Johannes Göransson - Napalm, Knives And Razor-Blade Symphony

Johannes Göransson, Entrance to a Colonial Pageant in which we all begin to intricate, Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011.


“I don't know where else you could contract the plague in these words but by ten TVs at once. On the TVs play: Salo, the weather channel, 2x Fassbinder (any), Family Double Dare, ads for ground beef, blurry surgical recordings, porno, porno, Anger (all). An 11th TV right behind you will show you yourself reading to the backside of your head. You'll need a machine gun and a body double. You will not feel your disease: as here these words bring such high pleasure: this malaria is fun. It's also fidgety, petrifying, elegantly rash, giddy, stunned. Burroughs and Genet and 'Pac are dead. Long live Göransson.” — Blake Butler

“It would take a miracle to perform this pageant. For a start, you would have to reanimate Charlotte Brontë, Adolf Loos, and Ronald Reagan, and you would need an ungodly amount of wax. Most of the action is obscene, and therefore takes place offstage. The actors enter and report on scenes of spectacular violence that go on all the time every day. The audience is part of the spectacle too. We are all transformed into images somewhere in this script. At one point, all of Hollywood appears onstage on the form of dead horses, perhaps because Hollywood film continues to rely on narrative conventions that it exhausted long ago. The entire world also appears, played by a boy who, in a series of rapid costume changes, puts on increasingly pretty dresses.” — Aaron Kunin

“Voluptuous, turbulent, and focused, inventive and strictly faithful to the performative instability of our queer moment, Johannes Goransson’s new book brings page and stage together in order to put genre (and gender) to a series of on-going tests. Here body and body of work (inextricable) are in a critical condition: subject to an invasive and relentless interpretation producing excessive, unruly 'truths.' Here the debased coin of feeling is rung hard and the 'Authenticity kitsch' of an easily accepted idea of the poetic is returned for a better metal, mined from a deeper vein. The love child—in this book at least—of Sylvia Plath and Antonin Artaud (if one can assign parentage at the end of an orgy?), Goransson gives us realisms complicated and fast enough to believe in. Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate is an immensely important and absolutely thrilling experience. Read this! 'Something tells me he is the poet of social justice. Peekaboo!'” — Laura Mullen

"There was a moment while reading Johannes Göransson’s new book, Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, when I thought of John Miller’s piece Dick/Jane. I believe it was when the character “The Author Function” parenthetically states the action meant to occur to his/her body: “(My naked body is brought out on a mirror, a tin wreath on my messy head, my body smeared in what could be feces, my eyes looking gouged out…).”
In the title of Miller’s piece, we recognize the children’s primer which not only taught students how to read but also how to distinguish between the roles of female and male. Miller takes the paternal law and perverts it: the blonde-haired, blue-eyed female doll is transformed not only into a phallic symbol but also into an indeterminacy that challenges the distinction between black and white. Furthermore, the mound of dung in which the doll head is plunged is a site of the “I” having crossed the boundary of self, or, as Kristeva states, “It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled” [1]. This disturbance (or “intrication”) of subjecthood, gender, and race are currents that run through this pageant of Göransson’s.

The collection (can we call it a collection?) begins with a “Note on the Production,” in which Göransson makes not only a reference to his home state Indiana but also to “[his] daughter Sinead.” In doing so, he establishes the performative nature of the text as well as the author as a character. The characters of author and daughter become conflated with other aspects of the production—there are multiple daughters in the book, so Sinead’s role is clearly present, though it is also interwoven with other characters, primarily through titles designating characters as “daughter.” The real and the fictive are not clearly delineated.
Early in the book, we are plunged into a world that takes the form of a dramatic text, with titles indicating characters and parentheticals indicating stage directions. We are introduced immediately to a key “character” in the performance, The Passenger:
I was admitted. I had to answer questions. Are you gay? Are you a terrorist? Are you a communist?
Here, we become aware that the culture in which the drama is set is one with a notable amount of xenophobia. The Passenger undergoes a mandatory cerebral operation, assisted by a nurse who perceives this passenger as a threat to children and society as a whole. This is a terrifying world we have entered, one that might be likened to a frenzied America souped-up with steroids, LSD, and the rhetoric of fear.
This fear and persecution of “strangeness” is combated through the intrication/blurring of subjecthood. For instance, the character Miss World:
MISS WORLD
(walks on his tip-toes into the middle of the stage. He is wearing only a basketball jersey. He is 5 years old. He is covered in fine dust. The audience is covered in fine dust. He turns to look at us and the loudspeakers emit the following like semen)
In this excerpt, masculine and feminine blur—the pairing of “Miss” with the pronoun “he” and also the basketball jersey, which becomes a dress of sorts. Character and audience are also blurred. The parallel phrasing of “He is covered in fine dust” and “The audience is covered in fine dust” make he/audience interchangeable. This intrication continues to build and magnify throughout the book—“I,” “We,” and “You” are blurred, the titles and stage directions evolve into characters themselves, and the distinction between author/reader/performer dissolve.

