Finding My Voice Again

I started today. I got in the car and drove 55 miles to Atlantic Cape Culinary Academy. I filled out the paperwork that would permit me to be paid, found my cubicle, printed out my notes, swallowed coffee,
walked to my classroom, said hello and started talking.
What am I talking about? That's always a good question. People, including me, ask it all the time. Today, I was talking about making sense of a college course called Culture and Gastronomy. Here's an excerpt from my lecture notes:

so let’s get back to Gastronomy and Culture- i’m intimidated by the words myself. one word sounds pretty pompous, the other has so many meanings that we can slip among them without noticing that we’ve changed what we’re talking abt.

And yes, I have to admit that I'm slipping around here myself. I decided to focus on what they're calling Modernist Cuisine because I've wondered for a long time how Modernism: The Trend affected Modernism: The Fashion in Food. In fact, I've wondered for years about food's position as a weird outlier in the world of Fashion. We can go naked, but we can't go hungry and food swings-or does it rotate?-in long arcs of High Fashion and Low. The rise and fall, I mean the Rise and Fall of the Tastykake completely underlapping the Rise and Fall of Cuisine Minceur. Can this mean anything? Is it just trivial or is something hiding?

I want to know just because I want to. It's not necessary to me, I can love the food I cook and the food I eat and it doesn't have to mean anything. I can be happy that it makes me and us happy, that we camp on the side of the angels when we cook beautifully and eat well.

But now, I've got to put up or shut up. 

Gordon Bowles and Ageya Bharati are watching you, man.

There are nine students at one of the best culinary schools in the country sitting in front of me with notebooks open. I know a lot of stuff, but do I know what I'm talking about? The only way I'm going to find out is to start talking and see what comes out of my mouth. Is this fair to them? Well, I've had a lot of courses where the professor put out all she knew and didn't even take a crack at the big questions. Some of those courses were the best ones of my life, but I'm aiming for something better. After all, this is a comeback and there ought to be something good to comeback to. 

Francis O'Laughlin at Hobart College-say the name and tremble before you walk in a classroom, boy.

At least, I should know what the terms mean. Here's what my notes have for 'Modern':

Modern means

•a significant break with the past.founded on

•new or newly diffused knowledge and/or

•new moral perspective

I'm sure someone has this better, but it's what I'm working with today. It's a backwards definition, one I built by starting with what I know about Modern Cooking and going backwards. Fair enough.

Then there's Culture. I've got my anthropants down around my knees here. I remember pages of 'definitions' and seminars of circular discussions. "What's Culture?" "It's X and Y and Z" "Okay, but what about B and R?" "Oh yeah, that too." So I know the important thing with a definition here is the -fini- part. You gotta stop somewhere. I stop like this:

Culture is Human Nature as processed by humans. Cathedrals and cartwheels, ways of talking and the grammar of walkingLet’s assume that a person can participate in more than one culture and that cultures can be large and inclusive (Han Chinese) 

or small and particular (Bolivian soccer fans).

Let’s allow that culture is usually passed from parents to children, but that transmission isn’t perfect. we have whisper-down-the-lane rather than digital duplication. Because of that cultures change. they change because of duplication drift (you ain’t your daddy) and also because cultures meet when peoples meet.

Sometimes when cultures meet, you get a mash-up: characteristics thrown together like in red-bean ice-cream. Sometimes (more often) you get genuinely new products: spaghetti and meatballs. The term for this is Syncretism (note slightly different use in philosophy.)

Then worst of all is Gastronomy

All of this brings us to our working definition of Gastronomy:

THE FOOD THAT MOM WOULD HAVE MADE IF SHE HAD HAD THE TIME, MONEY, ENERGY, INFORMATION AND COMMUNITY SUPPORT TO DO SO.

Let’s take a minute with that ‘IF’. If there isn’t enough food to go around, or if there’s only a few kinds of food, then there’s no Gastronomy. G depends on abundance and variety. without abundance, there's no creative struggle, there's just struggle. that’s the 

•first characteristic of Gastronomy

• second: there is a value attached to food beyond nutrition

•third: that value itself can be the subject of discussion. two types

aesthetic

Social

fourth: Gastronomy is about processed food, food that we have transformed. this is key.

So I go on from there: Culture is Cooking, ya see. Why do we cook at all? Who are we anyway? Claude, Levi and Strauss. Do I know what I'm talking about? Well, yeah, I've spent a lot of time with this stuff. Is my knowing about it going to take these students someplace new? 

As we say in Cancerland: Stay tuned.


