My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/15/20 "Khartoum"

"Make me a slow moving creature without complexities/I don’t want my mind to go/To a thousand places." I slept through my alarm this morning and had to teach my first class from home. It was just like Monday and Tuesday again when I was under voluntary quarantine. The leitmotif of this pandemic is repetition, the recognition of the same horrors and responses again and again. Like Walter Benjamin said, "That things 'just go on' is the catastrophe." I wrote yesterday about the return to blaming China instead of addressing the problem. In the US, daily cases and deaths are rising again. We're moving in circles. Even Jandek is sitting in place, this album just alternate versions of songs from the previous one. And I want to be that "slow moving creature" absolved of the responsibility of recognizing the repetitions. -5/15/20. "Khartoum" from Khartoum Variations (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)