Göransson’s prose is obsessive, feverish; it feels as if there is simultaneously an overwhelming joy and a keen aversion that animates his descent into the language inhabited by the characters. This pageant is ultimately redemptive—in a world where much is hidden and persecuted, all parties involved are catapulted into a liminal state that requires a confrontation of the concealed/uncanny. Instead of accepting the paternal law as such, we must create our own, while allowing for a multiplicity of laws to flourish and coexist." - Drew Krewer

Johannes Göransson, Dear Ra (A Story In Flinches), Starcherone Books, 2008.


BEST POETRY (Porno-from-the-pogroms Category) BOOK OF THE DECADE


"My cinematographer says you're pretty enough to be a razor-blade symphony" - JG


"Here the unnamed narrator writes compulsively to Ra, perhaps the Egyptian sun god, perhaps a teenaged penpal, telling him (her? For 'Ra' is sometimes a spectre of a girlfriend, a coy mistress, a Mom) of his days, complaining of his life in a white suburb in a carpeted basement and living with his parents. He speaks of his missing twin, Jesse Garon, a phantom self that won't let him go – 'Jesse Garon' was the name of Vernon and Gladys Presley's second son, stillborn in the same birth as Elvis--and in such passages a note of genuine melancholia and acedia enters the rhythms of the life unfolding. Otherwise it's a boy's world of discontent and horny fantasy and the belief that the whole world revolves around one's ups and downs. 'I can't jack offwithout history peering in.'
In the second half of the book, as in life, our boy's circle of acquaintance grows larger, and he experiments branching out with letters to others. Godardian maxims, so beautiful when Godard first coined them, undergo the angst and strain of being pulled to pieces by a born deconstructor, and guns enter the picture. We get the image of a Swedish boys transplanted to the USA at an early age, a teen perhaps, and made to live in a house of his own imagination. No more hands across the water, 'You've got a handgun, I've got a hand to shake.' At an unnamed academy he is surprised to encounter lessons in writing divorced from specific social contexts, to avoid using the word napalm in a poem, for example. 'Say knife instead. A knife will always mean the same thing.' Goransson's achievement here is to collapse, successfully, the Bildungsroman into the Paris Spleen-esque sort of prose poem that is the bedrock of today's mainstream poetry industry, and to both genres he applies the two fingered salute, while managing to strike all kinds of emotional, narratological, and sexual sparks. Me likey!
Feisty stalwart Starcherone Books has given Johannes Goransson's book the luxury treatment, and it is handsome almost beyond its means. The back jacket copy is a little misleading however. 'Each sentence,' it says, 'is like being stabbed by a beautiful murderer.' I did not feel that. 'Each entry [is like] crossing the border into some new language.' That's a little bit more reasonable.
Nevertheless the book has its startling passages and a general air of anything goes, which made me enjoy the rollicking ride. If occasionally DEAR RA sports the jaded air of having been written by one who has seen too many Sofia Coppola films, it reminds us of why we liked her in the first place - her fresh eye on the sweet and cheap wares life sells us." - Kevin Killian


"YEARS AFTER BURROUGHS DIED I STARTED THINKING ABOUT WHOSE BODY HIS MIND HAD ABSORBED INTO AT HIS DEATH.
There never seemed anyone for years. I think I read the most during my undergrad blur at a major technical college spending my library hours masturbating in the bathroom or staring at texts I knew no one had really written on the massive databank computers in the library, walking around in circles. I don't think I believe in rebirthing, maybe I do, but I definitely believe in invocation or attachment, or consumption via layering.
If anyone has been infected as the heir of the mass-apocalyptic Burroughs language virus megaburden, it must be Johannes Göransson.
I realized this while reading his new DEAR RA, out from Starcherone Books.
I don't know whether how he would take this idea (though the Burroughs surname is layered in the book along with other loaded refs like offhanded shotputs), if you've ever spent any time reading Exoskeleton you know the man is made of some kind of multipolymer plastic that glows in no light, but I still think the transcription is illuminary, at least for me, in that no one else since Burroughs seems as capable of inveigling such mass hysteria, hyper-sexual anti-sex mutation, cultural whitewall, rhythmic jargon, and just plain ravaged flesh language in such tangible, tasted bursts.
Though at the same time, Göransson is too made of himself to be just an infection, even one so now-real.
DEAR RA is like 89 hyper-prose pages, stuffed with white space, though here the white space is as loaded as the floor of the Tangier hotel covered in black muck where Burroughs was discovered in a daze with the pages of NAKED LUNCH strewn all around him. These are letters to the sun god, though some might say now this god's replacement is a florescent lamp, a tanning bulb, a whoops. Göransson's text is the kind that slips past spam filters and makes you consider the dick surgery. Göransson's mind is the kind you feel breathing behind you while you're watching that slightly more filthy than usual porn download that you will delete from your web browser's history when you are finished even though no one ever looks at your web browsing history because one day motherfucker you will die.
This book made Breton cry because Breton knew he never had such glimmer, and Breton is very dead.
DEAR RA knows more than it knows it knows, and the channels can't quite control their color.
Göransson, if he's not shotgun/cathair infected, is at least here an associative kingkong, stirring up Göransson's already hyperattended vocabs (sternum, animal, thievery, problematic answers to unasked questions, orifices, fucking, drive-bys) into little things that might sliver your balls hairs into new ball hairs. Then you'd have some hair ass balls and you'd wake up earlier and go places you didn't see despite having walked past them 1500 times doused in gasoline.
Did I mention J. G. has among the finest gloss of craniums in our wordland? You kind of want to kiss it." - Blake Butler


