Monday, August 18, 2014

The PC: Slave to words.

The PC: Slave to words.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Words matter, and so I decided to do some brainstorming.

In the amount of time required to listen to the album The Jazz Age by the Bryan Ferry Orchestra (roughly 35 minutes), I’d do some free association, letters A to Z, and compile a list of words in reply to a simple question: “What does the world of better beer really mean to me?”

My only self-imposed caveat was that these freely-associated words had to be non-specific to beer and brewing. The idea was to chart how better beer affects my brain as a concept, beyond its familiar chemical effects. Here are the results.

Authenticity, anti-fascist, agitprop
Broad-minded, breakthrough, bona fide
Community, cadres, credibility
Diversity, development, dissenter, Dionysian
Education, exercise, egalitarian
Foment, fun, feisty
Genuine, gadfly
Heterodoxy, healthy, heretical
Integrity, insurgency, idiosyncratic
Jamboree, jamming
Knowledge, kinship
Localism, leadership, liberal
Multicultural, mythological, militancy
Non-negotiable, neighborhood
Original, openness
Pride, placemaking, passionate, progressive, polemics
Qualified, quantifiable
Revolt, restoration, reuse
Substantive, subversive
Tactile, transformation, truth, timelessness
Unapologetic, underground
Viva la Revolution, validity, venerable
Walkability, work ethic
X
Yummy, yearning
Zealotry, zymurgy

Admittedly, there were times when I caught myself daydreaming, even though the music was chosen quite purposefully to be instrumental, without words and distractions. You’ll notice that the letter “x” was a problem, and yes, zymurgy is a beer-specific term. Exceptions, and all that.

Something else is obvious. I’ve consciously avoided attaching the word “craft” to any of it. Slowly and inexorably, I’m engaged in the process of purging this beer descriptor from written and spoken usage. Like so many other useful processes, doing so involves a steady shift, and there’ll be lapses.

It’s clear to me that as the market share of better beer gets ever larger, and efforts to explain what “craft” actually means in terms of process – say, as a maker of handmade furniture might compare and contrast his hand-driven methods to that of a room-sized machine – are downplayed, we’ll increasingly turn to economic descriptors like those of the “buy local” movement. Consciousness about matters like independent ownership will become necessary to help dispel the craftiness of Trojan Goose.

I’ve been saying it for a long time, and generally find myself heckled for it. That’s okay, because at some point, the pendulum will swing back. To indulge in drinking without thinking isn’t drinking at all. It’s just swallowing.

Which brings me to the point of the exercise: I didn’t get into better beer merely to swallow or “drink” reservoirs of it, although doing so might be a collateral result of proximity for three decades. Rather, I got into it so as to change the world, or as much of the world as I could reach.

Grasp is another matter.

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Perhaps appropriately, the book currently occupying space atop my nightstand is wonderful: Thinking the Twentieth Century: Intellectuals and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder. In The Guardian, reviewer Neal Ascherson sets the scene.

In this marvelous book, two explorers set out on a journey from which only one of them will return. Their unknown land is that often fearsome continent we call the 20th century. Their route is through their own minds and memories. Both travelers are professional historians still tormented by their own unanswered questions. They needed to talk to one another, and the time was short.

Tony Judt, author of Postwar, found that he was suffering from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), an incurable degenerative disease. His friend Timothy Snyder, a younger American historian, offered to help Judt create his final work. It takes the form of a series of conversations, recorded and then transcribed for Judt's approval over the best part of two years. Judt died in August 2010, a few weeks after dictating a long "afterword", which is as lucid as anything he had written. He was 62 years old.

I’m only hallway through it, but already the two historians have discussed a panoply of ideas, some still an active part of the political lexicon (Zionism, the Jewish experience), while others (Marxist theory) currently are situated just offstage, perhaps to return some day. George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and Stefan Zweig are among the writers popping up in these chats, along with Communism, Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, Reaganism and Thatcherism.

While reading this book, I’ve experienced much familiarity with the historical contexts, personages and schools of thought therein, but at times it has been necessary to reach for the iPhone and research who a Romanian poet or English trade unionist actually was. Overall, it has been exhilarating, serving as a timely reintroduction to ideas and the life of the mind, these being what inspired me to study philosophy and history at college in the first place.

In turn, it’s probably why I can’t keep various hop varieties straight in my mind, and couldn’t remember a fermentation temperature if you held a Lite to my temple. Science doesn’t scratch the itch. The idea of better beer is what matters to me – the history, theory, sociology, geography and culture of it. If you want to watch yeast mate under a microscopic eye, marvelous. I’d rather draw political insights from Woody Guthrie or find ways of connecting urban revitalization to the ready availability of Porter.

The most important word of all just might be the first one that popped into my head, with an assist from my former co-worker Joe. It’s authenticity, and as ideas go, it’s one of the best. It is my goal to combine authenticity with fun, polemics and localism, and see where they lead in my better beer life these coming months.

As for the Bryan Ferry album, I still go with “Avalon”. It’s the island from Arthurian legend, named for the apple trees located there – and cider’s always a pragmatic second choice to beer.

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