When you realize that you left iTunes running before leaving for your in-laws' 45th wedding anniversary. And that when you returned six hours later, half-filled bottle of wine in hand, you were still only half-way through your Dylan catalog.
Even worse? The secondary realization that you really should get a Twitter account.
Overheard on MetaFilter post on Brett Favre:
Jesus was shit on third down and long.
And when you needed a last-second TD to win, do you put him in? Hell no, you call his mother.
I do love The New York Times, but every once in a while they write something that's so ridiculously effete or wrong-headedly, you know, New York, that my inner Marine or Fly-Fisherman or cranky, sullen Middle-Westerner gets the best of me and I just shake my head.
Tonight it was reading their article, "Bourbon's Shot at the Big Time." There should just never be a sentence about Bourbon written like the following: "We all noted the wide range of flavors in these bourbons, from creamy chocolate and fruity to grassy and herbaceous." This makes a selection of the United States' only native contribution to the bounties of fermentation sound like a party of cows getting it on at the Christopher Street Piers. Bourbon's chief virtues are its clean palate (you should only drink it one of two ways: straight or with one or two ice cubes and a splash of water) and its slightly-sweet, somewhat oak-tinged flavor. To the degree that a Bourbon is smooth and drinkable on that basis, it's a good Bourbon. It shouldn't taste like an old boot dug up from a peat bog or like someone dumped a dairy pail full of potpourri into the barrel. And yes, like Marine, it's always capitalized (even if, like me, you have a mixed relationship with the subject).
Most importantly: no list of essential Bourbon's should exclude Maker's Mark. That's just wrong.
With the exception of a case of beer or so a month, depending on the season—less in the Winter and more in the Summer—all I drink is Bourbon. And here's what I drink, when I drink it, and why.
1. Maker's Mark. 70% of the time. For price/taste/danger value, this is the Bourbon to keep on your desk. I generally drink from about 10 PM until 2 AM, maybe starting a little sooner and ending either earlier or later depending on what's on the calendar for the following day. I start with a couple of ice cubes, a splash of water, and then just keep the bottle on my desk or end-table until I go to sleep. As such, I sip slowly over a long period of time. There are better tasting Bourbons, but none so reasonably-priced, so good, and so unlikely to leave you feeling like someone crawled inside your brain, dug a trench with an e-tool, and took a healthy shit as Maker's Mark.
2. Knob Creek. 20% of the time. Used to be 100% of the time, because among reasonably-priced Bourbons it's the easy champion all the way around. Unfortunately, it's about 20% more expensive than Maker's Mark and about the same amount stronger. Which means that if you drink it like I do—in slow sips over a more-or-less regulated period of time—you're liable to spend 20% more and get 20% more drunk. Flavor is no small thing, but Knob Creek's advantage over Maker's Mark doesn't exceed the algebra in calculating poorer and more-likely-to-be-hungover.
3. Bulleit. 4% of the time. This is a newer Bourbon on the shelves in Minnesota. It's cheaper by 20% than Maker's Mark, and not bad—but it's not as good. Whenever I buy a bottle (and I buy a bottle of Bourbon every week and have done so for the past ten years, at least), I think, "OK. But I'm picking up Maker's Mark next time."
4. Woodford Reserve. 3% of the time. I think this is about the same price as Maker's Mark. Maybe between Maker's and Knob Creek. It's a very good Bourbon. Maybe I should drink it more, but maybe the bottle is just too well-designed. It's true that Duffy here in Minneapolis designed the whole line of fancy Jim Beam Bourbons (Knob Creek, Basil Hayden's, etcetera) and did a marvelous job... but at least they had the sense to build the brands around Bourbon-looking themes. Woodford Reserve looks like what Kenneth Cole would design if he was designing a bottle of Bourbon.
5. Evan Williams Single Barrel. 3% of the time. This is a pretty good Bourbon, reasonably priced. Along with Bulleit, though, it's one that I always finish with the thought, "Next time, Knob Creek or Maker's Mark."
A few final thoughts on the New York Times piece: Under no circumstances should you buy Jim Beam Black over any of the Bourbons listed above. It's not better and it's not better priced than the Bulleit or the Evan Williams Single Barrel. Also: Bourbon should never be more expensive than Knob Creek. It's an everyday sipping booze, folks. If you want to drop $100 on something, get a rare single malt, a nice Cohiba, and spend a night getting so drunk and stinky that you don't care that you still smell (and feel) like an old boot dug up from a peat bog in the morning.
Update: Just back from liquor store and it appears that Maker's Mark is the same price as Knob Creek (at least for the 750ml—a little less for the 1.75l). The Maker's Mark has gone up. Just in time for the holidays? You wonder. So I bought Knob Creek and am here to report it's still just as strong and just as good as it was the last time. Like I said: the class-act of the non-ridiculous Bourbons. Also, the Woodford Reserve was a few dollars more expensive than the Maker's Mark and Knob Creek. Curious: is there a liquor distributor in the audience? How often do these prices change/how much to they vary?
This month's Esquire contains (just is?) their annual "Esquire 100": "The Ideas, Trends, Products, People, and Obscene Gestures You Should Know About Before Everyone Else." Well, Thomas Barnett's idea (five, actually, No. 5-9 on the list) must be counted as one of the "obscene gestures." Barnett's premise is that "in the lives of men and nations, either you are growing or you're dying" and that we should be asking the question, "...What will our next five states be?"
What?!
With the possible exception of Puerto Rico (which probably should become a state, or independent--the latter prospect of which would probably be great for the U.S., but horseshit for the Puerto Ricans), all of Barnett's ideas are historically-challenged in their basis, of questionable benefit, and, frankly, bat-shit stupid crazy. Barnett's list? British Columbia, Cuba, Mexico's northern states, Panama, and Puerto Rico.
