Stevenson, read by the light of the fires of abstinence:
“Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive apprehension, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers a cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged, and had of late began to pamper. To cast in with Hyde was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and for ever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would not even be conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part, and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.”
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
Latte My Arse
I hate coffeehouses. Not the real ones, just the ones the ones you see everywhere, full of people talking straight ahead and listening to their hands, oblivious to the loud and awful music, the cost of the coffee; those in which you have to work your way through board after board to find anything that’s made primarily or substantially from coffee beans.
The haggling when you want a small coffee is a factor:
“Small, regular coffee, please.”
“Tall coffee?”
“Just make it an ‘alto.’”
Having to put in the milk or cream yourself is a further irritant: your skin and the coffeehouse so far well-protected against burns and litigation, respectively, you now have to risk charring of the epidermis by pouring boiling coffee into a plastic bag to make room for your preferred pasteurized product. Worse, to get to this stage, you first have to wait behind others who ponder the whole, skimmed or half-and-half thing as though it were the riddle of the sphinx.
Bars have this advantage: a pint is a pint, whether American or Imperial; a pint is what you ask for. You don’t have to ask for an Amazonian to satisfy your taste in the petite. Another plus is that, while people don’t have to talk to one another, compulsory listening to half a conversation is rarer, because cell phone use is more of a challenge: after a certain hour the bar is too boisterous, and during office hours the unhindered noise of a bar can rarely sound like anything else, a deterrent to calling colleagues and loved ones. (I like it when Montgomery Clift does it in The Misfits, but it’s far less gratifying to overhear the guy with the hoppy beer and pasta special tell his half of the meaning of life: “Pale Rider … Kinda hoppy … the special … primavera … five bucks …”)
These prejudices are borne only partially of genuine reflection. You can be as solitary over beer as over coffee; bar music is louder and so, when bad, worse; and now, at least with the microbreweries, you can find yourself working through board after board to find something approximating your taste in lager, ale, or stout. So it’s arguable that I have developed a dislike of coffeehouses on account of the simple fact that they don’t stock beer.
But there’s more to it than that. Take Starbucks, today, noon, for example. Having bought a short-tall special-regular coffee, I joined the short-long line of those contemplating changing their faith from whole milk to skim milk. Distracted by the tedium, I didn’t see a young woman place her cup of coffee, with tremendous sleight of hand, behind the half-and-half container, the cup quite invisible from all perceivable angles and to all but fellow members of the magic circle. It was a trick of tremendous cunning, and foolishly I reached for and lifted the thermos as vertically as any human being would and watched it unfold, or spill (over the counter, over the floor, over the jeans of a third party), in slow motion. For no good reason, I offered to buy the magician another, and for no better reason, instead of apologizing, or at least politely declining, she uttered the following words, so full of presumption, entitlement, of all that is wrong with these establishments; five dollar words worthy of infamy – “Venti Skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte.”
The haggling when you want a small coffee is a factor:
“Small, regular coffee, please.”
“Tall coffee?”
“Just make it an ‘alto.’”
Having to put in the milk or cream yourself is a further irritant: your skin and the coffeehouse so far well-protected against burns and litigation, respectively, you now have to risk charring of the epidermis by pouring boiling coffee into a plastic bag to make room for your preferred pasteurized product. Worse, to get to this stage, you first have to wait behind others who ponder the whole, skimmed or half-and-half thing as though it were the riddle of the sphinx.
Bars have this advantage: a pint is a pint, whether American or Imperial; a pint is what you ask for. You don’t have to ask for an Amazonian to satisfy your taste in the petite. Another plus is that, while people don’t have to talk to one another, compulsory listening to half a conversation is rarer, because cell phone use is more of a challenge: after a certain hour the bar is too boisterous, and during office hours the unhindered noise of a bar can rarely sound like anything else, a deterrent to calling colleagues and loved ones. (I like it when Montgomery Clift does it in The Misfits, but it’s far less gratifying to overhear the guy with the hoppy beer and pasta special tell his half of the meaning of life: “Pale Rider … Kinda hoppy … the special … primavera … five bucks …”)
These prejudices are borne only partially of genuine reflection. You can be as solitary over beer as over coffee; bar music is louder and so, when bad, worse; and now, at least with the microbreweries, you can find yourself working through board after board to find something approximating your taste in lager, ale, or stout. So it’s arguable that I have developed a dislike of coffeehouses on account of the simple fact that they don’t stock beer.
But there’s more to it than that. Take Starbucks, today, noon, for example. Having bought a short-tall special-regular coffee, I joined the short-long line of those contemplating changing their faith from whole milk to skim milk. Distracted by the tedium, I didn’t see a young woman place her cup of coffee, with tremendous sleight of hand, behind the half-and-half container, the cup quite invisible from all perceivable angles and to all but fellow members of the magic circle. It was a trick of tremendous cunning, and foolishly I reached for and lifted the thermos as vertically as any human being would and watched it unfold, or spill (over the counter, over the floor, over the jeans of a third party), in slow motion. For no good reason, I offered to buy the magician another, and for no better reason, instead of apologizing, or at least politely declining, she uttered the following words, so full of presumption, entitlement, of all that is wrong with these establishments; five dollar words worthy of infamy – “Venti Skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte.”
Thursday, January 28, 2010
The Philosopher's Song
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel.
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach 'ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself,
Was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shanty was particularly ill.
Plato they say could stick it away,
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
And Hobbes was fond of his dram.
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart.
“I drink, therefore I am.’
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed.
Maybe that’s why they’re difficult to read when sober, and make so much more sense when drunk.
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel.
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach 'ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself,
Was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shanty was particularly ill.
Plato they say could stick it away,
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
And Hobbes was fond of his dram.
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart.
“I drink, therefore I am.’
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed.
Maybe that’s why they’re difficult to read when sober, and make so much more sense when drunk.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
White Male, 45
I was to follow up with my doctor three days after turning up at the ER. That would have been New Year’s Eve. The new year came in on a Friday morning, so there was the weekend as well. And then there were another three weeks that somehow went by, and then this week, when the pain shifted to a higher register. I finally made it today.
The doctor’s hands did their work. My concern was the liver. “That’s on the other side,” he said; “The other side.” He says most things twice, so I got to feel stupid twice. He has Tourette’s (which the Microsoft Word spellchecker wants to change to Toilettes). To avoid whatever it is he would otherwise do involuntarily, he intermittently stares at something on the ceiling, and, to get back to the matter at hand, he repeats whatever he has just said.
Twice relieved, then, of fears for the liver, I moved onto pneumonia. But the doctor’s hands had located the spleen.
I got a referral for a CT scan. I stripped and lay flat, feet pointing towards the electromagnetic donut hole. When the IV was inserted, there was the taste of salt and then the taste of ball bearings, just as advised. The sensation around the groin that was supposed to quickly follow was a complete disappointment.
The doctor found hardened and hardening blood between the ribs and whatever else is in there which can conspire with ribs to capture and harden blood. I missed exactly what he said, twice. He’ll be talking to me soon.
In the meantime, I have disk and can’t resist a look. CT imaging - from a number of x-ray beams and detectors operating, as you move through the tunnel, on a spiral path - has been compared to looking into a loaf of bread by cutting it into thin slices. This is not a comforting thought.
I know what I’m looking at. I’m not saying I understand what I’m looking at. There’s a fearsome shadow covering the lower third of one lung, for example, but I can’t tell if it’s inside, in front of, or behind it, and that is just about the only body part I recognize (along with the spine, which I know from the Natural History Museum): the rest of it could be something viewed in night vision from the bottom of the ocean, or an image, before enhancement, sent back from the Hubble telescope.
But I know what I’m looking at, nevertheless. With the hand that has lifted glass after glass for decades, held the burning cigarettes for as long, and shoveled up a reckless diet, I click the mouse on frame after unlovely frame of the vulnerable, ephemeral viscera, cavities, and bones of a white male, forty-five. And he doesn’t look good. They never do, from the inside. But this one doesn’t look good at all.
The doctor’s hands did their work. My concern was the liver. “That’s on the other side,” he said; “The other side.” He says most things twice, so I got to feel stupid twice. He has Tourette’s (which the Microsoft Word spellchecker wants to change to Toilettes). To avoid whatever it is he would otherwise do involuntarily, he intermittently stares at something on the ceiling, and, to get back to the matter at hand, he repeats whatever he has just said.
Twice relieved, then, of fears for the liver, I moved onto pneumonia. But the doctor’s hands had located the spleen.
I got a referral for a CT scan. I stripped and lay flat, feet pointing towards the electromagnetic donut hole. When the IV was inserted, there was the taste of salt and then the taste of ball bearings, just as advised. The sensation around the groin that was supposed to quickly follow was a complete disappointment.
The doctor found hardened and hardening blood between the ribs and whatever else is in there which can conspire with ribs to capture and harden blood. I missed exactly what he said, twice. He’ll be talking to me soon.