Right there in the front row, Smith, Baptiste have their notebooks open. Nyheim and McFadden are all ears. Gotta get it right.

Grown-Up Food

Mostly these days, it's mush for me. I blend up some cereal with milk and a few berries, I eat cottage cheese and clam chowder, apple sauce, ice cream, oatmeal, stuff like that. I try not to think of it as pre-chewed food, but that's the general idea: anything I eat has to come with its own saliva, cause I'm fresh out.
Soft foods have a certain infantile air about them. (In fact, I've looked the baby food aisle over once or twice.) I don't mind, eating mush beats the hell out eating nothing at all.
But the one grown up food that I can chew is sushi. The fish is soft and moist and the flavors-in a good sushi restaurant-can be superb. As it happens, I live about 40 minutes away from one of the best sushi restaurants in the country. In fact, a month's sojourn in Japan never turned up anything like it. It's Jesse and Matt Ito's magnificent Fuji and it's located on the main street in Haddonfield, a little exurb over in Jersey. Tonight, J and I decided that it was time that I started eating like a grown-up even if I'm not too chewish.
I won't take you through the whole meal, let's just say it was like getting one of my senses restored. Without too much jaw fatigue or dry mouth we worked through eight different kinds of sushi, including a live scallop drizzled with truffle oil (surf and turf) that I'll probably remember forever for its leaping, vaulting oceanic finish and a lightly marinated salmon that was so good we had to have seconds. For a man who's been living mostly on semi-digested human chow, the dance of tastes was thrilling, dramatic, a night at the opera and a day at the beach.
The best thing was the course that was thrown in. We didn't ask, but chef knew about my situation and dropped this in front of us:

The yolks are quail eggs', the black shiny stuff is caviar. 

You say you can't stand the thought of eating a raw egg? Great, I'll have yours: it's the kind of thing us grown-ups eat when we're recovering.

Restoration Interrupted/Life Summary part 4

So with Imagination (and maybe a touch of Depression)
  the butterflies turn in to emblems to sew just so.
I'll wear one per shoulder.
 Maybe emblems of my two granddaddy flaws,
the ones that have caused me the most tumult, the most sorrow,
the strongest smell of life half-lived, of luscious crumbs
left on the plate to delight the dishwasher and feed the drain.
They are Fear and Laziness, these granddaddy badges.

We'll let the Mourning Cloak be Fear and what's to fear now?
I can't lose the lost, I died just a while back. It's fine.
My Passover passed over, this cat-on-lap afternoon a bonus.
But the Hackberry Emperor, ah! Call him Laziness!
Him of the heavy limbs, and fatted lids.
Fear's little brother with the cuddly slippers and the shades pulled down.
Tiny beats of tawny wings. Little marriage-killer, book-spurner,
flabbifier, sure to try her.
He'll keep me in today.
It's raining and it's cold outside and besides
it's way too late.

Tomorrow, there's another pupa poppin'
Another scaly eclosed thing.
Let's see, let's see
What the butterflies bring.

And will we rise

Or will we not

At the sight of the

Slivery Checkerspot?

Two Visitors

Friday in Carpenter's Woods, I saw two butterflies-my first of the year. One was a startling, high-speed, crazy-energized Hackberry Emperor. I had to stand still while it dive-bombed the little patch of sunglight, lit on a downed tree and took off again. It was minutes, or maybe even a lifetime until it slowed up enough for me to see what it was. The other was a Mourning Cloak, so dark brown it was black. It would have been invisible but for its little jaunt into the sun to dry out its wings.

I was so grateful to see them, they reminded me what there is to lose of this world. Nothing like it in winter.

Stay Awake and Socialize

You may have wondered what a nauseated, sleepy, emaciated person does for a social life. Well, mostly he answers email. Occasionally, to spice things up, he may send a text. But the old fashioned soul-in-a-room-of-other-souls kind of hobnobbing kind of goes by the board when cancer comes to town. The hermetic gene starts expressing itself and you really don't get out much anymore.
Next week, I'm teaching two classes. There's a beer tasting in Mt. Airy (Trappist Ales) and a lecture on Gastronomy and Culture at Atlantic Cape CC. Aside from the demands on stamina, I'll have to revive whatever social skills I once faked and remember how to be with groups of people again.

 So my good fortune this week is to have two nights out. Last night, I sat in on Andrew Gilmore's seminar on cartoons from the pre-Hayes Code era. We looked at Betty Boop and Popeye. (Actually, we sort of ogled. Boop would have seduced Charlie Sheen, Popeye would have punched him out.They both would have done it for the sheer fun of the thing.)

