NancyKay Shapiro

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:11:44 GMT

Beautiful pic of my literary idol Sylvia Townsend Warner

featured as a Gay Icon At the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:18:19 GMT

I'm now on Twitter: @NancyKayShapiro

What Love Means To You People

Sat, 16 May 2009 00:43:31 GMT

... is now available for Kindle or Kindle for iPhone!

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:03:56 GMT

Amazon Rank.

Amazon removes all books with any gay & lesbian content or subject matter from sales rankings. Which is stupendously insulting. See more here.

Coffee regular?

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 21:19:53 GMT

I was awed by the meal service at St Xavier Church, where I helped out this afternoon. This was an amazing operation, beautifully run. It was also deeply troubling to see how necessary it was -- I was told they serve between 700 and 1000 meals to homeless or indigent people every Sunday. The church basement, which was rather vast, was full up. They serve in two waves -- first the elderly and infirm are brought in and seated, and they are brought meal trays. Once they're mostly done, the rest of the comers are admitted and come through in a line, picking up their own trays. In addition to a pretty ample hot meal, there is also free legal services and chiropractic treatments offered(!).

I was there for 4 hours -- at the beginning I helped assemble plastic cutlery, salt & pepper, and napkin bundles. After that I spent a little time as a tray mover, and then moved on to coffee service, which I really enjoyed, because I got to interact with the people, asking them if they wanted coffee (regular? Or black?) or tea, smiling and wishing them bon appetit. We weren't supposed to give seconds but I only said no to a couple of men who came back for fourths or fifths. We ran out of coffee before we ran out of coffee drinkers. Many of the people went through the food line two or three times -- which suggested that this might have been the main meal of their week, and many also left with extra bread and pastries.

I don't know how the meal compared to the usual, or if it was extra special because it was Easter -- it was turkey/cranberry sauce/dressing/mashed/veg/salad/bread/dessert, plus a festive candy bag -- the bags were made by a school class that were also there volunteering -- they'd raised money in the school to buy the candy and put together the bags with ribbons. Their teacher was with me on the coffee service, so we chatted about it.

After the meals were all served, I helped clean up -- collecting trays, then mopping down tables and chairs, and stacking the chairs on the tables. When they let me go at 3:30 I was kind of pooped, and very glad I'd gone. The organizers were friendly and appreciative, and kept saying at the end, "Oh YOU'LL be back." I expect in a couple of weeks, I will.

Who you can meet at the Metropolitan

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:31:50 GMT

	Sculpture from Metropolitan Museum I forgot to read the tag, but it's probably Indian, and at least 500 years old. I sort of identified with the guy, or maybe the animal, I'm not sure ....


	Ancient Buddhist sculpture, but these dames look to be straight out of the chorus line.

Time is a cloud

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:41:46 GMT

The novel I'm writing now is moving along fairly well; I'm excited about it, the ideas are bubbling up, it's surprising me and engaging me. I find I'm writing it in a particularly non-linear way (though I probably could've said the same thing about the previous novels). In this case it feels like I'm spiraling, or like the writing process is a sort of wheel of fortune, which keeps spinning and stopping and spinning again. I know that eventually the linear story will all be there, but right now it's coming to me in a state of disorder.

One thing I'm noticing as well, which is also not new to my process, is that I tend to think of fictional time as a Cloud. In other words, all the potential events in the characters' lives coexist; anything is possible, it's all limitless. The characters have form and mass in my mind, but perhaps their ages aren't fixed (or they're many ages at once, since the story I'm telling will probably end up spanning a quarter century at least), nor is the sequence of their actions. I find this state of things immensely appealing, and comforting. Probably I wish my own life could be carried out in a similar cloud. (Some people who know me might say that I live like it is ... for better or worse). Of course this is all beautiful until I realize that I'm writing along and have no idea what season it is, or that I've got a winter or a pregnancy that last for 2 and a half years, or ... or ... or .... I hate that moment when I realize that I must pin down some sort of chronology in order to proceed. Because time isn't a cloud, a character who is 20 when the novel opens can't stay 20 for five years, nor can she remain 20 while her child grows up ... and once one choice is made, it perforce precludes the three others that I was giving equal status while everything was just bobbing around in the cloud, without a horizon line.

