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  • Arts & Culture

    Beer Paradise

    By

    Ștefan_Dimitrescu_-_La_berărie

    My life might well be divided into two categories: Before Beer and After Beer.

    Life AB started in the middle of a trailing, boring Carolina winter. Previously, bourbon had been my drink, and I thought the horizon of beer extended only to bottles with “light” surnames. If you had asked me to describe beer culture, I would have said, What culture? But then one evening, prior to the first round of trivia at a local bar, a friend bought a Rogue Dead Guy for me. 

    Rather than commit impoliteness, the nastiest of southern sins, I sipped the beer with a smile. And then everything changed. This rich, decadent bread was nothing like the stale, crumbling crackers that filled the malted liquid basket of my past. Now, when referring to places I’ve been before the coming of hops into my life that day, I say, “I’ve been there, but I wasn’t a beer person yet.”

    At five o’clock on a mid-September Friday afternoon, the woman I am dating and I have to sneak out of our offices early for our first trip to Asheville together and my first visit to the city “as a beer person.” She comes from the eleventh floor, on loan to the bank from her consulting company. It’s her first job after graduating from Chapel Hill, and it’s a placeholder while she figures out what she really wants to do. I descend from the thirty-ninth floor, permanently on loan to the partners at my law firm. It’s my first job after graduating from the law school down the road from her sorority house, and I took it, in part, so that someone might introduce me to a woman or to her sister or to her mother much in the same way that Alec describes Fitzgerald’s semi-autobiographical Amory in This Side of Paradise:

    ALEC: Oh, he writes stuff.
    CECELIA: Does he play the piano?
    ALEC: Don’t think so.
    CECELIA: (Speculatively) Drink?
    ALEC: Yes—nothing queer about him.
    CECELIA: Money?
    ALEC: Good Lord—ask him, he used to have a lot, and he’s got some income now.
    (MRS. CONNAGE appears.) MRS. CONNAGE: Alec, of course we’re glad to have any friend of yours—
    ALEC: You certainly ought to meet Amory.

    I wish I could have met Fitzgerald. I think of him frequently, or rather, I think of his pseudo-autobiographical characters often enough. The draining struggle between writing and money, loves and incomes, and seeming “queer” and appearing “respectable” draws me to Fitzgerald’s characters—Amory in Paradise, Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned. While it may seem strange, even perverse, given his own history with alcohol, Fitzgerald and his writing have always felt particularly tied up with my budding passion for beer. Maybe it’s merely a question of timing, maybe of geography—but for me the two are inexplicably and inextricably linked. Read More

  • Arts & Culture

    Hypothetical Tom Robbins–Inspired Ben & Jerry’s Flavors

    By

    Cowgirls-Blues

    While we enjoyed the book-inspired ice cream flavors the good people at HuffPo Books put together for National Ice Cream Month, it got us pondering a very real question: How is it that, given their sensibilities and aesthetic, Ben & Jerry’s has never produced an ice cream inspired by the work of Tom Robbins? While one friend pointed out that perhaps Baskin-Robbins gets dibs, the following immediately suggested themselves:

    Even Cowgirls Get the Blueberries
    Another Rocky Roadside Attraction
    Vanilla Incognito
    Skinny Legs and Almond (obviously a fat-free yogurt)

    Many thanks to all who helped contribute ideas, although it should be said that no one could come up with a delicious flavor based on Still Life with Woodpecker.

     

  • Arts & Culture

    On the Map: Sherwood Anderson; Clyde, Ohio; and the Mythologies of Small Towns

    By

    Anderson.Winesburg.1961.big

    Wikipedia will tell you that the National Arbor Day Foundation has bestowed upon Clyde, Ohio, the illustrious title of Tree City USA, and also that the Whirlpool Corporation calls the town home. You might learn, too, from the “Notable Residents” section of Clyde’s Wikipedia page, that former NFL tackle Tim Anderson has lived there, and that he was preceded in this by George W. Norris, a progressive senator from Nebraska during the early part of the twentieth century. Should you meet a Clyde native of a particular sort, though—in San Francisco, say, or New York—she might skip these details to tell you about a more hallowed pedigree. She might say, if she judges you a literary type, that she hails from the small town where Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is set. (Winesburg’s Wikipedia page will explain, if you happen to visit it, that it is not the setting for Winesburg, Ohio.)

    It turns out, though—somewhat perplexingly—that Clyde natives eager to claim ties with Anderson are scarce. Since Winesburg’s publication, in 1919, residents have for the most part regarded Anderson as a prodigal child—a troublemaker and bawdy apostate from whom to keep a wary distance. A 2001 article in Cleveland Scene magazine titled “Unfavorite Son” noted that although the Clyde Public Library boasted a Whirlpool Room, “nary an alcove” had been dedicated to Anderson. For years, the library’s only copy of Winesburg “was kept in a locked closet with other ‘bad books.’” If you wanted a peek, “you had to ask the librarian, and she looked down at you with a scowl.” In the 1980s, an annual Sherwood Anderson Festival was inaugurated but lack of interest saw it swiftly snuffed. Local high school teachers exclude Winesburg from reading lists, and an Anderson scholar from a nearby college told Scene that at the time of the book’s release, townspeople regarded it as gossip: “They didn’t understand what fiction was,” he said. “They thought he was a liar.” It did not help, perhaps, that Winesburg contains much indelicate innuendo regarding married women, teenage girls, and the local religious establishment.

    Still, nearly a century has passed since Winesburg’s publication. Anyone who might have detected in the novel traces of her own biography has surely passed on. Modern-day Clyde has little to recommend it, and it strikes one odd, at first, that natives would fail to claim Anderson with pride. A town of some 6,000 citizens fifty miles from Toledo, Clyde is a place of vacant storefronts and empty streets. Stoplights hang heavy between buildings of faded red brick, and plywood boards panel downtown windows. It is the sort of town from which escape can prove difficult and not the kind to which people readily relocate. People in Clyde are quick to discern condescension, and though Winesburg, Ohio owes its endurance to universality—to artful, empathetic investigations of human weakness and desire—they cannot shake the notion that it levels at their town a targeted indictment. They do not see in it a feat of artistic alchemy but a slim volume of petty judgment, a document of isolation rather than transcendence. Read More

  • On the Shelf

    Wearable Books, and Other News

    By

    wearablebooks

  • Meet The Wizard of Jeanz. It consists of twenty-one volumes, each a chapter of The Wizard of Oz that, when unfolded, turns into an article of clothing. Designer Hiroaki Ohya says he was “disillusioned with the transitory nature of fashion … [and] struck with the permanency of books as objects that can transport ideas.”
  • Yesterday it was book-inspired ice cream; now we have Harry Potter beer. Pilsner of Azkaban, anyone?
  • Speaking of (well, sort of), J. K. Rowling explains how she lit on the pseudonym Robert Galbraith: a combination of Robert F. Kennedy and Ella Galbraith, her childhood alias.
  • On spirants, those consonants which involve a continuous expulsion of breath.
  • The bad house guests in literature.
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