Mix and Mingle

The foods I eat on a more or less daily basis are the result of years of tinkered blending.  To call what I eat for breakfast every day “oatmeal” is to feloniously assault the word.  Sure, there’s oatmeal, but I add a half cup of Fiber One cereal (you know, to, uh, make my insides happy), a scoop of Jillian Michael’s Vanilla Crème whey protein powder (vegetarians tend to not get enough protein; as for Jillian’s brand, it’s an unlit mystery but I yield myself to it), peanut butter powder (what can I say; I really like peanut butter), three packets of Truvia, and a generous dollop of Polaner’s Sugar-Free blackberry jam.  That’s cortex-tasering oatmeal!  That’s oatmeal on stilts!  That’s oatmeal with trumpets sounding and pennants waving! 

I mix Maxwell House Gourmet Roast coffee with Gevalia’s House blend because I like coffee robust enough to sidle up to the border of bitter without crossing over.  Sometimes, well, oftentimes, actually, I sprinkle in some chocolate velvet-flavored MillStone (what can I say; I really like chocolate).  The distilled spirit of that strange brew keeps me at snappy-salute attention all morning long. My favorite beverage combines Crystal Lite’s peach and mango powder mix with its cherry and pomegranate mix, then top it off with Mountain Dew (which did, after all, begin life as a bar mixer).  My wife Kathy quotes Huck Finn: “It don’t seem natural.”  I say it sets my taste buds stomp dancing.

And dinners?  Well, I combine asiago, romano, velveeta, and cheddar cheese with a refried bean and lentil mix for burritos.  I top veggies burgers, which I make from chick peas, oatmeal, onion, garlic, romano cheese, and salsa, with a condiment concocted from mayonnaise, sandwich spread, ketchup, and Dijon mustard.  Somehow, through it all, so far, anyway, I remain stubbornly impervious to heart burn, though, truth be told, I do keep a small packet of Prilosec discretely at hand.

Obviously, I like blended things.  I like mixtures and admixtures, minglements and amalgamations, suffusions and infusions of all kinds.  I like the motlied, the variegated, the hybridized. There is something about them that is emergent and synergistic, something more so than the simple sum of their parts.  Those who know me, or are even passingly acquainted with me, know that my favorite candy bar is the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, an inextinguishably delectable compound of chocolate and peanut butter.  It is delectable’s delectability.  Now, I grant that, on their own, chocolate and peanut butter are sacramental. Together, however, they beatify taste; together, they are a liturgy of grace; together, they call for a full-throated benediction, a psalm of celebration.  It is, I am convinced, impious to eat a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup too fast.  Only a thoroughgoing apostate would do so.

I like the improvisational freshness, the snazziness (snappy + jazziness), of blended words:  pixel (picture + element), frenemy (friend + enemy), sexting (sex + texting), chexting (cheating + texting), netizen (network + citizen), trashion (trash + fashion—clothing that combines old or recycled elements), smirt (smoking + flirting—done by those forced to the pavement outside a building to smoke), Brangelina (no explanation necessary).  Anyone who has flown is undoubtedly familiar with flightmare (flight + nightmare) and baggravation (bag + aggravation).  Those of us over fifty are indisputably quintastic (quint [50] + fantastic), though we worry about anecdotage (anecdote + dotage—the seeming impossibility to refrain from telling stories of the good old days) and, to combat its onslaught, we take up funkinetics (funk + kinetics—a vigorous form of exercise set to funk and soul music). 

I like the linguistic acrobatics of Spanglish, the colloquial code switching mingle of Spanish and English, whether it espanoles English words (chilleando—chilling out, sanguiche—sandwich) or mixes Spanish and English together in a sentence—Quieres que te cocine [Do you want me to cook you] some rice en la Hitachi [steam cooker], or should I just get you some confley con leche [cornflakes with milk].  It’s lively, and, well, pienso it’s cool, esto es todo.

I like a writing style animated by an occasional infusion of the whole wheat colloquial into white-bread Standard English, as this from Ishamel in Moby Dick: “What of it, if some old hunks of a sea captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? . . . Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance?  Who ain’t a slave?  Tell me that.  Well, then, . . . however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing . . . that everybody else is served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical way that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder blades, and be content.”  In this collage of jostling linguistic registers, Melville not only fosters a rapport with his readers, but also perfectly expresses the roughhewn democratic metaphysics of a universal ethic of mutual care in response to a universally shared indignity.

And I like the invigorating contradiction of the oxymoron, as this from Romeo and Juliet: “Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health.”  Or Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards, laboring mightily to express the inexpressibly “glorious majesty” of God: “majestic meekness” and “awful sweetness.”  Or John Donne’s “O miserable abundance, O beggardly riches.”  Or G. K. Chesterton defining a yawn as a “silent yell.”  Or Melville’s Ahab as an “ungoldly, god-like man.”  Or George Carlin: “How is it possible to have a civil war?”

