Sunday Snippet - Aphrodite, A Memoir of the Senses

One of my favorite books about food and eroticism is Isabel Allende's Aphrodite - A Memoir of the Senses, an unpretentious, witty, and earthy collection of stories, lore and recipes taken from history, art, literature, and life experience itself. I've snipped from this book in two or three previous posts but I lack the energy and time right now to link you to them, though you can, if you wish, do a search on the blog.

Below is an excerpt from Aphrodite about the perceived difference between eroticism and pornography, in the form of a letter written by Anaïs Nin to a consumer of pornography, with an introduction by Isabel Allende.

“Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken"

~ Isabel Allende

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 About Eroticism 

 In the forties, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller survived for a while by writing erotic stories for a man who paid them by the page. This client, known to them only as the Collector, remained anonymous, piquing the indignant curiosity of the two great authors who lent their talents and their pens to satisfy his caprices. This collector of pornography did not appreciate style and repeatedly asked them to "cut the poetry" and concentrate on the sex, because that was all he was interested in. Nin wrote him a letter in which she masterfully defines the essence of eroticism:

Dear Collector:

     We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession.

      It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.

     You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex is surprising textures, its subtle transformation, its aphrodisiac elements. you are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.

     If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, mood, there are no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

     How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repeated wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry: Cut the poetry! No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gestures; for a lover; when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore. What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence, Perversity and art.

    We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look. If you have closed your senses upon silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must by now be completely shriveled up. There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy. 

 Egon Schiele

Embrace

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

~ Henry Miller

Happy Hour Friday

Time to begin making dessert - peach crumble with this year's first local peaches.  Have a great weekend. :-)

Love and all Groovy Stuff,
Gina

Sunday Snippet

'Erotic is using a feather,'' she said. ''Pornography is when you use the whole bird.''

Isabel Allende 

This is the third snippet I've taken from the book Aphrodite - A Memoir of the Senses by Isabel Allende. If you're coming upon this series for the first time, you can click here and here for the two previous snippets.

In the recipe section on Hors d'Oeuvres Allende writes this...

Tidbits are to the table

what kisses are

to lovers: a delicate demonstration

of what is to come later,

when you slip into something more

comfortable. They are served to accompany a cocktail

or glass of white wine before moving

to the table. Or, in some cases,

when the urgency to make love

is so strong that

there is no time to lose,

they can take the place of a meal.

and includes several fine recipes. I have chose the one with figs, as I am a lover of figs. Specifically, figs bring me back to my childhood in Portugal, where fig trees are as abundant as apple trees in the Northeastern U.S. So for me, a fig is not just an item I can pick up at the grocery store for $2.50 per piece but the fruit I once picked in a friend's cultivated fig orchard in Portugal, along with my cousins, on a hot summer day in the late 90's. There were so many spoiling figs on the ground beneath each tree that our hostess insisted on getting us bags to take as many home as we wanted. I would have collected more, had I not been so busy eating them as I walked along, content to be in the moment with an abundance of my favorite fruit and the hot sunshine on my bare arms and neck. What a feeling!

I wish I'd known about this recipe then.

Widower's Figs

pg. 230

These tidbits lead to sin, and you always want more. The bursting figs suggest a certain urgency, and everyone appreciates the sensuality of the sweet and spicy combination.

Ingredients

 1 scant cup (8 ounces) semi-hard white cheese,                    

such asgoat cheese

1 tablespoon Salsa Picante

1 large apple or grapefruit 

4 large ripe figs

Preparation

Cut the cheese into 1/2 inch cubes and coat in the salsa picante. Spear on cocktail picks and insert into the apple or grapefruit (I prefer the grapefruit). Place in the center of a round plate and surround with peeled and quartered figs.

Sunday Snippet

 The second in a series of snippets from my current read Aphrodite (A Memoir of the Senses)
Last week's snippet is here.

From the Chapter

How to define an aphrodisiac? Let's say it is any substance or activity that piques amorous desire. Some have a scientific basis, but most are activated by the imagination. Cultures and individuals react to them in their own way. For thousands of years, humanity has experienced with countless possibilities in an incessant search for new stimuli, a search that led to pornography and the genesis of erotic art ancient as the dawn of millennary cave paintings. The difference between the two is a question of taste; what is erotic for one may be pornographic for another. For the Victorians, Evil was everywhere. They covered the legs of their tables to preclude bad thoughts, and a young lady was not allowed to hang a man's portrait on the walls of her room, for fear that the painting might look on as she was undressing. It didn't take much to excite those good folks.

