Witold gets his own back

[saliotthomas]

I remember Grauwolf and other people on previous book chatsites I inhabited, and as I try to be sincere about my book tastes, it would be awfully nice if people stopped the posing and started discussing for real. The degree of anonymity afforded on these book sites means that you can make up your personality as you go along without ever committing yourself to real life. Pessoa can get a bit boring in the end.
.

Funny enough,Eric von Hornblower,your about the only one i can't figure out in taste for books!Fausto,Mirabel,Bjorn,Sybarite,Irene,heteronym,Nnyhav....all have an outline that slowly reveale itself,but you,nope.Appart from blowing your horn and explaining to us simple folks how the all shlumon stand up,.....nada,niet,walou,rien,que dalle.
The idea of the 50 favorite books was yours but you did not comply,and except the divine Amelie and your repugnance for genre,very little transpired of your real love for the things.It might be so obvious to you and the sign so eloquant to the real connaisseur that i missed them altogether.You also can give review about book you didn't read,shooting wiki and comparing article,or stomp elegantly like the hippopotamus in fantasia on view contrary to your but never ,never did i see you giving away feeling about a read.Or maybe the few notes of flute were lost in the general bombast.
No bitterness her,just plain curiosity.Come on man do the fucking list and be done with it.

 

[Eric]

Saliocomma,y'r a real pissartist,man,but I'll answer seriusly,cos thats wot u wont,nada bulshitt,juss fax:

My tastes in books have been developed over about 40 years. They developed as follows (in sketch form):

1) School. A sprinkling of English authors such as Hardy, Lawrence, Shakespeare, Austen, George Eliot, T.S. Eliot, and a few others. Discovered Gerard Manley Hopkins on my own. Plus Gide, Camus and Mann in French and German.

2) University (UEA), where I read Swedish. Strindberg was one of my big discoveries there, especially his late plays. Also got to know about German Expressionism and Modernism in general, e.g. Kafka. Found Gombrowicz after they staged a play by him. Read Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson.

3) Year abroad at ?bo Akademi, Finland. Introduced me to Finland-Swedish literature. Several authors, mainly poets initially.

4) Year in Krak?w, Poland, immediately after university. Discovered Schulz and Witkiewicz.

5) Several years in Sweden. Read relatively little. Sat in the student club and drank beer and wine. But did mix with literary people. Discovered Lesmian about that time.

6) Discovered Dutch and Flemish literature. As I can read Dutch, this skill came in rather useful. Authors such as Vestdijk, van den Broeck, van de Woestijne, Hemmerechts, Boon, and a few others.

7) Discovered Estonian literature. This goes on until the present day, not least because I've translated five books from that language: Kross, Unt, etc.

8) Was told about Anthony Powell by a friend. Read the whole Dance suite. Like him.

9) Recent discoveries come from Finland-Swedish, Swedish, Flemish, Estonian literature, plus Charles Morgan.

That's about it, if you want a kind of overview. But I've read other authors as well, including Norwegian ones, Orwell, poetry in various languages.

So, no fucking list, but something in that direction. I've listed the authors that have meant something to me.

 

[Sybarite]

oi, franziskaner, so-called wei?bier. well. it's sweet and easy. "Girl's beer" I have heard it called. And indeed it was my entry into drinking beer.

Currently, due to moving to Bonn, I have taken a liking to K?lsch, the specialty here (as Wei?bier is a bavarian specialty). It ranges from beers like Fr?h, which is remarkably similar to Budweiser Budvar, to K?ppers, which is kinda close to 'regular' beer, i.e. pils.

Btw. Budweiser strong? Hell, what thin piss are you used to???

~~LOL~~

A "girl's beer"? Well, I wouldn't know about that. Lovely stuff, though. The staff bar where I work has started selling a bottled concoction called 'Fruli', which is a Wei?bier with raspberry ? very sweet. I always thought that was a Berlin summer thing ? Wei?bier with either woodruff or raspberry cordial added.

