MONDAY eat your blues away OT

What food do you dream about? Or what's your go-to comfort meal? Eating is not my thing, although I enjoy reading about others preparing and eating food.

Delicious in Dungeon (ダンジョン飯 - Danjon Meshi) season one is on Netflix.

The latest piece I read which had some memorable words about food was a short story by Jean Stafford. The story is funny and disturbing. An obese girl (who may or may not be everything she claims) has an unhealthy relationship to food and she enlists a friend to help her slim down. If you liked Shirley Jackson's The Bird's Nest or Hangsaman, you'll like this one too. Actually I think if you like any of Jackson's work, you'll probably like Stafford.

Ramona had found an old ladies' home, called the Gerstnerheim, which, being always in need of funds, welcomed paying guests at the midday meal, whom they fed for an unimaginably low price. Ramona did not patronize it out of miserliness, however, but because the food was nearly inedible. And it was here that the girls daily took their Spartan lunch. It was quite the worst food that Sue had ever eaten anywhere, for it was cooked to pallor and flaccidity and then was seasoned with unheard-of condiments, which sometimes made her sick. The bread was sour and the soup was full of pasty clots; the potatoes were waterlogged and the old red cabbage was boiled until it was blue. The dessert was always a basin of molded farina with a sauce of gray jelly that had a gray taste. The aged ladies sat at one enormously long table, preserving an institutional silence until the farina was handed around, and, as if this were an alarm, all the withered lips began to move simultaneously and from them issued high squawks of protest against the dreary lot of being old and homeless and underfed. Sue could not help admiring Ramona, who ate her plate of eel and celeriac as if she really preferred it to tuna broiled with black olives and who talked all the while of things quite other than food–of Walther von Der Vogelweide's eccentric syntax, of a new French novel that had come in the mail that morning, and of their tip to Switzerland.
 

~ "The Echo and the Nemesis" by Jean Stafford, published as "The Nemesis" in the December 16, 1950 issue of The New Yorker

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ETA – And in the last few days, we had Phil Donahue and Alain Delon both pass at the age of 88. I was too young to fully appreciate Donahue, but in retrospect, he's probably the first male celebrity I can think of who called himself a feminist. Read in an obituary one of his first interviews was with Madalyn Murray O'Hair, infamous US atheist. If you never had to pray in class during your days in a public school, you can thank her.

Speaking of prayer, Alain Delon serves as a kind of warning about the dangers of worshipping false idols. He is certainly a screen idol and will be considered one forever and rightly so. His most memorable roles were as a cold-blooded killer, the ruthless criminal with an angel's face. In real life, he was an abuser, an anti-LGBTQA+ activist, far right nationalist* – all wonderful fascistic traits. If he were a young US citizen, I'm sure the NYT would have published a glowing, soft focus, gently stroking interview over a trendy meal; normalize the bastards. He was a bastard, just one that had the looks to star in some of my favorite movies. I still watch them, esp. La Piscine, Le Cercle Rouge, Le Samouraï, and Plein Soleil and don't have any issues continuing to do so. Same with the works of many other problematic people. Fuck them all in real life though.

As Tom Ripley in Plein Soleil (1960)

And Jeff Costello in Le Samouraï (1967)

* a quick reminder that the French; although they cannot be blamed/credited with creating racist, sexist, bigoted behavior, thoroughly excelled and continue to excel at promoting them. Chauvinism is named after Nicholas Chauvin, a zealous Bonapartist, after all. Etymologically, Chauvin = Calvin. If you have a Presbyterian friend, try calling them a chauvinist. Tell me how it goes.