JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The renewal of hostilities in Gaza prompted me to pick up Apeirogon, which has been in the tsundoku for months. In this protracted pandemic year I have been partial to fiction that gives me comfort, and the little I know of the Palestine issue tells me there is no comfort to be found there. As I was finishing Apeirogon, with its beautiful passages reminiscent of McCann’s wondrous Let The Great World Spin, a package of books arrived from my friend in Copenhagen whom I’ve never met in person. One of them was Minor Detail by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli. It is brief and impassive, its matter-of-fact tone and aspergetic detail triggering anxiety.

An apeirogon is a shape with countably infinite sides—if you spend your life counting them you might get an answer. That is the approach taken by McCann’s book, an epic nonfiction compendium of stories and information centered on two men, a Palestinian and an Israeli who have both lost young children in the conflict and become friends. It is the feelgood version, if you will, in which one side grasps how the other has been humiliated, and the other grasps how the legacy of trauma up to the Holocaust has shaped their antagonist. The subject is complicated, but empathy might yet save the world.

Minor Detail is pitiless and unsentimental. It opens with an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers after the triumphant Israeli War of Independence/catastrophic displacement of 700,000 Palestinians who have lived there for many generations. A Palestinian woman becomes obsessed with this event, which is deemed so insignificant that the victim’s name is not even known. She sets out to do research, a fairly simple task that entails painstaking planning, permissions, subterfuges and humiliations, because she is living in the occupation. How can you reconstruct memory while you yourself are being erased?

I put off registering for vaccination because I didn’t want to navigate the bureaucracy and I was waiting for the other vaccines to become available. I did not want to be in a crowd (even in non-pandemic times I am socially distant). Through my friend I signed up with a private provider whose Moderna stocks are supposed to arrive in June. I have hypertension (genes) which seems to have vanished with the deadline-chasing (advantage of finally focusing on fiction), but I’m on meds and in a priority group.

Last week friends started pushing me to get vaccinated because there were plenty of vaccines, not enough people signing up for them, and it was easy. Dorski pointed out that when the vaccine lists open up it might be harder to get an appointment. If you don’t get the kind you want, just get a booster later.

Early morning Wednesday I signed up online for the vaccine in Makati, and 18 hours later I got a text informing me of my appointment on Friday.

Drogon, my eldest

My appointment wasn’t till 1120, but I was up two hours earlier than usual because Drogon was meowing for his breakfast. I’d decreased the cats’ meal portions as they’re all overweight, and they have been cooperative but cranky in the morning. I am usually ridiculously early for appointments (neurosis from childhood), so I delayed leaving the house as much as I could but still got to Fort Bonifacio Elementary School half an hour ahead of my schedule. Maybe there’d be no-shows and I’d finish earlier?

Fort Bonifacio Elementary School has impressive facilities, better than UP (though I know that’s not a high bar). The guard at the main gate took my temperature, then pointed me to the first station, where my appointment was verified and my ID checked. At the second station someone looked at my medical certificate, and at the next I filled out some forms before someone took my blood pressure. After months of being borderline low, my bp was borderline high—either my systems were showing proof of comorbidity (our vocabulary increases with each catastrophe), or I have white coat syndrome (in this case blue scrubs and full PPE). More likely I was excited: after 15 months of inertia, liberation loomed!

At the next station someone looked at my documents and I learned that I would be getting the Astra Zeneca vaccine. Whose side effects Eric Clapton had complained about. (Clapton bitching about drugs given his history: absurd.) This is not the time to be brand-conscious, but I was happy to hear I would get AZ.

Next there was a 30-person queue on nice chairs set a meter apart. At each step there were one or two city employees reminding us to keep masks and face shields on and face forward to minimize risk of contagion. We were always comfortable and in the shade, with industrial fans and open doors and windows for proper ventilation. A radio was tuned to some 80s pop divas program, because it’s not real unless Debbie Gibson is singing “Lost In Your Eyes”. Then there were two songs by Whitney Houston and I braced myself for “Indayyyyayyaaayyy” but the queue was soon out of radio range. The line moved briskly, and the lady behind me was especially enthusiastic, giving the scene the air of musical chairs at a children’s party. The lady in front of me, in skinny jeans that were perilously low-rise, moved slowly, prompting encouragement from the enthusiastic one. “Sandali lang,” the skinny-jeaned lady complained, “Nadulas ako sa banyo, masakit ang balakang ko.” And then they were exchanging medical histories. It really felt like a children’s party, with titos holding clipboards directing us at each station.

Jacob, my middle cat

It seemed to me that there were too many stations, duplicate functions, the same questions asked over and over again and the same instructions repeated like a mantra. Then I remembered that I know nothing about Filipino social expectations. The point is not to finish as quickly as possible, but to make sure everyone understands what’s going on. This entails constantly reminding and reassuring people. And in many cases, promising aging macho men that the needle won’t hurt. Because everything here is personal.

After an hour in the queue, I was in the cold vaccination room. The nurses kindly offered to record the actual jabs on the vaccinees’ phones. “Should she be allowed to get the vaccine?” a lady asked, and even with her mask on you knew she was pointing at someone with her puckered lips (nguso). The subject was a thin lady whose lower legs and feet were black—signs of advanced diabetes. “She had an operation,” the subject’s companion said, “but it’s still like that.” A nurse assured the questioner that the doctors in the earlier stations had cleared the diabetic for vaccination. “But we were sitting down, how could they see?” the questioner continued. “And you know, some people lie.” Within the subject’s hearing!

