{"id":686,"date":"2012-03-29T14:18:36","date_gmt":"2012-03-29T12:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=686"},"modified":"2012-11-09T09:33:41","modified_gmt":"2012-11-09T08:33:41","slug":"5-writers-id-like-to-booze-with","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=686","title":{"rendered":"5 Writers I’d Like to Booze with"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"There\u00b4s<\/a>Wednesday is chess night, which sounds very academic and intellectual unless you take into account that I usually get stomped like a NARC at a biker rally. Anyway, the conversation takes a few weird twists when you\u2019re playing chess at a strip club at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday. Thus the birth of this list.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with who didn\u2019t make the list. Aldous Huxley was a last-minute cut. Huxley wrote Brave New World, was a visionary and responsible for the name of The Doors. Also, as he was dying he had his wife inject him with LSD as she read to him from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is all pretty bad ass. However, I cut him because he would surely say \u2018dystopian\u2019 too often and would probably bring the party down in general. Plus, doing LSD at my age probably wouldn\u2019t be good for anyone in this city.<\/p>\n

Neither Shakespeare nor Hemingway made it. They may seem like obvious additions to this list, but Hemingway would just want to fight me, and he would probably win. Being able to tap into Shakespeare\u2019s writing mind would be amazing, however, he wears tights. I draw enough negative attention in this town to add a guy who wears tights into my life.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the list. I am interested in your opinions…sort of.<\/p>\n

5. Henry Miller. If you have ever read Tropic of Cancer you know why Miller makes the list. Anybody who can set a story in a vagina for over 20 pages and keep it interesting has got to be bought a drink. Furthermore, he had affairs with playboy playmates, models, actresses and Ana\u00efs Nin. Many of these affairs took place when he was over seventy years old. Every drinking crew needs a guy who can provide women and Miller is that man. The rest of the writers are pretty ugly.<\/p>\n

Also, anyone who can sum up his feelings for women as a split between respecting them and seeing them as “fuck dolls on the verge of falling into my soulful pool of lust,” has got to have an interesting story or two to tell.<\/p>\n

4. Kurt Vonnegut. This genius is responsible for such timeless creations as Ice-Nine, Billy Pilgrim and Harrison Bergeron. That is already enough to get him an invite to this party, even before considering that he\u2019s a World War II veteran, one of the few people to survive the Dresden firebombing and<\/em> sold Saabs. I\u2019m sold. He\u2019s in.<\/p>\n

3. Charles Bukowski. The Buke is a shoo in. How can you not invite a carousing womanizer who spent the better part of his life writing while hammered on jug wine? Besides, we might want to go to the dog races after some drinks and Bukowski would be the man with the inside track. There is a chance of him starting a fist fight with one of the other guys or accosting the waitress, but that\u2019s a risk we have to take.<\/p>\n

2. Larry McMurtry. Five words \u2013 Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call. In interviews, McMurtry comes off as a bit of a nerd, and for good reason, McMurtry is a bit of a nerd. He makes an appearance in Tom Wolfe\u2019s memoir The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, when the merry pranksters need a respite from taking acid and eluding green monkey men from the forest. McMurtry takes them in on his farm, feeds them, sobers them up and sends them on their way. He\u2019s the responsible one in this drinking crew that will otherwise surely end up in jail, bleeding, or both. Also, if you’ve got to have a nerd at your party, at least have a nerd who wrote Lonesome Dove and created Buffalo Hump.<\/p>\n

1. John Steinbeck. The man wrote Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row and the sentence \u201cTell me about the rabbits.\u201d His official emblem is a flying pig named Pigasus (a play on Pegasus) and, knowing he was about to die, drove around the U.S. in an RV with a French Poodle and a fully stocked bar. While visiting his son\u2019s front-line unit in Vietnam, Steinbeck manned a machine gun so the men could get some sleep. I don\u2019t need to tell anyone this, but Steinbeck rocks. He\u2019s at the head of the table.<\/p>\n

Who would you go for a drink with?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wednesday is chess night, which sounds very academic and intellectual unless you take into account that I usually get stomped like a NARC at a biker rally. Anyway, the conversation takes a few weird twists when you\u2019re playing chess at a strip club at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday. Thus the birth of this list. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-b4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1127,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions\/1127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}