Food? reprise

Ok, I've been taken to task by my mother and Emily for sloppy use of the term fascism. And in truth, I don't really know what it means. Not really. I should, seeing as how Clara is now on page 350 of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the part where they walk into Austria, by which point their fascism (which is, I think, properly characterized as fascism) was well-established. I sort of thought that it was an aesthetic preference for order and authority -- for being ordered -- without concern for its human effects. That's what I think of when I throw "fascist" around. I think that's how Alan Grayson would use the term, and I recently decided that Alan Grayson is the only person doing anything useful right now. So seeing the eggs lined up, and formed stacks of flour, make me think that this could only be "he most beautiful image of food" if you have a particular aesthetic taste for being ordered, regardless of the consequences. But as everyone else pointed out, the images were also an invitation to jump in and mess things up. As a last effort to see whether my idea had any merit, I tried to see if Futurist paintings bore any resemblance to the aesthetic of those pictures, and really they don't.

This morning I made corn meal pancakes, which I accomplished by dumping an amount of corn meal into a bowl, and dumping an amount of dried milk on top of that, and then a smaller dump of baking powder, and then a much smaller dump of sugar, and then really just a dusting of salt on top of that. Then some water and finally an egg -- which, being pre-packaged, was the only item that was properly measured out. This method doesn't always work.

On a side note, though, we've been doing some really productive experimentation with grains. We made polenta last night, and paella the night before. They are so easy to do! It was great. Put some combinations of sausage and veggies on top and on the side. And then we had nutella brownies thanks to Clara. Oh god it was so good. Clara said it may have been a bit undercooked but I said Bah!: fondant.

On sunday we took a little overnight trip to Gitega, the smaller city in the center of the country. It was in the hills and therefore cool, which was nice. It is a small city with some really pretty tree-lined boulevards. It also seems to have been the retirement home of a modernist Belgian architect. Or maybe not. But the town had a surprising number (7?) of really interesting buildings with random cantilevered planes and things like this, made during the colonial period and now used to house the regional police, or political party offices, or nothing. French was much less spoken, Swahili much more so, so Clara was much more speaking, me not as much. We do seem to attract anglophone mildly-crazy people, however, which may prove to be an interesting network, or might not. (I'm reading 2666 right now, which has really cultivated my taste for equivocation, for uncertainty, which Bolano uses a lot in his descriptions. Or maybe he's just asserting many certainties.) The first was a guy at the Burundi-Ivory Coast football match on Saturday. He was wearing a dress and the kind of bandana that Aunt Jemima wore, and he was a bit crazy. But he also described MLK as an anti-colonial leader and was the only person in the whole crowd who was willing to go up to the policemen blocking everyone's view and ask them to get out of the way (they didn't). So if he was crazy, he was also wise and ballsy. The second was a guy in Gitega who was very friendly -- in fact, he introduced himself as "Mister Nice" -- and would have escorted us around the neighborhood but he had to go prepare for his Koran lesson. We're divided on whether he was crazy, actually.

B