Enrique's erratica, 2010

Read in 2009

-1. Drawers and Booths by Ara 13 (first novel, U.S.A.)
-2. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (first novel, Irish)
-3. Disabilityland by Alan Brightman (non-fiction, U.S.A.)
-4. Fierce by Hannah Holborn (first story collection, Canadian)
-5. Ulysses (half of it) by James Joyce
-6. Smiles on Washington Square: A Love Story of Sorts by Raymond Federman (French-American)
-7. Roaming Kyrgyzstan: Beyond the Tourist Track by Jessica Jacobson (American expat)
-8. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
-9. Steps by Jerzy Kosinski
10. The Safety of Objects by A.M. Homes (first story collection, U.S.A.)
11. The Sea Came in at Midnight by Steve Erickson (U.S.A.)
12. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Japanese) by Haruki Murakami
13. Lightning on the Sun by Robert Bingham (Amer. expat., first novel)
14. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Russian)
15. Sadika's Way by Hina Haq (first novel, Pakistani-American)
16. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean Dominique Bauby (memoir, French)
17. Last Vanities by Fleur Jaeggy (first story collection, Italian)
18. The Body Artist by Don Delillo (U.S.A.)
19. The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (Brazillian)
20. 666 by Jay Anson (U.S.A.)
21. Shock Treatment by Karen Finley (U.S.A.)
22. Imperial (will continue slogging through into 2010) by William T. Vollmann (U.S.A. - Mexico/U.S.A. border relations)
23. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Boll (German)
24. I Think, Therefore Who Am I? by Peter Weissman (first novel, U.S.A.)
25. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (French)

I "sampled" at least as many titles as listed above in '09 which means I read anywhere from the first 25 - 100 pages or so of the respective books. I'll try to keep track of those better this year.

Medillia, a big "Ha, ha!" for you!

and Freeque, I'm quite a "sampler," too, especially with lit crit and history.

So, I finally get caught up with the Club Read 2009 threads, when I discover all you over achievers over here starting 2010 early. And now, Gold Stars.

Add me to the sampler list. Mostly I do this with nonfiction (yes, I love the lit crit also), and I dip in and out of contemporary poetry collections. Maybe I should keep track of this stuff...(ha ha, that would only encourage the habit...)

Man, I need to slow it down. I would have sworn the title to your thread was: "Enrique's errotica, 2010". Glad to see I was foiled!~!
gotcha starred dude.
belva

Looking forward to following your reading in 2010, Enrique!

5> I plan on sampling extensively this year, avaland, glad to see I won't be alone!

6> Nanny! Why I may just have to mix in some Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a book written in 1749 and banned in the U.S., until a 1966 Supreme Court decision set it free (according to the back cover), just for you. So, it very well may by "Fanny for Nanny" in 2010!

7> 'Bout time you got on over here to Club Read wisewoman! Excited to see you here and look forward to following your thread.

I just finished The Red Album of Asbury Park, Remixed by Alex Austin this morning, and am very excited to have "discovered" this unknown writer worthy of a much larger audience. If I were to write a one word review, it would be, "riveting." Intricate plotting, lyrical, poetic language, part mystery, part coming-of-age, underworld New Jersey shore odyssey, filled with up-and-coming would be rockers, and full of surprising resolutions. Austin seamlessly drops in historical events of the time, MLK & RFK assassinations, Tet Offensive, etc., to move the timeline forward. Fun, fascinating read. Some novels leave a lot unanswered for and that's probably just as well, while The Red Album eventually answers everything regarding "what happened?" and yet still leaves you wanting so much more.

I don't remember the details of Fanny Hill's becoming legal, but I do remember carrying a legally purchased copy on a flight from Ithaca to Albany, New York, in the Summer of 1964.

Robert

>8 absurdeist: I've often played with the idea of looking for best reviews of one to three words long. We should hold a competition in the Salon for the best tiny review. (hints)

Also, if the last few days are any indication, I will be doing more sampling than straightforward reading this year. Go samplers!

>6 rainpebble: belva, i had the same impression when I saw the title in last year's thread!!! hahah!
Isn't it disappointing? I was expecting full frontal no holds bared erotica and what do we get? SAMPLES!

Damn cheapscate that Enriiiiique.

btw on samples, I have thought of another great list: works to sample rather than read: (Where is that dreadful Belgian when you need him? MAC???)

works to sample:

Anatomy of Melancholy
Nabokov's commentary on his translation of Eugene Onegin
The Devil's Dictionary
OED
The Book of Disquiet
etc
etc

>8 absurdeist: the problem is actually remembering to log/note any sampling. Sampling is surely the function of the autonomic literary nervous system (like breathing)... Or perhaps best likened to keeping a food journal and only logging the three meals and not the things we nibble on inbetween...

