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Alcohol science
Alexander Waugh revisits Kingsley Amis’ booze writing in the February–March Bookforum. An excerpt from Amis On Drink (1972):
[Alcohol science] will tell you, for instance, that drink does not really warm you up, it only makes you feel warm — oh, I see; and it will go on about alcohol being not a stimulant but a depressant, which turns out to mean that it depresses qualities like shyness and self-criticism, and so makes you behave as if you had been stimulated — thanks. In the same style, the said science will maintain that alcohol does not really fatten you, it only sets in train a process at the end of which you weigh more. Nevertheless, strong drink does, more than anything else taken by mouth, apart from stuff like cement, cram on the poundage.
Remarks: 3 of 3
Remark · Zach · 28 February 2008
Some related recommendations for a bathroom library (in addition to Amis On Drink) — Ben Schott, Schott’s Miscellany; Purple fashion magazine; James Agee, On Film; Charles Lamb, The Best Letters; The Walrus; The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. I; Vanity Fair, Jan 2007; Philip Larkin, Required Writing; Palais de Tokyo; Garry Winogrand, Winogrand 1964; George Bernard Shaw, Shaw’s Music; and the New York Times Wednesday crossword.
Remark · Joseph · 3 March 2008
The stimulant-depressant thing is the sort of confusion only pedantry can cure. Actually, there’s a lot of that clogging up the intersection between biology and its pop-sci outlets – “fat” for example, which is dreaded by dieters because it sounds the same as “fat,” even though they’re actually two pretty disparate denotations. In this way, the same set of terms are rarely useful for describing both the effects of a substance on the neurons and the outward effects of ingesting it on behavior.
Remark · Chris · 10 March 2008
Also, Paradis.