Unknown Melancholies

Hello and welcome back!

Remember these?

I mean, the guy even looks punchable

In picking what I'd do for this macroblog I was really torn. Part of my wanted to make a crossword puzzle with all of my favorite little factoids, but the other part of me wanted to analyze my favorite passage (since I've already spent at least 75% of my nonfiction blog posts raving about Mukherjee's writing). In the end I decided to go with the crossword puzzle because what other opportunity am I going to have to make a crossword puzzle for an English project?

In a sense, this crossword puzzle is a shoutout to the first blog I ever made. Back in elementary school we got to make our own Wikispace blog for gifted. (A second shoutout for those of you who remember this project.) Mine was puzzle and riddle themed, though I already forget the name. Unfortunately I can no longer access it and find out the title because Wikispaces shut down, so this is for you, blog-who's-name-I-can't remember.

Before we get into it, two final things: 1) you'll likely be unable to solve this puzzle unless you're a trivia genius, but hopefully you'll get to learn something new! And 2) there's no blanks separating multiple-word answers.

Down:
1. Dubbed the “fairy godmother of medical research” by BusinessWeek magazine, she was a prominent health activist who rose the American Society for the Control of Cancer from the dead.
2. Word used in medieval times to describe any sort of affliction, whether it be a stroke, hemorrhage, or seizure.
3. Spurred on by the cloth-milling boom in Great Britain in the mid-1850s, ________ chemistry was a discipline focused on synthesizing products for textile dying. The chemical dyes it produced would eventually lead Paul Ehrlich to come up with the idea for chemotherapy.
4. Paul Ehrlich, the founder of chemotherapy, came up with the idea while ranting in a _____ ____ late at night to two of his fellow scientists.
8. The “most dogged, methodical, and single-minded” doctor to treat Hodgkin’s disease with X-ray radiation.
12. A journalist and advocate for breast cancer patients, who in warning against the growing disconnect between doctors and patients, sarcastically wrote, “The smiling oncologist does not know whether his patients vomit or not.”
17. William S. Halsted, the creator of radical mastectomy, battled an addiction to both ________ and morphine, yet he still managed to sustain an impressive career in surgery.
18. A word that means “beyond stillness” in Latin and that is used to describe the migration of cancer from one site to another.
19. The first of Mekherjee’s patients that the reader is introduced too. She was a kindergarten teacher and mother of three who was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
20. Leukemia, _______ is the malignant, rapid reproduction of white cells in one’s blood, "cancer in molten, liquid form."
23. Realized that postsurgical infections were caused by bacteria, so he began applying sewage cleanser (carbolic acid paste) to patients’ wounds after surgery to prevent infection. Surprisingly, it worked.
26. Civilization didn’t cause cancer, but by extending human ______ civilization unveiled it.

Because I already used Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer" last macroblog

Across:
5. A disease needs to be transformed ________ in order to be transformed scientifically. It needs advertising tools like mascots, slogans, and icons as much as it does scientific ones.
6. Stumbled upon the principle that cancer needs to be treated long after every visible sign of it disappears, though when he put it into practice it ultimately cost him his job with the NCI (National Cancer Institute).
7. What Paul Ehlrich called his cure drugs (Typan Red and Salvarsan) for their capacity to kill and for their specificity.
9. The boy behind the Jimmy Fund was not actually named Jimmy but rather _____ ________. Jimmy was just the name that Sidney Farber and Bill Koster gave him.
10. Cancer possesses different personalities and behaviors, so treatment needs to be ______ to the disease based on what stage and type of cancer it is.
11. Writer and influential Greek doctor who suggested that cancer was the result of a systemic malignant state, an internal overdose of what he called “black bile.”
13. A tight cellular seal that insulates the brain and spinal cord. It prevents foreign chemicals in the body from reaching the brain.
14. Charles Huggins discovered that the link between the “growth-sustenance” of normal and cancerous cells was much closer than previously imagined; cancer cells could be fed and _______ by our own bodies.
15. It was originally designed to be a birth control pill, but it was later used as a drug to treat estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer.
16. Pioneer of the movement to restore sanity and virtue to end-of-life care for cancer patients, she was credited with resurrecting the field of palliative (pain-relieving) medicine.
21. The first word for cancer that appeared in medical literature. It comes from the Greek word for “crab," because to Hippocrates, cancerous tumors looked like a crab dug in the sand with its legs spread in a circle.
22. Oncology—the study of tumors—took its name from the Greek word for a burden, _____, because cancer was thought to be a burden carried by the body.
24. A paleopathologist who, when performing an autopsy on the mummy of a young woman who belonged to the Chiribaya tribe, discovered a cancerous bone tumor (osteosarcoma) that was over a thousand years old.
25. A toxic gas that was used as a chemical weapon. It would later be used as a chemotherapeutic drug that rid the body of cancer.
You've officially made it to the end of the clues!


