"... James Joyce wrote in a letter to his brother at the beleaguered age of 25.... Martin Amis... and Vladimir Nabokov... suffered 'catastrophic tooth-loss' while in their 40s... Virginia Woolf['s] teeth were pulled on the bizarre theory that they caused her mental disorders.... Dostoevsky's Underground Man masochistically glories in the 'malignant' pain in his mouth. Handsome Count Vronsky is deformed by toothache after Anna Karenina's [SPOILER ALERT] suicide. Abscesses and botched extractions mark the decline of the Buddenbrook clan. John Updike's 1955 short story 'Dentistry and Doubt' places a seminary student in the dentist's chair and carries out a primer on theodicy. 'Even his toothbrush,' thinks the young cleric, his mouth filled with metal instruments, 'which on good days presented itself as an acolyte of matinal devotion, today seemed an agent of atheistic hygiene, broadcasting the hideous fact of bacteria. Why had God created them . . . ?'"
The beginning a Wall Street Journal piece about a novel where the main character is a dentist.
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9 comments:
This was all before the communists successfully plotted to fluoridate our water.
Crazy Street Corner Guy Off His Meds Says:
Teeth. Teeth are where our bones announce themselves to our view. A stranger's smile -- yes, a stranger, smiling -- this reminds us subconsciously of our own skeleton, bones helter skelter in the hands and the feet, mostly hidden, bones from which our organs droop like the butcher's meat from steel hooks. Eyes are windows, they are the windows into the soul, but teeth are the doorway into the dark, dank mystery of our gelatinous form, kept tenuously erect by a tree of marrow bark. Our fingernails grow, our toenails grow, but our teeth: it is the gums that recede, abscess, bleed. Behind our cage of teeth we wither and disease makes its way through us in ways little and big, disease swims through us like fish going upstream to spawn. With teeth we tear at flesh, meat fulfilling meat; toothmarks in a buttock or thigh can lead us to the savage criminal. Harvey Keitel knows this, his teeth have stories of blood and flesh. When he is consumed by his passions Harvey Keitel pulls loose a tooth and yells at God, it is Harvey's skull, not God's, and his teeth will not give away his crimes, he will forever bite the flesh in a torrid fever, it is his way. I need to be careful of Harvey's influence, it is already under my skin no matter how much I scratch, I scratch until the scabs break loose.
What the hell are you referring to here?
President Washington had a certain amount of vanity. He would put in his false teeth on state occasions and when greeting visitors. These teeth were quite painful to wear. One of the reasons he declined a third term was to spare himself this agony. Bad teeth have shaped our republic.
The article is behind a pay wall. What's the novel's name? (Hope it isn't Novocaine because that's already been done.
gunter grass local anaesthetic
For a great movie with a strong dental subtext, see 'Reuben, Reuben' with Tom Conti and Kelly McGillis, made back when Ms. McGillis was still smoking hot & still liked boys (NTTAWWT).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084591/
PS: Protip- The WSJ paywall can usually be bypassed by googling the article title & clicking on the link.
Are you sure Betamax didn't write that?
I think it's safe to say that Marathon Man changed the way a generation looked at dentistry ...
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