I need some help, Doc. The pandemic has presented great difficulties to recovering alcoholics such as myself. It’s hard enough to not drink when I’m trapped in the house, but now when I go out, HAND SANITIZER IS EVERYWHERE.
Every time I smell the stuff I want a drink. Nowhere is safe. Wearing a mask doesn’t even help. What am I supposed to do?
Signed,
Germ-x-ophobe
———————————–
Dear X,
Fear not: the doctor is in. I’ve been waiting all year to say that.
I hope you had a nice, sober holiday.
The United States hasn’t seen this level of booze-ism since the great Drink In of ’56. With an exceptionally cold winter across the nation, the government (at the urge of the alcohol lobby) advised all patriotic Americans to drink like the nation depended on it. That slogan was on propaganda posters everywhere. My mother followed that slogan, and that’s how I came about.
You need to disassociate the link between your former addiction and hand sanitizer. This can be achieved through meditation.
Or probably not, but it’s a start.
The sights, smells, and, yes, sounds of those clear, oozing Purell bottles are by themselves intoxicating, and they are quite ubiquitous. Have you tried quadruple masking, to keep the aroma from your so easily-tempted nostrils?
Your dedication to sobriety is admirable. Take some time to appreciate the finer things in life, excluding alcohol. Take up carpentry. The fresh smell of wood is about the furthest thing from alcohol you could get—except for barrel-aged whiskey. Or barrel-aged rum. Or beer from an old-fashioned tap.
Try to drink sawdust. That ipecac should distract you from your compulsive urge long enough for vomit-meditation. Try to abide the heaving. It’s going to be okay.
Have a fabulous 2022.
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
Episode 236 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this week’s show, I talk to the literary historian Bill Savage about the re-release of George Ade’s 1931 classic, breezy history of drinking culture in America.
George Ade
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
Watch and hear Bill’s rant against the term dive bar.
Should Prohibition be repealed? (illustration from The Old Time Saloon)
My beloved Jetsetter Lounge, in Lake Worth, Florida, circa 2007.
Mike Jones, Mixological Guru.
Teege Braune, The Official Bartender of The Drunken Odyssey.
Episode 236 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Writing a craft beer guidebook in a state like Florida—where a new brewery seems to announce plans to open every day—is tricky. Author Mark Denote had to know that the moment this book went to print, The Great Florida Craft Beer Guide would be out of date. So for that, I commend him. It is good, too, to have a place to start if you are looking to gain knowledge about the fast-growing (as long as Anheuser-Busch InBev doesn’t shut it down) beer industry in the Sunshine State.
The book starts with a foreword by one of the chiefs of Florida craft beer, Cigar City Brewing CEO Joey Redner and is followed by an introduction in which Denote—a columnist for Cigar City Magazine and the founding editor of FloridaBeerNews.com—shares his beerginnings: a Sam Adams Cherry Wheat while at Epcot’s Food and Wine Festival. He then offers a primer on beer is and the difficulties of opening a brewery. Readers are soon ushered back in time as Denote traces the histories of beer in Florida. The historical parts—Tampa, Central Florida, Northeast Florida/Jacksonville, South Florida—feature some of the most fluid prose in the book. You can tell he did enough research to tell an engaging narrative about the struggles of beer producers in a state not known for such endeavors.
Each section is set up in much the same way. You’re presented with the history, followed by breweries in operation, followed by other breweries “in fermentation.” I tried to figure out if the brewery listings were organized within each section—alphabetical, geographical—but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. This lack of form follows through into the writing about the breweries.
In the beginning, you get a sense that Denote tried to follow a framework. History, food (if available), types of beers, names of beers, distribution, and insider tips. Only about half of the tips turn out to be actual tips: “ESB is proud to be one of only six breweries in the United States that boast a woman as their head brewer”—interesting, surely, but not an insider’s tip. Denote, however, only uses this framework occasionally. If he had the information for each category, he seemed to use it. If not, I could not discern how he decided what he listed into the description.
