Notes on Cheese

CheeseDetail

1. I’m reading a printout of a 20-year-old piece of writing, one that I consider my first real, mature essay. Written on my friend Kevin’s word processor which was really a typewriter with a floppy disk drive, the pages came from a dot matrix printer that issued dolphin call sounds, the paper perfumed with the fusty potpourri of all the basements I’ve lived.

2. How difficult it was, the physical act of producing printed pages then! How did we manage without computer labs or scanners or spellcheck!

3. The class was called “Writing the Personal Essay.” I don’t think I knew what a personal essay was, not really. There were no parameters or guidelines that I can recall, no page counts or word limits. We were, I remember, reading examples of short, occasional pieces from people like Max Apple and Nora Ephron.

4. What I handed in was called “Some Words on My Hatred of Cheese.” I look at these pages and I can say I’m proud of it, in a way one is proud after doing a song justice on a karaoke night. I can’t say that for much of the writing I did from when I was 22; most of it would charitably be called apprentice work. But this one essay is different. Here’s how it starts[1]:

Before I get started, I just want to say that I do like yogurt. I especially like it with cherries, strawberries, or blueberries. That’s because, I’m told, yogurt isn’t actually what it appears to be: the bacteria changes the chemical make-up of the milk product, making it a completely different substance. Different, say, than cheese.

5. I can see now that this is an attempt at what is called an apology, or apologia.  I picked it up in the Greek plays I was forced to read in a big auditorium class called Intellectual Heritage, nicknamed “Intel Hell.” I didn’t know it’s something one might traditionally do in an essay, but I did it anyway. Here’s the “thesis paragraph”:

I hate cheese. I hate how it smells, how it tastes. I hate how it goes down my digestive tract. It more than doesn’t agree with me—I disagree with cheese. It alienates me at the dinner table. Cheese is my kryptonite, my garlic clove; melted cheese is the goop that ruins my meals, smelling up the room, the dreaded killer ingredient that demarcates me from all that is cheese-loving.

6. The essay was an assignment for a graduate class I took the summer after I graduated college. I treated myself to two graduate classes at the Rutgers campus in Camden, NJ as a non-matriculated student in Fall 1991. I had won a product liability settlement from a lawnmower manufacturer, after one its models drove off by itself and sliced off my Achilles tendon. It was the summer after my freshman year of college. Five years later, I cleared $40,000. Not a lot of money, as these things go, but it did give me some time to think and not work.

6a. I nicknamed the check my “ticket to the middle class.”

7. Paying for these classes was my way of forcing the question of whether I was cut out to be a writer. I knew I was going to keep writing anyway, whether I didn’t know if I sucked or not. To do so, I had to ignore the white noise of discouragement from my teachers, the same ones I had in my undergraduate classes, the same people I sought to be my mentors and failed miserably.

8. Mentor, according to dictionary.com, is a “wise and trusted counselor or teacher” and “an influential senior sponsor or supporter.” In those days, I wanted someone to support me or at least counsel me. Wisdom and trust were optional. What I learned in the first round of mentor-seeking was a willful naiveté, to not listen to teachers who refused to be mentors was perhaps the most important asset. If a writer actually listens to what others say, he or she is liable to quitting altogether.

9. Writers crave approval. No surprise there. Younger writers more so than adults. When I remember coming up with things to write for these classes, what I remember is a desire to impress my teachers. My ultimate dream that I would be taken aside and told that I was potentially a great writer, if not one already, and that he or she wanted to be my mentor. I wanted to rest under someone’s wing. I wanted someone to promote me and validate me not only as a writer, but as a human being. 

10. This is less about cheese and talent, I guess and more about imitation.  It’s more about how writing, or learning to write, is really about manners or pedigree as well as learning to write a sentence. 

11. I read my cheese essay now and am frankly amazed how I could mimic the style of 40-year-old middle class essayists, how grumpy and old-sounding I sound.

12. There are a lot twentysomethings who say they write essays, but what they really are writing are little memoir pieces. Which is fine.  To write an essay, however, is to have accumulated both a frame of reference and not a small amount of world-weariness. To accomplish both takes time and age. One earns the right to be an essayist; the essay is a bar stool monologue that reserves the right to go nowhere in its point and comes from a singular voice.

(13. This is partly why the current vogue for impersonality in essays enrages me so: the essay is the last bastion of solipsism in a world of above-it-all discourses.  To retrofit the essay and its traditions into the same audience-less wormholes as the aesthetic novel or lexico-technic twee poem makes me think nothing’s really changed or will change.)