I like the dialectic and trialectic energies of movies cross-fertilized by blended genres.  Inglourious Basterds fuses action/adventure, comedy, and film noir; Forrest Gump, comedy, romance, and action/adventure; Cowboys & Aliens, science fiction and the western; No Country for Old Men, the western, action/adventure, and the thriller.    I find this fluid interplay of genre convention suspends me between expectation and surprise, pinwheels me with an enticing disorientation, confects a narrative parfait that pushes me to interpret rather than describe, question rather than explain.  However, I do not like horror comedies like Shaun of the Dead or Scream, nor do I like horror romance like the Twilight series.  I prefer my horror straight and shudderingly visceral, a wall-like wave of fright breaking over me.

Mostly, though, I like people who are multiple and pluralled; people who are not carnival barkers for single-storied cant and do not indulge their pet beliefs with far too much Beneful; people who are passionate and keep their cool; people who are sophisticated and can get down with it; people with forensic minds and ambling imaginations, logical acumen and philandering thoughts, the gravitas of maturity, the wonder of childhood, and never, not once, not ever, lose their sense of the silly; people who can embrace and hold at arms’ length; people who are confident but never deceive themselves as being deeper, more perceptive, more defiantly original than they actually are; people who can read Shakespeare and watch a monster truck show with equal relish; people who bear witness to what they know and what they do not, cannot, will in all likelihood never understand;  people who are fully present and substantial and not silhouettes or silted currents of personality.

In the physics of personhood, such people are quantum rather than classical.  They are possibilities and potentialities precisely because they blend qualities; precisely because they pester genres, straddle apparent contradiction, combine savors and flavors; precisely because they know that the eye which rounds what they see can be repositioned, can see elsewhere, can see otherwise.

By Any Other Name

According to Family Education magazine, the top ten boy’s first names in 2012 were, in order, Jacob, Mason, William, Jayden, Noah, Michael, Ethan, Alexander, Aiden, and Daniel.  My first name, either as the formal “Jerome” or informal “Jerry,” appears nowhere in even the top 100 names, though the somewhat similar Jeremiah ranks 51^st.   How, I wonder, does it happen that Jerome, the name of the saint who translated the Bible into the Latin still used today as the official language of the Catholic Church, the saint whose name means “bearer of the holy word,” cannot crack the top 100, while Jeremiah, the name of the scolding Old Testament prophet, stands at 51.  The fate of the study-bound scholar, I suppose—that, and the undeniable public relations value of a charismatically condemnatory prophet calling the people to renounce their backsliding ways, repent their sins, and renew their spiritual commitment. 

Those denunciatory prophets!  They get all the attention, all the glory.  Cable TV miniseries are made about them, while the Jeromes languish in a twilit pocket of history.  Perhaps, could I gather and convince enough modern-day Jeromes to leaven their conversations with upbraid, to periodically reproach with declarations that  "Cursed are those who trust in mortals, who depend on flesh for their strength and whose hearts turn away from the Lord," the name Jerome would debut  the name chart and ascend with a bullet.

Actually, at an early period in my life, I did not like my name.  My dad had the same name.  I was a junior. Throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood I was referred to as “Jerry Junior.”   I resented the necessary inquiry if someone phoned asking for Jerry, “Jerry Senior or Jerry Junior?” though I took some small comfort in the question’s trochaic meter. Of course, I know now that, in my dad’s generation, naming a son after the father was unremarkable.  I know now that, at some level, those junioring seniors engage in a kind of magical thinking, seeking to extend themselves into a future they will not witness.  I know now that, in bestowing his name upon me, dad was ceremonially announcing to the world his pride in his dadship and my sonship, a kind of “This is my son, in whom I expect to be well pleased.”  I know now it was his way of throwing the grappling hook of tradition across the generations to draw them closer.

But I did not know that then.

Then, I felt somehow obscured, cloaked, as if my individuality had been commandeered and hidden behind a veil.  I wanted to stand forth uncurtained, unobscured, in the morning-crisped landscape of my own inexorable self.  I felt etcetera-ed. I did not want to be a remastered version of the original; I wanted to be my own melody. I did not want to a chipped shard from the old block; I wanted to be my own blazoned block.  I wanted to be the apple that rolled far from the tree; I wanted to be my own tree.  I wanted staccato, not legato.  I felt like a diminished thing, a permanent minor, exiled from the possibility of adulthood.  I longed for a rhetoric of discontinuity.

And then one day I didn’t.

One day I realized the name of someone is not the thingness of someone; realized that considering myself a replica was a fatalism of sorts, a shackling essentialism; realized that I could choose my own posture of being, my own orientation to the world, that all along Dad had actually been seeking to cultivate that posture, that orientation.  Suddenly, it seemed, I understood that even if we are immersed in a tradition, even if it leaves its imprint, we are not manacled by it, that it can be, must be, adapted, recontextualized, extended—a starting point from which we stray to find our own way.  I understood, finally, that I was responsible for my own architecture of character and personality, my own structure of desire, my own grammar of intent and motivation.  I understood that, sometimes, self-awareness involves running up a white flag and surrendering self-awareness.

