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Award-winning Australian Illustrator Shaun Tan reflects on the quiet mysteries of everyday life in his collection of stories with pictures, Tales from Other Suburbia. In this story, a family gets a surprise when a foreign exchange student, Eric, comes to stay…….
Read the full story On Guardian.Co.UK {click the link}
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(pic 12 – Thank you for a Wonderful time)
Sweet and Charming story…I loved the pictures…each picture has a loaded message!
A few quick points about this book in a few broken & semi-constructed sentences …..! would love to spend more time on this later…
It is a Graphic Novel that sways through simple & innocuous looking child like drawings in stark black and white, and manages to surround the reader with a web of complex experiences, successfully, in the end. It is a portrait of a culture, which scrutinizes social practices & traditions, & the relationship between Faith & Fantacism, in an intimate tone of a memoir blended wonderfully with the light stimulation of a comic book. While, also touching upon the conflict between fundamentalism and the people’s basic desire of leading their lives with a freedom of expression & action/living…..intelligent, funny, and sensitive yet times, this book introduces us to Marji - an inquisitive six yr old kid who comes of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution, who grows up to face tumultous and introspective phase as a Tween/Teenager 
…..The childhood of Marji, an intelligent and outspoken child of radical Marxists, is wonderfully merged with the history of her country - the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war and the astounding contradictions between home life and public life….Persepolis 1 ends at 14-yr old Marjane leaving behind her home in Tehran, escaping fundamentalism and the war with Iraq to begin a new life in the West. In Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, one meets a young, intrepid heroine through the next eight years of her life: lonely four years of high school in Vienna, followed by discomforting & depressing four years back home in Iran – reflects a scorching criticism against fundamentalism and its damage to the human spirit - this phase captures one’s struggle against the reality that drives one to behave almost like an outsider both abroad and at home, where one has no right to do things that one desires to do, date, or question authority – in an incredibly honest voice.
The true influence of fear on people and their daily lives, ‘It’s only natural! When we’re afraid, we lose all sense of analysis and reflection. Our fear paralyzes us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators’ repression” and the never ceasing & palpable conflict between the people and their repressive government…Passive consumption of lies…People sitting in their living rooms, consuming lies churned out by media, passively, and forming opinion about their nation and its relationship with the other huge influencers in the world culture….The never ceasing dynamics in the society that one lives, the importance of ‘Family – concept’ in the society, the differences one feels between the culture in which one was raised “We Iranians, we’re crushed not only by the government but by the weight of our traditions!”, the guiding philosophy {of resignation, here} “When a big wave comes, lower your head and let it pass”, and the other alien culture into which one tries to assimilate. The strategies that children employ to make sense of the political realities of the world around them, moves of teenage rebellion and the disparity between their public lives and their private lives as felt by younger generation. Embracing the age-old rituals and customs, enthusiastically, post exposure to an alien culture that one originally does not belong to.
“Humor is the writer’s armor against the hard emotions….” said American Writer – William Zinsser, and for Satrapi “every situation offered an opportunity for laughs” ….she feels laughter is “the only way to bear the unbearable” 
“Persepolis” was adapted into a sensational animated feature by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud – a seering story that makes a compelling point of view on complex things in life through simple pictures…
You are Elinor Dashwood of Sense & Sensibility! You are practical, circumspect, and discreet. Though you are
tremendously sensible and allow your head to rule, you have a deep, emotional side that few people often see.
