Archie Goodwin a.k.a. Catzilla
March 2006 - February 21, 2025

We found Archie in our flowerbed in July 2006 when he was 4 months old. No idea where he came from. We never saw any sign of a mama cat or siblings. He had been out on his own for a while, judging by his parasite load and the other contents of his poop, but he was definitely not feral. So we adopted him.

He was a spoiled brat of a cat, but he was also affectionate and funny and extremely patient with bipedal whims. He did not like laps, although he would sometimes come and sit on you tensely, as if to prove he could do it. He did love snuggling in bed and had finally worked out how to do it so that he was neither strangling me nor completely blocking my view with his fluffy butt. And he had the best deep, loud, rumbling purr. He came and snuggled with me and purred last night, even though he has to have been feeling pretty crummy, and that's a gift.

When UW did the ultrasound of his abdomen this afternoon, they found a very large mass in his intestines, which absolutely had not been there in December. The enlarged lymph nodes looked like they were metatastic, the pancreas looked, in his UW vet's term, "gnarly," and when they checked his bloodwork, his bilirubin count had doubled since Wednesday, and it was astronomical then. So large-cell lymphoma, fast-growing and aggressive. And he had gotten so frail. I didn't think he could stand up to chemo, and the vet said she honestly doubted chemo would even help.

So I called it. He was blissed out on the sedatives from the ultrasound. It seemed stupid and cruel to wait long enough for them to wear off. I told him I loved him, I told him he was a good boy, I told him it was okay for him to let go.

He died in my arms and I drove home with an empty cat carrier.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so it’s a good time to bring you up to date on what’s been going on with me for the past year and a half.

In May 2023 I was diagnosed with breast cancer in my right breast following a routine mammogram. (So if you want reasons that you ought to be doing routine mammograms, I am one. Also, the word that now strikes fear into my heart is “distortion.”) I did not say anything at the time because I REALLY did not want to talk about it. I just wanted to get through it.

They did biopsies, they did an MRI (which is the most unpleasant medical experience of my life to date, excepting only IUD insertion), they determined that the best thing to do was surgery followed by radiation. Happily, it---or they, there were two of them---they were not the sort of tumor that called for chemo. Also happily, they were very small, so a complete mastectomy was also not called for. At the beginning of July, I had a lumpectomy. They got both tumors, the margins were clear, the lymph node they dissected was clear. All good. I spent July and August recovering from surgery. Lots of fatigue.

In September I had radiation treatments for 20 days. Following excellent advice from my friend Elizabeth Bear, I used calendula cream and Korean snail slime religiously and never had anything worse than a mild sunburn. And more fatigue.

In October I started on Tamoxifen, which is an estrogen blocker. And here things started to go awry. The Tamoxifen made my fibromyalgia not just worse, but TERRIBLE. I was in miserable amounts of pain basically daily. So in January my oncologist decided to try halving my dose (from 20 mg to 10). The fibromyalgia cleared up, but the fatigue did not, so I wasn’t in pain, but I was exhausted. I was going to bed at 8 every night, sleeping from like 9 to 6 and then taking a 3 or 4 hour nap every afternoon. Not great, but I was still hoping my body would adjust when at the end of March I got a blood clot in my right calf.

No more Tamoxifen.

We tried a 10-day course of blood thinner injections (NOT FUN), but after that was done it became apparent that the blood clot was still a problem (my right foot started swelling and became too painful to walk on), so I started three months’ worth of blood thinner pills.

(At around this same time, I started getting nauseated. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the cancer or the cancer treatment, but it is persistent as hell.)

Had a mammogram in April that showed nothing wrong

Finished the blood thinners at the end of July and, the Tamoxifen having had time to clear my system, started estrogen suppression therapy, with an injection every three months and pills daily. So far, the big side effect is that my temperature regulation is completely out of whack, so that I spend my days going from too hot to too cold back to too hot, with the occasional hot flash thrown in for good measure. This is not pleasant, but it is better than the terrible fibromyalgia, and my oncologist holds out hope that it will in fact get better with time.

Had an MRI at the beginning of October which showed no problems, and---my oncologist tells me---breast MRIs are notorious for false positives, so if it didn’t find anything, that means there really isn’t anything to find.

So, from the perspective of this major and very scary upheaval, things are really going pretty well. It’s hard to say whether my current health problems (endless fatigue, nausea, anhedonia, apathy, complete lack of creativity) have anything to do with cancer or cancer treatment. (We’re currently tapering my antidepressant to see if that changes anything.) But I am doing my best to keep fighting.

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a smart, funny, angry book about murder in ancient Rome, and about what counted as "murder" and what didn't. (Most of the anger comes from the fact that killing an enslaved person didn't count as murder.) It's "popular" history, but history that doesn't cut any corners on that account. Southon does a great job of explaining the ins and outs of Roman history quickly and entertainingly. She does, of course, spend a great deal of time with the Julio-Claudians, both as murderers and murderees, but she also spends a lot of time talking about less visible murders, and she paints a vividly three-dimensional picture of life in late-Republican and early-Imperial Rome.



