and you will defend them as if they were literally your own body.

Corn Flakes and Coup D'Etats: "Bananas were available in the United States immediately following the Civil War. But they were a luxury item, like caviar, consumed more for status than taste (plantains, for cooking, however, had been a staple in the southern parts of the hemisphere since Spanish times). The bananas North Americans ate were sold at a dime a piece—about two dollars today—and came peeled, sliced, and wrapped in foil, mostly to prevent the fruit's suggestive shape from offending Victorian sensibilities, according to Virginia Scott Jenkins, author of Bananas: An American History. Shorn and overripe, these bananas offered hardly a clue that they'd one day become sowidespread" (52).

"The desire to remember unites our reasons for building for the living and for the dead. As we put up tombs, markers and mausoleums to memorialise lost loved ones, so do we construct and decorate buildings to help us recall the important but fugitive parts of ourselves. The pictures and chairs in our homes are equivalents--scaled for our own day, attuned to the demands of the living--of the giant burial mounds of Palaeolithic times. Our domestic fittings, too, are memorials to identity" (124).

Body : "One of the notions records in Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (Jacques Barzun translation): 'If we knew how our body is made, we wouldn't dare move.' Is this any way to think about our language (not to mention our ideas)? I don't think so. I think we want to know as much about our vowels as about our bowels. Which is to say, not too much, but it is interesting to note that vowel comes from the Old French vouel, which comes from the Latin littera vocalis, voiced letter; and bowel comes from the Latin for 'sausage,' botulus, hence the severe food poisoning named Botulismus by Germans, who know sausage, all of which raises (no, it does not beg) this question: Is it such as great idea, after all, to avoid knowing how sausage is made?" (40).

" Moab was the incest-born son of Lot, who had fled with his family from the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. After Lot's wife had been turned into a pillar of salt because she dared to look at the burning cities, Lot's eldest daughter fed him homemade wine and seduced him so the family line would not die out. The offspring of that drunken incest was Moab, who became the king of the high plain at the eastern edge of the Dead Sea that eventually took his name ...Moab would also be the place were Ruth would flee to the 'alien corn' in one of the most famous love stories of the Bible" (132).

Vaseline Glass

"Pleasure Seas" by Elizabeth Bishop, 1939

In the walled off swimming-pool the water is perfectly flat.
The pink Seurat bathers are dipping themselves in and out
Through a pane of bluish glass.

The cloud reflections pass
Huge amoeba-motions directly through
The beds of bathing caps: white, lavender, and blue.
If the sky turns gray, the water turns opaque,
Pistachio green and Mermaid Milk.
But out among the keys
Where the water goes its own way, the shallow pleasure seas
Drift this way and that mingling currents and tides
In most of the colors that swarm around the sides
Of soap-bubbles, poisonous and fabulous.
And the keys float lightly like rolls of green dust.
From an airplane the water's heavy sheet
Of glass above a bas-relief:
Clay-yellow coral and purple dulces
And long, leaning, submerged green grass.
Across it a wide shadow pulses.
The water is a burning-glass
Turned to the sun
That blues and cools as the afternoon wears on,
And liquidly
Floats weeds, surrounds fish, supports a violently red bell-buoy
Whose neon-color vibrates over it, whose bells vibrate
Through it. It glitters rhythmically
To shock after shock of electricity.
The sea is delight. The sea means roomIt is a dance-floor, a well ventiliated ballroom.
From the swimming-pool or from the deck of a ship
Pleasures strike off humming, and skip
Over the tinsel surface: a Grief floats off

Spreading out thin like oil. And Love

Sets out determinedly in a straight line,

One of his burning ideas in mind,
Keeping his eyes on
The bright horizon,
But shatters immediately, suffers refraction,
And comes back in shoals of distraction.
Happy the people in the swimming-pool and on the yacht,
Happy the man in that airplane, likely as not--
And out there where the coral reef is a shelf
The water runs at it, leaps, throws itself
Lightly, lightly, whitening in the air:
An acre of cold white spray is there
Dancing happily by itself.