“Suicide calculated well in advance, I thought, no spontaneous act of desperation”
Thomas Bernhard (The Loser)
“One of the pleasures of writing this novel was to say to my Turkish readers and to my international audience, openly and a bit provocatively, but honestly, that what they call a terrorist is first of all a human being. Our secularists, who are always relying on the army and who are destroying Turkey’s democracy, hated this book because here you have a deliberate attempt by a person who was never religious in his life to understand why someone ends up being what we or the Western world calls an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist.” -Orhan Pamuk 
SNOW by Orhan Pamuk captures a plethora of themes such as the never-ceasing confrontation between the Secular and Extremist Islamic universe, Atheism (…), Political Secularism, the so-believed Spiritual fragility of the Western world, staunch determination of young Muslim women to wear headscarves, ambivalence about religion, etc. Snow (in Turkish, “kar”) is both tender metaphor and unifying symbol. Snowfall covers everything and everyone indiscriminately, throughout the story, which is set in the city of Kars {in the north eastern part of Turkey}, the remote city on the Turkish border, the most neglected region with a glorious past – once a haunt of the Ottomans and the Russian tsars, now forgotten, lends it a melancholic spirit– in author’s words, “Kars was an important station on the trade route to Georgia, Tabriz and the Caucasus, and being on the border between two defunct empires, the Ottoman and the Russian, the mountainous city also benefited from the protection of the standing armies each power has in turn placed here for that purpose. After endless wars, rebellions, massacres, and atrocities, the city was occupied alternately by Armenian and Russian armies, and even briefly by the British”
Ka, the protagonist of the story, a journalist and an exiled poet who lived in Hamburg, arrives in the city amidst heavy snowfall. His bourgeois Istanbul accent and his charcoal-grey coat {fascinating!} define his status as an outsider who has to be treated with certain degree of care and reverence. As he enters the city, the weather condition worsens further and the blizzard cuts of the city from the rest of the world for three days, which is events-filled a period. His claimed primary objective of reporting on an epidemic of suicides among the city’s young women, the “Headscarf girls”, who killed themselves as a reaction to a law that prohibited women from participating in public life with their heads covered, is more like a mask , concealing his individual desire of finding some kind of revival to his not-so fruitful existence as a poet {has not written a poem in four years} and his austere lonely existence without any kind of sexual intimacy. His innate desire for making a trip to Kars is to tangibalise his growing attraction for Ipek, an acquaintance who he remembers only for her beauty {this is further accentuated by her current status of being a divorced}, with who his lonely and sad heart, eventually, desires to settle down. As he reunites with Ipek, he meets her father Turgut Bey who is an atheist and her sister Kadife, the most admired head of the headscarf girls who nurtures feelings for the mysterious Islamic militant, Blue. Ipek, though is willing, but is cautious enough not to make love when her father is under the same roof. He wanders about the streets of Kars, searching for some kind of creative inspiration in the ceaselessly falling snow, and learning about the political rifts that are destroying the remote city’s fabric, through chance encounters. Snow is a journey, which is haunted by the discomforting religious suicides in a region that is rife with the political strife, with “happiness” being the only constantly playing concern for everyone. It materializes the state of confusion that an individual finds himself in, as he or she trudges along the path that leads to a well defined belief system, amidst varied worldly developments as triggered in by ideological pressure and cultural change.
“We are poor and insignificant. Our wretched lives have no place in history. One day all of us living here in Kars today will be dead and gone. No one will remember us;no one will care what happened to us. We will spend the rest of our days here arguing about what sort of a scarf women should wrap around their head, and no one will care in the slightest as we’re eaten up by our own petty, idiotic quarrels. When I see so many people around me leading such stupid lives and then vanishing without a trace , an anger runs through me because I know then nothing really matters in life more than love”, captures, in a true sense, the sheer helplessness and fury that’s being felt by the youth in the city….
What I truly relished about this book is the author’s exceptionally sensitive & meticulous depiction of the moment, desolation & fragile poignancy of the season & the controversial events that are deliciously served up on an exotic Turkish platter, which is hauntingly delicate and only meant to be absorbed slowly. At times, I felt as if I am staring at a painting that’s made of words…
…were the streets empty because of the snow, or were these frozen pavements always so desolate? As he walked, Ka studied the writing on the walls – the election posters, the advertisements for schools and restaurants, and new posters that the city officials hoped would end the suicide epidemic. Through the frozen windows of a half-empty tea-house, Ka saw a group of men huddled around a television. It cheered him just a little to see these old Russian stone house still standing. In his memory they had made Kars such a special place….
Does not the paragraph given below remind us of sometime when we, certainly, would have felt so, while putting in certain efforts to lend a tangible format to those pieces of conversations we journeyed through with others….
