Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. His given name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto and he always wrote with a pen with green ink because he thought the color green was the color of hope. His poetry ranges from rather charged love poems to historical manifestos to surreal writings. He often includes natural images. He has been criticized for some of his politics, he served as a diplomat, and he lived in exile from Chile during his life. Here's two of his poems:
Water
by Pablo Neruda
Everything on the earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
nibbled away, the petal fell, falling
until the only flower was the falling itself.
Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colors,
takes limpid lessons
from stone,
and in those functionings plays out
the unrealized ambitions of the foam.
If You Forget Me
by Pablo Neruda
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Thursday, August 5, 2010
We evolved to cook? What should we make in the kitchen?
I am in the process of writing a vegetarian cookbook that I am hoping will be a type of The Joy of Cooking cookbook but for vegetarians. Mrs. Rombauer's book is a classic. In addition to easy to create and delicious recipes, I want the book I am writing to have informational sections on ingredients, cooking utensils and equipment, menu planning, and cooking techniques, similar to The Joy of Cooking, but for those wishing to follow a vegetarian diet. Vegetarian food can be quick, economical, tasty, beautiful, and have less of an impact on the environment even if a person's diet is not entirely vegetarian.
In the July 17, 2010 issue of New Scientist, there are two interesting articles that relate to cooking and vegetarianism. Despite that my high school chemistry teacher was a gourmet cook and insisted that cooking was chemistry, I don't often see science articles about cooking. Articles about vegetarianism have become more prevalent because of environmental concerns.
The article about cooking hypothesizes that cooking is what made us human. According to the article which is entitled, “I cook, therefore I am... human,” Richard Wrangham of Harvard University presented further evidence at the Evolution 2010 conference to champion the “cooked-food” hypothesis of human evolution. The cooked-food hypothesis is that humans were able to evolve from earlier primates because they acquired a taste for cooked food and the nutrition derived from it was of better quality and more efficient so bigger brains and more complex social relationships developed. Some of the evidence pointed to to support this theory involves the amount of chewing time and molar sizes in various primates as compared to humans. Two other paleoanthropological researchers, Christopher Organ and Charles Nunn who are also of Harvard, predicted that if humans were adapted to eat cooked food, then humans should spend less time chewing. They gathered data from various primates and humans about body size, genetic relationships among species, and the amount of time that each species spent chewing and determined that a species of our size should spend roughly 48 percent of the waking day chewing. Humans only spend less than ten percent of the day chewing. Also, our molars are simply not as big as the molars of other primates that need to chew a far greater percentage of the day. Homo erectus, an early ancestor of Homo sapiens, had considerably smaller teeth than other earlier hominids. According to Wrangham this is evidence that H. erectus cooked their food.
The only problem with this idea is that the earliest evidence that hominins could control fire is from about 790,000 years ago. H. erectus appeared between 1.8 to 2 million years ago. There should be more evidence of cooking hearths. Or should there? Maybe our early ancestors were stealth cooks. It seems to me that the lack of evidence of cooking hearths does not rule out the hypothesis. It just means that the evidence of such is not there to conclusively prove that cooking happened.
The other thought is that hominins evolved to cook and that somebody let the hearth fire go out. Oops. And they had to wait around for a million years or so for another spark to be captured.
The other article about vegetarianism is entitled, “What's the beef with meat?” and discusses the idea that if everyone ate a vegetarian/vegan diet that this might save the world from ecological disaster by reducing every individual's carbon footprint on the planet. The article's thesis is that this is a simplistic idea and there is more to consider. The article states that a meat-free world would be greener because there would be less need for cropland, potentially more forest and greater biodiversity, lower greenhouse emissions, less agricultural pollution, less demand for fresh water, and many other conditions and situations that would be desirable. After this the article argues for the continuance of a diet that includes meat based on the following points: 1. sheep and goats can graze on land that is not suitable for farming and turn inedible grass into meat and milk calories; 2. pigs and chickens can subsist on leftovers and be biological composters of a sort and turn scraps into calories; 3. animal by-products like manure, leather, and wool would disappear if the world became vegetarian; and lastly manure could be used to generate biogas and subsequently electricity.
All of these points are good points. The article goes on not to advocate that things remain as they are with the wealthiest countries eating a proportionally greater amount of meat and incurring the health deficits and generating great quantities of greenhouse gases as a result of the consumption of meat, but rather to advocate for a more thought out approach to the use of animals for calories. The article points out that as more countries gain wealth their consumption of meat also rises and in wealthier countries the desire for meat continues to rise. It offers as a solution that we change how much meat and what types of meat people eat. Rather than expecting grain fed and fat chickens, scrawnier free range chickens that had been fed scraps could be what was available. Also, meat consumption would need to drop to a portion of meat only once or twice a week as opposed to daily. The article skeptically asks, “Would people really accept pricey free-range beef and scrawny barnyard chickens perhaps once or twice a week?” In my opinion, is such a consideration an option, when, as the article also points out, if the desire for meat continues to grow that the impact could be environmentally disastrous?
