The yellow flour, bestrew'd and stirr'd with haste,
Swells in the flood and thickens to a paste,
Then puffs and wallops, rises to the brim,
Drinks the dry knobs that on the surface swim;
The knobs at last the busy ladle breaks,
And the whole mass its true consistence takes.
Could but her sacred name, unknown so long,
Rise, like her labours, to the son of song,
To her, to them, I'd consecrate my lays,
And blow her pudding with the breath of praise. (Joel Barlow, "The Hasty Pudding," ll. 41-50)

In 1792, Joel Barlow unleashed one of the most notorious examples of mundaniana onto an unsuspecting world with his poem "The Hasty Pudding". Barlow was an American diplomat in France, and he wrote this epic tribute to the most mundane food of the Americas at the time as a means of celebrating his American heritage. He found inspiration for his work in the poem "Ode to a Haggis," written by Robert Burns in 1786. Barlow wrote the poem while in the picturesque Haute Savoy region of France when a local cook prepared some of the pudding for him as a special favor. The warm corn mush sent Barlow into a nostalgic reverie, as he contemplated the dish's status as both a mundane and a quintessentially American food. The name implies that it is an early version of fast food if you accept a simple substitution—[hasty] : [fast] :: [pudding] : [food]—and fast food is the quintessentially American dish in the eyes of much of the modern world. In this light, Barlow's poem is remarkably prescient.

Why would Barlow identify such a mundane, formless, indistinct food with its "awkward unpoetic name" (l. 27) as something so American? Was he arguing that America was itself a mundane country? Not necessarily. Instead, Barlow's image of America in this poem has much more to do with the nation's profound appreciation of mundanity. Whereas Europe is a land of rigid hierarchies in which the lower tiers find themselves enmired in the mundane, America is a land of equals:

[The Yankey's] abundant feast,
With simples furnished, and with plainness drest,
A numerous offering gathers round the board,
And cheers alike the servant and the lord. (ll. 166-169)

All Americans are equal before the great, holy, delicious hasty pudding. Indeed, America's strength lies in its ability to embrace the mundane in defiance of the usual class restrictions. A healthy enjoyment of mundanity is, in Barlow's terms, America's gift to the world.

This poem is a mock epic and thus couches the discussion of something banal in the highfalutin language of Virgil's Æneid, much like Alexander Pope's more famous poem "Rape of the Lock." In some ways, one could even consider the Journal of Mundane Behavior a form of mock epic. The whole point of this type of writing is to confuse readers by creating a huge conflict between form and content. Upon reading a mock epic, the reader might say, "Now, just wait a minute buddy. You said you were going to tell me something important, and all I see here is the same old stuff I see every day. What gives?" Joel Barlow introduces us to hasty pudding with "Gallic flags, that o'er their heights unfurl'd, / Bear death to kings, and freedom to the world" (ll. 3-4). Marcel Duchamp places a serious artwork in a serious museum (though it is really only a urinal turned on its side). The Journal of Mundane Behavior publishes in-depth academic studies of wall calendars, sitting , and shaving.

Mock epics, ready-mades and other celebrations of the mundane are tricky. It is tempting to feel like the butt of a joke at times when we encounter such works, because they contain an element of parody, sometimes at the reader's or viewer's expense. However, most students of the mundane are actually very serious about their subject matter. For example, it would be difficult to argue that Joel Barlow wrote "The Hasty Pudding" out of hatred for his cherished mush. Beneath the veneer of mock-epic parody, Barlow makes a very serious argument against our collective disdain for things that are everyday. Disrespect for the mundane parallels disrespect for common folk within a rigid class structure. Such disrespect reinforces a traditional regard for the upper class as the only group with a life worth our consideration.

The Journal of Mundane Behavior similarly argues against a tendency in academia to focus on the peculiar and the extreme while neglecting what is directly beneath our noses. Along the same lines, the entertainment industry gives short shrift to anything that is not superlative or bizarre and thus abuses its viewers with an unremitting insistence that the normal is inferior to the extraordinary and telegraph a message to viewers that their own lives are not important. (Repeated tales of success or romance emerging from Hollywood engender their own form of mundanity, of course, and I encourage anyone reading this to submit an Outburst on either academic mundanity or Hollywood mundanity.)

Joel Barlow's "The Hasty Pudding" should serve as an inspiration for any purveyor or aficionado of the mundane. It reminds us that we are not the first to celebrate mundanity, and that doing so is not merely a joke. It also reminds us that, as you prepare our own heaping helpings of delicious hasty pudding, you should

Fear not to slaver; 'tis no deadly sin,
Like the free Frenchman, from your joyous chin
Suspend the ready napkin; or, like me,
Poise with one hand your bowl upon your knee;
Just in the zenith your wise head project,
Your full spoon, rising in a line direct,
Bold as a bucket, heeds no drops that fall,
The wide mouth'd bowl will surely catch them all. (ll. 362-369)

In other words, plunge yourself into that soupy, sticky mess. Let it dribble. Let it stain your shirt. Feel no guilt for wallowing in the mundane. It is real, and, therefore, it is good.

NOTE: You can read the poem in its entirety here in the Outburst section of the JMB web site:

John D. Schwetman is the person in charge of the Outburst section of The Journal of Mundane Behavior. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth and currently working on a book on travel narrative in twentieth-century U. S. literature.