Tonight, our neighbors Harry and Sara declared the First Night of Porch Season. It's a very big deal here in Philadelphia and so we sidled on over with snacks and a winter-full of repressed neighborly conversation. I brought a growler of homemade beer-a Saison that I brewed before the nasty diagnosis. The batch has been untouched for about eight months and sitting quietly thinking about itself in J's cool cellar. It was copper-colored with a passable head and a spicy-earthy nose. In the mouth, well-in my mouth it was clean and rich with a slightly toasted, full-on malt presence and a crisp mouth-watering finish. You could smell the pilsner malt and the tad of biscuit that went into it. Very easy to drink.
In fact, what with chewing being so difficult these days, it was easy enough to drink dinner. My neighbors thought so too and we ended up drinking two 2-liter growlers: one refrigerated, the other at cellar temperature. Nobody complained about warm beer, no one thought the color was odd and a few folks thought that they might want to brew something themselves.

So now, for next week I have stirred up  some images. I can tell people about how Social Structure (the code) effects Culture (the cartoon). I can use that as a foil to talk about how Napoleon's spanking the monasteries ultimately led to Trappist Ale. That may lead me to talk about the cute little way we have of letting ourselves slide back and forth between different meanings of the same word without even noticing. (I was going to use a trombone to illustrate the point, but Betty Boop is Better. I mean better.)
Then I also have the example of a bunch of people on a twilight porch drinking a very unconventionally colored and flavored beer. Nobody cried about the color, nobody said that the taste was weird-with the lights almost out there was only the flavor and the flavor made friends.

Damn, it's good to get out.

Vitamin Sleep or. . .

. . .Rest ye Merry.

Here's a little recovery tip. You can share it with your post-radiation treatment friends.
Radiation makes you tired. Doesn't matter where you got irradiated, asshole or elbow, radiation robs you of energy and the effect lasts for months. It's a mean-ass, ugly fatigue, the sort of thing that comes up on you while you're in the middle of page 112 and smacks you down so hard that you wake up two hours later with your thumb still on the same page. Even with Dr. Dry Mouth (xerostomia) waking you up every hour or two at night, this is fatigue that's always glad to welcome you back.
What should you do about a world-class case of the flopsies? Rest. Take it easy and don't, I say brothers and sisters, don't blame yourself. It's your body paying the price for the radiation that killed the cancer. There is a nasty puritanism about in our culture that will allow you any symptom of illness except fatigue. If you have to sleep ten hours a night, the little puritan says, there's something wrong with you. Not something wrong with your body, but with your soul. No giving in! it shouts. (How come these preachers are always shouting?) Well, if you run into that nasty puritan, tell him that you're tired of him. In fact, tell him to get out of your life, that rest is the first part of rest(oration) and that you may be sick but you know when to let sleeping cancer patients lie.

If the nasty little bastard is somebody close to you, be sure to establish firm boundaries. You know when you're tired just like you know when you're hungry and you know when you're horny. No discussion required. In fact you are The World's Foremost Authority on your sleep needs. It's not a moral issue, it's medical and you're the doctor. Period.
And if the puritan in question is you? I guess it depends on how you talk to yourself, but the message is the same. Don't beat yourself up, just lay yourself down.

It will get better, at least that's what they tell me.

You'll have to get your own dog.

Restoring the Appetite

A lot of my life has been about celebrating Appetite. I admire it as the Sistine Chapel of drives, I love it as a passion, a hobby, I even worshipped it a little as the Mother of Art and Love. My personal coat of arms would have a fork, spoon and glass. My home vibration is Yum, not Om.
And yet,  today I am a virtual anorectic. It's not that Appetite has deserted me in my illness or that I don't feel hunger. What's happened is that I'm hungry and I've become indifferent to my Appetites. There's the old Ourobouros problem here, the snake eating its own tail (or rather, not). If you don't care about caring, who cares? Why create an itch just so you can scratch?
My Buddhist self wants to just let the damn thing go- to let Appetite disappear and let Attachment go with it, but  some other sense is still hungry, still believes that if I have something to contribute, it's going to come from gnawing loudly on the bones, from grabbing ass and drinking and breathing deeply. Snorts and grunts and smacking of lips.
And I don't feel much hunger, or rather, there's no urgency to my feeling. I guess I would enjoy a feast, but maybe it's just as delicious to sit here and watch.

