Jeopardy? Really?

[strangegirl]

duh!!!

The comma ...yep I get it now....

Thanks hooch

 

[number6horse]

now THAT'S alcohol-related !

Ha ha !

(pause)

Get it?

(wind whistling)......

Why are you all slumped over your tables ?
Is this thing on ?

And by ON, I mean the human nervous system !
Am I right, people ?

oh shit....

 

[strangegirl]

lol.....:D:p:confused:

.....okay I get it....

...:D

 

[Gerard K H Love]

Excellent! I like that, good job.

That's why hooch is a moderator.

 

[roni]

it's interesting that all the questions for American Lit have a reference to Alcohol.

I've noticed that too.
But it makes perfect sense. Most writers are boozers. Isn't there a book about this?

 

[Lolita Twist]

I feel like a sober cunt for being a recovering dipsomaniacal writer :(


And... I figured out how to pronounce it, I think.

Dips-oh-main-ee-ack-ell.

But, fast, and not all broken up like that.

 

[roni]

... Isn't there a book about this?

yes:
Donald W. Goodwin: Alcohol and the Writer
Donald W. Goodwin: Alkohol und Autor

 

[bospress.net]

And... I figured out how to pronounce it, I think.

Dips-oh-main-ee-ack-ell.

I think that it is:

Dips - oh - Man - eye - ack - ell

Could be wrong, though...

Bill

 

[David]

Also: Tom Dardis, The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer; Thomas B. Gilmore, Equivocal Spirits: Alcoholism and Drinking in Twentieth-Century Literature. And perhaps the best book on the subject, which also includes "drugs": Marcus Boon, The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs.
Here's a few of the drinkers: Hemingway, O'Neill, Steinbeck, Poe, Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, E.A. Robinson, Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Conrad Aiken, Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, John Cheever, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Robert Lowell, James Agee, Lowry, Simenon, Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, John Berryman, Kerouac, Mailer, Hank....etc. etc.
And the druggies: Burroughs, Corso, Aldous Huxley, Ernst Junger, Coleridge, De Quincey, Foucault, Gottfried Benn, Henri Michaux, Artaud...etc. etc.

 

[Lolita Twist]

I think that it is:

Dips - oh - Man - eye - ack - ell

Is it possible that it's to-mae-toe/tah-mah-toe?

Then again... I suppose it doesn't matter, because if any of us used this word in everyday conversation, I doubt anyone would know what we were talking about anyway ;)

Off Topic: Bill! My broadside came today! (My mail comes very, very late). Thank you very much :). And also thank you for putting in the SA Griffin one as well, very kind of you :)

Lexxi

 

[CRBSMILE]

also... Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde, Anne Sexton, HST,...... Dega, Picasso....
Freud...:eek:

 

[David]

Jim Morrison, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Robert Graves (mushrooms), Jean-Paul Sartre...

 

[CRBSMILE]

Right ON- David!CRB:)

(i was gonna' say Morrison, but-well, youknow...)

Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath... I'm not going for musicians, a bit too easy...How bout' any of those stuffy fucks that worked on the OED?

 

[roni]

[...] I doubt anyone would know what we were talking about anyway [...]

That's my everyday-experience with Everything I say.

 

[Lolita Twist]

I hear you.

CRB - Freud was a coke head :p

And we're all forgetting Janis Joplin. Who once smashed a bottle of Southern Comfort over Jim Morrison's head.

 

[strangegirl]

Hunter S. Thompson, I'd say he dabbled in a bit of everything.

 

[roni]

I hear you.

thanks baby. unfortunately it was only half-a-joke. but still a nice one.

has anybody mentioned GEORG TRAKL here yet?
i seem to remember we had him on another thread once ...

 

[chronic]

has anybody mentioned GEORG TRAKL here yet?

Didn't he play Mr. Sulu on Star Trek?

 

[David]

A Clockwork Orange

Yep, I'm mentioned Trakl a while ago.
By chance going through the Anthony Burgess biography by Andrew Biswell I came across this a few minutes ago:
"Apart from work, of which there was obviously a great deal, there was also the drinking to get done. Burgess and Lynne [his wife] would get through a couple of bottles of wine over dinner, and a dozen bottles of Gordon's gin were delivered to the house every week--an astonishing amount considering that they hardly ever entertained visitors. Burgess's rate of gin consumption was not measurably lower than his wife's. When he wasn't drinking gin in the house, or downing pints of beer with double-whiskey chasers at the Etchingham Arms--his habitual den in the village, from which Lynne had been barred after a fist-fight with the landlord--he was devising life-threatening cocktails, such as the Hangman's Blood....which he described to readers of the Guardian in 1966: 'Into a pint beer-glass doubles of the following are poured: gin, whisky, rum, port, and brandy. A small bottle of stout is added, and the whole topped up with champagne or champagne-surrogate. It tastes very smooth, induces a somehow metaphysical elation, and rarely leaves a hangover.'"