Barnett starts his piece with the folksy premise that he's the first member of his family in seven generations to miss out on getting a new state. Well, that's sort of true. But not really. Let's work backwards from this idea first, before we even get to the new states.
Available in the UK since the July 1 smoking ban, these bad boys are evidently going to be available in the U.S. next year (waiting to hear back from the fine folks at Tank Magazine). I mean, really, wouldn't these look insanely cool on your writing desk?
... thereon must he lean to rise again. In Senator Larry Craig's case, that would be a bathroom stall partition. It's easy to make Craig the butt of too many jokes, it's true. But what the hell? It's fun and he's a hypocrite. After reading Scott McLemee's piece on Laud Humphreys, author of the (it just doesn't stop, does it?) seminal study of homosexual cruising habits, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, I'm less inclined to make such cracks (sorry).
In his piece, Scott writes:
But this pioneering role had its costs. Some gay activists told Humphreys that they found Tearoom Trade embarrassing. He was under suspicion of being a straight researcher “slumming” in the underworld. During a heated exchange at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in 1974, he was denounced as an example of those mainstream scholars “urging others to make great sacrifices,” as one participant in the discussion put it, while “their own lives are untainted by the behavior that they so courageously defend (in others).”
To this, Humphreys responded: “I want to be perfectly honest with you and I want you to know that I am gay. I have done my research and written [Tearoom Trade] as a gay person, closeted, trying to come out of that closet, dealing with my own personal pain.”
In an exchange over this drop-dead response over at Crooked Timber, Scott asks: "Joel—I’d hoped that someone who was at the ASA session would describe it in the comments section. So far that hasn’t happened. Can you imagine what the effect would have been in 1974?"
Well, sadly, I can...
In an otherwise throw-away line among some paragraphs about Norman Podhoretz and their Columbia days, Washington Monthly founder Charles Peters once wrote:
I knew Podhoretz as someone who attended a class with me, not as a friend or even an acquaintance. The course we took together was in twentieth-century fiction, taught by Harrison Steeves. Since the lures of life in New York often left me less than prepared for the morning's discussion, I sat in the back of the room. Podhoretz sat in the front and was always prepared. He was constantly waving his hand, constantly talking, constantly trying to impress the professor.
The problem was that Podhoretz was a Jew from Brooklyn and Steeves was a snobbish old WASP with little patience for the upwardly mobile. However brilliant Podhoretz might be, Steeves would not give him the recognition he so avidly sought. Steeves bestowed his regard, instead, on one Donald Maher, a reserved young man with the right accent.
It's true that Donald Maher was revered as an undergraduate, graduate student, and then lecturer at Columbia. His college room-mate, Jason Epstein, once told me he was the most brilliant man he'd ever met. He won the Cutting Fellowship. He hung around with Clement Greenberg and Justin O'Brien and many of the other highbrows at Columbia in the post-war years.
But far from being the sort of model WASP implied by Peters, he had a reason to be reserved: he was a gay, Irish-Catholic orphan from Utica. Despite his great promise, he would only publish a single essay--one he didn't even write himself: it was a translation of an essay by Jean Prevost on Mauriac.
He died of complications from alcoholism on July 25, 1968, at the age of 47.
I know all this because Donald was my great uncle and in my family he was a sort of higher-order legend. His younger brother (my grandfather) was a legend all by (and annoyingly, sometimes to) himself, having been a Commander in the Navy and a PhD at Harvard. Although my grandfather had long since given up on God when I came to know him, he positively worshiped Donald. I had thought, once, about writing a novel, or even a kind of memoir, about Donald... but after doing a very small number of interviews with those who knew him at Columbia and afterwards, I realized that the story was just too sad--and cruel. I remember thinking, as I sat with my grandfather on his death bed, "Should I tell him?" "No," I'd answer myself, "there are cruel truths that should themselves be buried--at least as long as they can still burn the living."
Donald's drawing for his nephews, diagramming a late-night mugging he received while walking home from a party to his apartment on Riverside Drive: God, in his Mighty Fortress, looks on, unmoved.
Stopped by local neighborhood bookstore today and thought I scored a couple of huge deals: 1st Edition, with HC/DJ of both James Salter's Light Years and of Thom Jones' Pugilist at Rest. The Salter did turn out to be a steal: $10 for a book that sells for $40+ ...but the Jones? Paid $10 for a book that sells for... $4 online. A major author's first book, a book that won the National Book Award... fetches only $4 for a first edition? Makes the fact that you can get a first of Baghdad Express for a buck a little less depressing, I suppose: but man, where's the love for literature?
As part of a big, but largely amorphous, project I'm working on, I've spent the last couple months annotating a list (and in more limited way, buying) for a would-be collection of 20th century war memoirs and novels. It's been a pretty instructive exercise in literary reputation and fame. A very small number of books are worth more than $10 or $20, even in nice first editions. One or two are worth $100 or more: Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone ($1500--and man, I had a chance a couple years ago to pick one up from local bookseller for $200... oops!), Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa ($850). Most? Books like Chickenhawk or Born on the Fourth of July or Paco's Story... four or five, maybe ten bucks--twenty is high-end. Even Michael Herr's Dispatches--an undisputed classic--is commonly found for $20 in a fine first.
I know, you can still get these things in paperback, that I'm not doing these authors any good in buying handsome firsts, & especially that the hardcover first fetish is one of the worst symptoms of book-lover's disease, but come on, people: Don't we all feel a little embarrassed that we'll spend more on a bagel and coffee than on a classic of 20th century literature?
