When Alcohol Replaces Books

Whiskey also goes with sketching, thankfully.

This is from the night. No.

This is from the night which follows ten hours of trying to get others to read — and they do read, wonderfully, sharply. Every word in every essay they are assigned is an idea or a problem, and each of these a question, each an argument. On a night which is not merciful enough to be cold enough, remembering the day’s classes makes me happy.

At 10 after the stove is unplugged and the sink smells like lemons, I sit down to try and make myself read. Over the past month, I have read the first five pages of The Archaeology of Knowledge, the first two of What is Philosophy?, the first ren of How to Write a Sentence, and the first page of something by Bernstein.

I can of course use these scraps to write and present a paper on “The Poetics and Rhetoric of Inscribing the Concept in Historiography.” Most of you would also agree, however, that academic writing is more of a rehearsal in collecting and compacting trash from treasure, and not so much a testimony to reading.

The tired warm sleepy night of reading ends with the end of the first glass. Drinking replaces reading, and not only of the academic kind. Or I’d be thinking of a brand of academic drinking where speech is also involved. The brand which usually devolves into conversation like the one in Waking Life, but more often like the ones in BoJack Horseman, and even more often like the ones in Hera Pheri. But then a silent glass calls for non-thought.

Even reading about drinking while drinking does not work. Neither Money nor Lucky Jim work with whiskey. Literary drinking does not exist either. There are hints of exclusivity with the first swirl, and the whiff that follows is one of sleep and not sentences. The final note is tobacco. It’s one or the other. Sleep is stinking or it is in pages, and it usually stinks.

What are the questions I ask of this? Must teachers read? Terrible question — they must! Must teachers drink? Great question — they must! Can reading be replaced? No! (Except with drinking) Can drinking? __________________________________________________ no.

What goes with whiskey then?

Fortunately, writing.