My last post for 2012--#117 (it seems like only yesterday I did my 100th entry) with 10,224 pageviews after 11 months of blogging.  When I began the blog, I had no idea that I would still be here this December.  The initial blogs were more often about death and atheism and "nothing to be frightened of."  As the months have passed and occasional bouts of writer's block have set in, I've wandered often into politics, law, and literature, as well as trying to write about the daily ups and downs of living with cancer.

The cancer had clearly metastasized by October 2010.  That date seems improbable, given the initial prognosis of less than a year, as we prepare to enter 2013.  By April 2011, the cancer had finally been diagnosed; by May, I was under the knife--and out again with my new titanium and plastic "bones" and joints.  By June, I had begun the daily regimen of chemotherapy and was preparing for radiation of my left scapula and right hip.  I was counting down the days till I could get rid of the abduction brace, and physical and occupational therapists were coming to the house for exercises.  I had consulted my lawyer and rewritten my will.  By January of this year, I decided to start blogging, even though I knew it wasn't going to be an "uplifting" blog about how I'd learned to savor every day or experienced the usual epiphany about living every day as if it were my last.  (There's a very old Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy, trying to convince Charlie Brown that he should change his life, advises him to live every day as if it is his last.  Charlie Brown responds with the anguished cry, "ARRGH!  I'm going to die tomorrow!")

Life during 2012 (and indeed through 2011) has been "diminished" in many ways.  For two years, the farthest I've traveled from home is to Kansas City, and those trips have been to the Med or Cancer Center, though luckily sometimes combined with lunch with friends.  There are many consecutive days when the farthest I travel from home is . . . home.  Between fatigue and diarrhea, going out is too much of an ordeal.  My relationship with food and drink has changed entirely.  I rarely have much appetite, and when I do go out, I fortify myself with Imodium (and now Lomotil) and check for the nearest bathroom.  Almost nothing looks appealing, and Mohamed spends an inordinate amount of time searching for something I'll want to eat.  Sushi is the one exception, so here's a haiku in praise of sushi:

Salmon and tuna
On a denim-colored plate
Sweet eel for dessert

A good friend wrote yesterday after the visit of her elderly mother and a couple of young children that she had grown impatient with "their quirky eating habits, their sleeping needs, their body temps in winter, their infirmities and hypochondriacal tendencies, and on and on."  That sentence was good for a laugh, as it describes me perfectly (except, I hope, for the hypochondria).  The day anyone finds me without a hoodie (I'm always cold these days) means that I'm getting ready to go out.

Still, it's been a very good year in many ways--not the least of which is that I'm still typing away long after I had expected the blog to have fallen silent.  I keep occupied at home and don't get bored.  (Perhaps being an only child was good training.)  Mohamed continues his unwavering love and support with incredible grace.  I've re-established contact with many old friends--from high school, from undergraduate and graduate school days, from ex-Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and, of course, France.  And I've been entertained and enlivened by visits from friends from all over Europe and America.  I've read and read.  And at a broader level, the election brought much good news, and LGBT issues continued their winning ways, though it remains to be seen what will happen when SCOTUS makes its rulings in two cases in June. 

I've tried to stay faithful to my mantra--cancer, shmancer, abi gesund.  And for the most part, I've stayed pretty healthy.  The cumulative effects of cancer and its treatment have been wearing, but I'm still alive and kicking, not in any real pain, and interested in matters great and small. 

One minor resolution for 2013: to change the layout of the blog.  It must be a strain to read white type on a dark background, so I promise a new look for the next year.

Wishing everyone a happy new year's eve and Bonne Année, Bonne Santé 2013.

I hope that everyone had a very merry Christmas with good gifts and not a lump of coal in sight.  Happy Kwanzaa, which begins today, as well.  One of my Christmas presents was that the blog passed 10,000 pageviews on Christmas day.  I still have a ways to go to catch up with Psy, but I'm working on it.