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An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government by William C. Davis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


My primary takeaway from this book is that Jefferson Davis was a pig-headed nightmare.

This is a step-by-step recounting of the flight of the Confederate government from Richmond. William C. Davis's two principal characters are Jefferson Davis and John C. Breckinridge, whom he depicts as locked in an almost-unacknowledged struggle for how the Confederacy was going to end the war. Or, in J. Davis's case, NOT end the war. He was talking up to the moment he was captured by the Yankees about going to Texas and raising another army, and the fact that he apparently could not understand that this was impossible is actually one of the things I found most frightening about him. Against him, Breckinridge's determination to end the war and end the Confederacy in a way that provided maximum protection for both soldiers and civilians does look honorable.

I think W. C. Davis is wearing rose-colored glasses in a couple of places. He asserts that Robert E. Lee waffled about telling J. Davis that the war had to end because the "old warrior" couldn't bring himself to admit defeat, whereas I've read enough about Lee to know that he waffled because that was what Lee DID---given almost any moment at which he needed to provide a clear statement of his opinion, he equivocated and sidestepped, was vague where he needed to be specific, etc. It was the nature of the beast.

And W. C. Davis is definitely wearing rose-colored glasses in his conclusion, where he tries to argue that BOTH Breckinridge AND Davis provided good examples for the South after the Civil War. Breckinridge I'll give you---when he came back to the US after the amnesty, he stayed away from political office, he supported the enfranchisement of Black men, when he said anything it was about reconciliation. But Davis?

"If the Confederate president never accepted defeat gracefully, and even if he fell into the bitter post war squabbles that helped to make so many Southerners look foolish and spiteful, still he always rose above the mendacity and rank falsehoods to which the others repeatedly sank. If he never inspired his people with love, still by his conduct as a prisoner and for twenty years afterward, he gave an example of unbending pride and refusal either to supplicate or apologize" (397), and I'm sorry, but how is this a good thing? Also, I'm not quite sure I understand the difference between "mendacity and rank falsehoods" and what he says about J. Davis's memoirs: "What he did not wish to admit, he simply wrote out of his history. Inconvenient facts he ignored, and embarrassing incidents he expunged. His failures were really those of others; his only mistakes had been putting faith in subordinates who then let him down" (395). It seems to me like W. C. Davis is splitting hairs, just as I think he's splitting hairs when he tries to argue that J. Davis wasn't a fanatic. J. Davis's complete divorce from reality seems to me to be the essence of fanaticism.

So I think W. C. Davis needed to think through what he was saying about J. Davis a second time. I would also have liked a slightly more heads-on acknowledgement of chattel slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War---he doesn't deny it, or try to ignore it out of existence, but he doesn't address it, either. I know, it's so much easier to talk about the Confederacy if you don't, because then it DOES almost look as simple as a disagreement over the Constitution, and words like "honor" don't have such an uneasy footing, but the fact is that the liberty that white Southerners were so loud about wanting was specifically the liberty to own other people, and while I understand that most of them didn't see it that way, I also don't think it's something that we should move past. We have the example of the abolitionists to show us that it's also NOT simply a matter of imposing 21st century values on 19th century people, and as I said in some other review, I think about Frederick Douglass and what HE would say. And that tends to cut through the rhetoric pretty quickly.



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The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution by Christopher Hill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Justifiably classic work on the explosion of radical sects that occurred during the English Civil War. Nowadays, we only know about the Quakers (and Hill talks about why it is that the Quakers survived), but there were Diggers and Levellers and Ranters and Grindletonians and Muggletonians... And the thing about them that Hill conveys very well is that, along with being radical religious groups, they were all Utopian experiments, trying to imagine a better system than what they had. Some of what they came up with, especially Gerrard Winstanley, sounds shockingly modern and Marxist---the abolition of private property was one a lot of them had in common, and they were trying to figure out what do you do NEXT? Unfortunately, the answer is, you get betrayed by the generals, and the power that almost shifted in your favor shifts back, and before you know it, the world turns "right side up" again and hello, Charles II.

Hill is an excellent writer, and he writes about his very dense subject matter very clearly.



Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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With My Face to the Enemy: Perspectives on the Civil War by Robert Cowley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Anthology of essays about the American Civil War from MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. As is to be expected, they vary in quality, but the good ones---like James M. McPherson's essay about Grant---are very good.

(I think the editor is wrong to call Raphael Semmes, the captain of the CSS Alabama, a "genuine American hero" (429), first because Semmes was a traitor---I know the Confederates had many arguments to prove that they weren't traitors, and I don't buy any of them, especially not for men who were in the US armed services before secession---and second because, while he achieved amazing things, he achieved them in support of the Confederacy and therefore in support of chattel slavery. I ask myself whether, say, Frederick Douglass would have called Semmes a "genuine American hero," and the answer is a resounding no. I think in talking about the Civil War it's important not to keep erasing the subject position of Black people, and one of the things that means is that your definition of "American" can't have a hidden (white) in front of it. I feel the same way about the essay on Sheridan and its enthusiasm for his victories against the Native American tribes he persecuted. I digress, but it's, unfortunately, the thing about the book that is staying with me most vividly.)

