Category Archives: teeth

On fruit

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When asked about my favorite fruit, I’m sure I would have to say fresh cherries with strawberries running a strong second with the kiwi coming in third. Can you ever get enough fruit? I suppose we should ask Adam, but he’s not here, so we’ll move on. Apples and oranges, bananas and pineapple, I can already feel the juice running down my chin. Nature’s own fresh candy, it’s sweet and delicious, a delight to the sense of taste and smell, touch to a certain extent. Not a huge fan of mango, but it’s because I’m allergic. Grapes, watermelon, lemons, limes, grapefruit, pomegranate. Fruit is a dark object of sensuous desire, the colors and textures yearn to split and eaten, juice running everywhere, down your chin, your hands and elbows, you grab for a napkin to clean up. It’s the sugar, of course, which we crave. Eat a banana–it has one of the highest sugar contents in the fruit world. What redeems fruit are all the vitamins and minerals they contain. I also think that sugary fruit, the object of desire, is redeemed by its aesthetics and its taste. The taste of a ripe grapefruit, beautifully red strawberries, sweet white grapes, or that perfect apple are all astonishingly different and astonishingly wonderful. No one will mistake one for the other, but it is rather rare to meet someone who doesn’t like fruit. The textures are also all different: raspberries are not at all like melon, and no one will mistake a peach for a pear, in the dark or with the lights on.

On fruit

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When asked about my favorite fruit, I’m sure I would have to say fresh cherries with strawberries running a strong second with the kiwi coming in third. Can you ever get enough fruit? I suppose we should ask Adam, but he’s not here, so we’ll move on. Apples and oranges, bananas and pineapple, I can already feel the juice running down my chin. Nature’s own fresh candy, it’s sweet and delicious, a delight to the sense of taste and smell, touch to a certain extent. Not a huge fan of mango, but it’s because I’m allergic. Grapes, watermelon, lemons, limes, grapefruit, pomegranate. Fruit is a dark object of sensuous desire, the colors and textures yearn to split and eaten, juice running everywhere, down your chin, your hands and elbows, you grab for a napkin to clean up. It’s the sugar, of course, which we crave. Eat a banana–it has one of the highest sugar contents in the fruit world. What redeems fruit are all the vitamins and minerals they contain. I also think that sugary fruit, the object of desire, is redeemed by its aesthetics and its taste. The taste of a ripe grapefruit, beautifully red strawberries, sweet white grapes, or that perfect apple are all astonishingly different and astonishingly wonderful. No one will mistake one for the other, but it is rather rare to meet someone who doesn’t like fruit. The textures are also all different: raspberries are not at all like melon, and no one will mistake a peach for a pear, in the dark or with the lights on.

On smiling

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It seems that it takes, according to experts, lots of muscles to smile, but that babies learn to smile before they can even talk, imitating the faces that their parents make at them. I am no expert, but I think that trying to analyze what a smile is, exactly, takes all the sunshine right out of a smile. Perhaps the most positive sign of affirmation that anyone can receive is a smile: when we do something right, when we meet again after a long absence, when we need reassurance, when we wake up in the morning. We all smile for lots of different reasons: we are glad to see someone, we are feeling happy, we are getting exactly what we want, we want to reaffirm the efforts of someone else, we are euphoric, we are relieved, we are in love, we want to cheer up someone who might not be smiling. When I see others smile, it warms my heart even when I am not involved in the conversation. Seeing that someone else is happy, reaffirmed, right, creates in me a positive light in a dark world. With all the tragedy, chaos, and sadness that troubles our world (and has always troubled our world, let’s face it, we are far from perfect creatures), a smile is like a beam of sunlight on a cold winter’s morning when you know it’s not going above zero that day. A smile reaffirms the idea that this whole business of life is worth pursuing for a bit longer. Smiles are also sexy, and in the right situation, speak about desire, pleasure, love, longing, intimacy, craving. Smiles between a man and a woman are about more than anything that might expressed in words, and perhaps there are no words to express those kinds of feelings. Poets, philosophers, play-writes, mystics, barbers, bartenders, and theologians have tried to express the ideas and emotions behind the smile, but they have been at it for several millennium without getting it exactly right. What the smile communicates is complex, positive, and happy, and it’s happiness that illusive thing that we all pursue? In a world which often seems arbitrary, cold, and uncaring, a smile is often a light for a soul lost in the dark night of life. I would suggest that smiles, even when we are alone and only smiling to ourselves, are a sign of mental health, of an upbeat, positive view of the world. Of course, we have all seen creepy smiles on the faces of sales people, receptionists, and others who are paid to smile regardless of how they feel. I wonder if smiling actually helps them deal with tough situations (customer service, blech) in which those fake smilers must deal with unhappy and demanding and unsmiling folks who are bringing trouble–me, for example, when I have to take back a defective product. Could a smile be a shield against ill-will and anger? Does a smile defuse and angry heart? In the end, a smile, as opposed to a frown, seems almost to carry with it supernatural powers for healing, loving, caring in a world of frowns, of negative energy, of violence and chaos. So we smile at each other–non-verbal communication–and hope that the message gets across, but maybe a smile is not just a one-shot deal, maybe it’s a promise, or an ethos, or pathos, unwritten rhetoric of hope that cannot be truly expressed in words or any other verbal way. Maybe smiles are more about communication and less about words?