 

[mjp]

Donald W. Goodwin: Alcohol and the Writer

I bought this book, and I'll probably read it one day, but for now I've put it aside after less than two pages, because I think the author (an M.D.) may be out of his mind.

Ring Lardner Jr., obtained from an almanac a list of 187 twentieth century American writers. One third, to the best of his knowledge, were alcoholic, and he said he probably missed some. The rate, he guessed, was at least three times higher than the rate of alcoholism in the general population. (Lardner didn't really know the rate in the general population. Nobody knows. [...] Household surveys cannot be depended upon, because the alcoholics are rarely home when the interviewer knocks on the door. [...])

Then we come to a Jewish laureate, Saul Bellow. Jews, like women, are "protected" against alcoholism, regardless of occupation, for reasons one can only guess at.

Oooookay. His theory is that drinking among writers is an "epidemic," which he apparently intends to prove using speculation and idiocy.

If the book wasn't written by a doctor and didn't have aspirations of proving a scientific theory, it may be interesting, but it's hard to take it seriously when it contains that much crazy shit on the first two pages.

 

[roni]

thanks for the review. I didn't know the book was that bad. Haven't read it myself. Just liked the title/subject and the cover of the german ed.

Too bad, it seems to be embarrassing. Ah, well ...

 

[chronic]

If the book wasn't written by a doctor and didn't have aspirations of proving a scientific theory, it may be interesting, but it's hard to take it seriously when it contains that much crazy shit on the first two pages.

Maybe he's a Doctor in the same way that Dr. Seuss and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson are Doctors, which is to say, not really a Doctor at all.

Reminds me of an old WKRP in Cincinnati episode where Les Nessman interviews a Doctor who claims to be an expert on child psychology, but it's soon revealed that his entire theory is that "Children, from an adult point of view, are completely insane."

 

[Gerard K H Love]

HST and Seuss were doctors, but not medical doctors who dominate the title of doctor.

Many great car salesmen are alcoholics too. It could be due to the high intensity of their work. The lofty highs quickly followed by the intense dark lows. I should be a doctor of speculation and guessing.

 

[homeless mind]

HST mailed away for his doctorate; I believe he paid about $5. Maybe less. Now that Seuss guy, he could operate the language...

 

[james]

HST and Seuss were doctors, but not medical doctors who dominate the title of doctor.

if you call paying 50 bucks for a mail order certificate stating you are a "doctor of divinity", well, then yea, hst was a doctor ;)

edit: homeless mind beat me to it! except he thought 5 bucks, i thought it 50...

 

[homeless mind]

You owe me 45 buckeroos, er, maybe....:D

 

[number6horse]

Then we come to a Jewish laureate, Saul Bellow. Jews, like women, are "protected" against alcoholism, regardless of occupation, for reasons one can only guess at

Oh, for fuck's sake - what was the context of Bellow's comment here ? I can't believe he would have said something as STOOPID as that.

I refuse to believe the author of "Humboldt's Gift" could have said something like this ! Please...(not that I am accusing you of misquoting, mjp).

Or maybe this "writer" needs an editor like an anchor needs a lifeguard.

 

[mjp]

No, no, Bellow did not say that. Goodwin, the author of the book did. He is commenting on Bellow, explaining why he could never be an alcoholic. You know, because he's a Jew, of course.

I have to say, that was the line that sent me over the edge too, and made me set the book down. Well, that and "...alcoholics are rarely home when the interviewer knocks on the door." Just demonstrates how utterly clueless Goodwin is, and how he is happy to base statements of fact on his own weird fantasies.

 

[scribbler]

So which is the aberrition, the subculture. The drinkers or those abstainers? THEY, the unthirsty, crash their cars and wreck their families easily as frequently (and have a miserable time doing it).

Regarding the alcoholic writers; well, writing poetry or prose is one of the few "jobs" you can have where it is possible to drink While you do it. You are generally alone, hidden and wish to feel good...but not so good that you'll leave your chair (everytime).

Anyhow, the drinking doesn't care about your vocation, it cares that its gets regular attention. The participating "life" may or may not be harmed. I'd hate to think where I would have been had I not been sitting quietly in those bars all those years...trouble indeed.

 

[roni]

oh, I thought that "Jews, like women, are protected"-thing was plain irony.
Like Hank once said, the only person you are allowed to write bad about is the white male hetero.