Hotel Zero

Real World Bourbon Guide

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?

Matthew Eck's The Farther Shore

A USA Today reporter called me a couple years ago to ask, “Which of the 300 books published about the Iraq war”—and this was 2005, just two years into the war—“are going to last like Jarhead and Baghdad Express seem destined to do?” Setting aside the assumption that either my book or Tony’s was going to “last,” the question struck me as ridiculous: “No one knows,” would have been the only proper answer to both her assumption and her question. But you know—you have to play the game, right? I mentioned Generation Kill as a likely candidate, but then said there were two big problems inherent in any book coming out so quickly after its author had served in a war (or a journalist had covered it): “Did they know how to write a novel or memoir?” and “Could they get their head around it—all the way around: morally, aesthetically, and so on?”

I looked back at how it had taken Hemingway and Remarque ten years or so to digest World War One and how, with the exception of Mailer—who had won the Story competition while still at Harvard prior to his WWII enlistment, most of what we now consider the classic accounts—especially in memoir—had taken decades: With the Old Breed by Eugene Sledge came out in 1981; Farley Mowat’s And No Birds Sang in 1979; Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier—out in 1967—was almost precocious by comparison.

There are always exceptions, it’s true, but in general: the longer you wait, with war, the more likely you are to have developed your chops as a writer and cleared your head—and prepared your heart—for the journeys you have to take through your experiences & the even more difficult one of preparing it in such a way that others might take that same journey.

Now, along comes Matthew Eck with The Farther Shore & we’re lucky he took his time: he’s delivered a small masterpiece.

Twin Cities Book Festival

OK, have to check out for the week: a few notes until I return...

1) Am introducing Chris Abani at the Twin Cities Book Festival on Saturday. Chris is an amazing human being, a terrific writer, and a fantastic speaker. If you get a chance, come out to MCTC this weekend. If you can't make it? Check out Chris's stunning TED lecture from this summer. Then go read his books.

2) Spoon concert at First Ave. tomorrow night. Will be great. Hope to see some of you there.

3) Wanted to share this great line from one of my editors (more about this soon): "Make clarity your God; the riff a minor deity." Of course, my early mentor Bill Kittredge put it somewhat more colorfully: "Keep the bullshit to less than 10% of anything you write."

Some Not-So-Final Thoughts on Burns' The War

The War as Memory and as Theater

Because I am who I am, I had certain expectations of The War--it met some of them. War is not a vehicle of hope, it is not enobling, it is full of disaster and death and compromises of the soul. Ken Burns more-or-less gets this across, sometimes powerfully. But other times the film dithered in a kind of nostalgia that drove me nuts. It happened, however, that my expectations in this regard were tempered when I met a woman who had grown up in Worthington, MN--right next door to Luverne--when I was half-way through the series. She had been old enough during World War Two to remember her afternoons carting scrap metal around in her Radio Flyer, her mother collecting maps on the kitchen wall, the conversations her father--the football coach at Worthington--had with his best friend, who happened to be the football coach at Luverne. "I remember paying twelve cents every Saturday to go see the movies, the thrill of seeing the newsreels of the war," she said. "To see it come back now, after all these years, was very powerful." I nodded and she continued, "I guess we didn't really know how horrible the war really was--they showed a very little bit of the shocking stuff in the newsreels. I was only a little girl, but even after that, after the war and after everyone came home, I never really knew. We didn't talk about it."

Quick Hits: Reviewery Edition

Yellow Ribbons and Flag Waving

Nathaniel Fick, author of the first-rate memoir One Bullet Away, has a nice piece up at the Poetry website:  a review of recent war poetry. A highlight is Nate's personal use of poetry while commanding Marines in Afghanistan--and his appreciation for Brian Turner's Here, Bullet. I gave Here, Bullet a rave review last year in Rain Taxi.

