"Could the shlock-rock '70s band Kiss in any way affect the outcome of a death-dealing twenty-first-century virus? Is Bob Ross-that permed, inimitable painter of Edenic nostalgia on PBS-actually an emissary from the land of personal loss? How could the work of Edward Hopper-caught as it is in that sticky, nearly post-Victorian amber-prove the ideal backdrop to a global plague? What is the grammar, finally, of grief, of isolation? What is the syntax of omen, augur, and portent? The essays in Chad Davidson's Bring Out Your ...
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"Could the shlock-rock '70s band Kiss in any way affect the outcome of a death-dealing twenty-first-century virus? Is Bob Ross-that permed, inimitable painter of Edenic nostalgia on PBS-actually an emissary from the land of personal loss? How could the work of Edward Hopper-caught as it is in that sticky, nearly post-Victorian amber-prove the ideal backdrop to a global plague? What is the grammar, finally, of grief, of isolation? What is the syntax of omen, augur, and portent? The essays in Chad Davidson's Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year mainly concern the loss of the author's father directly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which the pandemic itself provided a strangely ideal backdrop to grieving. Refracted through the kaleidoscopic, yet strangely stagnant, isolation period in the first year of COVID-19, his father's death-in some ways another plague visited on the author-found its way into all his waking hours, coloring whatever he tried to write, particularly when he tried not to. Friends both lost and nearly so, the burning of Notre Dame in Paris, even the seemingly inconsequential discovery of a rash of chew toys in the yard: these events assumed unmistakable gravity, considered in the midst of a pandemic and the ruins of personal grief. Bring Out Your Dead adds Davidson's father to the growing list of loved ones lost in-and in this case right before-the pandemic. It's a memorial of sorts, given over to a father's memory and the grief endured living through dueling plagues (one viral, the other psychological). Ultimately, though, the book is more about the ways we eulogize, how we remember those who are gone, why their memories persist, and what summons them back into our thoughts, our language, and our lives"--
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