Answer Key:

The numbers are a bit small so if you can't read them, here's the full list:
1. Mary Lasker

Hello!

I haven't written a microblog in over a week (whoops), so it feels a bit weird writing this. I've been on the reading grind the last week or so. (Is that how you use "grind"? Trying to stay hip and all.)

Also, because I'm incredibly indecisive, today's microblog is going to be a mishmosh of different commentary.

First off, what I really like about The Emperor of All Maladies is that even the parts that aren't personal anecdotes read like fiction stories. The book is dense--packed to the brim with information, but Mukherjee manages to make each scientist stand out and to seem more like a real person than just a name on the page. He throws in little factoids about a great deal of the people he writes about, and it reminds me that ultimately these scientists and activists were human too (as brilliant or as influential as they were). When describing the father of "radical surgery," Mukherjee says that Halsted and his wife "diligently avoided Baltimore society. When visitors came unannounced to their mansion on the hill, the maid was told to inform them that the Halsteds were not home” (64). I found it really amusing that here you had this famous surgeon repeatedly pretending he wasn't home because he was a total hermit. I mean, I totally relate, man. Unfortunately, though, Halsted turned out to be a frankly horrible (albeit misguided) person,

Even if these little factoids aren't necessarily relevant to cancer's history or their work in oncology, it makes these scientists and activists more relatable and more interesting. You root for some (namely literally every female in here because they're all so cool!!!), and you viscerally hate others (*cough* Halsted *cough*). Thus, even though this isn't necessarily a suspenseful book, I hate stopping in between sections because I'm always really interested to see how each scientist/activists' arc plays out.



Another thing I want to point out is Mukherjee's tendency to make connections between scientists and discoveries to past ideas he's already discussed. Not only does it help my (frankly terrible) memory keep everything in my head, but it also reinforces an idea that he brings up early on: science's intertwining with history. I hadn't really thought about the concept before until I read this quote: "Scientists often study the past as obsessively as historians... Every experiment is a conversation with a prior experiment, every new theory a refutation of the old" (93). It's really interesting to see how these scientists build off of each other, how they take work that's already been done and twist it into something new. For example, Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman at Yale University looked to mustard gas for the next chemotherapy drug, specifically at the gas' Krumbhaar effect--its ability to decimate white blood cells.

That's it for today, so thanks for reading!

me @ every nonfiction book I see

Not going to lie, I was at first scared to approach The Emperor of All Maladies with so much as a ten-foot stick. The book has been sitting on my desk for two weeks now, but for whatever reason, it's size has yet to stop shocking me. 571 pages may not seem terrible, especially when you take into account that 91 of those pages are composed of the index, glossary, and notes, but it's still a pretty hefty book. It wouldn't be all that much of a problem except for the fact that I don't like nonfiction. Like at all.

Now before you start coming at me with your pitchforks, sure, there are great nonfiction books out there, some of which I have read. But as a whole, I find it difficult to enjoy reading the genre, especially compared to fiction. Usually when I read a nonfiction book I might as well be sucking the life force out of my body with a vacuum. In fact, I make a point to avoid making so much as eye contact with nonfiction books, and I really only read them when forced to. (APELC here I come!)

