Archive for July, 2021
Hemingway: Birth of a Booze Lover
Posted by Damien Galeone in Blog, Uncategorized on July 26, 2021
“Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares. If you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.” – Ernest Hemingway (informal travel advice)
When he wasn’t on safari, catching a marlin, or leaving one wife to marry another one, that’s just where Ernest Hemingway was. Perhaps the only stories more famous than the ones Ernest Hemingway wrote are the ones about his drinking exploits. Hemingway drinking lore has him running up a tab of 51 martinis during the liberation of Paris, inventing the Bloody Mary, and measuring F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s evidently undersized…pen. But whether Hemingway drinking stories are apocryphal or not, he is synonymous with the drinking writer.
He was born into it. Over half of the American writers renowned for their drinking were born in the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century. One theory for why they were such drinkers is that they fought World War I, which pitted new weaponry, such as mortars, artillery, and Gatling guns against the slightly less effective method of walking slowly towards trenches with bayonets. In reaction to these horrors and inconceivable loss and waste, they felt lost and disillusioned and were so dubbed the Lost Generation. And in 1919, the Lost Generation needed a drink.
Hemingway among them, for a few reasons. While serving in the Red Cross Ambulance Corps on the Italian front, he was wounded by mortar fire. He recovered in a hospital where he fell in love with a nurse who tore out his heart, leaving an empty gap which Hemingway promptly filled with wine. Brokenhearted and most likely suffering from PTSD, he returned to America, where he drank and he fished and he drank. Then he moved to Paris, where he drank and he wrote and he drank. For Hemingway, moving to Paris and drinking there were acts of freedom and rebellion towards the mores of the U.S., a country which had sent him off to war and then would not let them have a drink to help him deal with it.
In Paris, Hemingway continued engaging in the two things he had a special talent for: drinking and writing. His tolerance was unmatched and he consumed large quantities of booze with little physical effect. He attributed this to a rigorous physical regimen of boxing, wilderness sports, and writing really mean things about his friends. By sheer physicality he remained healthy and by determination he was also productive. He drank constantly but refused to have a drink before he had reached his daily writing quota of 500 words, zero adverbs, and at least 3 friendships irreversibly damaged. If he was ever tempted to drink while writing he needed only visit his friend, the walking cautionary tale named F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald tried to inspire creativity and writing with alcohol, only to kill his creativity and writing with alcohol.
Drinking, among other issues, caught up to Hemingway’s in the 1930s. For the first time, his drinking caused his work to suffer and his mental health to deteriorate. He was depressed, so he drank, which made him more depressed, so he drank more. Stabs at his manhood came in the memoir of a former ally (paybacks = a bitch) and what followed was the Hemingway many now think of – cartoonishly macho, drunken fights and wrestling matches, and spewing proclamations of his manly abilities to “outdrink, outwrite, and outfuck” anyone who isn’t Gertrude Stein.
But more important than his own drinking is the deep reverence to alcohol and its rituals that permeate the fictional worlds that Hemingway created. Each book depicted a culture’s alcohol traditions and ceremonies surrounding it. In The Sun Also Rises, two men in Basque country are taught to drink wine from leather flagons like the locals. In Paris cafes they drink wine, champagne, and absinthe. In the Hotel Montoya in Pamplona, they drink rioja alta and fundador. In Islands in the Stream his characters in Cuba drink doble daiquiris. His characters drink what Hemingway drank, their livers become secondary characters, and they all follow the lesson Hemingway himself followed: “travel globally and drink locally.”
Just as culturally significant to the cultural rituals in Hemingway’s fiction are the bars, which are treated as sacred places. The actions within a bar are purposeful, meaningful, and result in deep consequences. Confrontations are made, allegiances forged, critical decisions taken. Hemingway created a language for those who inhabited his bars. Unlike other writers who made the dialogue in bars raucous, vulgar, or chaotic, Hemingway’s characters spoke in a laconic and controlled way and thus existed in a secret community of drinkers who knew how to handle their alcohol. This was of utmost importance to Hemingway’s characters and clearly to Hemingway himself.
“I like to see a man drink. A man does not exist until he is drunk.” – Hem
Or, to paraphrase Descartes: “I drink, therefore I am.”
Let’s have a cocktail that would do old Hemingway proud. He drank everything put in front of him (or in front of the people to his left or right). But he especially liked to modify cocktails to his own specifications. He drank gin and tonics with a few drops of Angostura bitters (try this!) and on fishing excursions he modified a Tom Collins by omitting sugar and replacing the soda water with coconut water (dubbed the Maestro Collins). He loved Campari and the Americano, but with gin instead of sweet vermouth. We at Hammered History recommend his favorite drink from El Floridita Bar in Havana – The Doble Daiquiri (link is to the 1934 menu of El Floridita and apparently Hemingway usually went for daiquiri #3 and modified it as follows)
The Doble daiquiri (ingredients)
– 4 ounces white rum (this is the double part, start your engines)
– ¾ ounce fresh lime juice (half a lime)
– ½ ounce fresh grapefruit juice
– 6 drops maraschino liqueur
– Ice (shaved if possible, broken or small cubes if not)
– Metal shaker
– A liver the size of Toronto
– A designated driver, preferably a combat hardened ambulance driver
Instructions from Hemingway *
Chill a martini glass before you go to work making the drink. Next, reach into a bag of shaved ice or ice cubes and bring out a handful. It will be cool and your hand will be cold, but you will feel good because of the cold. Put the ice in a metal shaker. The ice will frost it. Measure two full jiggers full of good white rum and add it to the shaker. Squeeze one half of a lime into a jigger. When it is full and there and good, add the lime juice to the shaker. Fresh lime juice is best, but Rose’s is fair if you are in a combat zone or in a cave. Squeeze a quarter of a grapefruit into a jigger. When it is full and there and good, add the grapefruit juice. Taste it. If it lacks authority, add more rum. If it is too strong, add more rum. Like a man. The cool liquid will jewel the sweat on the shaker. Don’t add any damned sugar. Add 6 drops of maraschino liqueur into the shaker with an eye dropper or a spoon. Enclose the shaker with a rocks glass or a pint glass. Shake well. Pour it into the chilled martini glass. Drink 5 of these until you are true and real. If you don’t, add more run.
