Wheat Poisoning

One day I will conquer cling wrap. I will spread it firmly and flatly over a dish of left-overs without wading it into a morph of origami animals. One day, I will conquer cling wrap, but until that day comes, let me just say this:

I was wheat-free, when wheat-free wasn’t cool.

I was born to peal a wrapper off a frozen dinner and pop it straight in the microwave, and nobody, I mean nobody, can put a crank on a can opener like I do, but oh no, God has a bigger sense of humor than that! I live with a person who is wheat-gluten intolerant. As this diagnosis has become the flavor of the month, I’m sure most of you are familiar with it. It is a failure of proper digestion, kind of similar to lactose intolerance, but caused by wheat gluten and a variance of other grains, depending on the person.

You ever seen somebody order a double cheeseburger, throw the bread out, then turn the meat patties in to use them as containment buns for the lettuce and tomato? Or how about the three finger special on a pizza? You place index and middle fingers at the crust of a slice, and span the thumb to touch the point, then bring the three digits together. Topping comes right off. A pizza buffet will kick you out on your butt if they catch you doing the three-finger special. Ever tried to find a knife and fork in a fried chicken joint? It’s nothing but sporks and foons! Again, not pretty. Piles of chicken skins, a stack of pizza crusts, poor homeless buns, faking sacrament at Communion, ordering salad without croutons—these are the adventures of the brave and the wheatless.

Absolutely no processed foods. Wheat is so often an additive, they’ve found traces of it in prepositions. It most certainly shows up in any white-based soup or sauce. There’s no saving a casserole with a can of cream of mushroom! Wheat flour comes in hidden processing too, like on the conveyor belts for certain chewing gum. Even soy sauce has wheat! How does a rice-based culture come up with wheat in its sauce? And Twizzlers, they have wheat too. Of course cakes, cookies, and breads have to be avoided unless they are prepared at home where you can be certain of gluten-free ingredients. It’s enough to make you think there is a God, and that God has a great big fat sense of humor on me.

Rice Crispies is a pantry staple, like you might have flour or sugar or a bottle of vanilla. I have Rice Crispies cereal. It goes in meatloaf. It tops casseroles where normally you would crumble Ritz crackers. It’s the filler of sausage stuffing.

Strips of green cabbage substitute for noodles in soup.

I have made tabbouleh with quinoa, at roughly the street price of cocaine. Then again, quinoa is reputed to be the perfect grain. Couscous is just fun to say.

I rejoice in the new products rushing to serve the exponentially increasing demographic of the gluten-intolerent. I welcome you who are newly diagnosed with celiac disease. Perhaps one day you shall have a candidate for President. Prior to the days of Paul Newman’s O’s, which delicately mimic Oreo cookies (with all the delicacy you can muster towards an Oreo) prior to that, any and all wheat-free cookies you could find in the obscure corners of the dirt-smelling health food store, yes, any of those old school wheat-free cookies were not just wheat free. They were also devoid of milk, eggs, sugar, and all resemblance of food substance. They were made strictly of sawdust, and exploded inside your mouth into the bitter dryness of sheet rock putty.

Pasta was another great stumbling block of the earlier days. For years, corn pasta was the only wheat alternative. You drop corn pasta in boiling water and instantly it congeals into one giant starch blob. You have to stir and fight and be diligent and vigilant! If you have religion, it’s likely to make you lose it. If you don’t have religion, you’re likely to pray to as much as a dirty ashtray trying to cook this mess. Now they have rice pasta, which is much better behaved. It doesn’t store quite as well as its wheat counterpart once cooked, and you’re not likely to find chocolate linguini in rice noodles, but the rice is better than the corn.

I have memorized the proportion of xanthium gum to one cup of rice flour, but some recipes translate better than others. Works pretty well for Nestle Toll House cookies. They come out more grainy and dense, but cookies really don’t have to rise a lot, so the essence is there, but try substituting rice flour in your favorite cake recipe.

My favorite cake recipe comes in a box. You add three eggs, oil and water. Me and Betty Crocker, we’re like this…I’ve stopped typing so I can put my two fingers together…second only to Duncan Hines. But that would be easy.

I make cake from scratch. Extra beat the eggs for more fluff to help the dough to rise. One teaspoon of xanthium gum to one cup of rice flour. Forget the electric mixer. You’ll kill it. And I’ve broken more wooden spoons…. You have to knead it, you have to want it, and then you have to knead it again. It’s like massaging a buffalo, except it’s the tar baby. You put your hand in. Your hand gets stuck. You put your other hand in. Your other hand gets stuck. Put your foot in. Call for help, using your nose to dial.