I'm looking at you, nonfiction

So it was a huge relief when I didn't feel like I'd shaved ten years off my life when I started reading The Emperor of All Maladies. (Shout out to my science nerd grandfather for convincing me to give it a try!) Right off the bat I was blown away by the prose. It may not be the best I've ever read (and certainly not Gabriel Garcia Marquez-level), but even in just the first couple of pages, it far exceeded my expectations with lines like, "Medical school, internship, and residency had been physically and emotionally grueling, but the first months of the fellowship flicked away all those memories as if all of that had been child's play, the kindergarten of medical training" (4). And “In the parking lot of the hospital, a chilly, concrete box lit by neon floodlights, I spent the end of every evening after rounds in stunned incoherence, the car radio crackling vacantly in the background, as I compulsively tried to reconstruct the events of the day” (5). I've always thought of nonfiction as being this very straight-forward, technical kind of writing, so it's jarring--in a good way--reading this book.

And don't get me started on Mukherjee's metaphors, because they're pure gold. Mukherjee takes what could easily be stiff and sterile and breathes life into it. My favorite metaphors thus far is “The disease had turned into an object of empty fascination--a wax-museum doll--studied and photographed in exquisite detail but without any therapeutic or practical advances” (12). Though a close second is “The bone marrow becomes a dysfunctional mill, a malnourished biological factory oddly reminiscent of the cloth factories of Bombay” (29). This book is very information- and fact-heavy, but Mukherjee manages to makes it easily understood and conceptualized. Not only that, but he makes all of the history and science truly interesting for more than just the history buffs and science nerds.

Hello!

I just want to start off by saying: we're half-way there!
As great as it is that I've finished my fiction book, that means this project is officially half-way over which makes me strangely sad. (I'll no longer have the excuse to rant for an obnoxiously long time about books.) That makes this the last blog I'll write for 100 Years of Solitude, so hopefully I'll go out on a good note.

In the time leading up to my writing this blog post, I was dead-set on retelling a moment from the novel in a different POV. Though I doubted that I could live up to Marquez's prose, I'll take any excuse to do creative writing. The only issue: the narrator is third-person omniscient, so nearly every relevant character constantly has their voice heard. However, I found a loop-hole of sorts in Santa Sofia de la Piedad. One of a group of women that I've affectionately dubbed "The Exasperated Housewives of Macondo", Santa Sofia de la Piedad is unique in that she has "the rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment” (116). In other words, she's the perfect narrator for a retelling because even in the instances that she does exist, it's rarely revealed what she's thinking and feeling. There's even a line towards the end of the book that says that when she was given a prophetic assignment by Aurelinao, it was "the first time in her long life Santa Sofia de la Piedad let a feeling show through" (356).

As for the scene I chose to rewrite, it begins when Santa Sofia's son Jose Arcadio Segundo returns home, the only survivor of the "banana massacre" (which is conveniently part of a giant government cover-up/conspiracy), and goes on to when the military raids the Buendia household looking for rebels. Santa Sofia de la Piedad speaks, moves, and exists in the scene, but the window to her mind is closed, like always, so I wanted to explore my interpretation of what she might have been feeling/thinking throughout it.


The persistent rain pattered against the windowsill, ran rivers down the cracks in the whitewash, as both Santa Sofia de la Piedad and the dawn rose into existence. Just then, Jose Arcadio Segundo entered through the kitchen door, not unlike the stray cats Santa Sofia de la Piedad occasionally spoiled. Perhaps she should have felt shocked by his return, but her heart remained as still as always. Her voice barely raised. “Don’t let Fernanda see you,” she said. “She’s just getting up.” She glanced back at the simmering stew as Jose Arcadio Segundo dripped in the doorway like a familiar stranger. She was not compelled to ask where he had been, for she could see in his eyes the stamp of a violence she was not meant to handle. One that he was perhaps not meant to either.

Santa Sofia de la Piedad left the stew to cool as she led her son to the “chamberpot room” and set up for him Melquiades’ decrepit cot. No small talk was made, for it was as if both of them knew that there was no longer any room in this house for thinking about other people’s happiness. Still, Santa Sofia de la Piedad smoothed the sheets and dusted the desk for longer than necessary, reveling in the feeling of shared solitude and of the inklings of what might have been affection. Soon enough, she left to attend to the stew she had abandoned back in the kitchen, but as Fernanda was taking her afternoon siesta, she returned to pass a plate of food to him through the window.