Overall, none of the less good essays were terrible, and the good ones made the book worth reading.

Three and a half stars, round up to four.




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A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom by David Williams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Socialist-lens history of the American Civil War, with particular attention paid to how many white people in the South actually DIDN'T want secession and how many white people in the North DIDN'T want war, but also a good chapter on what Black people were willing to do to gain their freedom. Also a chapter on the genocide of the Native Americans that kept going strong between 1861 and 1865. And points out that after the war, the same white people were in power both North and South that had been in power before.



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Robert E. Lee: A Life by Allen C. Guelzo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I like Allen C. Guelzo. He's a bit of an iconoclast,* he writes beautifully, and he has produced what seems to me a very even-handed and fair biography of Robert E. Lee (who himself never went by "Robert E. Lee"). Unlike Pryor in Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, Guelzo is not charmed by Lee, and he does not write hagiography, but he isn't as committed to disassembling Lee as either Nolan (Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History) or Fellman (The Making of Robert E. Lee). He gives a portrait of a flawed human being (with tremendous charisma) who made bad decisions, and he is not shy about saying Lee committed treason.

Lee continues to fascinate me. He, like Stonewall Jackson, remains compelling even though I don't like him and I don't admire him. Guelzo pins Lee's psychology on his father, Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, who deserted the family when Robert was six, and says that Lee's life was a struggle between the desires for independence and security and the overwhelming need to be perfect. I'm a little skeptical of tidy biographical schemas (and really, aren't all of us struggling to balance the desire for independence with the desire for security?), but Guelzo uses his well to explore Lee's relationship to the U.S. Army, to his Custis in-laws, and especially to Arlington, the house that his wife and children loved passionately, but that seems to have hung around Lee's neck like an albatross. He talks very carefully about Lee's decision to give his service to the Confederacy, and he does a good job of explaining Lee's career as a battlefield general, without either undercutting or overselling his accomplishments. (Yes, Lee achieved amazing results, but he did so at a terrible cost of human life, and really, he looks amazing because he's up against some really terrible generals.) He argues that Lee found the balance he needed at Washington and Lee University (contrary to Pryor, who says he felt trapped there), but was sabotaged by his failing health. This leaves us with Robert E. Lee as a person who was never really happy because nothing was ever perfect enough. (Certainly, no man was perfect enough for his daughters. None of the four ever married, and it's at least in part because Lee (a) froze out their suitors and (b) encouraged them to think that they could never find a man as perfect as their father. Also, of course, the Civil War swinging like a scythe through the men of their generation.) And that's sad, but it's also maybe no more than he deserved.

Overall, I found this biography compellingly readable, and found that it, like Gwynne's Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, left me feeling like I could see clearly the irreducible knot at the center of its subject's personality and life.

Five stars

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* He thinks Gettysburg was bad generalship on Lee's part, not good generalship on Meade's. He thinks Lee's strategy of invading the North was better than the strategy (which the Confederacy failed to follow in any event) of a purely defensive war. He thinks Lincoln was wrong to say that Lee's army had to be the target, not Richmond.



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Connecticut Witch Trials: The First Panic in the New World by Cynthia Wolfe Boynton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I have a couple of books with a little bit of a chip on their shoulder about Connecticut's witch trials being unfairly overshadowed by Salem. Granted, it's hard to look away from Salem, but part of the reason for this, as I think Cynthia Wolfe Boynton had to grapple with in writing this book, is that we know so much more about Salem's witches than we do about Connecticut's witches, and there are, of course, more of them. So this is a very skinny book and it's clearly taking up room with whatever it can, including Durer engravings and illustrations from nineteenth century works about, ironically, Salem. It needed a better copy-editor (someone who would catch the use of "ancestors" when what was meant was "descendants" and, my favorite typo, The Witch of Blackboard Pond). The prose is good, but the book is not very well organized, which I think again has something to do with the skimpiness of the material. Not all of its sources are reliable---or even worth quoting (the imaginative description of an imaginary witchcraft trial from Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly in 1881 that makes the glaring error of having the female suspect searched for witch's teats by MEN, like, why is this even HERE?).

Two and a half stars, round up to three.




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Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War by Ernest B. Furgurson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Biography of Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War. This is not as good a book as Nelson Lankford's Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital, but it offers a panoramic view of Richmond and a good sense of what the Civil War looked like from that geographic and political position. Most of Furguson's sources are, inevitably, white Richmonders and (at the end) white Yankees. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of Black viewpoints, even if only by unpacking more carefully what the white people wrote, but by and large Furguson is not really interested in unpacking what his sources say; his project is clearly to synthesize his array of sources into a coherent narrative.



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