{"id":7302,"date":"2011-11-24T18:11:48","date_gmt":"2011-11-24T22:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=7302"},"modified":"2011-11-24T18:11:48","modified_gmt":"2011-11-24T22:11:48","slug":"thanksgivin-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/thanksgivin-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Thanksgivin’ 11"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0So after eating Turkey or whatever gets you going, go & check out this year\u2019s BlazeVOX\u2019s Thanksgiving Extravaganza, honoring Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop,\u00a0here<\/a>. A little appetizer, below:<\/p>\n

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Thought Cuisine:<\/strong><\/div>\n
Food translations of Robert Musil\u2019s<\/div>\n
\u00a0Man Without Qualities<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n
\u00a0a.\u00a0We have established that respectable people are deeply attracted to cuisine, though of course only in\u00a0theirimagination. We might add that gourmets, to hear\u00a0them talk, would almost without exception like to be regarded asrespectable people. So we might arrive at a\u00a0definition: Cuisine is the concentrated form, within sinners, of\u00a0everything other people work off in little irregularities, in\u00a0their imagination and in innumerable petty everyday actsand attitudes of spite and viciousness. We could also\u00a0say: Cuisine is in\u00a0the air and simply seeks the\u00a0path of leastresistance, which leads them to certain individuals. We could even say that\u00a0while they are the acts of\u00a0individuals whoare incapable of behaving morally, in the main they\u2019re the\u00a0condensed expression of some kind of\u00a0general humanmaladjustment where the distinction between good and evil\u00a0is concerned. This is what has imbued us\u00a0from ouryouth with the critical spirit\u00a0our contemporaries have never been able to get beyond!<\/div>\n
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b.Most of us may not believe in the story of a Devil to whom one can sell one\u2019s soul, but those who must know\u00a0something about the soul (considering that as clergymen, historians, and artists they draw a\u00a0good income from it) alltestify that the soul has\u00a0been destroyed by cooking and that cooking is the source of\u00a0an evil intelligence that whilemaking man the lord of the\u00a0earth has also made him the\u00a0slave of his kitchens. The inner drought, the dreadful blendof acuity in matters of\u00a0detail and indifference toward the whole, man\u2019s monstrous abandonment in a\u00a0desert of\u00a0details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money-grubbing, coldness, and violence, all\u00a0socharacteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logicalthinking! Even back when Brillat-Savarin first turned to food for\u00a0philosophy there were already those who predictedthe collapse of European civilization because no human faith, no love, no simplicity, no goodness, dwelt any longerin man. These people had all, typically, been poor restaurateurs as\u00a0young people and at school. This later put\u00a0themin a position to\u00a0prove that cuisine, the mother of natural science and grandmother of the culinary arts,\u00a0was also theprimordial mother of the spirit that\u00a0eventually gave rise to poison soup and liquor.\u00a0The only people who actually lived in\u00a0ignorance of these dangers were the chefs themselves and their disciples thescientists, whose souls were as unaffected by all this as\u00a0if they were racing cyclists pedaling away for\u00a0dear life, blindto everything in the world except the\u00a0black wheel of the rider in\u00a0front of them. But one thing, on\u00a0the other hand,could safely be said about Brillat-Savarin: he loved\u00a0to eat because of the many kinds of\u00a0people who could notendure it. He was in love with food not so much on sustaining life as one would on human grounds. He saw that inall the problems that come within its\u00a0orbit, a chef thinks differently from the one who is\u00a0eating. If we translate\u201dhaute cuisine\u201d into \u201cview of life,\u201d \u201cmeal\u201d into \u201cattempt,\u201d and \u201cmeat\u201d into\u00a0\u201caction,\u201d then there would be no notablechef or gourmand whose life\u2019s work, in courage and revolutionary impact, did not\u00a0far outmatch the greatest deedsof history. The man has not yet\u00a0been born who could say to\u00a0his followers: \u201cYou may steal, kill, fornicate \u2013\u00a0ourteaching is so strong that it will transform the cesspool of your\u00a0sins into clear, sparkling champagne.\u201d But in cuisineevery few years something new develops in error and suddenly revolutionizes the field, or that some dim\u00a0anddisdained idea becomes the ruler of a\u00a0new realm of thought. Such events are not merely upheavals but\u00a0lead usupward like a Jacob\u2019s ladder. The life of a gourmet is as strong and carefree and glorious as a fairy tale. And Brillat-Savarin felt: People simply don\u2019t realize it, they\u00a0have no idea how much thinking can be\u00a0done already; if they couldbe taught to think a\u00a0new way, they would change their lives.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0So after eating Turkey or whatever gets you going, go & check out this year\u2019s BlazeVOX\u2019s Thanksgiving Extravaganza, honoring Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop,\u00a0here. A little appetizer, below: Thought Cuisine: Food translations of Robert Musil\u2019s...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1099],"class_list":["post-7302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-thanklsgiving"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7302"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7308,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7302\/revisions\/7308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}