I'm pretty much at this point with the novel. I need to peg out a line, even though I don't yet need to worry about writing the story in that line's order. I just need to know where along the sequence my various scenes and POVs get pinned. Also, as it's a novel set in the early 19th century, I need to be careful about anachronisms creeping in -- when exactly was photography invented, and when did passenger ships go from sail to steam? If I make mistakes with this stuff in the first draft, it's not a disaster, but it's good to have your mental image of where you are screwed down fairly tight. Especially when you're the kind of writer who doesn't like to do a lot of research in advance. Historical fiction that shows off lots of research ... well, it's not my cup of tea. I like to write what I want to read.

Broken mirror, West Eleventh Street

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:37:02 GMT

Click to enlarge images.

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:08:00 GMT

I just came across this in my dad's studio. It's the cover to the Board of Education of City of New York's Art Curriculum Guide from 1954-55. Please click on this to see the image larger because these goofy boys must be examined, and you must also examine the incredibly adorable blue sweater on the girl on the left, which has the darlingest no-doubt detachable little fur collar & cuffs, with the little buttoned tabs on the collar. I've never seen the like, and I want one. The girls look about 27 even though they're probably 15, and the boys look like accountants. Also they all look like extras from Mad Men.

Manhattan staycation adventures -- walking to Brooklyn

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:54:32 GMT

Taking some time off from the day job, working on my novel but mostly enjoying my city in new ways.

Lately I've really felt like walking.

Today was another gorgeous cool golden day here. So I set off from Third Ave and 32nd Street, where I'd just seen my dentist, and walked south, cutting over to 1st Avenue, past Stuyvesant Town, and then further east to Avenue B, which I think I've never actually walked on before. When I was new to NYC in the 80s, it was very dangerous for bougie white girls over there. Below Houston Street it turns into Clinton Street. At that point I was starting to really feel my oats and decided to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge, which is on Delancey Street. One of my favorite old movies, Naked City (1948), one of the very first to be shot on location in Manhattan, has its exciting climax on this bridge, and I wanted to see what it was like to walk onto it. Also, there's just something really appealing to me about walking across bridges. I busted my bridge cherry the other day w/the Bklyn Bridge and now I want MORE! (Link goes to a Flickr set of Brooklyn Bridge photos taken a couple of days ago).

They've changed the Wmsbg bridge a lot since the movie was made -- many of the buildings that lined Delancey have been knocked down and not yet replaced, and the walkway, which in the film was a sort of park with benches on it and children playing (because at the time the area had almost no park space, and the bridge would've been breezier in the hot summer than the surrounding streets) has been enclosed in a cage, I guess because testosterone-laden teens would jump down onto the roadways or try to surf the subway cars that cross the bridge. As you can see from the photos under the cut, it's all closed off as you walk across, unlike the Brooklyn Bridge which had unobstructed views. But I got some gorgeous views through the mesh (not photos, just views I stopped to absorb, looking north and south along the Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines), and really enjoyed the loooong walk. I thought I might turn back half-way across, but I was drawn on by curiosity, and ended up in Williamsburg, where after darting into a public bathroom in a playground, which to my amazement was actually a) open and b) had toilet paper in it, I strolled up to the vibrant area around the Bedford Ave L subway stop, which is hipster central. There was a wonderful arty bookshop I enjoyed poking around in, and a good record store. I didn't buy anything. I got a little lunch and then took the subway back into Manhattan.

Click the photos for larger views.

	Clinton Street barbershop
	Ices seller, Lower East Side
	Ices seller, Lower East Side
	Tree, Lower East Side
	Tenements, Lower East Side
	Chinese calendar art, Lower East Side
	Smell Good For Your House; store sign, Lower East Side
	Williamsburg Bridge entrance, Delancy Street
	Tenements, Delancy Street
	East River from Williamsburg Bridge, looking towards Brooklyn across FDR Dr
	Williamsburg Bridge walkway, with hasidic mothers & kids
	View south from Williamsburg Bridge towards Brooklyn
	Williamsburg Bridge view, south
	Williamsburg Bridge, subway crossing, looking north
	Williamsburg Bridge
	Williamsburg Bridge view, looking towards Manhattan Bridge (south) You can neither commit suicide nor get a good photo off the Williamsburg bridge pedestrian walkway. I suppose in the past, people tried and people died.
	Looking north from Williamsburg Bridge
	Domino Sugar refinery, Bklyn, from Williamsburg Bridge
	Brooklyn view, from Williamsburg Bridge
	Brooklyn/Manhattan view from Williamsburg Bridge
	Manhattan seen from Brooklyn (Williamsburg Bridge)
	Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from bridge walkway
	Red tenements in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
	Williamsburg bridge walkway
	Williamsburg Brooklyn graffiti
	Williamsburg Brooklyn, used refrigerators, graffiti
	Tenement, Williamsburg, Brooklyn The decoration on this little old building caught my eye. I wonder who 'F' was.
	Williamsburg, mural

Either I'm a writer or I'm a blogger

Tue, 20 May 2008 18:22:29 GMT

... can't seem to be both.