On floss(ing)

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Who ever it was that convinced us all to run a little white thread between our teeth at bedtime is a total marketing genius. Oh yeah, our teeth will stay in our heads longer, but the ritual torture of our gums is the price. Both my grandparents lost their teeth long ago and had no reason to ever floss. I still have teeth, so I floss. Flossing is a bathroom activity for which you necessarily must close the door. Brushing your teeth is even less intimate than flossing. It’s almost as if you were doing something bad and you don’t want others to see. I have my little routine: start on the lower left and work my way around, switch to the top left and finish it off. Sometimes I bleed, but the pain is a good pain that keeps you coming back for more. I would be disappointed at this point in my life if I could not floss. I must face the possibility that I am a flossing junkie that gets a little shot of pleasure from the pain involved in flossing. I’m wondering if this is a bad thing or good thing. I love the little floss dispenser packages that hide in your overnight bag so that you cannot find them until you get home again. Floss that breaks easily is not really floss, but string. When I put my fingers in my mouth to get the floss through the back teeth, I feel like a real dentist. Floss with a spearmint flavor, or cinnamon is a bit like putting rabbit fur on hand cuffs, but not that I would know. There is something very wrong about self-inflicted ritual pain which is associated with oral hygiene. I floss so that the woman who does my dental cleaning doesn’t yell at me for having swollen and bleeding gums lined with tarter, bacteria, and rotting food. It’s the rotting food which motivates me to hall out that high-tensile tooth piano wire. I’d rather scrape it off every night than let it sit and rot and smell. When I eat an unpeeled apple, popcorn, caramels, and tough roast beef, I really need my floss to finish the meal, otherwise I would being eating leftovers for days, and there’s nothing worse than getting popcorn stuck in your gums–they get sore and sensitive. In some ways, floss is a cleaning tool, but I wrap it around my fingers really tightly so I can get a good grip, and my fingers end up half-strangled, purple and puffy. My conclusion about floss is that it might be a necessary evil if we want to keep our teeth. Since I’ve had so much work done on them, spent thousands of dollars to keep them in working shape, I might as well keep up the maintenance. I would hate to throw away all that money, time, and pain for nothing. One can always get the dentures, but then you might end up in a late night commercial demonstrating how to put them in or how to get them clean, and the answer is not toilet bowl cleaner. I mean, imagine your dentures breaking free while eating a nice steak out in a nice public restaurant. Floss is probably the way to go, even though it is inconvenient, a pain to work with, and sometimes it gets stuck in your teeth as well. Perhaps someone should invent toe floss for the feet, or belly button floss for the navel. For the time being, I’ll live with a little pain, floss a little better, and hope that the dental hygienist who will work on my next week will be having a very good day, especially when she flosses. Last time she flossed I think I lost weight.

On floss(ing)

