11/17/2007: "Back from Italy / Links"

Hi All,

Back, battered and bruised, from my Italian soujourn (sojourn?). Not, not so battered or bruised, but a lot of fun times packed into 8 or so days left my 32-year-old bones exhausted and in need of recuperation. But a great time: lots of great food, wine, met some wonderful people, lost a few drinking contests (no matter where I go on tour, I always get into some contest and I always lose!) and had a good time. Shouts out to Marco, Elisa (tireless publicist extraordinaire who shepherded me around Italy whilst battling a raging fever half the time; Me: "Elisa, you're coughing and sneezing; why don't you go home, have some soup, take a nap?" Elisa: "No, you must---hack*hack*---see the Coliseum! Onwards! Avanti!"), Andrea, Danilo, Fillippo, Georgio, Elisa #2, Fransesca, Ivano, all the guys from Birra, Helen and Jordan and Angela from Granta and McSweeney's respectively, Antonio and Steve and Maurico in Rome, Pietro in Florence, Pietro and Alberto in Turino, and in general and in total everyone I met over there who helped get me drunk and helped me have a great time. And the book, by Edizioni BD, looks fantastic.

There were tons of pictures taken, mostly of the impromptu "Beer Club" event in Perugia where I lost to Danilo Denotti in a beer-chugging exhibition. First rule of Birra Club: you don't talk about Birra Club. Second rule of Birra club: if your name is Craig Davidson, you lose in Birra Club. But still, better to lose a beer-chugging competition than get my face knuckled over, so that was nice. Anyway, when and if I get any links where those pictures may be displayed, I'll pass them along.

So, in total, a great time. I certainly hope the book does well for them---Edizione BD is a graphic novel publisher who has recently moved into novels; mine is the first that has nothing to do with graphics, although certainly it is a graphic novel in terms of its content. So, I hope this crossover works well for them as they certainly went all out in its production and in taking me around and getting me out there to the Italian public.

Now, a few links that I heard about while I was gone. First is from the Picador UK website, where they've posted my blog about my trip to Scotland for the festival. My editor, Kate Harvey, had to edit it and I cannot in any way blame her. My only excuse is this: when I wrote it I hadn't written anything in like, a week and a half. That's a loooooong time for me to be away from the writing desk. So it's sort of like a guy who goes off his meds: what he comes up with is pure unadulterated id, just a seething tangle of weirdness. And too damn long. So I'll give the link to the cleaned-up version and post the whole version below, for anyone bored or weird enough to want to read a very bizarre and jagged and in some ways hidous example of a writer who needs to write every day and if he doesn't, things get pent up and those things come out in twisted ways.

Second is a link to Brett Savory's Broken Pencil column where yours truly is brought up in the company of some other, truly fantastic writers.
www.panmacmillan.com/picador/ManageBlog.aspx?BlogID=8caaa1d6-1ae5-42ec-b338-004f728fb626&BlogPage=Permalink

www.brokenpencil.com/indieartist/view.php?indieartid=14

Okay, that's all for now. I have much catching up to do. And much sleeping.

All best, Craig.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. The full screed. Feel free to abandon ship at any time. I'll take no offence:

EDINBURGH FOLLIES: MY SEARCH FOR THE OLD PURPLE TIN

By Craig Davidson

Oi! Oi! Oi! Wassallthisthen? Who's this blooming nutter, this Canadian, doing here in my own merry old Scotland? For two farthings I'd whap this geezer in his fat self-satisfied gob, stuff him in the boot of my lorry, boil 'is eid, and fire his bollocks off the moors!

Okay, so, that was not the reception I received from the local populace when I showed up in Edinburgh for their yearly arts festival—most likely because no self-respecting Scottish person, or indeed any person at all, would let loose with the sentence I've transcribed above. It's a dog's breakfast of cultural slangs, isn't it? That Oi! Oi! seems Aussie to me, and "blooming nutter" is, I think, English. Sorry to anyone I insulted by mixing up slangs ... actually, to be dead honest, I'm not. Not sorry. I thought I was there for a moment but after appraising my emotional barometer that guilt was merely of the chimerical variety, a ghostly heat-shimmer masquerading as sorrow so nope, sorry—I'm not sorry. Sorry for the confusion, though, and really this whole pointless opening paragraph. Not really sorry, though; I'm afraid I just don't have that in me.

