Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 97

The Best Hangover In Fiction? Ctd

Continuing our discussion, a reader submits the following exchange from Dan Jenkins’s Life Its Ownself:

“How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been et by a coyote and shit off a cliff.”

Another reader: “I would nominate Vera Charles in Mame, who stumbles down the stairs around, pulls aside a drape at the window and moans, ‘My God, that moon is bright.’” Many more below:

The following bit from Cheever’s Bullet Park isn’t written as well as Amis’s famous hangover description. But it’s more terrifying:

When the alarm rings he mistakes it for the telephone. Their children are away at school and he concludes that one of them is sick or in trouble. When he understands that it is the alarm and not the telephone he puts his feet onto the floor. He groans. He swears. He stands. He feels himself to be a hollow man but one who has only recently been eviscerated and who can recall what it felt like to have a skinful of lively lights and vitals. She whimpers in pain and covers her face with a pillow. Feeling himself to be a painful cavity he goes down the hall to the bathroom. Looking at himself in the mirror he gives a loud cry of terror and revulsion. His eyes are red, his face is scored with lines, his light hair seems clumsily dyed. He possesses for a moment the curious power of being able to frighten himself.

He soaks his face with water and shaves his beard. This exhausts his energies and he comes back down the hall to the bedroom, says that he will take a later train, returns to bed and pulls the blankets over his face to shut out the morning. She whimpers and cries. She then leaves the bed, her nightgown hooked up over her comely backside. She goes to the bathroom but she shuts her eyes as she passes the mirror. Back in bed she covers her face with a pillow and they both lie there, groaning loudly. He then joins her on her side of the bed and they engage in a back-breaking labor of love that occupies them for twenty minutes and leaves them both with a grueling headache.

He has already missed the 8:11, the 8:22, and the 8:30. “Coffee” he mutters, and gets out of bed once more. He goes downstairs to the kitchen. Stepping into the kitchen he lets out another cry of pain when he sees the empties on the shelf by the sink. They are ranged there like the gods in some pantheon of remorse. Their intent seems to be to force him to his knees and to wring from him some prayer. “Empties, oh empties, most merciful empties have mercy upon me for the sake of Jack Daniels and Seagram Distillers.” Their immutable emptiness gives them a look that is cruel and censorious. Their labels—scotch, gin and bourbon-have the ferocity of Chinese demons, but he definitely has the feeling that if he tried to placate them with a genuflection they would be merciless. He drops them into a wastebasket, but this does not dispose of their force.

He puts some water on to boil and feeling for the wall like a blind man makes his way back to the bedroom where he can hear his wife’s cries of pain. “Oh I wish I were dead,” she cries, “I wish I were dead.” “There, there, dear,” he says thickly. “There, there.” He sets out a clean suit, a shirt, a tie and some shoes and then gets back into bed again and pulls the blankets over his face. It is now close to nine and the garden is filled with light. They hear the schoolbus at the corner, sounding its horn for the Marsden boy. The week has begun its splendid procession of days. The kettle begins to whistle.

He gets out of bed for the third time, returns to the kitchen and makes some coffee. He brings a cup for them both. She gets out of bed, washes her face without examining it and then returns to bed. He puts on some underwear and then returns to bed himself. For the next hour they are up and down, in and out, struggling to rejoin the stream of things, and finally he dresses and racked by vertigo, melancholy, nausea and fitful erections he boards his Gethsemane—the Monday-morning 10:48.

Another good one:

I am a little slow on the trigger for this, but Kerouac’s descriptions in Big Sur should be on any short list of hangovers in fiction. The following is taken from portions of chapters one and two:

The church is blowing a sad windblown “Kathleen” on the bells in the skid row slums as I wake up all woebegone and goopy, groaning from another drinking bout and groaning most of all because I’d ruined my “secret return” to San Francisco by getting silly drunk [....] instead of going thru smooth and easy I wake up drunk, sick, disgusted, frightened, in fact terrified by that sad song across the roofs mingling with the lachrymose cries of a Salvation Army meeting on the corner below “Satan is the cause of your alcoholism, Satan is the cause of your immorality, Satan is everywhere workin to destroy you unless you repent now” and worse than that the sound of old drunks throwing up in rooms next to mine, the creak of hall steps, the moans everywhere Including the moan that had awakened me, my own moan in the lumpy bed, a moan caused by a big roaring Whoo Whoo in my head that had shot me out of my pillow like a ghost.