Lately I'm being a writer again, after a long period of struggle with a project that seemed well under way under it dug it's little work-in-progress heels in and refused to develop any further. So at last I gave myself permission to set it aside and came up with something else to do. Which is very new and fresh and mysterious and engaging right now, and which I therefore don't dare hint around at here beyond that.

Reading-wise I'm in transition, done for now with Richard Price after reading Lush Life and then Clockers, and mopping up a couple of other so-so reads in order to plunge (back) into the 19th century. I've got some Balzac on tap -- embarrassed to admit I've really never read him before -- and some rereads of English Victorian novels. Am also rereading Sylvia Townsend Warner's wonderful novel set in Paris in 1848, Summer Will Show, a book I wish I'd written. (She's responsible for a number of Books I Wish I'd Written, and it's a source of deep sadness to me that she's so almost completely forgotten, though at least the New York Review of Books has reissued a couple of her novels recently, albeit not the ones I'd most like to press into the hands of my friends [ie, The Flint Anchor]).

Since my last post I've also fallen in love with another TV show, Farscape. I was a fan while it was still on, but never saw the early seasons except for an ep here or there; I'm now watching it all in order from the beginning, and finding it vastly satisfying in the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer was; inventive, rich in character and back-story and lore and continuity (continuity is so damn sexy in a TV series). And what a visual feast -- the show threw most of its production budget (apparently) into designing amazing aliens, and making them up in such a way that it's very easy to forget there's a human actor under the latex and paint. A show with wonderfully credible world-building, and an ability, like BtVS as well, to incorporate both wild humor and wild angst into its storylines without any sense of cognitive dissonance.

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:47:38 GMT

I finished reading Lush Life, which was really riveting. I hadn't read anything by Price for the last 20 years -- I was alerted to him originally by my writing teacher at college, a friend of his, David Black, who went on after his little academical stint at Mt Holyoke to be a big-shot TV writer/producer with Law & Order -- he brought Price to campus to read, and I, who at the time just couldn't get interested in the sort of thing he writes (I think the book he'd just published at the time was The Breaks, which I read but didn't enjoy), was also miffed at how coked up Price was and how blatantly he leered at the cute girls in the room (of which I was not one). I was both intimidated by him and felt sort of dissed that he'd come to our campus to talk to us with a nose full of blow. I was even more of a prig at 21 than I am now. The guy was a cokehead every day at the time; it's not like he became one just to face the creative writing heads at MHC. It had nothing to do with us and I shouldn't have taken it personally. But in those days I was so fragile I took everything personally.

I guess my big mistake in life was not staying in touch with Black and worming my way into television. Of course back then I never watched television. Black and I did not get along -- I was writing my first real novel and he didn't like what I was doing and kept trying to steer the story into other avenues; our meetings were tense and I used to have vivid dreams about punching him out from which I'd awaken thinking that my sleeping consciousness could be ridiculously blatant -- where's the symbolism and interpretation in dreams like that?! Though I will cheerfully and heartily admit that he really taught me a lot of about how to revise, because after a while I'd get to the point where I'd rip the shit out of my own stuff before I showed it to him, so as not to give him the satisfaction of ripping it himself. This was really valuable. But we never remotely bonded (I don't think he wanted to be teaching, either, which didn't help matters), and though I saw him once in NYC after I graduated, I didn't have the sense to "work" the connection, just let it go.

This reminds me, I was talking to a friend the other night who is very worried about her 17 year old daughter, who she feels isn't "living up to her potential". She did get into a good college, rather to L's astonishment, but as she doesn't do much in high school, my friend is afraid she also won't apply herself in college. We talked about it for quite a while, and finally A said something that I pounced on, which was that she felt her daughter was socially pretty astute and that she cared a lot about her friendships, and if she spent as much time on her schoolwork as she did on maintaining these friendships, she'd be better off.

