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It’s been 12 or 13 years since its inception and I must say it’s kind of wild that ds106 won’t die. That’s gotta say something about how awesome it was/is/will be, right? I guess it really is #4life!
Few people have done more over the past decade to keep this course chugging along than the great Paul Bond. So, when Paul approached me with the idea of putting ds106 on trial at Reclaim Open, I was in. Paul and I have worked together over the years on a few classes, and ds106 was just one of them. We co-taught the True Crime course as well as the Internet Course at UMW, both of which were laboratory experiments in the spirit of the hallowed ds106. So when Paul framed the session as a trial we immediately went back to our True Crime roots.
Paul decided to frame the session as a sensational trial using the Aesthetic of the colonial American trials often predicated on a public display of shame and condemnation. Paul wrote the script, created the awesome trial poster above, and essentially did all the work. He was to be the accused, Martha Burtis the ornery judge, I was type-cast as the boisterous prosecutor, and the audience played the jury. It was really quite fun.
To promote the talk, Paul not only hung the poster in the main conference area during the art fair, but we also staged a short, impromptu performance wherein Paul was seated near the poster and I gathered the attention of the group loudly and started listing his crimes against ds106, while imploring attendees to join the session later that day to find this miscreant guilty of….
I mean, that list of abuses is pretty awesome, no? Paul is pretty awesome, and once again he delivers for ds106 because he’s definitely guilty of being #4life! You can see the entire session below:
Both the impromptu public shaming and the official trial were loose, rough, and a total blast, much in the spirit of ds106. But what was even cooler was the response from the audience calling for more art, dammit. It was even floated that the whole trial was just a ruse to re-engage some of the original ds106 crew to get the band back together. I can neither confirm nor deny any of this, but I will say after seeing what Michael Branson Smith did with the A.I. Levine session at Reclaim Open Paul, Martha, and I decided we are interested in creating a class for Spring 2024 that would essentially be a ds106 course focused on AI. Any folks interested in collaborating on such a project? Any schools willing to throw a course at it? Or have us teach a course for your campus? Let us know.
Dr. Oblivion!
A ds106 focused on AI means we may be able to coax Dr. oblivion out of hiding to run this course. He was always a staunch champion of interrogating the contested future of digital storytelling, so it may be high time!
In Italy Father’s Day is recognized on St.Joseph’s saint day, which is today. And I have to say given Joseph’s role in Jesus’s birth, there’s a strange subtext to the day here Anyway, I spend much of both the Italian and American Father’s Day quoting from the first episode of the horror omnibus Creepshow (1982), which is appropriately called “Father’s Day.” It’s a story of a wealthy, homicidal patriarch that is murdered by his daughter after having her lover killed in his ongoing campaign to control her love life. It’s an awesome episode, and everything is narrated by the bored, dissolute heirs of this fortune while they’re waiting for their great aunt Bediliah to arrive to celebrate Father’s Day, which happens to be 7 years after she murdered the pater familia.
Creepshow: “I want my Cake, Bediliah”
The line repeated throughout the episode is by the tyrannical patriarch, who belligerently cries, “I want my cake!” while banging the table with his cane. And that’s what I find myself saying again and again on this hallowed day. I often preface this demand with some context, “It’s Father’s Day, and I want my cake!” And once I get it I say, “It’s Father’s day, and I got my cake,” the latter being a reference to the end of that episode, but no spoilers here. Anyway, I’m not sure why Creepshow continues to be a huge touchstone for me on a regular basis 40+ years later, but it is. The other thing I find myself exclaiming histrionically when the occasion calls for it is “I can hold my breath for a long time!” which is a quote from the third episode of Creepshow called “Something to Tide You Over.” You just have to see that one, which is my all-time favorite.
