In this episode Kate interviewed not one, but three authors: Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg, and Lee Mordechai. Together, Robert, Merle, and Lee are the co-authors of a new book, Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics, and Zombies in American Movies. Robert Alpert is a lawyer and film scholar who teaches at Fordham University and has written extensively about film following his career as a practicing attorney. Merle Eisenberg is a historian of late antiquity and the early middle ages and a professor at Oklahoma State University. Lee Mordechai is a historian of the eastern Roman Empire and a professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Together, Merle and Lee also host a podcast called Infectious Historians, all about the history of disease, pandemics, and medicine. Kate talked with all three about what it was like to write a book together, which comes with one more wrinkle: Robert and Lee are also father and son!
Mentioned in this episode:
- Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics, and Zombies in American Movies, by Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg, and Lee Mordechai
- Infectious Historians podcast
- Zotero
- In case you’d like to learn more about Foucault or the cultural turn
- Richard Ford
- Alice Monroe
- Philip Roth
- George Eliot
- Montaigne’s Essays
- Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America
- Colson Whitehead, Zone 1
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I’m your host, Kate Carpenter, and in today’s episode I interviewed not one but three authors for the show. Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg and Lee Mordechai.
Robert Alpert:
Our pleasure to be here.
Merle Eisenberg:
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Lee Mordechai:
Yeah, excited to be here
Kate Carpenter:
Together. Robert, Merle and Lee are the co-authors of a new book, Diseased Cinema, Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies. Robert Alpert is a lawyer and film scholar who teaches at Fordham University and has written extensively about film, following his career as a practicing attorney. Merle Eisenberg is a historian of late antiquity in the early middle ages and is a professor at Oklahoma State University. Lee Mordecai is a historian of the Eastern Roman Empire and a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Together, Merle and Lee also host a podcast called Infectious Historians, all about the history of disease, pandemics and medicine. I was eager to talk with all three about what it was like to write a book together, which even came with one more wrinkle.
Robert and Merle are also father and son. Please enjoy my conversation with Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg and Lee Mordecai.
Robert Alpert:
My trajectory is probably a little different than my co-authors. I started out actually in law school and was bored studying law at law school and then kind of my … I think it was my third year in law school, I decided I wanted to study film, so I went from NYU Law School to Columbia Film School and took both schools at the same time. I hated law school and then, actually got out and actually loved the practice of law. So that’s what I did for the next 30 plus years, and that’s where I learned to write. But it was obviously, different from my co-authors because my writing was really developed, writing briefs, preparing for trials, depositions, appeal briefs and so forth.
And then about, I guess 10 years or so ago, I retired from law and began writing for film journals. I would emphasize non-academic film journals. That’s really how I got my writing skills to the extent I have any.
Merle Eisenberg:
So I was thinking about this and I think some of my background knowledge actually came from when I started writing opinion pieces for my college newspaper, the Colby Echo. And when I originally started writing things, I was writing about big topics of the day. This was back in 2004, 2005. So stuff like the Iraq War and the economics of the Iraq War. And someone said to me, we’re all a bunch of college students, this is not resonating. So I started writing about similar issues of economics, but about things that I think were more on topic. So I wrote a famous article about how they removed the full deli bar from the lunch at one of the cafeterias, which was based purely in a similar vein on economics.
They wanted to save money rather than to give us choice and allow us to eat, in my case, a tuna fish sandwich every day. And so, what I took from that and leading to my own academic work, I think is a focus on simple writing, not a lot of jargon, very straightforward and things that people can really grapple with and hold onto. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t love to read theory. And I think of the three of us, I’m the only one who actually likes to read theory, but at the very least a focus on writing in such a way that it’s accessible as possible and as simple as possible.
Lee Mordechai:
Yeah, and from my side, I would say that I learned to write at Princeton during grad school, but it was both the graduate program and the history department, but also, collaborating with others, which is something I’ve done through my work and environmental history. I think that once you try to work with others, it forces you to write in a certain way or teaches you … let’s say, teaches you first, forces you later, to write in a different way that is more accessible to others, to have to defend your ideas in person or in writing towards the people with whom you’re writing. And I think that was an experience that helped me with this book as well.
Kate Carpenter:
When and where do you like to do your writing?
Robert Alpert:
This is Robert. I always do it at my desk and I have a sort routine now. I get up in the morning, I have breakfast, read the news, and then I immediately go for an hour, an hour and a half walk. I come back, sit at my desk. I’m now in Vermont. So my desk overlooks the trees and whatever, and I sit there, work continuously, don’t get up on my desk really, other than for maybe a cup of coffee, have lunch and then go back. So I work pretty consistently as much as I can, right at my desk.
Merle Eisenberg:
And I would say it’s changed over the years. So I used to, before my kids were born, do my best writing from about 10 PM to 1 AM in the morning. And that’s definitely not the case anymore, except there was a little return to that during COVID for obvious reasons. So I do the thing probably a lot of people do, which is write a few hours early in the morning and try to get things done that way. The one thing I’ve noticed is I’m still very much a hard copy person, so I print everything out, I revise everything by hand, and I’m also very good for targeted outcomes and deadlines, much more so than if I just writing a bit here or there.
