Sociology, Food and Love

In the Soc 101 class, we were required to read Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud. While studying for my final, I came across a very interesting idea he quotes. He believes that the necessities in life are food and love.

Freud describes the importance of love and states the only thing that causes "social anxiety is the loss of love" (85). Love is the only thing that a man opens his heart to and it is the worst thing he can loose for it can do the most damage!

Freud even believed that love was just as necessary as nourishment was! Just thought I would share my findings :)

The One About Hair

Dear Students,

I thought that you might enjoy taking a quick look at the spring quarter course blog--I'm still working on it. Does the picture of Lady Godiva in the backgroun remind you of anybody?

address: http://www.hairraising-srdrissi.blogspot.com/

Final Project: Sexual Revolution in the Media

These are the videos from our project. Unfortunately I could not upload the powerpoint itself but I think this gets the point across well enough. The goal of this project was to explore the prevalence of sexuality through various outlets of media, such as food advertisement and music.

The Need

As I was reading Chapter 8, I came across this quote,

"Falling in Love is like an obsession with me, and I had been going through one of the loneliest periods of my life because of the ephemeral company I'd been keeping...I needed the "love of my life". I needed to die for love, to live for love, to fall apart for love." (p123)

This made me think of how in the novel, Yocandra throws around the concept of "love" without ever really knowing what it is. I believe she fills the void left by the changes done to her life (due to the revolution) with sex and she tries to justify it by saying that it is "love". For in fact, in this quote she admits that it is an obsession as a result of her loneliness.

Her "love" is superficial, and she falls in love at first sight. Her lovers use her and her body, as she uses them for their bodies and the way they make her feel. Are her sexual acts a form of rebellion? Her sexuality being part of her identity, something that she still has a slight grasp on. Or is the sex she has so pleasurable that it takes Yocandra to an alternate reality...a place with endless nourishment?

Jennifer Lopez's "Do It Well"

I came across the music video for Jennifer Lopez's "Do It Well" and I was intrigued by the reference to Fellini's "Satyricon" that we watched in the beginning of the quarter. The music video, released in 2007, is reminiscent of the scene in which Encolpio passes through a brothel to get back to his apartment. The music video depicts images of sex and feasting, emphasizing on extravagance and excess.

Best,
Jesada M.

Havana--The New Art of Making Ruins

Dear Students,

Havana—The New Art of Making Ruins (2006) is a documentary directed by Florian Borchmeyer and Matthias Hentschler. The documentary tells the story of the ruins of Havana and the people who inhabit those ruins—from a homeless man who lives in an abandoned theater (in which Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso once sang to Cuba’s high society), to an expropriated landowner, to a young woman living in one of the rooms of an old hotel. We also hear from Cuban writer and poet (and ruinologist, according to him), Antonio José Ponte. In recent years, Havana’s ruins have been romanticized and valued for their magical decay, for its poetic evocation of a glorious past now lost, in particular in Buena Vista Social Club; however, for the people who inhabit them, there is very little poetry left in these ruins. What we see is the conflation of the voice of the people whose stories we hear with the ruined city itself, a product of both the passing of time and the absolute neglect by the state. This documentary will help us contextualize the poetry of Carlos Jesús Cabrera Enríquez, as well as Zoe Valdes’s Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada. Hunger in these works comes in many disguises and it is our challenge to make connections between the images we see in this documentary (as well as what we see in Suite Havana—the following post) and the graphic sexuality of a novel such as Yocandra.

Colors in Breath, Eyes, Memory

In the novel, I came across some reoccurring colors that I found interesting.

First, the color yellow is mentioned numerous times. When things were going well, it seemed as if Sophie, her aunt or the flowers she passed by were a bright yellow color. Her favorite flower, the daffodil, is also a brilliant yellow color. She imagines her mother being “wrapped in yellow sheets” before she moves to New York to meet her.

Also, the color green is mention when a new life is to be created. When Sophie goes to her sexual phobia group she says: “We sat on the green heart-shaped pillows that Davina had made. The color green stood for life and growth. ” Also the balloon that was released with the note to the abuser was also green representing a formation of a new life because the events were to be put in the past.

When death and sadness are foreshadowed /seen, the characters are described wearing black clothing and near darker looking people.

Sophie’s mother’s house was also all red. The umbrella they used to protect themselves on page 158 was also red. The bloody pig meat was red as well.

