Book talkin'

Jeff Wright's Yoga Dubuque (Rivercross Publishing, 2000) is a unique collection of accessible writings about the philosophy and practice of yoga as it relates to the place where the author lives, a small city in Iowa on the Mississippi River: Dubuque, my hometown.

Wright considers carp in Catfish Creek and the concept of titiksha ("unreasoning persistence"), describes both mourning doves and asanas (yoga postures).

"I walk downtown along a busy street past an industrial laundry and the newspaper building, and yet look to the right into the deep shade of a forest hung with thick wild grape vines, tumbled with rock and fallen trees, remarkably free of human debris for it so inaccessible..." This must be near University Avenue and Bluff Street--I used to poke around here in the "University Woods" as a child.

"I want to push my hands with all my might against the floor and know it will not move. I want to breathe in and feel my mind become charged with images, then to breathe out and feel it empty and clean. I want the world of sequence, weight, and the slowly ticking clock.

I know I will continue to desire. That is also woven into the fabric of my home world. Preferably, though, those desires shall follow a will that flicks as lightly and wisely as a snake's tongue, and like a snake, totally flattened to the immovable, I will move forward with... careful and considerate grace. And, when, perhaps, and only when, my mind is completely stabilized in this, my home world, will I glide on to no mind and no world."

Dream Whip (P.O. Box 53832, Lubbock, TX 79453; $3) is the best zine I?ve read in the past couple months. In issue #11 its Texas-bred editor writes poetically and perceptively about New York City (and other places), describing typically overlooked beautiful things which are decaying, dying, or covered with grime. Something about it retains a glimmer of hope in the face of difficult reality.

Ed Abbey's Desert Solitaire (McGraw-Hill, 1968): tall tales and poetic essays about life and death in the desert, to be savored, read aloud, reread, quoted, declaimed from podiums, and remembered.

The beauty of getting lost, the psychic meaning of wilderness, how (and why) to counter road-building in national parks, smells and sounds of a flash flood comin' down a canyon, the truth about quick sand, visions from past generations who lived within the Grand Canyon: Abbey at his best is like Mark Twain meeting John Muir, rumbling with an incomparably reverent irreverence.

Read this book.

"The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning. Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom."

"The beauty of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful..."

"A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us--like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness--that out *there* is a different world. , older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of [humans] as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a while we are again able to see, as a child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earthm able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures." (From "Cliffrose and Bayonets")

Andrew Boyd's Daily Afflictions (Norton, forthcoming) is a dark, humorous, and true book which turns "daily affirmations" on their head in the spirit of curvyedge.

For example:

"When you look around you, it is easy to feel hopeless. Things always seem to be getting worse, not better. Even those of us still working for a better tomorrow can have a bad day, a bad week, or lifetime, when all seems lost. But such a lapse of faith should not be feared. On the contrary, you should welcome it as a revelation. Our situation is hopeless. Our cause is impossible. You are faced with a stark choice. Do you dedicate yourself to an impossible cause? or do you look after your own, making do as best you can? The choice is clear: You must dedicate yourself to an impossible cause. Why? Because we are all incurable. Because solidarity is a form of tenderness. Because the simple act of caring for the world is itself a victory. Take a stand--not because it will lead to anything, but because it is the right thing to do, We never know what can or can't be done, only what must be done.

I dedicate myself to an impossible cause."

I've recently read part of Eduardo Galeano's Upside Down (Metropolitan Books, 2000), including this from "The Right to Rave":

"Let's set our sights beyond the abominations of today to divine another possible world:

the air shall be cleansed of all poisons except those born of human fears and human passions

in the streets, cars shall be run over by dogs

people shall not be driven by cars, or programmed by computers, or bought by supermarkets, or watched by televisions

the TV set shall no longer be the most important member of the family and shall be treated like an iron or a washing machine

people shall work for a living instead of living for work

written into law shall be the crime of stupidity, committed by those who live to have or to win, instead of living just to live like the bird that sings without knowing it and the child who plays unaware that he or she is playing

in no country shall young men who refuse to go to war go to jail, rather only those who want to make war

economists shall not measure living standards by consumption levels or the quality of life by the quantity of things

