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It’s early March. It’s New York. It rained overnight and now it’s getting windy. The baseball games are starting down south. I found myself humming “Waters of March,” sung by Susannah McCorkle, with her English lyrics: “It’s the promise of life/ It’s the joy in your heart.” But wait: when Antonio Carlos Jobim wrote that song, in Portuguese, he was talking about March in Brazil, in the Southern Hemisphere. I checked with my friend Altenir Silva, film-writer, who lives in Rio, not far from the Tom Jobim statue. Altenir said the Portuguese lyrics mean, “It’s the rest of a bush in the morning light,” and he added, “Yes, March is a rainy month in Brazil.” Turns out, Jobim was caught in a major rainstorm, in the interior, far from the beaches of Ipanema. Apparently, McCorkle wrote the English version around 1993, giving it a northern take. She was a linguist, who sang in English, Portuguese and Italian, and a writer, published in magazines and working on a memoir when she committed suicide on May 19, 2001 at the age of 55. Her obituary was lovingly written by Leon Wieseltier in the June 4, 2001, edition of The New Yorker. McCorkle’s version of “Waters of March,” with terrific guitar backup by Howard Alden, survives her, as recorded music does. My friend Altenir followed up by sending me a version by Elis Regina, probably the most popular Brazilian pop singer when she died on Jan., 19, 1982, at 36, of an overdose. This sadness from both hemispheres is diluted by the music they left behind, the music of water, the rush of life, the little things we see and hear and feel, the things we take for granted: -- “a stick, a stone.” “É pau, é pedra.” McCorkle could have added a stanza about spring training. A bat, a ball, a glove, a cap. “It’s the promise of life/ It’s the joy in your heart.”
Altenir Silva
3/2/2016 09:23:38 am
Dear George,
George Vecsey
3/2/2016 09:57:41 am
I should have added, Altenir took wife and son to Yankee Stadium last time in NYC
Brian Savin
3/2/2016 07:37:09 pm
Then we should apologize to Altenir and his family for the destruction of baseball history. The new Yankee Stadium is in my opinion a featureless disgraceful sop to investment banker marketing convenience. There. I said it and I'm glad.
Altenir Silva
3/2/2016 08:12:28 pm
Dear Brian,
Brian Savin
3/2/2016 08:22:54 pm
I'm glad you had a wonderful time, Altenir. Interestingly to me today I had a doctors appointment and a meeting with a government official. Both are Yankee fans. Both talked of their excitement about spring training. And both volunteered that they hated the new stadium!
Sam Toperoff
3/3/2016 04:14:00 am
Sweet spot, George, sweet spot. 3/3/2016 12:13:16 pm
Delightful!
George Vecsey
3/3/2016 12:50:56 pm
Dear Sherridan: 3/8/2016 09:31:42 am
This is my all time favorite version of the song with Mr Jobim singing it live at Lincoln Center. As he sings, he speaks to the wonder and randomness that life presents to us...At least to me.
George Vecsey
3/9/2016 12:48:18 pm
Hi, thanks, I will look up a link for Jobim at Lincoln Center. I never saw him in person. Only Brazilian music I caught live with Astrud Gilberto with the amazing Emily Remler on guitar, on NYC's East Side. Remler also backed up Susannah McCorkle. I've got a DVD of Caetano Veloso in NYC with Jacques Morelenbaum...a classic. best, GV Comments are closed.
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Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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