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August 8, 2011
After a pulled muscle in his neck led him to go to the doctor, Cody, a music composer, found out he had a malignant tumor in his neck and suddenly his whole life changed. As he went through treatment, which included chemotherapy, radiation, and a bone-marrow transplant, he kept journals of his thoughts, emotions, conversations, and musings, which became the basis for this memoir. There are some straightforward revelations about having cancer (“Because you hate the disease, you hate yourself for having it”), but Cody’s observations for the most part are much more random and abstract, as when he states that “the series of chemo treatments” put him “right at the pyramidical, diamondsharp point of the Golden Ratio.” His anecdotes have an ethereal quality that slides from mathematic equations, September 11, and his ancestor Buffalo Bill Cody to memories of snorting cocaine in the bathroom of a downtown New York City bar. Cody, of course, makes countless musical references, and his prose often takes on a rhythm of its own: “What a gorgeous mind she has, smooth as sanded sandalwood, and her skin like the petal of a white flower.” Cody includes photocopies from his journal as well as excerpts from the diary his mother kept while caring for him and facsimiles from his deceased father’s notebooks—all of which cement this, at times, unconventional celebration of everything one man holds dear.