And I told her that rather than nag her kid about her grades, because in the end no one cares about your grades in anything, that she should emphasize to her daughter that social skills are what make for success in the adult world, and that if she wants to get into a creative field (she says she wants to be a writer), she should focus on meeting and cultivating relationships with people who can give her a leg up. Which was what I didn't know at the time myself -- and may not have been able to act on even had I been aware of it, because college-age me was a near-fatal mish-mash of Fear of People and Deeply Low Self-Esteem. It's taken me almost 20 years to realize that what I always thought was the Path To Success, or at least a Path to Success -- keeping your head down and doing the work well -- is the least, rather than the most of it. A's daughter may end up doing just fine if she realizes that how you present yourself and who you present yourself to is the major part of the battle in life.

What? I name some of my clothes. What?

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:21:02 GMT

So the weather report said it might go up to 68 degrees today, though I doubt it will. But New Yorkers are nothing if not opportunistic, so this a.m. as I walked to work I saw young women in short skirts with bare legs and ballet flats, others with bare feet in ballet flats, lots of cardigans, lots of people wearing no coat or jacket at all, even though I, dressed in Janis (suede jacket with mongolian trim), was actually slightly chilly. Silly silly New Yorkers!

The kitchen is a foreign territory

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 18:53:26 GMT

I wanted to be able to make coffee and steak at home, and my stove-top grill pan results in the smoke alarm going off and freaking out the dog, and the kettle I was using to boil water was a thing of ugliness and bad design. So i ordered a coffee maker and a broiler pan from Amazon. This morning I realized that I already owned a broiler pan, which I'd squirreled away in a seldom-consulted cabinet, and when I went to open the coffee maker box, realized I really don't need or have room for a 12-cup model and should've gotten the 4-cup one. Of course I've already thrown out the shipping box, which has been thoroughly soaked in the sleet storm, so I must wait until I can obtain a suitably-sized box. Meanwhile, I found my crappy but usable kettle and one of my single-cup Bodum french presses, and made myself a cup of coffee. Which I totally could have done at any time in the last bazillion years. Though at 46 I still don't entirely understand how much coffee to put in to get an adequate brew. The package said one heaping tablespoon, but note to self, it should be more like two.

We had a big slush storm overnight. I think it's raining right now. Outside is just a big slick opportunity to take a flying prat fall, but at least it isn't frozen and I expect the streets to be back to their usual dingy winter dirtyness by tomorrow morning.

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:25:44 GMT

Woke up this morning at 4:00 and couldn't back to sleep, so I spent over an hour on the sofa reading Hotel De Dream by Edmund White, which I'm loving. The main character is the real writer Stephen Crane, who in his last days as he's dying of tuberculosis just after the turn of the 20th century, is working on a novel about a New York City rentboy, called The Painted Boy, though he knows its subject matter will make it unpublishable, and also that it's doubtful he'll live to complete it.

Here are some recent pics of Traddles:

When she was younger I could never sneak up on her asleep -- she'd always awaken the second I moved. Now she's a lady of a certain age, and snores like a piglet while she's sleeping, I was able to get the jump on her, in her "office":

Rude awakening:

Pensive:

Anyone still reading non-ham related posts?

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 16:08:22 GMT

I began this blog because I published a novel that's still available from Amazon among other places. There's no ham in it, though at one point there's a rather romantic scene involving a peanut-butter-and-swiss-cheese-on-rye sandwich.

Ham for Chanukah makes the NY Daily News

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:28:03 GMT

There's a brief article about my ham photos in the NY Daily News today! I'm relieved to see I wasn't misquoted.

The photos are now available at my quickie cafepress store on mugs, an apron, magnets, and cards suitable for next Chanukah!

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 01:53:54 GMT

James Wolcott blogs about a disgusting sting operation the NYPD is running now (see this piece in the NY Times), where the cops leave valuables out in plain sight in the subway, or in department stores, and then apprehend anyone who picks them up and doesn't immediately, I guess, start shouting 'Whose is this, please?' It's disgusting of course because merely finding something in a public place and pocketing it isn't necessarily a crime -- more often it's probably a good faith attempt to deal with the apparently lost item while also getting on with what one is doing. This reminds me of the time a couple summers ago that I found a woman's wallet at Hudson RIver Park. It was left out on the steps where lots of people sit, and when I saw it I was at first suspicious that it was some kind of candid camera trick! When I did pick it up, it was full of ID, credit cards, and a single dollar bill. I kept looking around to see if anyone was watching me find the wallet. Long story short, it turned out it had been genuinely lost -- a woman sitting with a friend had laid it down beside her and then walked off without it. I took it home, tracked her down by phone using the address on her license, and she gratefully picked it up from me the next day. Of course, having read about this new police sting operation, I'd be afraid to do anything like that again, lest I get nabbed by cops for my good intentions.