In the meantime, I have disk and can’t resist a look. CT imaging - from a number of x-ray beams and detectors operating, as you move through the tunnel, on a spiral path - has been compared to looking into a loaf of bread by cutting it into thin slices. This is not a comforting thought.
I know what I’m looking at. I’m not saying I understand what I’m looking at. There’s a fearsome shadow covering the lower third of one lung, for example, but I can’t tell if it’s inside, in front of, or behind it, and that is just about the only body part I recognize (along with the spine, which I know from the Natural History Museum): the rest of it could be something viewed in night vision from the bottom of the ocean, or an image, before enhancement, sent back from the Hubble telescope.
But I know what I’m looking at, nevertheless. With the hand that has lifted glass after glass for decades, held the burning cigarettes for as long, and shoveled up a reckless diet, I click the mouse on frame after unlovely frame of the vulnerable, ephemeral viscera, cavities, and bones of a white male, forty-five. And he doesn’t look good. They never do, from the inside. But this one doesn’t look good at all.
Piss Artists
In a short essay on Louis Armstrong, Clive James provides the following footnote on Bix Beiderbecke:
“Beiderbecke put as much energy into self-destruction as into creation. His father didn’t want him to play jazz. Trying to prove to his father that his music could get him somewhere, the prodigal son sent home copies of all his records. His father never listened to them. You could call that a psychological obstacle: but there were no other obstacles that began to compare with what Armstrong had to put up with every day. The main reason Beiderbecke could not stop drinking was that he was an alcoholic. His short adult life was a long suicide.”
“But,” the footnote continues, “the cautionary tale had an awkward corollary: his underlying melancholy got into his tone, and helped to make it unmistakable … Even his upbeat solos were saturated with prescient grief, and the slow numbers remind you of Ford Madox Ford’s catch line for The Good Soldier: this is the saddest story ever told.”
Is there the awkward corollary of a link between alcoholism and creativity?
Over half of the American Nobel laureates of literature were alcoholic. So what? This proves nothing more than the fact that over half of the American Nobel laureates of literature were alcoholic.
For Blake, “The road of excess leads to the place of wisdom." Plato was more specific: “It is of no purpose for the sober man to knock at the door of the Muses." These are comfortable thoughts for the alcoholic artist, especially the artist who has chosen art specifically for the fringe benefit of alcoholism.
The only fair assessment is an impossible one: whether this or that writer or musician or painter compares favorably with the artist they did not become.
That said, several of the classic “proofs” are not very convincing. Hemingway got round to breakfasting on tea and gin and filled the day with absinthe, whisky, vodka, wine (and hypertension, kidney and liver disease, edema of the ankles, high blood urea, mild diabetes, impotence), but he also got round to some pretty lousy work. He was dead at sixty-two. Lowry wrote between the poles of two obsessions, literature and alcohol, but he wrote one of those books about an alcoholic trying to write a book, which doesn’t mean that the grander theme alluded him as much as it did Geoffrey Firmin but at least suggests it. He was dead at forty-eight. Drink and immense distraction forced Carver to work in miniature, and while he immaculately crafted characters caught up in the symptoms and disease of alcohol, he would have preferred a kinder muse. (No other word will do./For that’s what it was. Gravy./Gravy, these past ten years./Alive, sober, working, loving, and being loved by a good woman …) Dead at fifty.
“Beiderbecke put as much energy into self-destruction as into creation. His father didn’t want him to play jazz. Trying to prove to his father that his music could get him somewhere, the prodigal son sent home copies of all his records. His father never listened to them. You could call that a psychological obstacle: but there were no other obstacles that began to compare with what Armstrong had to put up with every day. The main reason Beiderbecke could not stop drinking was that he was an alcoholic. His short adult life was a long suicide.”
“But,” the footnote continues, “the cautionary tale had an awkward corollary: his underlying melancholy got into his tone, and helped to make it unmistakable … Even his upbeat solos were saturated with prescient grief, and the slow numbers remind you of Ford Madox Ford’s catch line for The Good Soldier: this is the saddest story ever told.”
Is there the awkward corollary of a link between alcoholism and creativity?
Over half of the American Nobel laureates of literature were alcoholic. So what? This proves nothing more than the fact that over half of the American Nobel laureates of literature were alcoholic.
For Blake, “The road of excess leads to the place of wisdom." Plato was more specific: “It is of no purpose for the sober man to knock at the door of the Muses." These are comfortable thoughts for the alcoholic artist, especially the artist who has chosen art specifically for the fringe benefit of alcoholism.
The only fair assessment is an impossible one: whether this or that writer or musician or painter compares favorably with the artist they did not become.
That said, several of the classic “proofs” are not very convincing. Hemingway got round to breakfasting on tea and gin and filled the day with absinthe, whisky, vodka, wine (and hypertension, kidney and liver disease, edema of the ankles, high blood urea, mild diabetes, impotence), but he also got round to some pretty lousy work. He was dead at sixty-two. Lowry wrote between the poles of two obsessions, literature and alcohol, but he wrote one of those books about an alcoholic trying to write a book, which doesn’t mean that the grander theme alluded him as much as it did Geoffrey Firmin but at least suggests it. He was dead at forty-eight. Drink and immense distraction forced Carver to work in miniature, and while he immaculately crafted characters caught up in the symptoms and disease of alcohol, he would have preferred a kinder muse. (No other word will do./For that’s what it was. Gravy./Gravy, these past ten years./Alive, sober, working, loving, and being loved by a good woman …) Dead at fifty.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
My Name Is Joe
Ken Loach doesn’t switch on the camera until the punch line, but through the darkness we hear the voice of Peter Mullan – “gritty, warm, with lots of energy,” according to the screenplay, “over and above the occasional smoker’s cough, rustling of chairs and a lone irregular snorer” – improvising around the following:
VOICE-OVER
It wuz Shanks here who got me tae ma first meetin’ … Fuck’s sake … Ah came in here … a cross between Rambo and a bear wi’ a sore arse … sat there next tae the door, runners at the ready, wi’ a scowl on ma face that wid turn milk … and as luck would have it, it was one o’ they real blood-and-thunder jobs.
At the top table they had this guy who had sliced up mair bodies than Zorro … he ended up daein’ life for stabbin’ a postman … Ah sat there wi’ a trace o’ a smile, a distant sense o’ satisfaction. Inside Ah let out this ‘eetsie-weetsie’ little snort … ‘Ah, that’s whit an alcoholic is!’
Anyway, this poor fucker went through the mincer … after fifteen years’ porridge he ended up in a hostel … in a twinkle, back in the jungle, back on the booze … back in the nick, back on the streets, back in the nick, back on the streets … a choo-choo train straight tae the gutter … The mair desperate his life got, ma scowl began to fade and the little smile began to grow … Another snort, ‘Ah … that’s whit an alcoholic is!’
Shanks here had an eye on me aw’ the time, and, little did I know, he knew whit was passin’ through ma tiny brain …
Anyway, poor old Zorro ended up on the streets, toes wi’ gangrene, arse out o’ his pants, matted hair, sick on his beard, you know the score … By the end o’ this catalogue o’ utter misery and degradation, I wuz nearly dancing’ wi delight …
The meeting ended, Ah shook hands with these poor unfortunates, and Ah marched oot of ma first AA meetin; and Ah thought to masel’ …
‘THE ROOMS’. ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, GLASGOW
JOE
… Ma name is Joe … and thank fuck, Ah’m not an alcoholic!
I read the screenplay first, and heard the voice - authentic, luckless, defiant - as soon as I read these first few lines. I was reading it in the Horse Shoe Bar, early 1999. I realized why the voice was so vivid. It wasn’t that a picture of Mullan, whom I had seen before, was on the cover; nor was it that Paul Laverty had captured the demotic rhythms of the Glasgow vernacular. The voice was clear because, at my elbow, ranting (all those years later, still with good cause, about Thatcher), was … Peter Mullan.
The screenplay came with a copy of the twelve steps (reprinted with the permission of the General Services Board of Alcoholics Anonymous GB Ltd.) and a list of AA contact addresses (all of which, for whatever reason, were, and still are in my copy, in London - nearest tube, depending on your choice: King’s Cross or Angel, Elephant and Castle, Westferry) as well as the address and phone number of the Salvation Army. I didn’t read the steps. Mullen might have read them, since he won the Best Actor award at Cannes for playing a man trying to live on them.
Two thoughts come to mind: one is just remembering spending a good part of a good afternoon in Glasgow drinking with Peter Mullen; the other is that this is enough irony for one day.
VOICE-OVER
It wuz Shanks here who got me tae ma first meetin’ … Fuck’s sake … Ah came in here … a cross between Rambo and a bear wi’ a sore arse … sat there next tae the door, runners at the ready, wi’ a scowl on ma face that wid turn milk … and as luck would have it, it was one o’ they real blood-and-thunder jobs.
