Christopher Higgs on reading Olivia Cronk’s Skin Horse in New Orleans.

With a roiling stomach, after six hours zipping across I-10 from our Magnolia Heights neighborhood in Tallahassee to the Lower Garden District in New Orleans, presumably attributable to the consumption of fast food, an uncharacteristic activity for me, I snatch Skin Horse from my bag, rush to the restroom in our hotel room, plop down on the toilet only to find my body is too big for the little seat. I have to squirm to make myself fit. I am reminded of Žižek’s commentary on the relationship between toilets and ideology, an extension or elaboration or corruption of Kristeva’s theory of the abject, of course, and instantly I begin wondering about the cultural significance of a toilet seat so small as to be unable to comfortably accommodate a person of my figure, which is to say an average figure for a man in his mid-thirties who exercises half-an-hour to forty-five minutes a day and eats fairly well balanced meals and is only slightly overweight, and I begin to worry for those people who are obese, who seriously could not fit themselves on this tiny seat. I wonder what it would be like to have a body of such proportion. My bowels explode, regardless, as I open the book.

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