So I think Lee probably remembers this. The first article we wrote together, back when I was finishing my dissertation, we wrote … and I think Lee correct me if I’m wrong, about five or six weeks, all told. And then, we sent it to a few people and submitted it to a well-known journal. And so that was done in about five or six weeks. And I do the same thing now, which is I have about two more weeks. I’m in Princeton at the moment and I want to get a chapter done, so it will be done next week no matter what. And that spurs me and gets me going a lot more than just letting it drag on for however long.
Lee Mordechai:
Right and Lee here. I also do mornings. I think it was way easier to do before kids. I think my dissertation was written in a year of three hours … I mean, three hours a day in the morning. It was much easier to do that way than any other way I could think of, having that or change things a bit, but I think I can still squeeze in, let say an hour, an hour and a half, hopefully before she wakes up, but not always.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you all organize yourselves, especially kind of the sources you’re working with? Are there tools that you use?
Robert Alpert:
The answer is … since I write on movies, I largely … it sounds kind of strange, but I largely disregard sources, sorry. And I completely immerse myself in the movies and formulate how they work together and in terms of what the thesis is that I’m writing about. And then, only once I’ve actually committed to electronic copy, I was going to say paper, but that’s no longer the case. Once I’ve written that, then and only then do I start looking at sources and that’s when I flesh it out, add things, footnote things, refer to writers and so forth. But I only do that after I’ve come up with what I think are my ideas, my perspective on what I’ve written about.
Merle Eisenberg:
I would say something similar. I still like hard copies of sources and those types of things in front of me spread out even if I’ll have multiple screens of other sources. And then, in terms of organization, I’m a big fan of Zotero, which I think I had to teach Robert even what it was.
Robert Alpert:
You did.
Merle Eisenberg:
Yeah, but that’s very useful for organizing things, pulling in sources, those types of topics. But I would say over the years, I basically go through a cycle in which I consistently use Zotero, but that I go back and forth between where I write, how I do things in hard copy. I’d like to say I’m consistent, but I’m definitely not at all.
Lee Mordechai:
Yeah, so I also use Zotero, but more broadly I match the tool I use or the tools I use to the project. Zotero is great for organizing my own information or for collaborating really, but in certain other projects I could use other tools. For example, Google Sheets to organize everything more easily. So let’s have let’s say a line or a row for each source that I use and that allows me to compare or to overview these more easily than Zotero.
Kate Carpenter:
Part of the reason I was so excited to talk with you guys is that I wanted to hear more about your sort of co-writing, co-authorship process. As many listeners know, whether the historians or not, historians often don’t write together. And I know Merle, you and Lee have been working together for a while, and then Robert, you added a third voice to this project. So I want to know first of all, just how did you decide to do this project together?
Merle Eisenberg:
I’ll start off I guess, giving some background and then, I’ll let probably Robert chime in with some specifics, which is, Lee and I have published extensively on a sixth century pandemic called the Justinianic Plague and pushing back on narratives of everyone dies and the world ends. I’ll be very brief, but what we were interested in is why it seemed like everyone had that idea in the back of their mind. So we were trying to answer the question, something like, why do people today think about disease changing the world? Why do people think that disease comes in the past, kills everyone and changes how people live?
And what we realized is that that was like all history didn’t always exist from time to memorial, that there was a change over time and that it was very much a cultural change. So it was very much how we think about things rather than how people necessarily read the sources any differently. So we wanted to explore these cultural changes, which is very much a 20th and 21st century American story. We set out to explore this and as I had watched a lot of films growing up, films seemed like the obvious category to explore this. So, we then approached Robert and asked him, would you like to write an article initially with us on disease films?
Robert Alpert:
And since Merle asked me, no dad really … his dad can’t turn down. And he and his children, if the child asked, can you help me write something? In fact, Merle from time to time had helped me and edited and commented on some of my film articles, and I in turn, on occasion, actually commented on some of his history articles. So I obviously had to say yes, there’s just no arguments, but I admit I didn’t know very much about the area. I mean, I knew movies, but I had never thought of it as a kind of subgenre. So the first thing I did was put together a list of about 50 movies. It was hard because there are a lot more than 50 movies.
And I had to make some decisions about how do you choose movies, American movies, foreign movies. Do I care if they’re good movies? Can they be junk movies? So there are all kinds of criteria and how historically important are they? So I came up with that list and we then began drafting an article, and this was I guess in December of 2018 when we first started and we drafted, as I say … and the article turned into about 23,000 words. You can see it kind of grew, and I remember the conversation in June and it was Lee, I’ve never asked why Lee, not Merle. And anyway, Lee, I remember specifically said, would I be interested in writing a book?
And my concern actually, I remember was … Again, I couldn’t turn my son down if he has to do something, but I was actually more concerned that why would he want to waste his time? They were both Lee and Merle, both in academia, what’s a movie book going to do for them in terms of their CV or whatever. So I expressed concern that this is going to take a lot of time to do. Do you really want to do this? And they both said yes. So that’s kind of how we started down the road. We initially divided the article 23,000 words into three chapters, chronological chapters. I took the first one … Merle took the second chapter, and Lee took the third chapter and each of us amplified it.
Eventually, what happened was that we realized we obviously, needed more chapters. Merle actually came up with some suggestions for the additional chapters, and I ended up doing what we call … we titled the Remakes Chapter, based on the Body Snatches chapter. Merle ended up doing the franchise chapter. He was originally going to do the Walking Dead. I remember it was just dreading it, but fortunately we obviously skipped that and Lee ended up doing what turned out to be a really smart chapter, which was the COVID chapter, and he did enormous amount of factual research that you probably … I don’t know if you can even get it, put it together the same way he did at the time.