A few entries ago, I compared Alice Munro to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Flannery O'Connor, two authors who share a number of characteristics.  My point in that entry was that the three authors were better read in small doses because the motifs and mannerisms in their work remain constant and thus become too apparent.  Hawthorne and O'Connor both found their form--almost allegorical morality stories--early on, but both suffered from a thinness of material.  (Melville, the other great mid-19th century American novelist had the opposite problem: he never lacked for material, but his novels are often shapeless and unwieldy--sometimes achieving greatness, sometimes remaining a mess.)  For both Hawthorne and O'Connor, the story is always an introduction to the reality of evil and a suggestion of the consequences of that loss of innocence.  Both use rather obvious symbols (especially color) and apt names.  Where they most differ is in their response to evil.  For Hawthorne, we have to accept the double-edged nature of humans.  Young Goodman Brown (Hawthorne had already used gray as a melange of black and white) cannot accept the imperfections of his wife, Faith, (and of human exemplars of faith) with her pink (neither purely scarlet nor purely white) ribbons.  And in his cynicism Brown becomes himself "the chief horror" of the scene.  The devoutly Catholic O'Connor is more pitiless, and her choice is stark and dark.  As the Misfit says (the evil characters often get the good lines) in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find,"  If [Jesus] did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can--by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.  No pleasure but meanness."  There is finally no gray or brown or pink in O'Connor's work.

Perhaps O'Connor's best known story, "Good Country People," is a variation of the old farmer's daughter/travelling saleman joke.  The farmer is Mrs. Hopewell, a relentless optimist who speaks almost entirely in clichés.  One of the ironies is that Mrs. Hopewell doesn't even grasp the import of her hackneyed speeches, most of which are of the order of "Everybody's different" and "It takes all kinds to make the world go round."  While she spouts these, she lumps everyone into a few categories, one of which, and the most dangerous, is "good country people" or "the salt of the earth."  The daughter is Hulga (née Joy), who has a Ph.D. in philosophy (much to her mother's consternation), has a wooden leg and a heart disease, and is a confirmed nihilist.  O'Connor loves tricking her audience with a double perspective: for much of the story, we identify with Hulga, simply because she seems so much more intelligent than her mother, and her comments are cynically funny.  But it is a trick, as the travelling salesman/mysterious stranger soon reveals.  Obstensibly selling Bibles, the pseudononymously named Manley Pointer disrupts the farm's equilibrium.  The mother takes him for good country people; Hulga sneers at his naiveté.  But she also hatches a plan to seduce him and convert him to nihilism. 

She's not a very experienced seductress, but they eventually find themselves alone in the hayloft. Pointer bringing his valise with him.  He's fascinated by Hulga's wooden leg, asks her to remove it and then wants to remove it and put it back on himself.  Finally, he keeps it away from her, and opening his valise reveals a hollow Bible with a flask inside, pornographic playing cards, and condoms.  The nihilist Hulga has nothing to fall back on but calling him a hypocrite and not good country people at all.  But Pointer isn't a hypocrite.  And he's certainly not good.  As he tells her, he's been believing in nothing since he was born.  He takes his suitcase--and her leg--and disappears, the seduction and the "conversion" silly fantasies.  If as Hulga believes, love and God are illusions, so too must be evil.  By the end of the story, Hulga and her nihilism are left both literally and figuratively without a leg to stand on.

There's one more important character in the story, again with an appropriate name, Mrs. Freeman.  O'Connor's Catholicism is slathered with a heavy layer of original sin, and being a free man is, for O'Connor, nothing to aspire to.  Mrs. Freeman is a nosy busybody (like Hulga, though more subtly, she condescends to Mrs. Hopewell) who is focused on imperfection.  She had "a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children.  Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable."  She has two daughters, Glynese and Carramae (Hulga calls them Glycerin and Caramel), the latter of whom is pregnant, and Mrs. Freeman loves recounting how many times Carramae has vomited since the last account.  Despite seemingly having no important role in the action, Mrs. Freeman is the subject of both the first and last paragraph of the story.  At the end, her gaze touches the disappearing image of Manley Pointer.  She turns her attention to an "evil-smelling onion shoot."  "Some can't be that simple," she said.  "I know I never could."

