Pie Are

Pies are round, of course. I actually do have a square skillet I use for cornbread, but I've never seen another. The rumor that I eat cats and dogs is greatly exaggerated. Just that once and I was really hungry. Small dogs and cats are very stringy. If you listen to enough bluegrass your mind turns to mush. Too much history. I want to be free, but there is no way I can be, from my past. I remember too much. Someone singing a Jean Richie song, "Blue Diamond Mine", it sounds like opera. It is. Half the fun is just covering songs, the other half is where it takes you. I can't help but think I could have turned out differently, if my parents had just beat me. Does vibrato have meaning? What is meaning? Does one thing mean something else? I'm confused when it comes to meaning. I do ok with installing a complex show, but when it comes to feeding crackers to geese, I get confused. Who is that singing? Her voice is like a knife. Kiri. I can hardly stand it. I don't even like Mozart, too tinny for my ear, but god, what a voice. Later, I'm listening to some South American brass band, and it's really hot, I don't even like this, but it's good, then a Nigerian singer, with a slack guitar. What is the meaning of music? How do we make sense? What sense do words make? Maybe an isolated mandolin, a clarinet in the dark, meaning is difficult. Sometimes something in the natural world makes sense, the way a branch grows, a particular fork. Meaning might be what emerges from the alembic of personal experience. Susanne Langer is good on music. She quotes an essay by Basil de Selincourt, "Music and Duration", which I manage to find, that argues strongly that music is a form of duration. I use paintings in two west windows, to block the afternoon winter sun. Do they cease being paintings when I use them this way? Then there's context, then there's text. Truth is the nature of the true. Heidegger, I think. The Greek word aletheia, which means the unconcealedness of being, naked truth, in a word. To mistake an artwork for a real object is no great feat when an artwork is the real object one mistakes it for, something like that, Arthur Danto in "Transfiguration of the Commonplace". I'm reading these essays between rounds of cutting firewood and the contrast is extreme. Finish the afternoon with Mikhail Bakhtin, who is wonderfully lucid in "Discourse in the Novel". If D takes another course in Aesthetics I'm going to shoot him. Good fuel for a day like this is a large bowl with a lower layer of mashed potatoes, topped with chili. Excellent staying power. First chance of snow the end of the week, so I examine my situation closely, to see if I'm forgetting anything. I need to start eating more, noticed that today, change to the winter diet, more meat, more fats, more beans and rice; need 10 lbs of rice and a gallon of olive oil but waiting until we take the Circus Show to Columbus, as both are so much cheaper at the ethnic markets there. If someone on the west coast would send me a pound of acorns from one of those isolated white oaks, and someone in Florida would send me a pound from a Live Oak I would greatly appreciate it. This winter I want to learn how to make a curd using acorns, that I could then fry or dry and use in other ways. Next year, I'm thinking, I can get Pegi to bring out a fleet of nubile Cirque girls, they can collect all the acorns I need in a single day, I'll feed them dinner as payment. They could wear costumes, maybe boots. Seriously, a day in the country with Mad Tom has its moments, and the meals are no small part of it. I cured and smoked meat for so many years, that I always forget, now, that I need to keep some smoked jowls or something on hand, for cooking pots of beans. I should pick up a slab of bacon, no, I'll cure a whole pork loin, I haven't done one in a while, and they're cheap right now. Breakfast meat and a welcome addition to any pot of whatever. Lightly cured and smoked, cut into 6 or 8 pieces and frozen. Two weeks of a sugar/salt cure and twelve hours of smoking isn't enough to really preserve meat, but it has all the qualities I want, isn't quite so toxic, and keeps fine in the freezer for a year. If I'm going to crank-up the smoker, I might as well smoke something else, some fish or something, some acorn curd. Smoked acorn curd, what a great concept, someplace between pemmican and jerky, a trail food for the truly informed. It would keep forever. They're digging out Shackleton's whiskey, cutting it free of the ice, is nothing sacred? Bleak is the word of the day, gray and barren. Prospects don't look promising. Thinking about Thanksgiving, I buy an acorn squash and a pound of ground pork; I make several sausages, but I make a chorizo that I know will marry perfectly with the squash, and will stuff the other half with berries and jam. Menu decided, I'll drink a Ridge Zin, recommended by experts, and a personal favorite. I have one left in my cellar. What time better than the present? I'm scheduled to return to earth sometime soon. Where, as Democrats, we try to keep 60 frogs in a wheelbarrow.