cooks shall not believe that lobsters love to be boiled alive

historians shall not believe that countries love to be invaded

politicians shall not believe that the poor love to eat promises

earnestness shall no longer be a virtue, and no one shall be taken seriously who can't make fun of himself

death and money shall lose their magical powers, and neither demise nor fortune shall make a virtuous gentleman of a rat

no one shall be considered a hero or a fool for doing what he believes is right instead of what serves him best

the world shall not wage war on the poor but rather on poverty, and the arms industry shall have no alternative but to declare bankruptcy

food shall not be a commodity not shall communications be a business, because food and communications are human rights

no one shall die of hunger, because no one shall die from overeating

street children shall not be treated like garbage, because there shall be no street children

rich kids shall not be treated like gold, because there shall be no rich kids

education shall not be the privilege of those who can pay

the police shall not be the curse of those who cannot pay

justice and liberty, Siamese twins condemned to live apart, shall meet again and be reunited, back to back...

in Argentina, the crazy women of the Plaza de Mayo shall be held up as examples of mental health because they refused to forget in a time of obligatory amnesia

the Church, holy mother, shall correct the typos on the tablets of Moses and the Sixth Commandment shall dictate the celebration of the body

the Church shall also proclaim another commandment, the one God forgot: You shall love nature, to which you belong...

the despairing shall be paired and the lost shall be found, for they are the ones who despaired and lost their way from so much lonely seeking

we shall be compatriots and contemporaries of all who have a yearning for justice and beauty, no matter where they were born or where they lived, because the borders of geography and time shall cease to exist

perfection shall remain the boring privilege of the gods, while in our bungling, messy world every night shall be lived as if it were the last and every day as if it were the first."

James M. Cahalan's Edward Abbey: A Life (University of Arizona Press, 2001) is a useful biography of the prickly desert philosopher, novelist, and essayist, based partly conversations with Abbey's friends, family, and colleagues, as well as on unpublished material from the author's papers. More words on this forthcoming.

Barbara Seyda's Nomads of a Desert City: Personal Stories from Citizens of the Street (University of Arizona Press, 2001) is a small book of oral history and photographic portraits of thirteen homeless people in Tucson, Arizona, ranging from a 17-year-old mother to a nonagenarian can collector. While some of these people are impressively resilient survivors, others seem barely to hang on to life. The book humanizes, putting not only faces but character to homelessness, but it is also depressing. A four-page resource guide at the end focuses mostly on Tucson services.

Canadian animator Graham Annable's Grickle (Alternative Comics , 2001) is an often subtle and nicely understated collection of cartoon stories. Best, I think, is a 4-page piece titled "Articulate Conception" in which a writer's imagination and fantasy lead to disillusionment without totally ruiining the joy of having created.

Erik Farseth's Wipe Away My Eyes: Underground Culture and Politics: Volume I (Abandoned House Books , 2001) is an oral history of "post-punk... independent record labels, book distributors, anarchist community centers, mini-comics, puppeteers, pirate radio stations, protestors and zines," with a focus on Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Funded in part by a grant from the Jerome Foundation and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, the book covers significant ground and I had high hopes for it. Unhappily it falls short of being a useful history. There's no index, for one thing, and not even a table of contents. Page numbers disappear for 28 pages at a time, and some pages are confusingly deranged without warning, so that a section about Artpaper magazine begins in mid-current on page 99, while it actual begins one page 151. It's also apparent that names mentioned in interviews haven't been checked: Lane Relyea is given as "Relyey" and Margaret Rog as Margaret "Brogh," for example.

There's significent material in here, about the late Emma Center and Epicenter (San Francisco) infoshops, for example, but it will take some mining to get at it. I like the book's zine-y look, its original woodcut prints, and the low price ($9.99). Any chance of a second edition, Erik?

From Hanif Kureishi's short novel Intimacy:

"How unsettling is desire! That devil never sleeps or keeps still. Desire is naughty and doesn't conform to our ideals, which is why we have such a need of it. Desire mocks all human endeavor and makes it worthwhile. Desire is the original anarchist and undercover agent--no wonder people want it arrested and kept in a safe place. And just when we think we've got desire under control it lets us down or fills us with hope. Desire makes me laugh because it makes fools of us all."

