“He shimmered out, and I subjected Catsmeat to a keen glance. I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover -the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer, and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all.”
Highballs for breakfast
P.G. Wodehouse
Arrow Books, 2016
169 págs.
“La relación entre un bebedor y un abstemio es peligrosa. La persona abstemia se siente incomprendida y se resiente de la fácil elasticidad del bebedor y su tendencia a exagerar, perdonar y disfrutar del presente. La persona bebedora se resiente de la rigidez de la abstemia, de su formalidad y su limitada capacidad para abandonar su implacable lucidez mental. Una lucidez que pese a sus bondades es, en última instancia, irritantemente prosaica. Uno se aburre del otro.
El bebedor sabe que la vida no es mental ni una cuestión de controlar y demarcar. El abstemio, por su parte, sabe muy bien que basta la capacidad de una sola molécula de alcohol para cambiar el cuerpo y la mente. El musulmán, el puritano protestante y el abstemio son similares; pese a sus grandes diferencias entienden el mundo de una forma parecida, mientras que los bebedores también entienden el mundo de un modo que los une inconscientemente. Saben que los parámetros que nos contienen no son completamente humanos, ni tampoco divinos. Incluso podría decirse que la dopamina nos une fugazmente con las moscas de la fruta borrachas y los perros felices. Nos sacan de la aburrida tristeza bidimensional del ser humano.”
Beber o no beber; una odisea etílica
LAWRENCE OSBORNE
Gatopardo Ediciones
227 págs.
Traducción de Magdalena Palmer.
“There was dirt, horror and disfigurement everywhere I looked. But after one stiff drink I could leave the house; after two drinks the fear started lifting and after the third drink I’d feel like an artist. Or to be more precise, I would see the world through the eyes of an artist. And after five drinks, well, I could take my pick of them. On a good day I felt like Picasso. But there were all kinds of days. Imagine being Gustav Klimt in Hull, the golden light of the low winter sun at 3pm in the afternoon radiating along The Avenues. Imagine being Walter Sickert in Manchester, the violent brown and black smudges radiating from your feet and along canal towpaths. Imagine being Vincent van Gogh in St Helens, the sky ablaze with stars. That is something close to victory, something close to beating death.
They laughed at me and called me a piss artist. And how right they were. I was an aesthete with a broken nose in a stained shirt and inside-out boxer shorts, drinking the world beautiful.
When you drink constantly, you become numb, slipping down into a sub-life, a waking coma. You become a chaotic ghost that exists almost at one step removed from everything else. You float through the film of your own life. You see the sublime in the augury of fried chicken bones and tomato sauce cast upon the upper deck floor of a bus. You can divine a narrative among the finger-drawn doodles on the misted windows. You can feel your destiny in hundreds of individual condensation droplets on the glass turning red, then amber, then green.
Everything that you’d worried about a few hours previously… Where will I get the money from? What if he beats me up? Am I seriously ill? Am I dying? Have I got cancer? What will she say when I finally get home a week late? Will she cry when we eventually go to bed together? Will she pack her things and leave the next day? How near is death? What will it be like? Will I scream and cry? What is it like to die? And now, after some drinks, there is just the sweet sensation of your life passing you by with no struggle and no fuss. The rope slides through your fingers with no friction, just warmth as a balloon rises higher and higher out of sight. I have bottles and bottles and bottles and my phone is out of credit. A Mark Rothko night. A Jackson Pollock night…
This is the eternal holiday of the alcoholic. Once you create as much distance from your everyday life as you naturally have from orange tinted Polaroids of childhood caravan trips or stays in seaside hotels and Super 8 film reels of school sports days, then you start to experience your quotidian life like it’s the sunbleached memory of a happy event. You feel nostalgia and warmth for boring events that are unfolding right in front of you. You feel wistful about experiences that most people would find barbaric or gauche or unremarkable. You experience the epic, the heartwarming and the hilarious in post office and supermarket queues. You develop permanently rose-tinted glasses.
But there’s no getting away from it, after a while the strategy starts failing. You start seeing everything through the eyes of Francis Bacon, through the eyes of Edvard Munch, through the eyes of HR Giger… Your vision becomes stained and cracked.”
Jolly Lad
JOHN DORAN
Strange Attractor Press, 2015
295 págs.
Me dicen de El Periódico de Catalunya que mi entrevista con el autor británico Mark Forsyth va como un tiro. ¿O era que si sigo escribiendo locuras me pegarán un tiro? Ahora no recuerdo y, además, esta mañana precisamente tengo alojado un pequeño picahielos entre las cejas.
En todo caso, pueden leer mi charla aquí. Solo hablamos de curdas. Con perspectiva histórica, eso sí. Su libro La borrachera cósmica (Ariel) es la remonda, se lo recomiendo con gran vehemencia.
En unos días o semanas o, con toda franqueza, cuando me acuerde, les publicaré la charla sin cortes, como de costumbre.
Una de las mejores entrevistas que he realizado en lo que va de año. Con la gran Sarah Hepola, autora de Lagunas, asombrosa memoria de alcoholismo social, teleles amnésicos y resacas nagasákicas con final razonablemente feliz. Libro favoritísimo del 2019, desde ya. Se lo recomiendo enfáticamente.
Lean la versión online oficial, publicada en El Periódico de Catalunya, aquí. Hablamos de sed precoz, alcohol como poción mágica para friquis tísicos, borracheras hostiles, Kerouac como «borracho imbécil con los pantalones meados», remordimientos morning-after y el vomitivo cliché del escritor mamado, entre muchas otras cosas.
En unos días publicaré la habitual versión extendida de la charla, en exclusiva para Bendito Atraso.
Bendito Atraso 