And then, we kept going through it and revising it. I don’t know if, Lee, you want to chime in at this point about how we progressed and what we did and how we edited it?
Lee Mordechai:
Yeah, I mean COVID happened somewhere in the middle there, where it was pretty early on, and I think that was a challenge for us. I mean obviously because of COVID itself. I think at least on my side, the things that changed at the time were me starting a new actual job and me having a baby. I mean, the fact that COVID happened gave us I guess more time in total, but also a sense of urgency and a sense of relevancy that that was kind of absent early on. I mean, we realized, I think pretty early on, in February or so, late January, early February, 2020 that this is going to be a big thing. We put out a piece in the Washington Post kind of talking about COVID and trying to comment on it from what we knew back then.
From what we knew on both history and movies to an extent. And we just kept on writing and revising, especially … revising in general and especially perhaps the COVID chapter. I think the chronological chapters were easier, that the two main controversial chapters or most revised chapters were the COVID one and the franchise one. So the Resident Evil one.
Robert Alpert:
That was a nightmare chapter, I’ll just say.
Kate Carpenter:
What does revising as a group look like?
Merle Eisenberg:
I’m happy to give an outline first and then, you can tell my co-authors have many stories they want to tell, but I’ll give the factual background as it were. Each of us, as Robert pointed out, started writing a particular chapter in Google Docs, which given my father’s age, I had to explain I think what Google Docs is and how to use it. So that was a unique challenge. So we started writing there. Everyone would go through and edit it in real time. One nice thing working with Lee that I’ve long learned is because he’s typically, although not right now, in Israel. He has that seven hour gap. So if you write an edit, you get the edits back in the morning and vice versa.
So you actually really go very, very fast, because you’re not working at the same speed. So we wrote all the chapters in Google Docs, then we found that there was a limit to how you could kind of see stuff in Google Docs, right? It’s not a complete software system, so you pull it down into Word. We would then pass around edits back and forth, again with the time lag being very helpful here. And then, we would all print it out, or at least I would print it out and Robert would print it out. I’m not sure if Lee does that and edit by hand, type up the edits and then do another round of sending around. So it’s a long complicated process in really three different media and how much the editing was needed, how much was done. Again, dependent on the chapter.
Robert Alpert:
One thing I would add is that we also did editing in real time. I mean, I do remember oftentimes, we were most often on Skype, and I remember us actually editing on Skype while all three of us were on for literally hours, and I remember Lee editing and then I would re-edit Lee’s and going back and forth. So it was a pretty intense process to try to get it so that it met all of our desires for what and how it would read.
Lee Mordechai:
Right, so there were two ways in which we did this, and I think as Robert said, one was … I mean after we all had our comments and we all essentially dumped our comments on one version, we had these marathon Skype sessions in which we would hash over things. So this was one version. The other version I think was to simply throw everything out then rewrite, and I think we rewrote the nightmare chapter that was an evil one completely, probably three times if I remember correctly. Yeah, and this was just out of frustration, as in one of us would read the current version and say, “Okay, this too bad. I cannot deal with this. Let me rewrite the entire thing.”
It is so bad that I’m willing to rewrite the entire thing. And we actually did that three times because of this. So I think that the most heated arguments were around that, partially because I think we all agreed that the movies were bad, but we kind of disagreed about how bad and what could we actually do with them. So a lot of the debates, I think most of the energy overall went there. And if you compare that to the chronological chapters, I really think those did not have that many heated arguments or even the Body Snatchers chapter. I mean all the four of those were pretty straightforward. I mean, there may have been arguments, but they were nowhere as heated as there is an evil one.
Merle Eisenberg:
I was just going to say on a more positive note that the really wonderful thing about writing with other people is when you write by yourself, you have a series of assumptions and ideas that you already know and you don’t connect the ideas. So I always like to think about it, you read a source, we’ll call it A, and then you have a big idea, which is C, and you have a hard time filling in the B, which is kind of the boring analysis of the source to get to your big point, but when you write with someone else, when you don’t do the B, they’re like, what are you doing here? There’s no analysis. You can’t just quote a thing and then, tell me this is the most important thing since sliced bread. That back and forth I think is very helpful.
Robert Alpert:
The difficulty to turn to the … the difficult aspect of collaboration is that when you have more than one … the upside is also the downside, and that’s what makes it both fruitful and difficult. When you collaborate with someone else, whether it’d be one person, two persons, or however many, each person adds something. And as Merle said, there are assumptions that you make that other people make explicit, but the flip side of that is that you approach things very differently. So that makes it very rough. I’m a film person. I’m also a literary person, fiction person. Lee is much more of a quantitative person, not immersed in film certainly, so has a very different approach.
I look back and early on, I can’t believe we did this, we actually did … I’m sorry, Lee came up with a spreadsheet to try to quantify community in the movies, which is both helpful and not from my perspective. So I think a lot of the dissonance was trying to … my trying to understand Lee and Lee trying to understand me was … Merle was in a way, since he is my son, sort of had some of me, and yet, he also had some of Lee’s thinking because he’d worked with him so long. So it made some rough … there were some rough moments, I think Lee and I had. I mean thank God we got over them and there were changes that were made. I actually found out about one change that I didn’t even know was going on in the invasion chapter that apparently Lee and Merle were making changes and had gone on interminably.
