International Drinking with Gary Shteyngart

This sprawling, entertaining interview with Gary Shteyngart at Modern Drunkard Magazine is a real gem. Here's the author on drinking in Russia:

GS: Right. All Russian rites are suffused with the idea that you will get drunk after you’re finished. I think there is vodka at the end of everything that happens in Russia. My favorite ceremony to do is to go to gravesites of famous artists in Russia. You bring a bottle of vodka andzakuski.

MDM: Zakuski?

GS: If you go to a Russian restaurant, the first thing you see on every menu is zakuski. Which literally means “the thing you follow it with.” “It” being vodka. Appetizers are built around vodka. The mystery of Russia centers on what will happen at the end of the day, or the middle of the day. That being the drinking of the 150 grams (5.29 ounces) of vodka. When I go back there, and I go back every year, I have to acclimate like you would in Denver. Everyone, especially the men, brings their own bottle of vodka. Each finishes their bottle and they enter that land of no return. I’m not a religious person by any means, but you feel this kind of strange communion. With people who, if you had met them on the street, you’d think, “My goodness, look at this strange specimen.”

And here he is on writers drinking: 

GS: True. There are so few people to drink with. The literary community is not backing me up here. I’m all alone. There’s a couple of guys who are strong, but that’s it. It’s so pathetic when I think about my ancestors. Give them a bottle of shampoo and they have a party. And here I am with the best booze available.

On how Georgians drink:

MDM: My Russian brother-in-law tells me some Russians like to spike their vodka with a good jolt of hair spray. Is this true?
GS: Ah, yes, the old hairspray maneuver. You know who drinks like crazy? My favorite people, the Georgians. They drink from these big ram horns and each person has to toast every other person at the table. There’s the tamada, the toastmaker, he’s like the air traffic controller. A toast comes in, and he stops it and makes sure everyone is okay with it, then another comes in — it’s a fascinating job. A good tamada is like an MC, he gets hired to work parties and weddings. Their wine is like Thunderbird, really strong. It’s not for a connoisseur, it wouldn’t pass muster. When I was in the nation of Georgia, I met some guys in the government. Some mid-level ministers. We went to their dacha, this gigantic compound. They wanted me to get involved in a scheme to steal $600 million dollars from American charities.

And Italians:

GS: Italy is a dramatic country. I was living in this square, where all these orgies were going on.
MDM: Actual orgies?
GS: Yeah. It was the rich children of the Italian intelligentsia, famous Marxists, people like that. And they all had these huge apartments. It was just these wild parties. And all based on wine. People would bring their own wine, from whatever region they were from. There were a lot of arrivistes from southern Italy, so there was a lot wines from Abruzzo, Campana, and Calabria, the really violent province. The only time I got semi-violent in a bar, someone came up and said, “You must be Calabrian.”
MDM: It’s considered an insult?
GS: It is, but I thought it was quite a compliment. The whole scene was wild youth, women, wine and a dearth of clothing. There was this one Italian. An incredible Russophile. 

 Brazilians:

GS: It’s not the bars, it’s hanging on the beach. The people are so beautiful. They drink, then the dancing starts. I don’t have an ass. I don’t own one. But they do. It’s so sad to leave it. You think, where the hell am I going? It’s not an intellectualized drinking culture. No one gives a damn about that stuff. You can’t bring up Schopenhauer after a couple drinks. I had the most expensive sake I ever had in Rio. A hundred dollars for a little flask.

He even has something to say about Austin:

GS: I was just in Austin. I could live there. It seemed pretty cheap.

One more for the Hymnal: Lived in Bars

Cat Power, "Lived in Bars," The Greatest (2006).

Bourbon, Bad and Good

Walker Percy was a fascinating dude. The author of (in my opinion) the best New Orleans novel, 1961's The Moviegoer, and a key champion of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Percy was both an existentialist and a self-proclaimed "bad Catholic." On top of all that, he was a drinking man, and his short essay "Bourbon, Neat" has become a  sort of touchtone text for religious people trying to make sense of their own drinking.

Maybe because of that, "Bourbon, Neat" is one of the most misread essays in the American canon. I guess because he called himself a Catholic, people figure that "Bourbon, Neat" is Percy's attempt to find virtue in bourbon, to show how drinking can be safe, healthy, and ordered.