At the top table they had this guy who had sliced up mair bodies than Zorro … he ended up daein’ life for stabbin’ a postman … Ah sat there wi’ a trace o’ a smile, a distant sense o’ satisfaction. Inside Ah let out this ‘eetsie-weetsie’ little snort … ‘Ah, that’s whit an alcoholic is!’
Anyway, this poor fucker went through the mincer … after fifteen years’ porridge he ended up in a hostel … in a twinkle, back in the jungle, back on the booze … back in the nick, back on the streets, back in the nick, back on the streets … a choo-choo train straight tae the gutter … The mair desperate his life got, ma scowl began to fade and the little smile began to grow … Another snort, ‘Ah … that’s whit an alcoholic is!’
Shanks here had an eye on me aw’ the time, and, little did I know, he knew whit was passin’ through ma tiny brain …
Anyway, poor old Zorro ended up on the streets, toes wi’ gangrene, arse out o’ his pants, matted hair, sick on his beard, you know the score … By the end o’ this catalogue o’ utter misery and degradation, I wuz nearly dancing’ wi delight …
The meeting ended, Ah shook hands with these poor unfortunates, and Ah marched oot of ma first AA meetin; and Ah thought to masel’ …
‘THE ROOMS’. ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, GLASGOW
JOE
… Ma name is Joe … and thank fuck, Ah’m not an alcoholic!
I read the screenplay first, and heard the voice - authentic, luckless, defiant - as soon as I read these first few lines. I was reading it in the Horse Shoe Bar, early 1999. I realized why the voice was so vivid. It wasn’t that a picture of Mullan, whom I had seen before, was on the cover; nor was it that Paul Laverty had captured the demotic rhythms of the Glasgow vernacular. The voice was clear because, at my elbow, ranting (all those years later, still with good cause, about Thatcher), was … Peter Mullan.
The screenplay came with a copy of the twelve steps (reprinted with the permission of the General Services Board of Alcoholics Anonymous GB Ltd.) and a list of AA contact addresses (all of which, for whatever reason, were, and still are in my copy, in London - nearest tube, depending on your choice: King’s Cross or Angel, Elephant and Castle, Westferry) as well as the address and phone number of the Salvation Army. I didn’t read the steps. Mullen might have read them, since he won the Best Actor award at Cannes for playing a man trying to live on them.
Two thoughts come to mind: one is just remembering spending a good part of a good afternoon in Glasgow drinking with Peter Mullen; the other is that this is enough irony for one day.
I've Been to Harlem
There was a song we sang in infant school:
I’ve been to Harlem, I’ve been to Dover
I’ve traveled this wide world all over …
Who would have imagined then, the child, now grown … in London, Paris, Madrid, New York, Chicago, Washington, DC; on transatlantic flights, the Metroliner, the Capitol Limited; behind the wheel in Michigan, New Jersey, Maryland; in offices, libraries, universities, theatres, galleries; in the early hours of morning, at breakfast and lunch, on long afternoons, at night, even in sleep; in the company of family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, rivals, strangers, and when alone … plastered, smashed, bombed, wasted, tanked, loaded, three sheets to the wind? Over and over. Paraletic. Pished.
Over, over, three times over
Drink all the brandywine and turn the glasses over.
I’ve been to Harlem, I’ve been to Dover
I’ve traveled this wide world all over …
Who would have imagined then, the child, now grown … in London, Paris, Madrid, New York, Chicago, Washington, DC; on transatlantic flights, the Metroliner, the Capitol Limited; behind the wheel in Michigan, New Jersey, Maryland; in offices, libraries, universities, theatres, galleries; in the early hours of morning, at breakfast and lunch, on long afternoons, at night, even in sleep; in the company of family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, rivals, strangers, and when alone … plastered, smashed, bombed, wasted, tanked, loaded, three sheets to the wind? Over and over. Paraletic. Pished.
Over, over, three times over
Drink all the brandywine and turn the glasses over.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Beethoven and I
Beethoven died of neurosyphilis, otosclerosis, brain trauma, or he died of something else. According to Professor Paul Wolf, writing in the Western Journal of Medicine, it was something else: an 1827 autopsy conducted by Karl Rokitansky “identified a uniformly dense skull vault and thick and shriveled auditory nerves, consistent with Paget’s disease of bone. Further investigation showed no evidence of syphilitic arteritis in the auditory arteries or recurrent otitis media. The liver, however, was atrophic, nodular, and cirrhotic.” Wolf boldly concludes: “Beethoven died of alcoholic liver disease, the result of alcohol misuse by a musician whose progressive hearing loss led to depression.”
What difference would it make if Beethoven was a drunk? None to the music, obviously, except maybe the banning of it in dry counties across the nation, lest minors and the God-fearing folks responsible for putting the fear of God into those minors be brought under its malevolent spell. (In faint-hearted parts of the land, Slaughterhouse-Five was banned, and burned, for less: the single appearance of the word “motherfucker” gave rise to widespread panic that those exposed to the book would suddenly become possessed with the desire to go out and fuck their mothers.) Banned in dry counties, on the other hand, Beethoven would be compulsory listening in Nevada.
What difference would it make to alcoholics if Beethoven was a drunk? Recovering alcoholics are reassuringly informed that there is no moral stigma to their disease, but mostly by their physicians and each other. There are plenty of people for whom alcoholism is sin, weakness of character, right next door to (voluntarily) sleeping outside the Canadian Embassy. So wouldn’t it be good to have on your team a few of the indispensables – Champagne Shakespeare, say, Leonardo the Lush, or Nine Noggins Newton?
For personal reasons, as well as perfectly objective ones (as far as objectivity goes in these matters), I’d have Beethoven on my side. With proud ignorance, I used to say that I disliked symphonic music. Then, not so long ago, I heard the Eroica on PBS. Later that day I bought it and played it several times, copied it onto the I-Pod and fell asleep to it. Then I bought the Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Symphonies, then the Fourth, Seventh, and Eighth, and then the First and Second, in that order. I bought a copy of George Grove’s Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies, the first comprehensive study of the nine, initially published in 1896. From a second hand bookstore, I bought a copy of George Marek’s Beethoven, Biography of a Genius. From Border’s, I got a copy of Lewis Lockwood’s Beethoven, The Music and the Life and Edmund Morris’s Beethoven, The Universal Composer. All of this took under a week. By the end of another week I had the five piano concertos, the violin concerto, the complete piano sonatas, trios for violin, viola and cello and piano, violin and cello, the Missa Solemnis, and the late string quartets. For a while, Beethoven and I were inseparable. (Clive James said that the late string quartets waited for him for thirty years after he “went mad” for the Eroica; no way is he getting on the team.)
The above-mentioned Lewis Lockwood, Research Professor of Music at Harvard, recently concluded that whether Beethoven had cirrhosis of the liver remains speculative, but that he drank alcohol “in quantities” (whatever that means) is not to be doubted. Lockwood appears to be an impartial judge on the matter. He makes no mention of Doctor Rokitansky who, for his part, went on to personally conduct thirty thousand autopsies, two a day, seven days a week, every week of the year for forty five years. Professor Wolf calls Rokitansky “the father of modern morbid anatomy.” Morbid’s not the word. The man is not to be trusted. So the best bet is that Beethoven liked a drink and that’s about the extent of it.
A more inspiring thought remains, although you’d need a hammer to get the evidence to fit: Beethoven was indeed an alcoholic, but a recovering one. Between the Second and Final Maturity lie the “fallow” years, a twilight zone of diminished creativity that stretched from 1813 to 1817. Sounds like a bender to me. And what does he come up with after four years of debauchery? The Hammerklavier Sonata, the “Diabelli” Variations, the Ninth Symphony. Stick that in your moral stigma and smoke it!
What difference would it make if Beethoven was a drunk? None to the music, obviously, except maybe the banning of it in dry counties across the nation, lest minors and the God-fearing folks responsible for putting the fear of God into those minors be brought under its malevolent spell. (In faint-hearted parts of the land, Slaughterhouse-Five was banned, and burned, for less: the single appearance of the word “motherfucker” gave rise to widespread panic that those exposed to the book would suddenly become possessed with the desire to go out and fuck their mothers.) Banned in dry counties, on the other hand, Beethoven would be compulsory listening in Nevada.
What difference would it make to alcoholics if Beethoven was a drunk? Recovering alcoholics are reassuringly informed that there is no moral stigma to their disease, but mostly by their physicians and each other. There are plenty of people for whom alcoholism is sin, weakness of character, right next door to (voluntarily) sleeping outside the Canadian Embassy. So wouldn’t it be good to have on your team a few of the indispensables – Champagne Shakespeare, say, Leonardo the Lush, or Nine Noggins Newton?