From Dear Ra:

"In this chapter you will be played by the pretty little curly-headed singer from the Bangles; my dick will be played by a moron; Jesse Garon will be played - poorly - by the bored ghost of Bertold Brecht; and I'll be played by an old homosexual with white wispy hair and glasses and a definite problem with booze and nostalgia. Don't ask me how I'll be able to make it marketable. All I really need is you dancing naked like an Egyptian. What do you think about setting it in a pool hall? A public pool with hair in the water? This is an exhibitionist flick, a nervous tick, a tattered bit of barroom humor, bloated by a heavy payroll racket I can't kick out of my skull.

The Screenplay of Our Porno

Our Lady of Snow and Our Slow Lady: These are the two girls I keep in my garage, these are the trinkets I tinker with when my day droops yellow. Dear Lady of Snow, are you the girlfriend of a teenage mutiny? A message in a bottle from a desperate bleeder? A song written in jail about whiskey? Was it supposed to be about childhood? Either way, the only important question is: Will you hide my raw with your white, will you sooth my scarlet, will you wool my tool?

Dear Lady Slowly, did you maybe dream of babies who wheeze strangely? Is this the card you were thinking of? The Queen of Pork. Did you squeeze it when I wetted you? Do you play with lye? Do you slowly slacken when I've slipped it out? Why do you like to be licked slowly, my tongue not even touching your clit, while you sister likes to be almost nibbled and chewed? I'm not missing your teeth. Why do you talk so dearly to the geezer with the glasses? His wig is fried like chicken. His charm is a tampered piece of evidence from the lost case of the man who thought he was the first but was not even second and proceeded to peel things that don't peel."

Johannes Göransson, A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Apostrophe Books, 2007.

"Johannes Göransson is the artery from which a gratefully beaten last avant garde circle of writers continue their pump — a sick and brilliant huddle who have been endlessly attacked by over a century’s worth of justified analytical acumen from an amassed castrati. Göransson’s first full length collection of poetry a new quarantine will take my place explodes with so much amazing wrong I am convinced it is one of the best books ever written. This book will ruin further reading experiences, because it weakens a lot of previous efforts to write imaginatively, poetically, and at all. Here is Rimbaud the terrorist, simultaneously new and willfully anachronistic. Each line bites and outperforms itself, oozes into new arithmetic. Göransson maintains a rhythm of Beckett death rattles mixed over his own pure animal nightmare, all while being post-everything and indebted to no one. An attempt to describe this sublime verse demeans the reviewer and is the only reason I am writing a review. Eat this:
Come back to my strangle. I want everything we do
to involve gibberish anatomies. That’s how best to
transform our teenage milieu into something less
freezing in the basement. Your skin looks lovely and
milky tonight, Hypothermia. Your youth looks like
the fake state flower of this hyperbole. I could do such
offensive wonders to your mouth, but I won’t. Not
yet. There are enough parasites in this bed to make me
royalty. King of Milk. Street of Thighs. I could make
such a wonderful cake out of your face.
I am thankful for homeless languages, lucky to be alienated. I believe in artifice that can panic well, that reflects the undeniable chaos of interpersonal communication. Avant garde literature is the most obviously underappreciated art form because it strives to be. I am always shocked when anyone uses this sentiment as an excuse to dismiss what has been, consistently and universally between cultures over the past one-hundred years, a trademark of the best contemporary writing available. Yes, the avant garde, the front line for critical defecation, invites no friendly audience. Yes, I believe people who strongly dismiss it have not learned the pleasure of a good beating, see no beauty in self-mutilation, and are generally pious and lack sex organs, but let me appeal to them, reluctantly, like this: no one likes dogma, especially purveyors of the avant garde. Manifestos happened because we are born defensive, born expecting, correctly, that no one is there to help. Certainly continue the bored sigh, spend no money on our books. Does any artist expect recognition? What writer doesn’t look forward to dying broke? Why do we write? For appreciation? To edify? Share? Be loved? Absolutely not — for excessive response alone." - Sean Kilpatrick

Malocclusion: Disease of Civilization, Part VIII

Three Case Studies in Occlusion

In this post, I'll review three cultures with different degrees of malocclusion over time, and try to explain how the factors I've discussed may have played a role.

The Xavante of Simoes Lopes

In 1966, Dr. Jerry D. Niswander published a paper titled "The Oral Status of the Xavantes of Simoes Lopes", describing the dental health and occlusion of 166 Brazilian hunter-gatherers from the Xavante tribe (free full text). This tribe was living predominantly according to tradition, although they had begun trading with the post at Simoes Lopes for some foods. They made little effort to clean their teeth. They were mostly but not entirely free of dental cavities:

Approximately 33% of the Xavantes at Simoes Lopes were caries free. Neel et al. (1964) noted almost complete absence of dental caries in the Xavante village at Sao Domingos. The difference in the two villages may at least in part be accounted for by the fact that, for some five years, the Simoes Lopes Xavante have had access to sugar cane, whereas none was grown at Sao Domingos. It would appear that, although these Xavantes still enjoy relative freedom from dental caries, this advantage is disappearing after only six years of permanent contact with a post of the Indian Protective Service.