14. Anyway, back then, the attempts at hijacking the essay form into some out-of-body aesthetic experience were yet to happen. It was 1991; the Best American Essays series had started five years previous. To write an essay, to me, was to write an editorial, an opinion piece, or some researched five-pager for a literature class. I was a poet; I wasn’t particularly jazzed about writing essays. As I look at the cheese-hatred essay now, I see that I am imitating the turns and dips of the what is classic wandering essay.

15. My papers in college were enthusiastic outbursts, and only if I was interested in the literature at hand, which wasn’t often. I wanted to be given free rein over everything I wrote, to write in my own voice and talk about anything I wanted to. A lot of writers buckle under the wealth of possibilities, and as it turned out, I was one of them. Call it attention deficit syndrome or being fickle, but I needed form. To that 22-year-old poet, to write meant talking about the Big Issues of the day. This is precisely what 22-year-olds should not write about, since most 22-year-olds do not know shit. I was no exception. Instead, writing should start small, with infinitesimal topics. Montaigne teaches us this when he writes about books, friends, meals. These are the things that essay should start from; when I wrote about cheese it was the first time I wrote from something small to try to talk about something big. 

16. I arrived at all this without any help from teachers. I cannot overstate the lack of mentorship I received as an undergraduate student. Phillip Lopate once wrote about his fear and hatred of mentorship; how it was a pain, a terror even, to have students want to learn how to write from him. I read that piece at the precise moment I wanted to have a mentor. 

17. Instead, I got whatever the opposite of mentorship is. On the way from the student center to our classroom one afternoon, my teacher said to me that my prose “hangs like wet laundry on the line.” Now, I wouldn’t dispute that my writing was not good and that, if I knew what she meant by wet laundry-line hanging-prose, I would not disagree with her.  But as I look at my cheese-hating essay, I see promise in my younger self.  I see an enthusiasm I read now in some of my best, even some of my average students.  I wanted to learn; I wanted to imitate; I wanted to try on different personas. 

18. When I replay the remark scene with my teacher, I am surprised how I wasn’t crushed, right then and there, and stopped writing.  I remember being hurt a little and laughing it off.  Maybe the teacher was trying to toughen me up.  Maybe we were all buzzed on wine from after the reading.  There were other people there. Maybe she was kidding.  Either way, I want to go back in time and defend myself or at least offer a comeback.  I didn’t even have the wit of the staircase; I knew I was unsophisticated.  I knew I was not well read. I just knew that I wanted to be a writer. Back to the essay.

At restaurants, from the golden arches to Greenwich Village, from South Philly to South Street, from Greek to Italian to Mexican, from Vegetarian to down home, I’ve had to request my dishes, from appetizers to dessert, sans cheese. The waiters seem to acknowledge my predicament, even if they—and I really hate this—get the order wrong, but those I am eating with always have to bring it up.  Not only that, but just as people add new twists or just plain invent untruths just to bring something up, those I sup with always have to raise the Big Cheese Question. “Why don’t you like cheese” is followed by particularized Q & A—“You really don’t eat cheese steaks” or “What about pizza?  You don’t like pizza?”

19. In this paragraph, I am trying to establish some world-weariness as well as worldliness.  The Philadelphia-centric ness of “South Philly to South Street” embarrasses me, as does “sans cheese”; it occurs to me I should have either written “without cheese” or went all in with sans fromage. But I didn’t know French, although Ms. Godin in third grade taught us the Our Father and the sign of the cross in French, well before we found out she was a lesbian and would live in Paris with her female lover.  I knew sans, that was it. I did initial-cap the Important Idea, which was then a new stylized tick.  I must have picked it up in rock magazines like Record or Creem or Spin. I don’t know why I wrote “particularized.”  That’s just awful.  But the em-dash-set off phrase—“and I really hate this”—could find a home in any magazine article or blog post.  It’s arch and grumpy and indicates this has happened many times before.  A few lines down:

I do hate mayonnaise, white milky sauces and creamy dips. They’re all akin to cheese, however, in their ambience, there [sic] reason for existence; that is, to lull and creamify the palate, oozing down awful bacteria enzymes and rotten milk, passing it off with the fancy rubric of curds and whey; or, the most painful, smelly, gooey, cataclysmic version of cheesedom, fondue.