This website attaches very interesting meaning to the colors we see every day!

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/colors1.html

Guest Poet--Pauline Marie Spirtos

Pauline M. Spirtos

Primal Hunger

                   I want to consume you,

pull apart your ribs and taste

each thin, white tip

with tenderness.

                   I would run my tongue

over grooves in your clavicle—

find the pools of flavor in

my favorite of your bones

which re-healed in such a lovely,

jutty way; with curves and dips

and pointed parts.

                    I could slurp warm

platelets from your spindle-cells

as easy as sucking sweet milk

from sponge cake.

                   I want to gorge

on your thick sensibility,

overpowering reason and principle,

but if I can indulge myself further—

I pass on the politics

to save room for an intoxication-laden

desert.

                    I picture myself twirling a crystal

glass by the stem

while the garnet liquid undulates

and opens petals of scent—

fig, chocolate, and dark

over-ripe cherry.

Your fluid imagination—

a sparse luxury.

Ton-Ton Macoutes

Like Water for Chocolate

After class, I looked up the meaning of hands and came across this article! The part I found most interesting was that "Hands folded together or clasped in Asian illustrations is iconic of allegiance and friendship." There was also a part about the proper way to give and receive things. It is proper to serve food and give items with your right hand and receive items with your left. Hands are meaningful in a lot of cultures and its interesting to see how the meaning of hand gestures differ from region to region.

READ HAND ARTICLE HERE! Hope you enjoy reading this!

Some Thoughts (from class lecture)

As we have seen, thus far, food involves both the fulfillment of a basic need as well as a primal pleasure, and represents a system of the sweet and bitter, as well as the tasteful and distasteful that, if not well balanced, can lead to either a culture of excess, or one of malnutrition and death.

The perishable character of food, its ultimately ephemeral nature may make of cooking a hopeless task, but the sum of meals (much like the sum of our days), the succession of prepared plates, soups, breads, desserts have a durable value (they become our history—the history of both our needs, as well as our desires), such as Tita’s book of recipes. Not only are Tita’s recipes passed down from one generation to the next, but they become a kind of archive of the Mexican Revolution and of the history of women. The relationship of people to food, the way in which people connect with food, the social significance of food and the assignment of food preparation to primarily one gender over the other tell us a great deal about who we are and about our place in the world. A close look at the way people ate in 19^th century in England, for example, may tell us a great deal about class. What we eat daily, the types of food we choose to buy and/or prepare are choices that amount to the formation and transformation of culture. Food has both to do, as we have seen, with the art of loving and the art of dying; this is seen both in John Keats’ Isabella or the Pot of Basil, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. We can also see this in the concept of the wake, a celebration with food, drink, and song (perhaps even dance) that takes place around a burial. Food consumption has also to do with death, if we consider that we, too, become food stuff when we die—as we have learned in Romeo and Juliet, we are devoured by death. Some believe that, when we die, we go back to nature, and that eternal life and redemption is ours through the act of eating (the Eucharist, for example) and that the act of fasting (Ramadan, for example, which involves abstinence from both food and sex from sun up to sun down) gets us closer to our spiritual being.  What we eat may also be an ethnic marker, such as the eating or not eating of pig.

Eating habits make up a space where tradition and innovation weight equally, where past and present are mixed to serve the needs and desires of the moment, to ornament the event, to bring joy to the hour, to change family dynamics, to create a revolution (if only, seemingly, within the domain of the kitchen—let us think of Tita and her cooking). With its strong affective investment and ritualization of ordinary tasks,  cooking may be, for women of all ages, an activity that brings them and others happiness and pleasure; it is also a source of love, as well as pain (if we think of the reasons behind eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia).

 As we have began to see and experience in Like Water for Chocolate, cooking and the kitchen arts demand as much wisdom, as much intelligence, imagination, memory, as those traditionally held as superior or those that may have easily identifiable values, such as those upheld during the time of war. But it takes courage to put ingredients in a pot, turn on the fire and hope for the best; it takes as much guts to twist the neck of a chicken, as it may take to point a gun at someone’s head in the name of freedom; it takes as much strategy to prepare a meal with little to no food in the pantry, as it may take to plan a military ambush. The prosperity of a family, of a country, is perhaps best expressed in its daily diet—the famine of some is the overabundance of others.