Take Michael Barruzini's "Walker Percy, Bourbon, and the Holy Ghost," published at First Things. Now, I don't want to be too hard on this essay, because it's a good piece of writing, and it calls attention to Percy's excellent piece of writing. 

But damn if Barruzini doesn't miss Percy's point.

In Baruzzini’s analysis, bourbon is one way of answering the existential question of how to be in the world. “No, not in the sense of drowning sorrows in alcoholic stupor,” Baruzzini writes, “but in recognizing that it is in concrete things and acts that we are able to be in the world.” Man drinks bourbon, Baruzzini argues, like an eagle flies or like a mole digs, “because that is what you are, what you are good at, what you love.”

And he concludes: “[B]ourbon is for Percy a way to be for a moment in the evening. Why might one take an evening cocktail? Baser reasons are: an addiction to alcohol, or the desire to appear sophisticated. Better reasons, according to Percy, are the aesthetic experience of the drink itself—the appearance, the aroma, the taste, the cheering effect of (moderate) ethanol on the brain. Another reason is that a drink incarnates the evening; it marks the shift from the active workday to a reflective time at home. One simply must choose a way to be at a five o’clock on a Wednesday evening. Instead of surrendering to TV, Percy recommended making a proper southern julep.”

We can put aside the objection that Percy doesn’t recommend mint juleps (the essay is called “Bourbon, Neat,” remember), and we can ignore the fact that Percy advocates the opposite of savoring the “appearance, the aroma, the taste” of bourbon. Those are confusing aspects of Percy’s essay—he does give a recipe for mint juleps, and he does have a beautiful line about the “hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime.”

The bigger problem comes in with Baruzzini’s insertion of the word “moderate” into that last paragraph.

Where does he get the idea that Percy's essay is about moderation? The drinkers in "Bourbon, Neat" are desperate, awkward, and unhappy: they drink illegally, they drink irresponsibly, they drink whatever they can get their hands on, from Coke bottles and hip flasks and home-rigged stills. He writes of a bunch of teenaged boys so scared of girls that they hide in the bathroom during a school dance, swilling whiskey and wincing at its taste. He writes about turning to bourbon when he has no idea what to say on a date. And he writes of a julep party on Derby Day where “men fall face-down unconscious, women wander in the woods disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahlil Gibran and the limberlost.”

But to hear Baruzzini tell it, Percy is advocating the stolid, responsible pleasures of a cocktail made with good whiskey, taken from an evening chair, maybe before going out into the backyard to toss the ball around with the kids and, then, once they’re bathed and off to sleep, making stolid, responsible love to the wife.

Percy’s ideal of whiskey drinking is far, far from that. It’s: 

“William Faulkner, having finished Absalom, Absalom!, drained, written out, pissed-off, feeling himself over the edge and out of it, nowhere, but he goes somewhere, his favorite hunting place in the Delta wilderness of the Big Sunflower River and, still feeling bad with his hunting cronies and maybe even a little phony, which he was, what with him trying to pretend that he was one of them, a farmer, hunkered down in the cold and rain after the hunt, after honorable passing up the does and seeing no bucks, shivering and snot-nosed, takes out a flat pint of any Bourbon at all and flatfoots about a third of it. He shivers again but not from the cold.”

So "Bourbon, Neat" isn't about drinking to be yourself--it's about drinking to escape yourself. 

Drinking to escape? Isn't that bad? Isn't escape precisely the wrong reason to drink? 

Yeah, it can be, but Percy hates what he calls the "everydayness" of modern life. And so he celebrates drinking, even bad drinking with all of its risks, because those risks are what allow bourbon to lift us out of that everydayness. In other words, for Percy, drinking whiskey is man’s (or woman's) way of getting at the unfathomable, of launching himself into the wilderness of mystery. Even when he does it from his armchair.

Now, Barruzini is right that there's a religious aspect to all this. But he's wrong to look for it in the concept of vocation (doing what God calls you to do) rather than in the concept of grace. We don’t drink booze because it’s good for us, Percy is telling us. We drink it because it’s not. And somehow, that’s good.

That “somehow” is grace. 

Booze is grace.

Can I get an amen?

(photo of Walker Percy courtesy Linda Faust/Winston Riley Productions)