"What puzzles me more than anything? The fact that I have struggled with the same questions and obsessions, and with the same dull and useless responses, for so long, for the past ten years, without experiencing any increase in knowledge, or any release from the need to know, like a rat on a wheel. How can I move beyond this? I am moving out. A breakdown is a breakthrough is a breakout. That is something."

"One makes mistakes, gets led astray, digresses. If one could see one's crooked progress as a kind of experiment, without wishing for an impossible security--nothing interesting happens without daring--some kind of stillness might be attained."

"You can, of course, experiment with your own life. Maybe you shouldn't do it with other people's."

"If living is an art it is a strange one, an art of everything, and particularly of spirited pleasure. Its developed form would involve a number of qualities sewn together: intelligence, charm, good fortune, unforced virtue, along with wisdom, taste, knowledge, understanding, and the recognition of anguish and conflict as part of life. Wealth wouldn't be essential, but the intelligence to accumulate it where necessary might be. The people I can think of who live with talent are the ones who have free lives, conceiving of great schemes and seeing them fulfilled. They are, too, the best company."

"Tonight... I will set the record crooked."

"The world is a skirt I want to lift up."

"He said to me once, 'You remind me of someone who only ever reads the first chapter of a book. You never discover what happens next.'"

I've been remiss in noting all the things I've been reading. Besides a ton of zines hauled home last month from the third Underground Publishing Conference in Bowling Green, Ohio, I've read most of Mitchell Duneier's Sidewalk (Farrar, 1999), a book about African American street vendors of books and magazines in Greenwich Village); started a new biography of Ed Abbey (details here eventually); and dipped into several just-published poetry collections, including Zorica Petic's Cascadilla Creek (Kearsarge Mountain Books, 2001) from which this comes:

Skinny Dipping

Long ago
a friend and I skinny
dipped in a creek, because
the creek asked us to.
By a deserted railroad track.
The rumble grew closer,
and before we could modernize,
a freight train passed
within judgment.
The shame over nothing
had arrived;
we knew it and could laugh.
Louise is gone.
I can still turn to the scene
and draw from it
two young girls
in young water splashed
under a clean sky.

B. Traven's The Cotton-Pickers(Hill and Wang, 1969) is a Mexico-set working class novel that reads like a cross between Jack London and Edward Abbey. Among other things, it contains the most fascinating account of a cattle drive I've ever read.

"And now the herd had to be cut out. I possessed not the slightest notion what was meant by that and how it had to be done. Never in my life had I driven even as few as fifty cattle from one pasture to the next. Now, since Mr. Pratt was hawklike, watching every move I made preparing the herd for the long march, I was forced to show off here and there. If you wish you may call it shameless bluffing. Perhaps you are right. If I had never tried bluffing at some critical occasions in my existence on earth I would have lost my life long, long ago."

"Ingratitude is so much a part of human character that it is best to take it for granted and not feel hurt by it."

"Snakes don't bother me. And in any case they'd hardly want to get up onto the table. And even if they did, it wasn't sure they'd bite me. And even if they did bite, they might not be poisonous. If all snakes were poisonous and all of them bit a sleeping man who had done them no harm, I would have been a goner long ago."

"Honor remains upright only if you don't have to starve; for a sense of honor depends on the number of meals you eat each day, how many you would like to eat, and how many you don't eat."

"It's unwise to go drinking with married men. It never does any good. They're a race apart."

"Against National Poetry Month As Such" (a nice rant by Charles Bernstein)

"The motto of...National Poetry Month is: 'Poetry's not so bad, really.'"

Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words (Context Books) is part essay on human/animal communication, part memoir, part philosophy of nature. Jensen is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and writes importantly not just about reconnecting with nature and listening (to animals, for example), but about the psychology of coercion, about isolation and alienation, about interdependence and connectivity.

"I love the land where I live, the trees... How can we be so poor as to define ourselves as an ego tied in a sack of skin, or worse, as lumbering automatons...? We are the relationships we share, we are that process of relating, we are, whether we like it or not, permeable--physically, emotionally, spiritually, experientially--to our surroundings. I am the bluebirds and nuthatches that nest here each spring, and they, too, are me. Not metaphorically, but in all physical truth. I am no more than the bond between us. I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet....