          With the passage from “The Potatoes,” you have encountered (and we are all, for the most part, well aware of this model) a feminine model that we are supposed to discard—that of the woman in the kitchen, the woman as master of the potato; however, with Tita, we a  different interpretation of the same feminine model. Cooking for Tita is something that comes from the body and, for the narrator, from the body of women from her lineage, incorporating her into the anonymous ranks of women (not only Mexican women) who have found the power and the magic behind preparing a meal. Tita not only learns the pleasure of eating and cooking good meals, but (much like Dr. Brown) that of measuring, mixing, inventing, of incorporating the old into the new. In her meals, the mestizo and criollo cooking of Mexico come together, a revolutionary feat all on its own. With Tita, the interminable repetition that cooking demands is contrasted to the household tasks that she must also perform, such as those that have to do with the caring of Dona Elena. The succession of meals become a way toward intimacy with the body of others, in particular with Pedro’s body, but also that of Gertrudis and, with negative results, with the body of others, such as the way the tears in the wedding cake affect the bride and her guests. Her recipe book becomes a way to preserve the alchemy of the history of not only the Mexican revolution, but also the history of the female body in captivity, trapped by tradition, by politics, racial prejudice and injustice, if we think of Nacha and Chencha.

Food and Sex in India- The Kama Sutra

As I was visiting home this weekend, I began thinking about food and sex in my own culture and how it relates to my Indian heritage. Until recently, modern Indian society has been quite conservative in matters of sex, at least in my opinion. But if you go many years back, India has a history of sexual art, literature, and even science.

While thinking, I remembered that someone had gifted our house a copy of the Kama Sutra, and I decided to take a look. It is an ancient Indian text that describes practices and techniques of sex as well as principles of love and marriage.

In the book, I found numerous references to food. First, a woman's sexual organ was referred to as a mango, some food-sex imagery that reminded me of Genesis. Then, the book described ways of using meals before and after sex to enhance the experience as well as the tie between man and woman. Finally, the book even had a glossary of "Plants, Herbs, and Spices" mentioned throughout the text in relation to sex.

So there has clearly been a strong connection between food and sex in ancient Indian history. I wanted to share these thoughts. I also wanted to offer a question if anyone has any insight. Why in a society that over a thousand years ago had great sexual imagery in art and literature, was sex and the role of women so suppressed during the 20th century? This is likely comparable to many Western cultures but seems more pronounced to me in Indian culture. Any thoughts?

So sorry for the lengthy post, but I found this stuff interesting.

Penelope in Greek Mythology

From http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Pa-Pr/Penelope.html

The wife of the hero Odysseus in Greek mythology, Penelope was celebrated for her faithfulness, patience, and feminine virtue. For the 20 years that her husband was away during and after the Trojan War, Penelope remained true to him and helped prevent his kingdom from falling into other hands.

Penelope's parents were Prince Icarius of Sparta and the nymph Periboea. Periboea hid her infant daughter as soon as she was born, knowing that Icarius had wanted a son. As soon as Icarius discovered the baby girl, he threw her into the sea to drown. However, a family of ducks rescued her. Seeing this as an omen, Icarius named the child Penelope (after the Greek word for "duck") and raised her as his favorite child.
When Penelope reached womanhood, Odysseus asked for her hand in marriage. Although reluctant to part with his daughter, Icarius agreed, and Penelope went with her new husband to his home on the island of Ithaca. Penelope and Odysseus were deeply in love, so it was with great sorrow that Odysseus later left her and their infant son, Telemachus, to fight in the Trojan War.

The Trojan War lasted ten years, and it took Odysseus another ten years to get home to Ithaca. During that time, Penelope received the attentions of many suitors. For a while, she put them off by saying that she would consider marriage only after she finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, who was grieving over Odysseus's absence. Each day Penelope would sit weaving the cloth, but at night she would secretly unravel her work. After three years, a servant revealed Penelope's secret, and she had to finish the shroud.