Creepshow: Lost Reception
Also, while we’re on the subject of Creepshow, it’s worth noting the “Father’s Day” episode also features a young Ed Harris doing an impressive series of disco dance moves:
A Young Ed Harris doing the sprinkler move
I love Creepshow, and all these GIFs were actually taken from the bava archive during the heady days of the Summer of Oblivion. I went on a little Creepshow tear in June 2011, and the tale of the blog confirms that. Speaking of GIFs, I’ve been watching a bunch of Yasujiro Ozu‘s films recently, and I got an idea for an interesting GIF project for my house. I ordered the Blu-ray and will be trying to make really high quality GIFs from Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon (1962) because I think that film is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, and like the first episode of Creepshow, it is all about fatherhood I’ll try and write about my Ozu GIF project once a figure a few things out, but until then 2011 is a little something to tide you over
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On March 11, 2020 — after nearly 4,300 deaths worldwide — the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. “It becomes clear this isn’t going to be over quick,” wrote Michael J. DeLuca in a publisher’s note in Reckoning’s Creativity & Coronavirus issue that April. The journal was one among a dozen or so literary magazines that produced special issues or sections, or even entirely new publications, in response to the “novel” coronavirus. A self-avowed introvert already working from home before shelter-in-place orders, I found myself drawn to such publications as a vital means of connection to the world beyond my window. The mundane details of interior lives proved oddly comforting, while also shedding light on the relative ease of my own seclusion.
Until recently, my wife and I lived on her family’s farm in Northern California. As she taught middle-school science on Zoom from the living room, I typed while watching white-tailed kites nest in the redwood trees bordering the property. There, we were afforded the luxury of both space and safety while much of the world was shut inside. While spikes in COVID cases continued to ravage the planet, we took to socializing outdoors (initially at six-foot distances and later unmasked in an open-air barn). “Amid this bucolic scene, with acres of sheep fields fencing us in from our neighbors, it’s easy to lose sight of others,” I confessed in an essay entitled “The Distance Between.” That disparity sharpened into focus when another writer, under prolonged lockdown at a senior residence not far away, attended my virtual workshops; she described the shock of fresh air on her face after 16 months of confinement, her account of delayed liberation published in Passager’s Pandemic Diaries.
The short-lived COVID LIT, an online mag and philanthropic endeavor, addressed such “positions of privilege” that countered the we’re-all-in-this-together platitudes designed by early campaigns to flatten the curve and slow the rate of infection. Three years later, as the public health crisis continues, the number of deaths worldwide is close to 7 million. Beyond the harrowing statistics of illness, isolation, and social upheaval, our personal stories hold significance and bridge our shared humanity.
Here are six stories from diverse voices and literary publications that point to the profound power of personal narrative: a global record from multiple nuanced perspectives. While each selection was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, some recount other types of sanctioned quarantines with similar themes of separation. Drawing on lived experience as well as historical research and firsthand observation, these authors tackle social issues from structural racism and the stigma of disability to repressive political regimes. Each one chronicles the heartache of disconnection and demonstrates the importance of collective remembrance.
Also for bioStories, Irish writer Phil Cummins uses humor in “134 Days” to document the 2020 lockdown outside of Dublin, with his wife and disgruntled grown son.
“Sharing the extraordinary in ordinary lives” is the tagline of bioStories. Although the online magazine, established in 2011, does not specifically solicit stories of quarantine, it was “conceived in the belief that every life can prove instructive, inspiring, or compelling.” Iris Chen’s essay, or “word portrait,” concerns itself with the spring 2022 lockdown in Shanghai, China — an effort to control the outbreak of an Omicron variant of COVID-19. Helpless from afar, and worried about the family, especially her ailing grandmother, Chen illustrates the impact of severe government measures on the city’s population. For any of us, like myself, who have ever used the term “lockdown” loosely, this piece urges us to reconsider its definition, and the dire consequences. In surreal prose, Chen offers a sobering look at the pandemic two years in.
The Chinese phrase for lockdown means to literally seal the city shut: fen cheng. It also means this: that no one leaves their apartment building. Hospitals shut down. Supermarkets stay empty and twenty-six million starve.
No one has cooked dinner and grandma still lies on the sofa, softly moaning. It is the night of Tomb Sweeping day. Ghosts walk on the streets, and all-around Shanghai there is a deep, asphyxiated silence: an honoring of the freedom that is now a privilege for the dead.
On this side of the ocean, a call is all I can give. Sorry is all I can say. I think about my mother when this is all over, about Shanghai when things open back up. How many bodies will they pull out of apartment doors? How will neighbors remain neighbors When my mother comes to California later this year, what will we talk about? The oceanic distance between us has changed.
Lindsay Zier-Vogel imagines a different mother-daughter separation in “Almost Forty Days” for The Quarantine Review, which was created “to alleviate the malaise of social distancing.”