For personal reasons, as well as perfectly objective ones (as far as objectivity goes in these matters), I’d have Beethoven on my side. With proud ignorance, I used to say that I disliked symphonic music. Then, not so long ago, I heard the Eroica on PBS. Later that day I bought it and played it several times, copied it onto the I-Pod and fell asleep to it. Then I bought the Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Symphonies, then the Fourth, Seventh, and Eighth, and then the First and Second, in that order. I bought a copy of George Grove’s Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies, the first comprehensive study of the nine, initially published in 1896. From a second hand bookstore, I bought a copy of George Marek’s Beethoven, Biography of a Genius. From Border’s, I got a copy of Lewis Lockwood’s Beethoven, The Music and the Life and Edmund Morris’s Beethoven, The Universal Composer. All of this took under a week. By the end of another week I had the five piano concertos, the violin concerto, the complete piano sonatas, trios for violin, viola and cello and piano, violin and cello, the Missa Solemnis, and the late string quartets. For a while, Beethoven and I were inseparable. (Clive James said that the late string quartets waited for him for thirty years after he “went mad” for the Eroica; no way is he getting on the team.)
The above-mentioned Lewis Lockwood, Research Professor of Music at Harvard, recently concluded that whether Beethoven had cirrhosis of the liver remains speculative, but that he drank alcohol “in quantities” (whatever that means) is not to be doubted. Lockwood appears to be an impartial judge on the matter. He makes no mention of Doctor Rokitansky who, for his part, went on to personally conduct thirty thousand autopsies, two a day, seven days a week, every week of the year for forty five years. Professor Wolf calls Rokitansky “the father of modern morbid anatomy.” Morbid’s not the word. The man is not to be trusted. So the best bet is that Beethoven liked a drink and that’s about the extent of it.
A more inspiring thought remains, although you’d need a hammer to get the evidence to fit: Beethoven was indeed an alcoholic, but a recovering one. Between the Second and Final Maturity lie the “fallow” years, a twilight zone of diminished creativity that stretched from 1813 to 1817. Sounds like a bender to me. And what does he come up with after four years of debauchery? The Hammerklavier Sonata, the “Diabelli” Variations, the Ninth Symphony. Stick that in your moral stigma and smoke it!
The Trouble with Poetry
John Barleycorn was a hero bold,
Of noble enterprise,
For if you do but taste his blood,
‘Twill make your courage rise.
… is that sometimes the mechanics of meter will force you to omit the word “false.”
Of noble enterprise,
For if you do but taste his blood,
‘Twill make your courage rise.
… is that sometimes the mechanics of meter will force you to omit the word “false.”
Saturday, January 23, 2010
How late it was
…, how late. No more mornings like this, sniffing like Sammy?
“Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer head; then the other words; there’s something far far wrong; ye’re no a good man, ye’re just no a good man. Edging back into awareness, of where ye are: here, slumped in this corner, with these thoughts filling ye. And oh christ his back was sore; stiff, and the head pounding. He shivered and hunched up his shoulders; shut his eyes, rubbed into the corners with his fingertips; seeing all kinds of spots and lights. Where in the name of fuck …”
“Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer head; then the other words; there’s something far far wrong; ye’re no a good man, ye’re just no a good man. Edging back into awareness, of where ye are: here, slumped in this corner, with these thoughts filling ye. And oh christ his back was sore; stiff, and the head pounding. He shivered and hunched up his shoulders; shut his eyes, rubbed into the corners with his fingertips; seeing all kinds of spots and lights. Where in the name of fuck …”
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The Broken Compass
I broke my compass. I’d be walking one way and all the traffic – people traffic, actual traffic – would be coming towards me, and when I turned around and headed in the other direction all the traffic would still be head on. Someone was messing around with the street signs. I’d be in the wrong part of town when I wanted to be sober, and in the right part when I wanted to be drunk, which basically meant that wrong was right and right was wrong. Sometimes it would feel like I was in two places at once, the body here, the mind in an undisclosed location, or there was the feeling of being in transit, neither here nor there. The worst was just being holed up somewhere among the lost and found, with no recollection of arriving or having set off from elsewhere, just the feeling that you had been mugged and dumped.
Some non-sane states of mind come closer than others to describing these feelings, which is not to say they hit the mark. Sufferers of Dissociative Fugue, for example, may wake up many miles from where they last recall being with no idea of how they got there. During the temporary unconscious or extra-conscious state, which can last for hours or weeks, the wanderer may even don a new identity, start over, as it were, and then remember nothing when roused from the state in a new bed, in new clothes, or in a new town. Agatha Christie is alleged to have suffered from Dissociative Fugue, which is ironic: her disappearance and reappearance eleven days later in a faraway hotel and with an assumed name remains an Agatha Christie mystery.
A.C. Grayling summarizes the condition as follows:
“The victim sets off on a journey, seemingly purposeful and conscious, but actually in an altered, self-forgetful state of mind, travelling impulsively, and directionlessly, perhaps across whole continents – and then “wakes” in astonishment to find himself far from home, having in the meantime behaved very uncharacteristically. According to recent studies, there is no such thing as fugue considered as a separate mental disease; non-conscious wandering can be caused by brain injury and a variety of illnesses. But the majority view is that fugue is a choice that a stressed mind makes to escape one or another kind of intolerable situation, as if it wished to seek a better life.”
Indeed: a choice that a stressed mind makes to escape one or another kind of intolerable situation.
Some non-sane states of mind come closer than others to describing these feelings, which is not to say they hit the mark. Sufferers of Dissociative Fugue, for example, may wake up many miles from where they last recall being with no idea of how they got there. During the temporary unconscious or extra-conscious state, which can last for hours or weeks, the wanderer may even don a new identity, start over, as it were, and then remember nothing when roused from the state in a new bed, in new clothes, or in a new town. Agatha Christie is alleged to have suffered from Dissociative Fugue, which is ironic: her disappearance and reappearance eleven days later in a faraway hotel and with an assumed name remains an Agatha Christie mystery.
A.C. Grayling summarizes the condition as follows:
“The victim sets off on a journey, seemingly purposeful and conscious, but actually in an altered, self-forgetful state of mind, travelling impulsively, and directionlessly, perhaps across whole continents – and then “wakes” in astonishment to find himself far from home, having in the meantime behaved very uncharacteristically. According to recent studies, there is no such thing as fugue considered as a separate mental disease; non-conscious wandering can be caused by brain injury and a variety of illnesses. But the majority view is that fugue is a choice that a stressed mind makes to escape one or another kind of intolerable situation, as if it wished to seek a better life.”
Indeed: a choice that a stressed mind makes to escape one or another kind of intolerable situation.
More Martin
From Money:
"Now the way I figured it I had six realistic options. I could sack out right away, with some scotch and a few Serafem. I could go back to the Happy Isles and see what little Moby was up to. I could call Doris Arthur. I could catch a live sex show around the corner, in bleeding Seventh Avenue. I could go out and get drunk. I could stay in and get drunk.
"In the end I stayed in and got drunk. The trouble was, I did all the other things first."
"Now the way I figured it I had six realistic options. I could sack out right away, with some scotch and a few Serafem. I could go back to the Happy Isles and see what little Moby was up to. I could call Doris Arthur. I could catch a live sex show around the corner, in bleeding Seventh Avenue. I could go out and get drunk. I could stay in and get drunk.
"In the end I stayed in and got drunk. The trouble was, I did all the other things first."
The Alcoholic Genre
Please confine your discussions to your problems with alcohol. This is always suggested, and sometimes mentioned by way of complaint. The complaint I heard was happily ignored, happily because it was made in a group that wanders far and wide in its discussions and rarely fails to raise one’s awareness that, even in far-flung places, there are signposts pointing back to drink and others pointing to continued sobriety.
There’s work and the absence of it, relationships broken, mended or long gone, the wolf at the door, the coof at the office, and the dogs people used to bark at. Some people speak without profanity; others just can’t fucking help themselves. A few have remarkable timing and could fill comedy clubs if anonymity wasn’t an issue; some shed heavy burdens with light remarks; and occasionally someone will appear to be reading aloud from a poorly transcribed copy of Beowulf. What people don’t talk about and the way people never talk would be two short lists.
Someone recently said that he felt he was listening to the same thing over and over. He said it several times, as though to emphasize his point and mine. It’s partly true because of the way some people talk, but more so on account of the way some people listen.
Sometimes there are certain expectations of content, form, and maybe even technique. But, as is appropriate for a condition that lasts and outlasts the four seasons, you can catch elements of the archetypal myths of each: comedy (sometimes you have to laugh); romance (getting lost in the forest); tragedy (the goat stories, heavy-handed character flaws); and satire (our former vaunted worth withering in the heat of – Heaven forfend! – some newly acquired moral purpose).
Given the mix, though, perhaps the most descriptive fit would be tragicomedy: for here are the laughs and diversions and there the looming calamity. But maybe the catastrophe doesn’t come to pass. A surprising, improbable reversal of fortune has occurred. And maybe that’s why we’re here, to remind others and to be reminded ourselves of this happy fact and that there’s no need, anymore, to exit pursued by a bear.
Unless Beowulf starts up again.
