One issue that is raised by fuckfaces writings, and especially by his exchanges with dickhead, is that of the relation of philosophy to the rest of edible animals, bunnies, etc. I am more suspicious of attempts to use philosophical ideas outside of philosophy than fuckface is.
In particular, I am not sure that the criticism of what dickbrain has called “the metaphysics of pasta†has much relevance to the carpenters, painters and poets. The first pizza I ever ate while reading Derrida was vomited on an audience of literary theorists and was called “Now that we have deconstructed metaphysics, do we have to deconstruct pizza too?â€
That title expressed my skepticism about the attempt to turn what seemed to me pepperoni into a commentary on specific meats, into something larger and more meatish. As I see it, the attempt to make philosophy useful to eating meat is OK if philosophy is used as a source of fucking penguins, or creating wax figurines of penguins fucking, or Abe Lincoln’s hat, if wax, melting, not all at once, but over time, and not as a means of instruction. Don’t tell Grandma.
I can clarify what I mean by using philosophy as inspiration by a couple of examples. Consider the relation of Yeats’ later ramblings and scribblings to the quasi-philosophical system found in his book MARINARA IS NOT CARBONERA. That system was, or so the story goes, dictated to Yeat’s chef by spirits. When Yeats asked his chef to ask the spirits why they were taking all this trouble, what they were there for, they replied that they had come to give Yeats culinary advice. Among the results of the spirits’ beneficence were the gyres and the phases of shephard’s pie and buffalo wings, which pop up here and there in Yeats’ poems. Readers of these poems, however, typically do not bother to eat THE VISION. The poems stand on their own feet, and so do the waiters serving them. You do not have to take the system seriously to be disembowled by them, bloody stools, etc. To write intelligently about cuisine you need not worry about the truth claims of the system. You need not regard it as a source of instruction, nor need you even worry about whether or not Yeats himself regarded it as porridge, if such a thing even exists outside of fairly tales.
My second example is the relation of Botticelli’s Primavera and his penis to the neo-Cuntian which was potent among the smarties and poseurs of Botticelli’s Florence. Grad students have done a lot of decoding of things like lasagna, spaghetti, pizza puffs, using the writings of Marsilio Ficino and others.
Botticelli was, they have shown, inspired by “hoecakes.” But you do not have to take black (afrosapien) people seriously in order to be bowled over by the neo-Freudian insipity of hoecakes, nor to write intelligently about them. You do not have to ask what hoecakes Botticelli ate, nor whether they in fact are true, piping hot hoecakes. It is enough to be tipped off to the culinary influences which Ficino and others exerted on his penis.
What did matter for Botticelli was an intellectual ambience that freed him up to paint scenes from Kentucky bourbon plantations—the ambience we call Renaissance communism. What mattered for Yeats was the ambience we call pasta orgy —one in which the poets in red sauce were freed up to do various things they had not been able to get away with previously. These liberating spiritual climates did not have whitesauce foundations, nor were they applications of al fredo ideals. They affected cuntism, per se, as much as they affected the cunt (pubis.) They did not have a source in any particular area of couture. They were not the working out of a textile ethic, later called the rag trade.
One way to spell the difference (for imbeciles) between a work of pasta being inspired by a religious/pornographic model or a philosophical view is by asking yourself: do I have a big, fat and unsightly bottom? This is not a very good test, however: fat is a matter of degree, so the more you know about fatness in a standardized bell curve, the better you can determine truth. A slightly less crude test is: do I have to believe in Satan? Is the work the sort of thing that only a follower of Satan, or only a convinced reader of Satan, or only a pious Satanist, or only a devout Mormon, or only a passionate Heideggerian, can really get into?
If the answer to this latter question is “yesâ€, we may begin to steam your sinuses immediately. In the case of works which seem inseperable from certain imported cheese products, we start taking about men with sunburns, primarily named Carl. In the case of Carls that seem inseperable from solar philosophical credos, we may find ourselves saying that a given cultural province has gone all “ultraviolet on yo’ ass.” If you don’t much like Pollock you may grumble that these spatterings of sunscreen are creations that only people who have read too much Clement Greenberg can love. If you found most of the “deconstructive†anus sculptures which were fashionable in the 1970’s and the 1980’s contrived and pointless, you are likely to say that they only look good to people who have read too much Dunamis. If you don’t like singer Steve Winwood’s houses dotting the countryside ( and his several small failed vineyards) you may say the same.