…it took some effort to maintain the conversation, but they both applied themselves to the task with admirable determination. At least they could both discuss the snow with ease. And when they exhausted this subject they moved on to the poverty of Kars. After that it was Ka’s coat. Then mutual confessions that each found the other quite unchanged, and that neither of them had been able to give up smoking. The next subject was distant friends …the discovery that both their mothers were now dead and buried in Istanbul’s Ferikoy Cemetery that induced the greater intimacy both were seeking. ..they soon turned to the pastry shop in which they were sitting…
Too much of Turkish influence is happening right now in my life. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 
….Faith Akin’s 
{German film with a Turkish Immigrant as the protagonist}
{I received this book as a gift from Nilanjana }
I am, these days, enjoying a fabulous selection of books, which includes “The Hungry Tide” by Amitav Ghosh, a lovely parting gift from Nilanjana, who is an avid reader. I started reading this book in the flight back home, post a few months of pleasant morning walks by the sea side, innumerable hours filled with a sense of emptiness at the work table, a whole string of earthy-humane-yet depressing evenings filled with many a kind of existential questions and a plenty of precious moments of solitude and introspective conversations by the sea. The book, as declared by Nilanjana, is enthralling and poised to be a pleasant getaway where I can put my turbulent mind at rest.
The book jacket summary reads as “Amitav Ghosh has discovered another new territory, summoning a singular, fascinating place, another world, from its history and myth, and bringing it to life. The book also explores another and far more unknowable jungle : the human spirit. It is a novel that asks at every turn : what man can take the true measure of another?
I, especially, liked this part of the first chapter, where the author introduces “the tide country” to the reader and felt a compelling need to upload the content, soon after which, I would vanish from the world to submerge under the intense tales of water-bodies. As you read, you can feel the voice rich with the most authentic Indian-ness singing Ode to the awe-inspiring grandeur of nature through string of words, which captured powerfully evocative images of the territory.
Amitav Ghosh
wrote …….In our legends it is said that the goddess Ganga’s descent from the heavens would have split the earth had Lord Shiva not tamed her torrent by tying it into his ash-smeared locks. To hear this story is to see the river in a certain way : as a heavenly braid, for instance, an immense rope of water, unfurling through a wide and thirsty plain. That there is a further twist to the tale becomes apparent only in the final stages of the river’s journey – and this part of the story always comes as a surprise, because it is never told and thus never imagined. It is this : there is a point at which the braid comes undone; where Lord Shiva’s matted hair is washed apart into a vast, knotted tangle. Once past that point the river throws off its bindings and separates into hundreds, maybe thousands, of tangled strands.
“Until you behold it for yourself, it is almost impossible to believe that here, interposed between the sea and the plains of Bengal, lies an immense archipelago of islands. But that is what it is : an archipelago, stretching for almost three hundred kilometers, from the Hooghly river in West Bengal to the shores of the Meghna in Bangladesh.
“The islands are the trailing threads of India’s fabric, the ragged fringes of her sari, the achol that follows her, half-wetted by the sea. They number in the thousands, these islands; some are immense and some no larger than sandbars; some have lasted through recorded history while others were washed into being just a year or two ago. These islands are the rivers’ restitution, the offerings through which they return to the earth what they have taken from it, but in such a form as to assert their permanent dominion over their gift. The rivers’ channels are spread across the land like a fine-mesh net, creating a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable. Some of these channels are mighty waterways, so wide across that one shore is invisible from the other; others are no more than two or three kilometers long and only a few hundred meters across. Yet, each of these channels is a “river” in its own right, each possessed of its own strangely evocative name. When these channels meet, it is often in clusters of four, five or even six: at these confluences, the water stretches to the far edges of the landscape and the forest dwindles into a distant rumor of land, echoing back from the horizon. In the language of the place, such confluence is spoken of as a mohona – a strangely seductive word, wrapped in many layers of beguilement.