There’s work and the absence of it, relationships broken, mended or long gone, the wolf at the door, the coof at the office, and the dogs people used to bark at. Some people speak without profanity; others just can’t fucking help themselves. A few have remarkable timing and could fill comedy clubs if anonymity wasn’t an issue; some shed heavy burdens with light remarks; and occasionally someone will appear to be reading aloud from a poorly transcribed copy of Beowulf. What people don’t talk about and the way people never talk would be two short lists.
Someone recently said that he felt he was listening to the same thing over and over. He said it several times, as though to emphasize his point and mine. It’s partly true because of the way some people talk, but more so on account of the way some people listen.
Sometimes there are certain expectations of content, form, and maybe even technique. But, as is appropriate for a condition that lasts and outlasts the four seasons, you can catch elements of the archetypal myths of each: comedy (sometimes you have to laugh); romance (getting lost in the forest); tragedy (the goat stories, heavy-handed character flaws); and satire (our former vaunted worth withering in the heat of – Heaven forfend! – some newly acquired moral purpose).
Given the mix, though, perhaps the most descriptive fit would be tragicomedy: for here are the laughs and diversions and there the looming calamity. But maybe the catastrophe doesn’t come to pass. A surprising, improbable reversal of fortune has occurred. And maybe that’s why we’re here, to remind others and to be reminded ourselves of this happy fact and that there’s no need, anymore, to exit pursued by a bear.
Unless Beowulf starts up again.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Enter Macduff and Lenox
How many mundane notions in the morning seemed to sparkle through the wine at night? And how many of the night’s ideas were not, by morning, useless scribbles again? Enter Macduff and Lenox.
MACDUFF
Was it so late, friend, ere you went to bed,
That you do lie so late?
PORTER
Faith, Sir, we were carousing till the second cock;
and drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things.
MACDUFF
What three things does drink especially provoke?
PORTER
Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine.
Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes;it provokes the desire,
but it takes away the performance.
Therefore, much drink may be said to be
an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him;
it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not
stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep,
and, giving him the lie, leaves him.
MACDUFF
Was it so late, friend, ere you went to bed,
That you do lie so late?
PORTER
Faith, Sir, we were carousing till the second cock;
and drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things.
MACDUFF
What three things does drink especially provoke?
PORTER
Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine.
Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes;it provokes the desire,
but it takes away the performance.
Therefore, much drink may be said to be
an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him;
it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not
stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep,
and, giving him the lie, leaves him.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Toad's List
One morning Toad sat in bed.
“I have many things to do,” he said. “I will write them down on a list so that I can remember them.”
Toad wrote on a piece of paper:
A List of things to do today
Then he wrote:
Wake up
“I have done that,” said Toad, and he crossed out:
Wake up
Then Toad wrote other things on the paper.
Drink Breakfast (two cans of Budweiser)
Get Dressed (check pants for smell)
Go to Frog’s House (see if he’s got any beer)
Walk with Frog to pub
Drink lunch (Guinness)
Play some drinking games with Frog
Drink supper (beer and chasers)
Have blackout
“There,” said Toad. “Now my day is all written down.”
He got out of bed and drank two cans of Budweiser. Then Toad crossed out:
Drink Breakfast (two cans of Budweiser)
Toad took his clothes out of the closet, carefully smelling his pants, and put on the cleanest dirty pair he could find. Then he crossed out:
Get Dressed (check pants for smell)
Toad put the list in his pocket. He opened the door and walked out into the morning.
Soon Toad was at Frog’s house. Toad knocked at the door.
“Hello,” said Frog.
“Look at my list of things to do,” said Toad.
“Oh,” said Frog, “that is very nice.”
Toad said, “My list tells me to inquire if you have any beer”
“Not so loud,” said Frog. “Dreadful hangover, you know. Beer’s in the fridge,” Frog said. “Get one for me while you’re at it.”
Toad said, “Okay.”
Frog said, “Hair of the dog, you know.”
Toad fetched the beers, took out his list, and crossed out:
Go to Frog’s House (see if he’s got any beer)
“Now we can walk to the pub,” said Toad.
“Just let me find my cleanest dirty pants,” said Frog.
Frog and Toad walked to the pub. Then Toad took the list from his pocket again. He crossed out:
Walk with Frog to pub
Frog and Toad were very thirsty and drank lots of lunch. Then they played some drinking games. The rules of one game were that if you didn’t know the answer to a question you had to take a drink.
Frog asked a question. Toad didn’t know the answer. So Toad took a drink.
Then Toad asked a question. Frog didn’t know the answer. So Frog took a drink.
This went on until it was the hour for supper.
By this time they were both very thirsty and ordered up a very large supper of beer and chasers.
Toad took out his list and crossed out:
Drink lunch (Guinness)
Play some drinking games with Frog
Drink supper (beer and chasers)
Just then there was a strong wind as someone opened the pub doors. It blew the list out of Toad’s hand. The list blew high up in the air.
“Help,” cried Toad. “My list is blowing away. What will I do without my list?”
“Hurry,” said Frog. “We will run and catch it.”
“But I can’t move,” cried Toad.
“Neither can I,” cried Frog.
“I cannot remember any of the things that were on my list of things to do. I will just have to sit here and do nothing,” said Toad.
Toad sat and did nothing.
Frog sat with him.
After a while, Toad said, “What were we talking about?”
“I can’t remember,” said Frog. “I think I was having a blackout.”
“That was the last thing on my list!” said Toad. Toad found a pen and wrote on the palm of his hand:
Blackout
The he crossed out:
Blackout
“There,” said Toad. “Now my day is all crossed out!”
“I am glad,” said Frog.
Then Frog went back to his blackout. And Toad had a blackout, too.
“I have many things to do,” he said. “I will write them down on a list so that I can remember them.”
Toad wrote on a piece of paper:
A List of things to do today
Then he wrote:
Wake up
“I have done that,” said Toad, and he crossed out:
Wake up
Then Toad wrote other things on the paper.
Drink Breakfast (two cans of Budweiser)
Get Dressed (check pants for smell)
Go to Frog’s House (see if he’s got any beer)
Walk with Frog to pub
Drink lunch (Guinness)
Play some drinking games with Frog
Drink supper (beer and chasers)
Have blackout
“There,” said Toad. “Now my day is all written down.”
He got out of bed and drank two cans of Budweiser. Then Toad crossed out:
Drink Breakfast (two cans of Budweiser)
Toad took his clothes out of the closet, carefully smelling his pants, and put on the cleanest dirty pair he could find. Then he crossed out:
Get Dressed (check pants for smell)
Toad put the list in his pocket. He opened the door and walked out into the morning.
Soon Toad was at Frog’s house. Toad knocked at the door.
“Hello,” said Frog.
“Look at my list of things to do,” said Toad.
“Oh,” said Frog, “that is very nice.”
Toad said, “My list tells me to inquire if you have any beer”
“Not so loud,” said Frog. “Dreadful hangover, you know. Beer’s in the fridge,” Frog said. “Get one for me while you’re at it.”
Toad said, “Okay.”
Frog said, “Hair of the dog, you know.”
Toad fetched the beers, took out his list, and crossed out:
Go to Frog’s House (see if he’s got any beer)
“Now we can walk to the pub,” said Toad.
“Just let me find my cleanest dirty pants,” said Frog.
Frog and Toad walked to the pub. Then Toad took the list from his pocket again. He crossed out:
Walk with Frog to pub
Frog and Toad were very thirsty and drank lots of lunch. Then they played some drinking games. The rules of one game were that if you didn’t know the answer to a question you had to take a drink.
Frog asked a question. Toad didn’t know the answer. So Toad took a drink.
Then Toad asked a question. Frog didn’t know the answer. So Frog took a drink.
This went on until it was the hour for supper.
By this time they were both very thirsty and ordered up a very large supper of beer and chasers.
Toad took out his list and crossed out:
Drink lunch (Guinness)
Play some drinking games with Frog
Drink supper (beer and chasers)
Just then there was a strong wind as someone opened the pub doors. It blew the list out of Toad’s hand. The list blew high up in the air.
“Help,” cried Toad. “My list is blowing away. What will I do without my list?”
“Hurry,” said Frog. “We will run and catch it.”
“But I can’t move,” cried Toad.
“Neither can I,” cried Frog.
“I cannot remember any of the things that were on my list of things to do. I will just have to sit here and do nothing,” said Toad.
Toad sat and did nothing.
Frog sat with him.
After a while, Toad said, “What were we talking about?”
“I can’t remember,” said Frog. “I think I was having a blackout.”
“That was the last thing on my list!” said Toad. Toad found a pen and wrote on the palm of his hand:
Blackout
The he crossed out:
Blackout
“There,” said Toad. “Now my day is all crossed out!”
“I am glad,” said Frog.
Then Frog went back to his blackout. And Toad had a blackout, too.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Genius!