* outright lie, instructions from me
The Humbling
Posted by Damien Galeone in Blog on July 19, 2021
Friday afternoon. I was in the living room when the cat walked to her box with a newspaper, this means it’s a # 2. I hang back for a few minutes but I had been planning on going to the bathroom to comb my hair. I peek around the corner and the cat is in “the stance.” I wait. The cat leaves her box with a leap. She then runs back and forth through the hallway. I know there’s a problem.
I have found that at times the universe decides to humble me. Usually when I get a little arrogant, things are going well, I’m on my A Game, the universe sends me a little reminder that I am but a speck of dust on the hindquarters of all there is. I step in a deep puddle, get a pimple on my nose, put of my boxers backwards. I get humbled. This was that.
When the cat runs around after pooping, it means one of two, equally-enjoyable, reasons. The first is that she has gotten poop on herself and is therefore freaked out that the poop is on her. She then celebrates by running around my house and wiping it on everything she can find. The second reason is that the cat has eaten some of Burke’s long hair, which exists in my house more ubiquitously than does oxygen. The hair then must leave her body the way everything else does. It’s during this process that poop attaches itself to my cat’s butt by a long hair. The cat, disheartened by this scenario, is then possessed by the soul of a demonic horse and run around the house trying to buck the poop. Which – and I can’t stress this enough – doesn’t work.
Read the rest of this entry »These Woods Are Haunted
Posted by Damien Galeone in Blog on July 12, 2021
Warning: Old Man Complaint Ahead
I understand that TV has changed. When I was young, MTV (Music Television) played music videos and TLC (The Learning Channel) showed surgery. Even later in my life, the programming on The History Channel was largely about, you know, history, or at the very least Adolf Hitler.
Based on the information scoured from a remote control peruse during my last trip home, these things are no longer true. TLC and The History Channel is rife with reality TV mostly hitting niche audience markets that somehow become crack cocaine to the larger viewing audience. Had someone told me a decade ago that I would be thoroughly involved in a show about trash pickers or about the daily happenings of a family that owns a Las Vegas pawn shop, I’d have thought you looney. But, alas, here we are.
In the land of target audiences, The Discovery Channel has cast a net so wide as to capture every audience that exists, has ever existed, or will ever exist on earth or any planet discovered or undiscovered in our universe or any universe. Just by going to Discovery Plus, one can find a number of shows about morbidly obese people trying to lose weight, a variety of different societal groups looking for love – immediately, those who want to be married and engaged, thousands of ghost hunters, and a huge group of people looking for Bigfoot and his cryptid buddies.
Read the rest of this entry »William III Wins the Battle of the Boyne and Gives the Protestants a Drink
Posted by Damien Galeone in Uncategorized on July 5, 2021
The armies of James II and William III were squaring off across the River Boyne near Drogheda, Ireland. Roman Catholic James II was making a push to regain the throne, from which William had deposed him the year before. James’s 23,000-strong army was mostly made up of Irish Catholics, but he had several regiments of French soldiers, as well as Scottish and English Jacobites. His soldiers were armed with outdated muskets and his Irish soldiers were mostly pressed into service and poorly trained; some were armed with scythes.
But there was brandy. According to John Stevens, a soldier at the Boyne, there was perhaps too much brandy. It was meant to calm the nerves of the untested men, but was so effective that more than 1,000 of them passed out drunk in the fields.
On the other side, Protestant William III (William of Orange) had 36,000 troops, half of which were British, the rest were made up of soldiers from Denmark, the Netherlands, and France. They were better trained and equipped with more modern weapons. We don’t know if William’s soldiers were drinking, but they won. (Irish Catholics never win.) In the aftermath, James II ran off to France, where he would spend the rest of his life presumably eating cheese and bitching about French employment laws. His flight earned him the nickname within Ireland of Séamus a’ chaca (James the Shit), so we probably wasn’t in a rush to put that on a customs card anyway.
Though not a decisive win, William’s victory had important implications. William was fighting to keep Protestant control over Ireland and to forestall future Jacobite (et al) attempts to restore James to the throne. James II had put forth the Declaration of Indulgence, granting freedom of religion for all of Ireland – which just about everyone saw as a sneaky way to reestablish Catholic rule. Victory at the Boyne helped William establish Protestantism in Ireland because his supporters were both Protestants and zealots. They were victorious, they needed a drink, and that drink need to be “Protestant.” But what?
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