The Wit’s Guide to Cheese
Or, how dair y!
Delicious or disgusting? Cheese balances on the edge of a small round knife, and if it’s the gooey kind, it falls both ways. It is, after all, milk that’s simultaneously gone off and gone on. But which?
“A corpse is meat gone bad. Well, and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk.”
― James Joyce
The French poet Léon-Paul Fargue once described the smell of a strong Camembert as “les pieds de Dieu,” or the feet of God. Compare that to John Magee’s famous poem High Flight, wherein the speaker “slips the surly bonds of earth” and “touched the face of God,” and then ask your maker: Is it ruder to touch His face or smell Her feet?
“Mozzarella has to be perfect and impeccably sourced or it’s like eating a blind whale’s eyeball.”
― A.A. Gill
The divine properties of cheese are proven by attempts to tame it. Consider American cheese, technically a pasteurized prepared cheese product. These crafted singles bring industrial standards to the local idiosyncrasies of cheese — take the plastic off or leave it on, the taste is fundamentally the same — but they can’t steamroll out the inherent queasiness of queso. The cheese stands alone, in two places at once. But where?
“A poet’s hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.”
― W.H. Auden
Queso in point: The American cheese square affixed to a storefront window in Chicago late last year. “One day someone stuck this cheese to a window on Armitage and now every day I admire it,” a resident wrote on a note next to the quadrilateral. “I could tell you that this cheese is symbolic of not taking life too seriously and that nothing really matters, that free will is an incredible tool to bring joy. But I think that would do the cheese a great disservice and go against what the cheese really is. Because it is nothing and means nothing.” But what?
“What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?”
― Bertolt Brecht
Cheese can breed existential angst as well as insects (cf. Mimolette, which is produced with the help of unpaid cheese mites). In the case of Archy the Cockroach, the poetic bug who used Don Marquis’ typewriter at night, it inspired both. In his lowercase musings, Archy reports that “as i was crawling through the holes in a swiss cheese the other day it occurred to me to wonder what a swiss cheese would think if a swiss cheese could think.” The answer: “it would think that
a swiss cheese was the most important thing in the world just as everything that
can think at all does think about itself.” But why?
“In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.”
― Saki
Cheese is traditionally sold by a cheesemonger. What else is monged? Fish, and at the Terroni restaurants in Toronto, you cannot have cheese on any sort of seafood pasta. The server won’t grate the parmesan on it, and it’s said they won’t bring a side of cheese for another diner at your table if they suspect something fishy. Thus we generate the third mongable thing: Fear. But of what?
“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton
All these questions can’t be answered by poets, but that’s OK: Scientists have unlocked the mystery of cheese. It’s called backwards smelling, a phenomenon by which the offputting aroma of a cheese becomes onputting when said cheese is in your mouth and said aroma creeps up the backstairs to surprise your unsuspecting nose. Again, this is science. Just as light is a particle and a wave, and as a mullet is business in the front and party in the back, a fine cheese is irritating and irresistible all at once. It is, as Clifton Fadiman wrote, milk’s leap to immortality. Cheese was destined for something … grater?
Welcome to February! This month’s Riposte Cardist is Paige Stampatori, a conceptual illustrator from Kitchener, Ontario, who specializes in clever ideas like this one:
Paige chose to mark the month of chocolate hearts and hibernation by illustrating this quip by the ever-effervescent Anita Loos:
“And what, for instance, would have happened had Romeo and Juliet lived to middle age, their silhouettes broadened by pasta?”
― Anita Loos
Her wonderful artwork has already been mailed out to paying subscribers and will be revealed in this space next week.
In the meantime, here’s more on the luminous Ms. Loos:
“It’s hard to focus the mind on praise, one thinks too much of the holes in the cheese or the slice of cheese, of the emptiness that goes with all good.”
― William Carlos Williams
Chesterton described “the holy act of eating cheese” as “approaching Nature in one of her myriad tints of mood.” So many tints! Such moods! Anyway, how about next week?
If you didn’t like Issue No. 292 of Get Wit Quick, let it ripen for a few minutes and come back to it. The artist Robert Gober gets to the paradox of cheese quite wonderfully with Short Haired Cheese, a waxy wedge with a toupee. It makes people crazy! But not as crazy as his Long Haired Cheese. The newsletter mascot is Magnus the Magpie, an intelligent bird who collects shiny things and who took his name from the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. He’s the one who moved your cheese. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck that will have you wondering, “Is subtle funk even funkier?” The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. I didn’t even get to to tyromancy, the art of fortune telling via fromage. Tap the ❤️ if it reminds you of a Babybel.