What's Gnu?

   Linda Ronstadt may have made famous that line written by Johnny Burke and Bob Haggart, "pardon my asking, what's new?"  And if you've read this blog before, well, this "new" format change should jump out at you.  But hey, this changed appearance wasn't my idea but rather that of the ever-changing Google, letting its users know that we could keep the "old" style for awhile (a few months at most) and then after that, the choice was theirs.  But actually, it's been good and served to remind me of how easy it is to get stuck in one's ways, especially when I heard Ira Flatow of Science Friday tell his listeners that they should stay in touch and contact the show, "even if with an old-fashioned email."  Later came the youthful column by Lauren Oyler in the London Review of Books that sort of finished the job for me, her piece reminding me that my methods (blog, email, punctuation, grammar, even an actual phone call) were antiquated forms and usages of communication and relegated to my older age group and should soon be cast off as surely as a Space X launch; wrote Oyler: Of course, ‘lolz’ isn’t used much anymore, except as a knowing reference to a bygone era, c.2012.  But its root, ‘lol’, is fundamental to internet linguistic history.  ‘Lol’ can be traced to chat rooms in the 1980s and was first cited as in a list of common internet acronyms in 1989.  In 1996, Wired Style advised it should be capitalised without punctuation, as ‘LOL’.  Now, a capitalised LOL would signal to me that my friend thought what I said was pretty funny, though if she thought it was really funny, she’d probably write ‘hahahahahah’, ‘lololololol’, ‘loooooooool’, ‘actual lol’, ‘lmao’ (laughing my ass off) or ‘lmfao’ (laughing my f**king ass off).  These days, lowercase ‘lol’ alone is used to tone down a sentiment, most often indicating mild amusement or joking, or to alleviate awkwardness, as in ‘i am months late on this deadline lol’.  It can also be passive-aggressive.  If I write a lengthy, ferociously sincere takedown of a novel, and the author replies ‘lol’, she’s not laughing out loud, but laughing at my efforts.  I can undermine her ‘lol’ by drawing attention to the replicable cool of this form of dismissal, perhaps by pretending to write from her perspective using the helpful meme: ‘i’m not mad, i’m actually laughing.’  I won't even venture into the world of emojis which Oyler writes, is growing more unique to younger users: ... ;) means something slightly different to an 😉​.  Though this creates as many opportunities for exclusion as inclusion (explaining memes is surprisingly hard), it’s more inclusive than what preceded it.  After all, anyone reading my tweets also has Google; if you don’t get one of my references, you can look it up.  (I learned a new acronym today: ngl.  Look it up!)  To be clear, I don't remember EVER using "lol" in a text message, even if it did come from a different time period (ahem, 1980, according to author Oyler).

Greenland Shark...Photo: National Geographic

   Some things are indeed old, another piece in the same magazine telling of the Greenland Shark (what??), some members of which are thought to be 500 or 600 years old (and in the 1900s, 30,000 of them were caught each year).  Did I forget to mention that it takes a female 150 years before she is mature enough to breed, and that they swim in deep and dark waters, as in "six Eiffel Towers deep" said the article.  And then there was the translation by Jacqueline Rose and her rebuttal to a lengthy critique of it and how something so "simple" can become something quite complicated (as if translating a book would be little more than flashing Google Translate over it).  And speaking of simple being anything but, what of this excerpt of Rupert Beale's piece from the issue: There are four ‘seasonal’ coronaviruses – 229E, OC43, NL63 and HKU1 – that cause mild disease in nearly everyone, only occasionally causing pneumonia.  They can be given to healthy volunteers to study the immune response.  They cause the ‘common cold’, and in experimentally infected humans they give rise to an antibody response.  That response wanes after a few months, and the same people can be experimentally reinfected, though they tend to get milder symptoms the second time round.  It is thought that adults get reinfected on average about once every five years.  Sars-CoV-2 causes mild disease in most cases, and gives rise to antibody responses in nearly all cases.  We don’t know how long these responses will last, but it is likely that people who suffer only mild disease will be susceptible to reinfection after a few months or years.  Humanity has never developed ‘herd immunity’ to any coronavirus, and it’s unlikely that Sars-CoV-2 infection will be any different.  If we did nothing, a likely possibility is that Covid-19 would become a recurring plague.  We don’t know yet.  It may have seemed like an aeon, but we have been aware of this virus for only a few months.  

