The evidence is common knowledge (our tastebuds proclaim it) yet this nicely balanced sentence is a welcome reminder of the encounter at the heart of the preparation of good food.
Great food happens at the intersection of your ingredients and your imagination.
Daniel Patterson and Mandy After, The Art of Flavor.
And so for day 2271
02.03.2013
Ronald Johnson
A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees (1964) [Jargon 42]
“Wild Apples” ends …
as a cow
may rust like
rock
I like how this just creeps up on you… the cow of a generic colour becomes more specific as the short lines sink into one’s attention the impression of very sedate bovines as still as stone and as brownish red …
And so for day 2270
01.03.2013
Aspen Art Museum
Educator Notes
Ritual
December 15, 2017–November 25, 2018
https://cdn.filepicker.io/api/file/wp6uIVWNTO7p31c8yO0B?
The Educator Notes list a series of probing questions. What attracted my attention was the embedding of one particular line of inquiry in this set: the difference between ritual and routine.
What do you do every day that you most look forward to?
How is ritual different from routine?
What rituals did you learn from your family? What rituals did you pick up from your friends?
What can we learn from ourselves by identifying our daily rituals?
“How is ritual different from routine?” is a question that seemed unanswerable until I came across one of the epigraphs in Catherine Bell Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. “Ritual is pure activity, without meaning or goal.” [Frits Staal, “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen 26, no. 1 (1975), 9].
Ritual is akin to aesthetic experience giving access to a time and space that is not tied to mundane purpose but is accessed for itself. It is thus distinguished from routine which we think of as goal-directed (e.g. brushing one’s teeth). Ritual is programless. This doesn’t quite seem to stick — ritual seems in my mind connected to the practice of magic which is anything but meaningless.
So we seek other definitions.
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual
A ritual “is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence”.[http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ritual] Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized but not defined by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance.[Bell, Catherine (1997). Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 138–169.]
From this I grasp two points: special space and sequence.
And so for day 2269
28.02.2013
Kate Young. The Little Library Cookbook “On Reading”
Whenever I’ve neglected them, books have sat, waiting patiently, always ready for me to come back. They are the true constant in my life, the grounding force, the comfort when I am homesick, anxious or lonely, a true joy when I am not. With them, I can travel in space and time, around the world and to places that don’t exist, except on the page.
And have conversations with the other neglecters, the others affected by true constants, and the fellow travellers.
And so for day 2268
27.02.2013
Elizabeth David
French Country Cooking
Escalopes de Veau en Papillotes
The recipe ends with a paean to these parcels.
The nicest way to serve them, if your guests don’t mind getting their fingers messy, is piled up in the dish in their paper bags, so that none of the aromas have a chance to evaporate until the food is ready to be eaten.
I once had success in charming guests with a presentation of salmon topped with slivers of ginger and wrapped in individual packets of parchment paper. Not quite the messy pile but offering nonetheless a mouth-watering aroma.
And so for day 2267
26.02.2013
Patricio Dávila
Curator Diagrams of Power
http://diagramsofpower.net/curators-essay.html
Maps, diagrams and visualizations are both artifacts and processes. They are tools that tell a story, and create ways of bringing people and things together in the telling of that story. The outcomes are often visualized so that they can be viewed and inspected, but also performed so that they can be heard and felt.
Interesting appeal to the dual senses of seeing and hearing — the rational eye and the emotional ear — to provoke a holistic experience. Still puzzled by the persistence of this mapping of faculties and senses. For does not the ear follow argument and does not the eye thrill to colour, shape and form?
And so for day 2265
24.02.2013
Two resistances.
Ronald Johnson’s last line in ARK 88 is “flying the marble kite” which I am prone to mis-remember as “flying the marble flag” — a form of protest.
Tom Crewe reviewing a number of books about AIDS (and protests) ends his review thus:
‘As I sweat it out in the early hours, a “guilty victim” of the scourge,’ Jarman wrote in his diary in September 1989, ‘I want to bear witness how happy I am, and will be until the day I die, that I was part of the hated sexual revolution; and that I don’t regret a single step or encounter I made in that time; and if I write in future with regret, it will be a reflection of a temporary indisposition.’
Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1989-90 by Derek Jarman
Smiling in Slow Motion: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1991-94 by Derek Jarman
The Ward by Gideon Mendel
Patient Zero and the Making of the Aids Epidemic by Richard A. McKay
How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed Aids by David France
And so for day 2264
23.02.2013
Philip Pullman in The Guardian presents the case for a way of seeing connectedness.
I’m relying on poetry to make this point because I think that poetry itself is a kind of enchantment. The effect that certain lines and images can have on us can’t be explained by translating them into simple modern English. The very form is part of the meaning, and the sound the poem makes works like a spell on our senses and not only on our minds. But it’s not just true of poetry. Everything that touches human life is surrounded by a penumbra of associations, memories, echoes and correspondences that extend far into the unknown. In this way of seeing things, the world is full of tenuous filaments of meaning, and the very worst way of trying to see these shadowy existences is to shine a light on them.
Reminds me that “the real” extends to “the imaginary”.
And so for day 2263
22.02.2013
Little borough. Big library stamp (4 in. x 4 in.)
East York was amalgamated into the City of Toronto. This trace of the previous municipal structure survives in one of the holdings of the Toronto Public Library. A charming crest.
And so for day 2262
21.02.2013
Eschatology Eschewed
Gary Thomas Morse
Safety Sand
The “Safe Spaces” sequence
In the opening section, where we are asked to “admit difficulty” from line one, there is a comment that is almost a metacommentary: “when cognitive / tinkering went rogue with / baroque treatment”. A few pages later in the second section, we cross a reference to a “chiaroscuro peep show”, another sort of metacommentary. Section 21 splits slaughter into an s-curve and laughter or sutures an “s” to “laughter” — we can be difficult about which direction to read the flow. See:
Elsewhere in the Safe Spaces sequence, there is reference to an “estranged methodology” and taking on this alien method, I venture once again to this minimal unit: this s- conjures for me Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty and the serpentine line. Interesting that this curve is cast in relief by a straight dash. Not an ending. Another metacommentary.
And so for day 2266
25.02.2013