{"id":11142,"date":"2020-12-24T15:10:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-24T22:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=11142"},"modified":"2020-12-25T15:19:12","modified_gmt":"2020-12-25T22:19:12","slug":"besottedness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2020\/12\/24\/besottedness\/","title":{"rendered":"Besottedness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/culture\/archive\/2020\/12\/dylan-thomas-herman-mankiewicz-and-the-writer-as-drinker\/617463\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">from The Atlantic<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What Drives Writers to Drink?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>Seeking in the eloquent benders of Dylan Thomas and Herman Mankiewicz an answer to an ancient riddle<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/author\/james-parker\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">JAMES PARKER<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><img srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.theatlantic.com\/thumbor\/oSpC0rVoxis2or8G_KsYcBrfCMQ=\/672x550\/media\/img\/posts\/2020\/12\/GettyImages_76205801\/original.jpg, https:\/\/cdn.theatlantic.com\/thumbor\/hrYH4cGiNDWMMf4QSBkHsNfQqmo=\/1344x1100\/media\/img\/posts\/2020\/12\/GettyImages_76205801\/original.jpg 2x\" alt=\"\"><em>A portrait of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914\u20131953) sitting in an unidentified bar in the early 1950s. (Weegee \/ International Center of Photography \/ Getty)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The drunk guy. What are you going to do with the drunk guy? He\u2019s holding forth, he\u2019s sucking up air, he\u2019s rhetorically inflated, he\u2019s ruining everything, and no possible appeal to decency or art can stop him. A bucket of cold water might answer. Or a Vulcan nerve pinch. Otherwise, you\u2019re just going to have to take it, you and everyone else, sinking deeper into a kind of frozen grave of disaffection, an icy bed of umbrage, as he goes on and on, drunk on himself, drunk on being drunk,\u00a0<em>drunk.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it\u2019s even worse if the drunk guy is a writer. Because not only are writers very tricky\u2014viciously down on themselves, impossibly in love with this or that, squirting little shafts of bile or ambrosia from secret writer glands\u2014they also have&nbsp;<em>language.&nbsp;<\/em>Their drunk-guy monologues will not, unfortunately, be without interest. They might even be\u2014as lights flutter out in the brain\u2014somewhat creative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>David Fincher\u2019s\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/culture\/archive\/2020\/11\/mank-david-fincher-review\/617012\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mank<\/a><\/em>, now streaming on Netflix, and Steven Bernstein\u2019s\u00a0<em>Last Call<\/em>, which I saw recently in a fantastically deserted AMC theater, both feature protracted drunk-writer monologues, because both movies have a drunk writer for a leading man. In\u00a0<em>Mank<\/em>, it\u2019s Herman \u201cMank\u201d Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who gave us\u00a0<em>Citizen Kane<\/em>; in\u00a0<em>Last Call<\/em>, it\u2019s Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet who gave us \u2026 Dylan Thomas. Mank was brilliant; Thomas was a genius. Drunk guys that they frequently were, neither man, to put it mildly, was without insight. What can they teach or impart to us about writing and booze?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[ <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/culture\/archive\/2020\/12\/dylan-thomas-herman-mankiewicz-and-the-writer-as-drinker\/617463\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">click to continue reading at The Atlantic<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The Atlantic What Drives Writers to Drink? Seeking in the eloquent benders of Dylan Thomas and Herman Mankiewicz an answer to an ancient riddle by JAMES PARKER A portrait of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914\u20131953) sitting in an unidentified bar in the early 1950s. (Weegee \/ International Center of Photography \/ Getty) The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}