Incompleat Iconoclast » Non sequiturs

Exercise #18: Food That Defines a Place

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:08:27 +0000

Note: I wrote the following exercise at the end of a long day when I didn’t have much energy or imagination left for writing. I’m only posting it on my blog because I don’t want to upset my loyal readers by leaving a gap at Exercise #18 in the series of exercises on which I’ve been chipping away. I don’t usually inflict the raw, unfiltered stream-of-consciousness emanations of my tortured brain on anyone else—except my friend Jo. So unless you’re reeeeally bored—or one of the aforementioned loyal readers—I’d skip this one if I were you. (No, really.)

It’s very late, and I’ve had a long day. I was up early without very much sleep, and I had a mountain of work to get done before a meeting with a new client, and then I had an event to go to in the evening, so I was blowin’ and goin’ pretty much all day, and so I haven’t taken any time to write to the 50/50 prompt yet. My usual routine is to write in 25-minute “episodes,” but the 50/50 prompts usually take me a little longer than that. I’m also still working on my “3,000-Word Initiative”—trying to write 3,000 words a day. And a lot of what I do for the 3kWI is stream-of-consciousness stuff. When I write stream-of-consciousness, I can crank out about 1,500 words in 25 minutes. But when I write to the 50/50 prompts, I tend to be more careful and deliberate, because, after all, someone else is going to be reading them, even if it’s just my captive audience of one. But tonight I’m in a hurry. I’m sleep-deprived, I’m exhausted, and I still have a full day of activities to get through tomorrow before I can call it a weekend. So I’m going to try to kill two birds with one stone and write stream-of-consciousness to the 50/50 prompt, no matter how rough it is, no matter how run-on my sentences may grow, and no matter how many digressions about men and sex and any other topic off the top of my head might pop up.

So the prompt is about food, food and place, foods that remind me of something, and so forth. The thing that I thought of first is probably the best approach on this one, and that was to talk about Rome. Of course it’s about Rome! My favorite topic. And the food in question is antipasto. Antipasto in the United States has come to have a fairly conventional definition—some cold cuts, a few slices of cheese, maybe some olives or a little fresh fruit. Nine out of 10 Italian restaurants will give you some variation on that theme. But those are only a few from among the many things that Italians would serve as antipasti.

Antipasti is the plural of antipasto. And as long as we’re talking about language, here’s what’s wrong the American idea of antipasto: all that the word means is “before the pasta.” And you can serve all kinds of things before the pasta. Sure, cold cuts are an option. Italian cuisine is full of wonderful cured meats—salami, mortadella (what we call “bologna”), prosciutto—and they frequently turn up on antipasto plates. And cheese turns up, too. And not just mozzarella. In Italy, restaurants will serve whatever they have, or whatever was good that day at the market. That’s really the only guideline for putting together antipasto—you serve what you feel like serving, based on what looked good at the market and what you felt like cooking—which is probably guided, at least in some cases, by what the cook felt like eating that day.

I’ve had antipasti that included assortments of freshly pickled vegetables—carrots, eggplant, cucumbers, olives—or roasted vegetables, or breaded and fried vegetables. My all-time favorite in nearly any form in which they care to serve it to me: artichoke hearts. The artichoke is king in Rome. It’s the centerpiece of Roman cuisine from the first harvesting of small, delicate buds in March all the way through the summer and into the late fall, when the last huge heads are served braised or stuffed and roasted. And speaking of blossoms, zucchini blossoms are another thing you’ll find on an antipasto place, usually stuffed with some kind of mild or soft cheese spiced with nutmeg and herbs.

The antipasto experience is typical of the Italian outlook on life. It’s not about blowing you away with the most expensive ingredients or an elaborate technique. It’s about taking things as they come and then finding ways to savor them. I’ve had antipasto plates that are a simple as a pile of olives drizzled with lemon juice and olive oil and served with thick chunks of rustic bread.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got for tonight. Out of gas.

Note: I warned you, didn’t I?

Exercise #14: Lead Line: “I cannot help noticing all the things that…”

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 05:58:54 +0000

I cannot help noticing all the things that I let get in the way of writing. I came in here more than an hour ago, and my agenda was clear: to write for another half hour, including coming up with something in response to this prompt, and then to get my ass to bed at a reasonable hour. But no. I had to have a quick look at Facebook. And then I had to see what was going on over at two or three other “social networking” sites (read: places to meet guys). Nothing was going on, but I didn’t let that stop me from distracting myself there for a while. Then back to Facebook, because I was thinking about what I’d said to my young cousin, Michelle, about maybe setting up a fan page for the Gumnick family. But then I determined that they don’t really accommodate family sites in the “fan page” model, so I had to figure out where to go to set up a group, and then I had to nose around to figure out which category a family group gets filed into. And then I had to figure out a name and description for the group. And then I had to find jussssst the right photo for the group page. And then I had to tweak some of the wording a little. And send an invitation to all of the family members who are on Facebook. And then remember a few in-laws I’d forgotten. Then I had to go back to one of those other sites to reply to a couple of messages that had come in while I was tinkering on Facebook.