>10 ChocolateMuse: We did have a thread of review haikus last year. Some were pretty terrific! (although best appreciated if one has read the book being haikued)

By "erratica" I honestly meant to denote a thread that wouldn't hold to a set pattern or routine, or necessarily get posted on very often, as I'm pretty busy in other places.

I am beyond appalled, Murr, by your base and bawdy and reprehensibly perverse misrepresentation of the purposes and connotations of my glorious thread's magnifique title. I, for one, can wait forever for your undoubtedly soon-to-be brilliant exposition of Eugene Onerous Gin, or whatever that weighty tome is titled. So take your time composing it, Murr-maid, please!

Review haiku's, avaland, I like that. Hurry, Chocolate Muse, steal her idea and take it to the salon before she notices!

Now, finally, having been reminded (thank you avaland) of my commitment to sampling. Here's what I've sampled so far in 2010:

The first 32 pages of Light in August for a group read. I've decided to abandon it because I'm rather burned out on group reads at the moment. I want to read for awhile by myself - alone, solo - what I want to read when I want to read it and not because some schedule says I have to read it! Pardon me, I really didn't mean to raise my voice.

I've also sampled some more of Vollmann's massive Imperial, a non-fiction work on U.S./Mexico Border relations I actually plan on completing, but not until probably 2013. William T. Vollmann is a complete nut, and thank God he is. He and a "river guide" he hired for $50 (which is cheaper than what the hardcover edition of this book costs), raft down the most polluted river in North America - the New River in California's Imperial County - in an inflatable raft not for sport, but just because it's there basically. He developed a bad cough (as did his guide) and rashes on his hands where the river water - industrial and agricultural and sewage runoff (plus some water) - inevitably splashed on them. The book was ten years in the making, so perhaps it's appropriate that it may take me ten years to read it.

And Vollmann is so insanely committed to traversing every inch of the wasteland he writes about, even at risk of personal harm, so that he can know it inside-out as if it were his lover; and I say "lover" because Vollmann begins early on referring to the desert land of Imperial - the accident of the Salton Sea, the poverty, the desperation, the irrigation battles, the daily cat-and-mouse games between "pollos" (those who attempt illegal crossings into the U.S.A.) and the border patrol - as if each component of the conflict were part of the flesh and blood and soul of his beloved lover; his estranged lover that he can never quite grasp (oh how "she" pulls away from him at the most inopportune times) and whom he can't really know no matter how much time and energy he spends pursuing "her".

I've also sampled the first two essays in Sarah Vowell's hysterical collection, Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, which I hope to have time to write about this weekend. Maybe by then I'll have read more of it.

Ok, you did, got me interested in reading another Vollmann novel. I just added it to my hold list at the library.

Solla, it's insanely long and tangential (1,306 pages) but if you're brave (and I know you are) and since you read, what?, nearly 100 books a year?, as I peruse all those titles in your thread, you might be able to finish it in a month, though I think two months is more reasonable. Can't wait to hear your takes on it!

I often feel the same way you do about group reads. Expect me to disappear at some point this year for the same reason. Right now, though, I'm sort of enjoying the whiplash I get as I go back and forth from Les Mis to Light in August.

I've been sampling and very much enjoying the erratica so far, although I'm not at all familiar with the books you've read in the past year aside from Les Mis (a favorite). I probably should be reading Light in August with the group, as I swore that was my next Faulkner novel to read, but somehow I can't bring myself to it. Also, I'm not entirely sure if we have a copy.

And you, sir, are a pimple on the face of the universe, a wart on a parson's behind, a wet stain on a baby's nappy, a bowl of puss and a false, pernicious HAIRBALL!!!!!

Pah! I defy you, SIR!

Oh, call off this duel, no more puss-hkins lost.

Aaaah, I LOVE that pun, solla.

I am prepared to be the second for BOTH the aggrieved parties. I will prepare the guns, making sure the powder is wet and there are no bullets.

After both guns are discharged, both combatants can fall, both get treated by the doctor on the scene, and since honour had been restored, can shake hands and make haste to the club, whiskies and cigars all around.

I will never wave the white flag. But I can be magnanimous and call a truce. Or....perhaps we should start a dueling insults thread, eh, you know, sort of like this?

Ah, Deliverance. How many iconic moments can one short book/one movie, share? That's a book that grabs you and never lets go. And since James Dickey also wrote the screenplay, the movie is as good as the book, but I won't say better, since I do so love them both. Is it true, anybody know, that Dickey fashioned his narrative after Dante's Inferno (or was it The Odyssey)? I'm confused. May be common knowledge but I'm not in the know.