   Alas, I grow weary.  My emails seem to burst with yet another virtual tour (although I must admit that the "tour" of the Karnak Temple was impressive since I had no idea of its size) and honestly, I struggle to get through the bulk of them, much less find the time to jump to my books or other reading; who would have thought that watching a few episodes of a Danish series such as Norskov would prove relaxing?  But just as I was about to admit defeat (that reactionary move of shoving everything off of my desk and starting anew), I read the opening words of editor Alexander Macheck of Red Bulletin: ...the U.S. is sliding into a public health crisis brought on by the Covid-19 virus.  The full scope of the consequences seem beyond comprehension.  While this might be one of the worst moments in history to pull the trigger on a life-list vacation, it's an excellent time to pause and reexamine how much adventure sustains your life....These tough times offer an opportunity to make sure your priorities are in order.  Adventure matters.

   To that end, I'm pausing just a bit to take all of this in; think of it as a mental break of sorts.  The next few posts will likely find me summarizing a few of the thoughts and questions floating around in my head as I somewhat discard the old and attempt to boldly stare at the new (well, new format anyway).  It's a work in progress so bear with me (being ahem, older, I'm not as whiz-bang tech-capable as author Oyler might wish).  But here's one way I'm pausing, by reminding myself that I am extremely fortunate to be where I am, not only in age but also in health and in being surrounded by family and friends and no-questions-asked animals.  As I pause from finishing Stephen King's The Stand (gasp, I haven't tackled a 1000+ page book in ages) and an ever-expanding pile of unread magazines, I am reminding myself of my good fortune by reading about what the New York Times called the "bloodiest battle of all."  Here's the book jacket's wording to introduce 82 days On Okinawa: On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, 1.5 million men gathered about 1,500 Allied ships off the coast of the Japanese island of Okinawa.  The men were there to launch the largest amphibious assault on the Pacific Theatre.  War planners expected an 80 percent casualty rate.  The sharp wit of the 99-year old author, Colonel Art Shaw, (the first American officer ashore in the assault) brings home something few of us will ever experience, that of bullets and bombs aimed at you, along with the realization that you'd be lucky to get out of this alive.  Writes Shaw: You take landing for granted until you've been on a couple of them, and then Christmas is over.  The first time around you think hitting the beach is like a football game.  Lots of hurrahs and excitement because everyone will be alright when the contest is done.  Maybe you write a letter home telling the ones you love that they were in your last thoughts if hitting the beach didn't work out, but you know everything will be fine...the second landing leaves you terrified and keenly aware you may be about to die.  This time around you've written many more letters home.  You give those letters to a number of buddies because you know a good number of you will end up in the sand.  Your stomach aches and you fight nausea.  If you make it to a third landing, you are swallowed by the hard, cold facts.  Most of you won't walk past the edge of the water...You know that your chances of survival are slim...How do you handle a catastrophe like that?  Many of us had only been farm boys before the war.  A few had been merchants, clerks, or schoolteachers.  Our families barely survived the Great Depression...Most of us were just kids trying to do our patriotic duty without any idea of how devastating, deadly, and dastardly the war really would turn out to be.  But we were finding out fast.

    During this time of strange viruses and financial collapse, many people are fighting their own wars, some of them perhaps as terrifying as hunkering down in Okinawa on Easter morning...domestic violence, bigotry, cancer, mental illness, drug abuse, losing a loved one, depression, and many more conditions we can't come close to describing.  Change is upon us whether we want it or not; and like the arrival of this format change we may have only a few months to gather our wits to adjust or to decide to move on.  One always hears that change is good...but sometimes, it can hide the fact that change might be difficult.  And it is at these times that I remember the words of author Sue Monk Kidd: I have this phrase I use: the old woman.  I say that with great fondness.  My daughter and I once went on travels.  On those journeys, I was searching for that old woman.  The woman I wanted to grow into.  She's wise.  She's bold.  She's strong and resilient.  She knows her voice, she speaks it, and she stands by it.  This is the old woman for me.  She's distilled down.  In my novel, The Invention of Wings, there's a moment at the end where Handful looks at Sarah and says she's been boiled down into a good strong broth.  I want to be that.  I want to be a good strong broth that has those qualities of the old woman I went off searching for.