should just throw myself into the elevator, I thought. I’d come down on my stomach. And then I’d crawl the rest of the way in, and they’d have to let me on.
Except my shoes were coming off. They were my much-loved black canvas ballerina flats. I wanted to run away from the elevator’s doors, reclaim the shoes. If I took the time to grab the shoes, though, I’d never get back on the elevator.
Fortunately, that’s when I woke up.
###
The CDC announced yesterday that if you’re vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask outdoors or even indoors under most circumstances.
Except I keep reading about fully vaccinated people who test positive for Covid.
They’re not just Yankees baseball team management.
An LJ connection just posted today that two of the (fully vaccinated) people she works with tested positive.
It would be interesting to find out which vaccine these people got. Are all four of the vaccines currently in use throughout the U.S.equally implicated? Both Pfizer and Moderna are supposed to have 94% effectiveness according to hastily conducted clinical trials. But do they have 94% effectiveness?
And do these people get sick, or do they remain (mostly) asymptomatic?
And do they develop long-haul Covid, which seems to me the most awful of the Covid outcomes, including death?
Katherine, my kinda, sorta cousin, who caught Covid last March and went on to develop symptoms that mimic chronic fatigue syndrome, still can’t get out of bed. Before Covid, she was an internationally famous urban planner, a mother in her mid-thirties with three young children.
She’s taken up art. She’s not bad, considering that she never drew a lick before she got sick:
I’m sure she’d rather be planning cities, though.
###
Neighbor Ed sent me this report from the Dutchess County Ground Vaccine POD (Point of Distribution):
We vaccinated 983 2nd doses yesterday and 87 single doses. The no show rate for 2nd doses was under 4% which is relatively high. The no show rate for J&J was higher. More than half the available J&J appointments, including walk-ins, went unfilled.
I was not working during the J&J sign in, but a colleague observed that most of the J&J people seemed to be appearing under duress, either family or work pressure, unenthused about getting vaccinated.
We hear unofficially that the state is going to keep all the Pfizer, so we won’t be doing anyone under 18 in the near future.
###
I was very regimented yesterday and in consequence, got an enormous number of things done.
Not the anxiety-producing administrative stuff though. I didn’t even put those on the To Do list because I didn’t want to deal with them.
I still have a couple of days before they must be dealt with.
In the evening,
mexpatriot sent me word that Emily Mortimer had written and directed a new adaptation of The Pursuit of Love, a novel I love. Her father, Robert Mortimer, has the screenwriting credit on Brideshead Revisited, which is simply one of the best novel-to-screen adaptations ever made.So, I watched it.
And it was awful.
First of all, any movie or TV show that has to rely upon a running voiceover to tell the story is an abject failure since film is essentially a visual medium. If all the dialogue is removed from a film, if it's a good film, you will still be able to figure out what's going on. Emily Mortimer has no sense whatsoever of the visual.
Second, attempts to turn The Pursuit of Love into a contemporary narrative—21st century music! Weird Studio 54 tableaux—kind of miss one of the main points of the book, which is that every generation spawns its own Bright Young Things. Like June bugs, they have their day, flitter in the sun. And then they wither, and the next generation of insects comes along. The morbidly self-involved Linda Radlett is no more the heroine of The Pursuit of Love than the detached and sensible Fanny Logan. They’re both aspects of Nancy Mitford.
Third, the casting is uniformly horrible. And the acting is uniformly horrible. I get that Lily James is a great contemporary beauty. Once you get over thinking, Gosh, she’s pretty! she's a total bore to watch. Dominic West is beyond awful as Uncle Matthew. And don’t get me started on how terrible Andrew Scott is as Lord Merlin. The biggest blooper, though, is the Tony Kroesig character whom Mortimer makes totally incomprehensible and inconsistent, presumably so that she can showcase Freddie Fox whom one assumes is the talentless offspring of a family friend.
Absolutely the worst thing about this adaptation, though, is that it is utterly humorless and removes as if by surgical scalpel all the charming status detail that makes the novel and previous adaptations of the novel so enchanting.
In fact, after watching the complete first episode and half of the second episode, I had to stop. And hunt down the very excellent 1980 adaptation of the novel, entitled Love in a Cold Climate, and watch two episodes of that.
