User:Aitantv/Atkens, E (2019) Old Food

Atkins, E (2019) Old Food. Fitzcaraldo Editions, London.

• "And for soft grub we'd do this burying thing? Packed grub with wet hay in a hole a grave. Seven or maybe eight hours later we'd disinter your dad and the skin on him would be burnt and inedible, basically, but the bushed senior flesh beneath was reallyu quite alright with a few teaspoons of Colman's and a quart of fassbruase." (Atkens 2019 p29)
• "Old slack heifers looking on wet and angry, we thought, as 2,300 calories forced themselves into the mud, mostly. Mostly they were insipid stews of barley, pirate herb, beans and potatoes, mostly. Fig bars to loosen our bowels for shitting. I guess. Clammy little towelettes from glossy plastic purses to wipe the remnants of poo off of our anuses and the surrounding part after we'd taken shits somewhere hopefully appropriate to take turd." (Atkens 2019 p30)
• "Dear Hannah, Thank you for saying your tremendous nothing and doing nothing. Thank you so much for absenting yourself entirely. Thank you for raising not a finger to halt the head-kicking. Me somehow still clutching a shawarma." (Atkens 2019 p33)
• "A large metal bowl of fiercely garlicked yoghurt. Cultivating an red plastic plate with the yoghurt, then planting fast-cooling demispheres of pared and roast beetroot to leach purple slur and incriminate the fingers. Cold-pressed Cypriot drooled gorgeous and opaque shine also lemon juice and each of us would track dips with lavash canoes. Biker's greased. Turns out hummus is really lovely, says one boy. Stocky green bottles of ownbrands pils to wash down squeaking erasers of hot and salty halloumi. Come spring we'd wrap it up and take off. They say the stench came to define an era." (Atkens 2019 p37)
• "Frozen pitta disks heated and distended on the tava then cut into soldiers and jostled into an artful heap. We'd eat hot tapas off of one another, then. Glazed dicks docked anuse, powdered sugar & hot brown churros pussy. We'd luck our clotted hands and titter, chasing about the yard and scatterings the legbars, thrusting game groins for little stole kisses and fingered, and unusual wattles done simple and rousig in a strawberry-blonde pakora batter pepped with mirin, Sichuan pepper and head." (Atkens 2019 pp49-50)
• "Nursing blue mugs of soupy brown stiffened with a wee bevvy. Alcohol used to be served to the elderly first, till we realised the elderly were no better than anyone and that history and experience bore no necessary correspondence with worth. An gives palate's susceptivity, however, generally corresponded with the quality of the alcohol served. Meanings old assholes were content to kill carafes of Blue Nun while tucking in to more warm, khaki-coloured pap." (Atkens 2019 p60)

+ something to connect with journal entry about grandma + blurb: "Ed Atkins'Old Food lurches from allegory tp listicle, from lyric to menu, fetching up a plummeting, idiomatic and crabbed tableau from the cannibalised remains of each form in turn." + total disinterest in narrative/plot. This is not storytelling but proselytising. He's not afraid to be stupid and incredible erodite in the same breath, using such eloquent terms to describe the scraping of anuses by miniature towelletes, i.e. (toilet paper).

• "Edible looking fish squirmed out their last, pouted we thought auguries? and meanwhile their eyes'd clouded, as with they hot skillet on the fire, surrounded by its juices, some butter and oil bubbling. Hissing noised as the fish's skin got rusted panoply. Where we'd slashed at it with a long knife we could make out pale food peeking through. Wounds would widen with heat in time and in a field, in a ditch, we'd cringe beside that dying fish. Writhing very desperate, presumably not wanting to die it was looking at the sky. I put my ear to its strange mouth to listen to what it had to say but it said nothing. Not that there was no sound at all coming out of its mouth but that it didn't say a thing. Whatever it has inside of it went unsaid forever." (Atkens 2019 pp69-70)

+ this is a beautiful passage, which totally inverts the anthropocentric gaze. In a discreet form of animism, the dying grilling fish is given a soul, a lens, a position in the scene.

• "We ate all the animals in any old order, without cooking them and then we looked at each other." (Atkens 2019 p71)
• "Cauliflowers were really great. Brained, crook broccoli; a damp mummified corpse of trees was tasty as. Sometimes a chargrilled stroke victim, other times atoddler's prop. A slowed cheddar bog inuring insipidity but it was everyone's absolute favourite and it was simple for us to make. We encourage everyone to try making it it was stupidly easy to make. And though necessity was the mother of invention, we ate an easy, sluggish cauliflower cheese clag for a good few years inb the middle, when everything was especially difficult, financially and so on. Poverty meant spongiform and otherwise compressed veg. - Compressed as in coal or crude. Megafauna and prehistoric fronds and sacrficed offsprung mashed by millennia's shining plate mitt. Armoured God. We had to drink the starless fluid that would gurgle from a wound in a rock abover the tree-line. Black and umber, a prodound nout." (Atkens 2019 p79-80)

+ class and food; so much dictated by economic standards

• "Most of the time what we had was this pleural self-supper. Brought up from inside ourselves like a love a sort of cud, chewed with some brown leaves from the driveway and horrible, salt rained retch spazzed, swallowed again and again an till heaved up one of the more vital purple organs and you had to go to the clinic then and have it removed. Autocannibalims seemed more virtuous and somehow easier, also, especially when given the choise between a really personable infant or one of your own limbs. They'd told ork was similar to human flesh but it wasn't at all." (Atkens 2019 p85)
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