Pandemonium Logs
Pandemonium Logs
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 2020–2022
In 2015, Ben Miller and the poet Anne Pierson Wiese moved from New York City to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to explore their midwestern roots and to focus on their writing careers. Working a day job in a hospital, Miller had a front-row seat to the COVID-19 pandemic as it moved from the coasts to the urban Midwest. Pandemonium Logs casts an unflinching eye on the state of the worker in the US health-care system during a global pandemic, giving voice to the doctors, nurses, support staff, patients, and families caught in the complex swirl of daily dilemmas and crucial choices.
In unsparing yet sympathetic prose, Ben Miller creates an intimate portrait of the impact of COVID on the diverse people of South Dakota. Through a wide range of characters—from understandably confused patients to quietly competent nurses—he explores the human complexities of the crisis: a doctor based in Mumbai who treats critically ill patients in the Dakotas via a tenuous hodgepodge of telehealth apparatus, a Hydra of six workplace trainers who together cannot train one employee to do one job, a vice president of corporate hospitality who lives to rip down safety signs as fast as nurses post them, a ninety-year-old hospital volunteer who pushes wheelchairs containing patients half his age.
In Pandemonium Logs, Miller provides precise and moving observations of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
This is what I suspect Kafka would have sounded like had he been raised on a steady diet of midwestern irony. Yet Ben Miller’s Pandemonium Logs is not just a writer’s disenchanted account of working in a telehealth intensive care unit in COVID-skeptical South Dakota. In spare, wry prose, Miller explores the full weirdness of his situation—a helper of helpers plunged into the heart of the pandemic yet still removed from it. A profound meditation on the fragility of life, delivered in a voice that is both irresistibly intimate and unfailingly precise.'
In this chronicle of the Covid pandemic’s era of e-medicine and its quietly surreal mundanity, Ben Miller depicts the brave, underpaid, overworked lives of his fellow healthcare workers and their desperately sick patients. His precise descriptive eye, coupled with his compassionate restraint, imbues their lives with both dignity and mystery.
Log 1: Call of the Killdeer
Log 2: The Magic of Palm Place
Log 3: Reckoning at the Prairie Center
Log 4: Coda Blue
Acknowledgments
Junctures in Women's Leadership: Health Care and Public Health
Edited by Mary E. O'Dowd and Ruth Charbonneau
Higher Education amid the COVID-19 Pandemic
Supporting Teaching and Learning through Turbulent Times
Edited by Jessica Ostrow Michel
