The Undying
Page 15
20. Denise Grady. “Breast Cancer Researcher Admits Falsifying Data.” The New York Times, Feb. 5, 2000, www.nytimes.com/2000/02/05/us/breast-cancer-researcher-admits-falsifying-data.html.
21. “Majority of Women Diagnosed with Breast Cancer after Screening Mammograms Get Unnecessary Treatment, Study Finds.” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 12, 2016, www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-breast-cancer-screening-mammograms-20161012-snap-story.html.
22. Christie Aschwanden et al. “What If Everything Your Doctors Told You About Breast Cancer Was Wrong?” Mother Jones, June 24, 2017, www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/faulty-research-behind-mammograms-breast-cancer/.
23. Acker, “The Gift of Disease.”
24. Sarah Schulman. Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
25. “The Last Days of Kathy Acker.” Hazlitt, July 30, 2015, hazlitt.net/feature/last-days-kathy-acker.
26. Lauren Elkin. “After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus—Radical Empathy.” Financial Times, Aug. 11, 2017, www.ft.com/content/b4ce8f48-7dc5-11e7-ab01-a13271d1ee9c.
27. Acker, “The Gift of Disease.”
28. Ibid.
29. Chris Kraus. After Kathy Acker: A Biography. London: Penguin Books, 2018.
30. Audre Lorde and Rudolph P. Byrd. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 2011.
IN THE TEMPLE OF GIULIETTA MASINA’S TEARS
1. Elaine Scarry. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
2. Roselyne Rey. The History of Pain. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.
3. The Wound Man is an anatomical drawing used to illustrate common accidents and injuries, and first appeared in medical texts in 1491. This illustration of the Wound Man is from Hans von Gersdorff’s Feldtbuch der Wundartzney (Fieldbook of Surgery), 1519. Despite the Wound Man’s multiple injuries, he is always depicted upright and alive.
4. This cadaver skin comes from organ and tissue donors, many of whom do not know that their tissue will be immediately harvested and trafficked through a chain of for-profit corporations. LifeCell promises that cadaver skin for bilateral breast reconstruction will be sourced from the same donor—so although I have two pieces of cadaver skin in me, it is only from a single person—but Alloderm is used not only to help cancer patients and other sick people, but can be used, as well, for elective cosmetic surgeries unrelated to illness. Although the for-profit tissue world remains murky, a 2017 investigative series by Reuters called “The Body Trade” points out that it is generally not illegal in the United States to sell human cadavers. Industry estimates are that donated tissue sales bring in millions of dollars in profits each year, none of this going to the loved ones of the donors: www.reuters.com/investigates/section/usa-bodies/.
5. An illustration of the pathway of pain from the philosopher René Descartes’s Treatise on Man, 1664.
DEATHWATCH
1. Aristides, Sacred Tales.
2. Cathérine Peyroux. “The Leper’s Kiss.” In Monks & Nuns, Saints & Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society: Essays in Honor of Lester K. Little, edited by Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000.
3. Aristides, Sacred Tales.
4. Carlo Ginzburg. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
5. SPK (Socialist Patients’ Collective). Turn Illness into a Weapon: For Agitation. Heidelberg: KRRIM, 1993.
EPILOGUE
1. John Matteson. The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acker, Kathy. “The Gift of Disease.” The Guardian, January 18, 1997, p. T14.
Arendt, Hannah, et al. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Aristides, Aelius, and Charles A. Behr. Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1969.
Avicenna, and Shams C. Inati. Ibn Sina’s Remarks and Admonitions: Physics and Metaphysics: An Analysis and Annotated Translation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Bellamy, Dodie. When the Sick Rule the World. South Pasadena, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2015.
Berkowitz, Amy. Tender Points. Oakland, Calif.: Timeless Infinite Light, 2015.
Biss, Eula. “The Pain Scale.” Harper’s Magazine, 2005.
Brecht, Bertolt, Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles, and Laura J. R. Bradley. Brecht on Art and Politics. London: Methuen, 2003.
Burney, Fanny, Barbara G. Schrank, and David J. Supino. The Famous Miss Burney: The Diaries and Letters of Fanny Burney. New York: John Day, 1976.
Burnham, John C. What Is Medical History? Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2007.
Cage, John. A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969.
Cazdyn, Eric M. The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Compton, D. G., and Jeff VanderMeer. The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe. New York: New York Review Books, 2016.
Compton, Michael T. “The Union of Religion and Health in Ancient Asklepieia.” Journal of Religion and Health, vol. 37, no. 4, 1998.
Di Prima, Diane. Revolutionary Letters. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1974.
Donne, John, and Herbert J. C. Grierson. The Poems of John Donne. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Donne, John, and Izaak Walton. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions: And, Death’s Duel. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.
Dumas, Marlene, and Mariska Berg. Sweet Nothings: Notes and Texts, 1982–2014. London: Tate Publishing, 2015.
Fenton, James, Alphonse Daudet, and Julian Barnes. “In the Land of Pain.” The New York Review of Books, vol. 50, no. 2, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic, 3rd. ed. London: Routledge, 2017.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1987.
Ginzburg, Carlo. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Ginzburg, Carlo, John Tedeschi, and Anne C. Tedeschi. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
Goethe, Johann W., and Charles T. Brooks. Faust: A Tragedy. Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1880.
Israelowich, Ido. Society, Medicine and Religion in the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Jain, S. Lochlann. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
James, Alice, and Leon Edel. The Diary of Alice James. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999.
King, Samantha. Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Kraus, Chris. After Kathy Acker: A Biography. London: Penguin Books, 2018.
Leopold, Ellen. A Darker Ribbon: Breast Cancer, Women, and Their Doctors in the Twentieth Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
Levinas, Emmanuel, and Seán Hand. The Levinas Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2009.