“There are no borders here to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea. The tides reach as far as three hundred kilometers inland and every day thousands of acres of forest disappear underwater only to re-emerge hours later. The currents are so powerful as to reshape the islands almost daily – some days the water tears away entire promontories and peninsulas; at other times it throws up new shelves and sandbanks where there were none before. When the tides create new land, overnight mangroves begin to gestate, and if the conditions are right they can spread so fast as to cover a new island within a few short years. A mangrove forest is a universe unto itself, utterly unlike other woodlands or jungles. There are no towering, vine-looped trees, no ferns, no wildflowers, no chattering monkeys or cockatoos. Mangrove leaves are tough and leathery, the branches gnarled and the foliage often impassibly dense. Visibility is short and the air is still and fetid. At no moment can human beings have any doubt or the terrain’s utter hostility to their presence, of its cunning and resourcefulness, of its determination to destroy or expel them. Every year dozens of people perish in the embrace of that dense foliage, killed by tigers, snakes and crocodiles.
“There is no prettiness here to invite the stranger in: yet, to the world at large this archipelago is known as “the Sundarban”, which means “the beautiful forest”. There are some who believe the word to be derived from the name of a common species of mangrove – the sundari tree, Heriteria minor. But the word’s origin is no easier to account for more than is its present prevalence for in the record books of the Mughal emperors this region is names not in reference to a tree but to a tide – bahti. And to the inhabitants of the islands this land is known as bhatir desh – the tide country – except that bahti is not just the “tide” but one tide in particular, the ebb-tide, the bhata. This is a land half-submerged at high tide: it is only in falling that the water gives birth to the forest…”
“we, who have always thought of joy
as rising….feel the emotion
that almost amazes us
when a happy thing fall…”
Isn’t it truly a gorgeous chapter? Next time, when you walk into the book store, do spend some time at this book, at the shelf where the books/works by Contemporary Indian writers (such as
Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and a few others), whose magnificent works takes us back to our rich Indian cultural identity which does not have space for petty & trivial regional & religion-al quabbles, the sheer beauty of Indian-ness with a modern-worldly attitude. Do skip the junk notes by Shobhaa Dé and her ilk, it’s like Junk food, extremely unhealthy. Now, I go back to the next chapter “The launch” . Thanking Nilanjana 
I am currently reading Akira Kurosawa’s “Something like an Autobiography”,
lingering at his “Boyhood” phase, each paragraph is a rich visual feast, a breathless journey into a magical landscape as captured by a little boy who was a slow learner who loved kendo and painting. I, particularly, terminated myself at this chapter…
“The Fragrance of Meiji, the sounds of Taisho”…the master-crafter took all of us back to the days of his boyhood, a mystical world of sounds that does not exist anymore
{Akira Kurosawa}“….the sounds I used to listen to as a boy are completely different from those of today. …everything was natural sounds. Among those natural sounds were many that are lost forever. Among those natural sounds were many that are lost forever. I will try to recall some of them. The resounding boom of midday. This was the sound of the cannon at the Kudan Ushi-ga-fuchi army barracks, which fired a blank each day precisely at noon.
The fire-alarm bell. The sound of the fire-watchman’s wooden clappers. The sound of his voice and the drumbeats when he informed the neighborhood of the location of a fire. The tofu-seller’s bugle. The whistle of the tobacco-pipe repairman. The sound of the lock on the hard-candy vendor’s chest of drawers. The tinkle of the wind-chime seller’s wares. The drumbeats of the man who repaired the thongs of wooden clogs. The bells of iterant monks chanting sutras. The candy seller’s drum. The fire-truck bell. The big drum for the lion dance. The monkey trainer’s drum. The drum for temple services. The freshwater-clam vendor. The natto fermented-bean seller. The hot-red-pepper vendor. The goldfish vendor. The man who sold bamboo clothesline poles. The seedling vendor. The night-time noodle vendor. The oden (dumplings-and-broth) vendor. The baked-sweet-potato vendor. The scissors grinder. The tinker. The morning-glory seller. The fishmonger. The sardine vendor. The boiled bean seller. The insect vendor. “Magotaro bugs!” The humming of kite strings. The click of kite strings. The click of battledore and shuttlecock. Songs you sing while bouncing a ball. Children’s songs.
These lost sounds are all impossible to separate from my boyhood memories….when I saw the child of the freshwater-clam vendor, who raised a pitiful wail to sell his goods, I felt fortunate in my own lot in life…Children of today probably wont be able to fashion very rich memories from these sounds. Perhaps they are more to be pitied than even that freshwater-clam seller’s child…”
(Jyo….The influence of each word was so intense that I ran down a specific memory lane when I was so scared of fire-alarms (every summer, I was the first one in my family to raise an alarm about the houses struggling under fire, in our neighborhood. Every monsoon, I stood on a dry place, with tears-stained face, feeling helpless and small, observed my parents shifting our belongings to a safer place)
{Image Courtesy : The New York Observer}
‘To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter.