No one emerges from trauma unscarred. Having been severely traumatized, it becomes the work of a lifetime to denormalize the trauma--to recognize it for the aberration it is--and to begin to reinhabit your body, your senses, your mind, to reinhabit relationships, to reinhabit a world you perceive as having betrayed you."

Richard Brautigan's posthumously published "novel" An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey (St. Martin's Press, 2000) seems not fictional but like a journal of the author's own life during 1982, two years before his suicide.

"Instead of having just a few miles and sometimes only inches between my problems, why not increase the distance? It would be nice for a change to have 47 miles between one problem and another, and perhaps in that 47 miles a little peace could grow like daffodils between my problems."

"It is a wooden house in the classic sense of describing a wood house, so the shadows in the house have been here for a long time, shadows to begin with and then decades of shadows added to those shadows..."

"I stared at the telephone, betrayed again by this strange instrument so far removed from nature. I've never seen anything in nature that looked like a telephone. Clouds, flowers, rocks, none of them resemble a telephone."

Ianthe Brautigan's You Can't Catch Death: A Daughter's Memoir (St. Martin's Press, 2000) poignantly describes her life as daughter of alcoholic poet Richard Brautigan--both as a girl while her father was alive and struggling, and as a young mother coming to terms with his suicide (and his unhappy childhood).

"A. Alvarez in his book Suicide: The Savage God, says that suicide is like divorce and that most people who attempt suicide are trying tio get a kind of divorce from life. What Alvaraz says that he realizes after surviving his own suicide attempt is that he could start is life again, the way one might start a new relationship."

Ianthe Brautigan compares rain torrents to her father's tears:

"I sit and rock...
The rain keeps falling.
My father and I have needed to do this for a long time."

From Lola Haskins' Desire Lines (Story Lines Press, 2001):

Love

She tries it on, like a dress.
She decides it doesn't fit.
She starts to take it off.
Her skin comes, too.

Longing

A rich man comes to you.
And he is a good man.
And he kneels at your feet.
And he says, Tell me what
I can do to make you happy.
But you can't answer him.
You can't answer him at all.

Noel Peattie's King Humble's Grave: New Poems (Regent Press, 2001) is dedicated "for Chris, who understands." Though meant for another, I take these words personally. Peattie, you are my distant mentor of sorts. Lone Noel, at home with your cats, listening to the world, missing someone, observing "the tiny ocean of milk/in the bottom of the blue plastic tumbler/swirled up in the center." Keep living and writing, friend.

FROST

Welling past sixty,
my geyser poems
move slowly.

She has returned home
from a late winter visit,
passionate, too brief.

Frost on neighbor's sheep field
this morning.

Ice of great thickness
approaches my salt springs.

In the United States, April has been decreed "National Poetry Month." I roll my eyes at such marketing concepts. Feh! to "national poetry" anyway. Read poetry at dawn, noon, midnight, each day of the year.

From Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy (Harcourt, 2001), translated by Theoharis Constantine Theoharis:

Epic in the Heart

All things with you it seems to me smile affable,
in the mirror of your eyes joy shines back.
Stay, my light, as yet I have not told you even half
those things that grip my heart in passion
and that surge to my lips at just one look from you.
If it is your wish do not speak to me, do not say love's
and adoration's charming words. That you're close here is enough,
that I might say to you I want you, might touch you, breathe
the freshness of the morning that you breathe; and if these
as well you deem excess, that I might see you only!

More poetry, from Eleanor Lerman's The Mystery of Meteors (Sarabande Books, 2001):

If Time Is an Engine

There are sunflowers on the path where I go
and lacewings rising from the fields
With each step I take, I know more surely
that this is the way

If time is an engine, then it was created in a dream
If love is an engine, then the dream weeps
If memory is an engine, then it will carry the dream away

But there are sunflowers on the path where I go
and the dog is at my heel. There is a gate
and a meadow beyond. There is a stream

The sky is blue by day, blue in the evening
but I know the way of the hidden stars
and I'm still alive, I still know secrets
There is nothing I have left undone

So my keys are on the table. You can sell my
clothes. Rust, rust is affecting the machinery
But I am not needed. The machines can be repaired

For if time is a cathedral, then I have lived in the cathedral
If love is a cathedral, then I have lived in splendor
If memory is a cathedral, then I remember everything

but now pass by. And there are sunflowers
on the path where I go. The dog is at my heel

There is a gate and a meadow beyond
There is a stream

I've been dipping into new poetry books frequently, among them Phillis Levin's Mercury (Penguin, 2001), from which comes this:

Morning Exercise

Line by line I unremember you:
Places your mouth hid, and where
Your teeth almost bit through
My skin, leaving a necklace

Whose blue pearls lingered
For days--a few scattered across
My chest, as if you broke a strand
Whenever you left. Say nothing

About how you are, or who
You have been, say nothing
Now that there is nothing to say.

