how to starve a child

i kept tapping the funnel against the jar into which it did strain red onion ketchup (not tomato) and i heard a muffled resounding noise.

from C. Lévi Strauss: Le cru et le cuit:
To the credit of its enterprise, couldn't one invoke for abstract painting the preceding argument about music, and claim that it is free to organise forms and colors, not completely liberally, but by following the rules of a code independent of sensory experience, as music does with tones and rhythms?
Proposing this analogy, we'd be the victim of a grave illusion. For, if there exist "naturally" colors in nature, there do not exist, except in a fortuitous and ephemeral manner, musical sounds: only noise.

i open the bedroom door and duylinh is standing in the doorway, wrapped in bedsheets. she cannot explain anything and only says "i'm going back to bed."

when i have several children and one is an orphan and not my own child, and all of the children are eating, i give the orphan a piece of tendon. tendon makes you late. this morning i was eating pho and i was chewing on a piece of tendon. the bowl of soup was half full. i had ten minutes to leave for work and i wasn't dressed yet. but i couldn't argue with the tendon. i had to keep chewing it. i didn't get to finish the bowl, and orphans hardly get anything to eat because the proper children chew their second and third pieces of meat while the orphan is still working on that one piece of tendon.