Back when I was in grad school, I had a professor who once had to chide me for the fact I didn't have a single source in my research from beyond the last few decades. He informed me that I had to dig a bit farther back to find some better established gems of literary insight. Don't worry, he told me: "people were smart before 1970 too."
At the time, I didn't take that as well as I could have. My theory classes had taught me all too well that what constituted intelligence got recycled every fifteen years so. All that changed was that a new Frenchman with an unpronouncable name got heaved to the top of the heap of accepted wisdom each time.
Luckily, though, I have since had the pleasure of discovering that my professor was oh-so-entirely-right in many more practical matters than semiology. Take drinking, for example.
I've just been reminded this evening that people who had the pleasure of drinking in the nineteenth century were very, very smart. Ingenious, even. For proof, I'll take the liberty of referring you to a handy little book called The Flowing Bowl, copyright 1892. I'm presently enjoying the recipe for The Manhattan it contains, one that savors of the sublime.
The Manhattan (for the insufficiently initiated who need a refresher) is a venerable booze hound classic. Make it at home, and it will give you a good example of the best in aromatic cocktails. Order it in an average bar, and it usually involves slamming together an unspecified whiskey and an unpredictable combination of vermouths and throwing in some bitters and rattling some ice cubes through it and pouring it up and charging you 12 dollars. The result is often one of those drinking experiences that will remind a hardened cocktail drinker why he/she always resort to drinking bottled beer in public.
(Side note: Props to a prominent and delightful exception to this statement. Deep Ellum in Allston, Cambridge St. and Brighton Ave., offers 10 different variations of the Manhattan, all of them delicious. Not that I'd know anything about all of them, of course.)
Back to my revelation. The Flowing Bowl, c. the White City, includes a recipe for "The Manhattan Cocktail" with a few unexpected twists that add some truly fantastic new dimensions to a handy old standard. The author's recipe (p. 128):
"Half a tumblerful of cracked ice.
2 dashes of gum
2 dashes of bitters
1 dash of absinthe
2/3 drink of whiskey
1/3 drink of vino vermouth
(A little maraschino may be added)
Stir this well, strain, and serve."
Obviously, a little intuition helps out: gum = gomme syrup, bitters = presumably Angosturra, "drink" = ounce ( I guess? I usually measure "drinks" in glasses, not exact fluid measurements. God help me if I took that analogue literally in this case). Not being an anise devotee, I used Herbsaint instead of absinthe, since I find the flavor of Herbsaint a bit less forward. By way of "Vino Vermouth", I used Carpano Antica, which has recently become a liquor snob-ish necessity in my bar. I suppose a clunky average sweet vermouth would be functional - but who wants to date the bland plasticine blond prom queen when you can have the multifaceted brunette artiste in the illustration class?
Result: divinity. I even got to try out my new julep strainer, courtesy of The Boston Shaker. Those nebbishy, uptight Victorians, as it turns out, knew a thing or two about a drinking as well as wanton colonialism. Now if only they could work a few stiff ones in between linguistic theory professors and their Jacques Derrida. Then I'd have even more to thank them for.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Of choking with the best of 'em
There are mornings when I wake up and realize that I don’t trust myself any further than I can pee.
These are the mornings when nothing I write makes sense, when I’m dead certain everything I put down sounds juvenile, predictable, and unnecessary. I rewrite everything a second after I’ve put it on paper, revise sentences one after the other before I even finish a paragraph, endlessly and unproductively circling back and forth on myself over and over again. Rather than composing anything new, since I don’t trust a word I have to say, I move modifiers around instead, swapping them between sentences, reordering clauses, moving some callouts back and forth, and agonizing over whether the button at the top of the webpage should say “Learn More” or “More Info”. On these days, a headless chicken could pound out something that would make David Ogilvy proud, compared to what I can do.
These are the days when the Big Choke comes to town. The Big Choke is not Writer’s Block, though there’s a common misperception that they’re the same thing. In fact, the Big Choke is to Writer’s Block what an epileptic fit is to a full-out catatonic trance. When you have Writer’s Block, you stare blankly at the blinking cursor, with genuinely no idea how you’re going to make pharmaceutical sales in Japan sound seductive, and a paralyzing conviction that you never will have one. When you experience the Big Choke, on the other hand, you compulsively scribble 5 pages about Japanese pharma sales by repeating and reordering the same three thoughts in different syntax and fonts, only to get to the end and panic when you realize you’ve used 5000 words to produce 127 characters of useful information. The Choke comes in when you realize that after all that effort trying to gag down your own bullshit, the only remedy is the Copy Heimlich: ctrl-A-backspace.
