I've just been reading Italo Calvino's Mr Palomar, and I found that one of the most enjoyable of the 27 short pieces that make it up was the one called "The Cheese Museum." This is a detailed observational piece about queueing in a specialist cheese shop in France. It seems to borders on the encyclopaedic - "Bleu d'Auvergne", "Brin d'amour" - and claims that status for itself:
This shop is a dictionary; the language is the system of cheeses as a whole: a language whose morphology records declensions and conjugations in countless variants, and whose lexicon presents an inexhaustible richness of synonyms, idiomatic usags, connotations and nuances of meanings, as in all languages nourished by the contribution of a hundred dialects. It is a language made up of things; its nomenclature is only an external aspect, instrumental; but, for Mr Palomar, learning a bit of nomenclature remains still the first measure to be taken if he wants to stop for a moment the things that are flowing before his eyes.So that seems to me to be a good enough reason to celebrate a very different encyclopaedic approach to cheese:
This is the version from one of the Amnesty concerts, and actually, as encyclopeadias go the Monty Python version is far more, well, encyclopaedic...
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