Lispector, Clarice, Stefan Tobler, and Benjamin Moser. Agua Viva. London: Penguin Classics, 2014.
Loraux, Nicole. Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Lord, Catherine. The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.
Lorde, Audre. The Audre Lorde Compendium: Essays, Speeches, and Journals. London: Pandora, 1996.
______. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2006.
Lorde, Audre, and Rudolph P. Byrd. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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Lucretius and Rolfe Humphries. The Way Things Are: The “De Rerum Natura” of Titus Lucretius Carus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968.
Martineau, Harriet. Life in the Sick-Room: Essays, by an Invalid. 3rd ed. London: Edward Moxon, 1849.
Matteson, John. The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Emperor of All Maladies. London: HarperCollins, 2017.
Pearcy, Lee T. “Theme, Dream, and Narrative: Reading the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974–), vol. 118, 1988.
Petsalēs-Diomēdēs, Alexia. “Truly Beyond Wonders”: Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asklepios. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Peyroux, Cathérine. “The Leper’s Kiss.” In Monks & Nuns, Saints & Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society: Essays in Honor of Lester K. Little, edited by Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000.
Plutarchus and Christopher B. R. Pelling. Life of Antony. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Rettig, Richard A. False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Rey, Roselyne. The History of Pain. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, et al. The First and Second Discourses Together with the Replies to Critics; and, Essay on the Origin of Languages. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Schulman, Sarah. Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. A Dialogue on Love. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.
Sontag, Susan. Illness As Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.
Sontag, Susan, and David Rieff. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980. New York: Picador, 2013.
SPK (Socialist Patients’ Collective). Turn Illness into a Weapon: For Agitation. Heidelberg: KRRIM, 1993.
Stephens, John. The Dreams and Visions of Aelius Aristides: A Case-Study in the History of Religions. Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2013.
Susann, Jacqueline. Valley of the Dolls: A Novel. New York: Bantam Books, 1966.
Woolf, Virginia, Julia D. Stephen, Hermione Lee, Mark Hussey, and Rita Charon. On Being Ill. Ashfield, Mass.: Paris Press, 2012.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to all the people whose care, conversation, encouragement, feedback, and example helped make this book possible, particularly CAConrad, Louis-Georges Schwartz, Jonathan Kissam, Erin Morril, Juliana Spahr, Dana Ward, Jasper Bernes, Daniel Spaulding, Sandra Simonds, Magdalena Zurawski, David Buuck, Anthony Iles, Jenny Diski, Ariana Reines, Carolyn Lazard, Dan Hoy, Amalle Dublon, Emma Heaney, Evan Calder-Williams, Jonah Criswell, Cyrus Console-Soicon, Jordan Stempleman, Phyllis Moore, Jonathan Lethem, Josh Honn, Frank Sherlock, Lauren Levin, Aaron Kunin, Hari Kunzru, Natalia Cecire, Jace Clayton, Lisa Robertson, Lyn Hejinian, Joanna Hedva, Sampson Starkweather, Constantina Zavitsanos, Malcolm Harris, Ed Luker, Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Melissa Flashman, and Jeremy M. Davies. L. E. Long, Cara Lefebvre, Cassandra Gillig, and Hazel Carson deserve special thanks. Most of what is good in this book is because of them. I also want to thank all the workers who helped take care of me during my illness, the technicians, nurses, paraprofessionals, doctors, clerical workers, cleaners, EMIs, and others who kept me safe and calm through this harrowing experience.
Some of this writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, Litmus, Swimmers, and Guernica. “Wasted Life” was part of a project commissioned by EMPAC for an exhibit by Patricia Lennox-Boyd. Some of the writing and thinking about care came from a talk given at the British Columbia Nurses’ Union conference in 2015, and some of the writing about Kathy Acker came from a talk given at an event at the CUNY grad center about Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker. I want to thank these editors and event organizers who helped bring this work into the world.
So much of my thinking, too, has emerged from conversations on social media, over email, and after readings and events, and I want to thank all of the generous interlocutors—many of whom have shared similar experiences with illness and disability—who have given me the ongoing opportunity to understand the world. I also want to acknowledge the thousands of people who make up the online communities that have gathered around breast cancer. Their emails, Facebook posts, tweets, vlogs, and forum contributions—all offered freely and in the interest of helping others—were necessary to my understanding of my experience. In particular, those who shared their lives on video, like Coopdizzle and Christina Newman, made a profound impact on me both during and after my treatment.
This work has been made possible with faculty development funds from the Kansas City Art Institute and a Philip Whalen Grant from Poets in Need. I also want to thank the Whiting Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Judith E. Wilson fund at Cambridge University for recognizing my work and providing me with the material support necessary for the completion of this book.
ALSO BY ANNE BOYER
A Handbook of Disappointed Fate
Garments Against Women
The Romance of Happy Workers
A Note About the Author
Anne Boyer is a poet and an essayist who lives in Kansas City. Her honors include the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, a 2018 Whiting Award in nonfiction/poetry, and the 2018–2019 Judith E. Wilson Fellowship in poetry at Cambridge University. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including the 2016 CLMP Firecracker Award–winning Garments Against Women and a book of fables, essays, and ephemera titled A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
THE INCUBANTS
BIRTH OF THE PAVILION
THE SICKBED
HOW THE ORACLE HELD
THE HOAX
IN THE TEMPLE OF GIULIETTA MASINA’S TEARS
WASTED LIFE
DEATHWATCH
EPILOGUE / and what it was that saved me
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY ANNE BOYER
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Copyright © 2019 by Anne Boyer
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First edition, 2019
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71948-7
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