What’s the point?
About a decade ago there were a solid three years I never got sick. No cold, no mono, no pink eye, no flu, no coughing, no puking. It ended on a December night after a band played at The Yellow House (a house that was yellow where bands played in the living room). I walked home from The Yellow House, opened my fridge, took out some rice pudding, ate it, and spent the night puking.
At that time I worked at a restaurant that served, among other things, spanakopita. We’d bake it in a large pan. The edges would burn. We’d cut the burnt edges off, put them on a plate, set the plate on a counter in the kitchen, and snack on them throughout the day. A couple months after my rice pudding puke, the burnt edges of spanakopita sat on the counter from 10AM until 4PM. At 4PM I ate the burnt edges. At 12AM I puked.
On a Saturday afternoon during graduate school I made a video with a couple pals where I ran down an alley and puked. I chugged a large bottle of lukewarm V8 strawberry banana smoothie to induce the puke. All three of these pukes came from consuming something that confused my stomach. Rice pudding, spanakopita, V8 smoothie broadly fall in the category of “food” but my gut disagreed and expelled the confusion.
One of the bands that played at The Yellow House the night I puked was a local and unintelligent punk band with a song about puking. The song had two parts. The first part listed different causes of puke the singer did not want to experience: drinking too much milk, motion sickness, food poisoning. In the second part the singer shouts “I wanna puke” while someone else shouts “puke! puke! puke!” The singer longs for some kind of pure, authentic puke without a cause.
I don’t know how to achieve a pure authentic puke. Every puke I had had a cause, a confusion. Some parts of my body (eyes and mouth) recognized rice pudding, spanakopita, and V8 as food while another part of my body (stomach) did not. The category of food got confused. I temporarily transgressed the the boundary between what belongs inside and what belongs outside. I polluted myself, my body got confused, and the confusion was cleared up by puke.
When I wasn’t sick for so long I guess the boundary between me and the outside was less rigid, more forgiving (or something else). Time fortified my boundaries. My body is less accepting of weird stuff. It’s probably good. I check expiration dates now. Sometimes it feels like a loss.
There is very little puke in the following books, but they all blur and cross boundaries. They confuse and pollute categories. Unlike me, these books can handle the confusion. Enjoy.
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo by Mary Douglas. First published in 1966.
A friend texted me and asked that I read Purity and Danger, so I did.
Some anthropologists believe religious rituals of cleanliness have instrumental purposes. Keeping clean, avoiding dirt provides physical health and safety as well as spiritual. Mary Douglas is unconvinced. Instead, dirt is “matter out of place” which suggests, “a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system.” Keeping dirt away isn’t for health but for creating and maintaining systems, classifications, and boundaries.
Dirt is matter out of place and pollution is when an “object or idea [is] likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications.” Attributing danger to dirt and pollution is a way of ensuring class conformity. Reading the dietary restrictions in Leviticus finds that “holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused.” Anything that confuses a class is unclean and unholy. Animals that creep, crawl, and swarm are dirty because creeping, crawling, and swarming are “indeterminate forms of movement” that cause confusion. Livestock can be eaten. Livestock have cloven feet and chew cud. Animals with cloven feet that do not chew cud and animals that chew cud but do not have cloven feet cannot be eaten because they pollute the category of livestock. V8 strawberry banana smoothie is sold as food, but like locusts and pigs, that’s a confusion.
As a librarian I’m pretty into classification. What Mary Douglas calls unclean or unholy in systems of religion Melissa Adler would call perverse in the Library of Congress Classification System (see Most Useful Information February 2022). In Purity and Danger things that don’t fit into classes provided by a classification system are essential to the classification system. Classification creates boundaries. For boundaries to be meaningful there needs to be something out of bounds. The same is true for libraries. “Novel” is only a meaningful category of book because there exist books that are not novels, but no matter how many decimal places we incorporate or how many subject headings we create some items simply won’t fit. The religious rituals of Purity and Danger demonstrate ways to acknowledge things that don’t fit and learn from them. Rituals clarify confusion while reinforcing the boundaries that cause the confusion.
Rules for avoiding filth are obnoxious, especially for women. Enga women cannot come into contact with men when menstruating because it might cause “persistent vomiting” (a cause the puke song overlooked). Menstruating Lele women cannot go near fire. If they need to cook something they have to find a friend to do it for them. Menstruating Lele women are not allowed near forests because their presence might ruin hunting for months.
