Results of the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY), both National and Regional categories, were announced today and I am pleased to post...
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date:
July 24, 2011 01:00PM
location:
Oceanside Civic Center Library Rooms, 330 North Coast Highway, Oceanside, CA, The United States
description:
Book Fair featuring Oceanside-only published authors. Visitors will have the opportunity to talk with and buy books from over 20 Oceanside authors.
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DIALOGUE WITH THE DEAD
When death puts an end to a marriage of long duration—30, 40, 50 years or more—the sense of loss experienced by the surviving spouse can be overwhelming. They suffer a paralyzing, disorienting, emotionally jarring type of grief,...more
DIALOGUE WITH THE DEAD
When death puts an end to a marriage of long duration—30, 40, 50 years or more—the sense of loss experienced by the surviving spouse can be overwhelming. They suffer a paralyzing, disorienting, emotionally jarring type of grief, intense and long lasting. Some stop eating and lose weight; others become confused, prone to wandering, no destination in mind. Suffering so profound it makes one look away, a cri de coeur too tender to witness. So forlorn can they be, it is not unusual for the newly widowed to themselves die soon thereafter—from a broken heart, a lack of will to go on. No reason to live.
Some, though, react differently. By refusing to sever the bond. By attempting to bridge the very chasm between this world and the next.
There is no more beautiful expression of this special kind of bereavement than Richard Wilbur’s poem “The House,” a short but sweetly haunting piece from "Anterooms: New Poems and Translations." Wilbur is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was the1987 United States Poet Laureate. A pair of quotes by Wilbur (taken from two separate interviews in 1977 later published in The Paris Review) tell us all we need to know about poetry—and all we need to know about Richard Wilbur, whose literary powers remain undiminished.
"One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable, not by falsehood but by clear, precise confrontation."
"To put it simply, I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good."
“The House,” the quality of which is representative of this entire collection, speaks to such glorious energy, and does indeed make the unbearable bearable.
Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.
What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.
Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.
Are such dialogues with the dead one-way conversations, or is someone on the other side listening?(less)
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"DAVID ROUNDED THE CORNER OF SIXTH AND HENNEPIN STREAMing with sweat. Traffic crawled, horns honked."
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Rather than give a general review of the entire collection, I will instead review a single story from this work--a moving piece called "Sin Dolor" (Without Pain)--the tenor and quality of which is representative of the entire group.
T. C. Boyle is a l...more
Rather than give a general review of the entire collection, I will instead review a single story from this work--a moving piece called "Sin Dolor" (Without Pain)--the tenor and quality of which is representative of the entire group.
T. C. Boyle is a luminary of American literature, a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. In 2009 he was inducted into The American Academy of Arts and Letters, considered the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States. He is the author of twenty-two—and counting—works of fiction. If you are unfamiliar with this author, do yourself a favor and read one of his fourteen novels.
What would it be like to never experience pain? "Sin Dolor" is T.C. Boyle’s discomfiting exploration of this very question.
Mercedes Fumes brings her four-year-old son Dámaso to the town doctor—who is the first person narrator of the story—for burns on his hands. But these aren’t just any burns; these are black, oozing eschars on his palms that came, his mother insists, from snatching hot coals off the brazier she uses to cook the indigestible tacos she and her husband Francisco hawk on the street. The doctor doubts her story and wonders about child abuse.
"No one, not even the fakirs of India (and they are fakers), could hold onto a burning coal long enough to suffer third-degree burns."
She answers his skepticism with the unlikeliest of explanations. “He’s not normal, Doctor. He doesn’t feel pain the way others do.”
She urges him to prick her son with a needle. The doctor doesn’t hesitate. He swabs Dámaso’s arm and takes a syringe from the cabinet.
"The boy never flinched. Never gave any indication that anything was happening at all…"
“We call him Sin Dolor, Doctor…The Painless One.”
