Aliens & Anorexia

As the rope was tightening around my neck, an Alien made love to me. Belief is atechnology for softening the landscape. The world becomes more beautiful when God is in it. Here iswhat happens inside a person's body when they starve.Written in the shadow of Georg Buchner's Lenzat razor pitch, Aliens & Anorexia, first published in 2000, defines a female form of chance thatis both emotional and radical. The book unfolds like a set of Chinese boxes, using stories andpolemics to travel through a maze that spirals back into itself. Its characters include Simone Weil,the first radical philosopher of sadness, the artist Paul Thek, Kraus herself, and "Africa," hervirtual S&M partner who's shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes upin the Northwest Woods for the winter to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her ownlow-budget independent film.In Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus argues for empathy as the ultimateperceptive tool, and reclaims anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor "self-esteem."Anorexia, Kraus writes, could be an attempt to leave the body altogether: a rejection of thecynicism this culture hands us through its food.