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Jon Gabriel flies solo to discuss the developing Coronavirus lockdowns, a Twitter spat with a Senator, the perils of modeling, and the need for skeptics during an age of monothink. The intro/outro song of the week is “Locked Down” by Swedish band Turbonegro. To listen to all the music featured on The Conservatarians this year, subscribe to our Spotify playlist!
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Thanks for the podcast.
In fiction – “Zorba the Greek” by Nikos Kazantzakis.
In non-fiction – “Arabian Sands” by Wilfred Thesiger. Travels in the Arabian peninsula 1945-50. I held little hope when I randomly picked up this book. But it as a terrific read.
These authors are very much from another time and with different sensibilities from now. Do such people exist any more?
Any book by Willa Cather will definitely keep you busy during this time of quarantine. I’m a big fan of hers. Here are three favorites:
My Antonia
Death Comes for the Archbishop
O Pioneers!
In 1883, her family moved from their home in rural Virginia (six generations!) to the prairie in Nebraska, partly to escape an outbreak of tuberculosis there, when Willa was nine. Her impression of Nebraska:
..The young Willa Cather saw the Nebraska frontier as a “place where there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the materials out of which countries were made … Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out”.
After college, she moved to cities and was a writer.
Maybe because I grew up as a farmer’s daughter, I can relate to her rural stories. Anyway–read them–they’re awesome!
Thanks for the podcast! Like you, I have for the last few years been spending time catching up on all the novels and literature that I should have read long ago. Didn’t read much when I was much younger, then when I did it was mostly business and architecture and construction due to my profession. So, now, I recommend Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick), Foundation (Asimov) and anything by Mark Twain, in terms of catching up, and The Great Good Thing (Klavan) for a more recent selection. Enjoy!
Crime and Punishment is next up on my Ruskie hit parade. Read Brothers Karamazov a couple of years ago and read The Idiot in January. His books are so deep.
Crime and Punishment was my favorite. It moved faster for me than Brothers Karamazov. Enjoy!
Hey, @cowgirl – thanks for the recommendation. Willa Cather has been on my to-read list forever. If you had to pick just one, what would it be?
Even years from now, nobody will really know what would have happened if things had been done differently. No doubt some will claim to have proof of their claims, but they’ll be wrong.
Even with 20/20 hindsight, it will be impossible to know how many people would have been infected – or died – if restaurants hadn’t been closed at all, or if they were closed earlier, or later. And so forth.