The brewery descriptions were where I found the biggest detraction in the book—the quality of the writing. While taking into account that this is a guidebook and not intended to be a work to match Nabokov or Faulkner, there’s an expectation that it should be readable. Often, variations in sentence structure seem to be ignored in favor of stating the name of a certain beer over and over to start a sentence, which has a droning effect. To read through a region’s section is hypnotically droning.
It’s a book about beer, I kept reminding myself. Beer. Why am I bored? The Subject-Verb, Subject-Verb agreements hit you like a wave and bury you by the midway point of the book.*
If you are not really looking for a high-quality literary adventure with your beer—and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that for the majority of the people who would purchase this book, that is not high on the list of needs—then this is a perfectly useful book. When you do not read the sections from beginning to end, they’re palatable. Interesting, even.
In the end, this book serves its purpose. It presents a look at the craft beer scene in Florida and offers a somewhat complete listing with some facts about the breweries and their offerings. The Great Florida Craft Beer Guide is a good book to keep in the trunk in case you find yourself on a day trip and you get a little thirsty.
Pair with: Craft beers, after you arrive at your destination.
*A smaller point, but one that still ate at me a little is the confusing geography. Living and writing in DeLand, which is forty miles north of Orlando, I and everyone I know in DeLand have been under the impression that we live and work in Central Florida. Denote, however, lists DeLand in the Northeast Jacksonville section. Jacksonville is a hundred miles north of DeLand. A small point, but one a map could’ve easily rectified.
______
Photo by Oxley Photography 2014
Sam Slaughter (Episodes 119, 126, and 129) is a writer, English professor, and beer brewer based in DeLand, Florida. He’s had fiction, book reviews, and other nonfiction published in a variety of places, including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, South85, Drafthorse, The Southern Literary Review, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. He can be found on twitter @slaughterwrites and on his website.
Episode 129 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s episode, I present a rambunctious reading honoring Repeal Day, which I think might be one of the twelve days of Christmas.
Photo by Matt Peters.
The Drunken Odyssey All Stars included…
Dianne Turgeon Richardson
Photo by Matt Peters.
Tod Caviness
Photo by Matt Peters.
Anna King (No photo)
Jared Silvia
Photo by Matt Peters.
Sam Slaughter
Photo by Matt Peters.
Danita Berg
Photo by Matt Peters.
Matt Peters
Photo by Jared Silvia.
Teege Braune
Photo by Matt Peters.
And Vanessa Blakeslee.
Photo by Matt Peters
_______
Episode 129 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
It has now been two weeks since the Game of Thrones’ season four finale aired, and if you are anything like me, the long, drawn-out, nearly endless interval before season five has you jonesing for an Ice and Fire fix. Common symptoms of withdrawal from GoT include nervousness, phobia of weddings, the fear that friends and loved ones will die violently without warning, itching, and hallucinations of Peter Dinklage.
What is one to do to assuage the agony? Binge on something like Supernatural just to get that dose of fantasy? No, of course it doesn’t hold up against Game of Thrones. Diehard fans, those with the worst yen, already know what’s going to happen in the next couple seasons as they’ve no doubt read the entirety of George R. R. Martin’s groundbreaking Song of Ice and Fire series. Furthermore, those who have followed Martin for any extended period of time, must be used to waiting by now as a period of over five years went by between the publications of A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, so what’s the big deal? Why the jittery, anxious impatience?
Here’s the rub: even the most colorful imagination can’t always hold up against a cast of talented and often very attractive actors, lush sets and costumes, and a budget of millions of dollars. The TV series and the book series have a marvelous way of filling in each other’s gaps, and sometimes seeing how one’s favorite scene plays out is exciting as reading that scene in the first place.
If waiting is just that unbearable, there is one recourse left to you: have a drink, and then have another.
Anthropological evidence has recently suggested that alcohol is the oldest form of artificial patience in human history. Before folks were able to kill time with Facebook, iPhones, and HBO, they had booze. Additionally many of the characters in the technologically challenged land of Westeros combat their ennui with alcohol. In his books Martin mentions many different adult beverages enjoyed by his characters: ciders, dark beers and rich ales, and especially wines such as the highly regarded Arbor Gold and the strong, sour Dornish reds.