19. Hooray for me is what I think when I read this.  Hooray for “cataclysmic version of cheesedom.” Hooray for “fancy rubric,” whatever I meant there. I could look at it that way, or think about the millionth monkey who wrote a boilerplate personal essay. When I read “reason for existence,” I think that maybe I did in fact know some French phrases, and maybe I am using the English transliteration of raison d’être to an ironic end, which would have been kinda masterful for me at the time. I doubt it.  I don’t know why I put “however” in the middle of the second sentence; my best guess is that I just learned that you should place this conjunctive adverb inside commas and place it mid-sentence. The same applies to the rather random use of a semicolon there after “whey.”  I am sure I committing the usual undergraduate sin of using semicolons to sound smart and accomplishing the opposite. 

19a. If I wrote that now, I would have placed another verb after the semicolon or just broke off into a new sentence fragment entirely to avoid drawing more attention.

20. I regarded professors as very sophisticated Martians who didn’t let on that they were real human beings, didn’t tell tales from their own lives or even their own personal connection, didn’t let on their investment in anything we were reading or writing. I’d ask them personal questions or make ridiculous comments to see if they would react differently. Maybe that’s why I sensed they kept a distance from me.

21. I remember trying really hard to make them break kayfabe, as professional wrestlers call it, to break character, to say “ouch! that metal chair you bashed on my head really hurt.” They never did.  

22. Unlike poetry, where the innocence or obliviousness of youth mixes well with raw intelligence and love of language, the essay is an older person’s game. An essay’s speaker is crotchety or witty, sometimes both; the only witty young person is a beautiful woman in the company of ugly, older men. There’s also the idea that the essay is a sophisticated way of expressing a grumpy world-weariness. The only thing I could be weary of in the world at that time was cheese.

22a. There is a way of thinking that an essay best exemplifies, that an essay offers us hope that we can find answers to problems big and small by writing about it through ourselves. One quality of experimental writing is how it makes its primary endeavor of getting rid of the self, as if we would be liberated if we get rid of ourselves of our bodies.

22b. Which, is of course complete and utter bullshit.

23. We should build even more into ourselves to solve our problems or to talk about particular aspects of our experience.

24. Anyway.

25. In the essay, I say that I hate all of cheese.

26. My roommate at the time suggested that there was a connection between my hatred of certain types of smelly cheese with my aversion to committed relationships. From the original:

The sexual theory [of why I hate cheese] started when I admitted to my old roommate that I had not yet had a satisfactory experience giving a woman oral sex. In another brilliant equation by people appalled that I would not each cheese, I now had to deal with a feminist theory that held I was selfish agent of male patriarchy for not liking cheese because I did not want to gratify women by eating them.

27. I remember debating whether or not to include this in my personal essay, when this is obviously the best part of the essay, at least to me know. It’s the most audacious and ridiculous.

28. It’s also the only paragraph that was crossed out by my teacher. “A little too much personal revelation,” my teacher wrote in the margins.

29. In another part, I quoted a co-worker at the Rutgers library, a fellow work study book-shelver. It ends the essay:

Perhaps the best theory occurred [sic] in fiction.  A Russian friend told me of a novella he read by sci-fi author Alexander Belyaev from the ‘20s, “Food for Everyone.” It’s about a futuristic cheese that expands, creative more food, that is, cheese for everyone.  For a while, the cheese seems like manna from heaven.  But growing out of all the post of housewives in the Ukraine, it – that is, the cheese – eventually turns sinister and threatens to eat all of Russia and beyond. In other words, it was my ultimate nightmare: The Cheese That Ate The World.
I didn’t ask him is it was melted Parmesan.

30. If I were to have 22-year-old me in my graduate essay writing class I would give me a “B.” I would encourage this writer, for what else can you do but encourage a writer to write?

31. I would also tell him to try manchego with quince paste or maybe stilton after having some ballsy Oregon red.

 

 

 

 


[1] I know I said “no scrapbooking” in my original rules, but it’s essential to the piece that I quote from my own writing.

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Notes on Anxiety

1. I’m anxious about writing. I’m anxious over writing this, I mean.

2. Writing about this. My anxiety.

3. I am anxious about my anxiety. The shakes I get, the dryness of mouth, the fight-or-flight responses that kick in, the almost-comic twitches in the eyes (mostly the right); and the defensiveness and paranoia. All this occurs without even the smallest inciting incident.

3a. Oh but when it does.

4. What happens is this: something happens, real or imagined. I think the wrong thing, basically, and with it comes a whole cavalcade of anxious thoughts. It goes right to my “core” or “foundation,” words I use with my therapists over the years.

5. Anxiety, for me at least, means I play out the worst-case scenario for whatever I’m worrying about. Bad day teaching? I’ll lose my job. Trying to get to sleep? I’ll have visions of my kids getting sick.  Mess up doing stupid shit? My wife will finally tap on my shoulder and say it’s been a nice time and she’s going to leave.