9> Pardon me, Mr. Durick, for missing your post. So it sounds like you're confessing to having been in actual possession of contraband? Erotic contraband, on an airplane? Hmm.

I've flown through the first 20 pages of The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson. His graphic depictions right out of the gate of what it's like to be in an end-over-end car crash off a cliff, to survive it, resting upside down, immobilized, as flames crisp your scalp, are stunning. His precision in detailing the medical differences between first, second, and third degree burns (and "4th degree" burns, which theoretically can enter a person's bones) are first rate.

Here's how Davidson describes what it would be like being trapped and burning: "And hold it there {he means hold your hands there on the electric coils of a fully heated stove burner.} Hold it there as the element scorches Dante's nine rings right into your palm, allowing you to grasp Hell in your hand forever....I have another task for you: lean down, turn your head to one side, and slap your cheek on the same element. I'll let you choose which side of your face....The convenient thing is that your ear is right there to capture the snap, crackle, and pop of your flesh.

"Now you may have some idea of what it was like for me to be pinned inside that car, unable to escape the flames, conscious enough to catalogue the experience until I went into shock."

I think I've abandoned The Gargoyle. Fabulous beginning, but by page 100 I'm getting bored. Perhaps this is a reason not to chronicle your "sampling": One day the book is great; the next it stinks!

I completed Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die about a week ago, a book I wasn't advertising reading because it's so, well, twisted, and might induce raised eyebrows from those, however few, congregate here, and with strange shenanigans inevitably happening on the 'Frique front, I figured people are already scared away enough as it is, so why advertise I'm reading it?

I'd planned on writing a similarly twisted review of it, but events in Haiti happened in the interim. And so I wrote this instead:

As the aftermath of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti continues unfolding and the horrific, gut-wrenching reality of Death grimly stares me and everybody down, collectively, body after ruined body, from the detached safety of my/our computer monitors and TV sets, how can I not imagine (especially considering I live too close to The San Andreas Fault that's long overdue to destroy us Southern Californians in "The Big One"), that those poor Haitians, buried and crushed by the rubble of not just an earthquake, but by chronic poverty and an archaically constructed infrastructure both physical and political, could just as easily have been me? Or my loved ones? Someday that may be us bloodied or obliterated on the TV screen should an 8.0 strike anywhere on The San Andreas Fault between Wrightwood and Palm Springs, California, thus making the movie 2012 a veritable reality.

I'd just finished reading most of Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die, when the Haiti earthquake struck. I'd planned on writing what I'd hoped would amount to a really funny review, good for some good lowbrow giggles, poking fun at and mocking those chronicled in the morbid book who've died in some of the most unbelievably ridiculous and absurd scenarios ever. Like death by Vending Machine. Or death by Video Game. Death by Vegetarians and Vigilantes too. No joke. I'm flipping through the "V" section of the book, right now, obviously, as this encyclopedia is arranged alphabetically after all, as most encyclopedias are, beginning with, Death-by-Words-that-Start-with-"A," and ending, you guessed it, with, Death-by-Words-that-Start-with-"Z". Death by A-B-C-D-E-F-G.... The lone "Z" entry is "Zoofatalism". Zoofatalism is "a psychological disorder in which the afflicted get dangerously close to zoo animals or keep wild animals as pets against better judgment." Normally, at this point in the "review," I would mercilessly mock such Zoofatalists, but out of respect for my brothers and sisters in humanity mercilessly suffering and dying by the day in Haiti, I will refrain.

Final Exits also comes illustrated with drawings and photos of either outright-death, or of seemingly non-fatal activities that can nevertheless lead to death. Like Cheerleading. It's "Rah-rah," one second apparently; and the next second...ooops...you're dead, and no pom-pom can save you now! Damn, I indeed was trying really hard not to mock or poke fun at anybody, even cheerleaders. But I was a geek in high school, and cheerleaders ignored, if not outright rejected me. Stuck up pom-pom wenches. So, I guess they deserve to be mocked, cheerleaders, now that I consider it, no matter what natural disasters and untold deaths have just occurred in the world.