Some aphrodisiacs function through analogy, like the vulva-shaped oyster or phallic asparagus; others by association, because they remind us of something erotic. They also work through suggestion, because they remind us of something erotic. They also work through suggestion, because we believe that when we eat the vital organ of another animal --- and in some cases, that of another human, as happens among cannibals ---we absorb their strength. In general, anything with a French name seems aphrodisiac. Serving mushrooms with garlic isn't at all the same as champignons a la Provencal, nor is ham and cheese comparable to croque-monsieur. The same criteria apply on the battlefields of love. It is a good idea to assign suggestive names to the different postures, as in the enlightened erotic manuals of Asia. It isn't necessary to remember the authentic terms; you can invent them and no one will be the wiser; delicate butterfly in somersault, swooning lotus flower in lake with ducks, and others of that ilk.  Of course, we cannot overlook therapeutic stimulants, plants, and hormones, but after testing a good number of them I believe that sensorial stimuli are more effective:  daring games, massages, shows, erotic literature and art.

February is a good time to visit a good grocery store or whole foods/gourmet market. I kept the winter blues at bay today by shopping for choice ingredients for dark chocolate mousse with roasted almonds. I also bought a used book and some French lavender soap.

Good weekend, everyone,

Pagan Sphinx

Sunday Snippet

Aphrodite - A Memoir of the Senses by Isabel Allende

I'd been looking around the house for weeks for my old copy of this book. There are a lot of things I'm looking for these days, in fact. This one was easy to replace, the other things, not so much.  I ordered it used from Amazon and it arrived in perfect hardcover condition for the less than the price I paid for the paperback when it was first released as such.

It is a delicious book full of stories, autobiographical detail, myths, lore, poetry, recipes and sweet little paintings about food and its connection to anything and everything erotic and human. 

I will share with you an excerpt from the introduction. (I could not find the painting Allende chose for this section, so I substituted with one by Frida Kahlo.  Further note:  I saw the painting up-close and personal at Tate Modern in 2005. One of the highlights of my museum going adventures.)

 The fiftieth year of our life is like

         the last hour of dusk, 

when the sun has set and done turns

naturally toward reflection.

In my case, however, dusk incites me to sin,

and perhaps for that reason,

in my fiftieth year I find myself reflecting

on my relationship

with food and eroticism; the weaknesses

of the flesh that most tempt me are not, alas,

those I have practiced most.

Shadow Shot Sunday & Part Two of my Amherst/Mount Holyoke College Day Trip

See Part One here.

Shadow Shot Sunday is being brought you to by The Pagan Sphinx blog this week, for a change of pace.

I went down to Mount Holyoke to surprise my daughter (SG1) and DIL (The Beloved) with a visit and maybe lunch and stopped several places along the way to take pictures. But there are just too many stops and too many photographs to document them, I'll post these for Tracey's Shadow Shot meme. I eventually meandered my way down to the campus. It was like summer today. Sunny and clear and hot. The First day all week that's been really nice.


During one of my stops, I discovered I'd forgotten my cell phone and couldn't call the girls to tell them I was in the area. So went about getting lunch on North Pleasant Street.

click on all photos to enlarge to a nice size

and ate it on a bench in front of this fountain. After lunch,I continued to travel through downtown traffic and down rt. 116 to my daughter's campus to look for her, sans cell phone. But not before I stopped and snapped these photos.

Mary Lyon Hall

Iron fence shadow in front of Mary Lyon Hall on the Mount Holyoke College campus South Hadley, Massachusetts
I then came upon this festive scene. Nice but it will be like trying to find a needle in a haystack with all these kids spread out over the expansive lawn

But there they were! So I asked them to pose, which they did with ease, dontach think? :)

My girl is radiantly happy. It's spring. She turned in her thesis today and she's in love.

Thanks, Tracey from Melbourne, for hosting Shadow Shot Sunday

Honest Scrap Award

You know I've made a blogging comeback when the first real, substantive post I put up is based on a blog award. A tad pathetic perhaps, but it does the trick for entertaining me at the moment. Besides, I like it that the famous Utah Savage (the esteemed blogger) whom I most admire, thought of me when doling off her honest scrap. :-) I mean, the woman inspires great painters! Enough said.

Thank you, Peggy and may you spread these little trinkets my way any time. Anything that gets me back to your blog. With the added bonus of making me feel less like a failure in life. ;-) I'm a bit droll these days. My apologies.