6. My family, my happiness.

7. Naming it, calling it anxiety or something fancier or more clinical, doesn’t really help. Thinking about how something makes me anxious only me anxiouser.

8. I have been diagnosed with “social anxiety.” I take pills for it. I was very surprised when I was diagnosed with this, and I’m still not sure it’s correct.

9. Anyone who’s ever met me in person would say I am sociable and make conversation easily. And I enjoy other people, I really do. But I also have to kick into a higher gear, I have to put on a show. I fill up silences. I make jokes, I try to make people feel comfortable; I try, I guess, to make myself feel comfortable.

10. I experience tightness in the chest and shortness of breath, but I am not sure I have bona fide anxiety attacks. A couple years ago, as I was getting my usual prescriptions, I asked about getting some “event-specific” medication. That’s the term I used: “event-specific.” I thought I was clever.

10a. The doctor denied this request. So I guess I don’t get real anxiety attacks.

11. I used to be anxious about God, sin, masturbating too much, going to hell, getting beat up by boys in my hometown, girls, making friends, losing friends, looking cool.

12. Other anxieties have replaced the old ones. Class anxiety. Professional anxiety. Anxiety over being a real writer, over reviews and evaluations and applications and emails and private messages and maybe sometimes my health.

13. Sometimes I think that when I am anxious, I am most alive. Or at least most focused.

14. Other times I think that anxiety is really some sort of ambition, like the way people are driven by anger or proving someone wrong. I’d rather not think this is the case and I’m not sure why.

15. Since I was a child, one thing I’ve done to ease my anxiety is breathe into crook of my arm, smell my own skin and arm hair. I’ll do this until the arm hair grows wet from and my glasses stream up. It sounds like some sort of auto-asphyxiation as I explain it here.

15a. Breathing helps.

16. I used to be skeptical of mindfulness, of “being aware,” of stepping outside oneself and monitoring what’s happening as it’s happening. I now think all this is another form of prayer.

17. And here’s the part where I admit I am anxious over how I’ll be perceived writing this.

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Notes on the Oxford Comma

1. The serial comma, the Oxford comma and the Harvard comma all refer to the same thing.

1a. If you got what I did there, omitting the last comma in a series before the coordinating conjunction, pat yourself on the back.

2. “An endangered species,” as it’s called by one language expert, the Oxford comma is “traditionally used”—how can a comma can be part of a tradition?—before the final conjunction in a list of three or more things.

2a. It’s to provide clarity and symmetry.

2b. Example: “Manny, Moe, and Jack.”

3. To save space or because it’s regarded as redundant, people take the Oxford comma out. This gets people worked up. If you do use it, and trumpet its importance or otherwise make a point of using it, you’re considered hardcore or a zealot in some circles.

3a. These people know what the Oxford Comma is, what it represents. It’s short-hand for taking a stand against the facile and user-friendly, and standing up for clarity, tradition, and punctilious precision.

4. Some–lets call them the moderates–hold that the rule only applies to and and or between the last two words of a series: x, y, and z; x, y, or z.

5. Another argument I’ve heard is that a conjunction like and and or does the work of that last comma as well as conjoining the last in the series.

5a. I dance to Vampire Weekend’s song “Oxford Comma” with my kids, even if one of the song’s lyrics is “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford Comma?” On a recent episode on his show, Stephen Colbert whipped out a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style in front of the band, and quoted from “page fucking two” about using a comma after each item in a series.

5b. “Respect to E.B. White,” lead singer Ezra Koenig replied, “but it’s just protocol.”

6. Even Vampire Weekend might agree that there are scenarios where the last of the series is itself a term with a conjunction: beer, pick-ups, and Brooks and Dunn. (Brooks and Dunn are a popular country singing duo.) Not using a comma there would make it read very strangely. “pick-ups and Brooks” might be read as a term.

7. “I’m told they really care deeply about the serial comma” writes a New York Times reporter’s story on MLA convention in 1973.

8. Since it’s a matter of style, a choice, I’m tempted to think there are two kinds of people in the world: people who use the Oxford comma and those who don’t.

9. Actually, there are three kinds: people who use the Oxford comma, people who don’t use this Oxford comma and who don’t give a fuck.

9a. If you flinched from my Oxford comma-less series there, pat yourself on the back again.

10. “Its use in the series represents to me an example of die-hards from a former day of overuse of punctuation marks,” one language expert is quoted as saying in an article dated 1945.

