Throughout history, foods that were once a marker of precarity and a lack of resources — dishes eked from scraps; tough cuts of meat; seafood too abundant to be of value to those who treasure rarity; wild roots scraped out of the earth with hardened hands — have gradually been co-opted by the upper classes, sometimes to the point that they’re no longer accessible to the people who once relied on them. For deliciousness has never been a fixed quality, wholly measurable by sensors on the tongue; it’s an invocation and reflection of memory, history and prevailing hierarchies. To have taste, in the cultural sense of showing discernment and an awareness of higher aesthetics, is to defeat taste in the physical sense: the animal instinct to simply eat what pleases us.
Evidence is mounting that other animals are capable of pyrocognition, the behavioural and cognitive abilities required to harness the potential of fire. This means that examining the way nonhuman animals interact with and live alongside fire can help us shed light on how our long-extinct ancestors managed this dangerous phenomenon, and how it went on to shape the creatures we are today.
Our overwhelming emphasis upon the visual aspects of architectural design fails to acknowledge the fact that, to gain understanding and knowledge of buildings, we rely upon all of our senses, including sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, as well as bodily senses such as proprioception and kinaesthesia, which are associated with balance and movement.
Chouette, Claire Oshetsky’s first novel, is part feminist fairytale in the vein of Angela Carter, part suburban body horror. Its epigraph is a quote from the David Lynch film Eraserhead: “Mother, they are still not sure it is a baby!”
Part of what’s refreshing in reading Patchett’s nonfiction is having a window into her discipline as a writer and her deep understanding of herself. This knowledge has made it possible for her to create the kind of life that suits her: devoting her hours to writing books and putting other people’s stories into eager hands as the owner of Parnassus Books.
While bird people will enjoy the photographs and facts, travelers will gobble up the tales of distant parts, and photographers will absorb the technical details included.
The days I don’t want to kill myself
are extraordinary. Deep bass. All the people
in the streets waiting for their high fives
and leaping, I mean leaping,
At a house full of deaths hiding under the stairs. I was barefoot at the
time because my friend said, I know it’s dark, but you have to take your
shoes off in this house. You have to tread on the darkness. She caressed