{"id":4648,"date":"2020-08-07T18:56:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-08T01:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/?p=4648"},"modified":"2020-10-10T19:28:31","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T02:28:31","slug":"pandemic-intellectual-media-diet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/pandemic-intellectual-media-diet\/","title":{"rendered":"Pandemic Diary, II: My Intellectual Diet During Quarantine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Forty seven days ago I penned a visceral (for me, at least) account of the pandemic and my reaction to it<\/a>. I focused on the physical aspect, explaining how I would burn off the crazy with intense and prolonged exercise. That has gone well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The simple but strenuous task of identifying and analyzing how I felt about the unprecedented events of this Coronavirus event was valuable. How would I react to the stay-at-home orders; what I was doing and why. That helped me. I am hesitant to post any of this. My personal choices during the pandemic are of interest to almost nobody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I start back to my next academic year next week, and I will be busy with that. So before that happens I want also to explain to myself what has happened in my interior\/intellectual life since the SARS-CoV-2 virus arrived to Ventura, California from Wuhan, China. I want to review and make sense to myself of how I have spent the many hours during this lockdown not only in the physical\/external respect<\/a>, but in the interior\/intellectual<\/a> aspect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is important. To me at least.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote around the time Time to Tend of the Interior World<\/a>. That was a good start, but much has happened since then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So many of my friends were telling me about the shows they binge-watched during the quarantine. Faced with so much time stuck at home, that is how they got through the days since March.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I decided to imitate them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I watched the first episode of the Mandalorian series<\/a> from the Star Wars saga. The George Lucas scifi soap opera is now owned by Disney. So of course the show was pretty stupid. More to the point, The Mandalorian appears to have been made for an audience of 12-year olds. I watched the first \u201cpilot episode\u201d and then was done. Disney Star Wars spin-offs were not a good use of my time. Next, I started watching the \u201cHarry Bosch\u201d<\/a> series because it looked decent and was free on Amazon Prime. I watched the first four episodes and they were satisfactory, but I did not want to go down the rabbit hole of spending hour after hour in the gutters with LA police and the resident scumbags in a police proceduralco. My brother highly recommended the Narcos<\/a> in Columbia and Mexico shows on Netflix, chiefly because of the beautiful women in the show. But I did not want to cozy up to drug dealers and that miserable business hour after hour. My dad recommended Ozark<\/a>. No thanks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe there is this simple problem: I can rarely summon nowadays the patience to sit still through a two-hour movie. To spend God only knows so many hours of the entire \u201cBreaking Bad\u201d<\/a> series is almost unthinkable. Could that saga really be worth 62 hours of my previous time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe. Maybe not. I will never know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I moved on and devoted my pandemic intellectual life to three pastimes: a few famous old tennis matches, plenty of classical music, and loads of good ol\u2019 fashioned book reading.<\/strong> I have read 30 books since March. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First of all, I watched some tennis matches. <\/strong>The grand-slam tennis tournaments have been cancelled this year, but all of them have graciously made available some of their more entertaining matches from the past on their Youtube channels. I had never seen most of these matches, as I am not a huge viewer of these in even normal times. So I watched these matches:<\/p>\n\n\n\n