He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.’
I truly felt like writing something exclusive, something original, to those few individuals who religiously visit my blog , everyday, at the crack of dawn, strangers who I may not see or talk to them in this life, leading their existence across the seven seas, in some corner of the world, waking up at the moment when I am finishing off the remaining part of a meeting or a presentation or some other note at my work table…but these days, my faculties fail me! However, the sustained momentum of reading in my life allows me to enjoy such aforementioned masterpieces…therefore, my dear readers, this tiny Pause is meant for you!
Pause…the tiniest slot of our lives when we forget our regular existence crammed with hideous levels of mundane-ness and lose ourselves willingly (with a servile admiration) to something that can never be captured in words. One of those Pauses captured by Calibre 
and read the Observation that left me devoid of words for a while. Uploaded the BENCH image, post-taking permission from the blogger-cum-Photographer.
{the capturer said : I have to think this is what an ant sees.}…isnt it ….do fill in the space
As I write this now, it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.
Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas–abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken–and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.
…….’There are stories within stories, whispered in the quiet of the night, shouted above the roar of the day, and played out between lovers, enemies, strangers and friends. But all, all are fragile things made of just 26 letters arranged and rearranged…’
– Neil Gaiman, introduction to Fragile Things
(link :I touched upon Whore of Mensa by Woody Allen here)
Bits of humor make life lighter and a bit easier. Woody Allen on his written work: “If it’s succesful, the laughs don’t come from jokes, they come from characters in emotionally desperate circumstances.” He finds humor in everything and his special brand of humor laced with satire taxes one with some indefinable hyperbolic energy, which eventually explodes into a maelstrom of blizzard like percussion…It’s fun to watch how his humor develops and acquires a solid character. He does entrance me with hypothetical tales around famous philosophers and historical figures. I literally ate this up.
“There’s nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope. On a recent trip to Heidelberg to procure some rare nineteenth-century duelling scars, I happened upon just such a treasure. Who would have thought that “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Diet Book” existed? While its authenticity might appear to be a soupçon dicey to the niggling, most who have studied the work agree that no other Western thinker has come so close to reconciling Plato with Pritikin. Selections follow.
Fat itself is a substance or essence of a substance or mode of that essence. The big problem sets in when it accumulates on your hips. Among the pre-Socratics, it was Zeno who held that weight was an illusion and that no matter how much a man ate he would always be only half as fat as the man who never does push-ups. The quest for an ideal body obsessed the Athenians, and in a lost play by Aeschylus Clytemnestra breaks her vow never to snack between meals and tears out her eyes when she realizes she no longer fits into her bathing suit. It took the mind of Aristotle to put the weight problem in scientific terms, and in an early fragment of the Ethics he states that the circumference of any man is equal to his girth multiplied by pi. This sufficed until the Middle Ages, when Aquinas translated a number of menus into Latin and the first really good oyster bars opened. Dining out was still frowned upon by the Church, and valet parking was a venal sin.
As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness; many sandwiches were forced to stay closed and only reopened after the Reformation. Fourteenth-century religious paintings first depicted scenes of damnation in which the overweight wandered Hell, condemned to salads and yogurt. The Spaniards were particularly cruel, and during the Inquisition a man could be put to death for stuffing an avocado with crabmeat. No philosopher came close to solving the problem of guilt and weight until Descartes divided mind and body in two, so that the body could gorge itself while the mind thought, Who cares, it’s not me. The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup? It was Leibniz who first said that fat consisted of monads. Leibniz dieted and exercised but never did get rid of his monads—at least, not the ones that adhered to his thighs. Spinoza, on the other hand, dined sparingly because he believed that God existed in everything and it’s intimidating to wolf down a knish if you think you’re ladling mustard onto the First Cause of All Things.