The Inn at the Crossroads is the official food blog for The Song of Ice and Fire, and while they do an excellent job of recreating the exotic menus that Martin describes in his novels, their input on the booze is more limited. Much of the technology and culture found in Westeros is comparable to that of Europe in the late middle-ages, so one can imagine that the booze would be similarly linked. For example, the cider Brienne enjoys at the Inn at the Crossroads (the fictional one, not the blog) wouldn’t be the overly sweet, fizzy stuff we refer to as hard cider in the United States. A cider in Westeros would probably be very dry or tart with perhaps even a mineral quality such as Hogan’s Cider out of England. It would also likely be still or contain only a slight effervescence from the natural fermentation process.
Before he was gored to death by a wild boar, King Robert Baratheon was unconventional in more ways than one. While the nobles of GoT usually only drink wine, Robert seemed equally at home indulging in beer, a beverage that was a staple among the commoners and clergy of medieval Europe as well. Truth is, Robert was apt to drink anything he got his hands on, and his love of the common folk was more amorous that it was paternal. If the ales Robert enjoys share their origins with the ales of the middle ages, they would have most likely be missing the hops, which characterize the bitter flavors of American IPAs and pale ales. Before hops became a popular ingredient, ales were more akin to what we call gruit today, an odd, malt-forward fermented beverage that utilizes herbs and spices in place of hops, not something that is particularly easy to come by these days. Pale, crisp lagers weren’t even invented until the nineteenth century, but then again, the same goes for stouts, and we’re told that these exist in Westeros, so perhaps the seven kingdoms have a more developed brewing history than did the people of medieval Europe, or perhaps the strong, dark beers that Robert enjoys are more akin to Gouden Carolus Cuvée van der Keizer, which means Grand Cru of the Emperor, a rich, Belgian ale that is brewed every year in honor of Charles V, certainly a beer fit for a king.
If you want to drink like a Lannister, the wealthiest family in Westeros, then wine will be your pleasure and your poison. Other than their surname, the one thing Cersei and Tyrion have in common is that both our seldom seen without a chalice of wine in their hand. Martin describes many kinds of wine in The Song of Ice and Fire: along with the Arbor Gold and Dornish red, he mentions iced wine; honeyed wine; warm, spiced, mulled wine; wines made from plums, apricots, persimmons, or blackberries; spicy pepper wine. One’s mouth waters imagining slurping down all these delightful, albeit fictitious, beverages. TV does a shoddy job of filling in the gaps in this context, and what’s more, examining the wines of medieval Europe isn’t much help either. Is there a historical antecedent for the Dornish sour? Sour flavors are usually avoided in fine wines, and yet this is a prized vintage in Westeros. I imagine it has more in common with Flemish reds, such as Rodenbach, which while actually beer, have a tart, decadent, semi-sweet flavor, perhaps an acquired taste, but one that is worth the initial shock.
Mead, on the other hand, a staple of hospitality in the northern regions of Westeros, is easier to get one’s mind around. That is assuming one has tried mead in the first place. Brewed from water, honey, and occasionally spiced with other ingredients like hibiscus, hops, or ginger, mead is the oldest fermented beverage in the world, and has evolved relatively little in the last few centuries. Only recently rediscovered outside of a few small circles, mead has enjoyed a surge of popularity in Orlando thanks to its availability at innovative bars such as Redlight Redlight, Li’l Indies, and Oblivion Taproom. After all, how could fantasy fans resist something with a name like Dansk Mjød Viking Blod.
