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’m rereading Samuel Becket’s novel Watt, while also listening to Dermot Crowley voice the Singing Master’s words on Audiobook. In the opening pages, we do not meet Watt directly but through Mr. Hackett and Mr. and Mrs. Nixon who sit at a bus stop and observe someone or something disembark from a tram, variously described … Continue reading Cooking Beckett: A Stew For Mr. Knott.
It truly amazes me how some Americans view this country, a group of states built from immigrants over and over across the centuries, and yet these cultural critics never appreciate nor understand. Now with Donald as their mouthpiece, some outrageous delusions appear on my newsfeed, leaving me speechless but definitely hungry. Take the Coney Island … Continue reading “Yes Donald, Immigrants Do Change Cultures, So Do You Want To Send Back The Coney Island?”
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.”
A pulling back of skin and forceps on flesh reveal an inner world of the human body in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Anatomy lessons entertained curious spectators throughout Europe from the sixteenth into the nineteenth century. Such spectacles danced the edge of the sacred and profane as worlds under the skin … Continue reading The Anatomical Theater Of Anthony Bourdain
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.
Vichyssoise made the list for Prolegomena Number 3, but Cocido interceded, so reading Kant and cooking with a pot continues today with garbanzo beans and odd bits. Let’s leap in with the beginning of the “Second Part of the Main Transcendental Question.” Nature is the existence of things, so far as it is determined according … Continue reading Prolegomena To Any Future Cocido Madrileño.
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
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.
