Cancer care auction features literary prizes

 

When Christine Lee Zilka's friend Jennifer Derilo was diagnosed with Hodgin's Lymphoma, she decided she was going to do something to help. The two became friends when getting their MFA degrees in creative  writing at Mills College in Northern California, and are now editors at the Kartika Review; Zilka knew her friend Derilo, 32, had no health insurance.

So Zilka called on friends, and some friends of friends, and a few strangers, and put together a literary auction, which is going on now on EBay. As you'd expect, there are some signed books to be had.

But the auction is geared for writers as well as for readers. There are several offers of manuscript critiques  by established authors, including Lac Su, Randa Jarrar, Yiyun Li and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum. Bynum, a SoCal resident, was named one of the New Yorker's 20 under 40 fiction writers to watch earlier this year.

"I am not one for feeling helpless," Zilka told Jacket Copy by email. "And I felt incredibly helpless watching Jennifer battle Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I mean, she spent the first several weeks after diagnosis navigating the healthcare system and figuring out ways she could even GET treatment without health insurance. Someone with health insurance would've gone into treatment immediately. Tragic."

Zilka knows what it's like to face a health scare. A few years ago, as an MFA student, she had a stroke. The blog she maintained at the time became a riveting chronicle of that experience, terribly close up (she now blogs here). "When I had a left thalamic stroke and in recovery for a year, I remembered feeling overwhelmed," she writes. "I thought about how devastating those awful bills would have been had I not had health insurance."

Purchases made through the EBay sales will go directly to pay Derilo's medical bills (in other words, they're probably not tax deductible).

In addition to the manuscript critiques, there are one-of-a-kind items like a book artwork created by Justin Chin, a poetry reading for hire and a semester's teaching advice. Bidders who want literary immortality can have their names included in a forthcoming work of fiction. Most items are currently selling for less than $100.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Christine Lee Zilka, left, with Jennifer Derilo, right, in 2006. Credit: Jennifer Derilo.

Cover of the year?

Bookstores that stock the smart academic books from the University of Chicago Press have something racier than usual on their shelves: the book "Manhood" by Mels van Driel. The cover features a copy of Michelangelo's David, from the waist down, naked in vivid, carved detail.

To protect the innocent, we've provided a modest black bar for the stone gentleman. The book, originally published in Amsterdam in 2008, is making its American debut.

Author Mels van Driel is a consultant urologist and sexologist at Groningen University Medica Center in the Netherlands. He brings a light hand to the subject -- the book's subtitle is "The Rise and Fall of the Penis."

But with chapters as plain as "Testosterone and Sperm" and "The Prostate and Seminal Glands," can the book live up to the wit of its title -- or the arty salaciousness of its cover? Here's how chapter two begins:

Modern medicine sees the erection of the penis as based on a euro-vascular reflex, dependent on a correct hormonal balance, a healthy anatomy, an adequate blood supply and an undamaged and efficiently functioning nervous system. If one takes all this on board, one realizes that it's easy for things to go wrong occasionally. Put more strongly, it's a miracle that things go smoothly so often! So this chapter will highlight not only the technical, but also the miraculous aspects.

That's not a laugh riot, but it's fairly easygoing for an academic treatise. Be warned, there are also photographs and diagrams of ailments of men's private parts, literary references, and a long section dedicated to ailments of the penis. There is also a table titled "Penis Length in Normal Men"; perhaps it's for the best that the measurements have been left in centimeters.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Genius and hypochondria

What do Charlotte Brontë, Marcel Proust and Charles Darwin have in common? They were all hypochondriacs, according to Irish author Brian Dillon. In our pages today, Heller McAlpin reviews "The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives"; the book, she writes:

... is an intriguing, suavely written blend of medical history and literary criticism, a book that adds to the growing (or metastasizing) field of pathological biography.

Be warned, however, that Dillon's subjects don't neatly fit our modern notion of hypochondria as neurosis. Alice James, Charles Darwin and Marcel Proust were all chronic invalids who obsessed about their health and defined themselves through their illnesses. But they also suffered real pain and organic, if undiagnosed, ailments. ...

Reading Dillon's account of the battles they fought with their minds, bodies and imaginations, one doesn't envy their heightened sensibilities.

Read the complete review here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: Genista via Flickr