It is useless to ask for a word,
Useless to know what is true.
Line by line I unremember you.

And Christopher Reid's Mermaids Explained (Harcourt, 2001), which includes:

I Disagreed

We visited the famous abbey,
its nettle-spring ruins.
There was not much to see:
gappy crumble,
bare shelter,
for the ghosts of clerics.

Here goose quills
had once illuminated
with their devout scratching
bibles as fat as suitcases.
How unhappy you looked!
"Dead, dead," you said.

I disagreed.
Looking at the neatly arranged
fragments of saints and angels--
here the peep of a foot,
there the tuck of a girdle--
I thought we might have been standing backstage
with all the props
and that anything was likely to happen.

Ed Abbey's Fire on the Mountain (Dial Press, 1962), a novel told from a 12-year-old boy's point of view, describes a summer at Grandfather's ranch as the old man resists eviction by the U.S. Air Force. From a human angle, this book mythologically portrays male heroism: beyond simply being what my pal Cathy would call "guysy", women play distinctly minor and subordinate roles in it. On the other hand, its words about nature inspire real respect. Thus, the typical Abbey read: paradoxical, contentious, sometimes over-simplified, but principled.

"The summer rolled on, hot and dry and beautiful, so beautiful it broke your heart to see it knowing you couldn't see it forever: the purple mountains drifting on the horizon, the pink tassles of the tamarisk, the wild lonely sky, the black buzzards soaring above the whirlwinds, the thunderheads that piled up almost every afternoon trailing a curtain of rain that seldom reached the earth, the stillness of noonday, the sight of the horses rolling in the dust to wash off the sweat and flies, the glamorous sunrises that flooded plain and range with a fantastic, incredible, holy light, the cereus cactus that bloomed and closed on one night only, the moonlight slanting through the open door of my bunkhouse room, the sight and sound of cool water trickling from a spring after a long day in the heat--I could list a thousand things I saw that I'll never forget, a thousand marvels and miracles that pulled at something in my heart which I could not understand."

"I walked on, bruised and tired but vaguely elated."

Jean-Dominque Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Knopf, 1997) is a painstakingly dictated account of life with "locked-in syndrome" after a stroke. The author was able to communicate letter-by-letter by using eyeblinks and an alphabetic board arranged by each letter's frequency of appearance in the French language.

"'Want to play hangman?' asks [10-year-old son] Theophile, and I ache to tell him that I have enough on my plate playing quadriplegic. But my communication systems disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter. So the rule is to avoid impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems that you bat back and forth lke a ball--and I count this forced lack of humor one of the great drawbacks of my condition."

And yet... there is sustenance in memory, beauty, grief, and even anger (at an arrogant, brusque doctor). In the confines of a sort of prison: love of life and the dogged determination not only to experience it but to share it.

I've been reading way more poetry than I've mentioned here. Some of the best: Pablo Neruda's Odes to opposites, selected and illustrated by Ferris Cook, translated by Ken Krabbenhoft (Little, Brown, 1995); Neruda's The yellow heart, translated by William O'Daly (Copper Canyon Press, 1990); and Neruda's Extravagaria, translated by Alistair Reid (University of Texas Press, 1974). All feature Neruda's Spanish language poems, enabling one to read twice, compare, hear an original version, and perhaps rethink the translation.

"Me remito a mi verdad
porque me falta una mentira."

("I turn toward my truth
because I am lacking a lie.") --Pablo N.

Alice Walker's The Way Forward is With a Broken Heart (Random House, 2000) is a collection of "stories that are mostly fiction" about relationships and change, dedicated to "all those who love, and who seek the path instinctively of that which leads us to love, requires us to become intimate with what is foreign, and helps us to grow."

