Plague Writing

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In order to smush together the amalgam of words that makes for a day’s worth of posts on TPV, PG has previously likened himself to a baleen whale.

In its mouth, a baleen whale has baleen instead of teeth. Baleen is made from the same type of protein that makes up human hair and fingernails. In whales, baleen are long (up to four meters), flexible bristly lengths of this protein that act like a sieve to trap krill, plankton and small fish found in the ocean.

Basically, a baleen whale takes a huge mouthful of sea water, then squeezes the water through its baleen and swallows whatever is trapped in its baleen after most of the water is gone. These whales typically have grooves in their throats that balloon out to accommodate the large amount of sea water they take in with each gulp.

For the record, age has given PG a bit of jowl he did not have in younger days, but even a baby baleen whale would put him to shame. A baleen whale is a metaphor only.

During the process of slurping up large portions of the internet of books, authors, writing, etc., etc., in order to find the small bits of nutritious intellectual plankton he posts on TPV, PG gets a sense of what else is floating around the bookish internet ocean as well.

It will not surprise most of the visitors to TPV that right now, writers, publishers, critics, librarians, academics interested in literature and writing are pretty much consumed by COVID-19. Perhaps because so many of us are sheltering in place, we are producing lots of plague writing, if not about this particular plague, strongly influenced by the idea of plagues and plaguish visions of a variety of things otherwise not associated with plagues.

China is like a plague. Trump is like a plague. Amazon is like a plague. Capitalists are like a plague. Those who do not subscribe to The New York Times in order to soak in whatever is showing up there on a particular day are like a plague.

Pretty much anyone unlike the writer in thought, behavior and attitude is like a plague or at least like a symptom of a plague.

Like the baleen whale, PG burps up most of the plague writing he encounters in the broad seas of the internet, retaining only a bit of plague krill from time to time that seems to him to differ from the general run of its species.

None of this is to imply that the current plague will not have a significant and lasting impact on the world of books. As PG has muttered before, he thinks the traditional book business will be smaller and more threadbare than it was pre-corona. Amazon will likely be even more influential.

Some writers currently immersed in plague topics will move back to a slightly different subject – Amazon is ruining book culture even more rapidly than it was before the plague revealed the fragile financial footing that underlays much of the traditional publishing world.

As a variety of different people have reportedly said,

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

PG hopes his baleenish approach to current writing affairs is useful to those who visit here.