Like the Greeks, the Romans were accustomed to drinking wine diluted with water. And like many Greeks, many Romans compensated for this observance by drinking it by the vat. The Emperor Claudius was one of them. Suetonius notes that “[i]t was seldom that Claudius left a dining-hall except gorged and sodden; he would then go to bed and sleep supine with his mouth wide open – thus allowing a feather to be put down his throat, which would bring up the superfluous food and drink as vomit.”
The Half-Horse Cousins
The Centaurs didn’t party very well. Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, learned this the hard way when he invited them to his wedding feast. He had to invite them: they were family; cousins, to be precise.
Wine was the everyday drink of all classes in Greece. The dinner or drinking party involved large quantities of the stuff, and weddings only more so. But custom had it that wine was always diluted with water, and it was considered a mark of the uncivilized to drink wine neat. Someone forgot to tell the half-horse cousins.
As soon as the drinks were served, the Centaurs pushed away the sour milk set before them, filled their silver horns from the wineskins, and knocked back a few rounds of undiluted wine. Then the Centaur Eurytion led the charge: he leapt from his stool, overturned the table, and dragged Hippodamia by the hair with the intent of raping her. Hippodamia happened to be the bride. The other Centaurs were not so fussy, and lecherously straddled whichever woman or boy was nearest.
The ensuing fight became known as the Centauromachy. Eurytion had his ears and nose cut off for his trouble. But each side lost favorites, and war would continue for some time after this battle was over. So everyone lost.
In the Odyssey, Antinous (who’s in the process of messing up another feast by calling the disguised Odysseus a “bleary vagabond”) puts it this way:
Here is the evil wine can do
to those who swig it down. Even the centaur
Eurytion, in Peirithous’ hall
among the Lapithai, came to a bloody end
because of wine; wine ruined him; it crazed him,
drove him wild for rape in that great house.
The princes cornered him in fury, leaping on him
to drag him out and crop his ears and nose.
Drink had destroyed his mind, and so he ended
in that mutilation – fool that he was.
Centaurs and men made war for this,
But the drunkard first brought it upon himself.
The myth has been much used by philosophers and head-doctors to reflect upon the interior struggle between cultured and ignorant behavior, moderate and unbalanced action, civilized and barbaric being. It is a (frequently repudiated) extended metaphor for the divided self. It’s certainly not a bad one, given the role of wine, for the alcoholic who has arrived at the point where he can only choose to be a sober alcoholic or a drunken one.
Hippodamia, ironically enough, means tamer of horses (hippos: horse; damazo: to tame). Whatever her skills, they were of little use with half-horses.
While we’re with the Greeks, Pythagoras is credited with the saying that drinking to achieve drunkenness is a training ground for madness. He lived between two thousand, five-hundred and eighty years ago and two thousand, five-hundred and five years ago. And I just learned the dictum a few weeks ago. I’ll speak for myself and the trouble that has mounted in all quarters of late: the drunkard first brought it upon himself.
Wine was the everyday drink of all classes in Greece. The dinner or drinking party involved large quantities of the stuff, and weddings only more so. But custom had it that wine was always diluted with water, and it was considered a mark of the uncivilized to drink wine neat. Someone forgot to tell the half-horse cousins.
As soon as the drinks were served, the Centaurs pushed away the sour milk set before them, filled their silver horns from the wineskins, and knocked back a few rounds of undiluted wine. Then the Centaur Eurytion led the charge: he leapt from his stool, overturned the table, and dragged Hippodamia by the hair with the intent of raping her. Hippodamia happened to be the bride. The other Centaurs were not so fussy, and lecherously straddled whichever woman or boy was nearest.
The ensuing fight became known as the Centauromachy. Eurytion had his ears and nose cut off for his trouble. But each side lost favorites, and war would continue for some time after this battle was over. So everyone lost.
In the Odyssey, Antinous (who’s in the process of messing up another feast by calling the disguised Odysseus a “bleary vagabond”) puts it this way:
Here is the evil wine can do
to those who swig it down. Even the centaur
Eurytion, in Peirithous’ hall
among the Lapithai, came to a bloody end
because of wine; wine ruined him; it crazed him,
drove him wild for rape in that great house.
The princes cornered him in fury, leaping on him
to drag him out and crop his ears and nose.
Drink had destroyed his mind, and so he ended
in that mutilation – fool that he was.
Centaurs and men made war for this,
But the drunkard first brought it upon himself.
The myth has been much used by philosophers and head-doctors to reflect upon the interior struggle between cultured and ignorant behavior, moderate and unbalanced action, civilized and barbaric being. It is a (frequently repudiated) extended metaphor for the divided self. It’s certainly not a bad one, given the role of wine, for the alcoholic who has arrived at the point where he can only choose to be a sober alcoholic or a drunken one.
Hippodamia, ironically enough, means tamer of horses (hippos: horse; damazo: to tame). Whatever her skills, they were of little use with half-horses.
While we’re with the Greeks, Pythagoras is credited with the saying that drinking to achieve drunkenness is a training ground for madness. He lived between two thousand, five-hundred and eighty years ago and two thousand, five-hundred and five years ago. And I just learned the dictum a few weeks ago. I’ll speak for myself and the trouble that has mounted in all quarters of late: the drunkard first brought it upon himself.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
The Rats
Some people I have spoken to have arrived at sobriety via alcohol detoxification programs. Some have had prolonged bouts of delirium tremens. I checked the dictionary: “Delirium Tremens: [L = trembling delirium] delirium with tremors and terrifying delusions, occurring esp. as a withdrawal symptom in chronic alcoholism.” So that’s a disordered state of mind (derangement, madness, insanity, irrationality, hysteria) with the shakes and seeing or hearing things that aren’t really there.
Wikipedia lists a few colloquialisms for this state of affairs: the DTs, the horrors, the fear, the abdabs, the jimjams, the rats, or, my favorite, jazz hands. The same source notes that afflicted individuals, in 1930s Harlem slang, were referred to as “jitterbugs.”
The delusions don’t have to be nasty – I know one man who called the police: two guys were stealing cars by lifting them onto a truck with their bare hands, and they had lions posted on the corner to make sure no one approached them – but they usually are. More than a few people I have listened and spoken to have felt that the dreaded "they" were after them, at the very door, their nastiest emissaries banging on it. Some have felt talked about, hunted, and haunted. Others have heard voices. So when that trembling delirium turns up, it’s usually not the jazz hands (who wouldn’t want a pair of those?): it’s the rats.
I feel lucky. For the last ten years, no matter how much I drank, I’ve barely had a hangover (a curse, of course, as well as a blessing). I would have to admit, though, to an occasionally acute sensitivity to the malevolence of some people I have found myself drinking beside, a malevolence that can dissipate with small talk, or amplify into the definite proximity of violence. For the most part, I’ve been gregarious, and tried the small talk. Occasionally, I’ve left the bar, thinking someone was going to get at least a sore face or that the bar itself was about to be robbed. I’ve thought this a rather tolerable measure of paranoia. There are, after all, plenty of bad bastards out there.
But today I remembered something I haven’t thought about for years. Ten years ago, more or less, I got less tolerably paranoid. This was my Confessions of a Justified Sinner period. I had put some thought into the Devil as a potentially interesting character in fiction. I had the inflated idea that while the great European novel could involve selling your soul for love or power, the great American novel would have the main character getting right down to selling someone else’s soul, or working out some kind of franchise arrangement for the soul selling business. So the Devil- not so much the theological personification of evil as the Walter Huston character in All That Money Can Buy – was much on my mind.
And did he not start turning up? For a while, he would be somewhere in whatever bar I was in. That would be him on the stool at the end in the checkered hat, hiding his face. Or the guy on the stool next to you, his pockmarked face in a book. Sometimes it would just be the way the door opened, the stale smoke, or a sudden wave of cold air. I knew this was nuts at the time, and I probably played with it a bit, scribbling in a notepad. But it seems more insane now than I would have cared to admit at the time. I even had the idea that I had to have ten words to beat him off with should he approach, a commandment with what had to be exactly ten words. Something like, “Get thee away from me in the name of Christ,” or “By the power of Jesus Christ I tell you depart.” One word more or less than ten and he’d stick a filthy finger right through your heart.
I don’t recall exactly when this nonsense stopped, but it did, so I’m right to feel lucky. Many were (and are) not so fortunate. Burns allegedly wrote the following on the window of an Inn after being refused entry: “We cam’ na here to view your works/In hopes to be mair wise/But only, lest we gang to hell/It may be nae surprise.” I’ve used the lines as a toast many times. I never meant them literally. But I almost did.
Wikipedia lists a few colloquialisms for this state of affairs: the DTs, the horrors, the fear, the abdabs, the jimjams, the rats, or, my favorite, jazz hands. The same source notes that afflicted individuals, in 1930s Harlem slang, were referred to as “jitterbugs.”
