Lahiri, Jhumpa. Whereabouts. Written in Italian and translated by the author. New York: Vintage, 2021.

This one-hundred-fifty-seven-page novel is divided into forty-six titled chapters, all in the form of prepositional phrases indicating, as the title suggests, place. Whereabouts. On the Sidewalk. On the Balcony. In the Sun. At the Villa. Even Upon Waking. Waking is a place, after all. Only Lahiri could create so much life with so little. The first-person narrative is told by a female Italian professor of literature living, we assume, not in Rome but a smaller, less satisfying city. She shares, in bits like chocolates from fluted paper containers, her life. After an unsatisfactory relationship with a man (told in flashback), she prefers living alone, prefers being childless, prefers to visit her ailing mother once a week. She wavers only a little between her preferred solitude and connecting with others: her neighbors, her university pupils, favored merchants. It is a hard-won battle, but she seems to win it with dignity and poise. An immensely satisfying read.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Linda Ellerbee
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | William Kennedy
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Jonathan Franzen
FRI: My Book World | Pat Conroy, The Great Santini

It Only Hurts When I Pee Hee Hee
or How to Kill an Entire Summer—Part III
July 8, 2023
10:23 a.m. The day following the surgery, during Doctor V’s morning round: I gained his permission to record on my iPhone what he was about to tell me beside at Covenant Hospital. I later transcribed our conversation for use here:

Dr. V: … type of bladder cancer, but yeah there are other types and variants, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s transitional stuff.
RJ: Okay, so you caught it early?
Dr. V: Well, yeah, I mean, the CT does not show that there’s anything outside of that, but one of the key things about bladder cancer, you know, it comes from that transitional epithelium of lining of the bladder, but there’s a muscular wall to the bladder, so one of the key aspects of pathology: Is it just in the lining or is it also growing in the muscle …?
RJ: Mm.
Dr. V: When it’s in the muscle, that’s where the blood vessels and lymphatics are, that’s how the cancer could escape out of the bladder.
RJ: Mm.
Dr. V: So the treatment for muscle-invasive bladder cancer as opposed to what we call superficial bladder cancer is different.
RJ: Okay.
Dr. V: Muscle-invasive actually is a much more aggressive disease stage, and the treatment ideally for a relatively healthy man like yourself, is the removal of the bladder. Which is a big operation. Whereas superficial bladder cancer you trim it off, you basically instill… The drug of choice is BCG, it’s a live, attenuated form of TB, it activates your immune system, to counteract early cancer cells within the lining of your bladder, because they tend to be recurrent. By doing that, it’s not really chemo, it’s immunotherapy for your bladder. It significantly reduces your chances of recurrence.
RJ: Mm.
Dr. V: All right, sir. Fill him full. Make sure he can pee [speaking to nurse]. See me in about two weeks is our plan.

​But I must return to the day before. I was feeling quite good actually; I never experienced any pain in my bladder. But about four hours after surgery, I began to feel extreme cramps in my bowels. I suspected, as with most surgeries I’ve had, that the anesthesia had locked my bowels. A night of hell ensued, by which I could not seem to make clear to the nurses where the pain was coming from as my stomach appeared visibly to distend. They gave me everything from tramadol to a shot of morphine when I told them my pain was a “10.” I had been hooked up to a foley—a catheter that collects one’s urine in a bag. After the doctor told me I’d be going home, they disengaged it, and the nurses did fill me with water—four glasses-worth. Problem was, my urological innards were locked up, as well—I couldn’t pee!—and they sent me home with a different foley. Two sullen nurses entered the room (their routine with their patients had been disrupted) to install it because my nurse didn’t know how, and they were trying like hell to get me out of that room by ten p.m. So I was sent home with that urine bag saddled to my side like I don’t know what. Six days later, it was finally removed at Doctor V’s office, his nurse following the correct procedure (I shall spare you the description). The only problem was that after six days of that damn foley chafing my urethra, it actually hurt to pee. In situations like this you want to blame someone, but whom? The huffy nurses who might have injured me in their haste? The doctor and hospital who insisted I go home without being able to pee? The insurance company that was only going to pay for one night for a supposedly out-patient procedure?