When I started drinking, I was living in the north west of England, in a market town that had two independent, local breweries. So I started with what we call 'bitter' and occasionally something called 'mild', which is something like a half-way house between a bitter and a stout (such as Guinness). They were lovely brews. Unfortunately, the better of the two breweries was bought out by a big pub chain, which then sold the brewery itself to the other independent brewer, because it only wanted the pubs. So the better beer was lost.

I moved to London 20 years ago and found that the bitter down here is generally piss poor. So I started drinking generic lager (or 'cooking lager', as I call it). Mostly that's Fosters. Which is poor, but I know what I'm going to get and it doesn't give me headaches (like some other Interbrew products). The aforementioned staff bar, however, also sells bottled Budvar, so I drink that when I drink in that bar. I find it pretty strong ? well, after quite a few bottles.

 

[Eric]

No reply yet from Sally O'Comatose. But what about girls' beer? The first Belgian beer I drank was a kriek at the age of about 16. Since then I've grown a beard, which all goes to show what sweetish beer can do to you.

 

[fausto]

Kriek is called a girl beer, and so is Blanche / Witte. Why? Well, most consumers happen to be females, simple as that. Or tourists.

 

[Stewart]

I don't drink as much beer as I used to, but those I've liked include Zywiec, Desperado, Krusovice, Kirin, and Sapporo. I also like the many variations on beer bottles, an Estonian one called Viru springing to mind, given that it looks like a salt shaker:

 

[fausto]

So only lager for you?

 

[Stewart]

So only lager for you?

Not quite. Guinness, cider sometimes, and vodka mixed with ginger beer. Most pubs in Glasgow are quite predictable in their offerings: Tennants (urgh!), McEwans (urgh-er!), Stella Artois, Grolsch, Budweiser, Miller, and Corona. But some pubs will through a curve ball and you'll get a Furstenberg or a great big pint of Erdinger.

 

[Irene Wilde]

I am alone in my love for cocktails?

No devotees of the G&T? No avid admirers of Vodka Collins? A julep with Maker's Mark sets no one's heart aquiver?

In the words of Yul Bryner, "It's a puzzlement!"

 

[fausto]

Cocktail, yes, of course.
Screwdriver. Sidecar. Gin Tonic. Gin Fizz. Vodkatini. Etc.

 

[Irene Wilde]

Ooh! A sidecar is a wonderful winter cocktail, elegant in its simplicity, nice change of pace from a martini. But one has to be so wary about ordering them when one is out on the town! I've seen everything from a brandy-margarita-slushie to a triple-sec with a drop of brandy served up as a "sidecar." I tend to make them myself to avoid the disappointment, then I can indulge in all the cognac/cointreau goodness without fear.

 

[Sybarite]

I am alone in my love for cocktails?

No devotees of the G&T? No avid admirers of Vodka Collins? A julep with Maker's Mark sets no one's heart aquiver?

In the words of Yul Bryner, "It's a puzzlement!"

I wouldn't call myself a 'devotee' of cocktails, but I do like an occasional G&T and a dry Martini.

 

[fausto]

The first sidecar I tried was at a friend's party where another friend did all the drinks. A real cokctail master, he turned up in black suit and tie and took care of the drinks all night although he was just invited. Fantastic cocktails all of them and I asked my second sidecar right after the first one.
I'm alos very partial to gin and last time in Madrid went to a Gin Bar where they have 40 different types. I had two of the best gin tonic I ever had.

 

[saliotthomas]

No reply yet from Sally O'Comatose..

Was i supposed to.
For calling me a pissartiste?
Can't find the right smiley thing !

 

[Mirabell]

Was i supposed to.
For calling me a pissartiste?
Can't find the right smiley thing !

 

[Eric]

In #26, Stewart shows a bottle of exquisite shape. Don't be fooled by the bottle, the contents are rubbish. At a reception a couple of years ago run by the Estonian Embassy in The Hague (now known as Karadžicville), we took a few of the leftover bottles home.