One of my guilty TV pleasures is HGTV's "House Hunters International."  I used to watch "House Hunters," but the endless recaps of what we've just seen three minutes earlier and the repetitive scripts with everyone making the same demands (open concept, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, two sinks in an en suite bathroom) have made it a parody of itself.  The international version is still interesting, if often a little baffling: the buyers all seem to have an excess of money over taste and little understanding of the language or culture of the country they're moving to.  They don't know what a bidet is or why a washing machine might be in the kitchen.  If they want something "traditional," they complain about small spaces and "dated" (a favorite word) furnishings; if they want something modern, they complain about its lack of character.  Watching those who are renting always makes me grateful for the good luck I had in finding apartments to rent when I lived and taught abroad.

My first experience was moving for a year to Skopje, Macedonia (then a part of Yugoslavia).  All the Fulbrighters who would spend the year in Yugoslavia met for orientation in Belgrade, and there I made friends with a young American couple, Larry and Suzanne, who were also going to be in Skopje.  I had spent part of the summer studying Serbo-Croatian (as it was then called; now that term is too fraught to be used), the closest language to Macedonian I could find at KU.  That meant I was the spokesperson when some of us would go out on our own in Belgrade.  Given my feeble mastery of the language, we had some unexpected experiences and surprising meals.  Even though we had just met, Larry, Suzanne, and I decided that if it was easier, we'd get an apartment together.  That turned out to be a great decision, as the three of us had a fine time.  With the help of Velko, the department chair, we found a huge apartment to share.  The apartment on Ulitsa Kozle was a bit far from the city center, but a bus stopped right outside our apartment--and going into town we were the second stop, so it was empty.  Coming back from the city center, however, wasn't so easy, and we all three learned to push those ahead of us with an elbow in the back like a local would.  The apartment had a very large combination kitchen, dining area, and living room.  Three huge windows looked out on the foothills of the mountains that surrounded Skopje, and we could watch the gypsies and their donkeys as they went up and down the hills.  Colleagues from the university donated enough furniture so that the room didn't look too barren, and it make a great open space for parties.  The only drawback was that I slept on the couch.  I didn't mind that arrangement, but it did mean that I could never go to bed till the last visitor left.  There was a real bedroom for Larry and Suzanne and two bathrooms.  Mine was tiny, but modern.  The shower wasn't separated by anything from the rest of the bathroom, and it took me a while to remember that I needed to put the toilet paper outside the door when I took a shower.  One problem is always doing laundry (there were no laundromats), but we hired a gypsy family who picked up our dirty clothes once a week and returned them clean and ironed.  (There's a sentence not many of you have ever written!) 

Housing was already arranged for me when I arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria--an apartment in a huge complex of Soviet-style blocks.  The complex was called Druzhba Dve (friendship--or more accurately 'comrade-ship'--two).  I should have known this wasn't going to be a happy arrangement when my Bulgarian seat mate on the plane from Frankfurt to Sofia sadly shook his head and gave me his phone number in case I needed help in finding a new place to live.  On seeing the buildings, which were falling apart, I thought they had been constructed in the 20s or 30s, but no, they were from the 1970s.  There was trash everywhere.  There were packs of dogs and groups of gypsies (there's a theme emerging here) that would go through anything that was actually put in the dumpsters, leaving piles of trash on the ground.  (The locals were often nostalgic for the good old, Communist days when many Vietnamese came to Sofia, because, so the legend went, they solved the roaming dog problem by eating them.)  Many residents didn't bother with the dumpsters and just threw bags of trash out of the windows.  Falling trash was a common sight.  The apartment itself was unbelievably depressing.  The bathroom was an interior concrete room with a faucet for "showering" coming out of the wall at waist level and dispensing cold water.  The toilet hadn't been cleaned since construction days, and water sprayed out of the topless tank every time I flushed.  The lock on the door worked sporadically, though I was more often locked inside the apartment than outside.  I had visions of my skeleton being found months later, my bony hand still trying to turn the key to get out.