The delusions don’t have to be nasty – I know one man who called the police: two guys were stealing cars by lifting them onto a truck with their bare hands, and they had lions posted on the corner to make sure no one approached them – but they usually are. More than a few people I have listened and spoken to have felt that the dreaded "they" were after them, at the very door, their nastiest emissaries banging on it. Some have felt talked about, hunted, and haunted. Others have heard voices. So when that trembling delirium turns up, it’s usually not the jazz hands (who wouldn’t want a pair of those?): it’s the rats.
I feel lucky. For the last ten years, no matter how much I drank, I’ve barely had a hangover (a curse, of course, as well as a blessing). I would have to admit, though, to an occasionally acute sensitivity to the malevolence of some people I have found myself drinking beside, a malevolence that can dissipate with small talk, or amplify into the definite proximity of violence. For the most part, I’ve been gregarious, and tried the small talk. Occasionally, I’ve left the bar, thinking someone was going to get at least a sore face or that the bar itself was about to be robbed. I’ve thought this a rather tolerable measure of paranoia. There are, after all, plenty of bad bastards out there.
But today I remembered something I haven’t thought about for years. Ten years ago, more or less, I got less tolerably paranoid. This was my Confessions of a Justified Sinner period. I had put some thought into the Devil as a potentially interesting character in fiction. I had the inflated idea that while the great European novel could involve selling your soul for love or power, the great American novel would have the main character getting right down to selling someone else’s soul, or working out some kind of franchise arrangement for the soul selling business. So the Devil- not so much the theological personification of evil as the Walter Huston character in All That Money Can Buy – was much on my mind.
And did he not start turning up? For a while, he would be somewhere in whatever bar I was in. That would be him on the stool at the end in the checkered hat, hiding his face. Or the guy on the stool next to you, his pockmarked face in a book. Sometimes it would just be the way the door opened, the stale smoke, or a sudden wave of cold air. I knew this was nuts at the time, and I probably played with it a bit, scribbling in a notepad. But it seems more insane now than I would have cared to admit at the time. I even had the idea that I had to have ten words to beat him off with should he approach, a commandment with what had to be exactly ten words. Something like, “Get thee away from me in the name of Christ,” or “By the power of Jesus Christ I tell you depart.” One word more or less than ten and he’d stick a filthy finger right through your heart.
I don’t recall exactly when this nonsense stopped, but it did, so I’m right to feel lucky. Many were (and are) not so fortunate. Burns allegedly wrote the following on the window of an Inn after being refused entry: “We cam’ na here to view your works/In hopes to be mair wise/But only, lest we gang to hell/It may be nae surprise.” I’ve used the lines as a toast many times. I never meant them literally. But I almost did.
So What?
More Carver, from Careful:
“One morning he woke up and promptly fell to eating crumb doughnuts and drinking champagne. There’d been a time, some years back, when he would have laughed at having a breakfast like this. Now, there didn’t seem to be anything very unusual about it. In fact, he hadn’t thought anything about it until he was in bed and trying to recall the things he’d done that day, starting with when he’d gotten up in the morning. At first, he couldn’t remember anything noteworthy. Then he remembered eating those doughnuts and drinking champagne. Time was when he would have considered that a mildly crazy thing to do, something to tell friends about. Then, the more he thought about it, the more he could see it didn’t matter much one way or the other. He’d had doughnuts and champagne for breakfast. So what?”
“One morning he woke up and promptly fell to eating crumb doughnuts and drinking champagne. There’d been a time, some years back, when he would have laughed at having a breakfast like this. Now, there didn’t seem to be anything very unusual about it. In fact, he hadn’t thought anything about it until he was in bed and trying to recall the things he’d done that day, starting with when he’d gotten up in the morning. At first, he couldn’t remember anything noteworthy. Then he remembered eating those doughnuts and drinking champagne. Time was when he would have considered that a mildly crazy thing to do, something to tell friends about. Then, the more he thought about it, the more he could see it didn’t matter much one way or the other. He’d had doughnuts and champagne for breakfast. So what?”
The Coroner's Report
Alcoholism, according to the literature lucky alcoholics get their hands on, is “an incurable, progressive, fatal disease.” The literature shared by doctors says the same thing. It is curious, then, that few people die of alcoholism.
Rather, they die of cancer in the liver, throat, mouth, or stomach; through the accumulation of excess fat in the liver, or a liver swollen and tender with hepatitis or hardened and scarred with cirrhosis; by stroke or inflamed heart muscles. There are also the suicides, the homicides, and all of those bodies smashed up like eggs in a box by moving vehicles they have had the misfortune to drive or walk into.
But really they die of alcoholism.
I know people who have died purely of alcohol consumption, without staggering into an oncoming bus or falling from the hairline of a cliff. I don’t know what was written on the death certificate, but it was wine, beer, or spirits and getting drunk every day that did it.
An aunt of mine died of drink. She drank whisky and vodka, rarely mixed with anything, except maybe water for the whisky. When I was young, she was my second mother. One day she was listening to voices from the radiator, the next she was dead at fifty-four. I think she had stopped eating altogether as well.
Her husband was the enabler. He, too, was a chronic alcoholic. He lived until he was sixty-two when they found him at the bottom of his staircase. My father had to identify the body (“There’s nobody there when you see it. It’s just an empty shell”). Anyway, the enabler used to hide half-bottles of whisky and vodka around the house while he went to drink (and fight) at the local pub. She’d think, perhaps, that she was getting something for nothing as she found them. She drank a couple of hundred bottles too many, but he bought every one of them.
A friend of mine died of sobriety. He was an alcoholic who drank stout, bottled beer, and Irish whiskey. I stayed at his place once. He got up one morning and called a taxi to take him to work and had a couple of cans of Guinness while he waited. This was about seven a.m. I used to think that odd. Now I think nothing of it, having had my own share, beginning last year, of breakfast beers.
When I was briefly not drinking nine or ten year’s ago, my friend’s girlfriend left him. He quit drinking. This was no doubt an act of character, since he was a bartender. Everyone he knew drank, every day. The girlfriend didn’t come back, but he got a new girlfriend, a grounded, attractive woman who also worked in the industry. Within a few months, he jumped off a small bridge in the middle of the city into heavy traffic and was killed. Thinking of the drivers, I thought that an awfully selfish suicide. His girlfriend, the new one, said that he had been circling passages in the Bible. I didn’t hear which ones. I wasn’t in the picture at the time. But circling passages in the Bible was enough for me.
And when I say he died of sobriety, I mean, of course, that the death certificate might as well have that on it as “traffic accident.” Like my aunt and her awful husband, and like countless others, he died of an incurable disease that doesn’t appear on death certificates as often as it should.
Rather, they die of cancer in the liver, throat, mouth, or stomach; through the accumulation of excess fat in the liver, or a liver swollen and tender with hepatitis or hardened and scarred with cirrhosis; by stroke or inflamed heart muscles. There are also the suicides, the homicides, and all of those bodies smashed up like eggs in a box by moving vehicles they have had the misfortune to drive or walk into.
But really they die of alcoholism.
I know people who have died purely of alcohol consumption, without staggering into an oncoming bus or falling from the hairline of a cliff. I don’t know what was written on the death certificate, but it was wine, beer, or spirits and getting drunk every day that did it.
An aunt of mine died of drink. She drank whisky and vodka, rarely mixed with anything, except maybe water for the whisky. When I was young, she was my second mother. One day she was listening to voices from the radiator, the next she was dead at fifty-four. I think she had stopped eating altogether as well.
Her husband was the enabler. He, too, was a chronic alcoholic. He lived until he was sixty-two when they found him at the bottom of his staircase. My father had to identify the body (“There’s nobody there when you see it. It’s just an empty shell”). Anyway, the enabler used to hide half-bottles of whisky and vodka around the house while he went to drink (and fight) at the local pub. She’d think, perhaps, that she was getting something for nothing as she found them. She drank a couple of hundred bottles too many, but he bought every one of them.
A friend of mine died of sobriety. He was an alcoholic who drank stout, bottled beer, and Irish whiskey. I stayed at his place once. He got up one morning and called a taxi to take him to work and had a couple of cans of Guinness while he waited. This was about seven a.m. I used to think that odd. Now I think nothing of it, having had my own share, beginning last year, of breakfast beers.
When I was briefly not drinking nine or ten year’s ago, my friend’s girlfriend left him. He quit drinking. This was no doubt an act of character, since he was a bartender. Everyone he knew drank, every day. The girlfriend didn’t come back, but he got a new girlfriend, a grounded, attractive woman who also worked in the industry. Within a few months, he jumped off a small bridge in the middle of the city into heavy traffic and was killed. Thinking of the drivers, I thought that an awfully selfish suicide. His girlfriend, the new one, said that he had been circling passages in the Bible. I didn’t hear which ones. I wasn’t in the picture at the time. But circling passages in the Bible was enough for me.
And when I say he died of sobriety, I mean, of course, that the death certificate might as well have that on it as “traffic accident.” Like my aunt and her awful husband, and like countless others, he died of an incurable disease that doesn’t appear on death certificates as often as it should.
