The Last Word, Saturday, January 17, 1:30 - 2:45 p.m.
Price: $45.00
A scientifically insightful approach to pairing food with drinks, focusing on beer, spirits, and cocktails. We'll cover the science of flavor perception using all the senses and relating it to the format of the paired dinners. Exploring food and drink-centric cultures beyond our borders to give a true perspective on what it takes to give meaning to a spirits/cocktail/beer dinner. We'll take your spirited dinner from an unrelated food/brand showcase to an harmonic, convergent and synergic experience.
You know. For the theological implications.
But given the state of the academic job market, I should probably also hit up this one:
St. Anthony Hotel, Saturday, January 17, 11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Price: $35.00
We live in an age where there is an unprecedented demand for highly skilled professional bartenders. With a demand like this there are scores of new career paths opening up for young men and women with the right training and correct motivation. Do you have what it takes? Panel Guests: Jason Kosmas (founder - 86 Co., co-founder - Employees Only NYC), Omar YeeFoon (Brand Ambassador - 86 Co.), Curtis Cheney (bartender turned distiller), and Bill Norris (writer/beverage director).
Over at the New Yorker, Ian Crouch critiques the Woodford Reserve commercial that ran during the season premiere of AMC’s Mad Men. In that ad, a woman’s voice tells us:
When I see a man drinking bourbon, I expect him to be the kind who could build me a bookshelf. But not in the way that one builds a ready-made bookshelf. He will already know where the lumberyard is. He’ll get the right amount of wood without having to do math. He’ll let me use the saw, and not find it cute that I don’t know how to use the saw.
For Crouch, this represents “a rather old-fashioned statement about gender.” Crouch goes on:
Despite the modern, fashionable feel of its new ads, Woodford Reserve’s definitions of gender are radically narrow, and its sense of the possibilities for human sexuality even narrower. Men must appeal to women, and women to men. To attract women, men have to be rugged and capable while maintaining a perfect veneer of nonchalance. Women can spot a phony or a wimp a mile away. Women, meanwhile, have to be forever good sports, proud of their men’s rough edges and presentable in mixed company with the rowdy boys. The core message is one of stern-faced seriousness: Bourbon defines a man’s world, and women are welcome only if they play by the men’s rules.
For the record, the Woodford spot didn’t really bother me. Even Crouch concedes that “[i]n the pantheon of sexist advertising, Woodford barely merits inclusion.” But the conversation reminded me of this piece I wrote last year about the gendering of drinking, and after reading it I decided to check on Whiskey Catholic, the blog I mentioned in that post.
I want to like Whiskey Catholic. They offer great reviews, they seem supremely knowledgeable, and they write with the jolliness you find in many of the best Catholic writers.
Funny coincidence: the day I checked in, Whiskey Catholic’s most recent post was “Man Skills: Making a Table.” The first line reads: “There’s nothing more romantic than making something for a woman using your own two hands, especially if that something ends up looking better than what you could buy at a department store.”
(I’ve got something to say about the manliness of table-making, but I’ll save that for a follow-up post.)
Anyway, as I flipped through Whiskey Catholic’s posts, I started to think that Robert Christian might be right to say that the Catholic Church has a drinking problem. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t agree that the problem is the one Christian diagnoses. “While engaging in interfaith dialogue,” Christian complains, “the vast majority of thoughtful, virtuous young people I have met from other faiths have been teetotalers (those who abstain from alcohol entirely), while I have witnessed many of my fellow devout Catholics, who are otherwise morally serious, acting foolishly due to their consumption of alcohol.”
I flatly disagree with Christian that the Church should encourage teetotaling. Obviously.
No, for me, the real problem comes when the Church’s insistence on strict complementarianism gets all mashed-up with its love of drinking. What Crouch identifies in the Woodford ads is just a lazy failure to see beyond the gender binary. But in the hands of the writers at Whiskey Catholic, gendered drinking becomes something much worse: dogma.
In other words, for these writers, drinking, which should be liberating, is about reinforcing order. Where drinking could be seen as a way of breaking down divisions and building community, instead it becomes a means of building divisions and excluding others.
Take the “Whiskey Men” designation that Whiskey Catholic bestows on “men who lived fascinating and fruitful lives.” The honor, I guess, is meant as a sort of “Most-Interesting-Man-in-the-World” award, and Whiskey Catholic does write up some amazing stories, like this oneabout the priest who was recently awarded the medal of honor. But the last group of menthey gave the award to was (ahem) the U.S. Bishops, including Charlotte Bishop Peter Jugis who (ahem) “defended the Catechism” after a talk by Sister Jane Laurel that (ahem) “included evidence drawn from scientific studies.” And also Bishop Paprocki for refusing communion to pro-choice senator Dick Durbin.
This was Bishop Paprocki’s second “Whiskey Man” award; the first time, Whiskey Catholic cheered him for defending (ahem) traditional marriage in a talk in which he apparently told those who disagree with him to become Protestants. Seems to me like only a lousy shepherd would tell his sheep to jump the fence for another pasture, but what do I know?
Or take their series on “The Catholic Gentleman,” in which posts on things like how to tie a bow-tie are interspersed with calls to confront relativism and to persevere in the face of the Supreme Court “giving its tacit endorsement to sodomy and the redefinition of union.”
For them, whiskey just serves this ideology. As Crouch writes about the Woodford ads, “Whiskey is about enacting particular rites of manhood, alone with other men and the ghosts of the manlier men of the past.” That’s almost word-for-word what Taylor Marshall said in his interview with Whiskey Catholic.
Which is disappointing because a proper (ahem) theology of the bottle would actuallychallenge the accepted Catholic dogma regarding human sexuality. As I’ve written before, that dogma is most often expressed in terms of an analogy with eating:
The idea is this: eating and sex both give us pleasure, but both have a vital purpose—nourishment, in the case of eating, and reproduction, in the case of sex. [Folks on the Catholic Right] argue that when we have deliberately non-procreative sex (sodomy, masturbation, contraceptive sex) we’re separating the pleasure of sex from its vital purpose. And this is as unnatural as separating the pleasure of eating from its nourishment—which, [they] say, would be like eating a great meal only to intentionally throw it up.
But drinking has a vital purpose, too—hydration—and drinking alcohol works against that. When we ingest liquor we harm ourselves in lots of ways, and open ourselves to all sorts of unnecessary and potentially catastrophic risks.
That makes no sense under the rubric used to condemn non-procreative sexual activities. It only makes sense if we think about Rowan Williams’ question in “The Body’s Grace”: “But if God made us for joy?”
In other words, it’s impossible to reconcile the puritan, instrumentalist sexual ethic of the Catholic Right with a hearty embrace of alcohol. The best Catholic writers know this, and that tension animates all of their writing on booze. That’s why Chesterton’s “Wine When it is Red” conflicts with the oversimplified Thomist reasoning that undergirds the current Catholic thinking on sex, and it’s why Percy’s “Bourbon, Neat” has more in common with “The Body’s Grace” than the “Theology of the Body.”
Misguided as he is, Robert Christian is absolutely right to question where drinking fits in the current Catholic cosmovision, and he’s right to oppose “GK Chesterton’s pugnacious writings” on alcohol to the teachings of the Church. He gets what the writers at Whiskey Catholic don’t: you have to choose your drinking or your dogmatism, your bottles or your certitude, your whiskey or your self-righteousness.
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)