(10a. Whenever I read something like this from 1939-1945, I always think, “My God. The world was fighting the Nazis and Fascists and Hirohito across the world, nuclear bombs will drop soon, and this is what you’re doing?”)

11. It wasn’t until I started medical proofreading jobs that I really took notice of Oxford commas. The American Medical Association style book calls for a serial comma preceding the last in a series of three or more.

12. Most styles guides that do not use it use as an example the redundancy of the Oxford comma in a “simple series” (i.e., “Manny, Moe and Jack”).

13. The house styles I worked off of were wishy-washy about using it. There are countless other house style rules and reminders I loved, and still use when I mark up papers.

13a. For example: The difference between (not among) compared to and compared with, fewer and less than, toward and never towards, composed of and comprising and never comprised of.

13b. Use said with a quote, and according to with a paraphrased statement. Also: Don’t stay “Marie said this,” according to Gary.

14. Nobody enforced any of these rules in my term papers in college, except one Shakespearean prick who was such a hardass in other matters that his marks were all part of a red-inked sea of correction.

15. Here’s a breakdown of magazines that used the Oxford comma according to an article authored by R.J. McCutcheon in a 1940 issue of American Dialect[1]:

With serial comma Without serial comma
Newsweek, American Magazine, American Home, American Mercury, Atlantic Monthly Better Homes, Business Education World,  Congressional Record, Correct English, English Journal, Family Circle, Fortune, Good Housekeeping, Gregg Writer, Harpers, Liberty, Nation, National Geographic, Newsweek, Pictorial Review, Popular Science Monthly, Saturday Review of Literature Time, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Du Pont Magazine, Esquire, General Motors’ Pamphlets, Forbes, Ladies’ Home Journal Life, Look, McCall’s, Popular Mechanics, Redbook, Saturday Evening Post, Time, Travel, Woman’s Home Companion

16. An article from a 2004 issue of the philosophy journal Mind discusses “Multigrade Predicates,” in layman’s terms the way a verb may apply or not apply to objects in a sentence or utterance. This, the authors write, is “the problem of lists.”

16a. Making “existential generalizations over common predicates” leads to all sorts of variations. A multigrade predicate is “no longer a mere device serving to punctuate a string of argument-terms, but is treated as creating a singular term designating a complex object, a set or group or aggregate or fusion.”

(16b. They should have used a comma somewhere at the end of the series in that last sentence. It’s very confusing. Don’t you agree?)

17. You can’t just say “Humberto and Galway delivered breakfast sandwiches” and let it go unnoticed that it really means “Humberto delivered breakfast sandwiches and Galway delivered breakfast sandwiches.”

17a. My eyes started to twitch as I read this article. You see, I worked for a brief time at NYU’s Philosophy Department, where these kind of talks and classes went on all the time. Before I worked there, I thought the study of philosophy was a noble thing to do. Once I got there, I realized that current philosophy is a mumbo-jumbo of extended logical proofs, distended grammar studies, and hermetic linguistics.

17b. It takes until a footnote on page 51 of this 74-page article that I came across any mention of whether a freaking comma before the last in a series might change meaning:  “Syndetic, polysyndetic and asyndetic lists are the basic forms, but nested lists may mix all three, and variations are possible, e.g. the notorious ‘Oxford comma’.”

17c. I mean, come on. Who gives a fuck?


[1]

McCutcheon, RJ. “The Serial Comma before ‘And’ and ‘Or’.”American Speech, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Oct., 1940), pp. 250-254.

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Notes on Beyoncé

1. I love nothing better than to describe how a song has moved me, how it’s made me cry or howl in joy. Or made me dance.

2. Beyoncé has never compelled me to do any of those things.

3. I know she’s a great singer technically, and I like her voice more than most singers. I don’t hate her songs, for the most part.

4. I like the “to the left to the left” song,[1] and I once got a t-shirt custom-made with the word “Bootilicious” on it. I liked how the song[2] samples the riff from Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen.”

4a. Beyoncé seems too perfect, too intended, too well-thought-out and choreographed. This is probably why people love her, and while I can see how she would be a role model or inspiration, I need there to be some visible defect or vulnerability in an artist for me to really identify with them.

5. Another reason for my agnostic attitude to Beyoncé is this: there is a loyalty I have for female singers that I don’t really have for male singers. I don’t exactly know why that is; it might be a female voice reminds me of a motherly voice, or a could-be lover’s voice. I don’t make many gender-specific generalizations, especially when it comes to, like, art. I evaluate female painters and filmmakers and poets with the same criteria as males, and enjoy them with the same passion as their male counterparts. At least I try not to. I know women artists suffer heaps of a harder time getting taken seriously and face heaps of inherited and acquired bullshit criticism. I don’t grade art on a curve.