Also living in Druzhba was an American couple, Andrew and Michelle, and Michelle and I set off to find a more pleasant place to live.  We went through an agency and together looked at perhaps a dozen equally depressing apartments until, feeling like ugly Americans, we emphasized that we were looking for 'luxe.'  One day we ventured out separately and both had success, finding two apartments that were about 100 meters from each other.  When we went to sign the lease, despite my shaky Bulgarian, I did read a sentence that said that the landlord could not raise the rent more than 300% every four months.  The agent was nonchalant: "That's if you're paying in levove, but you'll be paying in dollars," so that sentence was crossed out.  My apartment was on the 13th floor of a newer building.  It was beautiful.  I certainly wasn't superstitious about living on the 13th floor, but that did become a hassle when the electricity went out and I had to walk up twelve flights of stairs or was caught in the elevator.  (I learned which panel concealed a manual door release.)  The landlady, Maya, who became a wonderful friend that year, was an artist for the Communist city government, but as Communism was belatedly collapsing in Bulgaria, she was going to live in her atelier while renting her apartment for dollars.  Since no major purchases could be made in levove (only in dollars or Deutschemarks), with my deposit she bought a washing machine for the apartment.  One problem solved.  The apartment was beautifully furnished, had two bedroom, a large bathroom, and even a balcony, though there wasn't much to see except unfinished construction sites and falling trash.  Whenever other Fulbrighters from around Bulgaria came to Skopje, mine was the preferred apartment for sleeping.

In Meknes, Morocco, I stayed in a downtown hotel while the department chair and I searched for apartments.  After several fruitless attempts, we decided to go to an agency.  On the steps of the building we met a woman who had an apartment to rent.  She was clearly very rich.  She and her husband were from the Rif Mountains (the primary source of Moroccan hashish) and lived in Amsterdam, where they ran several cafés.  But they came to Morocco for a month each year, kept one apartment there for their yearly visit, and had another in the city center which they had never rented.  We went to her apartment for coffee; it was huge and furnished entirely in furniture imported from Italy.  There was also a room full of furniture from the other apartment; the agent had told her that the apartment would be easier to rent unfurnished.  We walked to the second apartment, and it was huge--two salons, a big kitchen, two bedrooms, two bathrooms.  And it was also very empty.  Despite the chair's insistence that I could get cheap furniture at Ikea, I wanted the real stuff, so for an extra few dollars a month (money was clearly not her primary concern), I rented it furnished.  Now, nothing gets done quickly in Morocco, but money speaks there as well as anywhere else, and within 24 hours every bit of furniture, three crystal chandeliers, and several crystal wall sconces were back in place. As an extra bonus, she bought a washing machine.   I felt as if I were living in a palace--for, I think, $400/month.  I was in the heart of the heart of the city.  I lived right above my bank and was surrounded by stores and restaurants.  The bathrooms even had "real" toilets, as opposed to the "Turkish toilets" that were much more common.  (The chair was building a new house the year I was there, and after he had had installed regular toilets, his wife made him take them out because they were unsanitary and replace them with holes in the floor.)  When we had left the agency the first day, we were followed by a furtive man who eventually trailed us to the apartment I rented.  No one knew who he was.  Then I began getting letters from the agency, which wanted a cut, threatening to expose me to my employer and to the American embassy.  The agency, as was clear from the letters, didn't know my name or who my employer was, but they still made me uncomfortable.  Sometimes, the man would appear at my apartment, though I never opened it to him, so he would slide another letter under the door.  Finally, since I didn't know what to do about him and the chair was equally ineffectual, I wrote the landlady (I never saw her husband), who said that her husband would take care of him.  That was the end of the threatening letters.

So watching "House Hunters International" leads to some moments of nostalgia and a renewed sense of how serendipitous my own apartment hunting international was.

Ezra Pound wrote

Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.
And those are my sentiments exactly.  After two horrible winters, last year Topeka had virtually none at all.  But the first big snow storm of this season arrived here last night.  I woke up at 2:30 a.m. and looked out the window to see that the rain and sleet had changed to blowing snow.  We didn't really get that much snow--just a couple of inches--and it's ending, but the streets are icy, the winds are howling, and at 7 a.m. it's still pitch black outside.  Even our german shepherd has little interest in venturing into the outdoors. 