Then it was my turn. I declined video and pointed to my left arm. I didn’t even feel the jab, it was so fast, then a bandage was applied. I’d been waiting for this for 15 months, and I barely noticed when it happened.

Another queue to have our temperatures taken and oximeters clamped on our fingers. Then a blood pressure reading, then someone talked to each of us about possible side effects and handed us 5 paracetamol tablets each just in case. Why not record the instructions and play them on a loop instead of repeating the same spiel 20 times an hour? Because the personal touch is vital in Filipino interactions. Also, it was a way of keeping everyone for 30 minutes to check for any adverse reactions to the vaccine.

Buffy the ex-ratslayer, my youngest

At the next station a man with a tablet recorded my information once again. This took a while because the wi-fi signal was faint. He looked at my ID and asked if I had other ID. “What’s wrong with it?” I said. The numbers were too tiny for him to read. I read them to him. Finally I was advised to return in exactly 3 months, which seemed long until I looked up the AZ vaccine and learned that 12 weeks is the optimal period before the second dose.

And I was done. Total time spent at the vaccine center: 2 hours. I went home, had lunch, didn’t notice any side effects other than a little tiredness. I did sleep extra-soundly that night, which could be from being woken up early, or from massive relief at getting vaccinated at last.

If you haven’t registered for vaccination with your local government unit, do it now.

Nearly everything I know about Black American History, I learned from Spike Lee movies. They are compelling and vivid, funny and furious, and they are an education. He will interrupt the flow of his own movie to have a character address the audience directly and deliver a lecture about some point of African-American life that we need to know. Reality is more important to him than the movie. In the end the movies merge with the real world: the undercover cop in BlacKkKlansman steps into a present where a sitting president empowers racism and murder. Da 5 Bloods is even more emotionally charged than other Spike Lee movies because Chadwick Boseman is in it, and the moment he appears onscreen his character is already a myth.

Spike Lee is an angry man, but he is fair. We understand Danny Aiello’s pizzeria owner in Do The Right Thing, we understand Edward Norton’s drug dealer in The 25th Hour, and here we almost understand Delroy Lindo’s Trump-voting, MAGA cap-wearing, PTSD-suffering Vietnam veteran. In a towering performance, Lindo pulls us into the rage and resentment of a man who feels that he has been cheated by life and will lash out even if he hurts himself. (Fans of The Wire will enjoy the reunion of Clarke Peters and Isiah Whitlock, Jr, who got one of his trademark Sheee-its in there.)

Da 5 Bloods is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as a Vietnam war picture. Five men go into the jungle to retrieve the body of their fallen leader and a stash of gold bars they view as reparations—they were conscripted into someone else’s war to kill and die for rights they themselves did not have. I do not know if it was the filmmaker’s intention or budgetary constraints that led to the flashbacks in which Chadwick Boseman (the joy and pain of seeing him, especially now that we know what he was going through during filming) is young and heroic while his squad is old and grizzled (no digital de-aging), but it drives home the movie’s point: Wars never end. Those men are still fighting to this day.

Reading Ali Smith is the most exhilarating experience. The things she can do with words—she bends them to her will, makes them fly with no visible effort. Her writing is exuberant, eccentric, and just when we thought everything has been done, original. Beginning in 2016, when Brexit signalled the end of the world as we know it (for me it was Prince’s death and then elections) she’s written a novel a year about our bizarre new world, where the truth is not the truth and everything you believe is wrong. The last volume Summer is hot off the presses, and in it the pandemic has begun. And yet the Seasonal Quartet is full of hope in humanity. Our species is not done yet.

Antkind, from the screenwriter of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is not a novel to be consumed quickly. It is best read a chapter at a time in order to get to know its protagonist, film critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, and enjoy its comic invention without becoming violently irritated at his dithering and self-loathing. Occasionally it is advisable to hurl it across the room, and when one’s tantrum has passed, to retrieve it and put it back on the shelf to return to the next day. It is about Rosenberg’s discovery of a stop-motion movie whose total running time is 3 months (Yes, a 3-month-long movie, so Bela Tarr and Lav Diaz have ADHD in comparison), and when it is destroyed, his attempts to reconstruct it from memory. Antkind is like your neurotic friend whom you can only bear in small doses but can’t write off entirely because suddenly they’ll do something brilliant.

You are living in a slum with your ailing parents. You work at a shop in a mall, and life is hard but you can support your family and you’re okay. You’ve just bought a smartphone and you can sneak a cigarette now and then. There is a terrorist attack on a train, and because you admire the people on Facebook who say what they want, you post a comment. “If the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean that the government is also a terrorist?”

And so you descend into hell: arrest, interrogation, jail, the media circus, terrorism charges, people howling for your blood. Because you wanted likes. A journalist writes up your story of grinding poverty, hunger, squalor, and it’s used as evidence that you hated your country. Meanwhile the trans woman you were teaching to speak English, and your former PE teacher want to testify on your behalf, but find there are advantages to participating in your destruction.

Devastating, compelling (Dare you not to read it in a single day), bleakly funny. You know this happens. This is today’s world in 289 pages.

How many times have I thought, “I just want to lie in bed all day reading books”? I’ve been staying at home for five months, and I had not done so. Why? I have the time, I have the books, so yesterday I read all day and night, stopping only to feed cats and self.
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