When I wrote a few days ago about a funk or mood, or being depressed, I forget what I actually wrote, I thought to mention that it might all be due to a hamburger I gargled down a few days before. Could my body really be getting sooo sensitive to what I put in it, that it chokes like a gas guzzler when I slip back into giving it "leaded" food? Or perhaps I've always been this way but like any primitive man I've superstitiously ascribed my bodily weather to external mystical spirits, such as "rent" and "taxes."

Nabokov understood the importance of digestion on mood and even decision-making and subjective experience (much the way Pynchon reportedly sees oral hygeine as a metaphor for psychological health - works for me). In at least one of his novels (I think it's Ada, but I'd have to check to be sure), he regularly reports on the quality of the bowel movement or stool the character in question has produced that day. His humor is more embedded in the writing, less the burlesque rim-shot style of Vonnegut (as when he cites the size of each male character's penis in one of his early novels), but no less black or outrageous.

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