When I got up in the middle of the night, I did make a minor trip to the john, but one of the many ways in which my kidney cancer hasn't followed the normal pattern is that my kidneys seem to be working better than ever.  (Kenahoreh/m-sha'allah!)  I haven't had any blood in the urine, I always sleep through the night, and even if I feel as if I need to go, I just roll over and go back to sleep.  That's one reason I'm reluctant to have the cancerous kidney removed, though the more important ones are that doing so won't prolong my life and that there are several risks involved with the surgery.  We'll review that decision a month from now after the next full battery of tests at the Med Center.

I still haven't gotten the tincture of opium.  I was surprised that Walgreens carried it at all, but although it was in stock, the bottle had been opened, so they wanted to order a new bottle.  After that delay--it's been ten days since I submitted the prescription--the insurance company denied coverage.  The retail cost for a bottle is nearly $500.  Since I'm in the catastrophic phase of Medicare Part D (with the costs of my meds, I move very quickly into the last, catastrophic phase), with the insurance coverage I pay only 5% of the retail price.  I can appeal, though the automated message announcing the denial gave no reasons and listed so many steps that I'll let Dr. Vanveldhuizen do the appeal, as he has, I'm sure, lots of experience with insurance denials.  At first I was rather indifferent to switching from Imodium to the tincture, but once I read that it was the same as laudanum and graduate school memories of dipping into De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater" came to mind, I've become more impatient.  I'll have to wait, though, till the appeal is processed.  If it's successful, perhaps the blog will become more hallucinatory. 

Last night, just as President Obama was finishing speaking about the unspeakable in Newtown, two Topeka police officers were shot and killed, three blocks from the house where I lived for most of the 1970s.  Two murdered Topeka policemen, 28 dead in Newtown, 10 shot in Chicago during the weekend, over 32,000 dead last year from gun violence in America.  As I type that sentence, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, life-long NRA member with a 100% pro-gun voting record, is saying that this is a time for a national conversation about guns in America.  We've talked for decades.  Dialogue is delay.  We don't need a conversation; we need action.

The pro-gun lobby makes several arguments, all of them specious.  One of the most common--and most ridiculous--is that we need more guns, not fewer.  If only everyone was armed, violence would be reduced.  At the moment, the Kansas legislature is considering a bill that would end the exemption for colleges and universities to our concealed carry law.  Last session, moderate Republicans managed to kill the bill in the Senate.  But all but one of them was purged during the Republican primary, and chances are slim that with the wingnuts in control, the bill can be stopped.  I know I'd have felt safer as a professor with the knowledge that any number of my students might be legally carrying a concealed weapon.  If the six- and seven-year-olds in Newtown had only been armed...

The NRA and its allies argue that laws regulating guns don't work.  The guns in Newtown had been purchased legally and Connecticut's relatively strict gun laws didn't stop the killing.  But that's not an argument against gun laws; it's an argument about how weak they are.  Over 40% of guns are purchased at gun shows, where there are no background checks or waiting periods.  Semi-automatic guns are legal, as are clips with over ten bullets.  As long as guns laws are inconsistent from state to state, are full of loopholes, and end up regulating almost nothing, the problem with such laws is not that they exist, but that their existence has almost no effect.

Perhaps the favorite argument is based on the "slippery slope": if government can regulate any guns, it will be able to regulate all guns.  (In virtually every freshman comp class, the slippery slope argument is among those discussed as a logical fallacy.)   And they argue, of course, that the second amendment prohibits regulation of gun ownership.  Even conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger said after he had retired that that argument was the greatest "fraud" perpetrated in Constitutional law.  When in 2008 the Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia's gun laws in the Heller case, it seemed a decisive blow against gun laws.  But the Court ruled only that gun owners have a legitimate right to use guns in self-defense in their homes.  Perhaps in some perverse way, District of Columbia v. Heller can be used as a sort of dam to end the slippery slope argument.  The government cannot take away all rights to gun ownership; that's been settled and leaves space for a slew of sensible regulations. 