The most striking thing about these data is the occlusion of the Xavante. 95 percent had ideal occlusion. The remaining 5 percent had nothing more than a mild crowding of the incisors (front teeth). Niswander didn't observe a single case of underbite or overbite. This would have been truly exceptional in an industrial population. Niswander continues:

Characteristically, the Xavante adults exhibited broad dental arches, almost perfectly aligned teeth, end-to-end bite, and extensive dental attrition. At 18-20 years of age, the teeth were so worn as to almost totally obliterate the cusp patterns, leaving flat chewing surfaces.

The Xavante were clearly hard on their teeth, and their predominantly hunter-gatherer lifestyle demanded it. They practiced a bit of "rudimentary agriculture" of corn, beans and squash, which would sustain them for a short period of the year devoted to ceremonies. Dr. James V. Neel describes their diet (free full text):

Despite a rudimentary agriculture, the Xavante depend very heavily on the wild products which they gather. They eat numerous varieties of roots in large quantities, which provide a nourishing, if starchy, diet. These roots are available all year but are particularly important in the Xavante diet from April to June in the first half of the dry season when there are no more fruits. The maize harvest does not last long and is usually saved for a period of ceremonies. Until the second harvest of beans and pumpkins, the Xavante subsist largely on roots and palmito (Chamacrops sp.), their year-round staples.

From late August until mid-February, there are also plenty of nuts and fruits available. The earliest and most important in their diet is the carob or ceretona (Ceretona sp.), sometimes known as St. John's bread. Later come the fruits of the buriti palm (Mauritia sp.) and the piqui (Caryocar sp.). These are the basis of the food supply throughout the rainy season. Other fruits, such as mangoes, genipapo (Genipa americana), and a number of still unidentified varieties are also available.

The casual observer could easily be misled into thinking that the Xavante "live on meat." Certainly they talk a great deal about meat, which is the most highly esteemed food among them, in some respects the only commodity which they really consider "food" at all... They do not eat meat every day and may go without meat for several days at a stretch, but the gathered products of the region are always available for consumption in the community.

Recently, the Xavante have begun to eat large quantities of fish.

The Xavante are an example of humans living an ancestral lifestyle, and their occlusion shows it. They have the best occlusion of any living population I've encountered so far. Here's why I think that's the case:

• A nutrient-rich, whole foods diet, presumably including organs.
  
• On-demand breast feeding for two or more years.
• No bottle-feeding or modern pacifiers.
• Tough foods on a regular basis.
  

I don't have any information on how the Xavante have changed over time, but Niswander did present data on another nearby (and genetically similar) tribe called the Bakairi that had been using a substantial amount of modern foods for some time. The Bakairi, living right next to the Xavante but eating modern foods from the trading post, had 9 times more malocclusion and nearly 10 times more cavities than the Xavante. Here's what Niswander had to say:

Severe abrasion was not apparent among the Bakairi, and the dental arches did not appear as broad and massive as in the Xavantes. Dental caries and malocclusion were strikingly more prevalent; and, although not recorded systematically, the Bakairi also showed considerably more periodontal disease. If it can be assumed that the Bakairi once enjoyed a freedom from dental disease and malocclusion equal to that now exhibited by the Xavantes, the available data suggest that the changes in occlusal patterns as well as caries and periodontal disease have been too rapid to be accounted for by an hypothesis involving relaxed [genetic] selection.

The Masai of Kenya

The Masai are traditionally a pastoral people who live almost exclusively from their cattle. In 1945, and again in 1952, Dr. J. Schwartz examined the teeth of 408 and 273 Masai, respectively (#1 free full text; #2 ref). In the first study, he found that 8 percent of Masai showed some form of malocclusion, while in the second study, only 0.4 percent of Masai were maloccluded. Although we don't know what his precise criteria were for diagnosing malocclusion, these are still very low numbers.

In both studies, 4 percent of Masai had cavities. Between the two studies, Schwartz found 67 cavities in 21,792 teeth, or 0.3 percent of teeth affected. This is almost exactly what Dr. Weston Price found when he visited them in 1935. From Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, page 138:

In the Masai tribe, a study of 2,516 teeth in eighty-eight individuals distributed through several widely separated manyatas showed only four individuals with caries. These had a total of ten carious teeth, or only 0.4 per cent of the teeth attacked by tooth decay.

Dr. Schwartz describes their diet:

The principal food of the Masai is milk, meat and blood, the latter obtained by bleeding their cattle... The Masai have ample means with which to get maize meal and fresh vegetables but these foodstuffs are known only to those who work in town. It is impossible to induce a Masai to plant their own maize or vegetables near their huts.

