“Cimitero Delle Fontanelle” is a cemetery that takes its name from the rivers which ran under the town of Naples. It contains over 40.000 remains of people who died during the plagues of 1656 and 1836. It became famous because of “anime pezzentelle” (beggars souls) The practice consisted in the “adoption” of a skull and praying for its soul in return of protection.
This is a tough time for many people. At the moment in my country there are 7918 confirmed infections and 314 deaths.
Remember to always make your health a priority.
I want to share with you some less waste tips that may help you these days.
Let’s start with masks - they are not difficult to sew at home (or even make without sewing!) and it is obvious that having a reusable one is better than using lots of disposable ones. After use you can disinfect it with boiling water or just put it into laundry ;) I recommend you having a few face masks.
Hand sanitizer - the world went crazy about it. Try making it yourself, it is easy! Ingredients:
12 tablespoons of rubbing alcohol
5 tablespoons of aloe vera and 3 tablespoons of glycerin which will prevent your skin from drying out and provide extra protection
You can also add some drops of essential oil;)
Most of people started to care about cleaning much more due to the pandemic. Using homemade cleaning products is a goal that I still have not achieved yet. If you feel ready to start using them, go for it, look for the recipes (for example on pinterest) and make your own natural cleaning supplies!
I know that gloves are required to be worn now, but to be honest I do not believe that using disposable gloves will save us and from my point of view we are just making a huge waste with this plastic or rubber accessories. But…
please,wash your hands after touching any questionable surface. It is crucial to keep you and others save.
If you are storing food, remember that using aluminium or metal cans is probably a better choice than choosing plastic or glass due to recycling. Of course you can reuse most of packaging. But again, make yourself comfortable and buy what you need to survive.
Buy fruit and vegetables that stay fresh for a long time as: apples, potatoes and sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, apples, carrots, celery, lemons, beetroots, cabbages, brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower. You can also freeze fruits, I often freeze my bananas ;)
Grow your own food and make your own bread, cookies, muesli, pasta etc. ;)
I hope you’re doing great and have everything you need. I wish you good heath! Greetings!
The AIDS Memorial Quilt honors more than 92,000 individuals who died of the AIDS epidemic of the 80s + 90s. Invoking symbols of pride, sorrow, power, and remembrance, I wanted to pay my respect with my own panel and shine light on a memorial not many people remember.
HIV/AIDS spread like a wildfire within the LGBTQ+ community throughout the 80s and in 1985, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was conceived by AIDS activist Cleve Jones. By 1992 – when the AIDS-related deaths in the U.S. had passed 250,00 - the AIDS Memorial Quilt had panels from every U.S. state and 28 countries. By 1996 - during which time the deaths had ballooned to over 580,000 - the number of panels had grown to such an extent as to cover the entire breadth of the National Mall. Today it is remembered as the largest, single display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Our history is important, and I wanted to shine some light on one of the darkest moments our community went through and remember those who we lost, thank those who helped fight, and honor all who lived through such horror.
To quote one of the panels “I CAN’T FORGET. NOT EVEN IF I TRY”
If they’re concerned, and speaking publicly about it, and especially that they’re talking to their family about their concerns, then you should already be taking early measures and start to take mental and physical stock. Will you be okay if the worst happens and you can’t or don’t want to leave your home for an extended period of time?
Now is the time to prepare, BEFORE the S H’s the F, when the stores are all stocked, life is normal and services, amenities and logictics are running at a normal capacity.
This isn’t to fear monger. It’s to bring the reality of disasters to light and ensure you are prepared.
If they’re concerned, and speaking publicly about it, and especially that they’re talking to their family about their concerns, then you should already be taking early measures and start to take mental and physical stock. Will you be okay if the worst happens and you can’t or don’t want to leave your home for an extended period of time?
Now is the time to prepare, BEFORE the S H’s the F, when the stores are all stocked, life is normal and services, amenities and logictics are running at a normal capacity.
This isn’t to fear monger. It’s to bring the reality of disasters to light and ensure you are prepared.