(The slippery slope tactic is also a favorite of those opposing same-sex marriage.  As Sen. Lindsay Graham, always a paragon of clear thinking, said last week, if a same-sex couple can be allowed marriage in the name of love, why not an owner and his dog? one man with several wives?  But why not go one step back up the slope: if a heterosexual couple can be allowed to marry in the name of love, why not a man and his dog?  The most egregious example of such "logic" is probably Justice Scalia's argument that approving same-sex marriages would lead to moral and legal approval of bestiality, of murder.  When challenged recently about the offensive and inane comparison, Scalia said disingenuously that it wasn't a slippery slope tactic but reductio ad absurdum.  But surely as a product of the best Catholic education with its tradition of teaching logic, Scalia knows that the reduction to absurdity is an argument you use to demolish your opponent's stance, not your own.  The sentence about arming six-year-olds--that's a use of reductio ad absurdum.  Yes, Scalia's statement was absurd all right, but that's to his shame.)

As we think about gun violence in America, one fact should not be overlooked: of the 32,000+ Americans who were killed with guns last year in America, over 18,000 (about 55%) were not murders but suicides.  I've had little experience with gun violence, but the one time I was confronted with it was indelible.  Over two decades ago, when my colleague and co-author Virginia and I were working on the letters of Karl Menninger, four of us were scheduled to attend the funeral of a Menninger psychiatrist, a man who had led a long and productive life and who died a sudden and painless death, a "good death," as it were.  But Barbara, one of the four, didn't show up to meet her driver.  Barbara had a long history of depression and hospitalization.  I told the person who was to drive her to call the police, but Laura said she couldn't do that.  So on a hot, gray, rainy day, I went to Barbara's house.  The windows were open despite the rain, the lights were on, her car was there.  No one came to the door when I knocked and called.  Instead of calling the police, I got the keys to the house from a neighbor.  When I entered, I saw a carton of cigarettes, still in a brown paper sack, on the living room table.  I felt a sense of relief.  I turned right to enter the bedroom.  Perhaps Barbara had taken an overdose, and I would find her on the bed, hopefully in time to call 911.  She wasn't there, and my relief heightened.  I left the bedroom, turned right and glanced into the bathroom.  There was Barbara in the bathtub, the wall splattered with her blood.  She had shot herself in the head.  That image I will never forget.  I found the phone, but it took several attempts to dial the police.  The dial itself seemed sticky; I felt as if I couldn't get it to turn.  When I did succeed and the police arrived, I had to do the interview on the porch because I was going to vomit if I had to remain in the claustrophic house.  Depressed, Barbara had walked to a gun shop, looked over the selection, changed her mind, stopped at a grocery store (the same one where the two Topeka policemen were killed last night) to buy a carton of cigarettes.  Once home, she had changed her mind again, returned to the gun shop, and with no background check or waiting period, bought the gun with which she had taken her own life.

Over 18,000 Americans last year made the same choice.  Over 18,000 Americans bought, borrowed, or stole guns.  There is no good death.  There is no good ending to this story.  We can hope only that it's not a story that closes with "to be continued." 

Since the last few weeks haven't been great--my energy level has been low and the G-I problems have been more severe again--I've spend a lot of time reading.  The major undertaking was Bull by the Horns by Sheila Bair, who was head of the FDIC during the worst days of the financial crisis.  It was very slow reading, in part because I was so out of my depth.  After I'd read about securitizations, I'd have to stop, put the book down, and review (and try to grasp) exactly what I'd just read before moving on to how tranches work and their consequences (advantage to the rich, of course).  Another pause, another tentative understanding before moving on to credit default swaps.  I learned, I think, a lot, though how sure my grasp is is questionable.  Bair is not shy about giving herself credit at every step of the way, and again, not having a clear context, I'd find myself nodding along and giving her the approbation she wants--and then having to remind myself that her perspective is hardly disinterested.

Relief arrives in the character portrayals along the way.  In the background are Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, Clinton's secretary of the treasury, with their unbridled faith in unregulated markets and their confidence that the "irrational exuberance" was just that--irrational and, thus, temporary.  But the bad guy during her tenure is Timothy Geithner, about whom she has absolutely nothing good to say.  Among politicians, despite the fact that Bair is a Republican, Barney Frank is clearly the one for whom she has the most respect as prescient in understanding the coming crisis and working both before and during it to move policy in the right direction. 

