Meals and Musings

As Edward Rothstein shows in his book, Emblems of Mind, quoted in an earlier DoubleQuotes today, music and mathematics are now widely understood to be "sister disciplines" in much the same way that mathematics and physics, or physics and chemistry are. Cooking suggests a slightly different issue -- it may not be a sister discipline to chemistry, it may just be chemistry pursued in a particularly happy disguise.

Whatever your opinion of disciplinary siblings and their petty rivalries, there are liminal areas between disciplines where remarkable creativity can make itself known, and Cantu's restaurant seems to be exemplary of the trend. I'm fascinated by the insights that arise when human conversations and conflicts are understood in terms of musical counterpoint. It's refreshing to know that Glenn Gould (and Edward Said and Maya Deren among others) thought along similar lines -- on the margins between rhetoric and music.