Read more: Penelope - Myth Encyclopedia - mythology, Greek, war, hero, trojan http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Pa-Pr/Penelope.html#ixzz1BjvmQyM2

The Marvelous Real--Prologue to Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World (1949)

from  http://instruct.uwo.ca/english/785a/Prologue.html

Prologue to The Kingdom of This World (1949)
 

Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980), one of Cuba's most distinguished writers and musicologists, had spent the years 1928-1939 in Europe as part of Andre Breton's Surrealist movement. He returned to Havana in 1939, having broken with the Surrealists, whom he now accused of bad faith, and otherwise thoroughly disenchanted with European an literature. In 1943, he travelled to Haiti with the French actor Louis Jouvet and his troupe. In Port au Prince he delivered a lecture on "L'evolution culturelle de l'Amerique Latine," in which he insists on the anti-Cartesian character of Latin America. On his return to Cuba, he began writing The Kingdom of this World, which recounts the slave insurrections led by Mackandal and Bouckman, and the rise to power and downfall of  King Henri Christophe. The text that follows is a translation of the original preface to that novel. It is at once a screed against the Surrealists and a manifesto on the marvelous reality of the Americas. A revised and expanded version of the Prologue was published as a travelogue in 1975; a translation of that essay is available in Zamora and Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995).
 
 

...What we are to understand in this matter of metamorphosis into
wolves is that there is an illness doctors call lupine mania ...

                                                                                        (The Toils of Persiles and Sigismunda) ⁽¹⁾

Toward the end of 1943, I had the good fortune to visit the kingdom of Henri Christophe ⁽²⁾---the poetic ruins of Sans-Souci, the massive citadel of La Ferriere, ⁽³⁾ imposingly intact despite lightning bolts and earthquakes--- and to acquaint myself with the still-Norman Cap-Haitien (the Cap Français of the former colony) where a street lined with long balconies leads to the cut-stone palace once inhabited by Pauline Bonaparte. ⁽⁴⁾
 

After having felt the undeniable enchantment of this Haitian earth, after having discerned magical warnings on the red roads of the Central Plateau, after having heard the drums of Petro and Rada, ⁽⁵⁾ I was moved to compare the marvelous reality I'd just experienced with the tiresomsome attempts to arouse the marvelous that has characterized certain European literatures for last thirty years. The marvelous, sought for in the old clichés of the Forest of Broceliande, ⁽⁶⁾ the Knights of the Round Table, Merlin the Magician, and the Arthurian cycle. The marvelous, pathetically evoked by the antics and deformities of sideshow
characters--will the young poets of France never get tired of the freaks and clowns of the féte foraine, which Rimbaud dismissed long ago in his Alchemie du verbe? ⁽⁷⁾

The marvelous, manufactured by sleight of hand, by juxtaposing objects ordinarily never found together: the old, fraudulent story of the fortuitous encounter of the umbrella and the sewing machine on an operating table ⁽⁸⁾,which engendered ermine spoons,⁽⁹⁾ snails in a rainy taxi, the lion's head on the widow's pelvis in Surrealist exhibitions. Or, even more to the point, the literary marvelous: the king in Sade's Juliette, Jarry's supermacho, Lewis's monk ⁽¹⁰⁾, the hair-raising theatrical props of the English gothic novel: ghosts, immured priests, lycanthropy, hands nailed to the castle door. The result of attempting to arouse the marvelous at all costs is that the thaumaturges become bureaucrats. Invoked by means of cliched formulas that turn certain paintings into a monotonous mess of drooping clocks, seamstress' dummies, or vague phallic monuments, the marvelous is stuck in umbrellas, or lobsters, or sewing machines, or wherever, on an operating table, in a sad room, in a stony desert. Miguel de Unamuno ⁽¹¹⁾ said that memorizing rule books indicated a poverty of
imagination. Today there are codes for the fantastic based on the principle of the donkey devoured by the fig ( proposed in the Chants de Maldoror as the supreme inversion of reality), codes to which we owe Children Menaced by Nightingales or Andre Masson's Horses Devouring Birds. ⁽¹²⁾

But we should note that when Andre Masson tried to draw the jungle of Martinique, with its incredible entangling of plants and the obscene promiscuity of certain fruits, the marvelous truth of the subject devoured the painter, leaving him virtually impotent before the empty canvas. It had to be an American painter, the Cuban Wifredo Lam ⁽¹³⁾, who showed us the magic of tropical vegetation, the uncontrolled creativity of our natural formations--with all their metamorphoses and symbioses--on monumental canvases whose expression is unique in contemporary art ⁽¹⁴⁾.Faced with the disconcerting poverty of imagination of a Tanguy,⁽¹⁵⁾ for example, who for twenty-five years now has been painting the same petrified larvae under the same gray sky, I feel compelled to recite the dictum that was the pride of the first generation of Surrealists: Vous qui ne voyez pas, pensez a ceux qui voient.[You who don't see, think about those who can.]