Days passed, and as well as the government had done in hiding their affairs, it was clear they were still on the hunt for the rebels of Decree No. 4. The government insisted Macondo was and continues to be a “happy town,” but Sofia de la Piedad was not so foolish. Perhaps Macondo had once been as lively and jubilant as Ursula recalled it to be, but now it might as well have been a ghost town home to only misery and solitude. And so it came as no surprise to Santa Sofia de la Piedad when one February night the unmistakable blows of rifle butts could be heard pounding the door. Aureliano Segundo, who now spent all his waking hours waiting for the endless rain to clear, answered the door, revealing an officer and six soldiers under his command. No words were said as the men, soaked to the bone, searched the every inch of the house. Santa Sofia de la Piedad managed to slip away from the fray—for she was not fully existent at that moment—to warn the sleeping Jose Arcadio Segundo. But by the time she woke Jose Arcadio Segundo, there was no time left for him to escape. She watched as he attempted to make himself presentable and then sat on the cot to bide his time before the arrest. Santa Sofia de la Piedad left, locking the door behind her, to make her way back to the scavenging. Once the men reached the “chamberpot room,” Santa Sofia de la Piedad placed all the hope she had onto her tongue and said, “No one has lived in that room for a century.”

But as always no one paid any mind to her, and so the door was opened. The beam of the officer’s lantern flashed in Jose Arcadio Segundo’s eyes and illuminated the pallor of his face, but the only thing the officer took note of were the numerous chamberpots piled in the cupboards. The lights were flicked on, and to Sofia de la Piedad, Jose Arcadio Segundo seemed to finally look like himself again—pensive, solemn, and constantly waiting for the inevitable. As the officer’s gaze paused over the spot where Sofia de la Piedad and Aureliano Segundo were seeing Jose Arcadio Segundo, the three of them realized that the officer was looking at the latter without seeing him. Satisfied that his search was complete, the officer turned out the light and closed the door. It was then that Santa Sofia de la Piedad sent her first and last message to God to thank Him for granting Jose Arcadio Segundo with the very same invisibility she had spent her life resenting prior to meeting Arcadio.

After all was said and done, the rain still had not cleared. Jose Arcadio Segundo returned to his room and to his thoughts, Aureliano to the window, and Santa Sofia de la Piedad to the kitchen. Somehow she knew that she had lost Jose Arcadio Segundo to something worse than the hands of the military officials, for he had never looked more alive than he had been waiting patiently for the reaper. But she figured that in a house full of ghosts, one more could not hurt.


End

gnossienne
n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.

When I first saw today's Google Doodle, I got super excited because from looking at it knew it was about Márquez. Turns out today is his 91st birthday, so I of course have to do something in honor of that. I was originally going to cram this little birthday message into my macroblog, but it's already wordy enough. Plus, I wanted to give a brief little lesson on Márquez and his contributions to literature.

I know I already have an "About 100 Years of Solitude" page on this blog, but I didn't go into a great deal of depth there in terms of who Márquez is. I know I already talked about Márquez's role as the definer of magical realism, but for those of you who didn't read my second microblog, magical realism is a literary genre in which the mundane and the fantastic are both equally plausible. Márquez said he took inspiration for it from the unbelievability of Latin American history — an illusory Eldorado plagued by conquistadors, despots and revolutions.

If that wasn't cool enough, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts".

Born in 1927 in the small town of Aracataca, Columbia, he grew up with his grandfather, a pensioned colonel from civil war. Many of his novels are based on his childhood experiences growing up in Columbia. 100 Years of Solitude's Macondo (and its history) are heavily based on that of Columbia, and there's striking similarities between Colonel Aureliano Buendia and Márquez's own grandfather. Márquez went to a Jesuit college, beginning to read law, but he instead switched to working as a journalist. His most notable novels include One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Autumn of the Patriarch. Márquez also wrote screenplays as well as continued working as a journalist throughout his writing career.

But the best piece of information I found is that Márquez's full name is Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, but in Latin America he's affectionately known as "Gabo". For whatever reason, I find this to be absolutely adorable.

So happy birthday Gabriel García Márquez!
 

Am I still iffy over the title of this microblog? Yes. Am I going to change it? Probably not because I'm supposed to write this in under 15 minutes and time's a ticking.