The Savage Critic

I don't think Heidi Julavits got the credit her essay against snark deserved (it wasn't as namby-pamby as people said it was), but you know: I don't think I could live without snark. I love a good negative review. Especially of over-hyped books or books by famous authors who aren't living up to their talent. They can go overboard, as Michiko Kakutani did with her Caulfield-eque review of Benjamin Kunkel's worthwhile freshman effort, Indecision, a couple years ago. But still: keeping up our USRDA of schadenfreude requires negative reviews, and no one does a negative review better--more accurately, with more humor and understanding--than William Logan. His piercing of Pynchon's Against the Day in this summer's Virginia Quarterly Review is a must-read.

Ken Burns' Blurred Focus

Since I'm more or less going to slag on Ken Burns for the duration of this series--and once more again, in summary, when the DVD set comes out--I suppose I should express a few thoughts on what I admire about The War...

First, let's face it: very few, if any, other documentary filmmakers could have gotten something of this scope made. Period. It's true, the Hanks-Spielberg team are making another $100M blockbuster miniseries for HBO, this time on the Pacific Campaign, but that's a feature film, not a documentary. For all the faults in Burns' project, it's bested only by the monumental BBC series, World at War.

Greene Around the Gills

"The canal was full of bodies: I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The bodies over-lapped: one head, seal-grey, and anonymous as a convict with a shaven scalp, stuck up out of the water like a buoy. There was no blood: I suppose it had flowed away a long time ago. I have no idea how many there were: they must have been caught in a cross-fire, trying to get back, and I suppose every man of us along the bank was thinking, 'Two can play at that game.' I too took my eyes away; we didn't want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply and anonymously death came. Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act."

Graham Greene, The Quiet American

"Of course there was nothing to do. Everything went very quickly like a routine. The officer stepped aside, the rifles went up, and the little man suddenly made jerky movements with his arms. He was trying to say something: what was the phrase they were supposed to use? That was routine too, but perhaps his mouth was too dry, because nothing came out except a word that sounded like 'Excuse'. The crash of the rifles shook Mr. Tench: they seemed to vibrate inside his own guts: he felt sick and shut his eyes. Then there was a single shot, and opening them again he saw the officer stuffing his gun back into his holster, and the little man was a routine heap beside the wall--something unimportant which had to be cleared away. Two knock-kneed men approached quickly. This was an arena, and the bull was dead, and there was nothing more to wait for any more."

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

I have always put off blogging because I found that I couldn't take it seriously enough--or, as likely and more often, far more seriously than I should & never in-between. I'd say: "Wouldn't it be cool if there were a blogger who was blogging with the intent of writing the next Arcades Project? Die Fäckel? Thoreau's Journals?" And it would be cool--fantastically so: and then I'd despair that I wasn't going to do any of those things.

But here we are and here I type and I intend to do something more than archive second-hand links and something less than an Augean labor of baring my soul on a daily basis, recorded for eternity.

So, book fans: mark your calendars--my compromise is going to be to use the interactivity, the take-it-or-leave-itivity of blogs to push forward some thoughts which previously malingered like Marines on light-duty. That is to say: September is Graham Greene Month at Hotel Zero. Of course, I'll still make occasional posts on the progress of my powerhouse fantasy football team, The Fighting Elvii, and the odd commentary on the Iraq War or veterans or writing (or, as my workshop approaches, all three together)... but by-and-large I'll be finishing my novel and reading a lot of Graham Greene.

Actively seeking an influence or model is a sketchy thing in writing, but I've come to admire Greene's writing tremendously over the past few years. It's a clear white liquor that never leaves me hungover. It's got wonderful rhythms, complex-but-supple sentences, and carries its philosophy lightly on the page yet powerfully in its effect. There are other books, by other writers, that I admire more than any of Greene's, but they leave a heaviness of influence, a persistence of specific rhythms, that I find hard to shake (a good thing while reading, a horrible thing while writing): Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried are books that I read once a year, or more: masterpieces of their kinds, and riveting. But I wouldn't dare read either of them within a month of doing serious writing: they are not only inimitable, but drunk-making and leave in their wake a hangover of word and rhythm worse for my prose than a hard night of bourbon on a too-light dinner is on my body.

Fire up your RSS reader, tell your friends, and dog-ear you favorite Greene passages: this'll be fun.