Until Kara Newman, author of "The Secret Financial Life of Food," invited me to participate in tonight's drink.think event, I didn't know that there was a New York City reading series entirely devoted to writing about drink. Further proof that this is a great town. I look forward to reading with a gaggle of my fellow drinkcentric writers.
Of course, there's a venerable history of liquor in literature, going at least as far back as Homer's wine-dark sea. Baudelaire implored us to get drunk (on wine or poetry or virtue — your call). Flann O'Brien reminded us that "A pint of plain is your only man." Much of Kingsley Amis's estimable output has gin on its breath, so to speak. The New York Review of Books Classics has just reissued two of his finest novels, "The Old Devils" and "Lucky Jim" in lovely new editions; the latter features perhaps the greatest description of a hangover ever committed to print. Lively, closely observed bar scenes and benders figure in many of Kate Christensen's novels, starting, appropriately, with her first, "In the Drink." (And early this year, The Times's dining writer Jeff Gordinier and I recorded a podcast called "Drinking in Poetry" for the Poetry Foundation, in which we read and discuss poems by Ciaran Carson, Kenneth Koch, Alicia Ostriker and William Butler Yeats, among others — over cocktails, naturally.)
Beyond fiction and poetry, there are numerous scholarly works from which I've learned scads of valuable information. I find James Spradley and Brenda Mann's classic anthropological study "The Cocktail Waitress," Catherine Gilbert Murdock's history "Domesticating Drink" and Madelon Powers's "Faces Along the Bar" indispensable.
I think it's just a coincidence that tonight's reading takes place on the birthday of Oscar Wilde, but it's a happy coincidence. In "The Importance of Being Earnest," one of the main characters, Algernon, says, "When I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink." Sounds about right to me. I hope to see you at tonight's event; until then, what works of liquored-up lit top your list?
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