A few years ago, a friend gave me a writing prompt: "re-visit an essay you wrote years ago and write another essay on that."
Very essayistic, I thought.
So I dug up an old paper, “Some Words on My Hatred of Cheese,” which I wrote as an unmatriculated graduate student, and got to essaying.
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 change the chemical make-up of the milk product, making it a completely different substance. Different, say, than cheese.
I am reading a printout of a 24-year-old piece of writing. My writing. The pages came from a friend’s word processor, which I borrowed whenever something was due and I couldn’t make it to the computer lab. It was really a typewriter with a floppy disk drive. Its dot matrix printer would issue dolphin-like sounds as it printed out, line by line.
The memory of old technology and these yellowed pages force me to think about an earlier version of myself, a writer but not yet a writer.
***
I wrote an essay. In this essay, I write about cheese, but also, in no particular order, fondue, city-dwelling, dinner parties, and a fear of cunnilingus.
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.
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 was 23. I had won a product liability settlement from a lawnmower manufacturer after one of its models drove off by itself and sliced off my Achilles 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. I nicknamed the check "my ticket to the middle class."
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 knew if I sucked or not.
Writers crave approval. No surprise there. Younger writers crave approval more so than older ones, I think it’s fair to say? Or maybe I’m just saying that to feel better, not that I am old. When I think back to coming up with things to write for this class, what I remember is a desire to impress not myself, but my teacher.
My ultimate dream: that I would be taken aside and told that I was a writer, a potentially a great writer. I wanted to rest under someone’s wing. I wanted someone to validate me not just as a writer, but as a human being. I'm still waiting for that to happen.
***
The class was called “Writing the Personal Essay,” I think. The assignment was simply to write an essay. There were no parameters that I can recall, no page count or word limit.
We were reading other essays—short pieces from people like Max Apple, Philip Lopate, and Nora Ephron. What I handed in was called “Some Words on My Hatred of Cheese.” I look at these pages now and can say I’m proud of it in the way one might be 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 younger--most of it would charitably be called apprentice work. But this essay seems different.
***
I do eat pizza…with the cheese scraped off. When you’re the lone cheese-hater in a world of goopy cheese enthusiasts, you adapt. And, being the grand exception, I endure the Dreaded Cheese Question even when eating a slice of sauced-up crust. Of course, since my condition is so rare and inexcusable, everyone is entitled to bring up “Dan’s cheese problem.”
This is less about talent and more about ambition and imitation. It’s more about how writing, or learning to write, is often about manners and pedigree as much as it is about learning to write a sentence. I am amazed how I could mimic the style of 50-year-old essayists, how grumpy and old-sounding I sound.
There are a lot twentysomethings who say they write essays, but what they really are writing are short memoir pieces. Which is fine. To write a real essay, however, means you have accumulated a wide 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; one earns the right to go nowhere and back again.
***
This is partly why the current vogue for impersonal essays irks me so. The essay is the last bastion of the solipsist in a world of above-it-all discourse. It’s a place where the first-person can exist without worrying over what’s cool and what’s not.
Back then, the attempts at hijacking the essay into some purely aesthetic experience were yet to happen. It was 1991; the essay and its practitioners were going about their business in a steady way. The Best American Essays series had started five years before. To write an essay, to me, meant coming up with an editorial, an opinion piece, or some research paper for a literature class. I was a poet and 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 a classic, wandering essay. All by accident.
***
The equation goes like this: one person with a lack of adventurous nature plus three units of fastidiousness equals one dislike for cheese. A given for this equation is that cheese would be my liberator from cheese-hating provinciality.
Pay attention not to the matter, but to the shape I give it, Montaigne writes. I didn’t know that quote then, but I wish I did. I never could write in a straight line or tell a story from beginning to end. My papers in college were enthusiastic outbursts, engaged only if I was interested in the literature at hand. I wanted to be given free reign to writing about anything I wanted to, but had no subject matter; I wanted to write in a distinctive voice, but didn’t have one yet. A lot of writers buckle under such a wealth of possibilities, and I was one of them. Call it attention deficit syndrome, but I needed form. I needed a name for it.
To 23-year-olds like me, to write meant talking about the Big Issues of The Day. This is precisely what 23-year-olds should not talk about: most 23-year-olds do not know shit. I was no exception. Here are some things I did know about: disliking most cheeses, hating some, and being picky and arch and bitter.
Writing should start small, with infinitesimal topics. Montaigne teaches us this as he writes about books, friends, sex, meals. These are the places essays start from. I didn’t know this then. When I wrote about cheese all those years ago, it was the first time I wrote about something small to try to talk about something big.
***
On the way from the student center to our classroom after a reading one afternoon, one of my teachers said to me that my prose “hangs like wet laundry on the line.” I wouldn’t dispute that my writing stank. But I see promise in my younger self; I see an enthusiasm.
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?”
I am trying to establish some world-weariness. 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.
I didn’t know French, although Ms. Hogan 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 new to me as a 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”—would find a home in any magazine article or blog post. It’s arch and grumpy and indicates this has happened many times before.
Another paragraph:
I do hate mayonnaise, white milky sauces and creamy dips. They’re all akin to cheese, however, in their ambiance, there 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.
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. When I read “reason for existence,” I think that maybe I did 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 one should place this conjunctive adverb inside commas when placed mid-sentence. The same applies to the rather random use of a semicolon after “whey.” I am sure I committing the usual college writer sin of using semicolons to sound smart and accomplishing the opposite. If I wrote that now, I would have placed another verb after the semicolon or just broke off into a new sentence fragment entirely and avoid drawing attention to it more.
Maybe I was millionth monkey who wrote a Shakespeare play, or a boilerplate comedy-of-manners personal essay. I read this paragraph and feel relieved.
***
Perhaps the best part of the essay has nothing to do with what I say it how I use other people’s words. My roommate at the time suggested that there was a connection between my hatred of certain types of smelly cheeses to my aversion to performing oral sex on my lady friends. This was, to me, shocking, and I remember debating whether or not to include it in my draft. As it turns out, that was the most interesting part of the whole thing.
The sexual theory started in my late teens 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 for not liking cheese as if I did not want to gratify women by eating them.
This made no sense and complete sense at the same time, and that’s why it worked.
I feel tempted to update this passage in matters of fact. Or in one matter of fact. Namely: I got over whatever aversion to lady-pleasing I might or might no have had back then, and very quickly. The thought occurs to me that I could accomplish this by using figurative language, that I often enjoy munching on a nice slice of manchego or stilton from time to time. Something like that.
***
When I look at this essay about my hatred of cheese, I see attempts to sound sophisticated, or my version of sophistication as a 23-year-old from South Jersey. As William Carlos Williams might have put it, I had no peasant tradition to give me character. I was the son of a truck driver and a part-time secretary and went to the college nearest my home. My English professors were sophisticated Martians who didn’t tell tales from their own lives. I remember trying to make them break character. They never did.
I see this essay about hating cheese, ultimately, as paying attention not to the matter but to the shape I gave it, which wasn’t really hating cheese, but getting some corner of my mind on paper.
Hands down, poetry is the best pizza I've ever tasted! Not only is the crust perfectly crispy, but it is even gluten free!
Posted by: Tallahasee Lassie | July 26, 2023 at 03:52 PM