The batter comes out of the oven in the exact shape you put it in. It doesn’t rise and fill the pan. It stays in the one lump, like it’s antisocial with the heat. Baking only preserves the odd-knobs and who-bubs you failed to smooth. Alligator hide has a better complexion. Furthermore, it’s hard. You haven’t baked a confectionary delicacy to enjoy after dinner—YOU’VE MADE BISCOTTI! It is hard and dense, and you need a hatchet to crumble it into various bits, servable only after you retrieve them off the floor and all corners of the kitchen. Dogs fail to recognize the crumbs as scraps. Even cockroaches are unattracted.

I’m sorry that so many people have this condition. I’m sorry for their suffering, but I’m thankful too. Without the ever-growing market for easy wheat-free products, the new instant mixes would have never appeared on the shelves. Even the Atkins Diet has helped by prompting restaurants to offer no-carb menu selections, which also means no wheat. I’m sorry for those of you who have wheat-gluten intolerance, but I thank you too, because you have improved my quality of life. I cannot catalogue how many more wheat-free products are available now, or how much easier it is to order out without back flips of substitutions, not to mention the labeling addition “contains wheat” which makes selection safer.

With food consciousness raised by emerging food allergies and intolerances, such as gluten intolerance, no doubt, I’m going to live far longer than I should. I’m going to cook and eat from more pure ingredients, closer to the raw materials, the building blocks of nutrition, probably extending my life way beyond what some would prefer. Perhaps I shall have to take up smoking.

People used to scoff at the hazards of lead-based crockery; now we’re recognizing the realities of wheat poisoning. Bon appetit, sans wheat!

Cock & Bull Story

It’s true, I’ve watched battle scenes in movies before, but I had never seen anyone put hot chestnuts down his pants. The chestnut scene of TRISTRAM SHANDY was definitely unique in my movie watching experience. Also unique was several seconds of black screen in the middle of the movie. You can watch and hear the actors talking and suddenly you don’t see them any more. Then just as you fumble find the remote to adjust your set, the picture comes back and you realize the joke’s on you, it’s all over you, again and again time.

The movie wiggles back and forth across the lines of reality and fiction until the lines look like the squiggle signatures on the Constitution. I’m not sure why the deleted scenes were deleted, or why the “Behind the Scenes” was included on the DVD extras. The whole thing plays like a “Special Features” movie edition. I can only assume that it is simply modern custom, the template of DVD production, to set aside some segments. There’s probably a computer program that automatically removes three to five scenes from any given feature-length film and stuffs them under the file allocation “Deleted Scenes.” It’s probably not a decision from the director at all, because what human being would delete the baby tossing scene? Filmed in true cinematic fervor, we see the baby’s head emerge from between two knees, and carefully held, cuddled, then tossed about from one cast member to the next in a heap of overjoyment that can only be appreciated at the absolute smashing point of reality with fiction.

Steve Coogan is the British actor who seems to be vigorously famous but no one’s heard of him in this country. He plays himself, Tristram Shandy, and Tristram’s father in a mixed up folly that’s all really one person. Furthermore, he makes comments on the child actors who portray him, giving them acting tips and discussing how little or much they resemble him. I don’t think he mentioned the dummy baby they tossed about, but that scene was deleted anyway.

When I was in college, my English English professor…that’s not a mistake, he really was English by nationality and taught English literature…my English English professor handed me a completely unreadable book: THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne. I tried to read it for a week, until the professor told me that it wasn’t meant to be read in any sort of linear fashion. Towards the latter half of the text, Sterne employs meandering diagrams to describe the progress and aim of the plot, and very nearly comes close to outlining the intricacies of a bee dance for directions to honey. The nectar of the book, and the movie, is the complete farce of one man’s life, even from conception. Coogan describes it as being Post-Modern, before there was a Modern to be Post about—something like that, I’ve misquoted a paraphrase. Perhaps I shall not be indicted for plagiarism this week. Sterne finished writing TRISTRAM SHANDY in 1767 and died the next year. He predates the debut of Monty Python’s Flying Circus by two hundred and two years, yet enjoys the same royal flare of entertainment.

The cinematic version is a happy acknowledgement to any literature student who has tried to read the book with the same heart by which you would approach a Jane Austen wood brick or any fibrous masonry from the Bronte sisters. For those who have not read the book, you don’t need to. Laurence Sterne would give a standing ovation from his grave for the movie. Threatened as an unfilmable story from an unreadable novel, the filmmakers did the only thing they could do: they were true to the book. It’s a cock and bull story.

Family Life

There’s a delicate balance between being Southern and being a redneck. Probably I’m about to cross it.

