Month: July 2004

I used to be very exclusive in my eating and really should be so again.

As in no or very little meat.

No refined sugar.

No cheese.

Mostly just beautiful vegetables.

I promise, I promise, if the Democrats win, I’ll stop eating everything so attentively and capaciously! I’ll be more discerning and think beyond the next five minutes. Really truly I will!

(Do bargains like that actually work? Who or what might I actually be bargaining with — fate? They always seem to work in Bollywood movies. The character is at a shrine to Shiva or Krishna, praying for someone’s — usually the heroine’s — life: “Please, please, take me instead!” And of course, the god always takes them up on their offer.)

Last Wednesday’s lunch in Harlem at Sylvia’s famous soul food restaurant:

Barbecued ribs (with famous “sassy” sauce)

collard greens with smoked turkey

macaroni ‘n’ cheese

cornbread (real pieces of corn)

peach cobbler

I thought I might die of pleasure. I might yet.

Delightful foods:

Bangladeshi aromatic rice (like Basmati but with a tiny grain)

Turkish preserved lemons (for mixing with green olives and chilis)

Chorizo

Black raspberry juice (delicious in “juicy pops!)

Tamarind (I have learned how to use it in cooking daal — yeah baby!)

Hong Kong style pan fried noodles (my kingdom for these)

Stonyfield Farm organic ice cream (we’re trying hard to reduce our pus cell intake. Then we’ll try to move on to our waistlines)

Tarama (as in taramasalata. Try this — without the salata part — on hot vermicelli with sauteed garlic, shredded nori, and cayenne pepper. A little parmesan can’t hurt.)

Black mushrooms.

Of course, I’ve read the biological explanations for why we crave what is the worst for us.

Nonetheless, I find it very disappointing.

And in my case, at certain times more than others, those cravings are overweaning — notably, for vermicelli. Also, copious amounts of ice cream.

I actually like the things that are supposed to be good for me (kale, tofu, avocado, carrots, quinoa, etc.) quite a lot (I know, there’s now some kind of controversy about tofu. I just find it hard to believe the arguments against it given the Japanese predilection for it, and their long history of eating it happily and healthily. I especially love it with Lee Kum Kee black bean & garlic sauce — tho I wonder if the MSG might not cancel out any health benefits).

But the bad things… sometimes… are like a hydra!

Overleaning…

I think there is a connection between eating the wrong foods knowingly and a deep sense (however wrongheaded) of a lack of political & personal agency. Is it too much to say that eating wrongly is an a- or anti-political act?

(Thinking, suddenly, of eating disorders.)

The incredible sudden gratification of certain foods. How one is completely absorbed in them. I know a diabetic who will wait at the Krispy Kreme factory for the freshest donuts — his description of them profoundly poetic… he brings others there to try to convert them, even! And it is true, once they have tasted that melting sugar, the lardy smoosh of the donut meat as it dissolves on the tongue, and smelled that heady smell, they are surely doomed…

Lewis Carroll, Anais Nin, and Donna Reed all died on the day I was born (although, of course, in different years).

Quote of the day:

“PICTURES JUST COME TO MY MIND; I THINK THEM OUT WITH MY BRAIN, AND THEN I TELL MY HEART TO GO AHEAD.”

— Horace Pippin

The Boohbah Zone is my favorite website at the moment. Gary and the kitties like it, too. Make sure you have the sound on and mouse around.

SHEEPNOSE

light on the gill

where the gill fluttes

slide — drip — smudge

light gill

gill heaves, flaps a

back up, spackles —

monkeyed, mannered,

affected lateral sliplight

and the light on

the brain, spackled —

deserted

stupid didactic gill

explanatorium

infinite number of rosy prosy gills —

the tiresome thing about

the tiresome thing about

the tiresome thiing about…

breathing — the

modernity —

the blunt unlucky

monologues — the fluting

opinions, the

swayback

demagogues — the

skinny plangent lambent planks

of teak in the crying eye

sloop — jump up on —

disgusted — extra fancy gills.

mudpuppy lost in a bank.

sludge of funny money

looping dumbly around the other dummies!

the rich dummies and their TV glasses.

the fat loving dummies and their favorite limits.

the tiresome thing about men

the tiresome thing

the tiresome t hing about men as deer in the bodies of the living —

and as bear-eaters —

is that they all have the same influences.

locked in slime, locked in the same slimes

flat as a line

on a locked french mouth

made to look like gills.

contemptorama — !

caught in chicken wire

with the white shit

and the elegance

and all the feathers, and the products, and the daddies.

stuck in the craw: a perfect gill:

squirming rhododendron —

a perfect cyclops

lusting after light,

or a perfect cossack

storming the people:

“my” people (gazonk)

pretty pretty gill,

gill and drug.

sturming and churning.

less than four million years old —

and tiresome

and blank,

and mangy.

Don’t reincarate.

Just fly.

Because the music is twinkly (for

the bloated corpses) we have a concrete

need — for cormorants…

who teach us not to hate —

the hemorrhoids filling up the sound holes

in poetic space.

We weren’t given words to make decadent

“word art” — feathery bough spreads over the water,

morosely

as a sauce —

circadian!

and full of cicadas.

We weren’t grim enough

to make our piranhas shatter.

Nor not grim enough to cadence down

into the ugly ugly dim mud —

the luminescent dim song

of strained peas and dirty conch.

Spattering its toe,

dragging it through the liquid silver —

liberating the elves and me —

and our happy happy gills.

And then a slither through the seaweed

(a modicum):

a fully normal

weaselsong.

Ululations: ALL COLOR! NO CONTENT!

I’ve seen so much FANTASTIC PROPAGANDA lately!

Realizing I love good agitprop because I love to be emotionally manipulated.

“Good” agitprop means propaganda whose views i already agree with anyway, and which is artfully constructed to trigger emotional reactions.

None of this postmodern flatness and remove for me, oh no.