And mixed in with all of that, there was a fair amount of staring blankly at the screen and thinking, “I should stop messing around and get to writing, or I’m going to be up half the night. But first, let me see what this thing over here is.” [Sound of mouse click.]

But now I’m here, and I’m writing. So get off my back already.

Note: The title of this assignment is self-explanatory, I think. It didn’t inspire any flashes of creative brilliance (or even dull glows thereof), but I’m sticking to a “warts and all” policy of posting everything I write in this workshop.

Exercise #11: Favorite Thing to Do in Your Favorite City

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:55:53 +0000

I’ve decided to return to the online workshop on which I was working when Hurricane Ike arrived last September. Had some trouble with the first prompt, though. My first attempt turned into unpublishable erotica. Here’s my second attempt:

Fragment #2

I want all of my life to be like these moments:

The day that Continental canceled our flight out of Rome, so we spent the day exploring Ostia. We surprised ourselves with how much fun we could cram into one unexpected extra day of vacation.
The day you led me through rush-hour traffic to Griffith Park, then showed me where the trail began. I was energized by your kindness.
The day the cold front blew through the city, and then you took me to your soccer practice. It was too cold for me to spend two hours waiting on a bench, so I wandered the unfamiliar neighborhood until I found a coffee shop open. Then I came back and climbed up and down the pedestrian staircase to to the road high on the hill above the soccer field to keep warm. While I walked the stairs, I had a heart-to-heart talk directed at a silent God. I told him that I thought he was irrelevant, and that I’d listened to his people and their bad ideas for long enough.

Well said

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:42:11 +0000

“The role of the social architect recognizes that acting on what matters for one person will happen in concert with those around that person. Individual effort will not be enough. If we do not encourage others to find their own meaning, their own voice, we will never be able to sustain our own.”

—Peter Block, from The Answer to
How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters

50/50 Fall 2008, Exercise #7: Lineage story

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 05:31:27 +0000

I don’t know a whole lot about my lineage. It seems safe to say that my family didn’t come over on the Mayflower, or I would probably have heard about it, right? From the little information we have, it’s more likely that most of my ancestors came to the New World much more recently, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On an encouraging note, that means my family is probably off the hook for ever having owned any African slaves. I’m told that my niece and nephew, however, are related by way of my brother-in-law’s family to Jefferson Davis. But that’s their karmic burden to work out. As for us Gumnicks, it’s more probable that our ancestors were somebody else’s slaves—or “serfs,” as they were called back when European white people owned other European white people.

When I was young, I had a fantasy that as an infant, I had somehow been switched—by a wild and convoluted set of circumstances that I never went to the trouble of trying to contrive—with Prince Edward. Yes, that Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, the youngest son of the Queen of England (and Canada and Australia and all sorts of other places around the globe). The fact that his name was Edward and that we’re about the same age made the fantasy seem more plausible than any of the other switched-at-birth scenarios I could come up with. I hoped that some day the mistake would be rectified and I would get to go live in a castle and ride polo ponies and go to Cambridge and be third in the line of succession to the English crown. I let go of that fantasy long before Edward was demoted to seventh in line by the births of his nieces and nephews and became as bald and dorky as all of his male relatives. You only have to look at a photograph to know without a doubt that he’s Prince Charles’s little brother.

So it turned out that I’m just the youngest son of Jim and Jean Gumnick, and every time I look in the mirror, I see a little more of Dad.

As far as I know, our ethnic heritages or national origins include Polish, Austro-Hungarian, French-German (Alsatian, woof!), and Irish with maybe a touch of Pennsylvania Dutch thrown in. We can’t claim any royalty, nobility, or even commoners of great distinction in our bloodlines. But I think one of the birthrights of Americans of mixed ancestry should be the right to claim anyone you like as one of your ancestors—whether by genes, by culture, or just by affinity. And so I claim descent from Genghis Khan by way of his first grandson, Orda Khan, who invaded Poland in the thirteenth century. It’s entirely possible that he left behind some Mongol-Polish offspring, and I credit the Khan genes for my natural talent for leadership and my propensity for cross-cultural communication.

Culturally, I consider myself a descendant of Leonardo Da Vinci. He was creative, imaginative, left-handed, at least a little bit crazy, and is reported to have had a weakness for men much younger than himself. A man after mine own heart. I think I will start referring to him as “my uncle Leonardo.”

Note: The assignment was to write a story about some aspect of “lineage.”

50/50 Fall 2008, Exercise #6: “We never ask for the things we need the most…”

Edward F. Gumnick — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 04:10:50 +0000

Five False Starts

“We never ask for the things we need the most.” I don’t know if I agree with that statement, so what am I going to do with it? If we’re in touch with who we are, we do ask for the things we need the most. But I guess a lot of people go through life without asking. Who is this “we”?