Most of the drawings and photographs in Final Exits are benign and tastefully crafted, like the doesn't-really-show-anything drawing (darn!) of the man being "Autocastrated" with a sword in the "A" section of the book. Equally as tasteful is the cute photograph of the huge-toothed hippopotamus Yawning in the "Y" section of the book. Death by hippopotamus Yawning? Read it to believe it:

"According to a story reported in the Melbourne Herald Sun in July 1999, one man died when a hippo yawned. A circus clown, a dwarf named Od...jumped off a trampoline just as a hippo, waiting to perform in the next act, yawned. The man landed square in the animal's mouth, which opened to a span of four feet. The hippo's involuntary gag reflex caused Od to be instantaneously swallowed whole. The one thousand-plus spectators who witnessed it continued to applaud wildly until common sense dictated that there had been a tragic mistake. Attempts to force the hippo to regurgitate the body were not successful."

Funny, right? Wrong!

Any other week it might've been funny and I'd of had a blast writing this "review," sharing such wacky, weird, and even erotic ways in which people die. Sometimes people die in wacky, weird, and erotic ways simultaneously, come to find out. But I just can't, right now, in good conscience, crack jokes about women who've died during cunnilingus, or died from "drowning in molasses;" I just can't, because, even though I know I stated at the outset I wouldn't try to be funny in this "review," and I've obviously failed in a very limited (arguably) perhaps unfunny-funny extent in that non-humor endeavor, because now is not an appropriate time for humor, right?, with so much inconceivable quantities of death - literally truckloads of death bound for mass graves - confronting us day after tragic day! I feel awkward "reviewing" a book like this at a time like this when so many are suffering beyond what the word "suffering" can even come close to adequately describing. How does one adequately describe complete decimation and despair without sounding glib or trivializing it in the process?

Know that whatever humor has been present here in this "review" isn't meant to make light of real pain and real grief and sorrow and all the other adjectives I could summon to my rescue (in case I have in fact, stuck my foot in my mouth); but that the humor is just a mask, a ruse, a psychological coping device, a weakness, a defense against the indiscriminate pain and horror hurled at this World from God-knows-where, that I can't understand nor control; a distraction, if you will, the humor, to prevent me from really pondering how godawfully unhumorous it is, the Hell that is happening in Haiti, and the Hells abundant elsewhere on this sorrowful globe, that are conveniently, in rectilinear, sanitized and safe fashion, transmitted to us everyday on a screen.

>22 absurdeist: re: sampling. Yes, I've just blown unnaturally through a novel. I chronicled it and it felt like a confession. Lesson: sometimes it's not the book, it's me. Then again, sometimes it's the book. Without a good literary therapist, who's to say which it is in this case?

Literary therapists: do they exist? If so, I need one. Badly.

"Dear Miss Lonelyhearts..."

(Or not. :)

>22 absurdeist: "...a book I wasn't advertising reading because it's so, well, twisted, and might induce raised eyebrows from those, however few, congregate here..."

If it makes you feel any better, Hollywood Babylon sits in my library. And I've read it.

ETA: Terrific, heartfelt review, Enrique

Brilliant review, freeeeeeky, totally human and very revealing about the book and our general response to (other people's) death.

Uncomfortable reading.

21> I have The Gargoyle sitting somewhere in a TBA, but after your description and quotes, I think I may send it to BookMooch. I already nightmare about car accidents, I don't think I need anymore lurid details to add to the details.

28> If you're squeamish at all, steer clear.

26,27> thanks guys! Though, thea, I don't think I can, in good conscience, communicate with you anymore after learning of your Hollywood Babylon indiscretions.

>29 absurdeist:. Sigh. Yes, I know. It was a gift... I used to live in West Hollywood... what more can I say?

hmm twisted sometimes appeals :) but nothankyou from that Gargoyle excerpt ... very effective, and framing it via second-person is amazing (and unbearable)

Rique - poor Od's fate has given me some chills. Regarding The Gargoyle, I'm not sure it's your type of book, but I found it fun, and playful with the references to Dante's Inferno. The 1st 50 pages or so are pretty shocking, but the really squeamish parts mostly end there.

32> wait a minute! Aren't you the Hugo-Hater-from-Texas who had the gaul to call one of my most personally beloved and iconic characters ever penned a "dolt"?

You know, Hugo-Hater-fom-Texas,I'm tempted to go all-adolescent on you and say something snarky-adolescent like, "it takes a dolt to know a dolt," but I will restrain myself because I have tact and decorum. Let everybody else ooh-and-ahh over that review of yours, but I'll be hot diggety-damned if I will. You diss'd Jean Valjean, man.

And now, now, you expect me to take you on your word, Hugo-Hater-from-Texas!!! that The Gargoyle is good after what you said about poor Jean Valjean, a man who suffered like no other fictional man in history; a man innovative, persevering, generous, loyal, thick-skinned, a financial genius independently wealthy, self-sacrificing, a heart for children, forgiving, full of grace...but apparently a man like that's not good enough for you, you Hugo-Hater-from-Texas!!!

