Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
I read Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics after spending many years with Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Carson, Gabriel García Márquez, and Virginia Woolf which means I understand Kant’s metaphysics through those authors, through The Metamorphosis, The Circular Ruins, Autobiography of Red, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Waves. My … Continue reading Prolegomena To Any Future Ragù.
To cook, to eat, to kill. An animal’s life taken, body split open, applied to fire and torn between teeth. What are the aesthetic and ethics? Dan Barber argues that good taste necessitates sustainable farming to table. Tayyib and Halal mean the animal has been raised in a “good” environment–think ethically sourced and sustainable–and then … Continue reading Brains and Balls.
Gustave Doré portrays one of the most famous acts of chewing in literature. At the end of Dante’s Inferno, the Poet and Virgil walk upon on ice amidst the very, very damned as we read in Robert M. Durling’s translation. . . . I saw two frozen in one hole so that one head was a … Continue reading Thinking About Chewing
Diana and Actaeon as painted by Titian. And a quote from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The hunter after filling the forest with blood looks upon the chaste goddess of the hunt, and in so doing seals his fate to become the stag his own dogs kill and eat. Consider the film below that The National … Continue reading Actaeon: “These violent delights have violent ends.” And they are served at the dining table.
Been away from Empires, Cannibals and Magic Fish Bones longer than I anticipated, but I’m back for the last day of 2017 as a pork belly marinated in honey and molasses smokes outside and I listen to King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man on the Live in Chicago CD (a Christmas gift from my daughter … Continue reading Happy New Year’s Eve And The Indiana Book Of The Dead.
The hedges have not been clipped for awhile in this small garden at the edge of the Villa Borgehese in Rome. Grass does its best to cover a narrow walkway, while the sky above unfurls grey clouds and grey light like an old sheet stretched between the sun and earth. We walk through marble and … Continue reading The Mystery Of Cacio E Pepe While Walking In An Edward Gorey World.
Liver has pride of place in the human body in ancient texts as a producer of blood and a source of life. The Etruscan bronze liver above with its inscriptions guides the reader of entrails through a large, meaty organ considered the basis of life. The ancient Greek term is hēpatoskōpia, which means to examine the liver. … Continue reading Reading And Cooking Liver While Several Species Of Small, Furry Animals Gather Together In A Cave And Groove With A Pict.
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.
Rain falls for six days, rain falls for one hundred and forty-four hours, rain falls for eight thousand six hundred and forty minutes, and so on. As with Aureliano Segundo who fights boredom during the four years, eleven months, and two days rain falls in Gabriel Garcia’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, I have … Continue reading Cooking Hannibal Through Thirty-Six Inches of Rainfall: It’s All About Love.
A maid and a cavalier look out at us from a 17th century kitchen in Pieter Cornelisz van Ryck’s A large kitchen still life with a maid and a gentleman. She’s scaling a fish and he’s pouring back some water or wine. Practices of a day and time, very much like today, though the clothes … Continue reading House Of Kitchens To Doctor Omelette: Cooking Strategies And Tactics.