Milton Bradley was not a Southerner. Nor was he a redneck. He invented the game we call “Life,” which poured on the market in 1860 when the nation went to war…with itself. But that’s history, and I’m talking literature.

We were supposed to learn in high school that an archetypal hero is an orphan. If you missed that on the SAT, well, here’s an overview:


OEDIPUS: line of confused heritage leads him to marry his mother—oops!

JESUS: earthly mother, but separated from His father by the great divide of flesh

HAMLET: father displaced by his uncle in his mother’s bed

(You notice in these older texts that orphan status relies on misplacement of the father, but not necessarily the mother? The testament of female status is changing in modern times with…)

HARRY POTTER: parents are murdered and he’s entrusted to his muggle uncle and aunt

SUPERMAN: an alien raised by earthlings

SPIDERMAN: with great responsibility comes great power, but no living parents


All these people, ALL these archetypal heroes of ancient and modern times, all of them are not Southern. An archetypal hero is never returning a casserole dish or buying lipstick from his cousin who sells Mary Kay. He is not pictured as a young toddler with a stack of dead squirrels. He does not burn diesel in his tiki torches or spend hours ogling an engine that’s driven four hundred thousand miles past the point where it was declared totaled. That just doesn’t happen.

That is why I will never be an archetypal hero.

I invented my own board game; it’s called “Family Life.” It has nothing to do with the vice and virtues that steer your advancement or demotion in Milton Bradley’s game. In my game, you begin at the grandparents’ row of your family tree, you work your way down through your parents and aunts and uncles, then through your cousins and siblings, then your nieces and nephews. Heaven help you if you get married. The object of the game is to reach YOURSELF through these inherent characters. Every relative is an opportunity to gain success or to lose money. And that can be a simultaneous event in the South. Each branch of the tree (hopefully your tree branches, but not in all cases), each branch has vital influence on how you grow up and what your adult world is like.

As I approach Thanksgiving, with its quilt-covered dining tables and church-borrowed chairs, I’m thankful that I’m never going to save the world. I’m glad to contribute to a potluck holiday with a patchwork of cousins, and where friends are as welcome as family. In my life, there’s enough pie to go around. Literally. We’re Southern. Somehow we always have a pie for every person present. Nobody plans this; it’s just what happens in a family like mine. No, I will not be an archetypal hero, and furthermore, an archetypal hero will not be Southern.

Chastizement

Roz Chast is the only NEW YORKER cartoonist I don’t like. Of all cartoonists I’m NOT likely to meet, Roz Chast would be the exception. It’s because I don’t like her. Fate works that way: I don’t like her, so, by some strange coincidence, I’m bound to meet her. I don’t like her so much, that she’s the only cartoonist I can remember by name. I keep her name at handy index in my brain for cocktail conversation, when I can smile and nod over mention of her and know that I am being false, not just ignorant. A lot of people do like her. Someone in my family likes her, but I can’t remember who it is right now. Forgive me, family, a lot of people like Roz Chast, but I do not.

I only read THE NEW YORKER for the cartoons. It’s like the converse opposite of having a PLAYBOY subscription. I look at the pictures, not the articles. A lot of you do that, you just don’t admit it. The other NEW YORKER cartoonists draw a simple, compelling image, then a brief caption. I consume them like eating popcorn, then go on to the next handful. It’s delicious. But Roz Chast’s cartoons read like a trifocal nightmare. There is no negative space in her drawings. The images are frenetic with scribbling congestion. The characters are always hunched and have bulging eyes, as if they drank one too many four-packs of Red Bull. It’s not the calm, classy clean lines of the rest of the magazine. Roz makes a four by six block of space into a comic book style crowdedness. New York itself isn’t that jammed at rush hour.

Plus also she commits double redundancy: she draws a picture AND says a thousand words. The feature articles of the magazine don’t use up that much text, which she prints in little tiny writing. What is smaller than Elite type? Why it’s Super-Elite—AKA Roz Chast! My brain sees that and my eyes automatically say, “Pass.” There are plenty of other good cartoonists in THE NEW YORKER, artists who can convey a simple point with humor and I don’t have to work and squint to understand. Furthermore, I don’t think Roz’s cartoons are funny. They’re certainly not worth squinting that hard over.

And now she’s illustrated a children’s book for Steve Martin (THE ALPHABET FROM A TO Y WITH BONUS LETTER Z!). Yippee. Okay, so I admit it, it’s the only Steve Martin book I’ve read. For children’s level, it’s a decent book, mostly; although any time you single out the planet Uranus to the exclusion of the other planets, the material becomes suspect. Still, he manages to get on a page words and combinations of words that appeal to the under-four-foot set. Roz’s accompanying illustrations are typical of what you see in the NEW YORKER. They are too busy, too complicated, too esoteric. Even Steve Martin, in a recent interview on National Public Radio, mis-identified a figure she had drawn and she had to correct him on the air. HE didn’t understand her illustration either.