There are still too many "adolescents who take pleasure in raping the freshly murdered cadavers of beautiful women" (Lautreamont), who do not realize that it would be more marvelous to ravish them alive. ⁽¹⁶⁾ It's that so many people forget, because it costs them so little to dress up as magicians, that the marvelous begins to be marvelous in an unequivocal way when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (a miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, from an unusual insight that is singularly favored by the unexpected richness of reality, or from an amplification of the scale and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by means of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of "limit-state." (MY EMPHASIS)

In the first place, the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes a faith. ⁽¹⁷⁾ Those who do not believe in saints cannot be cured by the miracles of the saints (MY EMPHASIS), in the same way that those who are not Quixotes cannot enter, body and soul, into the world of
Amadis of Gaul or Tirant lo Blanc. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Certain remarks by Rutilio in Cervantes's Toils of Persiles and Sigismunda, about men being transformed into wolves, are prodigiously believable because in Cervantes's day it was believed that there were people afflicted with lupine mania. The same applies to the character's journey from Tuscany to Norway on a witch's cape. Marco Polo allowed that certain birds could fly carrying elephants in their talons; Martin Luther saw the Devil right before his eyes and threw an inkwell at his head. Victor Hugo, so exploited by the sellers of marvelous books, believed in apparitions, because he was sure of having spoken, while in Guernsey, with the ghost of Leopoldina.

All Van Gogh needed was faith in the Sunflower ⁽¹⁹⁾ to capture its revelation on a canvas. Thus, the idea of the marvelous invoked in the context of disbelief--which is what the surrealists did for so many years--was never anything but a literary trick, and a boring one at that for having been prolonged, as is the literature that is oneiric by "arrangement," or the praises of folly now back in fashion. But, by the same token, we are not, for all that, going to yield to those who advocate a return to the realism--a term that takes on, in this context, a slavishly political agenda--because they are merely replacing the magician's tricks with the commonplaces of academics or the scatological delights of some existentialists.

There is clearly no excuse for poets and artists who praise sadism without practising it, who admire the supermacho because of their own impotence, who invoke spirits without believing they answer to incantations, and who found secret societies, literary sects, or vaguely philosophic groups with passwords and arcane goals that are never achieved, without being able to conceive a valid mysticism or to abandon their pettiest habits in order to risk their souls on the frightening card of faith.

All of this became particularly evident to me during my stay in Haiti, where I found myself in daily contact with something we could call the marvelous real . I was treading earth where thousands of men, eager for liberty, believed in Mackandal's ⁽²⁰⁾ lycanthropic powers, to the point that their collective faith produced a miracle on the day of his execution. I already knew the prodigious story of Bouckman, ⁽²¹⁾ the Jamaican initiate. I had been in the citadel of La Ferriere, a structure without architectonic precedents, portended only in Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons. ⁽²²⁾ I had breathed the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, a monarch of incredible undertakings, much more surprising than all the cruel kings invented by the surrealists, who were very fond of imaginary tyrannies, never having suffered through one.

I found the marvelous real with every step. But I also realized that the presence and vitality of the marvelous real was not a privilege unique to Haiti but the patrimony of all the Americas, where we have not yet established an inventory of our cosmogonies. The marvelous real is found at each step in the lives of the men who inscribed dates on the history of the Continent (MY EMPHASIS)and who left behind names still borne by the living: from the seekers after the Fountain of Youth or the Golden City of Manoa to certain early rebels or modern heroes of our wars of independence, those of such mythological stature as Colonel Juana Azurduy. ⁽²³⁾  It has always seemed significant to me that as recently as 1780 some perfectly sane Spaniards from Angostura set out in search of El Dorado, and that, during the French Revolution-- long live Reason and the Supreme Being!--Francisco Menendez, from Compostela, traversed Patagonia hunting for the Enchanted City of the Caesars. ⁽²⁴⁾ Looking at the matter in another way, we see that while in western Europe folk-dancing has lost all its magical evocative power, it is rare that a collective dance in the Americas does not embody a profound ritual meaning that creates around it an entire initiatory process: such are the santeria dances in Cuba or the prodigious African version of the Corpus feast, which may still be seen in the town of San Francisco de Yare in Venezuela.

