Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
Again I say, I do not know what happened to H.P. Lovecraft; though, I hope he has found some peaceful oblivion far from octopi, crabs and black drums, the infernal recipe he found in the Necronomicon. A dark cloud hangs over most of the night, but I do remember, as I’ve said, a knock on … Continue reading H.P. Lovecraft Arrives With Sea Creatures On Labor Day . . . Never Seen Again.
Midsummer in the Stockholm Archipelago and I’ve finally become accustomed to falling asleep in daylight. Important to blanket windows, shut eyes tightly, and dream about water and land washing, breaking each other. It’s about four in the morning when I wake to light and silhouette, and what can I do, emerging colors call me out … Continue reading Broth Of A Forest Floor: Walking On Storön.
We’re set floating in this light on midsummer day’s eve. The Baltic’s still, now that its been channeled around one island after another, though the surface slightly bends like a plate of glass heated and slowly turning in and out of itself. Think of a mirror dulled with age reflecting a dusted blue sky ringed … Continue reading Storön–Vignettes From The Big Island.
After a forty-five minute bus ride out of Stockholm, the road ends at Stavsnäs with a pier jutting out into the water, pointing toward an archipelago, a labyrinth of islands we’ll navigate on our way to a greeting and hospitality. This is Tomas Tranströmer’s realm as translated into another island language by Robin Fulton, a place of sky … Continue reading There’s An Island In The Baltic Sea
Our collective human memory reaches far back through many doors, many hallways and rooms, and alway we find, though never that first room, a place to cook and a place to sit down and eat with each other. In Homer’s the Odyssey, Odysseus portrays this action and place as the best life has to offer. … Continue reading Happy July 4th! Some Thoughts on Cannibalism For North Carolina.
The first thing you notice about Pieter Aretsen’s painting A Meat Stall With The Holy Family Giving Alms (1551) is all the meat–an ox head with eyes staring at us, pig trotters on a cabbage leaf, whole side of a slaughtered pig split cleanly down the spine, a large ham shank, sausage, smoked fish, herring; … Continue reading Thinking About Who’s Sitting Down To Dinner In North Carolina
Looking through the ground-breaking, original four-volume series The Image of the Black in Western Art, the myriad of interpretive decisions highlight problems and struggles with the representation of people of African descent in Western art. A project started by John and Dominique de Menil in the 1960’s as a response to segregation in America, the … Continue reading Further Thoughts Toward A Lecture In North Carolina: Lowcountry Seafood Boil.
The year begins with champagne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (circa 1880-81) and new dietary guidelines. Well, something like that. Marion Nestle at Food Politics offers a review of the impregnable document: The 2015 Dietary Guidelines, At Long Last, while Mother Jones points out that climate goes missing in the document: There’s A Huge … Continue reading A Week Thinking About What We Eat
People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and hinted years before. Many things … Continue reading Cooking Fish With H.P. Lovecraft
On March 25 at the Houston Country Club, I’ll sit at a white-cloth table, dine on a salad, a fowl perhaps, and some sort of pie, while drinking a few glasses of wine. This is the annual Great Conversation hosted by the august Honors College at the University of Houston–where I work. Along the way, … Continue reading A Rose For Emily, Buffalo Trace Bourbon, And A Lowcountry Seafood Boil
