I'd had this book in my stack for a long time: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010). The book won the Pulitzer prize and has been made into a Ken Burns series. A very readable, elegant narrative of the story of our knowledge of cancer, the struggle to understand and treat it, the individual stories of suffering and recovery, the collective story of scientific research and discovery. My mother's cancer story floated above my experience of reading it.
Here's his TED Talk about shifting paradigms in medicine today:
And here's his conversation with CRISPR scientist Jennifer Doudna
Well, I'm not quite keeping up with my book-a-week goal. Book 5 was a mystery novel by Tana French, Broken Harbor. For book 6, I finished Alison Bechdel's second memoir, Are You My Mother? It took me a few weeks to get around to reading it after I finished the first one about her father. I had read it when it came out years ago, but I had forgotten it enough for it to feel new. It's as much about dreams, therapy, and her engagement with the ideas of psychoanalysis as it is about her relationship with her mother. How would I react if my daughter decided to write a graphic memoir of our family life? She could do it, and she's a brilliant story-teller. I imagine it would be both thrilling and intensely uncomfortable.
For the last month or so I've found that I don't want to get out of bed. I end up staying in bed until 10, listening to podcasts because I need to distract myself. I actually wake up around 5 or 7 or whenever to go to the bathroom and don't fall back asleep but just sort of doze. Today I set an alarm for 9 and managed to get out of bed at 9:30. That's an improvement. I don't usually have anywhere to go or anything I need to do at those hours so I've just been noping it up. Nope, I don't want to move. It has been suggested to me that this might be one of the side effects of grief. I haven't been lying there feeling sad in a conscious way, so it's hard to know if this morning inertia is from grief or just good old fashioned depression. Or both, as the case may be. What I want to do is to try to get up earlier and try going back to some of my morning habits that I have abandoned: writing morning pages, looking at my Alanon readings for prompts and doing some writing about them, doing yoga with YouTube yoga teacher Adriene. So today I didn't quite make it up at 9 but I did get up a half hour earlier. I didn't write or do yoga, but I did get up and have breakfast and got out of the house for my 11:30 appointment. I'm going to try hard not to beat up on myself about how I don't like this behavior and I'm having such a hard time changing it. I read some things about how to break bad habits. I managed to break the bad habit of biting my nails a few years ago, a lifelong source of shame and frustration. So I know I can do it. The other activity I want to undertake is to get rid of all the stuff I do not want to move to Brooklyn in a few months. It's amazing how much clutter I've accumulated since I left Minnesota with almost nothing. I'm tempted to do the same as then--just jettison everything except what I can fit in a few suitcases. If it weren't for the framed art that I want to keep and the very fancy reclining armchair I love, I would just get on the plane and go. But I'm going to have to move a smallish amount of stuff and it will probably cost a fortune.
I am up to season five of the cop show Bosch on Amazon Prime. It is very anchored in its LA setting, and it's bringing back memories of the little trips I did there before the pandemic. I took one where I went to Pasadena and visited some museums, took the streetcar to downtown, did some very touristy things. The last one I stayed near the LACMA and did a lot of walking. I ate in Koreatown, walked through neighborhoods of bungalows, explored the farmer's market zone. And then there was the brief trip to see BTS! All in all, I did pretty well with my LA tourism for being on foot and public transportation.
The show stars Titus Welliver, who I had seen on Deadwood, and two of the more charismatic actors from The Wire: Lance Reddick plays another chief of police and Jamie Hector (Marlo) is Bosch's homicide detective partner. I was surprised at how the show murdered key characters (son of the police chief, Bosch's FBI agent ex-wife).
The character is named after the artist. Here's a very detailed look at his work:
Next art excursion was to SFMOMA with a friend who has a membership. I prepared myself for an arduous day because she wanted to stay from opening to late afternoon. But we managed to strike a nice balance between engaging with the art, taking breaks for lunch and coffee, and long chats. We ended up eating a a Chinese place Henry's Hunan, around the corner. The food was not good: green beans were woody, pork spareribs were too salty and dry. The onion pancake was short on onion and just a fried piece of dough with little flavor. I won't go back there. But later we sat on the terrace of the museum cafe and had a coffee, and watched the birds that frequent that little urban oasis. Highlights of the day: Kim Whanki painting, Agnes Martin room, Leah Rosenberg mural.
And this weekend I want to go to the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) to see the Afro-futurism show before it closes, and to get a preview of the Edith Heath show. My daughter gave me a Heath ceramics vase for Christmas--I would love to get a set of dishes some day but they are just too expensive. The only question is whether I should go on Saturday when there is also music in the garden or go on Sunday to give myself a day between my Friday excursion and my next art date. It makes sense to go on Saturday, and to also take advantage of the Off The Grid food trucks that will be there. I should go, get lunch and enjoy music in the garden, then see the show. I can come back for the Heath show later if I get too tired. I am trying to be realistic about my museum stamina. I'm good for one in-depth exhibition, not two.