The next time the doctor sees the boy, now eight, he is with his father, Francisco. Dámaso comes in limping, favoring his right leg, which the doctor discovers is broken, a fractured tibia. That he walked in on. Without the slightest whimper. The doctor again suspects child abuse, but Francisco Fumes tells him Dámaso did it by jumping off the roof of a shed. The doctor realizes he has stumbled onto an unprecedented medical marvel.
"I felt the boy’s gaze on me. He was absolutely calm, his eyes like the motionless pools of the rill that brought water down out of the mountains…For the first time it occurred to me that something extraordinary was going on here, a kind of medical miracle…"
He is seized by ambition, an intense desire to claim credit for discovering what must be "…a mutation in his genes, a positive mutation, superior, progressive…" He befriends Dámaso in hopes of spectacular medical fame.
"If that mutation could be isolated—if the genetic sequence could be discovered—then the boon for our poor suffering species would be immeasurable. Imagine a pain-free old age. Painless childbirth, surgery, dentistry…What an insuperable coup over the afflictions that twist and maim us and haunt us to the grave!"
He encourages Dámaso to spend time at his clinic and to come to his home for dinner. At the same time, he contacts a geneticist he knows from medical school in Guadalajara, who implores him to send scrapings from the inside of Dámaso’s mouth for analysis. But Francisco Fumes becomes jealous of the attention lavished on his son—and of Dámaso’s response to the attention. He forbids all contact between Dámaso and the doctor, destroying the doctor’s ambitions and his son’s only chance to escape his circumstances "…the stew of misinformation and illiteracy into which he’d been born…"
Five or six years pass before the doctor sees Dámaso again "…Though I heard the rumors—we all did—that his father was forcing him to travel from town to town like a freak in a sideshow, shamelessly exploiting his gift for the benefit of every gaping rube with a peso in his pocket."
Finally they meet again, Dámaso now thirteen or so, no longer in school and supporting his family by performing cheap carnival tricks that weren’t tricks, burning and slicing and maiming himself for the crowd without a hint of pain. After witnessing one such performance, the doctor observes that Dámaso has changed.
"He seemed to walk more deliberately than he had in the past, as if the years had weighed on him in some unfathomable way…"
Later, he learns the price Dámaso has paid for being a medical freak.
“I have no friends, Doctor, not a single one. Even my brothers and sisters look at me like I’m a stranger. And the boys all over the district, in the smallest towns, they try to imitate me.”
He tells the doctor that he does what his family asks of him—exploiting his painlessness, profiting from his miracle in the most vulgar of ways—out of a sense of duty to them.
“But what they’ll never understand, what you don’t understand, is that I do hurt, I do feel it, I do.” And then he taps himself over his heart. “Here,” he says. “Here’s where I hurt.”
The story concludes with the doctor treating a small girl who has stepped on a sea urchin.
"As delicately as I could, I held her miniature heel in my hand, took hold of the slick black fragment with the grip of my forceps and pulled it cleanly from the flesh, and I have to tell you, that little girl shrieked till the very glass in the windows rattled, shrieked as if there were no other pain in the world."
The last twenty years have seen the rise of an entirely new medical field: the specialty of Pain Medicine, or Algiatry, a discipline devoted to the prevention of pain. At first blush a noble endeavor, relief from the myriad cancers, fractures, nerve impingements, torsions, and infarctions we human beings suffer long overdue. But having practiced medicine during this time, I have witnessed firsthand a troubling and proportional surge in prescription drug addiction, patient after patient hooked on Vicodin, Norco, Percocet, Xanax, Oxycontin and countless other “mother’s little helpers,” as the eponymous song by the Rolling Stones goes. Perhaps, as T.C. Boyle so poignantly suggests, a certain amount of pain—I know, not childbirth and Oh God, please not kidney stones—is necessary to the human condition. Perhaps the complete elimination of pain is not without consequences.