I'm about to pass out over here I'm so upset! How could you?! I'm never going to visit Texas again!

I love Texas (well, parts of it), Hugo-haters or no Hugo-haters.

And verily, Jean Valjean rocks.

Freeque - my dearest apologies, my honest feelings could not contain themselves.

...

Hugo-Hater-from-Texas ? What a great username. (For the record, my love of Texas is of the ambivalent sort.)

Oh it's a good review (I thumbed it begrudgingly) only because I thumb reviews based not on whether I agree with their assessments, but on the quality of their crafting: its overall exegesis; it's precision and clarity and consistency of thought; its originality (are the takes - the arguments - clever or creative and/or do they make me laugh whether I agree or not?) and when humor is involved that always helps, as far as I'm concerned. Your review, Dan, pains me to say, has all those qualities - and more: Honesty. Can't beat that.

And as for Texas, you know I dropped by the local Bev-Mo on my way home from work this evening, and the garrulous young guy at the checkout counter (why can't all people behind checkout counters be so friendly like that?) starts telling me about going to college in Texas and how there are dry counties in Texas....Yeah, I know this has absolutely nothing to do with reading, writing, or anything, but just thought I'd share with you how floored I was hearing that. I honestly did not know that Prohibition still existed in parts of Texas.

Opposite experience: I grew up in one of those dry counties in Texas and went to visit my father-in-law in California five years ago. I was shocked to find that they sell liquor--not just wine and beer! liquor!--at the supermarket!

My dry county bordered a wet county, not so far away, so people drove about 15 minutes to the liquor store there. (And got drunk on the drive home. Brilliant law-making, folks.) But even in the wet county, it was confined to actual liquor stores, and some beer at the gas station.

My experience mirrors Meddy's. Of course, during my growing up years in Texas, people could drink a beer in the car. Once a Texas friend visited us after our move to California, tried to enter our car with a beer, and was shocked to find out the CHP might frown on that act. (By the way, have you noticed how many of us either currently live in Texas or grew up there? Weird.)

EF - wow, that was just really nice, thank you. (I'm looking up exegesis.)

#38 - yes, very weird.

On a recent visit to Canada we spent at least 20 minutes looking round a very small supermarket for the wine section on the grounds that 'it must be there somewhere'. Our first experience of alcohol only being sold in liquor stores. In the UK any sort of alcohol is available in the supermarket.

#40

In Ontario, Canada (Canada's most prominent province, where Toronto is) until quite recently liquor and wine were only sold in liquor stores and beer only in beer stores and they were of course both closed on Sundays.

Now the liquor stores stock beer as well, even though there are still totally separate beer stores. And many supermarkets, even in small towns, do have a separate area where they sell wine, but it is usually only the wine of one or two local wineries. And we have given up on protecting the populace from the evil of alcohol on the Lord's Day.

In Sweden too, supermarkets are only allowed to sell beer. Stronger stuff is available in state-run Systembolaget shops, with limited opening hours. When we visited Sweden, we stayed in the flat of my friend's sister, who was on holiday, so before we left we wanted to leave them a nice bottle of wine. First of all I had to wait on the pavement with the winos for the shop to open... then when I got to the checkout the guy asked me for ID!! I asked him whether I needed ID, and he said, "I don't know... do you?" I squealed, "I'm 33!". But even so I think he only let me through because I was buying one bottle of expensive wine, rather than a six-pack of Special Brew...

This is why I am glad I grew up in Louisiana, where not only do they sell liquor in the grocery store, but also the drug store, gas station, and generally any other retail establishment which might also have a bag of chips. And drive-through daiquiri shops - not an open container if you don't put the straw in.

I am so delighted that I mentioned dry counties in Texas, because now, with this post, that's nine (9!) consecutive posts related to booze rather than books! Is that a record? I hope so, and I hope too that the mentions-of-booze-streak will continue, and future posters (assuming there are future posters on this thread - though one should never assume such a thing) will continue regaling us with more AAA (Alcohol Acquisition Anecdotes).

43>A drive-through daiquiri shop?! How is that legally possible? Though I'm pretty sure we have some drive-through medical-marijuana dispensaries here in So Cal.

Suppose I should say something about a book now, since there's been no book talk here in quite some time, and this thread is supposed to be about books, not booze, though let me finish this beer here first and then I'll talk books. **Glug glug** Mmmm. **belches** 'Scuse me.