5a. But with female singers it’s different.  Sometimes I will connect with a female singer’s voice and attach a spiritual loyalty to them.

6. Joni Mitchell. Joan Armatrading. Aretha Franklin.

7. When I listen to a song by a female singer, I expect something different. Not better or worse, at least I hope not, but something different. I do evaluate on a gender-specific basis. I think of them as women as well as singers. Not sexually or anything, or at least on a conscious level.

8. When I listen to a Beyoncé song, I not only feel nothing, I feel less than nothing. This has nothing to do with Beyoncé being a pop star or a manufactured commodity or being Jay Z’s wife.

9. Neko Case. Nina Simone. Liz Phair. Sarah Vaughn. Gillian Welch. Sandy Denny. Elizabeth Fraser. Danielle Howle.

10. Beyoncé is beautiful. I know that. And she has a great voice.

11. I’m not one of those anti-melisma folks, or whatever “over-singing” means. I am pro-over-singing, pro-over-the-top. I actually hate restraint for the sake of it, understatedness in the name of gouache affect. I want direct and tacky connections in singing.

12. Everything I just described might describe me as a Beyoncé fan.

13. Kelly Clarkson. Billie Holiday. Dusty Springfield. Pat Benatar. Sade. Cindy Lauper. Peggy Lee. Madonna. Natalie Merchant.

beyonce-freddie-mercury-mem_jpg_630x640_q8514. There was a jpeg that went viral a year ago, a handmade two-column infographic with “Run This World (Girls)” by Beyoncé on the left side and “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen on the right. Its point is that a pop song like Beyoncé’s with it inane lyrics (“Who runs the world? Girls (girls)) and its 6 writers and 4 producers pales in comparison to Freddie Mercury, pictured, the 1 writer, and 1 producer.[3]

15. Since Queen is my favorite group, a lot of friends have forwarded it to me or posted it on my Facebook wall. I get the meme’s meaning, but I guess I don’t have enough invested in debunking Beyoncé and the way her songs are put together.[4]

16. Patsy Cline. Feist. Dale Bozzio. Roberta Flack. Rebecca Gates. Wendy & Lisa. Norah Jones. Karen O. Tina Turner.

17. I could imagine becoming a Beyoncé fan if she did a cover version of a song I really love, like “Lush Life” or “Hejira.”[5] It wouldn’t lead me to reevaluate Beyoncé’s whole oeuvre, I don’t think. But it might give me one of those howl-for-joy moments.


[1] It’s called “Irreplaceable.”

[2] Which is by Beyoncé’s former group, Destiny’s Child. I’m not a complete idiot.

[3] I assume they mean Roy Thomas Baker.

[4] She did sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” live at least once in a concert in England, and supposedly messed it up or something.

[5] I never really thought much about Chaka Khan, other than her version of “Sweet Thing,” but after I heard her cover of this Joni song, I’ve seen the error of my ways.

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Notes on Robert Plant’s Hair

1. I’ve been on a Led Zeppelin tear lately. It started last winter, after a student of mine submitted a terrific memoir piece about how she lost her virginity while listening to “Tangerine” play on a frat house turntable.

1a. The whole second side of Led Zeppelin III, actually, but “Tangerine” was quoted extensively.

2. There was a period–let’s say, 1980 to 1990–where it seemed each hairstyle adopted by former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant made him look more and more like my mother.

3. I was embarrassed that I didn’t remember “Tangerine.” Basically, Led Zeppelin III for me growing up was known as The One with  ”Immigrant Song.” Such blank spots are an embarrassment to someone like me who takes pride in an encyclopedic knowledge of rock music.

3a. So I started to listen to Led Zeppelin in album order: from “Good Times, Bad Times” on Led Zeppelin I, then playing the bass-drum breakdown of “Lemon Song” on Led Zeppelin II over and over so loud in my car that my subwoofer almost blew out.

4. I’ve always been fascinated with Robert Plant’s hair. When Robert Plant’s first solo album, Pictures at Eleven, came out in 1982, I was a freshman in high school and Led Zeppelin were considered old hat by anyone my age. They were older sibling’s music. What I admired about Robert Plant was he updated his hairstyle to fit the MTV age.