Reading: still making my way through The Emperor of Maladies by Siddhartha Mukerjee. (2010). Next up: Alison Bechdel's memoir Are You My Mother?
Watching: finished kdrama Bulgasal (not as good as it started out to be) and started a new one, Tracer, but the subs are really poor so I'm having to wait for better fan subs and they are only up to episode 3 so far. I tried watching with the bad subs but they consistently get the wrong pronouns so it's anyone's guess who is doing what to whom. My Korean is not good enough to listen AND read bad subs at the same time, and not good enough to follow a drama about tax evasion without subs. Have to say that it is actually making tax evasion dramatic and emotional, so it's worth the wait.
Also watched: first season of Bosch, a police show with Titus
Welliver and the guy who played Marol in The Wire, also the guy who
placed Cedric Daniels in yet another police chief role. I'm ready for
the second season.
In the queue: the next episode of The Gilded
Age. No surprises as to plot for anyone who has read Henry James or
Edith Wharton, but what a sumptuous spectacle
Excitedly watching: the men's figure skating singles short program. Lots of drama as the fan favorite and two-time gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyo popped a quad and is now in 8th place while Nathan Chen leads over the other two Japanese competitors, who I liked more than him: Shoma Uno (in third place) and Yuma Kagiyama (in second). Also skating a fabulous program but without the quads of other competitors was Jason Brown. He was far and away my favorite as to interpretation of the music and the exciting choreography but I don't know enough about skating to tell whether his step sequence or jumps or spins were more technically difficult that the others. According to many fans, the new scoring system rewards jumps over the technicalities of the rest of the skating elements, and while he is technically superior in many aspects of his skating, you have to do quads now to win the biggest competitions. Yuzuru Hanyu was very poetic in his program, but I preferred the energy of Kagiyama in his. The free skate program will be held tomorrow, and I'm able to watch it live without commentary on peacock, although I still have such a hard time navigating the stupid menu. I should be glad it's included in my Comcast service and be grateful. In other figure skating news, the medal ceremony for the team competition, which the Russians won, has been postponed due to "legal issues" and rumors are that they were caught doping again. It may even be that the fifteen-year-old competitor who is the first woman to hit all those quads in competition is the victim of crooked coaching. The Russians had already been penalized for doping by being forced to compete as the ROC--Russian Olympic Committee. The drama is being commented on live over on reddit. What a shame if the team is penalized because of one competitor's violation.
Here is a sweet and thoughtful piece about Jason Brown's path to achieving a balance in his state of mind. His joy in his performance was wonderful to see!
Today's arts excursion was to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco to see the Leonard Cohen show by Candice Breitz. It has two parts: in the first room you see a group of men in yarmulkes who are singing the backing vocals for Leonard Cohen's album I'm Your Man (1988). From an adjacent room, you can hear the rumble of men's voices singing Leonard's part. After hanging out in the chorus room to remind me that I know all the songs on this album, I went into the other room where one is surrounded by the video images of older men, all in their sixties and seventies, each singing with passion and emotion the songs from that album. The effect is of an acapella chorus. From the first room, one hears faintly the backing vocals. Each man moves as he sings in his own way, flutters his fingers, air drums, taps on a crutch, sways from side to side, whistles the instrumental parts. I stayed to hear the whole album's cycle of songs. Even through I had listened to it many times in the past, I heard the lyrics in a new way.
I first heard Leonard Cohen's music in 1967 when the song "Suzanne" became a big hit for Noel Harrison. I was nine. It was first released by Judy Collins in 1966, and we had the album it was on, too. Her cover of his song "Dress Rehearsal Rag" on the same record mesmerized me. It was filled with dark emotions that I was too young to understand but the lyrics were evocative anyway.
Since it is now the time of the Olympics figure skating competition, I though we should appreciate this work of genius: Canadian champion skater Gary Beacom skates to "I'm Your Man."
Today I got the news that a dear friend of the family died of brain cancer. He was only 51 and leaves behind his wife and two young children. He had had surgery twice, but the cancer returned. Apparently he felt unwell and died in fifteen minutes. He and his family had had the chance to be together, to tell each other how much they loved each other, to take a final trip together, and when he went he wasn't alone. But there's a big difference between my mother's death of brain cancer at the age of 88 and this dear man's interrupted journey with his family. My daughter has an uncle who is also dying, slowly, of a kind of brain cancer. He responded well to radiation and chemo for a fairly long time, as these things go, but it came back and now he is paralyzed and we are all waiting for his transition. His adult children are taking turns spending time with their mother and with him. My daughter also lost her grandfather on her father's side within a few months of her grandmother. It has been a relentless season of loss.
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