Books. Am one essay removed from completing Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World and just based on this book and this book alone, I've added Sarah Vowell to my favorite writers list. She's one of those writers you read that everything she says resonates so much that each time she says something extraordinary I stop at my place in the book and turn the book over just to look at her photo - not in creepy oogling fashion - but because what she says is either so funny or so astute (or both) that it's like I want to see what the person who wrote such hysterical things looks like, as if looking at their jacket photo, again and again, will somehow make me understand or know them even better beyond what's printed on the page. Am I alone in that behavior?

Example of her work from her essay, "Music Lessons":

"My junior high had an electronic music lab. We made tape loops and learned words like "quadrophonic." In my spare time, just for fun, I checked out all the books on electronic music from the library. My favorite records for a while there were Walter Carlos's concept albums Switched-On Bach and it's sequel, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, which offered what I thought were hilariously witty covers of Bach classics performed on (get this) a Moog synthesizer. What kind of madcap visionary was capable of turning eighteenth-century fugues into machine-age mongrels?

In my readings on electronic music, something puzzled me. Every time I'd look into Walter Carlos, the information would just stop and someone named Wendy Carlos would turn up. I got to school early one morning to ask my electronic-music teacher what happened to Walter and was Wendy Walter's wife or daughter? He didn't answer for a long time. Then he blurted out, "Uh, Wendy is Walter."

What did he mean?

"Walter had a sex change operation and changed his name to Wendy."

What's a sex change operation? I had just started eighth grade. I knew absolutely nothing about sex. We didn't talk about it in my family and sex ed wasn't scheduled until spring. I was a wholesome, small-town Christian kid engaged in what I thought were wholesome, small-town Christian pursuits. It's Bach for heaven's sake. Suddenly, bam, I'm standing at the corner of Sodom and Gomorrah and where's my street map?"

Okay - back to booze. ;-)

Here in Minnesota, the only alcohol sold outside of liquor stores is 3.2 beer (per Wikipedia, MN is only one of 5 states with the 3.2 rule). No other alcohol can be sold in in a supermarket or any other non-liquor store. Plus, no liquor stores are open on Sundays. Oh, and there is some rule that allows bars to only have a 3.2 liquor license - it's much cheaper, I guess. The scroungy basement bar at my small college only served 3.2 beer back in the mid-80s. (They stopped serving alcohol a few years after the legal drinking age went from 19 to 21.)

3.2 beer = 3.2% alcohol by weight, which is equivalent to 4% alcohol by volume. My husband has been trying to explain the difference to me, which doesn't seem to be very consequential (except to him, as he's a beer brewer).

NYS -- where I grew up -- beer in the grocery stores, wine in liquor stores.

FL -- when I moved here 27 years ago, you could still drink a beer while driving -- no longer (thank god -- now if they'd just prohibit cell phones!). Beer and wine in the grocery stores, drug stores, superstores (WalMart, Target), specialty food stores and convenience stores. Liquor and all the rest in liquor stores -- but most of the groceries have their own liquor stores next door to the grocery -- go figure. Oh, and we have a super-size wine store nearby that sells beer and liquor too. Gotta keep the old folks happy (and I'm one of them).

Booze and books:

In the Chicago, they sell alcohol in Costco, grocery stores, liquor stores and wine shops. They don't sell it in drug stores, although I read that Walgreens is trying to reintroduce alcohol to their stores. On Sunday, no store, including a liquor store can sell alcohol before 11:00 a.m. That means you are supposed to be in church until 11:00 a.m., and if you are not you most certainly cannot have any fun until after that time!

Books, sort of:

Have you ever heard Sarah Vowell on NPR? I love her books and essays, but I think I love them even more because I hear her voice every time I read one. One of the great comics and comic writers of our time.

I was an English major in upstate New York when all of America except New York had a minimum drinking age of 21; in New York it was 18. A bunch of us went up to Keuka one night to see if anybody wanted to go out. That county was dry; we had to go over one county to party.

When I was a boy in Massachusetts, liquor stores and drug stores sold liquor. There were blue laws restricting the sale of liquor on Sunday. On Sunday drug stores could sell medicinal alcohol; otherwise the sale was prohibited, and law enforcement authorities decided to enforce the law. One Sunday our Catholic next door neighbor, a solid member of the community, went to the drugstore for a bottle, bought it, then refused to sign asserting it was for medicinal use on the grounds that it was for pleasure and that the law was ridiculous. I don't think anything ever came of it. In more recent years alcoholic beverages were available at least in the corners of supermarkets.

I'm reading a book.

Robert

Is the party still going?

I believe "party" constitutes booze-speech! Good one, thea! So that means we are now at fifteen (15!) consecutive posts about booze. You are all to be greatly commended for keeping this amazing streak alive!