We may have evolved to eat cooked food-- tubers, roots, seeds, grains, and meat. I do see cooking as a form of everyday art—evolved as much as we have evolved. It is meditative, self expressive, and a reflection of how we choose to live. It can be part of creating a life of beauty and harmony. It is one of the most basic things that we do because we need to eat and we may need to eat food that is cooked (to be honest, I am still thinking about this because of information that I have read from the Raw Food movement). As a species that has the ability to be self-reflective, analytical, and capable of solving problems, examining our collective and individual relationship to the planet and our most basic biological needs and imperatives seems tantamount if we are going to survive the short geological timespan of the next century.
In the July 17, 2010 issue of New Scientist, there are two interesting articles that relate to cooking and vegetarianism. Despite that my high school chemistry teacher was a gourmet cook and insisted that cooking was chemistry, I don't often see science articles about cooking. Articles about vegetarianism have become more prevalent because of environmental concerns.
The article about cooking hypothesizes that cooking is what made us human. According to the article which is entitled, “I cook, therefore I am... human,” Richard Wrangham of Harvard University presented further evidence at the Evolution 2010 conference to champion the “cooked-food” hypothesis of human evolution. The cooked-food hypothesis is that humans were able to evolve from earlier primates because they acquired a taste for cooked food and the nutrition derived from it was of better quality and more efficient so bigger brains and more complex social relationships developed. Some of the evidence pointed to to support this theory involves the amount of chewing time and molar sizes in various primates as compared to humans. Two other paleoanthropological researchers, Christopher Organ and Charles Nunn who are also of Harvard, predicted that if humans were adapted to eat cooked food, then humans should spend less time chewing. They gathered data from various primates and humans about body size, genetic relationships among species, and the amount of time that each species spent chewing and determined that a species of our size should spend roughly 48 percent of the waking day chewing. Humans only spend less than ten percent of the day chewing. Also, our molars are simply not as big as the molars of other primates that need to chew a far greater percentage of the day. Homo erectus, an early ancestor of Homo sapiens, had considerably smaller teeth than other earlier hominids. According to Wrangham this is evidence that H. erectus cooked their food.
The only problem with this idea is that the earliest evidence that hominins could control fire is from about 790,000 years ago. H. erectus appeared between 1.8 to 2 million years ago. There should be more evidence of cooking hearths. Or should there? Maybe our early ancestors were stealth cooks. It seems to me that the lack of evidence of cooking hearths does not rule out the hypothesis. It just means that the evidence of such is not there to conclusively prove that cooking happened.
The other thought is that hominins evolved to cook and that somebody let the hearth fire go out. Oops. And they had to wait around for a million years or so for another spark to be captured.
The other article about vegetarianism is entitled, “What's the beef with meat?” and discusses the idea that if everyone ate a vegetarian/vegan diet that this might save the world from ecological disaster by reducing every individual's carbon footprint on the planet. The article's thesis is that this is a simplistic idea and there is more to consider. The article states that a meat-free world would be greener because there would be less need for cropland, potentially more forest and greater biodiversity, lower greenhouse emissions, less agricultural pollution, less demand for fresh water, and many other conditions and situations that would be desirable. After this the article argues for the continuance of a diet that includes meat based on the following points: 1. sheep and goats can graze on land that is not suitable for farming and turn inedible grass into meat and milk calories; 2. pigs and chickens can subsist on leftovers and be biological composters of a sort and turn scraps into calories; 3. animal by-products like manure, leather, and wool would disappear if the world became vegetarian; and lastly manure could be used to generate biogas and subsequently electricity.
All of these points are good points. The article goes on not to advocate that things remain as they are with the wealthiest countries eating a proportionally greater amount of meat and incurring the health deficits and generating great quantities of greenhouse gases as a result of the consumption of meat, but rather to advocate for a more thought out approach to the use of animals for calories. The article points out that as more countries gain wealth their consumption of meat also rises and in wealthier countries the desire for meat continues to rise. It offers as a solution that we change how much meat and what types of meat people eat. Rather than expecting grain fed and fat chickens, scrawnier free range chickens that had been fed scraps could be what was available. Also, meat consumption would need to drop to a portion of meat only once or twice a week as opposed to daily. The article skeptically asks, “Would people really accept pricey free-range beef and scrawny barnyard chickens perhaps once or twice a week?” In my opinion, is such a consideration an option, when, as the article also points out, if the desire for meat continues to grow that the impact could be environmentally disastrous?
We may have evolved to eat cooked food-- tubers, roots, seeds, grains, and meat. I do see cooking as a form of everyday art—evolved as much as we have evolved. It is meditative, self expressive, and a reflection of how we choose to live. It can be part of creating a life of beauty and harmony. It is one of the most basic things that we do because we need to eat and we may need to eat food that is cooked (to be honest, I am still thinking about this because of information that I have read from the Raw Food movement). As a species that has the ability to be self-reflective, analytical, and capable of solving problems, examining our collective and individual relationship to the planet and our most basic biological needs and imperatives seems tantamount if we are going to survive the short geological timespan of the next century.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound is the poet probably most responsible for establishing and promoting the modernist aesthetic in poetry. He, as one individual, promoted and facilitated the exchange of ideas and work across the globe. He connected British and American writers. He also very generously advanced the careers of writers and poets such as T. S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. His Cantos is an epic work of modern poetry.
