A Night of Serious Drinking

IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
HMGovt said:
The other St Petersburg by John Nicolson (1994)

It was written by the elder brother of a drinking buddy in college, and in it recounts the escapades of various Soviet-era hard drinkers in and around Leningrad/StP. There was a practice of arriving at a friend's apartment, ringing the bell and then quickly downing and then concealing a bottle of vodka. Your host would open the door to a stone cold sober visitor who would soon become inexplicably intoxicated on the journey from front door to kitchen table. Always stuck with me, that.


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This sounds particularly rough.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
they dont quite qualify as novels but i always get a text from woops telling me what he's drinking at the time.
last night ran to about 10 cocktails and then the final text, pints. so hopefully he's still alive after that.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
there's a lot of drink in his actual novel but does it describe drunkeness or hangovers? Not as far as i can remember. lots of booze in grahame greene too but it's the steady drip feed of the alcoholic as a rule. not so much wild abandon.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Promising title... also for those who don't know, the title of this thread I took from a book by Daumel who wrote the book that Jodorowsky made into The Holy Mountain.
 
V

version

Well-known member
I can't remember whether or not it was any good as it's been an age since I've seen it, but there's a Jack Lemmon film called Days of Wine and Roses about a spiraling alcoholic couple.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Lots of drinking in the latter half of Ulysses. The climax (or 'afterbirth") of "Oxen" captures the chaos and rowdiness of a laddy pissup acutely.

I think Joyce was a pisshead himself so presumably he was no teetotaler but I'd describe the attitude towards drinking in Ulysses as highly disapproving. Stephen is drinking and pissing his wages and talents away. His father is drinking the family's money away, leaving his daughter's as beggars. Dignam the dead man is remembered for his alkie red nose. The Dublin dudes gather in pubs to sing sentimental songs, talk rubbish and indulge in antisemitic gossip. Bloom, meanwhile, Hero, the conspicuous teetotaler.

But OTOH, drink stimulates the action of the book. Without booze Stephen would never meet Bloom, the potentially redemptive event of his life. And the language of the "noman" narrator of Cyclops (as with Simon Dedalus's) crackles with pisshound energy.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Stick to the topic guys, this thread is about fat over educated under motivated losers drinking themselves to death, not Corpsey.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Tangential to Joyce, here's one of Flann O'Brien's pen-portraits of a Dublin "type":
…this portrait of undead human decomposition, not peculiar to Christmas but most frequently encountered about that time.
(Enters public house on St. Stephen's Day, obviously shattered with alcohol. Lowers self into seat with great care, grips table to arrest devastating shake in hands. Calls for glass of malt. Spills water all over table. Swallows drink with great clatter of teeth against glass. Shakily lights cigarette. Exhales. Begins to look around. Fixes on adjacent acquaintance. Begins peroration.)

'Bedam but you know, people talk a lot about drink, Whiskey and all the rest of it. There's always a story, the whiskey was bad, the stomach was out of order and so on. Do you know what I'm going to tell you…?
(Pauses impressively. The eye-pupils, almost dissolved in their watery lake, rove about with sickly inquiry. Accepts silence as evidence of intense interest.)
"Do you know what it is?"
(Changes cigarette from normal inter-digital position, holds it aloft vertical; taps it solemnly with index finger of free hand.)
"Do you see that? That thing there? Cigarettes. Them lads. Do you know what I'm going to tell you…?"
(Is suddenly overcome by paroxysm of coughing; roots benightedly for handkerchief as tears of pure alcohol course down the ruby cheeks, Recovers.)
"Them fellas there. Them fellas has me destroyed…"
(Collapses into fresh paroxysm Emerges again):
'I wouldn't mind that at all (indicates glass). I know what I have there. There's eatin' an' drinkin' in that. Damn the harm that done annywan, bar been taken to excess. But this…"
(Again points to cigarette, looks of sorrow and horror mingling on 'face'.)
"Them lads has me destroyed."
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