There are other more illicit beverages floating around the world of Game of Thrones as well. Maesters often give a drink called milk of the poppy as an anesthetic, and we can assume this would be similar to laudanum. The warlocks of Qarth drink a mysterious beverage called Shade of the Evening that stains their lips blue and supposedly enhances their magic. Perhaps one could dissolve a grape Jolly Rancher in a tea of psilocybin mushrooms to capture this effect, though I can’t legally recommend you actually do this. Nevertheless, one can only imagine that a decent enough portion of this drink would be ample to propel the uneasy fan, dreading the upcoming Game of Thrones-less year, straight into George R. R. Martin’s universe, a place that I, for one, would much rather observe than actually live in, but I’m the voyeuristic type who’d rather gander at other people’s cosplay than actually participate in it. Maybe a tripped-out, hallucinated afternoon in Westeros would be just the thing to ease the agony of waiting.
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Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90, episode 102) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.
Two of Cups Press’ collection of bourbon-inspired poetry called Small Batch begins with a brief description and history of bourbon followed by this short piece by David S. Atkinson entitled “A Bourbon Poetry Submission,”
I heard this press wanted poems about
bourbon.
This confused me, because I thought
bourbon
was already a poem.
Bourbon, like poetry, is something that should be savored, enjoyed slowly. A connoisseur will return to her favorite examples over and over again throughout her life. When done well, poetry and bourbon are both highly nuanced with a complexity that requires a meditative examination. Some are of the mindset that bourbon and poetry should both be reserved for special occasions. Others, like John King and myself, see this as blasphemy and consume either as often as is humanly possible. Sour mash and white dog can be seen as the various drafts a distiller has to go through to achieve a signature product, just as a poet must rewrite a piece several times before it’s publishable. If you want to take a more mystical approach, both bourbon and poetry go through a kind of transubstantiation, a handful of unspectacular ingredients that, through craft and perhaps at times sheer luck or divine intervention, become something much greater than the sum of their parts. Poetry is a smattering of symbols with no inherent meaning, arranged in such a manner as to bring forth, inexplicably, image, music, language at its most significant. Bourbon contains the same mystery. It isn’t just the alcohol derived from distillation, a process any chemistry major understands and can duplicate; it is the ineffable quality that comes from aging 51% corn based alcohol in new, charred oak barrels. Alcohol aged in anything else is not bourbon and inferior for that reason. It is why all the best bourbons still come from a small geographical area in northern Kentucky.
But I digress. A distiller must follow strict guidelines to even legally market a whiskey as bourbon. Poetry, on the other hand, is more elusive a term, and the pieces collected in Small Batch exemplify this in their range and diversity. While many of the poems in this collection follow the American free-verse tradition and the confessional tone so popular with the post-MFA crowd, others experiment with voice and style such as Briana Gervat’s “Bourbon Style Green Eggs and Ham,” an amusing, adult-oriented parody of Dr. Seuss’ classic. Not unexpectedly, some of the work goes down like a shot of Old Crow,
harsh, unrefined, a bit painful, the only appeal being that any poetry, like bourbon, is better than no poetry at all, but you’ll be glad you endured these moments when you come to gems like Jeremy Dae Paden’s two poems “Smooth Pour” and “The Story of Uncle Frank,” truly top shelf work reminiscent of that deliciously obscure bottle one pulls out to wow friends at social gatherings. If you are expecting a collection of Bukowski knockoffs, look elsewhere. The Bard of Debauchery shows his influence here and there, winking slyly in Erin Elizabeth Smith’s “Drinking Poem” and Jude C. McPherson’s “Neat.” On the other hand, much of this work stands completely outside of Bukowski’s legacy. This anthology demonstrates that the nexus between bourbon and poetry is much larger than the romanticized notion of an alcoholic writer, though that character has a time and a place as well. As the unifying factor of every poem of this collection, bourbon takes on a myriad of roles: as an aspect of cultural identity in Ellen Hagan’s “Kentucky – You Be,” welcomed antagonist in Peter Fong’s “A Thirsty Man Considers his Future,” poetic muse in Parneshia Jones’ “Ode to Bourbon: A Writer’s Distillery,” and simply one lovely detail amongst many in Annette Spaulding-Convy’s incredible “The Spaulding-Criss-Potter-Craig-Sherer-Smith-Walker Women Ponder the Corrals They’ve Built Inside.”