And I didn’t even realize the changes had been made on something I had written. But as I say, the negative is also part of the positive. When you have somebody who’s very different from you, it really upsets what you anticipate, what you assume and so forth. But the good news is as a result of that, you get a perspective that’s different from yours and really enriches the writing as a consequence.
Lee Mordechai:
Yeah, I agree completely. And I think that part of the challenge in this project for me was to figure out the methodology to use, because this was so out of field for me. I mean, what am I supposed to know, right? I’m a medievalist, actually working on Byzantium … I mean in the Middle Ages. I mean, what’s the connection between that and film? Basically nothing, and I remember that early on I tried to find some kind of literature that would help me understand this project in general just as a model and I could not find anything, right? So a lot of what we were discussing really were the ways to tackle this research question.
I’ll also add that as someone who’s collaborated quite a lot, I think collaborating with two other people, so having a three-person project was especially challenging because we all had inputs, we all wanted to contribute, and there was a lot of dialogue between the three of us as opposed to having one person lead and the other two just chime in or add to what that one person was doing. So from my experience, when I write with one other person, it’s usually a dialogue, but that’s relatively easy to do. And when I write with let’s say four more people in total, one person usually takes the lead and the others just make the changes, revise. But there’s clearly one person lead.
And I think that the three-person dynamic was very different in the sense of having, I don’t know, three co-authors in the full sense as opposed to one lead author and many co-authors.
Kate Carpenter:
I’m very glad that you all can laugh about this process, since the interview now. I mean, did you get sick of each other? It sounds like you spent a lot of time working and thinking together.
Lee Mordechai:
Yeah, Robert, do you want to …
Robert Alpert:
I think Lee was a real gentleman. I just want to … kudos to Lee. I do. I have to admit, I lost my cool on a couple of occasions. It’s interesting, Lee, you would’ve been a … I don’t think I’ve said this to you, you would’ve been a great lawyer. Just argumentative and it was great, but I wasn’t used to it in the movie world and certainly not in writing, but he was certainly a gentleman in terms of acknowledging that we had our differences and smoothing over those differences. And yes, we can laugh at it now, but there were some very tense moments at one point, wondered if we were going to finish this book.
But as I say, Lee, you were really wonderful when it came to understanding the difficulties with what we were encountering, all three of us, ultimately.
Lee Mordechai:
Yeah, and thanks, I’ll start by that, but it was really, I think our commitment to the project in general that helped push us through. Then here really … I mean, I’ll return the favor and it was really Robert, without whom this couldn’t have worked, right? Merle and I could have wanted as much as possible, but … I mean, we’re not film people. And I mean we kind of knew some of the films, but I mean I at least knew nothing about theory. I mean, the conversations with Robert taught me a lot. Even if they were heated, at times, they still taught me a lot about how to watch films, how to think about them, and all these different layers that I remember were all new to me.
I guess for Merle, this was part of his education, I guess, as a kid in their family, but for me it was not. So it was really informative to kind of have these conversations. And again, I’m kind of used to arguing this is the tradition from which I’m coming. So it was less a big deal. And again, because we were all committed to the project, then we were all willing to eventually work through our differences. It was a very edifying experience for me to just go through this entire process.
Kate Carpenter:
I want to ask about that family dynamic a little bit because I am curious what it’s like to write with your dad or your child rubber and roll. What was that process like for you? Did it surprise you?
Merle Eisenberg:
Yes. I’ll start with that. So as I’ve taken to being the positive person I guess on this episode, it was really wonderful. I mean, how often do you get a chance to write with a family member in the course of the academy? I can think of a few other people off the top of my head who’ve done it much, much later in their career. And so in that sense, I realized it was a once in a lifetime experience for good or bad. And so I thought, this is something we’re going to do and we’re going to get it done. So I was really wonderful in that sense and really amazing to get it done.
I’ll say it was also interesting, and this is something we haven’t touched upon, although I think it’s obvious even if obviously, listeners can’t see us, is my father is obviously much older than the two of us, which led … I’ll give you two specific writing based examples is one … and this took me a long time to figure out, is that my dad’s education stopped, I don’t want to tell everyone exactly how old you are, but certainly before the cultural turn happens and before theory really is involved in much of the academy. So in a sense how he watches and thinks about things is much more of a completely previous generation who then didn’t learn about Foucault and didn’t learn about the cultural turn.
And all these things I think we all take for granted in terms of how we write. So his approach to writing was much different than ours. And it also showed up very interestingly enough, and to speak more positively of my father now, he was trained to write in a old school grammar kind of way. And so in a way that you and I certainly myself never learned English grammar in school anymore, the way in which he would write sentences was just actually fundamentally different in where he places his clauses and how he writes. So we had to decide, do we do this very 19 now kind of age you, 60s-ish writing style, or did we update it in a more looser way? So it was something I just never thought about or never considered both of those two things.
Lee Mordechai:
No, I mean, I’ll add that I think we kind of touched upon this earlier on, but Robert always seemed to reject the over-theorizing of the kind of content that we were working on, which is something that really resonated with me because I have my issues as well with this very dense type of writing, and I think it was Robert or who kept pushing us towards simplifying and speaking to actual people as opposed to five other people around the world. So the fact that we could speak to a wider audience is really something that Robert pushed.