I've yet to get the rules of this award straight. I think you're supposed to invent seven honest things about yourself and then pass the award on to seven other bloggers. I think that's where the honest factor comes in. Sort of. I also noticed something about poetry and I perked up! Poetry? Why, of course. Poet? Of course not! :-)

In any event, it's all fun and good, isn't it? If I've failed to follow the rules, I may either have flopped the award meme or created my own! Who knows, right?

The Seven Honest Things (is this sort of like The Seven Deadly Sins? That was a brilliant one from Kay, wasn't it?

1) I love to eat raw fish and seaweed. Sometimes I scare myself trying to figure out what creature(s) I would have been in other lives.

2) I am fiercely protective of those I love.

3) I am very practical and I have common sense; usually. Especially in terms of every-day life matters, raising a family, work, etc. I often butt heads with people who are neither smart, creative nor flexible and who are incapable of articulating their ideas or don't want to. I know. It sounds arrogant. It is, probably. But I'm being honest, knowing I am neither an angel nor a demon. My name is Gina. :-) I'm okay. Ha! That feels good to say!

4) I am sensitive. My emotional side is always at odds with my rational side. I believe that I am almost equally in charge of all the sides of my brain. I am bad with numbers but functional with geometry and patterns. I had a very early and precocious predisposition to literature, poetry, art, nature and equally so a keen sense of people; (unfortunately mostly mixed) by a pretty young age. I loved my parents and they loved me and come to think of it, that's all that really matters. :-)

5) It takes a long time to really get to know me and thus really love me. ;-) But I think it's worth it! :D

6) One of my favorite quotes: "Love all, trust a few, do harm to none."
~Willy the Shake

If I were to reinvent that quote to suit me personally, I would change it to

"Be civil to all, trust and love a few, do harm to none or nothing." ~ Pagan Sphinx

Okay. So I'm not Shakespeare. But you get my drift. I hope.

7) I'm currently in love with a family friend's dog; a bulldog named Omar. Just look at that face! I don't so much know if it's the breed or this particular dog. All I know is that if Omar ever needed a home, I would take him in in a heartbeat! What a sweetie!

Isn't he cute?

Honestly, while I personally enjoy these awards, I'm at a point where I don't know who to give them to because it's hard to keep track of who likes them and who doesn't and, even, who has already received it a hundred times. Instead of giving the award, I'll link you to seven great blogs and if their respective blogger wish to pick up the award and display it, by all means. As always, no obligations! We all have enough of those in our day to day, non-blogging lives, right? I just hope you pay a visit to these lovely people, if you haven't already.

Little Bang Theory - Cunning Runt
The Five of Us - Catherine
Phantsy That - Susan
Color Sweet Tooth - Steve
After the Bridge - Sherry
Betmo's Corner - Betmo
Imac's Photos from the Mind's Eye - Imac
Why, What Have You Heard? - Mojo (plus a huge thanks for helping with my photo sizing)
Forks Off The Moment & Do You See What I See? Dianne

I think that's more than seven but I've never good at counting...

The Tree of Happiness Award

From the warm-hearted and talented Linda at Vulture Peek Muse

&
The the equally talented and warm-hearted Steve of Color Sweet Tooth

(how luck am I, to know these wonderful people, huh??)

Thank you so much for this award. I will cherish it and keep it always on the blog mantel.

This award has attached a requisite of stating six things that make me happy.
Because anyone who reads TPS knows that my family and my dear WP are who make me most happy, I will concentrate on other things; perhaps even food or something equally inane. I guess I'm not feeling all poetic about happiness today. ;-) We'll see what happens.

Food It is:

1) bread of the world
2) black olives
3) cherries
4) raw oysters
5) artichokes
6) asparagus

Steve's request is that his recipients of the Tree of Happiness Award list att least three of the six things be ones that readers don't yet know about.

1) Once in a while falling asleep to the low tone of the TV set when WP is watching. I don't know what about this makes me happy but it makes me feel safe and contented.

2) Watching the birds and squirrels at the feeders

3) African music

4) Blogging

5) Children

6) Chocolate (dark truffles but the less exotic Raisinettes and Reeses miniatures will do in a pinch) ;-)
I want to give the award to six people whom I depend upon daily for emotional, spiritual and intellectual sustenance. In other words, food for thought. It sort goes with the food list. ;-)

1) Linda, who is not supposed to be listed because she gave me the award, because she got from someone else, but I insist on including her. She is rich in love and spirituality and shares herself and her wonderful art generously.

