Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Obsessions, ranked and schematized


This word cloud of all the blog's ramblings makes it evident that HUMANS are big, just like RACE and IDENTITY; facts are slightly smaller; and "society" is very small indeed.

It's funny, I did one of these several months ago but didn't post it. The cloud was all about "erotic" and its synonyms. Remember those posts on animals as sexual symbols and medieval transvestites? Naturally they have progressed to the conversation about philosophy, physics and temporality that we are now conducting. Naturally.

(inspired by Old English in NY)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There's something incredibly medieval about this book, and the title is one element.

The splendid new book by Bill Buford, former New Yorker writer turned kitchen "bitch," as he puts it at one point, reminds us of the sacrifices and rewards of becoming more fully human. Buford's journey through the great kitchens of the world is at once masochistic and transcendent, and in the end the reward is not knowledge but humanity:

"I didn’t want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human," he says.

Cite: Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. New York: Knopf.