Whose nutty and offensive idea was this? I mean, what NYer hasn't found a wallet or a cell phone in a cab or on a bench and made an effort to get it back to its owner? Who now, knowing about this new policy of entrapment, will take a chance on any such thing again? And are our cops really best used with this kind of activity that further erodes our civil rights?

Before someone else gacks the idea

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:12:01 GMT

If you're tickled by the Ham for Chanukah pic, visit my store at cafepress.com, where you can get it on a mug, or on greeting cards (stock up now for next year!).

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:11:21 GMT

I just heard from a reporter at the NY Daily News -- he interviewed me briefly about the Chanukah ham! Who ever guessed that THIS would be my 15 minutes of fame???? Where were you all when I published my novel?

Ah, I must laugh ....

Move on, nothing to see here

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 15:08:30 GMT

Well, I had my few minutes of fame yesterday thanks to Gothamist, which was lots of fun. Popped into Balducci's again this morning to pick up some roast beef to take to work, and of course checked on my little friends the hams. Who were stripped of their Chosen status and returned to the realm of the nondenominational with green "Perfect for The Holidays" tags. I assume the store must've gotten a couple of calls.

Not quite as amusing but still providing some fodder for fun was the sign I saw on the door at Borders in Penn Plaza: Books Are Safe Presents for Kids. I assume this meant that they're free of lead and phthalates, but the first thing I thought, as both a reader and a writer and just a person, was that we're in dire straits when safety has to be the #1 concern of a gift choice, and when safety is the #1 thing that recommends the gift of a book, in particular. Then I thought: but books can have sharp edges! And what about paper cuts! And if you're one of those po-faced literalists who believes that reading about anything imaginary will make little Dick and Jane grow up to be Satanists, books aren't safe at all ohnoohnoohno!

I went up to Borders because I wanted to take a lunch time walk, and my current client's office is in quite a boring neighborhood with nothing much to browse nearby. But once I was inside the store I felt like I'd entered a sort of combination pinball machine/Disneyworld ride, Books seemed pretty incidental to the whole thing, and books for serious readers, as opposed to those with candy-colored covers and the large see!-reading-isn't-really-too-hard-and-this-book-isn't-really-very-long fonts, seemed to be in pretty short supply. Whoever was in charge of shelving in the Fiction/Literature section had only the most rudimentary grasp of alphabetical order. (Is it just me becoming po-faced when I think that each passing generation is more and more indifferent to the civilizing importance of these little sanities such as shelving books in their proper order? Because the NYPL has the exact same problem -- you're lucky if novels are reshelved somewhere in sniffing distance of their author's first letter, let alone anything so subtle as not breaking up the Trollopes with the Tolstoys.) After a couple of minutes' browsing I couldn't shake the feeling that this really wasn't actually a bookstore, and I couldn't wait to get out.

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:36:10 GMT

I'm reading Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I'd meant to wait for the paperback on, but after hearing him on an NPR podcast two or three times, I was seized by an urge to read the book now. And it's so gripping I'm carrying it around even though I don't usually like to weigh down my poor achey shoulders with hard-cover books. Temporarily bumped Karen Russell's also-gripping collection St Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves. Am looking forward to my week-long Christmas break for a chance to spend entire afternoons sacked out on the sofa reading, a past-time I don't seem to allow myself enough these days. I've got a high ziggurat of to-be-read volumes in place for this upcoming festival of lazitude.

Am glad I don't have to go anywhere or do anything over the December holidays. I'm still recovering from the socializing of my Thanksgiving week adventure in the midwest -- I'm not used to spending so much time, day after day, with friends, and have become quite a hermit with the passing years. I love being with my far-flung buds, but I need to RECOVER afterwards. Was supposed to attend my client's holiday party Friday night, but was so filled by dread at the prospect that I didn't go ... I've been like this all my life but these days it's starting to feel like one of those phobias that one must just shrug off as part of how one is. I'm the one who blanches in the face of a party.