The Doctor's Opinion
I can’t say I’ve ever been terribly sick, but a few years ago my doctor noticed that my PSA levels had spiked. I had to look it up (prostate-specific antigen) and look up what it meant. The doctor had other things to look up.
I took some antibiotics for a few weeks, to get rid of or rule out an infection, and drank all the while I was taking the antibiotics. So the levels barely budged.
I was referred to a specialist – an understandably well-paid person, given the specialty - for a biopsy. For just under an hour, I had what looked like hair tongs sheathed in a condom pressed against my prostate. The hair tongs had teeth, and took little bites of my prostate every time the gun went off. The doctor invited me to watch the procedure on a monitor. I remember being very polite as I asked him, please, to just get on with it.
The results of the biopsy were fine, although the doctor signed off with the disclaimer that the test was only on the stolen tissue: “We can’t guarantee there’s nothing in there.” This was good news, although I was happy enough with the removal of the hair tongs.
I was given more antibiotics. I was careful where I sat for a few days, but I drank while taking the second round of antibiotics as well, until I stopped taking the pills altogether.
My other PSA levels, those measuring my propensity to swallow alcohol, were not tested, but were obviously off the chart.
I took some antibiotics for a few weeks, to get rid of or rule out an infection, and drank all the while I was taking the antibiotics. So the levels barely budged.
I was referred to a specialist – an understandably well-paid person, given the specialty - for a biopsy. For just under an hour, I had what looked like hair tongs sheathed in a condom pressed against my prostate. The hair tongs had teeth, and took little bites of my prostate every time the gun went off. The doctor invited me to watch the procedure on a monitor. I remember being very polite as I asked him, please, to just get on with it.
The results of the biopsy were fine, although the doctor signed off with the disclaimer that the test was only on the stolen tissue: “We can’t guarantee there’s nothing in there.” This was good news, although I was happy enough with the removal of the hair tongs.
I was given more antibiotics. I was careful where I sat for a few days, but I drank while taking the second round of antibiotics as well, until I stopped taking the pills altogether.
My other PSA levels, those measuring my propensity to swallow alcohol, were not tested, but were obviously off the chart.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Drunk, Drunker, Drunkest
In 1939, Joseph Roth died in exile in Paris. Exile was long in the cards, since his homeland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, no longer existed. He was the age I am now. As a friend of mine would say, “And there the comparison ends.” But Roth died of delirium tremens and pneumonia. He was a chronic alcoholic. So there’s that as well.
Roth’s great subject was nostalgia (for the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and there was no shortage of oxygen for it (world war, fascism). But it doesn’t take an expedition to find discernment of the alcoholic condition as well.
He writes of The Berlin Pleasure Industry that every class is supplied “with the appropriate entertainment and the appropriate – and affordable – drink, from champagne and cocktails to cognac to kirsch to sweet liqueurs down to Patzenhofer beer.” He was not reluctant to do his own research, of course, and in a single night “my mournfulness was such that it compelled me to experience the pain of every class of big-city dweller athirst for joy …”
In an earlier essay, he says of proposals for the Berlin skyline: “[A]lready we hear that the first skyscraper in Berlin is to contain a great entertainment palace, with cinemas, dance hall, bar, Negro bands, vaudeville, jazz./ Because human nature will not deny its weaknesses, even where it is seemingly in the process of overcoming them./ And if it were possible for us to build a “planet scraper” and to construct settlements on Mars, the expeditions of scientists and engineers would be accompanied by a delegation of bartenders.”
In the novella, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, finished a month before Roth’s death, Kartak promises to make good on a series of “miracles” which have allowed him to drink on and on by leaving his benefactor’s two hundred francs to Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux. He dies drunk, believing he has completed the task, though he has simply (and gratefully) given the money to a young woman who happens to be called Thérèse. The last line of this last work says: “May God grant us all, all of us drinkers, such a good and easy death!”
The chronology is not Roth’s (the first piece above was written eight years after the second), but it is an interesting descent nevertheless: alcohol as pleasure, as weakness, and then as destiny. I know, to the fingertips, the pleasure; the weakness, maybe; and certainly the indifference to a good and easy (and pleasurable and medicated) event at the end. Who would want to die of anything else? But I also know that Roth hits a precise note, not for all but for many, when from the beginning he reports on the “pain” of those “athirst for joy.”
Roth’s great subject was nostalgia (for the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and there was no shortage of oxygen for it (world war, fascism). But it doesn’t take an expedition to find discernment of the alcoholic condition as well.
He writes of The Berlin Pleasure Industry that every class is supplied “with the appropriate entertainment and the appropriate – and affordable – drink, from champagne and cocktails to cognac to kirsch to sweet liqueurs down to Patzenhofer beer.” He was not reluctant to do his own research, of course, and in a single night “my mournfulness was such that it compelled me to experience the pain of every class of big-city dweller athirst for joy …”
In an earlier essay, he says of proposals for the Berlin skyline: “[A]lready we hear that the first skyscraper in Berlin is to contain a great entertainment palace, with cinemas, dance hall, bar, Negro bands, vaudeville, jazz./ Because human nature will not deny its weaknesses, even where it is seemingly in the process of overcoming them./ And if it were possible for us to build a “planet scraper” and to construct settlements on Mars, the expeditions of scientists and engineers would be accompanied by a delegation of bartenders.”
In the novella, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, finished a month before Roth’s death, Kartak promises to make good on a series of “miracles” which have allowed him to drink on and on by leaving his benefactor’s two hundred francs to Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux. He dies drunk, believing he has completed the task, though he has simply (and gratefully) given the money to a young woman who happens to be called Thérèse. The last line of this last work says: “May God grant us all, all of us drinkers, such a good and easy death!”
The chronology is not Roth’s (the first piece above was written eight years after the second), but it is an interesting descent nevertheless: alcohol as pleasure, as weakness, and then as destiny. I know, to the fingertips, the pleasure; the weakness, maybe; and certainly the indifference to a good and easy (and pleasurable and medicated) event at the end. Who would want to die of anything else? But I also know that Roth hits a precise note, not for all but for many, when from the beginning he reports on the “pain” of those “athirst for joy.”
Mightily Reassured
I can’t even see the point of drinking unless you at least think you’re going to get drunk.
From Martin Amis (The Information):
Richard was drinking “from the mini-bar, which sounds comparatively prudent of him. Given a free hand, he might have been drinking from something bigger. Richard was drinking beer from the mini-bar because there was nothing else left in the mini-bar, except for mixers and snacks. Slowly Richard’s head jerked back. He stared at his drink with indignation. The softly humming liquid seemed disturbingly bland to his tongue. The suspicion formed that it contained no alcohol. Under the light he peered closely at the bottle until he found some small print warning that its contents might fuck up pregnant women. And so he drank on, calmly nodding, mightily reassured.”
From Martin Amis (The Information):
Richard was drinking “from the mini-bar, which sounds comparatively prudent of him. Given a free hand, he might have been drinking from something bigger. Richard was drinking beer from the mini-bar because there was nothing else left in the mini-bar, except for mixers and snacks. Slowly Richard’s head jerked back. He stared at his drink with indignation. The softly humming liquid seemed disturbingly bland to his tongue. The suspicion formed that it contained no alcohol. Under the light he peered closely at the bottle until he found some small print warning that its contents might fuck up pregnant women. And so he drank on, calmly nodding, mightily reassured.”
Monday, January 11, 2010
Drinking's Funny
Raymond Carver says somewhere that being a drunk takes real dedication. It’s hard work. Looking for this, I found the following in the story Gazebo:
"Drinking’s funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on our drinking, we’d be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey. When we made up our minds to move down here and take this job as managers, we sat up a couple of nights drinking while we weighed the pros and the cons."
The biggest decision I made while drinking was to keep on drinking. The biggest decision I made when briefly sober was to go back to drinking.
With these decisions come all the sins of omission, all the choices removed from negotiation: houses, vacations, schools, jobs, clothing - you name it; I took the choice away.
All the small decisions count, too – endless arguments over nothing, played on a loop, missed occasions which may have accumulated into decent relationships with others. A thousand small decisions made over all those penultimas, the ones for the road (“One for the ditch”), all those small opportunities shred useless by a thousand cuts.
"Drinking’s funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on our drinking, we’d be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey. When we made up our minds to move down here and take this job as managers, we sat up a couple of nights drinking while we weighed the pros and the cons."
The biggest decision I made while drinking was to keep on drinking. The biggest decision I made when briefly sober was to go back to drinking.
With these decisions come all the sins of omission, all the choices removed from negotiation: houses, vacations, schools, jobs, clothing - you name it; I took the choice away.
All the small decisions count, too – endless arguments over nothing, played on a loop, missed occasions which may have accumulated into decent relationships with others. A thousand small decisions made over all those penultimas, the ones for the road (“One for the ditch”), all those small opportunities shred useless by a thousand cuts.
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