This is essentially the same description Price gave during his visit. The Masai were not hunter-gatherers, but their traditional lifestyle was close enough to allow good occlusion. Here's why I think the Masai had good occlusion:

• A nutrient-dense diet rich in protein and fat-soluble vitamins from pastured dairy.
• On-demand breast feeding for two or more years.
• No bottle feeding or modern pacifiers.
  

The one factor they lack is tough food. Their diet, composed mainly of milk and blood, is predominantly liquid. Although I think food toughness is a factor, this shows that good occlusion is not entirely dependent on tough food.

Sadly, the lifestyle and occlusion of the Masai has changed in the intervening decades. A paper from 1992 described their modern diet:

The main articles of diet were white maize, [presumably heavily sweetened] tea, milk, [white] rice, and beans. Traditional items were rarely eaten... Milk... was not mentioned by 30% of mothers.

A paper from 1993 described the occlusion of 235 young Masai attending rural and peri-urban schools. Nearly all showed some degree of malocclusion, with open bite alone affecting 18 percent.

Rural Caucasians in Kentucky

It's always difficult to find examples of Caucasian populations living traditional lifestyles, because most Caucasian populations adopted the industrial lifestyle long ago. That's why I was grateful to find a study by Dr. Robert S. Corruccini, published in 1981, titled "Occlusal Variation in a Rural Kentucky Community" (ref).

This study examined a group of isolated Caucasians living in the Mammoth Cave region of Kentucky, USA. Corruccini arrived during a time of transition between traditional and modern foodways. He describes the traditional lifestyle as follows:

Much of the traditional way of life of these people (all white) has been maintained, but two major changes have been the movement of industry and mechanized farming into the area in the last 25 years. Traditionally, tobacco (the only cash crop), gardens, and orchards were grown by each family. Apples, pears, cherries, plums, peaches, potatoes, corn, green beans, peas, squash, peppers, cucumbers, and onions were grown for consumption, and fruits and nuts, grapes, and teas were gathered by individuals. In the diet of these people, dried pork and fried [presumably in lard], thick-crust cornbread (which were important winter staples) provided consistently stressful chewing. Hunting is still very common in the area.

Although it isn't mentioned in the paper, this group, like nearly all traditionally-living populations, probably did not waste the organs or bones of the animals it ate. Altogether, it appears to be an excellent and varied diet, based on whole foods, and containing all the elements necessary for good occlusion and overall health.

The older generation of this population has the best occlusion of any Caucasian population I've ever seen, rivaling some hunter-gatherer groups. This shows that Caucasians are not genetically doomed to malocclusion. The younger generation, living on more modern foods, shows very poor occlusion, among the worst I've seen. They also show narrowed arches, a characteristic feature of deteriorating occlusion. One generation is all it takes. Corruccini found that a higher malocclusion score was associated with softer, more industrial foods.

Here are the reasons I believe this group of Caucasians in Kentucky had good occlusion:

• A nutrient-rich, whole foods diet, presumably including organs.
  
• Prolonged breast feeding.
• No bottle-feeding or modern pacifiers.
• Tough foods on a regular basis.
  

Common Ground

I hope you can see that populations with excellent teeth do certain things in common, and that straying from those principles puts the next generation at a high risk of malocclusion. Malocclusion is a serious problem that has major implications for health, well-being and finances. In the next post, I'll give a simplified summary of everything I've covered in this series. Then it's back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Malocclusion: Disease of Civilization, Part VII

Jaw Development During Adolescence

Beginning at about age 11, the skull undergoes a growth spurt. This corresponds roughly with the growth spurt in the rest of the body, with the precise timing depending on gender and other factors. Growth continues until about age 17, when the last skull sutures cease growing and slowly fuse. One of these sutures runs along the center of the maxillary arch (the arch in the upper jaw), and contributes to the widening of the upper arch*:

This growth process involves MGP and osteocalcin, both vitamin K-dependent proteins. At the end of adolescence, the jaws have reached their final size and shape, and should be large enough to accommodate all teeth without crowding. This includes the third molars, or wisdom teeth, which will erupt shortly after this period.

Reduced Food Toughness Correlates with Malocclusion in Humans

When Dr. Robert Corruccini published his seminal paper in 1984 documenting rapid changes in occlusion in cultures around the world adopting modern foodways and lifestyles (see this post), he presented the theory that occlusion is influenced by chewing stress. In other words, the jaws require good exercise on a regular basis during growth to develop normal-sized bones and muscles. Although Dr. Corruccini wasn't the first to come up with the idea, he has probably done more than anyone else to advance it over the years.

Dr. Corruccini's paper is based on years of research in transitioning cultures, much of which he conducted personally. In 1981, he published a study of a rural Kentucky community in the process of adopting the modern diet and lifestyle. Their traditional diet was predominantly dried pork, cornbread fried in lard, game meat and home-grown fruit, vegetables and nuts. The older generation, raised on traditional foods, had much better occlusion than the younger generation, which had transitioned to softer and less nutritious modern foods. Dr. Corruccini found that food toughness correlated with proper occlusion in this population.

