Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Pablo Ouziel, Elisabeth Tova Bailey, Janine Bandcroft June 4, 2020

Welcome to GR. We are as yet NOT broadcasting live from the basement of the Student Union Building at the University of Victoria, but instead recording live-to-Skype this day, May 13th, 2020.

Fitting it’s been a late Spring here. Winter’s intransigence keeping us indoors longer than we’d like, confined to leaving the greeting rituals of the new season overlong under wraps. But nature won’t be denied, and sure as God made green apples and bright flowers, our deliverance from the power of the pestilence that’s held much of the World at bay is waning. Or, so we’re told. The green lamp is lit – sort of – with Spain, one of the countries worse-effected by Covid, announcing last month its “deconfinement plan” roll out, beginning in earnest Monday, May 11. It’s the first stage of a phased emergence from the virus, and as elsewhere it’s a policy fraught with doubt and controversy.

Pablo Ouziel is a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria’s Political Science Department and Centre for Global Studies whose Fellowship Project at UVic, ‘Democracy Here and Now: The Exemplary Case of Spain’ was interrupted by the Covid-19 closure of the University. He is currently in his native Barcelona.

Dr. Pablo Ouziel in the first half.

And; what can we take away from this weird moment when the World stood uncertainly on its axis? Perhaps from our time in collective isolation we can understand better what it means for others forcibly removed by circumstance from their lives and an agency taken as granted, until just taken? Elisabeth Tova Bailey is an intimate acquaintance of solitude, having experienced years of patient recuperation from a randomly encountered debilitating disease. The product of her long estivation is the book, ‘The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating’. The multi-award garnering chronicle of her bed-side companion and its special history has now metamorphosed too as the short film of the same title.

Elisabeth Tova Bailey and life at a snail’s pace in the second half.

And; long-time Gorilla Radio contributor, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour with this week’s Left Coast Events Bulletin of some of the good things you can get up to in and around our town – both real and virtual – in the coming week. But first, Pablo Ouziel and Spain’s planned emergence from crisis.