Black Death patches, for those of you who like something morbid and beautiful. During The Great Plague of 1665 in London, the last major epidemic of The Bubonic Plague, a sprig of lavender was fastened to each wrist to protect the wearer form the dreaded disease. Link in bio. ⚔
Corona virus has been the topic of every conversation around the globe. The virus does not discriminate, it’s a world traveler, it’s a deadly weapon since it lingers with no symptoms. If anything, it should slow us down and look around at all the things that we take for granted daily. It should make us appreciate all the “family time” that we didn’t even know that we missed. It should have us turn off the TV and put down the phones and just BE. Be with the ones that matter most. This is the time to be inspired and maybe take a break from a job that you resent and have a re-charge or a re-set. It does not matter if you are white, black, Asian, Mexican, Italian, Russian- we are all people and we all want to live to see tomorrow. Please stay safe, please stay at home, hold and love one another because tomorrow is not promised.
alright. we’re going to talk about typhoid mary. one last time, i promise.
it was not mary’s fault that her body was hospitable. it was not mary’s fault that there was no cure.
she wasn’t discovered as a fluke. an epidemic fighter by the name of george a. soper, who was investigating the outbreak at oyster bay, tracked her down. her work as a cook wasn’t directly her downfall either, for almost everything she handled would be exposed to high temperatures thus killing the bacteria. instead it was a frozen dessert “which Mary prepared and of which everybody present was extremely fond. This was ice-cream with fresh peaches cut up and frozen in it.” in the beginning there is always a woman and a piece of fruit. whether an apple, a pomegranate, or a peach. an ovarian symmetry persists in propagation.
mary didn’t believe that which she could not see. in her defence, what would you do if a man showed up at your door demanding samples of piss and shit and blood, insistent that you were an accomplice to a crime, unwitting or not.
soper kept tracking mary down. she was increasingly bullish and refused to acknowledge any part in the infection. soper called mary a proved menace to the community. mary retorted that there had been no more typhoid where she was than anywhere else. there was typhoid fever everywhere. the department of health and the police hunted her down. after administering the tests and fully confirming her role as a carrier, she persisted in her denial while they forced her confinement.
when soper discovered her once more she was again sent to north brother island. this time there was less of a struggle.
she never fully admitted that she agreed with the diagnosis but the fact that enough around her accepted it meant that perhaps she could no longer go about her life in the usual fashion.
no one came to her aid while she was sick and no one came to claim the small sum she left behind. for all intensive care purposes she was alone.
it’s funny that we don’t have other accounts of asymptomatic carriers of the like. then again, how can we expect others to self-report an unrecognizable lack.
consider war as a disease. it spreads from one to another while borders are shut hoping to keep out the infection hoping to contain peace. those considered to be instigators are shut up and isolated.
consider that war is self-induced. a mass hysteria of its own. an auto-immune condition that erupts from within.
“war is a disease, a disease not of individuals, but of countries.” this metaphor is neither new nor controversial. but often it is treated as an inevitably malady, something to be contained and limited but unavoidable. laying skeletons and genes bare to decode a resistance to nature while unable to ascribe a resistance to ourselves.
almost everyone is a warmary. asymptomatic carriers who go about their daily business because their own personal lives aren’t interrupted by the sickness. never mind the fact that it is often those daily habits that contribute to the suffering of others, whether witnessed or not.
what would it mean to stop that spread of transmission? how can a sickness that ripples through us all be contained? such questions reveal the limits of the metaphor as well as of our own coping mechanisms.
carrying it within ourselves the potential to spread to aggravate is great. typhoid mary persisted with her habits because it was all she knew. other options were more difficult. they always are.
we have to question the systems that keep us entrenched in asymptomatic warfare.
•
metaphors can easily be stretched thin, like butter scraped over too much bread. metaphors can spread like an infection, drawing dangerously false equivalences like the recent economist article that i will not dignify with a link. or become kindling to inflame without elaboration for the sake of a buzzing headline.
war on a virus is proclaimed, willfully oblivious to the fact that a virus cannot sign a peace treaty. aiming for an annihilation of the abstract regardless of the bodies that lie in the wake. bodies are just carriers, patients made culpable by their visibility.
so of what use is this warmary analogy when nothing is quite like another and straws grasped at are hollow nonetheless. perhaps the appeal lies in its ability to reveal complicity without malice. a banality of evil that is at once benign and malignant like a cancer cell who claims it’s just trying to survive like all the rest. but what’s to be gained from acting like there’s opposing sides when there’s only one body.
marina manoukian is a reader and writer and collage artist. she currently resides in berlin while she studies and works. she likes honey and she loves bees. you can find more of her words and images at marinamanoukian.com or twitter/instagram at @crimeiscommon.