I asked my friend what he got from the book. He mentioned a Lele ritual, “where they exalt the most defiled animal in their ecosystem -- the pangolin. They all eat of this animal after ritual slaughter in order to teach one another about its danger and remind themselves why it isn’t to be eaten at any other time. Vaccination is our modern equivalent to eating the pangolin, and I felt as if the book contained some answer as to why so many refused to take part.”
The pangolin ritual works because everyone agrees to a system and adheres to its boundaries and classifications. I’m not sure we have that.
Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval. First published in 2009. Translated into English from Norwegian by Marjam Idriss. Published by Verso in 2018.
Paradise Rot does look away from menstruation the way Enga and Lele people try to. Early in the book Jo, the narrator, gets her period and it’s described as a rotten apple core dissolving and leaking.
Jo flies from Norway to Aybourne, a fictional Australian city, for college. Her first couple weeks are spent in a hostel with other international students. She struggles to find permanent housing. When she does it’s in an old warehouse with a woman a couple years older named Carral. Carral brings home a lot of apples. They eat some but many go bad. Carral thinks they’re gross, so Jo puts them in the trash outside. Jo tells Carral about worms that bore into apples and drown in rotten, melting apple flesh. Jo drinks apple juice and it’s faintly fermented. The warehouse used to be a brewery.
In a biology textbook Jo reads that all natural objects belong to one of two categories: the living and nonliving. It tells her that in the world of the living there is “a hierarchy where each level of the biological chain feeds off of the level below.” The warehouse she lives in is growing grass, moss, and mushrooms. It houses spiders, insects, worms, and people. The house is both inside and outside, both living and nonliving, both paradise and rot.
Paradise Rot defies the rules of Purity and Danger. Jo and Carral live in a old brewery where everything crosses and confuses categories. Brewing beer requires fermentation. Fermentation turns sugar to alcohol. It makes fresh things rotten. But the fermented sugar is meant to be consumed, confusing the boundary between fresh and rotten, food and poison. Jo and Carral go from roommates, to friends, to rivals, to lovers, to nothing. Constantly shifting classification from fresh to rotten, back to fresh, and back to rotten.
A hunky guy named Pym lives next door. He writes poetry and courts Jo. He wrote a book and he wants Jo to read it. They sleep together. She doesn’t read his book and avoids him. Jo and Carral become inseparable. At a work party people think they are lovers. They aren’t. They grow apart. Jo decides to move out. Carral and Pym sleep together. They both want to be higher than Jo on the biological chain so they can feed on her. They want to hurt her. It works, briefly. Jo reads Pym’s book but only likes the lines Carral added at the end. Jo and Carral have a weird, surrealist fulfillment of desire. Jo moves out.
Paradise Rot is exactly what anyone familiar with Jenny Hval’s music would expect. Disdain for rules and the establishment. Course descriptions of bodies and fluids. She retells the story of the Fall where the apple Adam and Eve eat adheres itself between Eve’s legs to rot and leak. Generally, a lot of peeing.
Paradise Rot isn’t uncovering the seedy, dirty underside of paradise. Hval isn’t suggesting people believe paradise is great when in truth it’s rotten. Or she is, but she celebrates rot as an essential and underappreciated aspect of paradise. Like Purity and Danger this book believes that the dirt of a given system is an essential part of the system. Unlike Purity and Danger Hval doesn’t need a ritual to accept the dirt. The dirt is what makes it paradise.
The Great Medieval Yellows by Emily Wilson. First published in 2016 by Caranam Books.
Emily Wilson writes poems that describe paintings. The paintings are of nature. She also writes poems that describe personal encounters with nature. It’s hard to tell when a poem describes nature and when it describes a painting of nature, blurring the distinction. An experience of a painting is as terrific as an experience of nature. Many poems describe colors. Some colors are qualified by plants, “radishy-pink.” The pigments of paint are made from various minerals. A painting represents nature and is a product of nature. Rather than blurring distinctions these poems wonder if there is are legitimate distinctions.
In “Siphonophore” Wilson describes a siphonophore, which looks like an individual organism but isn’t. It’s a “colonial organism” composed of several distinct organisms. Something that appears to be one is actually many. There is only “the illusion of ‘rightness’ or ‘oneness’.”