Tell us what you think about the quest to eliminate pain, both from the perspective of a doctor seeking to relieve it, and from the perspective of a patient--a human being--who suffers from it.(less)
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Where Youth Grows Pale
The title of "Everyman," the mordant yet immensely moving 2006 novel by Philip Roth, comes from a medieval play of the same name, and is intended to remind us that aging and death await us all, every man and every woman. In 2009...more
Where Youth Grows Pale
The title of "Everyman," the mordant yet immensely moving 2006 novel by Philip Roth, comes from a medieval play of the same name, and is intended to remind us that aging and death await us all, every man and every woman. In 2009, Roth became the third living American writer to have his work published by the Library of Congress. As I have written elsewhere, Philip Roth is the greatest living writer never to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Roth sets the tone for this 192-page novella with an epigraph quoting Keats.
"Here where men sit and hear each other groan; / Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; / Where but to think is to be full of sorrow."
The novel begins with Everyman’s funeral, then skips backward in time to an unvarnished accounting of his life. The protagonist, who remains unnamed throughout, is a 71-year-old retired—and materially successful—advertising executive who has walked away from two marriages, three children, and his once-revered older brother, leaving him ill-equipped to cope later in life with his decaying body and a series of medical events—appendicitis, two heart surgeries, and various other procedures—that force him to confront his own mortality. His death-and-dying tocsin, though, rings well before his body fails him, at his father’s funeral.
"All at once he saw his father’s mouth as if there were no coffin, as if the dirt they were throwing into the grave was being deposited straight down onto him, filling up his mouth, blinding his eyes, clogging his nostrils and closing off his ears. He could taste the dirt coating the inside of his mouth well after they had left the cemetery and returned to New York."
"Everyman" reaches old age and Starfish Beach, the retirement community his infirmities consign him to, cynical and resentful, unshriven (by two adult sons) for cheating on his first wife, unforgiving of the body that betrays him and robs him of his prodigious sexual vigor. Only his daughter from his second marriage remains loyal—as only daughters can. She sees to it that he is buried in a Jewish cemetery alongside his parents, even though he is an atheist, because she "…didn’t want him to be somewhere alone."
The last to pay respects at his funeral is Maureen, a home health nurse who cared for him after his first heart surgery.
"…a battler from the look of her and no stranger to either life or death. When, with a smile, she let the dirt slip slowly across her curled palm and out the side of her hand onto the coffin, the gesture looked like a prelude to a carnal act. Clearly this was a man to whom she’d once given much thought."
And that was that.
"…In a matter of minutes, everybody had walked away—wearily and tearfully walked away from our species’ least favorite activity—and he was left behind. Of course, as when anyone dies, though many were grief-stricken, others remained unperturbed, or found themselves relieved, or, for reasons good or bad, were genuinely pleased."
I once recommended—prescribed—this book to a patient, now deceased, who in addition to being on dialysis with kidney failure, had heart disease so severe it was clear to all, my patient included, that he would not survive another year. A fiercely intelligent man, he understood his predicament intellectually, but refused emotionally to accept it. When he grew angry and then despondent, I suggested "Everyman," which he agreed to read. He found the protagonist’s cynicism and bitterness and lack of grace so contemptible he vowed to die a better way. For the remainder of his life, a few months only, he was notably happier and at peace. Sometimes, only great fiction can tell the truth in a way that is transformative; we humble doctors lack the words.
"Everyman" is a profound adumbration that settles nothing, but fearlessly illuminates everything, leading the reader to a place where confronting death is at least possible.
Why do we fear death so? Do the atheists among us fear they are right? And the faithful that they are wrong? And this notion of bodily decay, how to deal with that, our unwanted senescence? Is there no limit to what we are willing to do to forestall it?
Perhaps it is the loss of those we love that we most fear. A different way of saying we fear losing our humanity. But what I have learned from my patients, I think, is that it is the sweetness of life, the intensity, the vividness we fear losing. And that the balm for this fear is to have savored fully all the heavenly ambrosia this mortal world holds.
Before youth grows pale.(less)
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4.68 avg rating — 19 ratings
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published
2011
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3 editions
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American Historical Fiction
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