​In any case, starting Wednesday, August 16, 2023, I will begin BCG cancer treatments, once again, in Doctor V's office. Not the hospital! BCG stands for Bacillus Calmette Guerin, a procedure by which the doctor will directly inject (by way of that still handy urethra) a “live attenuated form of TB” into my bladder. Six Wednesdays in a row, ending on one of the last days of summer, September 20. Maybe autumn will be a better time for me, for us all. I sure hope so. We shall have earned a break from the heat.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Barbara Delinsky
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Mark Doty
FRI: My Book World | Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts

It Only Hurts When I Pee Hee Hee
or How to Kill an Entire Summer—Part II
The eighth thing the doctor’s staff was about to do to me was to take place as they escorted me down the hall to what looked like a new piece of equipment in a room tinier than the radiology room. A beautiful young woman with dark swooping hair stood by.

“This is my daughter,” Doctor V said, “blah blah blah, she’s out at the med school.” And she smiled at me.

Now, the good doctor told me to lie back in the chair. “It’s kind of like a recliner,” he informed me, “but it isn’t really built for the patient.”

No shit.

It was fucking hard—unforgiving, like a seat pulled from an old MG Midget—and I swear I think I remember there being stirrups for my legs. Of course, my pants were pulled down, and the good doctor seated, manning his equipment as if he were a jet pilot, pulling at this lever and that knob, typing shit onto his keyboard. He wrapped a piece of pale blue paper around my wee cock so that that was all that was showing, as if my cock were a discrete sort of apparatus—something in his way, not a precious portal to my innards. Doctor V injected some deadening gel into my cock, unfortunately not deadening enough. Before I could scream or in any way protest this brutal, barbaric treatment of my member, he slid a probe in there and kept shoving it inside until . . . then he brought to my attention two computer monitors joined together in a “vee” . . . and he, oh, by the way, it felt like my wee cock had been connected to an electric socket, especially when the flow of water meant to cool things down surged all around my wee urethra. Anyway, he talked me through it, narrating as everyone in that tiny room, including the doc’s daughter, for Christ’s sake, listened:

“Here’s your prostate,” he said, pointing to the monitor. “Except for being about twice as large as it was four years ago, it looks to be in good shape.” (Is this yet another problem I’ll have to face in the years to come?)

By then I realized my hands were grasping—no gripping—the armrests, reentering the earth’s atmosphere. Sweat flying from my forehead, challenging my deodorant. Then the doc gave me a good view of my bladder. It just appeared like pink skin to me.

Then, he announced, “I don’t like this,” and he made me turn my head while my hips make their Saint-Vitus-dance my hips dance so I could view the monitor to my left. “This is not good,” he said, pointing out a whitish, lacey-looking growth. “We’ll have to shave it off.”

“Today?” I asked, alarmed that I might have to squirm through yet another procedure.

“No,” he said, looking at me funny. “No, we’ll set up a hospital appointment. You’ll be sedated.”

“Thank Christ,” I mumbled, hoping my curse hadn’t offended anyone.

All in all, I was in that office for nearly three hours. Must have been sixty of us being shuffled in and out of those wee, antiseptic rooms like Marx Brothers’ characters—peeing in cups, giving up blood, having x-rays taken, being prodded and poked—then escorted back to what nurses kept referring to as the lobby, as if we were guesting ourselves at the Waldorf-Astoria—made to sit and wait (it was a waiting room, let’s be clear) for the next round of torture.

But then, there was no more. I was told I would appear at Lubbock's Covenant Hospital on July 7, where the doctor would “shave” the tumor and have it biopsied. Yippee!

NEXT TIME: In “It Only Hurts When I Pee, Part III,” I give you Dr. V’s blow-by-blow description of what is to come.

It Only Hurts When I Pee Hee Hee
or How to Kill an Entire Summer—Part I
No, I do NOT have an STD, but ha! I hope my title got your attention. This post is about something perhaps just as menacing: cancer.

I wasn’t sure I was ready to blog about my bout with this disease. Most of my posts share quotes from others more eloquent than I, “A Writer’s Wit,” or ascribe my take on literature, “My Book World.” But if I don’t write about my cancer, it might otherwise wind up as something-swept-under-the-carpet—mentally, emotionally—something I wish to avoid. Must I share? you might wonder. Yes.

The turmoil began when I noted blood in my urine. Knowing better than to fool around with a symptom as obvious as that (never a good one), I immediately made a quick appointment with my urologist, whom I’ve consulted for over twenty years.

