I’m a Macaroni Man, and Other News

Richard Cosway, who went by the “Macaroni Painter” or “Billy Dimple”, poses for a portrait. Image via the Public Domain Review

 

• I’ll just come out and say it: I enjoy macaroni. Always have, always will. And I’m fortunate to live in a time when a man can eat his noodles with no fear of reprisal from the squares and fuddy-duddies of the anti-macaroni establishment. It was not always so. As Dominic Janes writes, Britain in the eighteenth century cast a cold eye on young men who dared to devour macaroni in public—they seemed, you know, funny. Soon the very word macaroni “became associated with sodomy … Horace [Walpole], who was not a married man, presented himself as something of an old-school fop and it was he who first recorded the existence of a ‘Maccaroni club’ in 1764 which consisted of ‘all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses’ …Whilst British patriots rejoiced in roast beef, some of those recently returned from the Grand Tour flaunted their newly acquired tastes for Italian cuisine—with a supposed penchant for macaroni pasta in particular … permeating all these late eighteenth-century notions of the macaroni is the idea that strange cuisine and dress were not the only unconventional customs these travelled young men brought back from abroad. Italy, in particular, was associated by the Protestant British with perversity because of the influence of an unmarried Roman Catholic priesthood which, it was thought, expended its sexual energies on cuckoldry and sodomy. The further implication was that British aristocrats might also bring a taste for such vices back with them from their travels.”

• By the next century, not much had changed—the historian Heather Ellis argues that Sir Humphry Davy, a preeminent chemist, was the target of a smear campaign implying that he was too effeminate to be a good scientist. His takedown reinforced the sexism in the sciences that continues to this day: “Popular magazines, like the John Bull, launched vicious personal attacks on the chemist’s flamboyant dress and the charismatic delivery at lectures that had brought him a wide female following … Rivals also spread rumors of closet homosexuality, speculating on not only his dress, but also his close association with the Romantic poets, especially Southey and Coleridge, with the latter once declaring of Davy: ‘Had he not been the first chemist, he would have been the first poet of his age.’”

• David Byrne has said that highways are the cathedrals of our time. He’s right, but there are also malls: malls are the cathedrals of our time. So I can’t understand why people are teasing the Mall of America for its ambitious writer-in-residence campaign, which invites authors to celebrate the mall’s twenty-fifth anniversary by steeping themselves in its culture—our culture—reporting in real time on the sights and sounds of a place that serves as the ultimate metaphor for the contemporary United States. The Mall, as The New York Times reports, “is inviting ‘a special scribe’ to ‘spend five days deeply immersed in the mall atmosphere while writing on-the-fly impressions in their own words.’ … The goal of the contest, according to the mall’s news release cited by The Star Tribune, ‘is to come away from this project with an evocative story about Mall of America that represents the contemporary guest experience after twenty-five years of evolution as a leading retail and entertainment establishment.’” Don’t knock this. Writers are seldom asked to serve vital functions in the culture anymore. If you can’t write well about a shopping mall in 2017, you can’t write well.

• Would it be such a crime, Maximillian Alvarez asks, if academics sometimes, just sometimes, tried to write and speak for the public good instead of ensconcing themselves in jargon and rarefied forms of expertise? “I’m not agreeing with conservative shoe-bangers and cranky old idiots like George Willof the Washington Post who love to seize on … proof that we academics are all hoity-toity elitists who are conspiring together to lord our knowledge over a public full of nothing but bigots, lardos, and morons. What I’m arguing is that, far more often, we are either unconscious of, or we don’t think hard enough about, the ways we act as if this is the case … using jargon for what are essentially self-serving ends, or not working harder to hash out forms of meaningful, critical engagement with non-academics in ways that move beyond the dumbed-down TED Talk model. Even if we are consciously not the archetypal ivory-tower elitists conservative pundits like to pretend we are, we can still essentially amount to the same thing by not making it a priority to honestly ask questions like, ‘When is my jargon necessary and when am I just being an asshole?’”

• Speaking of “just being an asshole,” here’s a little taste of Evelyn Waugh’s approach to parenting, courtesy of Violet Hudson: “Whenever [Waugh’s wife] Laura fell pregnant—seven times in all, though only six of the children survived—his attitude was consoling rather than celebratory. ‘It is sad news for you that you are having another baby,’ he wrote once—it evidently not having occurred to him that it was they who were having the baby. When his children came to school age, he openly rejoiced at the end of the holidays. He went out of his way to avoid spending Christmas with them when they were little, either staying in boarding houses or traveling abroad. There is also a famous story … of his managing to procure a banana during the gourmet wasteland of the Second World War. The Waugh children had never seen the exotic fruit before—let alone tasted one—but their father, after showing it off proudly, covered it with cream and sugar and devoured the whole thing himself.”

from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2lchnxa