And I look around the dismal cell [....] the rucksack sits hopefully in a strewn mess of bottles all empty, empty poor boys of white port, butts, junk, horror… “One fast move or I’m gone, ” I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you cant learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimism you read, or how many jugs of vision producing Ayahuasca you drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with — That feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens with the fear of eerie death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders weave in the hot countries, the feeling of being a bent back mudman monster groaning underground in hot steaming mud pulling a long hot burden nowhere, the feeling of standing ankledeep in hot boiled pork blood, ugh, of being up to your waist in a giant pan of greasy brown dishwater not a trace of suds left in it… The face of yourself you see in the mirror with its expression of unbearable anguish so haggard and awful with sorrow you cant even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection and therefore nothing to connect with tears or anything: it’s like William Seward Burroughs’ “Stranger” suddenly appearing in your place in the mirror — Enough! “One fast move or I’m gone.”

Another:

I think my favorite hangover description in fiction must be from Sir Henry at Rawlinson End by the late, great Vivian Stanshall. Sir Henry embodied all that was reactionary in the English aristocracy, taken to absurd extremes. Stanshall, a fascinating and sadly underappreciated character who died in 1995 and was perhaps the purest example of a Genuine English Eccentric, created the character and his equally odd extended family (including his loyal manservant “Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer”) for John Peel’s radio show. After a number of broadcasts and an LP or two, Sir Henry was immortalized on film by Trevor Howard. Stanshall’s mastery of numerous English dialects was put to good use here, as well as his wonderful Edward Lear-like facility with words. His work inspired Stephen Fry, among many others. Here’s a taste (transcribed from a broadcast):

“Filth Hounds of Hades!” Sir Henry Rawlinson surfaced from the blackness hot and fidgety. Fuss, bother, and itch. Conscious mind coming up too fast with the bends – through pack‑ice throbbing seas. Boom – sounders – blow‑holes – harsh croak – Blind Pews tip‑tap‑tocking for escape from his pressing skull. With a gaseous grunt he rolled away from the needle-cruel light acupuncturing his pickle-onion eyes, and with key-bending will slit-peered at the cold trench Florrie had left on her side of the bed. Baffling? At the base of his stomach – great swaddled hillock – was pitched a perky throbbing tent. This was so unusual he at first feared rigor mortis, but Madame Memory’s five lovely daughters jerked him to boggling attention. With grim‑mouthed incredulity he snatched for a riding crop and thrashed his impertinent member into limp submission. Bah! To Henry’s way of thinking, waking up was not the best way to start the day.

Another reader takes the thread in a new direction:

Screw the discussion about the best hangover in fiction. What about the best word for hangover in any language? The Latin for it is hard to beat: it’s crapula. Because, hey, that’s how you feel!

(Photo: Day 2 of the Oktoberfest beer festival on September 21, 2008 in Munich, Germany. By Johannes Simon/Getty Images)

The Best Of The Dish Today

A reader sends the above diagram:

I’m bored at work, so made you this.

Cheers. Jesse Walker also came up with a Venn Diagram for states where you can legally smoke weed and carry a gun. I think he’s trying to reassure us.

Today I focused on attempts to police or control free speech: the move by Twitter to employ some crusaders against patriarchy to improve its prevention of harassment and bile; and the much more serious move by the British government to stamp out extremist thought and speech even if it has nothing to do with inciting violence. We noted the classic mission creep of the new US war in Iraq and Syria; the power of the Greater Israel lobby in bringing together two of the biggest money-men in Republican and Democratic party circles; and featured a baffled Canadian’s response to the mid-terms. The Canadian isn’t the only one puzzled. A reader writes:

Watching the German news I was fascinated by their framing of the American elections. They talk about the “alternative reality of American politics” in which Democrats are on the defensive and Obama is considered such a failure that most Democratic candidates don’t want to be seen with him. I paraphrase the correspondent: “Obama a failure?! With solid economic growth, declining unemployment, and his major program in healthcare reform now an obvious success notwithstanding Republican predictions of catastrophe? Yes, that’s the political alternate reality of America, in which right-wing extremists dominate the airwaves and the political dialogue and most citizens are convinced of ‘facts’ that are political propaganda and not reality.” Sums it up pretty well.

Also: rats in New York City! And a beat-boxing lyre bird!

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 20 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including the new “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here.

See you in the morning.

Faces Of The Day

A self-portrait (with father) by former president George W Bush. Well, he got the necks right.

A Win-Win Game Plan

Christian Jarrett highlights a study suggesting that in “countries with greater gender equality … both women and men tend to perform better at the Olympics.” What researchers found when they compared Sochi medal results with World Bank data for 121 countries:

The key finding is that countries with more gender equality, especially in terms of educational equality, tended to achieve more Olympic medals among their female and male athletes. This association held true even after controlling for wealth and population size and income inequality. Income inequality was also associated with medal success (greater income inequality correlated with fewer medals), but income inequality and gender inequality were not correlated with each other, and each had an independent association with medals gained.