Lisa, I've yet to hear Vowell on NPR, except for a couple YouTube clips that left me gasping for air. You're right, it's that voice of hers that makes what she's saying all the more amusing. I didn't know that she was also the voice of the daughter in The Incredibles until BeckyJG pointed that out to me. So now every time I read her work I hear the voice of an animated precocious superhero pre-teen in my head. Fun-eeee!

Very funny stories all! Talbin (here's a toast **raises a bottle of Mickey's Bigmouth**to your beer-brewer husband and his blessed profession!), and here's a toast to "old LT-author folks" like you, janeajones **raises martini glass high in the air (do you take one or two olives?** and here's a toast to Lisa who (sounds like, or am I misconstruing your statement maybe?) looks forward to late Sabbath-morning-booze-imbibing while sitting in a church pew - whoohoo! **raises a cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon** and to Mr. Durick, for reading a book.

I'm also reading (and how apropos!) Emile Zola's L'Assommoir (The Dram Shop) and also titled The Drinking Den I believe, at the moment. Quite good, but so sad. Much more on it later. Shouldn't you all be drinking reading now? It's late.

* Murr suddenly comes to*

hic.

Any more herring in that bottle?

*Murr passes out again*

And here I thought herring was a fish....

I'm learning so much from this thread. :p

Growing up in Michigan, my parents bought at state-controlled liquor stores, then eventually at “party stores.” The state set the prices, at least on liquor, and when anyone went to Chicago they took orders from their friends and came back with a trunkfull of lower-priced liquor.

So when I moved to the Chicago suburbs years later, I had no idea there were rules! -- I rushed into a grocery store before work one weekday morning for a bottle of wine to take to a Ravinia (outdoor venue) concert immediately after work. When the clerk tsked and said I couldn’t buy until 10am (or maybe 8, which was still too long to wait), I’m sure the look on my face hinted at other desperations!

Hmm...care for some more Louisiana alcohol trivia? The legal drinking age was upped from 18 to 21 in 1996 under threats from the federal government to stop funding for interstates - I think they were one of the last ones. Previous to that they tried some odd experiment where you could buy at 18 but not drink it unless you were 21. In addition to the drive-thru daiquiri shops, there are also delivery liquor stores - Hello. That will be, what are we now - 17, bottles of bourbon delivered to ClubRead.

Delivery liquor stores--we have those in Chicago, too! And that reminds me of one of my previous lives when I was a personal trust officer for a big bank. Many of our beneficiaries were somewhat challenged when it came to paying bills, so we had a service for them. And as trustee we often had discretion as to how trust income could be spent. It was interesting wrangling with one of those beneficiaries over the bill from the liquor store that seemed to be making deliveries to her every other day!

How is the "booze" count coming?

I've seen drive-through grog shops in Australia, but a drive-through daiquiri shop just adds an extra layer of decadence...

52> you really worried me there for a sec, ncgraham because at first blush there's no explicit reference to booze in your post. However, you did mention "herring" and thanks to tomcatMurr's operant-conditioning, we now know that when we see "herring" on the screen, that "vodka" is also present, regardless of whether or not the "vodka" is stated. "Vodka" is implicitly extant in its association with "herring," so while your post, graham, was a close call to ending the streak, the streak still stands. And with this post, we are now at twenty-two (22!) consecutive posts mentioning booze!!!

Good work everybody! Let's keep it going!

Now, so as not to make a mockery of my reading thread, I think it's vitally important now that I mix in a book (again, I know, this is a book thread, I'm sorry) with the booze. And what better book about booze has ever been written than Malcolm Lowry's alcoholic masterpiece, Under the Volcano? I don't know that I can think of a more self-destructive, self-loathing, sad alcoholic character ever depicted so poignantly and so allusively and lyrically in literature than Geoffrey Firmin, the former British consul, living in Quanhnahuac, Mexico, depressed and self-exiled protagonist of Under the Volcano.

It's the Day of the Dead when the novel opens, and its the same Day of the Dead when the novel closes. "Quanhnahuac possesses eighteen churches and fifty-seven cantinas". With a lopsided ratio of liquor looming over religion at 3:1, it's no wonder Firmin won't remain sober, not even to save his estranged wife, Yvonne, from the arms of a man he's been close to all his life. Addiction is complicated. Duh! How, or when, Firmin, wound up so addicted we do not fully know; the reasons and the origins of his alcoholism are not fully outlined in the novel - it's not cut and dry as to why he let himself go so completely even (he can't blame it all on his bad marriage can he?) - we just know he's pretty much lost, and we're witnessing the consequences of his life's accumulation of bad decisions, on what turns out to be the last day of his life: the Day of the Dead.