My appointment with Doctor V began at 9:30 a.m. on June 13, two days after my seventy-fifth birthday. I mean, I had to stop and think. Edith Wharton lived to be seventy-five. Penny Marshall lived to be seventy-five. So too, her once-upon-a-co-star, Cindy Williams. I’ve had a great life, I say, trying to bolster myself. Anyway, the doctors and his staff did at least eight things to me while I was present for my two-hour-and-forty-minute appointment.

1) They took an EKG.
2) They took and tested my urine.
3) Took and examined my blood sample.
4) & 5) Gave me an antibiotic shot in EACH buttocks.
6) & 7) The office was a sprawling building. My doctor and a second urologist maintain their own radiology lab, employ their own radiologist, who x-rayed my kidneys. (I think this is right. Things moved so quickly.) The rugged man with a gray beard but the hardbody of one who works out at Golds told me mechanically (because he must repeat the same words thousands of times a day) to lay on the table. It was a high, narrow sort of table, with a footstool to help me up. And above me loomed that X-ray machine, threatening to create solarized pictures of my organs. The radiologist entered the adjacent room, his office, to execute the x-rays (Hold your breath please|click|you may breathe).

When done, he determined all the images were viable. The radiologist disappeared into his office again. He emerged and informed me both kidneys and prostate were healthy. Yay. 

This same man then slathered cold gel over parts of my body, injected it up my rear end, and stuck a probe up there to take sonograms of my kidneys, my prostate? (Again, I know he told me, but I couldn’t seem to retain the information.) I just wanted the barrage against my body to be over. When finished, he handed me the large, gel-soaked piece of paper I’d been laying on, and pointed also to the cute stand with rolls of toilet tissue. 

     “There’s more paper over there,” he said, “if you should need it to wipe off the gel. Put all that paper stuff over there in that big red container, not in the trash can, and I’ll leave you to get dressed.” 
NEXT TIME: In “It Only Hurts When I Pee, Part II,” I share the gruesome details of another test, the one that reveals I have a bladder tumor.

I will not be publishing any "Writer's Wit" or "My Book World" posts until July 18! Hope everyone has a fine summer and fine summer holiday! RJ

Tóibín, Colm. The Magician: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2021.

There aren’t enough superlatives that can be ascribed to this novel, the author of which has published twenty-four other books. This fictionalized story of literary giant, Thomas Mann, is both riveting and sobering. The young Mann writes poetry exalting his also young lovers, all male. But in his Germany he cannot get out of marrying. And in fact, he does marry a woman he loves, and they produce quite a family. The novel traces their lives as they unfold in pre-World War II Europe, and as their lives extend to America, where the Mann’s take up residence. The book as well traces the processes or problems he incurs in writing some of his important works, including Death in Venice. It seems that Tóibín utilizes only the most important details or facts, or otherwise, his five hundred page novel might be twice the journey. A joy to read if you care about world literature and its important authors.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Lillian Hellman
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Ian McEwan
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Adam Schiff
FRI: My Book World | Pat Conroy, The Great Santini

Gabor, Thomas, and Fred Guttenberg. With a foreword by Steve Kerr. American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence. Coral Gables: Mango, 2023.  

This succinct book is a must-read for every person in America. Gabor, a professor in criminology and sociology, and Guttenberg, father of downed Parkland Shooting victim, Jaime, have teamed up to appeal to our better senses about gun violence and gun safety.
 
First, the authors set the historical record straight. For much of our 247-year history, this country has regulated guns. It has only been during the last two or three decades that organizational leadership (not necessarily their members) of the National Rifle Associate (NRA) have sold Americans a phony bill of goods. Instead of concentrating on the formation of state militias only, certain NRA members have glommed onto the Second Amendment to push their gun-toting agenda.
 
Second, the NRA has failed to take the historical context into consideration (what so-called originalists claim to love to do when speaking of the Constitution), that the amendment was designed to help communities protect themselves collectively, not to promote individual gun ownership.
 
