This finds me working on my Far West Texas book and, after hours, bit by itty bit, that is, post by post, still migrating my old Blogger blog over here to self-hosted WordPress, a project I began a couple of years ago because… hmm, yes, deplatforming, in the news! The potential for deplatforming has been a concern for me, although not because I blog on touchy political subjects. Some years ago I started to feel uncomfortable with Google’s ever-changing and opaque algorithms (one of which, for reasons known only to itself, temporarily froze access to my blog) and Google’s outsize power. Therefore, rather than continue to rely on Google’s free Blogger platform for Madam Mayo blog, I opted to shell out for a domain name and hosting, all under my own control here at www.madam-mayo.com. I’ve been blogging 2006, so it has been quite a job* to select the posts worth the bother to migrate, and then, of those selected posts, update the links.
It has been a sobering education to find so many links that I had pointed to now dead. Yes, some webpages can be retrieved on archive.org. But a lot of things, from home pages to individual essays to interviews, are just… poof.
By the way, might this Monday find you yearning for post-pandemic fun times? Well, who needs a “bucket list” of things to see and do when you can have, à la Melanie Koyabashi, a champagne kegger! Check out her post and see if doesn’t make you feel better. (Ooh, that even rhymes, sort of.) You can also watch her dispatch, in her unique manner, a sculpture made of Cheetos.
*(Yes, I know about the software that could help me, and to those of you have pointed to various programs, though these are not going to work for my particular situation at this point, please know that you have my very sincere thanks.)
The rest of this Monday’s post is from the archives– a short post about an excellent and haunting biography of the victim of an epidemic. …hmm, yes, epidemics, in the news!
Ruth Levy Guyer’s
A Life Interrupted: The Long Night of Marjorie Day
By C.M. MAYO
Originally posted on Madam Mayo blog September 26, 2012
A few weeks ago I happened to be wandering around Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington DC’s venerable go-to place for the latest chewy policy tomes, when, in the second room, I came upon Opus, the book-making contraption. It struck me rather as a beached whale. Not breathing. But there was a little stack of books that had come out of its maw… I picked up the one on top, A Life Interrupted by Ruth Levy Guyer,and began reading. By the time I got to page 10 or so, I realized, ah, time to buy it and go finish it over a cup of coffee. Or three. Or four.
Wow.
First of all it’s beautifully written, very deeply researched, and strange. It’s the true story of Marjorie Day, “Daysey,” a bright Wellesley graduate studying in England in the 1920s who came down with sleeping sickness which left her zombie-like and beset by delusions. And then… seventeen years later, after a horrifying odyssey of hospitals and mental institutions, she woke up. Permanently. She then proceeded to have a very nice and very long life as a teacher and then retiree in Georgetown, DC. Even more bizarrely, she never knew that what she’d been suffering from all those years was encephalitis lethargica– neither her doctor nor her family told her.
The author wrote to Oliver Sacks, whose book and the movie based on his book, tell the story of the victims of sleeping sickness who were woken up, decades later, but only temporarily, by L-dopa. To quote:
I asked Sacks if he had ever seen a patient like Daysey, who had recovered completely and permanently.
“I have never seen anything like this in my own practice,” he wrote back.
(What in blazes is the state of U.S. publishing that a book of this quality is self-published?)
UPDATE: Interesting 2014 essay about the 1915-1927 epidemic of encephalitis lethargica.
Q & A with Timothy Heyman on the Incomparable Legacy of
German-Mexican Novelist B. Traven
A Writerly Tool for Sharpening Attentional Focus or, The Easy Luxury
of a Lap Desk
A Review of Claudio Saunt’s West of the Revolution:
An Uncommon History of 1776
*
My new book is Meteor