5. Then MTV started up, they played Robert Plant’s solo videos in heavy rotation. The extended video for “Big Log” shows Robert Plant walking around in an abandoned Mexican gas station after his ’57 Chevy breaks down, then walking around an elementary school classroom wearing mom jeans and a Hawaiian shirt.

PlantScreenShotBigLog

6. It was right around this time that my friends started noticing something.

6a. “Did you ever notice your mom has Robert Plant’s hairstyle?”

7. In her high school yearbook, my mom, Patty Nester, had what I would call a beehive. (She will correct me on this, using some 1964-specific term I have never heard of, so watch this space for a correction.) Shortly thereafter, she had a smart, short style called an avocado. That’s when she met my dad, a sailor who had just been stationed in Philadelphia.

8.  As the 1970s moved into the 1980s, my mom eventually used curlers for more body as well as frosting, or highlights. She stands almost six feet tall, and the hair style made her seem like a giant.

GumbyMouseBruce

8. In the photo above, my sister and I pose with my mom wearing all of the “funny t-shirts” I would wear. My sister would have never got caught dead wearing a Gumby shirt in public. And that’s the only time I allowed anyone else wear my favorite t-shirt, the one Mighty Mouse, bought in a store called Heaven in the Cherry Hill Mall.

9. I include this photo because this is right around the time that a couple of my friends started making the Robert Plant/Patty Nester comparisons.

10. I don’t think my friends were in any way saying my mother was a manly woman, or even that Robert Plant looked like a New Jersey secretary. Call bouffant kismet.

10a. My hairstyle around this time was exactly the same as blues rock singer guitarist George Thorogood.

11. These days Robert Plant has a more floppy look, and my mom, who is a year older than the singer, has trained back the curls.

11a. Judging from recent photographs, Plant still uses what was called back in the 80s “frosting,” or “highlights,” as does my mother.

11a. By the time I made it to the Zoso (or Led Zeppelin IV) album on my recent tear, I was convinced, or re-convinced is more accurate, that they were a great band. I was also reminded that I don’t get any of the Tolkien allusions; as a kid, I misread words like  ”Gollum,” “Ringwraiths” and “Mordor” as “gamma,” “ring-raid” and “murder.”

11b. I prefer the Lord of the Rings-less Led Zeppelin song lyrics, but if they didn’t have those, to me they would be the same as, like, Spirit or Canned Heat.

12. “Robert Plant?” my mom said the last time I told her about her rock singer hairstyle doppelgänger. “Led Zeppelin? Don’t they sing about the Devil and incest?”

13. “I’d rather listen to Michael McDonald,” she said. “I love his voice. I could listen to Michael McDonald all day. And I love his hair.”

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Notes on False Modesty

1.The novelist and poet George Parsons Lathrop, writing in The North American Review in 1889, complains about “False Modesty in Readers” of fiction.

2. “Our amateur censors,” Lathrop writes, “with their rickety, uncertain and inconsistent standards of false modesty,” can’t determine when a writer has “dwells persistently on the grosser elements of human nature or sexual passion,” among other things.

3. “This false modesty results from a mistaken method of bringing up children—especially girls—and is far more dangerous and insidious than a frank and healthy minded contemplation of even dubious literature, for the reason that it rests upon hypocrisy, error and deceit.”

4. It was my second year of grad school when I got to teach my own college class. I’d taught at a halfway house before, then a hospital and a needle exchange, but never for traditional students. It was NYU, 1996, and the program I was in held a couple of pedagogy meetings to prepare us for the world of undergraduate creative writing.

5. It was at one of those meetings that the novelist and faculty member E.L. Doctorow sat in and gave us advice, assured us we could do a good job, that sort of thing. He was calm and wore a really nice tweed sport jacket.

6. At some point the meeting was opened up for questions, and of course I have to ask something, just to hear myself talk. Or maybe I really wanted to ask a question? I forget.

7. The subject of “difficult material” came up, as in if a student-writer presents a story or language that challenges the sensibilities of the workshop, and then someone else mentioned drug use, writing about it.

8. I raised my hand.

9. “What if you yourself did the drug that’s being described in a student’s piece?” I asked Doctorow. “Is it OK to admit you’ve done drugs?”

10. “Why wouldn’t you mention it?” Doctorow replied. “False modesty?”

11. I didn’t know what he meant, but I think he meant it as a burn, or maybe to brush away a question riddled with bourgeoisie hang-ups. I’m not sure.

12. Lathrop again: “Many readers are pleased with a work of fiction so long as it presents a certain artificial resemblance to life, but begin to clamor against it if they find that it is too nearly true to actual human existence. They do not want a novel to be too real, too outspoken—especially when it deals with vicious or immoral actions.”