At the end of the book, she gives credit to her husband, who has edited the book.  Editing, however, doesn't seem to be his forte, as the book is full of clichés, of clashing tones and registers, and of needless repetition.  A more critical, less involved editor would have wielded his blue pencil more frequently.

After Bair's book, I gave myself a break and read Alice Munro's new collection of short stories, Dear Life.  These are quiet, psychologically astute stories of people living lives of quiet resignation.  Munro captures the dreariness and insularity of small-town Canadian life at the end of the last century and of the consequences--both tentative and tenuous--of the choices her characters make.  Individually, the stories are effective, but collectively they suffer from a thinness of material.  She seems to me a short story writer like Hawthorne or Flannery O'Connor who is best read a story or two at a time, not straight through.  After four or five of them, I began longing for something to happen, for a more interesting variation on her theme, for a narrator who wasn't so hesitant.  Her stylistic devices (and I think the same thing is true with Hawthorne and O'Connor) become more tics than considered decisions.  The stories are lovely, perfect for The New Yorker, where most of them first appeared and where, I realized, I had read most of them before.  But it's a book better dipped into than read through.

And last night, I finished Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth, a "spy" novel set in the drab and dreary London of the early 1970s.  I was first introduced to McEwan in France and read three novels in a row in French, a rather counter-intuitive procedure.  I began with Enduring Love, the title of which is masterfully ambiguous.  (The French title, Folle d'amour, can also be read two ways, but doesn't have the richness of the original.)  I loved the first three-quarters of Enduring Love, but thought it fell apart completely at the end.  I've had the same reaction to everything else I've read by McEwan: he's very clever at complicating plots and characters, but he's too clever by half, and the last half of Sweet Tooth has the same problem as he disentangles the story.  The main character and narrator is the Serena (an ironic name indeed) Frome, which she tells everyone rhymes with 'plume,' a red herring that goes nowhere.  She is hired by MI5 in a program called Sweet Tooth (a name which never acquires much resonance in the novel) to recruit unsuspecting writers with the hope that they will lead to a cultural enthusiasm for the West in the last years before Communism crumbles.  Serena bumbles her way through a variety of men and becomes increasingly committed (as much as she's capable of commitment) to what she's doing--or at least to the man she's in charge of.  For half the book I was hooked, even though I knew that I couldn't trust anything I was reading.  But by the second half, the dreariness of the setting, the internecine quarrels, and the coy hints that double agency applied not only to the business of spying but also to that of writing (and reading) became tedious.  Although Serena prefers traditional fiction (and is a voracious, but indiscriminate reader, announcing at one point that Valley of the Dolls is the equal of anything Austen wrote), McEwan's novel is self-reflective meta-fiction.  There are real editors and authors in the novel, thinly disguised characters based on real people, and a young novelist, Serena's charge, whose life and writings parallel those of McEwan.  By the last half, the games wear thin, the coyness cloys, and the ending fails to surprise.

There is one image, though, that sticks with me.  Serena has had an affair with an older man who, after he leaves her, she discovers has been dying of cancer.  She regrets her impatience with his increasing need for naps.  "Sleep comes on like the tide," she thinks.  I think I'll borrow the simile.  Not only is it accurate and suggestive, but after writing too often about the "black wall" and the "crashes," I need a new metaphor.  "Like the tide" it is.

Every six weeks, I go back to the KU Med/Cancer Center in Kansas City.  The appointments alternate between brief ones, where I have blood tests and a consultation with the oncologist, and full days with the complete battery of tests, including CT scans.  These are usually draining, not because of the tests themselves but because I can't eat or drink for four hours before the CT scans and then there is always a long break before the consultation while all the tests are analyzed.  On these days (the next one is January 25th), we can either get up very early so that all is over by mid-afternoon or go later in the morning but not get home till much later--neither an attractive option.