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Who ever it was that convinced us all to run a little white thread between our teeth at bedtime is a total marketing genius. Oh yeah, our teeth will stay in our heads longer, but the ritual torture of our gums is the price. Both my grandparents lost their teeth long ago and had no reason to ever floss. I still have teeth, so I floss. Flossing is a bathroom activity for which you necessarily must close the door. Brushing your teeth is even less intimate than flossing. It’s almost as if you were doing something bad and you don’t want others to see. I have my little routine: start on the lower left and work my way around, switch to the top left and finish it off. Sometimes I bleed, but the pain is a good pain that keeps you coming back for more. I would be disappointed at this point in my life if I could not floss. I must face the possibility that I am a flossing junkie that gets a little shot of pleasure from the pain involved in flossing. I’m wondering if this is a bad thing or good thing. I love the little floss dispenser packages that hide in your overnight bag so that you cannot find them until you get home again. Floss that breaks easily is not really floss, but string. When I put my fingers in my mouth to get the floss through the back teeth, I feel like a real dentist. Floss with a spearmint flavor, or cinnamon is a bit like putting rabbit fur on hand cuffs, but not that I would know. There is something very wrong about self-inflicted ritual pain which is associated with oral hygiene. I floss so that the woman who does my dental cleaning doesn’t yell at me for having swollen and bleeding gums lined with tarter, bacteria, and rotting food. It’s the rotting food which motivates me to hall out that high-tensile tooth piano wire. I’d rather scrape it off every night than let it sit and rot and smell. When I eat an unpeeled apple, popcorn, caramels, and tough roast beef, I really need my floss to finish the meal, otherwise I would being eating leftovers for days, and there’s nothing worse than getting popcorn stuck in your gums–they get sore and sensitive. In some ways, floss is a cleaning tool, but I wrap it around my fingers really tightly so I can get a good grip, and my fingers end up half-strangled, purple and puffy. My conclusion about floss is that it might be a necessary evil if we want to keep our teeth. Since I’ve had so much work done on them, spent thousands of dollars to keep them in working shape, I might as well keep up the maintenance. I would hate to throw away all that money, time, and pain for nothing. One can always get the dentures, but then you might end up in a late night commercial demonstrating how to put them in or how to get them clean, and the answer is not toilet bowl cleaner. I mean, imagine your dentures breaking free while eating a nice steak out in a nice public restaurant. Floss is probably the way to go, even though it is inconvenient, a pain to work with, and sometimes it gets stuck in your teeth as well. Perhaps someone should invent toe floss for the feet, or belly button floss for the navel. For the time being, I’ll live with a little pain, floss a little better, and hope that the dental hygienist who will work on my next week will be having a very good day, especially when she flosses. Last time she flossed I think I lost weight.

On physiognomy (the Libro de buen amor and don Amor)

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When I started researching female beauty in Spain’s 14th century, I had no idea I would be stepping in the pseudo-science cow pie that is physiognomy. If you don’t know, physiognomy is the “science” (quotation marks mean that the word science is being both ironically and loosely to include this area of inquiry) of external shapes, marks and other physical characteristics which shape how a thing, or a plant, or an animal, or a person, looks or gives it an outward appearance and how that appearance, in turn, shapes the internal characteristics of said object, plant, animal, or person. This particular science has it roots deep in Greek philosophy in a half dozen famous writers. This particular branch of science has been extremely popular well into the modern era, and there are hundreds of books and articles that date from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and even the twentieth century. It was finally thrown on the ashheap of pseudo-science when the Nazis used it to justify their particularly odd (and wrong) ideas about how the way people looked and what this said about their character. Today, physiognomy is practiced by the same people who read tarot cards, make astrological charts, study cabala and practice necromancy. They probably also search for Big Foot in their spare time when they are not searching the pyramids for signs of ancient astronauts. No rational empiricists allowed. Physiognomy was extremely popular, especially in the nineteenth century when random positivists thought that if you could measure it and set up a data table then it must mean something. Well, they were wrong, but real science took its sweet time in proving that. In Spain’s 14th century, the tenants of physiognomy were a part of what passed for both science and philosophy, so as my poet’s fictive creation, Mr. Love, describes the ideal woman (ideal for love, that is) he goes through a very standard list of facial characteristics that is quite commonplace in the medieval poetry of Europe–small head, blond hair, nice eyebrows, high cheekbones, big eyes, shining and bright, long eye lashes, long thin neck, thin nose, small even teeth, red gums, red full lips, small mouthy, white face, no facial hair (LBA, stanzas 432-5 if you care to read it for yourself). Mr. Love is sure that this is the kind of woman that a man should pursue because, given her physical characteristics, she will be more receptive to male advances. This rhetorical practice, a descriptio, is also common in medieval scholasticism and would be reliable if the source were reliable. What subverts the description, or perhaps what validates it, is the speaker, Mr. Love, who has just been berated by the poem’s (LBA) main character, the Archpriest of Hita, Juan Ruiz, for ruining everyone’s life. Mr. Love has an agenda, albeit an unreliable one, and is not a trustworthy source or narrator. In fact, he is the opposite of anything that might resemble truth, ethics, or morality. The question for me, then, is this: is the author playing it straight, (i.e., this is what he truly believes) with his readers with this description or is he undermining and subverting the medieval practice and belief in physiognomy by putting it in the mouth of an unreliable narrator?