The senior-junior relationship is, it seems to me, freighted with paradox, but, paradoxically, one that clarifies. Being a junior identified me, but it was not my identity.  Dad and I shared a name.  We shared certain interests, attitudes, physical features, mannerisms.  We shared, it seemed, a capacity to cause my mother unending frustration.  We were the same, but we were not the same.  We were complements, but we were not complementary; entangled, but not.  I imitated him, but I was not his duplicate.  As Heraclitus observed some 1500 years ago, you do “not step twice in the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on to you." No word on whether there was a Heraclitus Sr.

The fact is, Dad and I were men of different generations, different social and cultural contexts, different values and virtues. Different contingencies of history converged in us, of which we were different expressions.  And somehow, in a way I do not fully comprehend, from that sameness and difference my specificity, my singularity as a person in my on right emerged.  And Dad’s.  He too had, was having, a life; he too embodied particularity.  Who knew?  For too long, for far too long, I didn’t.

The percentage of juniors has declined steadily since the 1960s, as parents bestow  more distinctive names on their baby boys; names more intransitive than the transitive junioring previously in fashion; names, it is thought, that will catalyze the child’s individuality.  This is wishful thinking, however; tatting lace while wearing chain-mail gloves would have a likelier prospect for success.  Only the most superficial kind of individuality is conferred by a name. Individuality will happen, if it happens, as it did with me.  A page turns, a moment unfastens, a bud blooms, a dusty landscape clears, and it emerges.  Until then, even if the abbreviation “Jr.” does not trail our name, we are all juniors.  Until we are not.  Until we become seniors.

The Anti-Writer

Before the first week had ended, I knew that Richard, a student in one of my freshman composition classes, would likely be, not a hard nut to crack, but an uncrackable nut altogether.  Before the first week had ended, I knew Richard’s truculence was so sharp it could corkscrew through granite.

On the first day of class, amid the faces bright with hope or settled into placidity, his was fixed into a scowl that periodically morphed into petulance that periodically smudged into disdain.  He would have me know, even as I handed out the course syllabus and explained the requirements, that he felt not the feeblest flame of interest, that he was, in fact, thuddingly bored by the prospective enterprise, that he would be, at best, a disinterested tourist in my class.

At the second class meeting, as I returned to the front of the class after handing out a short assignment, he called out, “Yo! Bro.”  I turned and replied, “I am not your bro.  Please address me as either Mr. DeNuccio or Dr. DeNuccio.”  Richard said, “Yeah, whatever.  Okay, Jerry.” 

It represented, I knew, a blustering challenge to and ostentatious scorn for any authority but his own inexorable self.  He sought to provoke a recoiling response, a fractioning spark; sought to impressario our classroom encounter into a street theater drama by commandeering and volleying my anger.  But I would not surrender it.  I knew this game, knew that its combativeness could escalate to no good end, knew that I needed to be actively passive.  I remained expressionless, shrugged slightly, smiled faintly, and returned to the front of the room to explain the assignment.  That first-week skirmish set the tone for the semester:  Richard’s small thrusts, my defusing parries.

Richard’s work on that assignment, as on all subsequent assignments, displayed a studied indifference to its requirements and lacked even a modest garnish of effort or thought.  It was done only to be done, to be gotten rid of, tossed off then tossed back to me.  It was lavishly vapid, sumptuously empty, devoid of voice, absent a presence.  It was indolent and uncurated writing, glancing drive-by writing, intellectually unengaged, offering only opinions, unsullied by explanation and undisturbed by their opposites or alternatives.  Only in some parallel universe antithetical to our own could what Richard did be considered writing.  It was a mutant shard of writing, writing without a center or animating purpose, writing disengaged from the very act of writing.  It was anti-writing, what writing would look like if an author willfully excluded himself or herself from it.

I continued to comment extensively on his writing, as I do on all student papers.  He disregarded my suggestions for improvement and ignored my offers of tutorial sessions.  Toward the end of the semester, however, Richard stopped by my office to tell me he needed at least a C; otherwise, he could not play football.  I told him a D was the best he could hope for.  “But I turned in every assignment,” he said, as if his work were separate from its workmanship; as if the virtue of it consisted of the labor only and not its excellence, or at least its satisfactory competence.  Perhaps Richard suffered from a strange optimism that his inadequacies would, finally, magically, prove adequate.  Perhaps he wanted, needed, to see himself positively, needed to swing from the trapeze of self-esteem and, thus, removed academic achievement from the pragmatics of his university life.  Perhaps he thought that wanting something is indistinguishable from doing what the wanted something requires.  Perhaps he relied on my sympathy for his plight.  Perhaps he was simply oblivious.  “Can’t you cut me some slack,” he asked.  “I am,” I said, “by giving you a D.”

And then he leaned forward in his chair and said, “How many friends do you have on Facebook.”  I was startled by this seemingly abrupt detour in our conversation. “I don’t know,” I answered; “maybe 40 or so.”  “Well,” he said, “I have 872.”  And he stood up, nodded once, and left my office.  872.  It lingered.  Richard.  Who will not read between the lines of himself.  A needle without a compass.  A broken trill, a half-strummed chord, a fragmented rhythm, an echo of an echo.