Karl Ove Knausgaard on his favorite kind of gum
While he’s working, Karl Ove Knausgaard chews gum and lots of it.
From a purely physiological perspective, chewing something without swallowing is pointless. So is smoking cigarettes, but when you smoke, the cigarette releases stimulating and addictive substances, which explains why fully grown adults suck on them. Gum does not produce any such effects. Its pleasure is more closely related to that of the pacifiers that infants suck on, where the sucking reflex first tricks the body into believing that it is working at getting itself some food, then takes over entirely and turns sucking on something into an activity that is valuable in and of itself. It is obvious, then, that there is something infantile about chewing gum.
I would love to see 4-5 paragraphs about him trying the gum from a pack of 1989 Topps baseball cards for the first time. Just thinking about it makes me gag.
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