Robert Alpert:
Yeah, it was great. I hesitatingly say that I loved working with Merle. And it was a privilege because when does a parent actually get to know their child as an adult? And I don’t mean to watch from the outside, but actually to see them think and act in their profession as an adult, that’s just never happens. So I am tremendously appreciative of that. And I hope, going back to something I said earlier, I hope that Lee and Merle didn’t waste their time academically writing this book. About how I write, and I think yeah, that’s probably the case. I’m not very much into theory, to put it mildly. I once had an article rejected by one of those academic journals.
They said it was … I was writing, I think on Lubitsch, and they said, “Oh, it’s over-theorized.” And they told me the book that I should have analyzed in the context. I said, “Who wants to read that?” So I’ve never been into theory for that reason. I also have a view that at the end of the day it’s you want to be, dare I use the old term humanistic. You want people to read what you write. That’s why I write. I write because it’s personal, it’s very personal. I want to extend myself to the audience. On occasion, I acknowledge that I am probably too into the minutiae of such thoughts, but at the end of the day, it’s not about theory. I don’t believe it’s about connecting with your audience.
I also, I suppose … and now, I’m going to kind of go on a limb, I also have a view that a lot of … I mean I lived through that Foucault and early writings and later writings and so forth. And I guess part of it is also a political stance on my part, which is … I also think a lot of this is part and parcel of what we discuss in our book. A lot of this theory just comes out of … it’s like capitalist thinking in a way. We’ve lost touch. And I think that’s part of what our book, I hope is about, is that we’ve lost touch with a part of who we were and that our system emphasizes theory. There’s a reason why and academics are, that’s why I don’t write for academic journals because you are writing to five people. This was just pointed out, and you want to love what you’re doing, you want to love the movies.
You want people to love what you write and you want to help people in reverse. Yeah, so I guess I’m old school, but that’s … I say, that’s pre-Reagan, and that’s good. That’s all to the good hippies. She’ll live forever. Sorry.
Kate Carpenter:
Fantastic. To talk a bit more about how the book came together, I asked the authors to read a section of the book and talk to me about it in true collaborative fashion. Here are Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg, and Lee Mordecai. Reading from the final chapter of Diseased Cinema.
Robert Alpert:
COVID’s outbreak and global spread played out like a movie script, and that similarity helped shape the public’s perception of the pandemic. COVID slowly expanded from China to Iran to Europe, the United States gradually resulting in the implementation of lockdowns to mitigate the disease’s impact. From early on, international, national and local media compared the developing COVID pandemic to movie diseases. Fictional narratives and reality blurred steals from movies were juxtaposed with photos from real events such as runs on food at supermarkets or overburdened hospitals, movies, comparisons focused on film scenes which reflected COVID experience such as self-isolation at home, and deserted streets of a post-apocalyptic world.
Merle Eisenberg:
Pandemic movies, particularly films from the mid-1990s onward entered COVID-related discussions. Almost immediately, film and real-life events reinforced one another. As early as January 23rd, 2020, the New York Post cited, Contagion as the model for the development and spread of COVID. Likewise, the New York Times review of outbreak appeared in the front page of its online version in March with the title, “Now we’re living the sequel.” Perhaps less expected was the significant place of zombie movies in discussions, commentators for example, compare real Israel’s closing of its borders with the walls fictional Israel raised around the country in World War Z.
The media also featured a few references to older movies. An American baby boomer who was infected in the Diamond Princess cruise ship remarked that the doctors and nurses checking him on board while quarantined looked like something out of the Andromeda strain. The Wall Street Journal even used the 70-year-old panic in the streets that described the urban COVID experience. Given that these movies were less well-known to audiences though, they were unsurprisingly featured less often.
Lee Mordechai:
Movies helped their audiences understand the early harsh lockdowns in many countries. These strict lockdowns led to the emptying of public spaces in urban centers, reminding observers of the end times. Stores closed, mass transit travel was reduced, and car driving ceased almost entirely. Recalling scenes from earlier diseased films such as 12 Monkeys, some stories described how cities, suburbs, and towns appeared to turn into natural habitats with wild animals prowling the streets. The two films that featured commonly in comparisons to the present were Contagion and 28 Days Later. Each was used primarily in the country that produced it, the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively,
Kate Carpenter:
Merle and Lee, so you have a podcast called Infectious Historians, and I know this book was really shaped by some of those conversations and the research for that show. How have you seen the relationship between the podcast and the book?
Merle Eisenberg:
I would say it’s quite symbiotic. I mean, we started the podcast, if I recall, Lee. Lee refuses to listen to early episodes, because they think they’re so terribly edited.
Kate Carpenter:
I sympathize.
Lee Mordechai:
They are.
Kate Carpenter:
They are most popular though, Lee. We started podcasting in March of 2020, which is when we really accelerated, I think the books, chapters at that point. I think we had obviously started writing well before that, but accelerated at that point. So I think these things combined together, we had a number of guests on whose work features throughout the book, whether it’d be for historical reasons or for movie reasons. I think we had someone on who wrote a really great article about Italian zombie films at some point early on, because I wanted to talk to him about it, but what I would say, and we often talk to people about the podcast in this way is … I imagine you feel the same way, is you get basically an hour long one-on-one seminar with someone on their topic after you have read their work.
So you learn about a field or a subfield or whatever, a way of writing that you had no idea about, and then you get to talk to someone who’s really smart about it, about their ideas. I think for this book, it was absolutely central. I mean, if you compare the podcast episodes with the end notes for the chapters, you would see a one-to-one correspondence. And it’s also, I think Lee and I have talked about this before. We both taught a course on the history of disease, so that work has spilled over into that and into our own research in other fields.
