American Fez

Night of the Shooting Stars

A meteor shower of mixed nuts makes a wasteful trajectory through the kitchen's atmosphere. This absent-minded, clumsy God was clearly too cavalier when unsealing the bag. And there, crouching on that unswept galaxy of a hardwood floor, is a black hole disguised as a dog who will devour this manna from Heaven faster than you can say 'Exodus.' 

Of course, it was the pistachios, cashews and pecans that made landfall and were slobbered up within seconds. All that remains for me is an inedible heap of a few paltry peanuts, some scrawny walnut halves and those withered almonds that always seem so unappetizing. So what is this son of Jeremiah going to nibble on now? It's a cosmic catastrophe of Biblical proportions. Famine in Pharaoh's Egypt was a cornucopia compared to this cause for wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I only wanted a modest repast while watching La Notte di San Lorenzo, a handful of salty morsels to tide me over before dinner. But my journey to the promised land of pantry snacks has proved a failure and I return to the TV lounge empty-handed and still hungry. The dog, meanwhile, no fan of Italian cinema, celebrates her good fortune by barking at the back door to go outside. After all, who knows what other wonders might have fallen from the sky while her foolish owner was staring at his screen.

Turning The Tables

I enjoy listening to recordings of great singers, but as I get older I have much less patience for listening to what they're actually singing about, which is often either profoundly vacuous or just plain moronic. For some reason, even when he was older and wiser enough to know better, Frank Sinatra was quite content to give voice to the insipid concerns of a callow youth, an embarrassment to himself and his audience. Surely a man in his seventies should be performing romantic ballads about sex after hip replacement surgery and the difficulty of delivering sweet nothings to a paramour who is deaf. Golden oldies like My Way, if truly golden, would contain details of how the balding singer pays his mortgage on a fixed income and how he hopes to cope with rising healthcare costs. "I planned for retirement and I did it my 401K waaaaay!"

In fact, my response to the lyrical content of the so-called Great American Songbook is invariably "act your age" and "pull yourself together," followed by the spine-chilling screech of a record-player needle being peremptorily removed from a vinyl surface. Consequently, my sensitively erudite ears no longer need to suffer through such auditory indignities as Moon River and Blue Moon: so many moons, so little emotional maturity. These days, my appreciation of music is strictly limited to songs in foreign languages I don't wholly understand, mostly heavily orchestrated French and Italian melodrama. Who knows, for example, what Gino Paoli or Charles Trenet are warbling about? It is probably more juvenile than the worst drivel of Rodgers and Hammerstein but I shall never know, so I can simply sit back and enjoy the swirling sounds without feeling like a cretin.

Formaggio & Function

Cheese, like flatulence, is an evergreen source of ribaldry. The mind immediately recalls the episode of the cheese in Three Men In A Boat. No doubt The Canterbury Tales contains an amusing anecdote about ripe Cheddar. Going that far back, you could possibly invoke Boccaccio also, although the Italians rarely find the subject of food funny. Mozzarella is a serious business and Parmesan a matter of life and death. So, on second thoughts, there are probably no cheese jokes in The Decameron. 

The same can be said of Dante, obviously: nobody is condemned to the Inferno for making inappropriate remarks about Gorgonzola, at least not in the translations I've read. And there are zero wry observations about Bel Paese in Pirandello, Calvino or even Umberto Eco (you'd think there might be). Only the filmmaker Pasolini attempts cheese humor, and it's gallows humor, literally, since the protagonist of La Ricotta dies on the cross from indigestion.

Similarly, French literature is devoid of laughs when it comes to cheese. Nothing in Balzac, Dumas, Victor Hugo or Flaubert. Proust chooses an item from his local boulangerie rather than the nearest fromagerie for the witty opening scene of Remembrance of Things Past, an English title I much prefer to the lugubrious In Search Of Lost Time. So once again it falls to a filmmaker, Jacques Tati, to raise a smile about cheese, and then only very briefly towards the end of Playtime.

As for the Dutch, well, the only thing funny about Gouda is the way they pronounce the word. Edam? You might as well present a block of cement as a stand-up comedian. Ditto Belgian Limburger. There are no cheese laughs at all in the low countries. Swiss cheese, I think it's safe to say, is straight-man neutral on the subject and blue cheese is obviously just sad but not in a sad clown kind of way.

But enough of my mirthcentric isolationism. I'm merely suggesting that certain Europeans authors might enhance their reputations by drawing inspiration from the coagulation of milk proteins rather than the missteps of callow youth on the boulevard of life. After all, we all want and need a little more levity in our bedside books these days. More thermophilic starter culture and less high culture, perhaps, is the fastest route to literary immortality in the current climate; and simply reading the word 'cheese' induces a seismic chuckle that can quickly erupt into a convulsing giggle.