In another study published in 1985, Dr. Corruccini studied rural and urban Bengali youths. After collecting a variety of diet and socioeconomic information, he found that food toughness was the single best predictor of occlusion. Individuals who ate the toughest food had the best teeth. The second strongest association was a history of thumb sucking, which was associated with a higher prevalence of malocclusion**. Interestingly, twice as many urban youths had a history of thumb sucking as rural youths.

Not only do hunter-gatherers eat tough foods on a regular basis, they also often use their jaws as tools. For example, the anthropologist and arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson described how the Inuit chewed their leather boots and jackets nearly every day to soften them or prepare them for sewing. This is reflected in the extreme tooth wear of traditional Inuit and other hunter-gatherers.

Soft Food Causes Malocclusion in Animals

Now we have a bunch of associations that may or may not represent a cause-effect relationship. However, Dr. Corruccini and others have shown in a variety of animal models that soft food can produce malocclusion, independent of nutrition.

The first study was conducted in 1951. Investigators fed rats typical dry chow pellets, or the same pellets that had been crushed and softened in water. Rats fed the softened food during growth developed narrow arches and small mandibles (lower jaws) relative to rats fed dry pellets.

Other research groups have since repeated the findings in rodents, pigs and several species of primates (squirrel monkeys, baboons, and macaques). Animals typically developed narrow arches, a central aspect of malocclusion in modern humans. Some of the primates fed soft foods showed other malocclusions highly reminiscent of modern humans as well, such as crowded incisors and impacted third molars. These traits are exceptionally rare in wild primates.

One criticism of these studies is that they used extremely soft foods that are softer than the typical modern diet. This is how science works: you go for the extreme effects first. Then, if you see something, you refine your experiments. One of the most refined experiments I've seen so far was published by Dr. Daniel E. Leiberman of Harvard's anthropology department. They used the rock hyrax, an animal with a skull that bears some similarities to the human skull***.

Instead of feeding the animals hard food vs. mush, they fed them raw and dried food vs. cooked. This is closer to the situation in humans, where food is soft but still has some consistency. Hyrax fed cooked food showed a mild jaw underdevelopment reminiscent of modern humans. The underdeveloped areas were precisely those that received less strain during chewing.

Implications and Practical Considerations

Besides the direct implications for the developing jaws and face, I think this also suggests that physical stress may influence the development of other parts of the skeleton. Hunter-gatherers generally have thicker bones, larger joints, and more consistently well-developed shoulders and hips than modern humans. Physical stress is part of the human evolutionary template, and is probably critical for the normal development of the skeleton.

I think it's likely that food consistency influences occlusion in humans. In my opinion, it's a good idea to regularly include tough foods in a child's diet as soon as she is able to chew them properly and safely. This probably means waiting at least until the deciduous (baby) molars have erupted fully. Jerky, raw vegetables and fruit, tough cuts of meat, nuts, dry sausages, dried fruit, chicken bones and roasted corn are a few things that should stress the muscles and bones of the jaws and face enough to encourage normal development.


* These data represent many years of measurements collected by Dr. Arne Bjork, who used metallic implants in the maxilla to make precise measurements of arch growth over time in Danish youths. The graph is reproduced from the book A Synopsis of Craniofacial Growth, by Dr. Don M. Ranly. Data come from Dr. Bjork's findings published in the book Postnatal Growth and Development of the Maxillary Complex. You can see some of Dr. Bjork's data in the paper "Sutural Growth of the Upper Face Studied by the Implant Method" (free full text).

** I don't know if this was statistically significant at p less than 0.05. Dr. Corruccini uses a cutoff point of p less than 0.01 throughout the paper. He's a tough guy when it comes to statistics!

*** Retrognathic.

Riley Michael Parker - Our Beloved 26th Parker

Riley Michael Parker is a funny corporation outlaw. In a Bookmunch review of his chapbook Our Beloved 26th Nathan Tyree said it all:

"Our Beloved 26th, is a dark, offensive, violent little book. This chapbook clocks in at a mere thirty-six pages, but in those pages almost every boundary is crossed; almost every more is destroyed.
Our Beloved 26th is a series of interconnected, very short stories that all take place on the 26th floor of a big office building owned by an unnamed corporation. The tales are told from the point of view of middle management types as they go about their day-to-day lives. As you read these stories you begin to suspect that this is what could have happened in the film Office Space had it gone terribly wrong.
In these stories people murder their co-workers. A man poisons the bottles in his liquor cabinet to stop theft. Various minorities are belittled and pushed down. Women are objectified, used and hated for being women. Young boys are starved and kept on leashes as pets. The corporate world is turned on its head and becomes a twisted version of the wild west. Many of these stories would be offensive were it not for the mordant humor and matter of fact minimalism with which they are told.
Parker clearly knows (and hates) the corporate world. Some of the stories inject a strange homoeroticism into a world where homosexuality is obviously out of bounds. He bends the average, and transforms it into a Takashi Miike view of the American west.
These are stories meant to shock, to terrify, and to amuse. Parker has created a book that is certainly not for a mass audience, but which will delight the select few who are prepared for his sick style of wit.»


