#the second body

[draculasdaughter]

[Lila] makes the reader feel her horror in her pungent experience of other humans. She compares human bodies with inert objects and animals, and describes her disgust at this perception. These bodies are too physical to be bearable. How poorly made we are, how insufficient. To see the body as physical is to notice its inbuilt mortality.

— Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body, 2017.

[random-bookquotes]

To the person who believes that light symbolizes all that's good and draped across this world: One should believe ancient myths contradict that way things are.

Claire Donato, The Second Body

[random-bookquotes]

To live without The healing properties of books To read alone

Claire Donato, The Second Body

[fairest]

When I read Shylock’s speech, something else kept coming to mind but I couldn’t remember what it was.

When I read Shylock’s speech, something else kept coming to mind but I couldn’t remember what it was. It was on the tip of my tongue, and it haunted me while I planned my seminars on The Merchant of Venice. I couldn’t think, and then in the evening I heard it on an advert for a probiotic yogurt drink. It was a song by Nina Simone. Like Shylock, she makes a case for her body. She asks: What happens to a human from whom everything beyond her body has been taken away? What happens if you take away her shoes, money, class, skirts, sweater perfume, bed, mind, mother, culture, friends, schooling, love, name, ticket, token, God, father, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, children, love, earth, studies, land, country, wine, freedom, god, water, air, smokes, mind and sweets. What does she have left? She’s got hair, ears, nose, mouth, smile, tongue, chin, neck, boobs, back, sex, arms, hands, fingers, legs, feet, toes. She’s got blood, brains, heart, liver. 

Simone’s song and Shylock’s speech give their bodies a scary human dignity, which doesn’t seem to come so easily to most people. The popular use of Simone’s song -- I hear it everywhere -- continues the violence on the body that the song attempts to repossess: nobody with any sense of respect would use Shylock’s representation of the male Jewish body to sell yogurt-based drinks. 

-- Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body (2018)

[fairest]

We keep the needs of animals

We keep the needs of animals well away from our language -- even death in the abattoir has to be described as humane or inhumane, as if the animals we are slaughtering were human, simply because we have no words to express respect for a body which is not human.

--Daisy Hildyard, from The Second Body (2018)

[dannielschoonebeek]

SPILLS

Claire Donato, author of the newly published poetry collection The Second Body and my tourmate for the next week, whipped together this little supermarket disaster poster for our impending dooms. Come find us and watch us clean up on aisle six this week. xx