Small Batch’s introduction invites us to “Pour a shot, open a page, and drink it in.” While the poems are divided into lose sections cleverly titled “drawing confessions,” “crack the wax,” “bourbon-strong fist,” “whatever’s open has to go,” and “this want travels,” nothing compels the reader to read these poems in any particular order. Reading any poetry anthology cover to cover is kind of like sampling from every bottle of a prodigious bourbon collection in a single evening. Discovering something new, returning to an old favorite, these are the twin joys of bourbon and poetry. Scan the shelf, pull off any bottle that strikes you for no good reason; peruse the table of contents, grab a title at random. I, for one, am finishing off the bottle of Elmer T. Lee that my brother gave me for Christmas two years ago while revisiting this delightful collection on a Sunday afternoon, as good a time as any for drinking and poetry. We all have our priorities, and I’m grateful for artists, distillers and poets alike, who take the time to create those things that make life worth living.
___________
Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.
Somewhere among the odd off topic asides and the sounds of clinking glasses I share an obscure poem written by Irish poet, scholar, and mystic W.B. Yeats entitled simply “The Irish Car Bomb.” Don’t ask me where I dug up this relic of misguided poetic innovation. I’m sure Yeats himself would have preferred it lost to posterity. It is admittedly not the poet’s best work: for one thing its rhythm and meter lack the near perfect precision for which Yeats’ is rightfully credited. Furthermore, the poem’s references are a hodgepodge of Irish culture and mythology with nothing of any discernible importance uniting them together in this particular poem. Careful readers of Yeats’ work will find it odd that he mentions Orlando, which at the time of his death in 1939 was still only a fledgling metropolis. Stranger still is that the poem is about a drink often deemed culturally insensitive to the Irish and their history of violent conflict between imperialist England and the IRA, but most perplexing is the fact that Irish car bombs were invented in the United States forty years after Yeats died. His prophetic foreknowledge of their future popularity can only be attributed to his involvement with the Hermetic Order of Golden Dawn and communion with Secret Chiefs.
Despite its spurious origins and cultural carelessness, the Irish car bomb is a favorite among binge drinkers on St. Patrick’s Day. We can at least acknowledge that its ingredients are Irish, though ninety percent of the Guinness consumed in the United States any day of the year is actually brewed in the company’s facility in Canada and not in its historic Dublin brewery. One could argue that the car bomb is actually a perfect symbol for St. Patrick’s Day in the United States: “Irish” ingredients created in the new world thrown together and chugged at one’s own peril with zero consideration for how they actually relate to the people one is supposedly celebrating. This is the way we appropriate any culture in this country, right? Taking bits and pieces from various stories and epochs, combining them without much thought or justification, blurring the lines between honoring another ethnicity and simply bastardizing it.
And yet I’ve enjoyed my fair share of car bombs, consumed them with a clear conscience, and probably will again.
This is the nature of a melting pot: one generation shares with its neighbors and progenies the pieces of the old country that it has brought with it across the ocean. These same neighbors and progenies remember the details but forget the old country, a place, after all, they have never seen, or if they have, visited only as a guest and a stranger. Like a cross generational game of telephone, they pass the half-remembered traditions up their family trees until they are as watered down as their own bloodlines. This isn’t a lament. This is simply the nature of America; the alternative, namely nationalism, is much darker indeed.
Neither is this an argument for unbridled cultural appropriation, the inevitability of which does not justify the creation of insulting portrayals of other ethnicities, nor the trivialization of their struggles. Unfortunately, racism is still a huge problem in this country and much of the world. Despite my occasional consumption of the beverage, the Irish car bomb is undoubtedly on the insensitive side of the cultural appropriation fence. There’s a great Irish proverb that goes, “It is often a person’s mouth that broke his nose.” The ignorant tourist who orders an Irish car bomb in any random pub in Dublin deserves the fat lip that he may receive instead. Why, then, drink it in the United States? Guinness, Bailey’s, and Jameson are surprisingly delicious when all gulped down all together, but is this justification enough? What if we simply changed the name? Were I taxed with renaming the car bomb, I might call it something like Fergus’ Folly or Finnegan’s Quake, but we all know that neither of these are likely to stick.