But at the heart level of all that shocks you will find their Doppelgängers - nostalgic-emotional spree. Friendship candy wrapped in horror.

Like Parker himself said in an interview:

«It's satire, but I wanted there to be real emotion slipping out from these dreadful, over the top characters. I wanted them to love each other, to be willing to die for each other. I may be overselling it, but I just wanted to write a little book about men who want nothing more than to be men, in any way they can; men who romanticize the their fathers, and the old west, and the so-called glory of the white male world. I wanted to write about the worst that men can do in a place that felt familiar, even comfortable, and I feel like I did what I set out to accomplish.

...There is a part of me that likes to poke fun at things. To focus on the absurd, to blow things out of proportion, but it is just a part of me. I tend to focus on families in most of my writing, or failed romance. A lot of friendships in various stages. I write about incest kind of a lot. More than most, for sure. I think it is one of the only real taboos left, sleeping with your relations, and so it intrigues me. Writing about incest allows me to shape familiar tragedies in different ways, giving me the option to reexamine the different roles people play in romantic relationships.»

Horror Movie On The Radio

The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation: Succubus (Ad Noiseam Records, 2009)

Clever horror muzak for mental worm escalators.
Jazz-noir vs. Tumor humor.
Ambient Lovecraftian chamber wind-jaws.
Spooky action at a distance in slow motion.
YouTubular bells of continuous melting doom.
Silent movies in a black hole theatre.
Remember, we are far far above the heaven.



"On the 15th of January 2009, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble gathered at a studio in the Netherlands to shake out the rust before going on tour. One wisely recorded improv session later, these film buffs emerged with a seventy-five minute love-letter to the movie they habitually watched while recording: Jess Franco’s Succubus. Capturing the taboos and temptation of its source-film’s eroticism, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble transformed themselves into The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation, trading their past efforts in metal for a greater emphasis on free-form jazz. A Succubus – meaning, a demon that fornicates with human prey – deserves a soundtrack of such alluring menace.

With the lead-off track’s deep drones and loose cymbal hits, ‘The Sexy Midnight Torture Show’ doesn’t sound like the taping of an S&M performance at all; in fact, it sounds as if whoever was responsible for recording jetted for the venue’s dark back-alley. Into the shadows, after all, is ultimately where Succubus belongs, amid the gothic gloom of urban and social decay. As the echoed drums of ‘Perverted Pleasure Party’ clatter like rain on trashcans, the violin in ‘Fleeing the Scene’ seems to ricochet across the buildings of an abandoned metropolis. Needless to say, Succubus can illustrate morose bleakness to the extreme. Mercifully, the Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation avoids completely bumming us out with a scattered handful of tracks that individually combat this near-impenetrable darkness. ‘Erotic Love Queen’ for example, parts the grisly clouds of its preceding segue with warm bass movements and soaring trombone while album highlight ‘The Admiral’s Game’ incorporates such elements into a visceral build worthy of post-rock’s pioneers. It’s a strategic success; after a few tracks of androgynous drones weigh us down, the collective eases you back with the tender sighs of trombone and muted vocals. Such instruments are as fundamental to the soul of Succubus as they are payoff for us listeners.

Although Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation don’t intend for this release to stand as soundtrack to Jess Franco’s 1969 cult favourite, it certainly ebbs and flows with the sympathy necessary to compliment moody cinema. In the case of ‘A Bad Trip’, the soundtrack is purely subconscious, operating on the minimal scale of tense bass and distant brass before ‘A Place for Fantasies’ subtly rises into trombone-squiggles and foggy ambiance. By the record’s last third, there’s little point trying to distinguish this track-by-track; as surely as Succubus was recorded live in one take, it deserves to be heard as such. Pertinent to its muse, this follow-up to the Mutations EP is a tad frightful but wholly encompassing, and while it’s best heard at night, don’t dare play Succubus in the dark." (theskeletoncrewquarterly)

Omega-3 Eggs

Eggs are an exceptionally nutritious food, as are all foods destined to nourish a growing animal. However, one concern lies in eggs' high concentration of arachidonic acid (AA), a long-chain omega-6 fat that is the precursor to many eicosanoids. Omega-6 derived eicosanoids are essential molecules that are involved in healing, development and defense. Some of them are inflammatory mediators that can contribute to disease when present in excess. Eggs are one of the main sources of AA in the modern diet.

The percent long-chain omega-6 fats (including AA) in red blood cell membranes associates quite well with heart attack risk. You can see the relationship in this graph compiled by Dr. Bill Lands. However, egg consumption has never been convincingly linked to heart attack risk or any other disorder I'm aware of, despite dire warnings about eggs' cholesterol content. Nevertheless, conventionally raised eggs are unnaturally rich in AA, and unnaturally low in omega-3, due to the hens' diet of grains and soybeans.

The ideal egg is one that comes from a hen raised outdoors (often on pasture), in a place where she can eat a variety of green plants and insects. Hens raised this way typically still eat grain-based feed, but supplemented with a significant amount of foraged food. This dramatically increases the nutritional value of the eggs, as I've noted before. Modern hens lay nearly one egg a day, which is a rate of production that can not be sustained without a large amount of calorie-dense food. They can't eat enough to lay at this rate by foraging.