Lee Mordechai:
Right. I’ll remind again that when we came to both actually podcasting, but also this film, I mean, I’ll speak for myself, I had very little background as to all these other pandemics or all these other movies, and I think that the podcast allowed us to approach people, asked them to contribute to just come on. And I think that was Merle, you could probably correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember this being way easier to do early on and when everyone was like sitting at home having nothing to do than a bunch of … I think Merle were you a graduate student at the beginning? I think you … or you were postdoc already. Both of us were postdocs. No, I actually started my job, but we were very early career people, kind of like unknowns to the entire field.
So when two random people emailed you out of the blue in the beginning of COVID, so actually quite a few people said yes, I would say actually everyone said yes other than our friends who kind of refused to do this, but it was a great way to enter a field and understand what was going on, and we had both the hour long conversations that were eventually aired, but especially early on, we all had quite a bit of time on our hands, so we tended to stay and speak off the record with some of the people … some of our guests, and that was also very useful to get less formal answers as to what was going on and bounce back and forth ideas.
Merle Eisenberg:
Yeah. Just to quickly add, I mean, you’re a historian of science and Lee and I guess are technically historians of science, but without any formal training, even though we’re from the same department and we should have taken all the courses with all the people you obviously took courses with. So a lot of the stuff we had to learn on our own, but then when people would come on the podcast, we could basically get a mini lesson and a seminar that we should have taken in grad school from a whole bunch of people.
Kate Carpenter:
You’ve all hinted at this, but I really want to underscore that you started really talking about this book in 2019 and then COVID interrupted all through the trajectory. I think it’s not uncommon for historians, especially 20th century historians to be writing about things that are still very much sort of ongoing, but you guys were living this subject in a way that few other people do. How did that change the way you approached this book or the way you thought about it?
Robert Alpert:
I’m going to say that in a way, COVID accelerated us in writing the book. And as I think Merle said earlier, it gave us impetus to not only hurriedly write it, but also, try to get it published. As I’m thinking back, I’m not sure … speaking for myself, I’m not sure it really changed the book in terms of the book’s thesis. I think what it did, at least for me is it illustrated exactly what we were saying in the book. How ideology oftentimes drives what’s supposed to be objective science and how politics oftentimes is responsible for how we approach diseases. So while it exemplified it, I’m not sure it changed my thinking in terms of the book itself and how we approach the different movies that we talked about in the book.
It certainly, it made possible the chapter in COVID, but the chapter in COVID to my way of thinking is an illustration of what the movies are already saying. So it becomes a real life example of it.
Merle Eisenberg:
What I would add is, if we peel back the layers of when we wrote the book, we accelerated the process, I think Robert just pointed out, and I don’t think that the book was quite ready or there yet. And so then we took a step back and kept doing more work. And Lee, to his credit, thought about the COVID chapter very early on, but if Lee recalls, the COVID chapter itself went through probably 30 mini drafts, right? Because we’re literally writing about an ongoing thing. And I think we thought that there would be significant changes in American thought society, whatever you want to talk about through COVID. And actually when we finally finished the book, it was at probably the best moment, which was effectively everywhere in the world ending all lockdowns, right?
Because I think right as we finished the draft, China had just said whatever, we’re done and lifted it overnight. So we had to change … we had a Chinese paragraph, we had to change the whole Chinese paragraph literally, I think in the last bit. By that point, what you realized as Robert said, is that we had had all these intermediary drafts, which would be actually interesting to pull up in retrospect where we thought things would be different. We thought there might be changes, this and that. But in the end, I think we arrived at somewhat, at least in that chapter, depressing conclusion, that not much had changed whether or not it was Donald Trump in the White House or Joe Biden in the White House, for example.
Lee Mordechai:
Right, and I think COVID was a good case study to observe as we wrote the book. And to me, it also demonstrated how what we were saying was actually an important addition to the conversation, because COVID did not actually work as movies such as Contagion predicted it would, right? So yes, there were superficial differences, but this entire idea of movies portraying us all as equal and having the same chance of dying from a disease that was very clearly unrealistic. And it was pretty obvious early on. I mean, for us working on this and yet was not really part of the conversation surrounding these movies, especially in the first half or so, of 2020 when these movies featured pretty significantly in discussions.
Kate Carpenter:
We’ve talked a fair amount already about how this book is quite interdisciplinary, and for all of you, it sort of stretched the bounds of what you normally think and write about. I wanted to know though, in addition to the challenges that can come from trying to fill those sorts of gaps and knowledge, were there surprises to you about combining those different perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches?
Lee Mordechai:
I mean, for me, I would say yes, right? As a historian, I remember some of the early discussions and also not so early discussions, were me trying to grapple with this idea of defining our own corpus of movies. I mean, Robert kind of alluded to this early on, there was, and some people might argue, there still is no such genre as a disease movie genre. So how do you actually decide which movies to include in the film and which not to include in the film? Now as a medievalist, I am used to working with anything I could find, so I just put everything together, try to read everything and work that way. With movies, I mean, this was obviously not realistic to do.
And then there’s the question of why are we choosing movie A and not movie B. And how do we justify that to ourselves first, but also our audience? So this was something I clearly learned. This different approach of just putting things together that you thought are important, putting it together and kind of working through that self-defined corpus, which might be easier for other historians who work on, let’s say, 20th century stuff in which you obviously cannot cover everything, but were unusual to me.