Ouch.

Her only noteworthy accomplishment in Martin’s book is on the front and back inside covers. The book is about the alphabet, and groups words starting with the same letter. However, the inside covers depict alphabetic letters omitted in the English language, and thus left out of the book. Letters with umlauts and conjoined consonants and other symbols that I can’t find on my keyboard. These foreign letters stand around and make comments about not being in the book. It’s fun and clever, and, after all, it’s on the inside covers, so you won’t really miss anything if you skip them. Except they’re the best cartooning I’ve seen from Roz Chast.


Dear Roz, I don’t care for your style. I wanted to say that before we meet so that I’m not forced into being fakely complimentary, and so you know that I have paid attention to your work, which is the best compliment anyone can pay.

Wood Monkey

Monkeys do not have a fancy French word that means climbing. To claim that David Belle invented Parkour is like saying Christopher Columbus invented America. Parkour is life is health is flight from persecution and bounding over obstacles in the path to a goal…it's what primates do, what they have done from the earliest demarcation of their order, and what they are likely to keep on doing for their continued existence. David Belle only named it, the same way Adam named the monkey.

The great apes' taxonomic line diverges from the monkey branch at the height of true brachiators: the gibbons and the siamangs. On the monkey side, you have the animals with prehensile tails, which assist with gripping, the quadrapedalist climbers (really pentapedalists in some cases). And on the ape side you have the knuckle walkers and the bipedalists, that's us! All great apes climb at some point in their lifespan, but maintain a larger proportion of terrestrial lifestyle than do monkeys. From the baboons (a bridge species often not considered a true ape) to orangutans to gorillas to chimpanzees to humans, we are generally well-grounded. Humans as a whole are particularly bad climbers in comparison, so we've had to grow our brains and come up with other pursuits. David Belle and Mark Toorock have decided to go retro, and they're not making a bad show of it really.

Let's face it, though, for the rest of us, we got laughed out of the trees years ago. Gibbons and siamangs are also known to be the most vocal of the primates, so we probably got howled out. And yet we retain this primordial reverence for trees. Think about it in terms of the importance of Biblical trees: from the Tree of Knowledge (symbol of original sin) to covering up sin with fig leaves, to Noah who preserved countless species in a wooden boat, to Jonah who was comforted and discomforted with the life and death of a tree, to Jesus' earthly father, Joseph, who shaped wood in the practice of carpentry, to the cross itself—a specifically wooden object of modern worship. We worship trees. We build and furnish houses with them. The Bible from the Gutenberg forward is printed on trees. We may not climb them so much as other animals, but we are a species of tree worshipers. Is it because they have defeated us? Did humans create fire in order to get rid of them? Are current deforesting practices a sign of the ongoing conflict?

My cousin ran a paper mill so I asked her how much of a tree was used to make one ream of paper (I was concerned, of course, about the great sacrifice of the forest to my meager writing); however, she being an engineer, could not give me a concise answer. She said they lose a quarter of material off the tree in debarking, which is a very important process, especially for the removal of dirt for the end product, “dirt” being a technical term with weighty implications for the paper industry yet still just means dirt. A quarter of the weight after that is water. So off the top, fifty percent of a live, healthy tree is unused and discarded. Depressing isn’t it. Probably analogous to what happens with my query letters.

One year I bought a palm tree at the beginning of Lent and by Easter, it had one frond still alive. I can kill a houseplant at a glance. The ones that do survive are rather honest life forms. When I get them, they look like they’ve never lost a leaf in their lives. Now they seem as if the color green were only a tentative hue, subject to change at any moment. I’ve managed to kill egg carton gardens and had bean seeds with a failure to launch.

And now I’m busy butchering trees with moderate prose. If in the beginning was the word, and the word was God, then trees were the most damned race of beings ever invented. Maybe if we go to Hell we grow up as a tree, the fodder of flame. That or we’ve made a huge error of printing medium. Probably we were supposed to use stone as God did for the Ten Commandments. Maybe that’s what the eleventh commandment said: “Thou shalt use rocks on which to build my laws.” Rock, paper, scissors? Ah metal. Joseph Smith of the Latter Day Saints had the tablets of gold. When I get to Heaven (if), then I shall open the bedside drawer and see what stationary the Gideons have left.

(Yes, you may notice a slight reprise here, a composting of “Garden Ashes” for a richer, nutrient base in support of my new idea. I’ve recycled words to cut down on emissions, to be AlGorical through my actions.)