13. A relatively new word, “humblebrag,” is somtimes used  instead of false modesty.

14. A humblebrag is defined as “a specific type of brag that masks the boasting part of the statement in a faux-humble guise.”

15. Talking about the heroic amounts of drugs I had ingested while an undergraduate to my students might be called false modesty, I guess.

16. Humblebraggers employ self-deprecation—“Ten years ago I was working as a waiter, and now I’m on a TV show!”—while false modesty might be more about trying to appear humble while asserting one’s accomplishments—“The show is a number one hit because of the cast and crew and the writers.”

17. I’ve had times where I have felt embarrassed of my accomplishments, or uncertain whether or how to get those accomplishments across. This might occur during a conversation, writing a cover letter or proposal, but it always bears the same quality of awkwardness. It seems easier for to think that, as opposed to being happy with what I have got or have done, to think there’s something missing, and someone or some outside force is to blame.

17a. In therapy, we call that a personal schema, a core narrative, the easiest and most familiar behavior.

18. The chip on my shoulder can come off as false modesty since both come from being less-than-humble, ungrateful, or even, and this is a word I hate to use, at least referring to myself, entitled.

18a. How we present good things, events, news is as difficult, if not moreso, than complaining about the bad news, disappointments.

19. I guess if there was a Venn diagram of “entitled,” “false modesty” (or “fale modesty,” as I misspell it here below) and “humblebrag,” I would have to come up with another word that comes in the middle. What could it be?

Falsemodesty

17. Piety maybe? Vainglorious pomposity?

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Notes on Snakes

1. Whenever my mom sees me doing things around the house, she says I’m “killing snakes.” I never knew what she meant.

2. My mother is prone to making up here own  idioms and catchphrases. For example, in my family we have a term, originated from my mom: Shove The Jack Up Your Ass.

3. Shove The Jack Up Your Ass comes from a joke. Here goes:. A man is driving down a country road and his car gets a flat. He looks in his trunk and he sees has a spare tire, but no jack. He has no choice but to walk a couple miles to the house of a farmer up the road ask to borrow a jack.

4. As he walks, he starts to worry over the interaction with the farmer. What if he’s a strange country bumpkin and draws a shot-gun on him? What if he charges money? What if he just slams the door.

5. The man is working himself up with these anxieties as he comes to the last leg of his walk. Finally, he reaches the farm, walks up to the farmer’s front door, the farmer says hello, and the man just goes, “aww, shove the jack up your ass!”

6. My family members all have this negative attitude at one time or another. It comes from my grandmother, I think, who offered such life advice as “always expect the worst, so when it doesn’t happen you’ll be pleasantly surprised.” And so our gallows humor fits right in with Shove the Jack Up Your Ass.

6a. I don’t know any other person who gets the meaning of this phrase, and yet we all use it in conversation as if it makes sense. When I said it once in during a therapy appointment, my shrink had me explain it and took such copious notes I thought I was about to be diagnosed with something other than my usual depression and anxiety.

7. So when my mom says, “you’re killing snakes over there” as I sweep a floor or hurry through hand-washing pots after dinner, I have assumed she was referring to some strange South Jersey-specific snake-killing, perhaps in the Pines, and it doesn’t make sense.

8. But it’s not some homegrown saying. To “go at it like a boy killing snakes” is an actual idiom which means to do something frenetically and with a great deal of energy.

9. She probably picked it up from my father, who is from Arizona by way of Tennessee, who regarded New Jersey and the whole Northeastern United States as some decadent and unnatural mass of humanity.

10. My dad has a phrase that always stuck with me, and I think it’s his. “Once you get past Harrisburg,” he would say, “Once you get drive past Harrisburg, you’re back in America.”

11. It’s only in the last couple of years my mom I’ve noticed my mom using “killing snakes” in conversation. Phrases come and go, and my mom has a million of them. I was talking about the movie The Big Lebowski with my mom on the phone, for example, and how my nephews have started to watch it over and over again. My mom just interrupted me and said, “I hate Jeff Bridges. Hate hate hate him.”

11a. I asked why and she said, “I never thought about it, actually. I just have this reaction to him. But the other day I was smoking with my friend Mary, who also hates Jeff Bridges, and we figured it out: his tongue is too short for his mouth.”

12. I kind of understood what she meant but didn’t. Just the same as “killing snakes.” Sometimes it’s best just not to understand something; to live in a world of misunderstanding is a gift.

 

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