Alas, I still have one of the three left unopened. Insipid LeCoq stuff. I love beer and wine, and Estonian beer at its best ranks just below Belgian. But it is an expression of my indifference to this particular beer that I still have this one unopened bottle in my garage.

In my opinion, there are far better beers available in Estonia, such as Saku Tume, a kind of Newcastle Brown. In Sillam?e, in the Russian zone, they also brew an excellent beer which was available a decade ago, but seems to be have been pushed out by the big breweries. If you can get hold of some of the less commercially hyped beers in Estonia, you'll discover real ale style stuff.

 

[Stewart]

In #26, Stewart shows a bottle of exquisite shape. Don't be fooled by the bottle, the contents are rubbish.

Yeah, I wasn't too fussed by it when I tried it a few years back. I saw recently that they sell it in Tesco now.

I've just remembered I had a beer last Saturday: Zhiguli. It was alright.

 

[Eric]

Looking at Howard Goldblatt's interview (as posted elsewhere by Stewart) about how he became a literary translator from the Chinese made me thoughtful. Goldblatt says:

I went to a state college and was an absolutely abysmal student, a terrible, terrible student. I was a hail fellow well met kind of guy and had a lot of fun, but I almost flunked out. They were dying to have students, so you know I had to be an absolutely terrible student if I almost flunked out there. Ironically, the only course I ever dropped in college was a course on Asian history.

My route to being a translator of Estonian literature (though I've only translated about a sixth of the books that Goldblatt has) has some similarities:

I studied Swedish at UEA, Norwich, England. At the original interview to get a place there, I, a keen but ignorant schoolboy, said boldly that "Scandinavia was neutral during World War Two". But I still got the place at the university. As Goldblatt says: "they were dying to have students".

As mentioned before, I was by no means brilliant; I got a pretty poor degree. But I did do my year abroad at a Swedish-speaking university in Finland. When I studied Estonian in Uppsala, Sweden, a decade later, I also dropped out after two or three semesters. I'm not a born academic. To cap it all, I had a disastrous career as a translator of Estonian laws for EU accession in the mid 1990s.

But I have found my forte with literary translation. I won the Estonian state prize for translating a novel into a foreign language twice. And now, I'm concentrating on both Estonian and Finland-Swedish literature. Things pay off, but sometimes only decades later.

Just goes to show that life is a long-term business.

 

[Irene Wilde]

Good story, Mr. Dickens. Myself, I feel like I took the reverse course -- started strong and full of promise, then rapidly declined to my present state. May explain my keen interest in martinis. Of course, according to the actuarial charts I've got a few decades left, maybe I'll get a wow! finish. How do you say "three olives" in Estonian? I better start practicing.

 

[Eric]

Three Olives? I would say Schreiner, Oyl, and Olive... er... Cromwell.

Rarely drink flavoured vodka myself. Used to drink Jarzebiak and Wybr?wka when living in Poland. Though I preferred the Tokay you could get in the Balaton, the Hungarian restaurant in Krak?w, one of the few civilised restaurants in Krak?w in 1976. Drunk a lot of Pepsi in those days. The capitalists and their communist importers had divided Poland up into zones, so that you could only buy Coca Cola in Warsaw, only Pepsi Cola in Krak?w. And when you wanted a nice cup of coffee and a cake, you could go to the Holiday Inn. Krak?w will be utterly changed now, regarding consumer goods. Nowadays, you won't have to go to the state shop where you could only buy things with dollar coupons. Important things, such as sunglasses, whisky, sun cream, toilet paper, cameras, and other things that were impossible to buy in normal shops. (I remember using Le Monde as a substitute for toilet paper. One of the very few Western newspapers you could get, and then three days old.)

I don't think that many young people who never experienced the Soviet bloc have the slightest idea what everyday life was like then, while the West was basking in luxury and moaning about the occasional shortage.