Brew Date:9/20/2008

Last Fall I was examining my brewing palate and realized I’d not done an Irish Red. Why not? I like Irish Reds. I’ve purchased Irish Reds. Why haven’t I made an Irish Red? At the same time, I was wanting to branch out a bit on my recipe sourcing. Don’t get me wrong. The kits from G&G have been fantastic, every one. But I thought I’d see what else was out there. Having just purchased BeerSmith software, I checked out their archives and located a couple of possibilities. After more searching, I determined that “Big Head Irish Red” by Tim Gorman had what I was looking for. So, I ordered up the ingredients and had it. I was so pleased with it that I brought some out to HI for our special trip.

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Brown, Cecil. The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. 1969. Berkeley, CA: Frog Books, 2008.

“All the publishers are interested in selling books and if you say something about sex and being a nigger then you got a bestseller” (206).

C.S. Lewis writes that fiction allows you to be a thousand men whilst always maintaining the integrity of your own person. In today’s impoverished lingo, he argued that fiction allows us to walk in another person’s shoes. To be honest, the world of Brown’s classic novel of an African-American navigating the gigolo world of Copenhagen is one I didn’t want to stay in for very long. The rawness of the sexual encounters that make up much of the book at first seemed to be little more than the kind of meaningless encounters strung together by thin plot lines that are the hallmark of run-of-the-mill porno. I found myself repeatedly referring back to the insightful, new introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to reassure myself that something worthwhile was going to come of this odyssey through the sordidness of late-60’s Denmark.

However, as the novel progresses, the increasing bizarreness of the protagonist George Washington’s encounters with women wear on him as much as on the reader. Upon entering the bedroom of his last encounter, he sits on the sofa, head in hands, wondering “What is beauty, Mrs. Hamilton?” When Washington realizes that “everybody in this town, every black person, seems to be living off someone or something else. Everything but their insides” (203), he decides to go back home to the U.S., back to where “the battleground is a bit more familiar” (206). (more…)

Keats, Jonathan. The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six. Random House, 2009. $13.00

When one reads “modern-day fairy tales for grown-ups, reimagined from Jewish folklore” on the back of a book, one is prepared for ironic tales in which that which we see the good side of the bad. We’ve been prepared for these ironic fairy tales from the spate of post-modern spate of books that tell us that what we’ve been shown thus far isn’t the whole story. What I wasn’t prepared for in Jonathan Keats’s The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six was the storyteller pushing through the idea that irony is good for its own sake to show us the truths that irony reveals in its opposition.

Tet the Idler, who lives in a world without sleep, not only discovers the value of rest, but in doing so, he also rediscovers the joy of work. Dalet the Thief, whose thieving becomes toothless when the traditional items he steals lose their worth in a booming and developing economy, returns the town to their humanity by stealing those baubles by which the neuveau riche now measure their worth. And so it goes in each of the 12 tales.

The tales are framed with a mysterious tale of a student collecting these stories of secret Jewish saints. Sounding almost Buffy-like, we’re told that in every generation there are 36 saints roaming the earth. The catch is that the saints don’t know it. The narrator suggests that it is in the “quotidian” that we find holiness rather than in the special. The tales themselves suggest that not only is holiness found in the quotidian but also that it is found in those who do not seek it. None of the protaganists know that they are saints nor are they much interested in seeking out spiritual truth. Each blithely goes about their lives simply trying to live. It is as they try to make sense of thier lives that their search reveals to their communities the truths they didn’t know they sought.

Performing this sort of ironic morality instruction would be engaging in a single story, but Keats pulls off a thoroughly wondrous set of 12 tales, each one rendered in a natural voice that while echoing the patness of a fairytale never condescends to either the material nor the reader. While the inclusion of only 12 tales in a book whose subtitle is “Tales of the Thirty-Six” may smack of marketers setting up a sequel, it’s a sequel I would gladly welcome.

Ted on the Ash Cave Path, originally uploaded by TCTruffin.

On Friday, Ted and I thought it would be nice to return to Hocking Hills State Park and see the ice formations at Old Man’s Cave and Ash Cave. Todd thought, “What with the recent fluctuations in temperature–the warm days followed by the bone-chilling cold–there should be some really good ice.” Somehow I didn’t translate that observation into “Hmm, all that really good ice will probably make the trek into Old Man’s Cave treacherous and very actually dangerous. Not to mention climbing out of the gorge.”

Despite the travails, I did get some nice pics. Check them out at my Flickr paga.