Robert Alpert:
For me, the difference in this was … my background is under Andrew Sarris, was as an auteurist, I guess, how I’ve always approached movies. That’s how I was trained, I guess. As times passed, I’ve also been influenced by other writers, especially someone like Robin Wood, who’s not only an auteurist, but also politically oriented. So the difficulty I had with the book was I view it as an art form film, and this is more cultural historian approach. So it was difficult to … how shall I put it, stomach some of these movies. I mean, watching Resident Evil is just, my God. But having to do that because it actually is significant culturally in terms of what it says about us or having, I remember we talked about the Dawn of the Dead, the remake, which I thought is just horrific.
And actually, I think Lee, unless I’m mistaken, chime in if I’m wrong, I think Lee actually liked it. So it was, for me, to try to pick movies in terms of culturally and historic changes was a struggle, certainly. So that is the one way I would say. At one point, I had to … one of our readers suggested we needed early movies from the 30s, so I had to ignore who the directors of all these movies were and just plunge into a half dozen movies so that I could get the cultural sense of them. So that was my struggle is just use them as … I guess to use the quantitative notion, use them as data, and that I struggled with, but I had had Leah’s health. I mean, we … That was part of our arguments. How do you approach movies?
Merle Eisenberg:
I’ll just quickly add that one thing I think is useful for me having gone through this process, and it’s something that is as likely a medieval historian, I always think with, is doing a deep dive on one source and doing it really well, was something that this book allowed me to return to because we decided, I think, correctly to focus on a few important examples of films and then also, give alternative visions. And so thinking about centering certain actors, certain people, to really give a voice to what you want to do rather than just trying to do everything, which is a temptation, I think, for historians.
If you have, you’re a 20th century, historians have a million sources, but you do have to start picking things in people, even as you want to show, “Oh, I’ve read everything and thus I want to talk about everything.” Actually, as most of us go through, I think our careers, we realize that doing a better job on one or two things is often much better. So I think this allowed me in my own work that I do on medieval history to start going back to that a lot more now and not feel so worried that, “Oh, I don’t have 9,000 sources and I don’t cite everything.” Just tell the story you want to tell and say, “Oh, they’re all alternatives. Here are some alternatives, and just know that you know your stuff.”
Kate Carpenter:
Well, as we wrap up here, I want to turn and ask a little bit about sources of inspiration. Who are other writers or perhaps other media that you each look to for inspiration?
Robert Alpert:
Again, I’m a movie person, so I look to movies. I mean, I’m watching movies every day without stop. So it depends on the day. I mean, I was just noting … I mean, I watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia the other day, and Richard Lester’s, Marion and Robin. So the range of things that I watch are pretty broad in terms of writers, I tend to read, I guess what my co-authors would say are kind of classical old school people, and I still do, I mean, I am reading a Richard Ford novel now, simply because I get immersed in his sense of the kind of daily details of just staying alive and what that means. But I tend toward writers who I think just don’t write simple sentences, who write poetically.
And I binge on them like Ishiguro, like Alice Monroe, Phil Roth. Merle knows that I’m deeply immersed in George Eliot. I’m reading Montaigne’s essays. Now, all classical writers because they write wonderfully. And that’s part of … as a reader, that’s what inspires me. People who write … so I connect with them. That’s I think the beauty of writing, you can actually reach out … I’m going to use this stupid, reach out and touch somebody phrase, stupid phrase. I can’t believe I was going to do that. You connect with and it’s true of all art. I mean, I also collect art, and art is similar visually.
If you can connect with some great Rembrandt etchings or paintings, that to me is a source of great inspiration, a commonality with the people who are writing or who are painting. Who are drawing, whatever. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about, is the sense of great writing and connection.
Merle Eisenberg:
So I’ll stick with the history genre for the moment. One thing I did many years ago in grad school is I went to all my friends in completely different subfields, and I said, can you give me a top 10 list of things I should read for whatever reason? So I worked my way through books in that manner more than anything else, rather than in my own field. I mean, I like medieval history. I’m a medieval historian, but reading in your own field just gets kind of, after a while. So I look to other inspirations as Lee has probably heard me gone about 19 or 20 times at this point. Margot Canaday’s Straight State, for example, is my go-to example of the best structured book I’ve ever seen and ever seen put together.
So books like that is where I really get inspiration from something that makes me think a little differently outside the confines of the questions that are in my field over and over again, as well as more interesting and different ways of writing. So actually, my co-authors would probably be interested to know that I’ve actually almost finished now, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, which is a zombie novel. It’s the first zombie plague thing that I’ve read. They’re laughing at me, because I think all of us are so sick of anything disease zombie related that we can’t watch anything. And it’s true and this is … someone told me about this as we were finishing the book, and I said, absolutely not. I’m not reading this, and I got a cheap copy.
So I’ve actually been reading through it, and it’s just fantastic because it’s very human driven, very simple writing, very straightforward. So it’s the first zombie thing. So I’d recommend to both Robert and Lee that they both read it actually, and it’s a very good read.
Lee Mordechai:
Might be part of a sequel of our book. But no, my inspiration, I mean, is clearly not in the discipline of history. It is also clearly not in some kind of classical writing. I mean, I would probably go with online writing. So online long form writing, as in long articles in which a person … usually a random person that I don’t know in some blog or something, manages to convey an idea that I had not thought of before in an attractive and fluent way. That has been … let’s say, over the past five years or so, that has been a source of inspiration for me of how to write and how to connect with broad and unknown audiences, which I think are different from how I thought of audience in my grad school days or within my small limited field.