"What I've come to realize about myself is that I honestly like living on the edge, wherever it is; that is where I feel most alive and most free."

"One of the sad things about their relationship was that even though she loved John she was unable to expect the best from him. John thought this was solely his fault, but it wasn't. Orelia had been brought up in a family and a society in which men did not frequently *do* their best in relation to women, but rather a kind of exaggerated approximation of what their male peers told them was correct. Then, too, at a very young age, when she was no more than seven, her older brother, Raymond, gentle and loving, whom she adored, betrayed her [calling her by her other brothers' derisive nickname for her, 'Rhino']. She was shattered and never again really trusted a man not to unexpectedly and obliviously hurt her feelings no matter how much she loved him.

So John was not trusted, no matter what he did, and sometimes he pointed this out to her, but mostly he kept quiet. No matter how many times he proved himself different from other men, in her eyes he always seemed to measure up just the same, and this was depressing. However, he loved Orelia and understood many of the ways she had been hurt by society and her family and empathized with her."

"Orelia and John had been intimate for so long that any little secret kept from him was like a sharp piece of straw in his sock."

"She wanted to be in love with him, not just love him, but she couldn't. That feeling of breathlessness and joy seemed gone from their relationship... the elation and trust she had felt for him seemed to die... not all at once, but bit by bit until the mechanism that tripped the 'being in love' feeling seemed not merely unstuck but uprooted..."

"Suddenly she felt better. She had told him. It was a problem for them to figure out together."

Knut Hamsun's first novel, Hunger, compellingly tells the story of a struggling young writer determined to make a living by his pen, despite the fact that he is literally starving (and despite pride and borderline insanity to which he has degraded physiologically). I first read this and other early (19th century) Hamsun novels as a youth. Now, upon rereading, I find it holds up strongly, though I no longer relate so directly to it.

Bill Holm's The heart can be filled anywhere on earth (Milkweed Editions, 1996) is a big-hearted book about desire, brown bread, piano playing, living fully, the significance of cultural roots, old Icelandic-Americans in smalltown Minnesota, and the power of books and unconditional love. Focusing on the author's own life--family and friends in Minneota, population about 1400--it occasionally strays, as Holm has, to China and Iceland and back. Reading it may make one hungry, curious, a little agitated, and grateful, all at once.

"We were two of the three tallest fellows of the class of 1961, but Charlie is still reasonably gangly, while I had no gangle to start with and never acquired one."

"Americans have always feared the physical world, both of nature and our our own bodies. We live as uncertainly inside our received ideas as we live on the tallgrass prairie. Neither topsoil nor sexual desire bring out our best intelligence or humanity. We attack nature with big machines; we throttle upwellings of desire with disapproval and judgment..."

"To love and respect food is only to be human, to honor desire as it deserves in our too short span of bodily life in this often sweet world."

"Virtuous eating infects Americans at the moment. We eat what no sane person could desire in order to reach some amorphous and ethereal 'higher good,' whether eternal health or political correctness. Desire will neither sink nor elevate us, whatever fashionable illusions we entertain. It is simply desire and makes only the inexorable argument that we are, after all, human. That's it. That's all there is. To long for a crepe, or a square of old bean curd, or a herring, or a dried Madeline, merely qualifies us as card-carrying higher mammals...."

"We cook and eat not only for ourselves, but as an act of community, of love and necessity. That is true even when we dine alone..."

Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: a memoir of anorexia and bulimia (Harper, 1998) is a compelling, painful, elucidating personal look at the author's lifelong struggle with eating disorders. Lucky to be alive after bottoming out at 52 pounds, she wrote this articulate book at age 23.

"Death by starvation is nasty," Hornbacher writes, then describes it in detail, calling an eating disorder "a visual temper tantrum". Years ago I read Kafka's short story, "The Hunger Artist" and Knut Hamsun's Hunger and now I'm thinking about rereading them to compare this real-life account.

"I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic because I was afraid of being human."

"I have not enjoyed writing this book. Making public what I have kept private from those closest to me, and often from myself, all my life, is not exactly my idea of a good time."

"...the hardest decision I've ever made [was] the decision to protect myself no matter what happened. My entire life, I've turned on myself the minute something went wrong, even a tiny little thing."

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