Third, the authors tackle, by way of eleven chapters, thirty-seven myths that the NRA et. al. have dreamed up through the years. Just a few of them. Myth 3: America Has and All-Encompassing Gun Culture. Nope. Only three in ten Americans personally own a gun. Myth 6: The Only Consequences of Gun Violence Are Murders.Nope. “Sadly, some victims experience life-altering injuries that have a profound impact on the quality of life. For example, when a person is shot and paralyzed in his twenties, his quality of life will be diminished significantly . . . [w]hen all the above financial costs are taken into account, it has been estimated that the annual cost of gun violence in the US is over $280 billion” (51). Myth 16: The Training Required of Concealed Weapons Permit Holders Prepares Them for Effective Defensive Gun Use. Nope, once again. The authors prove that the carrying of guns can lead to escalation of disputes. Gabor, in an earlier book finds “that ongoing or spontaneous disputes were the most common motives underlying mass shootings” (91). Moreover, “since May 2007, concealed carry permit holders have killed more than two thousand people and committed thirty-seven mass shootings, as well as many other crimes” (91).
 
Authors Gabor and Guttenberg conclude their book with suggestions for what Americans can do, for we all know it will take an upswelling of such citizenry to join the rest of what the civilized world has already accomplished, and that is to reduce and limit the amount of gun violence. From requiring gun owners to secure guns in their homes to leveraging the corporate world to cease doing business with the gun industry to voting, the eighty to ninety percent of citizens who want change can achieve it.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Fanny Burney
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Jerzy Kosinski
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Amy Clampitt
FRI: My Book World | Colm Tóibín, The Magician

Loe, Nancy E. Hearst Castle: An Interpretive History of W. R. Hearst’s San Simeon Estate. Aramark. Santa Barbara: Companion P, 1994.

I first visited Hearst Castle, San Simeon, California, in 1978. The tour was conducted more like an informal swirl through a friend’s home. The lighting was poor, and items seemed casually thrown together. The second time I visited the park, in 1997, it had been acquired by the state of California and a visit to the new museum was divided into separate tours. My partner and I were so fascinated that we took all four, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. We became so well acquainted with the docent that we later had drinks . . . that is not true . . . I wish. He was a handsome blond man. Anyway, by that time, the entire property had been curated and updated so that it looked more as it would have in its heyday, the 1920s and 1930s.
 
Loe’s book, which I bought on that latter trip, has remained on my shelf until now, but it is no less interesting. The content is as much about the original owner, William Randolph Hearst, newspaper magnate, and his architect partner, the renowned Julia Morgan, as it is about the property itself. In fact, the book seems more about Morgan, an early feminist and a rare woman architect at that time. Hearst may have liked her in part because she was able to create almost every feature he wanted, even if it meant destroying a newly built basement wall to widen his bowling alley to three lanes from two—a whimsy that he scarcely utilized in his lifetime. But he also respected Morgan’s opinion and taste, because she was usually correct in her judgment. I still find the idea fascinating that a mere mortal could make his every wish come true (except that wish to live forever). What it must do to one’s psyche to get one’s way ninety-nine percent of the time.
 
To some eyes, the castle is a mishmash (or is it now mashup?) of every major historical architectural period and every major culture in the world. To others it represents the hubris of the ultrawealthy. To me it sings of the creativity of two people rich with ideas and nearly unlimited resources. Late in life, Hearst would be forced to sell off certain assets in order to take care of his $126 million dollar debt. Now that’s living! And yet he would still hold onto his Casa Grande, as he so fondly called it, for a bit longer.
​Nice work if you can get it!

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Marian Wright Edelman
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Gwendolyn Brooks
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Frank Lloyd Wright
FRI: My Book World | Gabor and Guttenberg, American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence (School Safety, Violence in Society)

Johnson, Denis. Angels: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2002 (1977).

I wouldn’t have thought of these words, but a blurb located on the back of the book describes the novel as being about two born losers. And I believe that is the case, unfortunately. A poor woman with two small children meets a divorced man, and they wind up in Phoenix. In the desert city, after mishaps with drugs, the woman finds herself in rehab, on the path toward a new life. The man and his two brothers, however, make a plan to rob a bank, believing their idea is brilliant. The heist, of course, goes awry, and the man winds up in prison killing someone. The account of his execution may be one of the most realistic and chilling scenes I’ve ever read in fiction. Angels makes a fine title on several levels of irony.

TUES: A Writer's Wit | Colm Tóibín
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Jane Green
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Christopher Lasch
FRI: My Book World | Nancy E. Loe, ​Hearst Castle: An Interpretive History