•
The truth is that I've always responded well to the right prod, and I've been lucky in having attracted some world-class prodders. Today, I have J who sometimes stalks me with a fried egg on challah french toast, and I have Hugh Gilmore who emails:

Nothing would do more for your recovery than becoming part of the human race and stop living as though no one knows you cut school today...


And that's just the feeling. I cut school and nobody knows. In fact, I could probably sit here quietly forever.
But. In tribute to the wonderful succession of nags who've kept the hornets in my hat worked up, I'm going to Restore the Appetite.

Enough of this blogging! There are lists to be made and items to be crossed off it. Lips to be smacked and self-congratulations to be wallowed in. Makes a person hungry just thinking about it. Chocolate truffles and Truffle Mousse! Mousse and Squirrel and Brunswick Stew! Time to go stew myself.

•

For more of the wit and wisdom of Hugh Gilmore, check out EnemiesofReading.blogspot.com

The Radiologist and the Restoration Software

He’s a nice young man named Thomas Galloway, a scientific type who answers questions thoughtfully and humanely. He listens to how shitty I feel, examines me, and then: “There’s good news-you don’t have cancer.” I have to believe him, he’s just shoved a tube down my nose, asked me to recite some vowels, made me puff out my cheeks and stick out my tongue. “It’s the same size dead zone you’ve had since radiation ended. Cancer isn’t coy. It grows when it’s there. The bad news is that you still feel lousy and that’s probably a matter of time and eating right.”
Does it happen often that people start to improve and then get worse? “Not often, but we see it a few times a year.”
So I’ve decided that I’m going to feel better, that I’m going to have to eat in spite of myself. One thing that’s troublesome is that I don’t eat easily so I don’t eat much. Today at the gym, I weighed 138 pounds. I look like a human whose fat has been sucked away and whose muscles are hanging as if they’d been tossed casually on his bones and the whole thing covered with wrinkly skin. You may have seen pictures: Buchenwald, the Bataan Death March, Biafra-sort of like that. If I scared easily, I’d use pictures of me to frighten myself.
What I eat is dairy products like milk and yogurt and ice cream and dairy phony-foods like Ensure. Sometimes I have pound cake or homemade chocolate mousse or a few chocolate truffles. I’m a conscripted vegetarian trapped in the pastry section. What I’m missing is meat and fish. I get some fruit, pureed into my milk and yogurt, but I can’t crunch a vegetable or chew a chunk of chuck. Last week, I was able to get down some short ribs in a mole sauce, but that’s been it for flesh.
The internist reminds me that I’m a food guy so I ought to be able to come up with something to feed myself. Tonight’s try was a piece of salmon filet. I haven’t been able to eat grilled salmon (too dry to swallow) and I didn’t know this fish well enough to even think about sashimi. So I wiped him with lemon and olive oil, s&p, wrapped him up in a plastic bag and pumped out the air.
A big pot of water at 122 degrees F and the fishy gets dunked in for 16 minutes (the time was a pure guess on my part).
Now here’s the magic: because the food is sealed in, it can’t dry out. 122 is salmon’s magic temperature. If you cook the fish in the skillet, you have to make the outside much hotter than 122 before the center is cooked. This way, you can reach ‘done’ all the way through. It’s a good technique with beef too, but us chewing-challenged folks start out with salmon-it’s softer stuff.
It works, sort of. I get about five ounces down. Then J comes in. She’s been out on the sushi trail and she’s home with a little bit of Ikura-the fat orange salmon eggs that defy chopstickery. The Ikura are delicious, I inhale them. There’s less than an ounce, but they probably have more calories than all the salmon I choked down. It’s a good thing that Ikura only cost about $25 a pound. Maybe I’ll sponsor a benefit.

How to Prevent Throat Cancer-part two

Don't get too excited now. There's no way that you can absolutely prevent throat cancer. Of course, if you've been reading any good blogs lately, you know that. All you can do is decrease your risk: make yourself more likely to dodge the bullet that ricochets around the genome looking for some poor bastard to pick off.

One of the things you can do to lower your risk is exercise. I haven't seen any explanations but the consistent observation is that the virtuous exercisers, the lean-butt, flat-ab, snaky triceps crowd are less likely to come down with cancer.

Of course, it's a little too late for me, but one of the pieces that goes along with good health is being active and so today, I started walking. My buddy Hugh Gilmore the writer talked me into it. On a mild, springish day, he dragged me out of the house for a mile and a half around the track. Part Prevention, part Restoration.
I came home, didn't pass out, ate everything in sight that was mushy enough to get down and while I can't say that I feel better, I do feel virtuous.