Is there a relationship between a healthy regimen and creative genius? We need only look at the composer Richard Wagner and see what he puts away. French fries, grilled cheese, nachos—Christ, there’s no limit to the man’s appetite, and yet his music is sublime. Cosima, his wife, goes pretty good, too, but at least she runs every day. In a scene cut from the “Ring” cycle, Siegfried decides to dine out with the Rhine maidens and in heroic fashion consumes an ox, two dozen fowl, several wheels of cheese, and fifteen kegs of beer. Then the check comes and he’s short. The point here is that in life one is entitled to a side dish of either coleslaw or potato salad, and the choice must be made in terror, with the knowledge that not only is our time on earth limited but most kitchens close at ten.
The existential catastrophe for Schopenhauer was not so much eating as munching. Schopenhauer railed against the aimless nibbling of peanuts and potato chips while one engaged in other activities. Once munching has begun, Schopenhauer held, the human will cannot resist further munching, and the result is a universe with crumbs over everything. No less misguided was Kant, who proposed that we order lunch in such a manner that if everybody ordered the same thing the world would function in a moral way. The problem Kant didn’t foresee is that if everyone orders the same dish there will be squabbling in the kitchen over who gets the last branzino. “Order like you are ordering for every human being on earth,” Kant advises, but what if the man next to you doesn’t eat guacamole? In the end, of course, there are no moral foods—unless we count soft-boiled eggs.
To sum up: apart from my own Beyond Good and Evil Flapjacks and Will to Power Salad Dressing, of the truly great recipes that have changed Western ideas Hegel’s Chicken Pot Pie was the first to employ leftovers with meaningful political implications. Spinoza’s Stir-Fried Shrimp and Vegetables can be enjoyed by atheists and agnostics alike, while a little-known recipe of Hobbes’s for Barbecued Baby-Back Ribs remains an intellectual conundrum. The great thing about the Nietzsche Diet is that once the pounds are shed they stay off—which is not the case with Kant’s “Tractatus on Starches.”
Breakfast
Orange juice
2 strips of bacon
Profiteroles
Baked clams
Toast, herbal tea
The juice of the orange is the very being of the orange made manifest, and by this I mean its true nature, and that which gives it its “orangeness” and keeps it from tasting like, say, a poached salmon or grits. To the devout, the notion of anything but cereal for breakfast produces anxiety and dread, but with the death of God anything is permitted, and profiteroles and clams may be eaten at will, and even buffalo wings.
Lunch
1 bowl of spaghetti, with tomato and basil
White bread
Mashed potatoes
Sacher Torte
The powerful will always lunch on rich foods, well seasoned with heavy sauces, while the weak peck away at wheat germ and tofu, convinced that their suffering will earn them a reward in an afterlife where grilled lamb chops are all the rage. But if the afterlife is, as I assert, an eternal recurrence of this life, then the meek must dine in perpetuity on low carbs and broiled chicken with the skin removed.
Dinner
Steak or sausages
Hash-brown potatoes
Lobster thermidor
Ice cream with whipped cream or layer cake
This is a meal for the Superman. Let those who are riddled with angst over high triglycerides and trans fats eat to please their pastor or nutritionist, but the Superman knows that marbleized meat and creamy cheeses with rich desserts and, oh, yes, lots of fried stuff is what Dionysus would eat—if it weren’t for his reflux problem.
Aphorisms
Epistemology renders dieting moot. If nothing exists except in my mind, not only can I order anything; the service will be impeccable. Man is the only creature who ever stiffs a waiter.”
try to read the most hilarious chronology of the life and struggle of the Earl of Sandwich, “inventor” of the now-ubiquitous snack, “Yes, But Can the Steam Engine Do This?”
1741: Living in the country on a small inheritance, he works day and night, often skimping on meals to save money for food. His first completed work – a slice of bread, a slice of bread on top of that, and a slice of turkey on top of both-fails miserably. Bitterly disappointed, he returns to his studio and begins again.
1745: After four years of frenzied labour, he is convinced he is on the threshold of success. He exhibits before his peers two slices of turkey with a slice of bread in the middle. His work is rejected by all but David Hume, who senses the imminence of something great and encourages him.
& “The Diet” from Side Effects….{source for Thus Ate Zarathustra : The New Yorker}
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