Reason #16 Why I Love To Blog -- Notes From The Readers -- July 3, 2015, Part III

Updates

July 12, 2015: this regards the comments I made below regarding sentimentality and romanticism as defined by F Scott Fitzgerald. I'm continuing to read This Side of Paradise. Now, on page 213 with Eleanore, Amory, brings the subject up again, the difference between sentimentality and romanticism. Over at wiki:

"A sentimentalist", Oscar Wilde wrote, "is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."

In James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus sends Buck Mulligan a telegraph that reads "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done."

James Baldwin considered that 'Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel...the mask of cruelty'.

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, contrasts sentimentalists and romantics with Amory Blaine telling Rosalind, “I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.” 

Then, as noted above Fitzgerald/Amory brings it up again with Eleanor. One wonders if this was one of the issues Fitzgerald was struggling with and he was trying to work out in the novel. I may have to go back and re-read the book for the third time to see more allusions / references to sentimentality and romanticism.

According to wiki again: sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but current usage defines it as an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason. I wonder when that "usage" changed?

July 3, 2015: down below I mentioned I was looking for a particular story on "two-buck Chuck." It turns out that the original story was taken off The Huntington Post for possible (likely?) libelous material.
 

Original Post

The other day a reader mentioned in response to something I had written that his favorite snack was sheep cheese. I love cheese but had never come across sheep cheese, so I was curious. I found Basque cheese, specifically Mini Basque Cheese. In small italics: "Trader Joe's Mini Basque Cheese is made in the Pyrenee Mountains in France. It is made with 100% pure sheep milk cheese and has a rich and buttery flavor."

It is incredible. Our older granddaughter was a bit hesitant to try "sheep cheese" despite the fact she enjoys goat cheese. But I convinced her to try the Basque cheese and she loves it. It is clearly her favorite. It was quite difficult for the two of us not to eat the entire half pound in one sitting.

It is a firm cheese, but not as firm as a cheddar cheese, but much more firm than a brie. Of the cheeses I am familiar with, it probably comes closest to a mild cheddar but it is definitely not a cheddar.  Would one say it is has a more pleasing taste than cheddar? It really is "rich and buttery."

We found the sheep cheese at Trader Joe's which has the best prices on all beer, wine, and food in the southern California area (same prices, or very close, as we found in Texas). I think this was the only sheep cheese offering at Trader Joe's. The Basque sheep cheese was about twice what other cheeses sell for, but probably similar to the price of goat cheese at $11.99 / pound.

That might sound expensive, but it is offset by the price of Trader Joe's famous "two-buck Chuck" wine, which now costs $2.49 / bottle and it one of the best-selling, if not THE best-selling wine in the US.

With regard to "two-buck Chuck," there was an article over at Yahoo!Finance this past week on this particular wine. I was looking for that site a few minutes ago to link it, and found this site instead. The article begins:

Since, by law, you can’t buy wine at grocery stores in New York, I drove out to a Trader Joe’s in Westfield, N.J., that does sell it. And there they were, case upon case, stacked like a shrine to Charles Shaw, the name of a defunct California winery recycled for the Two-Buck Chuck line. They took up far more space than any other wine — or just about anything else in the market. I bought six bottles for $17.94. These days that will barely buy you a couple of glasses of wine in some restaurants.

That brought back some pretty strong memories.

One of my first ever "real" summer jobs was in Westfield, New Jersey. It's a long, long story, and is both a romantic story and a sentimental story for me. I won't say any more about that job or about Westfield, NJ, in this post, but suffice it to say that summer may have been the most memorable in my life -- and that includes 30 subsequent years in the US Air Force.

F Scott Fitzgerald provided the definitions of "sentimental" and "romantic" in This Side of Paradise. In the play (inside the novel), page 165, FSF defines a sentimental person as one thinks things will last. He says a romantic person hopes against hope that things won't change.

Then, of course, there's the cynic. Not only are things going to change, they're going to get worse. Much worse.

The realist: the cynic is correct.