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Craddock’s own prim, starched lines are not to my taste. I enjoy a man who’s kissed with a yeasty beastliness.
You sit at a bar and you’re gifted with that feeling of utopia peculiar to places frequented by wanderers. Hotels are like train travel, like early-morning pillow talk with a stranger. They allow you to occupy a space that’s caught in indefiniteness.
Unlike the man who flicked his glances toward me like a cigarette in the general direction of an ashtray, this young man met my gaze in the mirror and held it steady.
Preverbal, love is the smell of a known body, the touch of a recognized hand, the blurred face in a haze of light. Words come, and love sharpens. Love becomes describable, narratable, relatable. Over time, one love comes to lay atop another, a mother’s love, a father’s love, a lover’s love, a friend’s love, an enemy’s love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of smiles and cries in the dark, of half-hushed pleasures and heart-cracking pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in embellished bricolage. One love coats another, like the clear pages of an
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We women have an emotional wiliness that shellacs us in a glossy patina of caring.
The only people to whom a lifestyle comes naturally are the very rich or the exceptionally famous. Everyone else is just trying to hardscrabble an existence about which they don’t feel an unendurable level of shame.
I rather enjoyed being objectified. I like it when men look at me as if they want to devour me. I find it deeply entertaining. It becomes annoying only when they start talking, as if I’d have any interest in anything that comes out of their mouths.
The human body holds 66 pounds of comestible meat, on average, more than you might expect, given how much of humans is inedible.
You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy, moral business, and feel like you are a better person.
During the time span of our dalliance, I enjoyed many. Some were firefly fleeting in the warm belly of a July night—a tinkling cocktail party, twinkling lights, bare shoulders, sun-warmed flesh, the moist air salt-laden, wrapping you in an embrace even before you touched. Some were quicksilver flashes on trips, metallic clanking trysts thrusting like pistons and groaning with stress. Some slipped like silver slivers in hotels, motels, inns, and pensioni, fleshy shivers in crisp sheets, kicking the martial corners asunder. Some, very few, occurred in my apartment, the unfamiliar masculine funk
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I was beginning to find it laborious—it wasn’t the seduction, exactly. I looked good, and I’ve always been as charming as a hungry cat when I needed to be. It was more that performing the dance had grown tedious. I didn’t want to tell someone my history; I didn’t want to be bothered to invent a new one. I wanted Marco and all our weight, all our wrinkles, all our textures, all our complexities.
A beef cow shits up to fifteen times a day, a total of sixty-five pounds of poop, the weight of the average nine-year-old child.
An average cow produces 490 pounds of trimmed, edible meat; it also produces about 12 tons of shit, or 24,000 pounds, during its lifespan.
in the 1930s, there were 5,000,000 more American farmers than there are now, not quite a hundred years later, and these millions of farmers grew a wider range of foodstuffs on these predominantly family-owned-and-operated farms. Most important, these farms don’t exist today.
The USDA, for all its questionable wisdom, has eight rather serviceable categories for meat: Prime, Choice, Select, Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter, and Canner.
There’s no good way to turn animals into meat. Statistically, traditional stunning and shochet killing fail at about the same rate, roughly ten percent of the time.
One dead cow can garner more than sixty different cuts of beef in as many as eight grades of quality.