Yesterday we went to KC for what should have been an easy day.  The bloodwork was scheduled at 11:45, so we didn't have to get up early and rush to KC.  I could eat breakfast and drink coffee.  And then the consultation was at 12:20.  I was sure we'd be out by 1.  The day didn't, however, go as planned.  We got there on time and were called by an overly cheerful young woman to review my address, phone, insurance, and next of kin (Mohamed).  I think I'm quite mobile, but as I got up from that brief interview, she said, "I see you're having trouble getting around, so why don't you just wait in the anteroom of the lab?"  We sat there and were quickly called for the blood work.  The guy who drew the blood is my least favorite phlebotomist.  I don't mind needles (as witnessed by the roughly 600 shots Mohamed has been giving me in the stomach every morning), and I have, as I'm always told, great veins.  But somehow this tech always makes it hurt--not a lot, just enough so that I'm aware of the needle going in.  And then we returned to the lobby for what we thought would be a 20-minute wait to see the doctor.

After 50 minutes of sitting (and we hadn't brought anything to read since we thought this would be fast), I went to the desk to see about the delay.  The receptionist checked and assured me that I would be the next to be called.  Another 45 minutes passed; at least a dozen people were called.  I was becoming increasingly tired and grumpy and hungry--as I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast.  I glared periodically at the receptionist, who clearly had no control over what was happening.   Finally I heard my name, and it was my turn to have my vitals taken (everything was fine) and to be shunted into the small exam room, where there is always another long wait.  Dr. Van stuck his head in and said he's be with us in a second.  "No, you won't," I said.  Finally, Dr. Williams, the same Fellow that we'd seen last time, came in.  Luckily, he is very relaxed and friendly, and he seems both competent and knowledgable.  When he asked how I was, I was tempted to say "tired and grumpy," but I perked up.

The blood results were all close to normal range.  Of major decisions to be made in January, Dr. Williams said that while he'd always defer to the surgeon, he thought the benefits of surgery to remove the kidney would outweigh potential harms.  And then we talked about the more immediate problems of the chemo side effects.  Although I haven't blogged about it, the last few weeks haven't been good.  Until last Saturday, I hadn't left the house for a week: the fatigue was too overwhelming and unpredictable (except for its inevitability), and the diarrhea had returned with a vengeance (ditto).  At the urging of a friend, I brought up the possibility of taking tincture of opium to calm my stomach.  I had mentioned this previously to the physician assistant, but I don't think she was familiar with it and didn't give it serious consideration.  Dr. Williams, however, said he had used it before, and if I wanted to try it, he'd write me a script for it.  So as soon as I get to the pharmacy, I'll stop the Imodia (which I've decided is the correct plural of Imodium) and try the tincture.  He asked about the anti-nausea medication, which I said worked, but took time to take effect.  He said it was available in suppository form, which worked more quickly, but I decided to pass on that.  The pills work to quiet the nausea; the problem isn't really the speed so much as that even once the nausea has passed, I still don't have an appetite.

By the time Dr. Van entered, it was nearly 3 p.m., and he was clearly flustered from running so late, so his visit was very brief.  He always runs behind schedule, but this was the latest he'd been and the first time I felt as if I was getting short shrift.

I left the office with two prescriptions, neither of which can be phoned in but have to be presented in person: one was a refill of the Percocet (Oxycodene plus acetomeniphen), the other the new one for tincture of opium.  The next time I show up at Walgreens, I'm going to seem like a serious druggie.

By the time we left, we were exhausted and hungry.  It was the wrong time of day to go to a nice restaurant, and I didn't have the patience for a long meal (Mohamed is much more patient than I am), so we stopped at Panera's, where I wolfed down (rare for me these days) a turkey and avocado sandwhich, and then we headed off to Topeka, me sleeping, Mohamed staying awake long enough to drive.  When we got home, we both crashed for 90 minutes, much to the displeasure of our dog who missed her dinner time.  She should complain!  And so it's back to the routine, the "new normal," which after 18 months isn't so new anymore.  Tests will be over for Mohamed on Thursday, and we have lunches and dinners on tap for Friday and next Monday.  Both of us are looking forward to a nice, four-week break before school resumes and the next, longer appointment is on the calendar.