2) Bobbie at Almost There. For being there, not almost, but always.

3) Dianne at Forks Off The Moment because everything she stands for makes me happy and proud to know her.

4) Steve at Color Sweet Tooth for his art, friendship and all the learning I do from his comments.

5) Betmo at Life's Journey and Betmo's Corner for her unwavering stand on so many important leftist issues and for her friendship and support. Oh, and the haiku!

6) Sherry at After the Bridge for her poetry, interesting tid-bits and images and her sweetness and friendship

If you haven't done so already, check out their blogs and stay awhile. Treasures abound there!

Love,
Pagan

The Season

Our favorite farm stand is just a few short miles from our house.
This season they had the best corn for miles. In fact, it's the best corn I've ever tasted in my life.
Corn, tomatoes and peaches have been daily meals.

The peaches we get at an orchard another town over. I don't think they're organic, per se. But they're local and delicious. They also have apples. Plus they're very, very nice people with an Obama sign on their lawn. :-)

These little watermellons were pretty tasty, too. If you don't mind finding seeds in your fruit as so many seem to be these days.

Destination Meat Cove

Nova Scotia Part I

Our destination was Cape Breton. So after stopping along the way in Maine and New Brunswick, we arrived here at Meat Cove and parked our little trailer.

The day remained cloudy and wet...

Creating this dramatic mist over the hills behind us.
The next morning gave way to better weather and this stunning sky...

Finally erupting into the only truly sunny day we experienced in our four days' visit to Meat Cove.

Ending with a dinner of oysters and a bottle of white wine (boyb) on the deck of a little seafood shack, right across from our campsite.

Could life get any better?

Dinner

This is my first-ever food post. What the hell, everyone needs to do at least one food post in their blogging life, right?

Supergirl Two and I made pesto with the basil from our garden. It was tough old basil, I tell you, but ground up with pine nuts, cheese, olive oil and garlic, there were no complaints when it came to eating it! We also bought local, organic greenhouse tomatoes and fresh mozzarella, sliced them, arranged them, added black olives, lots of black pepper and ate it all with gusto.

SG2 would not let me take her photo because she thinks I'm indiscreet about which pictures of her I choose to post. I guess I can't be counted on to put her best face forward. But I'm her mother and I think she always looks perfect. So there you have it; tonight's dinner.

Also a note to you all. I've had quite a bit of spam lately. For instance, describing myself as shy in one of my blog posts, generated a couple of emails from folks trying to sell me "get over your shyness" programs. The usual medicine show, internet style. So, starting tomorrow, I will be screening comments, at least for a while. I don't want to come back from vacation and have the blog riddled with unwanted comments.

We're packing up and putting things in order tomorrow and leaving for Nova Scotia on Thursday. W.P. and I have decided to take his work computer (which I have mixed feelings about) but he promised he'll only do the Wi-Fi thing occasionally. When he does, I will likely check in and even maybe read a few blog posts.

So long everyone! I'll try not to come back and bore you with too many Nova Scotia pictures but I know I won't be able to resist posting at least a couple of the highlights.

Peace & Love,
Pagan

My Life This Week

The prayer flags are flying and the forsythia blooming in my yard. This was taken on Sunday.

This is the part of our yard that faces the Connecticut River to the east. It's tranquil, beautiful and a perfect place to sit and contemplate, read, eat, drink and be merry. To the left, which is north, lies the eagles' nest. There is currently one baby in there. The other egg never hatched. With field glasses, we can see the nest and a blob of the eagle's fine head occasionally.

So, about my week. Firstly let me tell you that my weekend was splendid. On Saturday, W.P. and I went to our favorite breakfast/brunch spot in Amherst - The Lone Wolf. I had been craving a bagel with lox so I ordered their version which includes generous slices of red onion, sliced tomatoes and capers. Oh, was it good. Uuum.

Sunday night we went to see Lou Reed in Northampton. It was a beautiful night and we had ample time to walk around town and take in a sculpture exhibition in the park across the street from The Calvin Theater.

This week; this entire glorious week; I am on vacation. I have some projects I want to begin here at home. Some painting, raking and preparing of flower beds, window boxes and planters. W.P. has to be in Zurich on business all week, so I'm going to keep very busy. I have lunch planned with a friend later in the week and on Friday, I'll be spending the day in Boston with Supergirl II, who has only one class that day. We haven't finalized our plans yet but I think we're going to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art.

I am so diggin' this incredible weather, aren't you?