Nehaveigur

A collection of Jim Harrison’s food writing. The introduction is by Harrison’s friend, celebrity chef, gifted writer and harasser of women Mario Batali.

Some of Harrison’s best insights compare the pleasures of the flesh and of the mind:

As a mediocre student I wasn’t in the least interested in critical assessments and more than fifty years later still am not. I was drawn to what made my heart sing in what my father called “this vale of woe.”. This meant wine and poetry.

I […] made a simple soup out of seven pounds of short ribs, a large head of garlic, cabbage, barley, and rutabaga, all of them the fruits of earth rather than the dithering mind.

Abstract wisdom is as evanescent as one of those five-second rainbows. Read a half hour’s worth of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, then segue to a chapter of Apollinaire’s pornographic novel, The Debauched Hospodar, and see which you remember better. We are earthlings indeed, as our vestigial tailbones indicate.

The novels of Updike, Roth, and DeLillo could be much improved if skin pictures were interspersed in the pages.

I’m giving up nearly everything, especially my vain interest in abstractions. Along with Ungaretti I ask, “Have I fragmented heart and mind to fall in the service of words?” (Ho fatto a pezzi cuore e mente per cadere in serviti di parole?) The answer in the American language is “Yup.”

There is clearly a worldwide conspiracy to drown us in fear. Even the solace of food and alcohol is suspect not to speak of the cigarettes so valued by Albert Einstein, James Joyce, and me.

Success is a disease that diverts one from the more graceful qualities of life such as nature, love, and fishing, submerging the unlucky soul in narcissism.

Returning to earth, my favorite place after all, at least for the time being.