Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
Though James Joyce’s Ulysses properly begins with, Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: —Introibo ad altare Dei . (3) … Continue reading Eating Ulysses. Bloom Balls.
I take the long way to the Cirkus Arena. Walking from Slussen across Slussenområdet with its bridges rising over locks between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea, and further towards the Stockholm Cathedral, Riddarholm Church and Baroque orange and yellow facades greeting me as I descend into Gamla Stan, stepping cobblestone to cobblestone in black patent leather shoes, past ornate … Continue reading Night Of A Red Right Hand / First Postcard.
Morning. Sleep with scattered images of pigs running through flooded woodlands on the end of a vast sea reclaiming what always belonged to it and it alone. Woke up and walked out before coffee to see what the sky had brought us. Water on all sides, but a slight rise of earth and grass has … Continue reading Remembering Harvey / Chapter Three / One Hundred Years Of The Same Morning.
Storm coming. Storms having come. We made the decision not to leave the house, not to pull out on the highway in my 2003 Chevrolet Cavalier loaded with ourselves and the cats. I strapped myself to the iron fence like Ahab lashed to the great whale. Catastrophe in the air. What would the night bring? … Continue reading Remembering Harvey / Chapter Two / Pulled Pork And Gin.
After a meal, a walk helps aid digestion, at least, that’s what I’ve been told repeatingly, and as Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin writes, ‘Man lives not on what he eats, but on what he digests,’ says an old proverb. We must therefore digest to live: rich and poor, king and shepherd are equal in the face of … Continue reading A Walk After Goulash With Brillat-Savarin, Blackpink, Walt Whitman And Tomas Tranströmer.
Five hours roasting at 150 Celsius or about 300 Fahrenheit and Maillard Reactions abound as lamb bone, flesh and skin browns, fat melts and a wondrous dark, umami aroma fills the kitchen and house. Carbohydrate molecules and amino acids change and change in dry heat as colors and taste merge. Fat molecules with the aid … Continue reading Roasted Spring Lamb And Veg With Several Calls To The Suicide Prevention Hotline.
Spring lamb. First born and first kill. Three to five months old and now on our table, well one of its legs. An offering for new growth and warmer days. Flesh and sign of a flayed god and his ascendance into blue skies. Once upon a time a celebration at the end of fasting. The … Continue reading Spring Lamb With Roasted Vegetables, Agnus Dei, William Blake, the Tenebrae Choir, Broadway And Seventeen Years Of Therapy.
The seeming definition of a ghost, someone there and not there–reflection in a shop window shading in a blurred face and dark suit through which paintings and photographs may be seen or not paintings and not photographs because it’s not that easy to say, and other blurred faces and clothes passing by and passing into … Continue reading Ghosts On A Walk And Premonitions Of April From W.S. Merwin.
The end of March juggles winter and spring, often choosing both. Ice and melting ice, snow and melting snow, bare branches and first blooms, and over all blue, blue sky and marshmallow clouds. W.S. Merwin’s poem, “It Is March” from The Lice muses on appearances and disappearances, revealings and vanishings. It Is March It is … Continue reading March Dust: W.S Merwin And The Precariousness of What We Haven’t Done.
Rock, shadow, hole in ice, ring of trees, sky. W.S. Merwin passed from this life into the further reaches of Hawaii last Saturday. Certainly one of the great poetic voices through the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st, Merwin captivated readers with his consummate literary skill, knowledge of literary traditions ranging through … Continue reading What The Boys Said To Homer: W.S. Merwin’s The Lice And Our Fragile Place In The World.