The novel is making creeping (not creepy) progress that I feel good about. It finally feels like it's past the opening stages and in the middle-of-writing-it stage, which is good considering that I've actually been working on it for a few years now, when you add it all up.

Still lifes and snow

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 16:14:44 GMT

My breakfast in progress, at La Bonbonniere, Dec 2007. The book is Karen Russell's collection St Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves.

Another view of the table with the snowy scene on the avenue.

Abingdon Square in the snow today. The statue is a WWI memorial. Looking south towards Hudson Street.

See the whole set here.

Let's all eat trafe for Chanukah!

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 15:53:23 GMT

A holiday scene:

The Place: Balducci's, today.
Personae: Me, shopping for low-carb food.
Action: I'm sort of staring at the meat display, lots of salamis and sausages, and then various hams. And the hams' price signs have all been tagged with festive PERFECT FOR CHANUKAH banners. Which I blinked at for a couple of secs, trying to decide if this was an example of truly monumental cluelessness or ... nah. It's just the Department of Monumental Cluelessness, Well-Meaning Division.

Photos taken at the Balducci's on 8th Ave at 14th Street, on Sunday, 12/2.

Update: As of Tuesday morning 12/4, the hams are now tagged with green "Perfect for the Holidays!" signs.

By Popular Demand: If you're tickled by the Ham for Chanukah pic, visit my store at cafepress.com, where you can get it on a mug, or on greeting cards (stock up now for next year!).

On Gary Taubes' marvelous book GOOD CALORIES, BAD CALORIES

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:11:58 GMT

I finished reading Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challening the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease recently, and I was so galvanized by it that I want to share just a little more, so I'm reproducing the book's summarizing conclusions--the points that Taubes either proves by careful sifting of the data, or feels are strong hypotheses that merit serious unbiased research. (The book will be coming out in the UK with a different title: The Diet Delusion.)

The reason I'm so fascinated by this book is that, after a lifetime of struggling with weight and eating patterns and being told in various ways that it all comes down to me being a compulsive overeater, lacking in willpower and self-control, and indolent in general, and even in the pro-size anti-dieting literature I've read never quite seeing a logical feasible reason for assertions that fat people eat more no more than lean people or that diets don't work, finally Taubes answers these questions, or points to potential answers that really satisfy my mind. I hope these ideas get disseminated in our culture, but I'm pretty sure that there's so much entrenched medical dogma to the contrary, as well as cultural dogma that relishes hating fat people and passing harsh moral judgment on them, that it's unlikely to get a fair hearing or have a large meta-effect, and that's a tragedy, because it's easy to foresee a lot of suffering in store for fat children being targeted by social engineering in the name of the "obesity epidemic", etc. Taubes makes the point that diet is like religion, in that few other things seem to so universally arouse people's passions, self-righteousness, and defensiveness, so he himself isn't very optimistic that the establishment that has built up its reputation (and he goes into great detail about who these so-called experts are, what their research credentials are, and how they got to be eminent, and it's not exactly on sheer merit) on the low-fat, fat-people-eat-too-much dogma aren't going to let go of that just because the evidence isn't there. (Why let facts get in the way of a good feeling of superiority?)

Now, Taubes does write from a supposition that this epidemic is real, and that obesity is a disease and part of (but not a cause of) other diseases he calls Diseases of Civilization or Western Diseases, principally diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and I know some people will argue that one can be fat and healthy, and I probably agree with that. But since he really goes to great lengths to show that obesity is part of a group of metabolic symptoms, rather than a cause, I think he gets a pass on that.

Here's his summary list of points that are made in the book, followed by a few paragraphs immediately following, all drawn from the book's epilogue:

1. Dietary fat, whether satured or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any other chronic disease of civilization.

2. The problem is the carbohydrates in the diet, their effect on insulin secretion, and thus the hormonal regulation of homeostatsis--the entire harmonic ensemble of the human body. The more easily digestible and refined the carbohydrates, the greater the effect on our health, weight, and well-being.

3. Sugars--sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup specifically--are particularly harmful, probably because the combination of fructose and glucose simultaneously elevates insulin levels while overloading the liver with carbohydrates.

4. Through their direct effect on insulin and blood sugar, refined carbohydrates, starches, and sugars are the dietary cause of coronary heart disease and diabetes. They are the most likely dietary causes of cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and other chronic diseases of civilization.

5. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating, and not sedentary behavior.

6. Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter, any more than it causes a child to grow taller. Expending more energy than we consume does not lead to long-term weight loss: it leads to hunger.

7. Fattening and obesity are caused by an imbalance--a disequilibrium--in the hormonal regulation of adipose tissue and fat metabolism. Fat synthesis and storage exceed the mobilization of fat from the adipose tissue and its subsequent oxidation. We become leaner when the hormonal regulation of the fat tissue reverses this balance.

8. Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. When insulin levels are elevated--either chronically or after a meal--we accumulate fat in our fat tissue. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and use it for fuel.

9. By stimulating insulin secretion, carbohydrates make us fat and ultimately cause obesity. The fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be.

10. By driving fat accumulation, carbohydrates also increase hunger and decrease the amount of energy we expend in metabolism and physical activity.

He adds: Evolution should be our best guide for what constitutes a healthy diet. It takes time for a population or a species to adapt to any new factor in its environment; the longer we've been eating a particular food as a species, the closer that food is to its natural state, the less harm it is likely to do. The fat content of the diets to which we presumably evolved will always remain questionable [because we can't know what paleolithic hunter-gatherers ate at all places and seasons]. Recommending that we consume oils is a problem--did we evolve to eat olive oil, for example, or linseed oil? And maybe a few thousand years is sufficient time to adapt to a new food but a few hundred is not. There is no such ambiguity however on the subject of carbohydrates. The most dramatic alterations in human diets in the past 2 million years, unequivocally, are 1) the transition from carb-poor to carb-rich diets that came with agriculture--the addition of grains and easily digestible starches to the diets of hunter-gatherers; 2) the increasing refinement of those carbs over the past few hundred years; and 3) the dramatic increases in fructose consumption that came as the per-capita consumption of sugars--sucrose and now high-fructose corn syrup--increased from less than 10 to 20 lbs a year in the mid-18th century to the nearly 150 lbs it is today. Why would a diet that excludes these foods specifcally be expected to do anything other than return us to "biological normality"? It is not the case, despite public-health recommendations to the contrary, that carbs are required in a healthy human diet. Most nutritionists still insist that a diet requires 120 to 130 grams of carbs/day because this is the amount of glucose that the brain and CNS will metabolize when the diet is carb-rich. But what the brain uses and what it requires are 2 different things. WIthout carbs in the diet, the brain and CNS will run on ketone bodies, converted from dietary fat and from the fatty acids released by the adipose tissue; on glycerol, also released from the fat tissue with the breakdown of triglycerides into free fatty acids; and on glucose, converted from the protein in the diet. SInce a carb-restricted diet, unrestricted by calories, will, by definition, include considerable fat and protein, there will be no shortage of fuel for the brain. Indeed, this is likely to be the fuel mixture that our brains evolved to use, and our brains seem to run more efficiently on this fuel mixture than they do on glucose alone.

For me what was so remarkable here was being walked through the science of WHY all calories aren't equal, why animals and people lay on fat even on low-calorie regimens, and a feasible hypotehsis on exactly why sugars can be addicting in the manner of alcohol and addictive drugs (they certainly are for me; moderation is entirely impossible). Taubes also makes the point, which gets lost in much of general rhetoric about fat, diets, eating, that there will always be people who will remain lean no matter what sort of diet they have, which explains why even among populations that have huge rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes due to the general diet, there are still people who are not fat and not diabetic. This is important to me, because I've often seen in the media (and in nasty comments on various blogs) and been the subject of harangues about how if some people can control their size by food restriction and exercise, so should I, if I REALLY wanted to. Taubes shows the data that demonstrates that this just isn't true, that there's no cause-and-effect.

As much as its about diet and disease, the book is also about science, and how it is practiced, and badly practiced, how politics and personalities and the separation of disciplines, among other things, can result in the establishments of erroneous dogmas. (Interestingly, one could almost blame much of the low-fat-is-good stuff on Hitler--prior to WWII much of the more in-depth and interesting nutrition research went on in Germany and was published in German; those scientists who got out and came to the US were never able to establish themselves at prestigious institutions, and anti-German bias and disinterest in work not published in English effectively sunk their research findings from the notice of the scientific community.)

Anyway, I'll stop now before I write out the entire book. I wanted to go on at some length because i know a fair few of you who are reading my jnl are interested in these matters.

A review of the book at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Taubes' NY Times article, "What If It's All A Big Fat Lie?" in which he lays out his argument.