There is a moment in the sixth song of Maldoror when the hero, chased by all the police in the world, escapes from "an army of agents and spies" by taking on the shape of diverse animals and making use of his ability to transport himself instantly to Peking, Madrid, or Saint Petersburg. This is "marvelous literature" at its peak. But in the Americas, where nothing like that has been written, there did exist a Mackandal who possessed the same powers because of the faith of his contemporaries and who used that magic to inspire one of the most dramatic and strange uprisings in History.

Maldoror--Isidore Ducasse himself confesses it--was nothing more than a "poetic Rocambole." ⁽²⁵⁾ All he left behind was a short-lived literary school. The American Mackandal, on the other hand, has left behind an entire mythology, accompanied by magical hymns, preserved by an entire people, who still sing them at Vaudou ceremonies. (There is, on the other hand, a strange coincidence in the fact that Isidore Ducasse, a man who had an exceptional instinct for the fantastic-poetic, was born in the Americas and bragged so emphatically at the end of one of his chapters of being "Le Montevideen.") Because of the virginity of
its landscape, because of its development, because of its ontology, because of the Faustian presence of the Indian and of the Black, because of the Revelation its recent discovery constituted, because of the fertile racial mixtures it favoured, the Americas are far from having used up their wealth of mythologies.

The text that follows, even though I didn't conceive of it in programatic fashion, responds to this order of concerns. It tells of a sequence of extraordinary events that occurred on the island of Saint Dominigue over a period of time which does not exceed a singe human life. It allows the marvelous to flow freely from a reality set down strictly in all its details. The reader must be warned that the story he is going to read is based on rigorous documentation which not only respects the historical truth of the events, the names of the characters (even the minor ones), of the places, and even of the streets, but which also conceals under its apparently non-chronological facade a minute collation of dates and chronologies. And yet, because of the dramatic singularity of the events, because of the fantastic bearing of the characters who met, at a given
moment, at the magical crossroads of Cap-Haitien, everything seems marvelous in a story it would have been impossible to set in Europe and which is as real, in any case, as any exemplary event yet set down for the edification of students in school texts.

What, after all, is the history of all the Americas but a chronicle of the marvelous real? (MY EMPHASIS) 

Notes:
 

1. The Toils of Persiles and Sigismunda (1617); Cervantes last romance, the story of the religious conversion of some travellers from Greenland to Rome.

2. Henri Christophe (1767-1820); president (1807-1811) and king  (1811-1820) of the French Caribbean colony of Saint Dominique (now Haiti). He was born in Grenada, and  distinguished himself in the revolution against the French in 1791. In 1806, he and the Haitian general Alexandre Pétion helped to overthrow the self-proclaimed emperor Jean Jacques Dessaline. In 1811, following a civil war between Pétion and Christophe, who in 1807 had proclaimed himself President of nothern Haiti, Christophe proclaimed himself king as Henri I. He did much to improve the lives of  his people, and his court tried to rival the splendour of Versailles, but his rule was brutally autocratic. In 1820, he was incapacitated by a stroke, and shot himself when his army mutinied.

3. Images of Sans Souci and la Ferriere

4. Pauline Bonaparte (1780-1825); Napolean's favorite sister resided in Cap Francais as the wife of General Victor Leclerc, who had been sent to quell the insurrection. He died from fever in 1802, after which Pauline returned to Europe to marry Prince Borghese of Italy.

5. Petro and Rada: "loas" or spirits, in the Voudon religion. Rada loas are benevolent and gentle; Petro loas are dark gods, counterbalances to the benevolent forces of the Rada, and can be very aggressive and sometimes ferocious.

6. The forest of Broceliande lies in the region known today as Paimpont, to the south west of Rennes.. This enchanted region is the setting for the quest by the Knights of the Round Table to recover the Holy Grail under orders from King Arthur. One of the best known inhabitants of the forest was Merlin the Magician.

7. The second Delirium, "The Alchemy of the Word," is from A Season in Hell (1873) the best known prose poem by the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1881). The poem recounts his sufferings close to madness and his failed experiment to become a seer poet.

As translated by Paul Schmidt, and published in 1976 by Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row, the poem reads, in part:.

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were : absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints ; old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naïve rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents : I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels ! - A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. - I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.
........

The worn-out ideas of old-fashioned poetry played an important part in my alchemy of the word.

