As the world went into lockdown last year, Robert Pogue Harrison ended a short hiatus from his podcast with a dark, centuries-old tale.
Resuming “Entitled Opinions” that spring in 2020, the Stanford University professor wasn’t broadcasting from his usual lair at the campus’s Studio B. Instead, he spoke through the tinny echo of his home writing studio, a place fortified with wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, sherry, gin and “Lord, even brandy, should that prove necessary to roll the afternoons forward.”
The host turned his listeners’ ears back centuries to the moment Giovanni Boccaccio produced “the Decameron” — a collection of tales from Florentines escaping the Black Death plague of 1348.
The message was clear: We’ve been to these dark woods before, and stories have lighted our way.
In the coming weeks, Harrison explored the ways loss, mutability and separation have repeatedly intruded on the human story. As a writer obsessed with exploring how the dead shape the living, a professor who teaches plague-shadowed texts and a media personality focused on the nexus of literature and everyday life, Harrison turned out to be a podcaster made for the moment.
“Historically, I was thinking about how many precedents there have been to something like our experience of COVID,” Harrison, who’s still recording shows from his home, told The Chronicle. “Boccaccio’s ‘DeCameron’ is written in the context of a plague that wiped out a third-to-half of Europe’s population. So, it’s one...
Read Full Story: https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/podcast-an-intellectual-dig-through-past-plagues-and-future-tech
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