Kate Carpenter:
What’s the best piece of writing advice each of you has received?
Lee Mordechai:
Yeah, I can go first here. It’s pretty simple. It’s just write every day and things add up, right? So writing, let’s say a page or two every day kind of struggling with it, even if it’s bad, just put something on paper adds up very quickly to chapters and more chapters and more articles. And then yes, obviously you have to revise stuff, but you at least have a big lump of text that you can work with, which is, at least from my perspective, far more useful than having everything in your head because you start losing things from your head very quickly. This is my experience. Yeah, just like putting that stuff out there.
Saving it somewhere and returning and revising many times if necessary, but it’s still the easiest way of moving quickly and getting stuff done, for me at least.
Robert Alpert:
The one piece of advice that’s stuck with me, and I don’t know if it’s the best piece, but it is clearly, as I say, it has really stuck with me in terms of how I approach writing, which is Samson Raphaelson, when I wrote for him, we had to write a treatment for screenplay, and I wrote something extraordinarily personal. I’m not going to repeat it here, as if it’s so personal. And I was clearly troubled by the events that I wrote about. As I say, it was intended to be a treatment for a screenplay, and we turned it in and in class he looked at me and said, “When you write,” he said, “You can’t write too rawly.” What he was clearly getting at is it has to be poetically filtered.
And I guess in a way that’s both good and bad in terms of how I approach writing. It’s both personal, and yet, it can’t be too personal because it has to connect.
Merle Eisenberg:
So probably one of the similar moments to Robert that I had was I wrote what’s now a part of a book chapter, but an early form in a dissertation for … on this guy, Cesare Sivaro, who’s a bishop of Southern France. And I gave the chapter to Bill Jordan, William Chester Jordan, the now emeritus, but great medievalist at Princeton. And Bill as he’s want to do, had edited the whole thing by hand with pencil, ripped it apart in terms of the writing, and basically said to me, I’m paraphrasing now, something like, you clearly don’t like this guy, and you think he is. I don’t think Bill would ever curse, but in my words, he’s a pain in the butt.
And I said, “Yeah, the guy sucks.” And he said, “That might be the case, but you have to have empathy with everyone and all of your actors because it doesn’t explain by just saying, this person sucks.” You have to try to understand them on their own terms and have empathy with whatever their situation is. You might condemn them for their actions, and that’s perfectly reasonable, but to try to understand why they made the decisions they did in their own time period and how they thought is really the approach.
Kate Carpenter:
Before I let you all go, can I ask you what you’re working on these days? Is there another collaboration in the works? Are you also traumatized by collaboration?
Robert Alpert:
The answer is we’re not. It’s in bits … I don’t know if it’s a tempting thought or not, but to answer directly your question actually on working. I’ve completed a manuscript and editing a book that I actually had started before we began this book on disease, and now only many years later returned to, it’s a book on … it’s called Robots or tentatively titled Robots and Computers in American Movies, the AI Myth. As the title would indicate it’s about movies, about artificial intelligence and robots and what that says about us both culturally, but also as you use my word ontologically, how we define ourselves.
Lee Mordechai:
So for me, I just submitted the manuscript about the sixth century environmental event, an industrial event or some kind of atmospheric event that happened in the sixth century, which turned a particular year, 536 CE to be considered the worst year to be alive by both some historians and broader public discussion. So it’s really an intellectual history of how we move from essentially important, which is not very important in the sources, to something that is extremely dramatic in 21st century readings. So really focusing on the past 40 years and seeing how interdisciplinary discussions have moved the interpretation of that particular historical event in unexpected ways, let’s say.
Merle Eisenberg:
So I should say, for my penance, I have read both of their manuscripts and given both of them detailed feedback on both manuscripts. So I still work with them, I suppose, whether or not especially my father listens to any of the things I gave him as feedback is an open question. For myself, I am doing two book manuscripts at the moment. One is a revision of my dissertation finally after getting sidetracked for obvious reasons on diseases and plagues for the last five years. So that’s about halfway or two-thirds of the way done. So I hope to finish that in the fall. And that’s on basically the fall … reactions to the fall of the Roman Empire and what’s now Southern France.
And then Lee and I, probably sooner rather than later, will also finally write our book on the Sixth Century Pandemic, the Justinianic Plague, since we published on that a lot. And both of us, I think, want to have one last thing to say and then probably never touch disease and plague again, if we can help it. Although I’m sure people will ask us to write articles in the years to come and we’ll say, but we’ll probably do it anyways, because I know how this works.
Kate Carpenter:
Fantastic. Well, Robert Alpert, Lee Mordechai and Merle Eisenberg, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting The Past.
Robert Alpert:
Thank you.
Lee Mordechai:
Thanks. It was a …
Robert Alpert:
We can’t even successfully say thank you collaboratively.
Merle Eisenberg:
I’ll take the pause and say thanks for having us.
Kate Carpenter:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of Drafting The Past. Visit draftingthepast.com to find show notes with links to all of the books we talked about, as well as the complete transcript of the episode. Please tell a friend about the show and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and if you’d like to help keep Drafting The Past going, you can always support the show at patreon.com/draftingthepast. Until next time, happy writing.