I got used to elementary hallucination : I could very precisely see a mosque instead of a factory, a drum corps of angels, horse carts on the highways of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake ; monsters and mysteries ; a vaudeville's title filled me with awe.

And so I explained my magical sophistries by turning words into visions !
........
 

8. Carpentier alludes to, and may be misreading Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870), who wrote under the name Comte de Lautréamont. The image of the umbrella appears in the sixth canto of Les Chants de Maldoror (1890) and was for Breton and the Surrealists the emblem of a fortuitous and incongruous encounter. Lautréamont describes an encounter with a passerby as follows:

I am an expert at judging age from the physiognomic lines of the brow: he is sixteen years and four months of age. He is as handsome as the retractility of the claws in birds of prey; or, again, as the unpredictability of muscular movement in sores in the soft part of the posterior cervical region; or, rather, as the perpetual motion rat-trap which is always reset by the trapped animal and which can go on catching rodents indefinitely and works even when it is hidden under straw; and, above all, as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!
                                                                      (Maldoror and Poems. Trans. Paul Knight, Penguin Books, 1978)

The Surrealists regarded Ducasse as an antecedent, and this particular image and variations of it seem to have been especially resonant with them. See, for example, Salvator Dali's poem, "You Could See the Ass's Bone," in Julien Levy's Surrealism (New York, 1936) or Joseph Cornell's Collage(1932) below. According to Nancy Gray Diaz, Carpentier is reading Lautréamont through a Surrealist filter; in actuality, the Chants of Maldoror constitute "a vigorous, multivalent assault on the French popular novel, Romantic literature and beyond these, the western literary tradition, for the transgressions of its myth-making"(52). See "The Metamorphosis of Maldoror and Mackandal: Reconsidering Carpentier's Reading of Lautréamont," Modern LanguageStudies 21, no 3 (Summer 1991): p. 48-56.]

9. Carpentier here alludes to a number of works that he might have seen at the 1938 "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme" in Paris (Galerie Beaux-Arts).

Meret Oppenheim created her Object: Fur Covered Cup, Saucer, and Spoon in 1936.

Salvador Dali's Rainy Taxi was the main object in the lobby of the January, 1938 "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme". The installation consisted of the hulk of a taxi containing a driver with a shark's head (supposedly Christopher Columbus) and a blonde female passenger. Holes had been cut in the roof of the taxi to let rain seep through the installation for the benefit of the 200 live snails.

The "head of a lion on the pelvis of a widow" refers to Georges Hugnet's Woman Panther(1938).

10. Carpentier aludes to Donatien Alphonse François, comte de Sade (1740-1814). His Historie de Juliette; ou, Les Prosperites du vice (6 vols.) appeared in 1797. Alfred Jarry (1873-1907); his Ubi Roi appeared in 1896. Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818); his The Monk was published in 1796.

11. Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), important member of the Spanish Generation of 1898; a philosopher in the Existentialist vein.

12. Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale (1924), by Max Ernst; Horses Devouring Birds (1927) by Andre Masson, oil and feathers on canvas. The image of the fig devouring the donkey occurs early in the fourth canto of the Chants, and is intended to convey Maldoror's condemnation of figurative language. The "drooping clocks," "seamstress' dummies," "phallic monuments," etc. referred to earlier in the paragraph  indicate works  by Dali and Giorgio de Chirico.

13. Andre Masson (1896-1987) left France in March 1941, and spent three weeks in Martinique in the company of Wilfredo Lam(1902-1982) and Claude Levi-Strauss. Lam had come to Martinique with Breton and numerous other artists and intellectuals, all heading for the USA directly or indirectly. Early in 1942, and in subsequent years, Lam attended Afro-Cuban ritual dances and nañigo ceremonies in Havana and elsewhere with Carpentier and others. In 1945, Lam, Breton, and Pierre Mabille visited Haiti, where they witnessed voudon ceremonies.

