Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
Take a study of natural forces, add a healthy pour of figurative language and delicious fragments from the natural philosophers from the eighth and seventh centuries BCE throughout the Aegean, especially in the Greek letters of Heraclitus. Consider, Fragment 7: εἰ πάντα τὰπάντα καπνὸς γένοιτο, ῥῖνες ἂν διαγνοῖεν. Transliterated into our alphabet, and we read: … Continue reading Heraclitus On Smoke; Hervé Smoking.
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.
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.
Jules-Alexandre Grün knew how to paint a dinner party. All the light, all the wealth, all the joy. Such a beautiful nineteen hundred and eleven, what could go wrong? I think of the word hospitality. Here’s a Walter Arnold photograph of the old Marine Hospital in the French Fort area of Memphis, Tennessee. … Continue reading The Dinner Party: Do I Amputate, Change Out, Or Kill The Guests?
The Hermetic science par excellence is alchemy; the famous Emerald Table, the bible of the alchemists, is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and gives in a mysteriously compact form the philosophy of the All and the One. That which is above is like that which is below . . . . And as all things have … Continue reading “Dad, It Tastes Like Blood!” Alchemy And Briny, Smokey Crustaceans And Suids. Oh My!