First Nations writer Laura Vukson, sheltering in an old rambling house set against the rugged beauty of Ontario’s Georgian Bay, feels a fierce sense of protection for her young sons. Their little bodies snuggle under baby quilts sewn by their grandmother, who as a child endured family separation as a result of federal government policies. “Safer that way,” says Vukson’s mother, who observes her grandkids and their parents co-sleeping “like a wolf pack.” The Tlicho Dene woman was one of 150,000 Indigenous children forced to leave their families to attend residential schools across Canada. In haunting prose, Vukson reveals the reason behind her mother’s “bulging wrist bone” as she works on an Indian Day Schools class action settlement, breaking her silence for the first time.
They weren’t allowed to speak their language, practice their culture, or go home.
I can’t fathom my children stolen from me. My grannie Julie’s mind cracked. She was found wandering around Behchoko, a Dene community on the northwest cusp of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, in her nightgown. It was the dead of winter. Subarctic temperature. All 10 of her children were taken to those schools.
[The application] asked her, on a scale from one to five, to choose the level of abuse she faced. She had to write the story of as many events as she remembered, providing documentation to back it up. All spring and summer the application sat on her kitchen table as she eked out 16 pages of memories she’d buried long ago. Not only was she forced to relive it all, but she had to prove it was true.
For Lit Hub in 2021, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón considers her gender in “Preparing the Body for a Reopened World.”
Nam Hoang Tran describes the horrors of discrimination in “An Issue Masks Alone Cannot Fix,” an essay in the Quarantine issue of Montana Mouthful in 2020.
In the Editor’s Comments introducing the Dwelling-themed issue of Speculative Nonfiction, Robin Hemley fondly describes an old family farmhouse in a “quaint” town in upstate New York, where he is briefly quarantined. His wife Margie, a woman of color, feels differently: “For her, the place was spooky and the area, dotted profusely with Trump signs and overwhelmingly white, felt threatening,” writes Hemley, who realizes he is protected by his whiteness.
In “No Kind of Good Trouble,” an essay in this issue, Shabrayle Setliff reflects on her upbringing as a biracial child — part Quechua, part Black — in a low-income, mostly white suburb of Oklahoma City. Later in the piece, Setliff recounts life as a resident in wealthy northern Virginia during the summer of 2020, when cities and communities around the world mobilized in response to the murder of George Floyd. “I have often been the only Black person in the spaces I occupy, as is the case now,” she reveals, contemplating class privilege and racial divisions in the ethnically diverse neighborhood where she and her white husband live. As protests kick off elsewhere, she notes the lack of real action and activism in her city: “I had become disquieted by the order in this overly resourced place.” A series of underwhelming local demonstrations for Black Lives Matter prompts Setliff to reexamine her own complacency, engendered by her surroundings.
Ever since I came to this U, I’ve known nothing but an uneasy peace, and I’ve wanted to leave. I want to unsettle our lives, get new jobs, move to a place with more class diversity, with people willing to engage, where the collective is lived out because proximity demands it.
There is an inviolable pact of safety and order here. A deep reliance on the myth of individualism. A commitment to comfort. Despite my unease, there is a part of me that wants to rest in this place, even if it’s an illusion, even if it’s wrong. I sometimes find that I’m satisfied to give money and time, call it mutual aid, go to demonstrations, put up a sign, and say that I worked for something, when I know that as long as eruption in the world never leads to disruption in my own life, it’s not true.
Check out the COVID flash nonfiction published at Months to Years, like Barbara “Bo” Jensen’s “Unloading the Kiln,” about their clinic’s failure to serve the unsheltered who didn’t die from coronavirus, but from living on the streets.
Published in this pre-pandemic quarterly exploring themes of “mortality, grief, or loss,” Michael Colonnese’s heartrending essay relays the seclusion and family division that arose from social stigma during the Great Depression. “This is a story about a dead woman I never met, my mother’s sister, Eva, who never became my aunt because she’d only lived to be fourteen,” he begins. Because of the congenital defect of a cleft lip, the teenage girl was “hidden away from the world” — first behind the walls of various tenement apartments in Connecticut, then in an asylum “for the insane and feeble minded.” Only at 94 did the author’s mother, who shared stories of her three brothers but never mentioned a sister, finally disclose their family secret. Part of what makes this tale so harrowing is what Colonnese discovers: not only the official cause of death, but also the unsurprising reason behind the institution’s closure.