Not everyone has access to pastured eggs. "Omega-3 eggs" come from hens fed an omega-3 enriched diet*. Not only do they have a much higher omega-3 content than conventional eggs, they also contain less AA. One study found that omega-3 eggs contain 39% less AA than conventional and organic eggs. Omega-3 eggs were also rich in short- and long-chain omega-3 fats. Omega-3 eggs are certainly not nutritionally equivalent to pastured eggs, but they're a step in the right direction.

I don't really know if the AA content of eggs is a concern. Eicosanoid biology is complex and it doesn't like to fit into simple models. I'll look forward to seeing more research on the matter. In the meantime, I'll be eating pastured eggs, and when they're not available I'll eat omega-3 eggs.


*Typically from flax seeds, but some operations also use seaweed. The hens in the paper I cited were fed flax. The hens managed to convert a substantial portion of the alpha-linolenic acid into the important animal fat DHA, and presumably EPA although it was not measured.

Impressions of Hawai'i

I recently went to Hawai'i for the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Waikiki, followed by a one-week vacation on Kaua'i with friends. It was my first time in Hawai'i and I really enjoyed it. The Hawai'ians I encountered were kind and generous people.

Early European explorers remarked on the beauty, strength, good nature and exellent physical development of the native Hawai'ians. The traditional Hawai'ian diet consisted mostly of taro root, sweet potatoes, yams, breadfruit, coconut, fish, occasional pork, fowl including chicken, taro leaves, seaweed and a few sweet fruits. It would have been very low (but adequate) in omega-6, because there simply isn't much of it available in this environment. Root crops and most fruit are virtually devoid of fat; seafood and coconut contain very little omega-6; and even the pork and chicken would have been low in omega-6 due to their diets. Omega-3 would have been plentiful from marine foods, and saturated fats would have come from coconut. All foods were fresh and unrefined. Abundant exercise and sunlight would have completed their salubrious lifestyle.

The traditional Hawai'ian diet was rich in easily digested starch, mainly in the form of poi, which is fermented mashed taro. I ate poi a number of times while I was on Kaua'i, and really liked it. It's mild, similar to mashed potatoes, but with a slightly sticky consistency and a purple color (due to the particular variety of taro that's traditionally used to make it).

I had the opportunity to try a number of traditional Polynesian foods while I was on Kaua'i. One plant that particularly impressed me is breadfruit. It's a big tree that makes cantaloupe-sized starchy green fruit. Breadfruit is incredibly versatile, because it can be used at different stages of ripeness for different purposes. Very young, it's like a vegetable, at full size, it's a bland starch, and fully ripe it's starchy and sweet like a sweet potato. It can be baked, boiled, fried and even dried for later use. It has a mild flavor and a texture similar to soft white bread. It's satisfying and fairly rich in micronutrients. On the right are breadfruit, coconut and sugarcane, three traditional Hawai'ian foods.

I find perennial staple crops such as breadfruit very interesting, because they're much less destructive to soil quality than annual crops, and they're a breeze to maintain. I could walk into the backyard of the apartment I was renting and pick a breadfruit, soak it, throw it in the oven and I had something nutritious to eat in just over an hour. It's like picking a bag of potatoes right off a tree. Insects and birds didn't seem to like it at all, possibly because the raw fruit exudes a bitter, rubbery sap when damaged. Unfortunatley, breadfruit is a tropical plant. Temperate starchy staples that were exploited by native North Americans include the majestic American chestnut in the Appalachians, and acorns in the West. These are both more work than breadfruit to prepare, particularly acorns which must be extensively soaked to remove bitter tannins.

One of the foods Polynesian settlers brought to Hawai'i was sugar cane. I had the opportunity to try fresh sugar cane for the first time while I was on Kaua'i. You cut off the outer skin, then cut it into strips and chew to get the sweet juice. It was mild but tasty. I don't know if it was a coincidence or not, but I ended up feeling unwell after eating several pieces. It may simply have been too much sugar for me.

Modern Hawai'i is a hunter-gatherer's dream. There are fruit trees everywhere, including papayas, wild and cultivated guavas, mangoes, avocados, passion fruit, breadfruit, bananas, citrus fruits and many others. Many of those fruits did not predate European contact however. Even pineapples were introduced to Hawai'i after European contact. Coconuts are everywhere, and we could pick one up for a drink and snack on almost any beach. The forests are full of wild chickens (such as the one at left) and pigs, both having resulted from the escape and subsequent mixing of Polynesian and European breeds. Kaua'ians frequently hunt the pigs, which are environmentally damaging due to their habit of rooting through topsoil for food. Large areas of forest on Kaua'i look like they've been ploughed due to the pigs' rooting. Humans are their only predators and their food is abundant.

While I was on Kaua'i, I ate mostly seafood (including delicious raw tuna poke), poi, breadfruit, coconut and sweet fruits-- a real Polynesian style hunter-gatherer diet! I swam every day, hiked in the lovely interior, and kayaked. It was a great trip, and I hope to return someday.

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