After you’ve experienced the Big Choke a few times, Writer’s Block can start to sound pretty appealing. After all, if you never write anything, you’ll never puke out anything timid, repetitive, and asinine. The Universe can never disappoint your aspiration to write crystalline prose when you don’t put down a single word that could ever be judged as insufficient – secure in your conviction that in your head, where your Muse is safe from ACDs, over-helpful friends, constructive criticism of any kind, and objective reality in general, you’re actually Fitzgerald reincarnated.
So, hell with that, who wouldn’t retreat into Writer’s Block? Paralysis, if you think about it, can be kind of cozy. You don’t have to do anything; you just sit there, nice and still, maybe blinking once in a while. One spasmodic fit after another, however, bites immensely – especially when your paycheck rides on your ability to write your way through everything short of an artistic aneurism.
But that’s exactly what you have to do – after all, trusting your work has virtually nothing to do with belief and expectation, and ever so much to do with cussed perseverance. Once you’ve coughed out what you’re choking on, you try and get it down again; you get it down, you hate it, you fix it, you do it again, and then maybe you like it better. And once you like it, once you see it start to go to work on its own – even if no one else does – then you start to trust it.
Granted, there was A Guy once said that the worst writers are the ones with most trust in themselves. I tend to believe him. Hell, I know every morning I could wake up with a Big, Fat, Ugly Choke staring me in the face, and the only thing I can do is try to get it down anyway. And if I choke, so what?
I know which keys to hit.
These are the mornings when nothing I write makes sense, when I’m dead certain everything I put down sounds juvenile, predictable, and unnecessary. I rewrite everything a second after I’ve put it on paper, revise sentences one after the other before I even finish a paragraph, endlessly and unproductively circling back and forth on myself over and over again. Rather than composing anything new, since I don’t trust a word I have to say, I move modifiers around instead, swapping them between sentences, reordering clauses, moving some callouts back and forth, and agonizing over whether the button at the top of the webpage should say “Learn More” or “More Info”. On these days, a headless chicken could pound out something that would make David Ogilvy proud, compared to what I can do.
These are the days when the Big Choke comes to town. The Big Choke is not Writer’s Block, though there’s a common misperception that they’re the same thing. In fact, the Big Choke is to Writer’s Block what an epileptic fit is to a full-out catatonic trance. When you have Writer’s Block, you stare blankly at the blinking cursor, with genuinely no idea how you’re going to make pharmaceutical sales in Japan sound seductive, and a paralyzing conviction that you never will have one. When you experience the Big Choke, on the other hand, you compulsively scribble 5 pages about Japanese pharma sales by repeating and reordering the same three thoughts in different syntax and fonts, only to get to the end and panic when you realize you’ve used 5000 words to produce 127 characters of useful information. The Choke comes in when you realize that after all that effort trying to gag down your own bullshit, the only remedy is the Copy Heimlich: ctrl-A-backspace.
After you’ve experienced the Big Choke a few times, Writer’s Block can start to sound pretty appealing. After all, if you never write anything, you’ll never puke out anything timid, repetitive, and asinine. The Universe can never disappoint your aspiration to write crystalline prose when you don’t put down a single word that could ever be judged as insufficient – secure in your conviction that in your head, where your Muse is safe from ACDs, over-helpful friends, constructive criticism of any kind, and objective reality in general, you’re actually Fitzgerald reincarnated.
So, hell with that, who wouldn’t retreat into Writer’s Block? Paralysis, if you think about it, can be kind of cozy. You don’t have to do anything; you just sit there, nice and still, maybe blinking once in a while. One spasmodic fit after another, however, bites immensely – especially when your paycheck rides on your ability to write your way through everything short of an artistic aneurism.
But that’s exactly what you have to do – after all, trusting your work has virtually nothing to do with belief and expectation, and ever so much to do with cussed perseverance. Once you’ve coughed out what you’re choking on, you try and get it down again; you get it down, you hate it, you fix it, you do it again, and then maybe you like it better. And once you like it, once you see it start to go to work on its own – even if no one else does – then you start to trust it.
Granted, there was A Guy once said that the worst writers are the ones with most trust in themselves. I tend to believe him. Hell, I know every morning I could wake up with a Big, Fat, Ugly Choke staring me in the face, and the only thing I can do is try to get it down anyway. And if I choke, so what?
I know which keys to hit.
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