—

“We never ask for the things we need the most,” she said to me.

“What do you mean by that?” I said.

“I mean, we say we want independence, but what we want is financial security. We say we want justice, but we’d rather have revenge.”

—

We never ask for the things we need the most. No, strike that. We ask for the things we need, but we don’t actually want them. We ask for Truth, but Truth isn’t what we want. We want a good story. We want a great story. We want a story of wonder and magic and nobility and heroism, but Truth doesn’t tell that kind of story. Truth tells stories about suffering and survival and the slow passage of time….

—

We never ask for the things we need the most. And most of us make do, we find our way, we get by with what comes our way from the goodness or grace or benevolence or lucky indifference of the universe. But once in a while, one of us gets lost, one of us becomes isolated, or perhaps I should say, one of us becomes more isolated even than all the rest. He finds himself in a place where no one can reach him, and he does something terrible, something desperate, and puts himself in a position where no one can give him anything at all.

—

“We never ask for the things we need the most.” I don’t know what that means. I’ve tried imagining those words in the voice of a frustrated seeker, an unsatisfied lover, an angry materialist, or the witness to a suicide, but I don’t like where any of these stories lead.

What else to say?

We never ask for the things we need the most, because as long as we don’t ask, then we can blame the other person for not giving those things to us, and so our unhappiness is someone else’s fault. As soon as we ask, we accept responsibility for the consequences of having expressed our desires.

Is that true? Does it matter?

To ask for what we need the most is to accept responsibility for our own destinies.

Note: The prompt for today’s assignment—the lead line “We never ask for the things we need the most”—comes from the writer Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love.

Cleanliness is just a good idea

Edward F. Gumnick — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:26:29 +0000

If I’m going to poke fun at goofy signs, it’s only fair that I applaud the ones I like:

Everyone should wash their hands

Employees must

I found this nugget of wisdom on an unassuming, hand-lettered wooden plaque in the restroom at Antidote Coffee (729 Studewood St, Houston). It’s a refreshing change from the standard-issue health department signs that you see all over the place. I like the reasonable tone, the gentle admonishment that could be spoken by your grandmother, or maybe a patient nursery-school teacher.

“We want you to wash your hands because we care about you,” it seems to say. “Oh, and if you work in the kitchen, we really must insist. Thanks for being so understanding. Have a great day!”

Great News!

Edward F. Gumnick — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:36:33 +0000

Although God had clearly outlined His plans to kill 500,000 people in southwestern California yesterday, He must have changed His mind at the last minute.

I hope the FBI is keeping an eye on the fellow who writes the web site to which I’ve linked above, because he makes the Unabomber sound quite sensible. I also hope the FBI is keeping an eye on God, just in case the other guy is right about all the terrorist threats in the Bible.

From the department of “Stuff I Not Only Don’t Wanna Do, But Shouldn’t Even Hafta”

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:58:33 +0000

July 7, 2008

Red Light Camera Enforcement Program
P.O. Box 4996
Houston, Texas 77210-4996

Re: Notice of Violation #0100800975xxx

To Whom It May Concern:

I wish to contest the above-mentioned Notice of Violation on the grounds that the vehicle shown in the recorded images of the violation is not my car.

As you can see from the enclosed Photo A (from your web site), the car in violation is a beige Toyota Camry. My car, shown in Photo C, is a dark blue-gray Nissan Maxima. Note the contours of the trunk, taillight features, etc.

I believe that a careful examination of Photo B, the offending vehicle’s license plate, will reveal that the vehicle’s license number is xxx xxT. My license plate, as shown in Photo D, is xxx xxY.

Thank you for your assistance in this matter. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you need further information.

Yours truly, etc., etc., etc.

Enclosures:
Hearing Request Form
Copy of Notice of Violation
Photos A, B, C, and D

[Heavy sigh.] The things with which we have to put up if we want to live in a civilized society.

Boot Camp Day 5(a): Coffee, Rain, and Conversation

Edward F. Gumnick — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 05:17:18 +0000

There is one thing that stays the same she said and I said What’s that? and she said We always end up talking about Peru and I asked her Do you want another coffee and she said No, I’m fine, but go ahead if you want and so I was gone for a minute and when I came back the conversation turned to other subjects like how hot it gets in Dallas in the summer and how the grass turns brown for what seems like six solid months and all you can think of is Will it ever rain again? and how we don’t know why we stay here but we guess we’ll stay put for a while and then she told me that she liked to think of herself as a poet and I said I can see that in you so why don’t you go back to writing poetry? and she said It hasn’t been the same since he left, but maybe I will.

Note: The prompt for this piece was the lead line, “There is one thing that stays the same…,” which is taken from the work of Abigail Thomas, and the inspiration was a real conversation to which I’ve added a few imaginary elements in order to protect the innocent.