[Researcher Jennifer] Berdahl and her colleagues said that their results contradict the argument that striving for equality for women means inevitably that men will lose out. “Rather, gender inequality is likely to hurt both women and men by encouraging stereotypes that limit their ability to reach their full potential as individuals,” they concluded. “Eroding false and antiquated norms regarding what men and women can and cannot do is a ‘win-win’ that allows members of both genders to realize their true potential.”

When Eddie Discovered Freddie

Leann Davis Alspaugh considers Edvard Munch’s affinity for Friedrich Nietzsche:

In Nietzsche, Munch discovered a shared spiritual kinship – both suffered from loneliness, a lack of recognition, and a fear of madness. Nietzsche’s own work on art and physiology coincided perfectly with Munch’s temperament and artistic interests; both regarded patho-physiology as a revelatory state, one to be feared as much as sought after. Art and physiology was much on the minds of nineteenth-century French and German thinkers, who often looked to rationalize man’s place in the world through the burgeoning field of what we today would call “metrics.” In 1847, Carl Ludwig introduced the kymograph, or “wave writer,” to track spatial position over time. Nietzsche himself personally owned a dynamometer, an instrument that purported to measure beauty and ugliness. In addition, developing photographic technology was used document the internal organs as well as facial expressions and the movement of the lips during phonation. With these graphical representations of bodily circumstances, thinkers like Nietzsche and Munch believed that elusive concepts like being, beauty, and aesthetics could be captured and made manifest, a sort of grand interdisciplinary ontological experiment.

(Image: Munch’s Friedrich Nietzsche, 1906, via Wikipedia)

Where It’s Deadly For Local Reporters

Juan David Romero passes along a “new report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reveals that only 6 percent of the 593 reporters killed from 2006 to 2013 were foreign correspondents”:

The most dangerous nations for journalists reporting at home from 2006-2013 were Iraq with 107 deaths; the Philippines, 63; Syria, 49; Somalia, 45; Pakistan, 43; Mexico, 43; Honduras, 23; Brazil, 19; the Russian Federation, 18; India, 17; Afghanistan, 16; and Colombia, 12. In this time period, the number of journalists killed in their home countries increased in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Arab states; in Africa the total remained stagnant, and in the U.S. and Europe the numbers declined.

The Ghosts Of Tourists Past

Jillian Steinhauer spotlights the surprisingly spooky work of German design student Philipp Schmitt, who captured images of flashing cameras at frequently photographed sites:

He began by simply placing geotagged photos in online maps as markers, little mustard-yellow drops littering New York City. Next, he created a web app “to retrieve my current geo location and to query the web for pictures taken at that position,” he writes on his website. He also rigged a camera flash to go off whenever pictures are found, allowing him to walk around an area while the flash is triggered. He recorded those results in long-exposure photographs of his own that are dotted with spots of light. In the final step, Schmitt added a person to the scenes, focusing his camera and flash on a stand-in tourist who appears and reappears brandishing a camera of his own.

She adds:

In a curious way, [the images] hark back to the first photograph ever taken of a person, a street scene shot by Daguerre with a 10-minute exposure – only two men stayed still long enough to appear. Then, in 1838, people went about their lives with no inkling of the technology that was set to revolutionize the world; now we carry it in our pockets, snap without thinking, and barely notice it at all.

Rodent Residents

A new analysis has found one rat for every four people in the Big Apple. Only one in four? Compared with the bed bugs … I was going to jump on this for another unpopular rant about NYC. But DC’s at least as bad, if not a little worse:

The District was the nation’s third rattiest city in 2013, faring better than just Chicago and Los Angeles, according to pest control company Orkin. Orkin compiled these ranking based on how many rat treatments it performed in 2013, so take this ranking with a large cluster of rat dropping–sized skepticism … In Orkin’s ratings, New York City ranked as the fourth rattiest city, coming in behind D.C. But, it should be noted, City Desk spoke to D.C.’s very own rat consultant, Robert Corrigan, back in November, who declared New York City as “probably the No. 1 ratropolis in the United States.”

It’s still pretty bad – but way better than I remember. My habitual bike ride down the alley-way behind my apartment would routinely enter an Indiana Jones environment. There were so many rats it was close to impossible to avoid them. And the feel of a writhing, scurrying rat beneath your bike wheels is a particular form of eww. Meanwhile, Ben Richmond offers a brief history of the creature:

[W]hile we all agree that there are too many rats, no one has been sure of just how many we’re up against here. Jonathan Auerbach, author of the rat population study, traced the one-to-one ratio to a 1909 book by W. R. Boelter called The Rat Problem, “which assumed that there lived one rat per acre of land in England.” Since the country had, at the time, both 40 million residents and 40 million acres, Boelter concluded that England had a rat for each person. “The hypothesis was erroneously applied to New York City and is widely quoted to this day,” Auerbach’s paper states. Boelter probably wasn’t right about England, and there’s no reason to think what he found applies to New York.