In this engraving from about 1660, a syphilis sufferer gets fumigated in a special oven. The caption on the oven translates as “For one pleasure a thousand pains."
The London Necropolis Railway Line was a railway line which functioned to transport cadavers and mourners from London to the newly opened Brookwood Cemetery 23 miles away in Surrey. The railway was opened in response to overflowing inner-city cemeteries. Throughout the early 19th century London had been subject to vast industrialisation leading to economic boom and, in turn, increased population with which the city could not cope. For example, the cholera epidemic of the late 1840s, which claimed the lives of 15,000 citizens, led to bodies piling up in the streets as cemeteries became saturated.
When it opening in November 1854, the Necropolis line was given its own platform at Waterloo Station (bodies would be kept in tunnels under the station as they awaited transportation) and a timetabled service saw coffins being transported by night, and mourners by day. The train made two stops; one at an Anglican cemetery and one at a Non-conformist cemetery. The carriages were also divided into classes so that posh dead people wouldn’t have to mingle with poor dead people.
The service was never as popular as had been thought; in its heyday it transported a mere 2300 people a year, as opposed to the 50,000 envisioned for it. It did hang on for almost a century though, “Until the 1940s it remained a weird London institution, a ghoulish Victorian hangover that resisted time, social change and falling demand” [source]. Then, in 1941, bombing by Hitler’s Luftwaffe destroyed the Waterloo terminus and the LNR shipped its last cadaver.
Collection item of the week: Black Wedding, a painting by Samuel Rothbort (1882-1971) probably based on memories of his early years in Wolkowisk (Belarus). This illustrates an Eastern European folk tradition of marrying two people in a cemetery to ward off an epidemic.
It’s a cautionary tale of the time I was a conference’s Patient Zero for con crud.
Once upon a time, way back in 2014, I lived in Nebraska. I flew to California to attend two concerts – one in San Jose and one in Los Angeles the following night.
Now, the lead singer was on vocal rest during the pre-show VIP events because he’d been sick for a while with a bad cold that was screwing with his voice. I attended those VIP events at both concerts, and they included photos with the band. Which meant standing right next to the lead singer. Who was on vocal rest. For a bad cold.
I joked with my friend, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we got his cold? We could totally brag that we got Jared Leto’s cold. lol”
And it was funny… right up until a couple of days later when my throat started getting scratchy and I started coughing.
Yep. I got his cold. Dammit.
But the story doesn’t end here! You see, I had a conference to attend, and my bug and I flew from Los Angeles to Atlanta to attend that con, along with around 400 other people.
When friends went to hug me, I’d say, “Whoa, I have a cold. Probably best not.” But then to lighten the moment, I’d joke, “Then again, it IS Jared Leto’s cold.” And they’d say “WELL IN THAT CASE” and they’d hug me anyway.
And it was funny… right up until a couple of days later when they started getting scratchy and coughing.
It turned out to be one of the worst con cruds any of us had seen in a long time. No one was seriously ill, but a lot of people were pretty miserable (and they haven’t let me forget it, either).
But it didn’t end in Atlanta.
Because then I flew back to Nebraska.
And they flew back to their homes in Europe, Australia, Canada, and other parts of the US.
And the globe-trotting microbe continued its world tour.
I’m one (1) person, but I carried that virus into the crowd at one (possibly two) concerts, multiple airports (including LAX and Atlanta), and at least four flights before passing it on to a conference on the other side of the continent attended by around 400 people, who then drove or flew back to their own homes in various parts of the world.
All because I stood next to someone with a cold.
Fortunately, for as unpleasant as it was, it was relatively mild.
Now let’s make it a virus that we’re not quite sure how to treat, kills more people than the flu, and is more easily and widely transmitted. Let’s make it a virus that is easily transmitted by asymptomatic carriers. Let’s make it a virus that survives on surfaces for days. Let’s make it a virus that we still don’t quite have a grasp on, whose effects are serious and have the potential to leave its survivors with lifelong health problems.
Imagine the Spanish Flu with twenty-first century travel and population density. Epidemiologists have been warning for years that a modern day pandemic could be an unprecedented disaster purely because of the sheer amount of traveling people do, and now that pandemic is here.
THAT is why you should stay home.
THAT is why you should wear a goddamned mask.
THAT is why business as usual is too dangerous right now.
I don’t care about your conspiracy theories: DON’T BE RECKLESS WITH PUBLIC HEALTH.