In 1945 Ezra Pound returned to the United States after a voluntary exile in Italy where he had participated in Fascist politics. He was promptly arrested. In 1946 he was acquitted but then committed to a hospital for the mentally ill. He was released from St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington D.C. after twelve years due to the continued efforts of writers and poets who petitioned on his behalf. While he was committed in St. Elizabeth's, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included many of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to look past Pound's political involvement with the Fascists in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements. They awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948).
Pound's significant contributions to poetry began with his conception of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. The Imagists movement stressed clarity, precision, and economy of words over traditional rhyme and meter. Pound summed up his ideas by saying that a poet should "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome."
Portrait d'une Femme
by Ezra Pound
Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you—lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind—with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion:
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own.
Yet this is you.
In 1945 Ezra Pound returned to the United States after a voluntary exile in Italy where he had participated in Fascist politics. He was promptly arrested. In 1946 he was acquitted but then committed to a hospital for the mentally ill. He was released from St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington D.C. after twelve years due to the continued efforts of writers and poets who petitioned on his behalf. While he was committed in St. Elizabeth's, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included many of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to look past Pound's political involvement with the Fascists in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements. They awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948).
Pound's significant contributions to poetry began with his conception of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. The Imagists movement stressed clarity, precision, and economy of words over traditional rhyme and meter. Pound summed up his ideas by saying that a poet should "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome."
Portrait d'une Femme
by Ezra Pound
Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you—lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind—with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion:
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own.
Yet this is you.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Mirror, Mirror
What causes a villain in a piece of fiction to be indelibly stamped upon the memory of a reader? Who are the notorious villains who worm their way into the psyche? What makes them reappear in daydreams, wandering thoughts, and nightmares?
In the movie Unbreakable, the character of Elijah Price who is otherwise known as “Mr. Glass” explains that in the comic book universe there is always a polemically paired hero and villain. The area of the hero's strength is the weakness of the villain and vice versa. Because one exists the other exists. In the movie, it is easy to feel sympathy for Elijah who is exceptionally fragile because of a rare bone disease that makes it easy for his bones to break. You feel for him when he is shown to be taunted by the other children, when he does not want to leave the apartment for fear of breaking, and when he does venture forth because his mother rewards him with comic books. I have always had incredibly conflicted feelings for the character of Elijah Price. In the comic book universe he never chose to be afflicted with his bone disorder or to be a villain. He never chose to be the opposite of Bruce Willis' David Dunn character who is unbreakable and the hero. Elijah Price has made more of his life with the deficit of his disorder and lived far more heroically than David Dunn who shies away from the gift of his abilities and is in a dysfunctional marriage. Elijah Price is the one who searches for and creates meaning. He is proactive and a heroic agent who shares his enlightenment. And defines himself as a villain and derails trains in the process of looking for his destined other half.
Villains can be mustache twirling, black hatted bad guys who tie limp damsels to railway tracks for no other reason than the sheer fun of it, but really they are there to provide the conflict, create the story, and illuminate the hero in his glory. Judas Iscariot was essential to the resurrection story. Harry Potter was in many ways created by Voldemort. Dudley DoRight would have been nothing without his arch nemesis Snidely Whiplash.
Shakespeare was a master at creating memorable villains. Would Othello's weaknesses have come forth without Iago's plotting? Was MacBeth a hero or a villain? He conquered a weak king and brought his strength to the throne but then was undone by his love of power. What of Shylock? Was he a simple villain demanding a pound of Antonio's flesh or a rich and proud man of the Jewish faith who could no longer bear the discrimination heaped upon him? Was Tybalt a villain for killing Mercutio? Was Romeo a villain for killing Tybalt?
Villains are the heroes of their own stories. They have their own motivations and histories. They cause stories and they move stories forward. They define heroes. They are the mirrored image of the heroes and one cannot exist without the other. The point where the hero and the villain divide into two identifiable personalities is the point where the conflict and the story begins. Just as heroes can be inspirational, villains can make one stop and reflect. Villains offer the chance to meditate on one's own beliefs and morality. Can you identify with them and, if so, does this make you uncomfortable? If it gave your life meaning to help you rise above your affliction would you become a villain? Could you sacrifice your reputation and your love for a friend by betraying them? For what gold? What if it helped them to achieve a greater destiny? If the only way to attain prominence and rise above a powerless social status was to become a criminal, would you? Could you handle the power of absolute rule? Would you be able to set aside anger and a sense of injustice and accept losing after years of being downtrodden?
I believe that what gives villains life is when they are created fully and sympathetically and we can relate to them and their circumstances. I believe they are memorable and haunt us quite often because of the tragedy of the choices they make and because often if we lived in their skin we might make the same choice. The knowledge or denial of this gives them life in our minds.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