The poems lack a recognizable subject because acknowledging a subject incorrectly creates a distinction between one and many, “just look at you/button yourself back/the membranes held/down, in the dark/variorum.” The siphonophore is being told to hide its tentacles and look like a single object perpetuating the illusion of oneness.
A variorum is a book full of notes and edits by various commentators. It looks like a single book by a single author, but it isn’t. It is made by many. Another illusion of oneness. A painting appears whole but is made up of many different brushstrokes, many different colors of paint A color seems whole but is made up of various minerals. A poem seems whole but is made up of various words, sentences, lines, rhymes, what have you. A person seems whole but is made up of bacteria, experiences, other people, animals, plants, minerals, poems, what have you. There is no discrete individual. There is no complete category. There is only confusion.
“Fondo D’Oro” suggests staying outside clear definition where everything is gray and unconstructed, “let the world go/where it can keep/in the gray codes/unconstructed.” Lingering in unconstructed spaces is maybe what Wilson calls in “Machinamenta” a “morbid endurance.” We need to let V8 strawberry banana smoothie into our world because it is the gray, unconstructed area between food and poison. Life is full of “morbid endurances” and “soft resilience” is how to keep from puking.
Ginger Bread by Helen Oyeyemi. First published by Riverhead books in 2019.
No matter how nice soft resilience sounds, ignoring boundaries sometimes causes puke. Perdita wants to cross severely constructed borders to her mother’s home country, Druhastrana, and ends up with food poisoning.
Harriet and her daughter Perdita live in England. Harriet makes gingerbread. One day she comes home and Perdita is sick making puke on the floor because of gingerbread. She loses her ability to speak. As speech returns Perdita swears she wasn’t trying to kill herself. She thought eating gingerbread would take her to Druhastrana, a country that either does or doesn’t exist. Harriet grew up in Druhastrana but left as a young woman with her mother Margot. Perdita promises to describe her journey to Druhastrana if Harriet first tells the story of how she immigrated to England.
Harriet grew up on a farm. A girl, Gretel, went missing and Harriet found her in a well. Gretel climbed out of the well with two pupils in each eye. She was a changeling and Harriet’s best friend. When they separated they agreed as adults they’d meet in one of three places. They pick the places by putting pins in a map. Harriet leaves the farm to work in a gingerbread factory. The gingerbread factory is like a prison and a brothel. She is paid fake money and makes a shiv out of gingerbread. Harriet and Margot elect to be drugged and shipped to England. They can’t remember their voyage. They live with rich Kercheval family until they believe Ari Kercheval kills people for money.
Gabriel Kercheval, the son of Ari, gets Harriet pregnant but doesn’t want a child. The Kerchevals don’t want anything to do with Margot and Harriet. Margot makes money as an interior designer. They move out of the Kerchevals and never see them again. Until Perdita hires a private investigator to find the Kerchevals. The PI is actually Remy Kercheval, Gabriel’s cousin, who leads Perdita to grandma and grandpa Kercheval. They give her poison and she bakes it into a batch of gingerbread believing it’ll take her to Druhastrna. Instead Perdita pukes on the floor. Harriet and Perdita reconcile with the Kerchevals. Together they start a charity and look for Gretel in the three pre-selected places. They are all houses and they are told the houses are definitely not haunted. The houses seems kind of haunted. Gretel is in neither of the first two houses. They can’t go to the third house because it is a gingerbread house floating in the sea that sails away whenever approached. Harriet decides to let go of her past. She doesn’t need to find Gretel anymore.
Gingerbread plays with fairytale tropes and is annoying. I read it for a book club I host at my library. I first heard of the book by googling “good book club books.” Three people e-mailed me to say they would read the book and come to the book club. Another person officially RSVP’d online. The library bought five copies of Gingerbread. Quickly they all checked out. Someone put a copy on hold. I loaned my personal copy to a student. At least seven students were reading Gingerbread. I came up with questions to ask students in order to cause a discussion and show them I’m smart. Questions like, “What does gingerbread symbolize?” and, “Is this a novel about immigration?” and “Is Druhastrana meant to evoke a post-Brexit Britain?” Zero people came to the book discussion. I didn’t ask any questions. Either folks didn’t attend because of several severe weather warnings, or they didn’t finish the book, or they were getting wild with friends, or they were studying, or they were at home puking.
These are great reviews, Tim, thank you.
I started Gingerbread a while ago but never finished it.