And as Lowry lowers the boom of Firmin's eventual demise with abundant foreshadowings (I don't pretend to have grasped them all) with increasing intensity page after page, like these ones on pages 297-299:

"Dark coils of shadows lay in the deserted barroom. They sprang at him. "Otro mescalito. Un poquito."

"The subdued roar of the falls filled the room like a ship's engine...Eternity...The Consul, cooler, leaned on the bar, staring into his second glass of the colourless ether-smelling liquid. To drink or not to drink. --But without mescal, he imagined, he had forgotten eternity, forgotten their world's voyage, that the earth was a ship, lashed by the Horn's tail, doomed never to make her Valparaiso. Or that is was like a golf ball, launched at Hercules' Butterfly, wildly hooked by a giant out of an asylum window in hell.... Why lost?....What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse? The soul!...."

we know that a bitter (though beautifully written) end is swiftly approaching...

The Consul (Geoffrey Firmin) is easily my favorite anti-hero in literature. So sad, but so strangely inspiring, how Malcolm Lowry, with his authorial gifts, elegantly elevated the tragedy of Under the Volcano and turned it into a triumph of modern language.

Having recently moved from Europe to South Carolina, I'm still adjusting to the new rules. Like the embarrassment of being turned away from the register when I tried to buy a bottle of wine on a Sunday. And the ABC stores (what on earth does that stand for) with the barred windows and doors that makes buying a bottle of freakin' Fra Angelico for a torte recipe into an illicit act. Of course, one can trot off to the liquor store attached to the local Costco and buy a gallon jug of bourbon.

Incidentally, for a few years in the 1930s South Carolina was proudly known as The Iodine State. An enterprising moonshiner added the catchphrase to his likker -- not a goiter in a gallon.

57 - Under the Volcano was quite lovely. I would like to re-read at some point as I feel I missed a great deal on the first pass.

A Death in the Family sticks out in my mind for its drinking - people are constantly giving the wife hot toddies to make her sleep. It touched a very personal place about dealing with sickness and death.

Let's not forget Erofeyev's Moscow to the End of the Line.
"Two bottles Kubansky Vodka at two sixty-two, together five twenty-four. Then: two quarter-litres Rossyski at one sixty-four each, together five twenty-four plus three twenty-eight. Eight rubles fifty-two kopecks. And then some of that red stuff. It'll spring to my mind. Yes, sweet rosé of one thirty-seven."

Or Ironweed by William Kennedy made into a harrowing film with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.

*sigh* I miss New Orleans, where no one has a drinking problem. And you can walk to the Rite Aid to replenish your supply when you're too "tipsy" to drive. And every neighborhood has cozy dive that never seems to close. And you can get "geaux" cups. (Just try asking for one of those at a bar anywhere else.) And, yes, I even miss the drive-through daiquiri shops. It doesn't matter whether your have the straw in or not b/c it just looks like you're drinking a slurpie. (Not that I would ever drink and drive. I mean as a passenger.) *looks away quickly*

I hate the taste of licorice, but my husband was happy that Absinthe was legal.

You know, I never thought about it before, but booze is the great unifier of NOLA. You can have conversations with people in so many walks of life, in one night. (Okay, not particularly deep, but I think it might be true.)

I grew up in Czechoslovakia, which I believe still has the highest consumption of beer per capita and NO age restrictions whatsoever. It was a totally normal sight to see five-year old children go into the neighborhood pub with a huge pitcher, have it filled to the rim and then carry it back home for the parents. Of course along the way you would slosh some of it off, and some you would drink, just to make sure it could not get spilled.

And eight year olds could go up to the bar and order several beers for their own consumption, and nobody blinked.

Are there more alcoholics in Czechoslovakia than other places? I don't think so. There used to be a lot of public drunkenness, but again, nobody fussed about it at all.

Hmmm, this IS a book thread, right, Rique? The great Czech novel which everyone should read is The Good Soldier Svejk by Hasek. It has a spectacular scene in which a man keels over dead drunk after a night of carousing. His superior officer leans over him, takes a sniff and identifies the variety of twenty liquers the man had consumed. A great comic masterpiece. Joseph Heller said he could not have written Catch-22 if Hasek had not written Svejk.

You see, booze and reading are related. (Of course, Murr has known this all along.) And thank you Andrew for adding to my wishlist!

In the "spirit" of this thread let me add that in Texas we call stores that sell alcohol package stores. Do you think that we are trying to fool ourselves?
Velma

ooooh velma, I do like a nice package.

*giggles at the cat*