Fat - Ron Singer
In
the course of food-and-diet chin-wags,
people
often invoke a fat metaphor:
they
quip, ambiguously. Does that refer
to
weight-watching or (as the Germans say)
“The
Watch on the Rhine”? In both cases
--global
and personal, body and war--
there
is ebb and flow, great redundancy.
Still,
the metaphor seems trivial, extreme,
perhaps
even obscene.
My
wife’s late cousin, Harry, noted wag,
used
to call Eliot’s poem “The Waist Line.”
That
joke would shake us like bowls of jello,
although
it, too, like the Bulge metaphor,
was
undermined by its evocation
of
the ruined landscape of “The Great War.”
Talk
about ebb and flow!
Jokes
and metaphors aside, there’s something
to
the pairing of Lucien Freud’s mis-shapes
with
ravaged landscapes: Appalachia,
Detroit,
for starters, not to mention
the
global stations of garbage and war.
In
the course of an anti-obesity campaign
in
my own waste-ridden city, New York,
another
wag, this one a comedian,
made
a quip to the effect, I recall,
that
big sodas are the country houses
of
the poor. But I’ll speak of rolls of fat,
garbage
mounds, carcasses, waistlines and waste
...
no more.
-
- -
Ron Singer (www.ronsinger.net)
has published seven books, and he recently completed three trips to Africa for
an eighth, Uhuru Revisited: Interviews with Pro-Democracy Leaders
(forthcoming). His serial thriller, Geistmann, and his serial farce, The
Parents We Deserve, are both available at jukepopserials.com.
His work has twice been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.