One finds references to St. Patrick’s Day lacking in Yeats’ work. In fact, the ideologies of the poet and the patron saint of Ireland, separated from each other by a gulf of centuries, stand in stark opposition to each other. While the latter made the rediscovery of Irish mythology and folklore his life’s work, the former spent his first years in Ireland, a land that was not his home, in slavery, and then after gaining his freedom only to voluntarily sacrifice it for a monastic life, created his legacy by converting pagans to Christianity, thus Romanizing Ireland and initiating the end of the age of myth. The primary miracle associated with St. Patrick is the legend that he drove all the snakes from Ireland. While it’s true that there are no snakes on the island, paleontological evidence suggests that they were never there to begin with. The snakes St. Patrick drove from the island symbolize the pagan gods whom Christianity associates with demons. Rediscovering these gods, breathing new life into them and reestablishing their significance was Yeats’ own mission, and thus its easy to imagine why St. Patrick was a not figure for whom he had much reverence.
Despite their differences, there are aspects of St. Patrick’s Day for both Yeats and the old monk to enjoy. The shamrock, for example, while appropriated by Christianity to represent the trinity, was also a sacred symbol of springtime and regeneration to the pagan Celts who came before. On the other hand, the adoration of leprechauns, about whom Yeats collected a host of folktales, would no doubt please the poet, while their ubiquitousness might have the saint rolling in his grave, and if that didn’t do it, the fact that his holiday serves as an out in out bacchanal for many would most likely not please him in the slightest. Of course, it is unlikely that your average American reveler is thinking much about how the plastic shamrock hanging on a beaded necklace around their neck is a bridge between Christianity and paganism while they are getting smashed chugging car bombs in some “Irish” pub most likely owned by Americans.
Last year while I was in Target with my own bonny lass, Jenny no less, on an errand unrelated to the holiday, a middle-aged woman ran up to me and began talking enthusiastically about how excited she was to meet a real leprechaun on St. Patrick’s Day. Perhaps I was wearing green. Perhaps not, though I can safely say I sported a big, red beard. Nevertheless, I allowed her daughter, whose mortification was obvious, to take a picture of her mother and myself together while Jenn stood off to the side unable to control her laughter. What can I say? I am a person who aims to please. No sense, it seemed, in mentioning the fact that I am really only about twenty-five percent Irish, my lineage being mostly German. When people see my red beard, especially on St. Patrick’s Day, they often want me to be Irish, and I am usually quick to indulge them. If I meet a party-goer with more than one drink in them, I just claim to be 100% Irish. “Came to America when I was a wee lad,” I’ll tell any random drunk person. It reinforces some idea to them, not a religious principle or anything so sacred. Rather I become another component to the flimsy veneer of Irishness with which they have adorned themselves. Rubbing elbows with a real Irishman on St. Patrick’s Day becomes one more glorious detail in a night of blurry memories. If I, of all people, approve of them, then they must be doing St. Patrick’s Day right.
Personally, I love St. Patrick’s Day. I enjoy an excuse to dust off my collections of Yeats and Seamus Heaney, to play the music of Shane MacGowan and Ronnie Drew, and yes, get drunk on beer and whiskey. Perhaps my red beard is indicative of Irishness as my spiritual ancestry even if it only makes up a quarter of my blood. I’ll ignore the fact that the recessive ginger gene is a minority among the population of the emerald isle as it is everywhere else in the world. Perhaps my red beard is only an excuse to claim a cultural identity that is more romantic than my German lineage. In truth, I am really as American as everyone else pretending to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. Sitting in the Drunken Monkey, writing about Irish car bombs while listening to French pop music and drinking Ethiopian coffee, I feel grateful to live in a time and a place where I can enjoy various bits and pieces of cultures all over the world, but I also know that their is privilege there too, that enjoying a song, a beer, or kind of coffee will never allow me to understand what its like to be anything other than an American. St. Patrick’s Day will never mean the same in America as it does in Ireland. Nor, for that matter, will it mean the same today as it did for the down-trodden Irish immigrants of a hundred years ago. We will never distill the experience of an entire people into a single day or idea. That being said, rather than deride those who wish to adorn themselves in green hats and beads and consume green beer, I would simply encourage you to have fun in whichever way you please, but while you do so remember that respect is always an important virtue in the United States, Ireland, and across the world.
