On my mind...

Some of the most honest writing I've experienced about cancer...

"Sifting through the videocassettes, the Mother wonders what science fiction could begin to compete with the science fiction of cancer itself - a tumor with its differentiated muscle and tone cells, a clump of wild nothing, and its mad, ambitious desire to be something: something inside you, instead of you, another organism, but with a monster's architecture, a demon's sabotage and chaos.  Think of leukemia, a tumor diabolically taking liquid form, better to swim incognito in the blood.  George Lucas - direct that!...

... Pulling through is what people do around here.  There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn't bravery at all.  It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess and an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow?  'Everyone admires us for our courage,' says one man, 'they have no idea what they're talking about.'"

- Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are the Only People Here"

Wish I Wrote That

A co-worker lent me The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif a few years ago.  I lost it down the back of a bookshelf and just found it the other weekend.  It was a pretty interesting read - I'm always a sucker for books that use different and varied narrative styles to tell a story.  I appreciated how Soueif wove in the historical realities of 20th century Egypt under the thumb of English rule.  Some parts were a little too love-y for me, but on the whole it was an enjoyable read.

"How can it strike so suddenly?  Without warning, without preparation?  Should it not grow on you, taking its time, so that when the moment comes when you think 'I love', you know - or at least you imagine you know - what it is you love?  How can it be that a set of the shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a strand of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow?"

Wish I Wrote That...

The curious came from far away.  A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel, but rather, those of a...bat.  The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood had been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"

Books = Happy

In honor of Cyber Monday, I decided to do my part by purchasing two very coveted books:

I spent an entire night during my Thanksgiving break reading "Where the Sidewalk Ends" from cover to cover.  I was reminded how happy those poems and drawings made me...and that I can still recite "Homework, Oh Homework" from memory.  I decided that adding 2 more of these books to my collection could only be a good thing.  So many great poems to choose from, but I think my favorite is:

Worried

I worry about myself and my ability to remember things.  I have always had a bad memory, made worse by the fact that my brain spent a few years floating around in chemo.  I love reading, obviously.  But sometimes it feels like I'm barely retaining what I read.  I don't know if this is a problem particular to me, or a problem shared by other voracious readers.  I'm especially flummoxed by the current book I'm reading, Henning Mankell's Pyramid.  I bought this from Daedalus Books at a reduced price a few weeks ago.  Small bits and pieces of it are jumping out at me as I read it - mere hints of deja vu.  However, I wouldn't be able to honestly tell you whether I'd read it or not.  I went on to Good Reads today to log it as a "current read" and was told that I had read and posted about it in March 2009.

So...here I am, wondering what to do with this information.  I'm going to go ahead and blame it upon the repetitive nature of the crime / detective genre, rather than on complete memory loss.  I think most of these detective stories (they are my guilty pleasure and favorite quick read) are so similar that they sometimes all blend into one.

Well, I guess I will still go ahead and finish reading Pyramid, especially since I don't remember how it ends.

Vanished

I read a really fascinating story today about a young woman named Barbara Follett.  She was a published and accomplished author at the age of 13 (in the mid-1920s).  She was hailed by the New York Times and H.L. Mencken for her extraordinary talent and "almost unbearably beautiful" style of writing.  She would have likely had an amazing career if it were not for the misfortunes that fell upon her as she entered her twenties.  The abandonment of her father and the immediate need to quit school in order to work to support her mother meant she had to postpone her dreams of writing.  In 1939, she walked out after a nasty quarrel with her husband and vanished.  She was never seen or heard from again and her body was never found.  She was 26.

Here is an excerpt from a letter she wrote a friend about her heartache:

“My dreams are going through their death flurries,” she wrote that June. “I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together—with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money.”

Thoughts for a Monday...

"Why do we get out of bed?" Mitch wondered.  "Is there any feeling better than being in bed?  What could possibly feel better than this?  What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?"  Every day, Mitch awoke to this line of reasoning.  Every day, the first move he made outside his sheets immediately destroyed the only flawless part of his existence.

- Chuck Klosterman, Downtown Owl