BLOG THIS! Highly Suspect Wisdom for the Widely Disinterested Masses
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This is how I intend to face the (possibly Brave, unquestionably New, at the very least sans-tyrant World) of 2021: lean, hungry, and with zero compromise....just like I did on that grim day many years ago, low on provisions, frostbitten but stoic, surrounded by wolves and bears on the vast frozen tundra of Reykjavik.
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"At this point, any new novel or work of fiction is just a repetition of something that has already been said, written, ignored, derided and ultimately remaindered over hundreds of years and thousands of times. Even the term derivative is hackneyed, derivation an insufferable cliché. That is why we have immersed ourselves in the miserly lexicon of the internet, into slang and acronyms and 240 characters of abbreviated nonsense, into pictograms of ductile cartoonish non-meaning, because even language has become ashamed of itself. Even the clever knows it is not clever enough to suppress its inherent cannibalism. The only looming innovation, for literature and ultimately culture at large, will be a final, collective acceptance of the nature of our inescapable unoriginality. Probably streamed as an unnamed thousand-episode series on HBO of a hushed, forever stilled, dingily grey screen."
-from pg. 462, "The Beaudoin Omnibus of Witticisms, Observations, and Prosaic Meditations." A mere eight years ago today, on the streets of beautiful Madrid. With a steely gaze toward a horizon of culture and sophistication I was compelled to stop in front of the Museo de Jamon. Which, yes, is the Museum of Ham. I strolled in awe though gallery after hushed gallery of hinds and dry-cures and bone-ins. Spiral cuts and smokers, Bayonnes and Black Forests, Capicola and Culatello and yard after yard of glistening Gammons. But Speck aside, it was the stunning Salt Period of Ibericos and Serranos that truly blew me away. The light, the hue and coloration, the art-brut strokes of marbled fat, the intricate brushwork, the Parma perspectives and avant-slicing, the acorn-fed beauty of it all. But oh, the casings. The delicate, whisper-thin, gossamer folds of casing. I think I can say, as a purely objective matter and without undue hyperbole, that I have never been the same since. Also, you can tell by my expression that I am unwittingly, or perhaps with full-prescience wittingly projecting myself into a hog-laden future of a very different sort, one soon to become gloriously swine-free on January 21st, 2021. It all works out in the end, friends, this life, tinged with a beechwood and juniper glaze as it is, the marvelous pungency of all that is available to us, all that awaits.
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