the sourcerer: Eating Istanbul.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Eating Istanbul.

That's what I was planning to do - bit by delicious bit. I forgot about my sensory overload problem. Place me in a foreign country and my appetite promptly disappears. Like being in love... and there's that too. So I walk my walks and here and there I take a small bite. (Knowing that next week maybe, I will suffer huge regret.)

In a back alley off Istiklal this morning I spotted a tray of medlars, some of them perfectly bletted. The man watched me as I looked for the most shriveled and aromatic one - oozing a little sticky juice, and nodded his approval. I nipped it - like a vampire - and sucked the pulp from it. Heavenly apple sauce! He blew me a kiss as I walked off into the rain.

Lunch was half an aubergine roasted in a smoky wood oven. Lamb and pine nuts. To such bedlam! Some people have no manners...

3 comments:

Chris said...: :-)
:-)
:-)
!!!

xx; December 20, 2011 at 8:08 PM
Marie said...: Ag shame! For the lack of appetite (but for the best reasons), and for knowing how to eat a medlar, and for the bedlam.; December 20, 2011 at 8:27 PM
the sourcerer said...: :-) back at ya big C.

it would have broken my heart if that cat was scrawny, but he was well padded. and good lungs; December 20, 2011 at 8:40 PM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.