14. Note with what American prestige the works of Wilfredo Lam triumph, in their deep originality, over the other painters shown in this special issue--a panorama of modern art--published in 1946 by Cahiers d'Art. (Author's note)

15. Ives Tanguy (1900-1955)

16. "In his critique of Ducasse, Carpentier demonstrates ironically how much of a Surrealist he is. Furthermore, the remark about the delights of raping live women places him with the Surrealists in the cult of gratuitous violence advocated by Breton, Artaud, and other French writers of the thirties (including Gaston Bachelard, who wrote his study of Lautréamont, a celebration of violence, in the thirties. Violence in El reino itself, of course, is in no way gratuitous, since it serves the goal of revolution against oppression. But here again Carpentier approximates Ducasse, in whose work violence is anything but gratuitous, as it works to try to demolish what Ducasse considers to be the pernicious influence of literary myth, metamorphosis arming itself to destroy metaphor" (55). Nancy Gray Diaz; see note 8.

17. Cf;: William Seabrook, The Magic Island (1929)] " I learned from Louis that we white that we white strangers in this 20^th century city (New York), with our electric lights and motor cars, bridge games and cocktail parties, were surrounded by another world invisible, a world of marvels, miracles, and wonders--a world in which the dead rose from their graves and walked, in which a man lay dying within shouting distance of my own house and from no mortal illness but because and old woman out in Léogane sat slowly unwinding the thread wrapped round a wooden doll made in his image, a world in which trees and beasts talked for those whose ears were attuned, in which gods spoke from burning bushes, as on Sinai, and sometimes still walked bodily as in Eden's garden...Voodoo in Haiti is a profound and vitally alive religion--alive as Christianity was in its beginnings and in the early Middle Ages when miracles and mystical illuminations were common everyday occurences" (12).

18. Romances of chivalry read by Don Quixote.

19. Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)

20. François Macandal, was the famous runaway slave who led a six-year rebellion (1751-57) against the French colonists in Saint Domingo. He was reputed to be an hougan, or voodoo sorcerer, and drew upon African traditions and religions to motivate his followers. The French burned him at the stake in Cap Français in 1758, although his followers believed that he escaped execution by turning himself into a fly..

21. Bouckman, a houngan who employed vaudau in its most aggressive (Petro) form to summon the slaves to revolt at a ceremony at Bois Caïman in 1791. He was  assumed by some of his followers to be the reincarnation of Mackandal.He was captured and beheaded.

22. Giovnni Batista Piranesi (1720-1778). In Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1745 this Italian engraver transformed Roman ruins into immense, fantastic dungeons with gloomy arcades, staircases rising to incredible heights, and bizarre galleries leading nowhere. Piranesi's engravings were an influence on 19th-century romanticism and also played a role in the development of Surrealism.

23. Juana Azurduy de Padilla (1781-1862), a heroine in the Bolivian wars for independence.

24. The enchanted City of the Caesars is a variant of the Eldorado legend and has incited countless explorations in Patagonia. Many Spaniards claimed to have  actually been there, and and numerous others went in search of it.. Sebastian Cabot, who discovered the Paraná and Paraguay rivers and established the first Spanish settlement in the Plata basin in1528, was preparing to search for the fabled city when a surprise attack by the Indians in1529 wiped out his base at Fort Sancti Spíritus.

25. Rocambole was the hero of Les Exploits de Rocambole (1859), French popular romances by Pierre-Alexix, Vicomte de Poson du Terrail (1828-1871). Maldoro is thus the ultimate parody of the Romantic literary hero and, at the same time, the embodiment and the destroyer of the Romantic literary myth. See Nancy Gray Diaz, note 2.
 

Friends--the one where Phoebe asks the ultimate question! (from Jesada)

Tale of Lisabetta da Messina--from Boccaccio's Decameron

Read Boccaccio's story here:
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/decameron/engDecShowText.php?myID=nov0405&expand=day04

Prized for its healing properties, during the Middle Ages basil was used to heal exterior wounds. The image above was taken from http://dobianchi.com/2010/08/26/the-basil-of-salerno-and-lisabettas-tears/  and may be found in the Tacuinum Sanitatis (Codex Latinus 9333) from the Bibliothèque de France in Paris.

Isabella and the Pot of Basil--John William Waterhouse

Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1907)

Lorenzo and Isabella

(J. Everett Millais, 1849) - National Museums Liverpool

Isabella and the Pot of Basil--William Holman Hunt

Seinfeld--"The Blood"--George combines food and sex

Food and Desire in Contemporary Marketing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edC_TGqtpOA

Food for thought...

"The most dangerous food is wedding cake." American proverb

"If you cook like you walk..." Cuban proverb

"Food has replaced sex in my life; now I can't even get into my own pants." Anonymous

"The quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach." Anonymous