A new month, new … obligations? Tasks? Goals?
January 1st ‘the goal,’ such as it was, was to do a drawing-per-day. That lasted until February 4th. One or two days in there I may have ‘missed’ my scheduled sketch, done two another day, and back-dated the late works … I couldn’t even claim that the dog ate it.
We have no dog.
Yet.
February 5th, 6th … up through about the 20th, perhaps even beyond, I thought to myself—does anyone ever think not to him or herself?—, “self, you can make up the whole batch of them and be back on schedule.” And S and I did indeed continue watching television episodes and the occasional movies, during which I had previous doodled, but the make-up-sessions never happened.
I moved on.
That 1st of January I put a conscious and conscientious effort into better (and less?) eating. Calorie counting, we haz eet. There was little method to the madness, but it worked. The semester ended and we tried a few food related variations: more juice, more fresh vegetables, cleaning out the processed & prepackaged products, more seeds and nuts, less sugar, and so on … not all at once. Before and after delicious items were discovered (the deliciousness of tempeh! amaranth and quinoa, non-spinach leafy greens … Hi, collards!) and rediscovered (how could I have forgotten asparagus, cabbage and its relatives, beets, squash … things I love). We finally went to Edelweiss. The pantry has been pared down. May and the first part of June were plateau-centric; July was productive. August (and beyond) ought to be a return to form, where form is defined as good cooking—following the ol’ standby ‘food, mostly plants, not too much’—and occasional meals out.
T-Town is not a cultural or culinary wasteland, but it’s no oasis, Mecca, gem in the rough, etc. That having been said, I’ve been here about two years and yet I’ve not been to DePalma’s. Students have recommended Yakamoz for some time. I need to get back to Surin and finally eat at Ruan. I’ll leave this up to S.
With S now winning the bread and being the baconbringer, I will devote ‘daily dissertation’ time until the damned document is done. A couple months back I was inspired by Jerry’s Map, and S and I have both bitten the bullet and been bitten by the bug. My ‘deck of cards’ may be a Django app, but creatives juice will, like metaphors, be mixed, flow, ferment …
Notes:
- It was reported (A.V. Club) that Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman is/was missing, so the evening playst list became their 1980 self-titled album. I really only know the band and have any of their music because of my time living with J&C down on Jenifer, since C had a significant collection of their works.
- I’m quite behind on my comic book reading, which (1) basically ceased once I moved to Alabama and (2) was interrupted by a digital comics archiving issue … call it hard drive meets user error. At the time I was “behind” on various storylines, but was more or less in the middle of Cable-and-Hope-paloooza, aka “Second Coming.” Since then X-Men got a new volume, Uncanny … finished its run and began anew, X-Force got a reboot, other titles, X- and otherwise have continued, been cancelled, seen reboots, and so on. Now there are, what, four ongoing Avengers titles? (straight, New, Secret, Dark? … or is Academy still running?) I’m a bit out of the loop. And so today I started catching up shortly after where I last left off after I last started up again: X-Men Vol. 2, No. 12-15 (and “Giant Size” No. 1), the “First to Last” tale.
- During our Madison mission last August I stopped by Star Liquor, stopped by Woodman’s, and so on, and among other things found a bottle of Pendleton Canadian Whiskey (Hood River Distillers), and as the city and rodeo are dear to me, I bought myself 750mL and have spent the past year emptying it. It’s not particularly nuanced, not especially sweet or spicy, not smokey or peaty, any of that, but it’s smooth enough and not too rough, and it’s what’s keeping my snifter from World Market wet tonight.
- When S is away I’ll culinarily … play? Not exactly. As an ‘alternative protein source’ I’m fond of the occasional fungus, in this case represented by regular button mushrooms—let’s say, 5oz.—tossed with 5oz. of chopped (yellow) onion, a clove of garlic, salt, balsamic vinegar, and a couple teaspoons of olive oil; and stuck on a sheet in the oven for 425F for 15 minutes and an extra 40-ish at 350F. These then might be blended with some cooked wild & brown rice (just seasoned with salt, pepper, and paprika). If S cared for mushrooms or onions I’d prepare it more frequently, but it’s just for me. It is, though, sweet, savory, a little earthy, filling, and not too heavy.
- Regarding the D.D.: today I cracked open Nick Zangwill’s Aesthetic Creation (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), a slender (~200 page) volume with seven content chapters, five of which—by title—interest me little and two (3. “Are there Counterexamples to Aesthetic Theories of Art?” and 7. “Against the Sociology of Art”) that caught my attention. As the author notes in his preface (ix), the chapters all began as stand-alone papers, and furthermore he wishes to defend/develop a particular “Aesthetic Theory of Art”: “[…] having an aesthetic purpose makes a thing art.” (2) He then references Monroe Beardsley, but what of course interests me more is how, say, Kant or any other the other 18th-century German philosphers and their ilk make out in the index. The answer, to be concise, is that with the exception of Kant (pages 44, 47, 51, 56, 91n, 118, 153, 172, 172n, 177, 178n, and 179) none (Baumgarten, Herder, Hamann, Goethe, Schiller … Lessing, Mendelssohn, Winckelmamn?) are mentioned. But Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett do get space, as does Wittgenstein. The Kant references belong mainly to a chapter (7.) that interests me and to 2.—”Art as Aesthetic Creation”—, which should interest me more. “Analogy” does not make the subject index; neither do “allegory” and “metaphor.” “Poetics” is also missing, as are “irrationality,” the “sublime” and the “grotesque.” Therefore the work may be interesting as a whole and on its own, but its usefulness to me consists in it not saying anything interesting about the things I care about.