___________
Teege Braune(episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.
Episode 90 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this week’s show, my friends Teege Braune of In Boozo Veritas fame, Matt Peters, Jared Silvia, and my brother James King join me for a wooly discussion of St. Patrick’s Day. Much was consumed.
Jared and James watch Teege do his miraculous pouring technique.
The foot of good cheer.
How can it be possible Teege is only a quarter Irish?
Creamy toasty goodness.
Eventually, the peer pressure was too great for sweet Matthew.
My red face was sunburn. The angle of my head, weariness.
Episode 90 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Episode 87 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this week’s show, I talk to fiction writer Vanessa Blakeslee,
And Anthony Seidman writes about James Thompson’s The City of Dreadful Night.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
If you live in NYC, check out this wonderful event with my friends Gilbert King (episode 60) and my fellow NYU alum, Maaza Mengiste. RSVP is required.
Find Burrow Press’s releases here, & check out the discounted subscription rate.
If you live in Orlando, do come to Vanessa’s book release party.
Episode 87 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
I am honored to welcome the brilliant and amazing poet Susan Lilley as guest blogger for this week’s In Boozo Veritas. While I’m braving the ice and snow up north in Indiana, she is down south in Key West no doubt having a remarkably different experience.
—Teege Braune
Special dispatch from Key West, Florida February, 2014
Writers know better than to make a no-alcohol resolution on New Year’s Day. After all, the doldrums of January signal the beginning of literary festival season! Actually, it’s always lit fest season, but the period of January through March seems to have more than its share of workshops, residencies, seminars, and confabs of all kinds. As one who just survived a glorious week at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, I can say with certainty that, if you imbibe at all regularly, there is absolutely no way to make it through these things without drinking.
A quick look at my Facebook feed in winter reveals glasses raised from the Key West Writing Seminars to MFA residencies in New England to Poetry Week in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. But what is the drink of choice for writers when away from home, wallowing in the in the blessed company of their own kind 24-7?
My research has taken me from Hemingway’s mojitos at Captain Tony’s Saloon (the original Sloppy Joe’s) in Key West to martinis at the Blue Bar in the Algonquin Hotel in NYC, home of the famous round table where Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley once planned articles for a new magazine called The New Yorker. I have conducted scientific observations involving beer and Jagermeister at a bucolic artists colony in Vermont and endured the crappy bargain wine of late-night vagaries in10-day intensive MFA residences. Here is what I have learned:
The very most popular cocktail among writers in far-flung places is the FREE cocktail. Billy Collins says that “forthcoming” is a writer’s favorite word, but I would submit that no expression is more welcome to a writer than “open bar.” Alas, more often than not, writers are forced to curate their own swilling experiences. These circumstances thus divide us into a few major categories of preference.c
Wine. Ahh, my personal favorite. Yes, it’s rather obvious, allusions to Bacchus unavoidable, but a majority of writers really do overwhelmingly prefer “a beaker full of the warm south” (thank you Mr. Keats) to all other drinks.
Some writers bring their sommelier chops to festivals along with their verbal ones, and wow their friends and fans with their exquisite taste in the world of oenophilia. Most of us are not so organized, and must seek out local bargains to share in bleak dorm rooms, on residence porches, hotel balconies, even conference hallways. Self-made group retreats in equipped vacation mansions and more upscale festivals make it easier for a writer to tap into the never-ending river of wine. But we are good at making do, under almost any circumstances. I often claim that if a good chilled chardonnay stood available and we had no corkscrew, I could open the bottle with my vagina if need be. (Thank God I have never been tested on that one.)
