Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
In the HBO series Westworld, androids also known as “hosts” struggle to achieve the most fundamentally unique experience of the human species, consciousness and all its attendant wakefulness and awareness, or so we’d like to think about ourselves, but hosts like Dolores Abernathy and Maeve Millay become alert to themselves and the world around them, distinctly … Continue reading Banquet World: “These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends.”
Ah, if only our bodies featured an ever-growing fruit basket a la Arcimboldo, then food distribution would be at our hands, from our faces. Exploring the metaphysics of food includes the portrayals of its production and distribution. The seed I hold in my hand has a real growth potential and biochemistry to its existence; just … Continue reading Metaphysics Of The Food Labyrinth.
Oh this tasting and thinking self! We experience it and swear we’re at the heart of who we are, and yet, and yet. But though we may call this thinking self (the soul) substance, as being the ultimate subject of thinking which cannot be further represented as the predicate of another thing, it remains quite … Continue reading Prolegomena To Any Future Single Malt Scotch Whisky.
Philippe de Champaigne’s painting Saint Augustine (1645-1650) presents the image of a burning heart in the theologian’s hand to emphasize his burning love of knowledge, truth and God. A smoking heart has much to do with a love of taste, and with that, a few words about taste from the Journal of René Redzepi: The connection … Continue reading Smoking Heart Of Love.
In the early sixteenth century, Leonardo Da Vinci sketched many anatomical drawings and wrote many notes concerning the human heart. Nature has made the cords on the back side of the fleshy membrane of the three gates with which the gateway of the right ventricle is shut; and she has not made them on the … Continue reading Eating A Burning Heart Of Love.
Such a sacred tableau in Pablo Picasso’s 1902 painting La Soupe. There’s a graceful, reverential bow on the part of the mother as she offers a bowl of soup to her daughter, who springs forward, ready to receive sustenance, ready to receive a gift. I love cooking soup. A small, crafted merging of nature and … Continue reading A Few Thoughts On Soup
There it is, the sea, the most unintelligible of non-human existences. And here is the woman, standing on the beach, the most unintelligible of living beings. As a human being she once posed a question about herself, becoming the most unintelligible of living beings. She and the sea. (401) The moment of consciousness, of self-awareness … Continue reading Reading And Eating Clarice Lispector’s Story “As Águas Do Mundo.”
My friend Doug Arno went for a walk with a compound bow in Northern Ontario near Longlac during bear hunting season and brought down a black bear weighing nearly 300 pounds. With one arrow. Bear hunting in North America dates back to the beginning of the Holocene. Bear Hunting at the Pleistocene/Holocene Transition on the Northern … Continue reading “Looking After the Bones:” A Hunt And Bear Stew.
A dissolute aristocrat dreams Don Quixote who dreams Miguel Cervantes writing his novel Don Quixote who dreams Pablo Picasso painting two lonely figures on a hill. Our narrator dreams the Knight of La Mancha dreaming an inn as a castle, prostitutes as maidens, and stockfish as trout. I read of Castile and Alcalá de Henares … Continue reading Dreams Of Mustard Greens, Pigs And Shrimp.
That’s Demian above running up a hill in Linlithgow, Scotland outside the burned out remains of the Royal Palace. It’s nearing dusk, which in June at this latitude means night won’t completely fall until after 10pm. The image speaks to how a camera, in this case an iPhone, is limited in how it processes light, … Continue reading Taste Creates The World: Several Drams Of Whisky / Part 2.