And because my mother’s story about Eva had now also become my story—a story about resistance, helplessness and avoidance—I could see that there was a pattern to it. Those hauntingly tragic details got under my skin, and I took it upon myself to try to learn more if I could.
“Failure to thrive” sounded like a phrase that a deliberately evasive doctor might employ to explain a mysterious death, and except for her facial deformation, Eva had been a healthy and intelligent young girl who had probably just gone through puberty when she’d been sent to that asylum.
Also at Pangyrus: Susan Schirl Smith’s account of nursing at the height of the AIDS epidemic in “Hero.”
After the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the ongoing spread of the monkeypox virus a Public Health Emergency, Darren Chase recalled the “quiet, shameful aftermath” of the AIDS epidemic for a column called In Sickness & In Health: Life in the Pandemic and Beyond. When he and his partner decide to break eight years of monogamy, he experiences the “visceral, cellular-level carryover from that old HIV hysteria and stigma,” even decades later. As a gay man who became sexually active in the late ’80s, before “sex-positive” was a concept and HIV still carried “the feeling of a death sentence,” Chase describes his metamorphosis from “cautiously-out teenager to out-and-proud adult.”
I, too, claimed my queer identity in the mid ’90s, in San Francisco. Back then we marched to protest government apathy to HIV with placards that stated: “10,000 SF deaths and rising.” On the wall above my single mattress was a poster of two nude women entwined, bordered by the words safe sex is hot sex — a campaign to make dental dams desirable.
Chase beautifully captures the paradox between sexual empowerment and paranoia under the looming threat of a new plague:
Nonetheless, during those first few dalliances after dark, part of me was still morbidly afraid that any extra-marital contact would irrevocably contaminate me. … It was like I’d be totally cool for a while, having a grand old time, and then all of a sudden I’d be bungeed back to the feeling of panic, as if I were seventeen again, sitting in a dingy clinic, clutching a handful of safe-sex brochures.
Quarantine Journal: Notes From Inside posted more than 70 dispatches, from an evangelical church to a prison cell. Read The Point’s “Gimme Shelter” by Helena de Bres, a philosophy professor who recalls her own “spinal lockdown” when one of her vertebrae cracked in middle school.
In “Saying Yes,” Kaya Genç’s short essay for The Point’s Quarantine Journal, the Istanbul-based journalist prepares for his wedding ceremony, which takes place just hours before a pandemic curfew begins. In this longer piece on the history of lockdowns, Genç registers citywide panic during a two-day lockdown in April 2020, which is reminiscent of Turkey’s 1980 military coup. He notes that “tactics used to curtail freedoms in 2020 are eerily similar” to that “years-long nocturnal confinement” when martial law was declared — only days after a curfew was lifted — and continued until 1985.
Genç, who recently reported on Turkey’s devastating earthquakes for the New York Review of Books and other publications, points to patterns of autocracy under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He urges against collective amnesia — “willful forgetfulness” — and argues for a historical record that reaches beyond “the viewpoints of warring generals and politicians.”
In Istanbul, the country’s biggest city, the announcement was met with panic. Crowds of people scrambled for groceries, showing little regard for social distancing. Fistfights broke out in bakeries; customers quarreled in department stores. City officials estimated that the ensuing chaos in the streets would cause a spike in COVID-19 infections. Two hours before the curfew was lifted at midnight on April 12th, the interior minister announced his resignation, admitting that it was a mistake to have hastily called a curfew that startled the nation.
No wonder that, for a certain generation of Turks, the COVID-19 lockdowns can be seen as a screen for the country’s authoritarian politics. In Turkey, the coronavirus poses a double threat: along with the risk of contagion, there is also the danger that, in trying to control the epidemic, the country will fall victim to its own past.
Further Reading
While longform nonfiction storytelling takes the stage at Longreads, here’s a mix of shorter reads from some small publications and pandemic-themed special sections that entertain, inform, and connect us:
Nicole R. Zimmerman is a writer based in the Bay Area. Her work appears in literary journals such as Litro, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction. Her essay “Autumn Inferno” was featured on Longreads in November 2021, in a reading list on loss, love, and living with fire in California. Nicole is at work on Just Some Things We Can’t Talk About, a memoir-in-essays about denial and family dysfunction.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editors: Carolyn Wells, Peter Rubin
"He regarded with skepticism and clarity the temptations to make racial identity the foundation of our humanity."
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