Beer. Among younger writers, beer is a safe, democratic, and affordable choice. Beer has its own connoisseur contingent. After a long day of workshops or sweating over manuscripts, 20 and 30-somethings are drawn to a craft beer hall like hung-over hipsters to Starbucks. Beer-loving writers have their own continuum, from the IPA elitists to the purist lovers of a correctly drawn Guinness (the “blonde in the black dress”) to the PBR proles in the parking lot having their own party on the super-cheap. They’re all adorable. Beer comes in all languages and there is a golden nectar for everyone. Viva la cerveza!
Spirits. Quickly making strides on conference and festival drinking menus is good old distilled spirits. Vodka seems ahead of the pack, what with the restorative properties of a good Bloody Mary and the ascendency of the martini in recent years. Famed writer and traveler Bob Shacochis is known to bring his own favorite brand to writers’ gatherings, and he packs his own cut crystal glass to ensure a perfect vodka sipping experience even in the shabbiest motel. Veteran literary drinker Michael Smith of Berkeley, CA claims that vodka straight up with a twist is fine until the moment of “awkward writer overload” is reached. Then it’s time to reach for the scotch. Writer Lisa Lanser-Rose swears by the Millionaire’s Coffee served at O.C. White’s in St. Augustine, Florida; the five shots of whiskey put her into “a companionable spirit” while the caffeine allows her to stay chatty. Poet and frequenter of festivals Suzannah Gilman reports a new trend in shots of tequila before readings, surely to enliven the imagination in the listener. Fiction goddess Kelly Luce observes that since she moved to Texas, she’s noticed a whole lot of bourbon going on. Spirits are just bubbling up everywhere on the writing circuit. Which brings me to the phenomenon of …
Commemoration cocktails. Whether you are toasting the beloved memory of Frank McCourt with Jameson’s in the Hamptons or prayerfully imbibing a Graham Greene inspired concoction called “The Whiskey Priest” in Key West, drinking is even more fun when it has a hallowed purpose. I, for one, will try almost any cocktail known to be loved by a writer I revere. Just ask Jocelyn Bartkevicius about our evening with absinthe at the Eden Bar in Winter Park. Hey, if it was good enough for Oscar Wilde, right?
Most of us can relate to my pal and Massachusetts poet Ruth Foley as she confides that whenever she is with her writer friends in creative captivity for a week or so, she drinks more and sleeps less than any other time in the year. Well, as my Granny used to say, you can sleep when you’re dead. These are precious times of comraderie, productivity, and serious sipping.
I haven’t even mentioned AWP, the biggest writers conference in the known universe, which looms ahead in March. Part family reunion and part literary Coachella, this 5-day megafest has been known to put even moderate drinkers on the liver-transplant list. And if, like me, you are not attending AWP this year, you might feel the need to hoist a few that week anyway, in solidarity.
This week in Key West, January’s writing seminars are but a liquor-scented memory in local watering holes. But I find there is nothing more perfect than a lovely gin Negroni served with some delicious poetry to conjure the festival spirit. Tomorrow, my solitary quest for this town’s perfect Papa Doble (rum, lime, grapefruit, and a few drops of cherry juice) goes on. I still have a couple of days.
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Susan Lilley at the Algonquin.
Susan Lilley (episodes 36, 82, 85) is the author of the poetry chapbooks Night Windows and Satellite Beach and blogs gloriously as one of the Gloria Sirens.
Every time I smell the stuff I want a drink. Nowhere is safe. Wearing a mask doesn’t even help. What am I supposed to do?
Or probably not, but it’s a start.
Your dedication to sobriety is admirable. Take some time to appreciate the finer things in life, excluding alcohol. Take up carpentry. The fresh smell of wood is about the furthest thing from alcohol you could get—except for barrel-aged whiskey. Or barrel-aged rum. Or beer from an old-fashioned tap.
Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.
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