I was originally planning on making this microblog about the historical events behind 100 Years of Solitude with a look into the effects of "banana republics," but I found myself dreading writing it because...

Well, history can be kind of boring (sorry, Mr. McDaniels).



So instead, today's topic is snark and humor. 100 Years of Solitude, despite being a rather sad and melancholic book, is surprisingly rife with humor. There's literally a character named Meme (which for whatever reason I find endlessly amusing), but aside from that, my favorite element of humor is the dialogue. Marquez may use dialogue very sparingly, but when he does, it's always succinct and a punch to the gut, though usually in a more heart-wrenching sense. In addition, Marquez's writing as a whole is one of the most "quotable" things I've ever read. I could go on and on about the millions of quotes I jotted down because I just had to have a record of them, but I already waste enough time as is getting off topic.

Anyways, I always enjoy looking back at the notes I took while reading and coming across my favorite little tidbits of humor, like these three gems:

• “In the den that smelled of camphorated cobwebs he found himself facing a kind of dusty iguana whose lungs whispered when he breathed” (103). 
• I'm dying--Aureliano literally called the guy a "dusty iguana"; that's officially my new favorite insult
• I love how the liberal agenda includes really intense stuff like assassination but also "instituting free love" (105).
• Whatever "free love" means I want it to happen
• Amaranta was on the point of causing panic because one of the nuns went into the kitchen as she was salting the soup and the only thing that occurred to her to say was to ask what those handfuls of white powder were. 'Arsenic,' Amaranta answered." (261). 
• Wow what a mood

• 100 - this is super random, but I love that Ursula’s just like That MomTM, y’know, the helicopter mom who never lets her daughter out of sight
• “Ursula recognized in his affected way of speaking the languid cadence of the stuck-up people from the highlands. ‘As you say, mister,’ she accepted” (127).
• I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love Ursula
• “Let’s hope he becomes a priest so that God will finally come into this house” (188).
• Ursula is honestly just the gift that keeps on giving

Unsurprisingly, half of my notes are just different iterations of “I love _______” and "I'm dying." Still, it makes note-taking a great deal more enjoyable knowing that it's really only me looking at and using them, giving me the freedom to phrase them however's easiest or the most fun. Some of you are probably reading this like, "I don't think these are even funny. How much time did you waste transcribing all of these?" The answer: way more time than I probably needed to. After all, it's not like most of these are integral plot points or symbolism or even likely to be relevant to my macroblog post. But, jokes on you, because I probably had way more fun reading my book than you did. (That sounded a bit less mean in my head, but you get my point).

Plus, those brief little flashes of humor were a nice respite from when I was drowning in a jumble of characters who are all named Aureliano and in really delightful but long-winded prose.

Hello!

Today's post is all about figurative language and imagery--perfect, since that's Marquez's specialty. Below is one of my favorite passages from the book, a description of Macondo's reaction to the introduction of movies.

"A character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears of affliction had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. [...] They decided not to return to the movies, considering they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings" (225).

I found it funny how furious the residents since breaking the seats of a theater is a rather violent reaction to the idea of actors reappearing in different roles. However, the more I thought about it, the more I became to wonder why we don't find it strange that the same people are the faces of multiple of our favorite characters. In addition, with so many of our own problems, why do we find solace in crying over others'? Marquez is able to illustrate just how silly the idea of movies are with phrases like "outlandish fraud" and "weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings," causing the reader to begin to query about the merits of movies. Like many other scenes, this one calls into question just how important modern technology is to one's enjoyment of life.

The town of Macondo may be "primitive" to some, but their problems are never the result of a lack of technology. Much like with this scene, Marquez also repeatedly makes readers question the familiar and accept the surreal, resulting a world that's strange for all the wrong reasons. Jose Arcadio Buendia deems ice "the great invention of our time" (22). People simply shovel out the flowers that fall from the sky the same way they would snowfall. Phonographs are considered to be "mechanical tricks" whose only real use is as something for children to take apart (226). Despite the fact that the modern world is beginning to invade Macondo--spurred by the creation of a railroad--its residents remain firmly stuck in the past, rejecting every new piece of technology that comes their way.