The estimated number of rats has varied widely over the years: from 250,000 estimated in 1948 – a ratio of 36 people for every rat– to twice as many rats as people, according to unnamed experts cited by the New York Post. The city government isn’t into putting a number on its rat residents, but it does track the number of properties that could be housing them. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Office of Pest Control Services reported that, in 2013, 10,800 property inspections had conditions able to harbor rats and 11,128 had active signs of rats.

What Parts Of Obamacare Will Republicans Repeal?

Jason Millman explains why the medical device tax is at the top of the list:

With more than 7,000 device companies spread across the country, the industry has large concentrations of employers in California, Minnesota, Massachusetts and New York. The map [above], which shows the location of companies and employees who have signed onto a letter opposing the tax, helps explain why the issue keeps resurfacing.

How much would repealing it cost?

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the tax, which was added to the law to help pay for expanding coverage to an estimated 25 million people, will bring in $29 billion over a decade. That’s much less than other the funding sources in the law, like the tax on health insurers ($101.7 billion) or the requirement on medium-sized and large employers to offer coverage ($130 billion).

Sarah Kliff notes that opposition to the tax is bipartisan:

Nearly every industry has lobbied against its own assessment since Obamacare passed; insurers, for example, have run an extensive campaign against the health plan tax. But what might have given medical device makers an extra boost is that a decent number of Democratic senators want to see that fee gone, too. Both Minneapolis and Boston are hubs for medical device making. So it’s not especially surprising that Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Al Franken (D-MN), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) all support medical device tax repeal.

Suderman agrees the “most likely item on the list is a repeal of the law’s medical device tax.” Other brewing fights:

Republicans will try to make an issue out of the individual mandate which is widely disliked, but Obama won’t let that one get through. The employer mandate, however, might be a successful target: The administration has delayed and undercut the provision on multiple occasions, and liberal policy shops have argued that it’s not necessary.

Paul N. Van de Water criticizes another item on the Republican wish list:

House Speaker Boehner and Senate Minority Leader McConnell called this week for a major change in health reform’s requirement that larger employers offer health coverage to employees who work 30 or more hours a week or face a penalty. Claiming that the 30-hour threshold is “an arbitrary and destructive government barrier to more hours,” they propose raising it to 40 hours. In reality, however, that step would lead to fewer hours and more part-time work — the exact opposite of what their rhetoric about “restoring” the 40-hour work week implies. …

Only about 7 percent of employees work 30 to 34 hours (that is, at or modestly above health reform’s 30-hour threshold), but 44 percent of employees work 40 hours a week and thus would be vulnerable to cuts in their hours if the threshold rose to 40 hours. (See figure.) Under the Boehner-McConnell proposal, employers could easily cut back large numbers of employees from 40 to 39 hours so they wouldn’t have to offer them health coverage.

Chait points out that all of tweaks Republicans are advocating for would increase the deficit:

The GOP’s Obamacare conundrum in a nutshell is that they have condemned the law for its fiscal irresponsibility, but its political weakness stems precisely from its fiscal responsibility. The law made a lot of enemies because it had to make the numbers add up. Republicans have spent five years promising to get around to proposing their own plan, but they haven’t done it because if you want to make the numbers add up, you have to take things away from people.

The Wrong Way To Win In Texas

Douthat ponders the failed Wendy Davis campaign:

Yes, the social conservatism of Hispanics, while real enough, is sometimes overstated; yes, polling on abortion is always fluid and complicated, in red states as well as blue. But it still should be obvious that if your long-term political vision requires consolidating and mobilizing a growing Hispanic bloc in a state that’s much more religious and conservative than average, nominating a culture-war lightning rod is just about the strangest possible way to go about realizing that goal, no matter what kind of brilliant get out the vote strategy you think you’ve conjured up or how much national money you think she’ll raise.

It would be a little bit like, I don’t know, nominating a political-novice Tea Partier who owed her prior fame to a pro-abstinence campaign to contest a winnable race in a deep-blue, more-secular-than-average northeastern state. Not that the Republican Party would ever accidentally do anything like that, of course. But even that joke is part of the point: The Christine O’Donnell thing really did happen more or less by accident, because she happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch an anti-establishment wave and win a primary in which she was supposed to be a protest candidate. Whereas the Davis experiment was intentionally designed: She was treated to fawning press coverage, lavished with funding, had the primary field mostly cleared for her, and was touted repeatedly as part of an actual party strategy for competing in a conservative-leaning state.

Earlier Dish on the Davis campaign here.