Mireille Guiliano
French Women Don’t Get Fat
“Il faut des rites”
The French enjoy eating out in a special way, knowing that what they savor today may never again appear on the menu. They treat every meal as something special, and this is what you must learn to do, too.
Could not the same be said of Japanese cuisine?
Or what is bubbling in the universal soup pot?
And so for day 2841
22.09.2014
John Ota
The Kitchen: A journey through history in search of the perfect design
The dishes from his kitchen more than simply entertained his guests. Jefferson believed that bringing opponents together over food and wine allowed them to better understand each other. He used food as a way of finding common ground.
“Thomas Jefferson Kitchen”
And so for day 2840
21.09.2014
“Introduction: the islands, the spirit, the flavours”
Quietness when eating is something I’ve noticed across Indonesia. Even when eating together, conversation often pauses so you can focus on the food. On days without ceremony, members of a family will help themselves at a point they feel hungary rather than at set mealtimes. Food is cooked freshly each morning and left out at room temperature, under woven baskets. It is quite usual for people to eat alone sitting in a quiet corner, so they can appreciate every mouthful without the distraction of conversation.
Enak is the word for delicious in Bahasa Indonesia. It goes beyond simply taste to the pleasure felt by all the senses. The scent of lime blossom can be enak, or the firm stroke of a massage, or the ripple of gamelan music. Food is enak for its aroma, colours, texture and flavour and each of these is given full attention both in cooking and in eating.
Eleanor Ford. Fire Islands: Recipes from Indonesia
I like how these two paragraphs both stand alone and yet complement each other. Like the pauses in conversation. And the breath taken between mouthfuls.
And so for day 2839
20.09.2014
I think there is an ethical drive behind this aesthetic statement:
A person who does not write books, thinks much, and lives in
unsatisfactory society will usually be a good letter-writer.Nietzsche
Human, All Too Human
And where does a collector of letters (published as a volume in a book) stand in this process of mining the unsatisfactory society?
And so for day 2838
19.09.2014
Svend Brinkmann: seek to create a cultural ecology with aesthetically appealing rituals that allow for an ethically based form of life. (The Joy of Missing Out: The Art of Self-Restraint in an Age of Excess).
And so for day 2837
18.09.2014
Byung-Chul Han
The Scent of Time
Translated by Daniel Steuer
Out of nothing, narration makes world. […] The world becomes readable, like a picture. You need only let your gaze move here, move there, in order to read the sense, the meaningful order, off it. Everything has its place — that is, its meaning — within a firmly set order (the cosmos). […] Events take place in fixed relations with each other, they form meaningful chains.
I would substitute field for cosmos and open a space for interbeing with an eye on the formulation of possible worlds — a world is a field with objects primed for action — everything has a place that can shift. Chains are the links.
Han hints at this notion of world as a state of affairs arising out of field in the characterization of a contemporary aesthetic sensitive to sequences:
The end of the linear constitution of the world not only results in loss. It also makes possible new forms of being and perceiving. Progressing gives way to hovering (Schweben). Our perception becomes sensitized to non-casusal relations. The end of that narrative linearity, whose strict selectivity forces events on to a narrow path, makes it necessary to find orientation and to be able to move, amidst a high density of events. The arts and music of today also reflect this new form of perception. Aesthetic tension is not created by a narrative development, but by the superimposition and compression of events.
Han’s theme of lingering (in the face of an age of haste) and his survey of how different historical orders shape the experience of time invites a reflection on how sequences are read off worlds and how narrativity leads to narration which leads to world and narrative… go slow go far.
And so for day 2836
17.09.2014
Brenda Laurel
Computers as Theatre – Second Edition
Side Bar page 83
At first, we thought simply to build a game […] But as we began conceptualizing the game, we realized that we were actually building a world; material in that particular game arose from construction about the environment and characters that was larger than the content of the game itself.
Laurel’s report suggests to me that world and narratives and games arise from acts of narration which are ways of constructing.
Decoupling narration from narrative (discourse still gives rise to story but it also can result in world or game) … narrativity is the potential for formulating sequences from semiotic material (it need not be verbal); narration is the production of sequences and their recombination; narrative, world and game are products of acts of narration (thought through an expansive notion of manipulating sequences). This conceptualizing of the relations build upon earlier efforts.
And so for day 2835
16.09.2014
From the text that accompanies Ours, a browser-based work by Samuel Marion
Buying a product as a way to support a cause is a much easier way to scratch the “guilt-itch” than by supporting any sort of political action, with the added bonus of accumulating some sort of object within the process. […] The framing of this brainwork is especially seductive to a class that has the income to reassure themselves that they can buy themselves out of their ecological footprint.
https://www.thisisours.us/essay.html
Green washing … rinse recycle repeat.
And so for day 2834
15.09.2014
rupi kaur
the sun and her flowers
in the middle of a poem about rape
call the electrician
my eyes won’t light up
assessing the damage … formulating hope
And so for day 2833
14.09.2014
Donald Culross Peattie
An Almanac for Moderns
September Fifth
[entry devoted to asters]
Here some call the white ones frostflower, for they come as the frost comes, as a breath upon the landscape, a silver rime of chill flowering in the old age of the year.
I like how this sentence creeps in a fashion similar to its subjects (frost and flowers).
And so for day 2832
13.09.2014