Anyway, the Edinburgh festival. I was invited to read from and promote my novel THE FIGHTER—which, it must honestly be said, could benefit from that. I know the book exists as a physical entity, paper and ink and, I think, a pretty snazzy cover, but so far I'm put in the mind of that oft-quoted Confucian maxim or a derivation thereof: If a book is printed and nobody reads it, does that book truly exist?

Someone attached to the festival must've read it; it or my first shot over the bows, a collection called RUST AND BONE, because I got an invite. And was damned happy to attend—Edinburgh being the hometown of one of my favorite writers, Irvine Welsh.

So to honor Irvine Welsh, the fine city of Edinburgh, and indeed Scotland in sum total, I resolved to sample one of that country's best-known (to my mind) beverages.

I speak, of course, of The Old Purple Tin.

Now, from my reading of Welsh, I had a vague notion of what The Old Purple Tin (hereinafter designated TOPT) was. In his novels, characters of modest-to-low fiduciary means, men and women suffering through temporary income droughts—or, as I came to know them, "jakeys"—these people, when it came time to "huv a tipple," would wrap their lips around TOPT. I took this to be some super-strong, cheap, fortified alcoholic beverage.

Which got me to thinking—sorry in advance for the digression but not really—how most countries have a beverage that is seen as emblematic of reduced financial status or of certain lifestyle concessions most of us seek to avoid. The two factors that put a beverage in the running for national drink of the dissolute are: cheap, sky-high alcohol content. In the US, it'd be Thunderbird fortified wine; many US novels have a rummy character described in a manner such as: "So-and-so looked as if he'd spent the last week in a dumpster marinating in Thunderbird." In Mexico, mezcal. Thailand: mekong. Japan: overindulgence in shoju brought on by crippling parental scorn.

Canada, oddly enough and to the best of my knowledge, lacks such a beverage. Yes, we have ice wine, a high-alcohol dessert wine, but it's expensive as hell—the image of a bum staggering down the street chugging an eighty dollar bottle of ice wine does not hold together ... unless said bum happens to be wearing a monocle and a top hat ... which, though highly hilarious as an image and even moreso when you envision his wild monacled staggerings to peppy high-hat music like in those old sped-up Benny Hill montages (pretty heartless of me, I know; alcoholism and homelessness are real problems and I should feel sorry for writing that although right now, at present, I do not) ... anyway, all this is to say the idea of ice wine bums is simply not credible.

I mean, don't get me wrong, Canada's full of drunks, lushes and rummies. Just the other week I saw a man riding home from the beer store on a pink mountainbike with a twelve pack of beer on a mesh-metal carrier bolted to the handlebars. You have to wonder at the series of events in his life that precipitated my sighting but, all that aside, it seemed evidence of a deep, dare I say crippling addiction. Here was a fully grown man riding a pink bike far too small for him, a girl's bike with the easy-to-straddle frame, so small, this pink bike, his knees bumped the handgrips—but even more telling was the fact he'd reconfigured the mesh carrier into such a shape that would perfectly, tightly, hold his 12-pack. I could only imagine that once he'd been riding home on his pink girl's bike with his beer precariously balanced in a carrier that, at that time, failed to hold it snugly—conceivably because whoever designed that particular carrier, perhaps exclusively for that pink bike, never envisioned its rider using it for carting around this peculiar burden—maybe he'd hit a rock ad his beer smashed all over the sidewalk. Maybe this same man, beset by a reckless despondency at his loss, pedaled furiously home where he hammered at the carrier until its diameters met those of his precious cargo. In fact, that is highly likely.

These are the things I think about walking down the street.

Where was I? Ah, yes: TOPT. So my main goal of my time in Edinburgh, apart from trying to kick-start my morbid joke of a writing career, was to consume TOPT. This was a more objective, tangible and fully achievable goal. The first goal is very hard to come by, I've found, owing as it does to a random collision of talent, passion, stick-to-it-ness, and often a grand helping of luck; it can take years and years if it even happens at all, whereas the second of these goals was as easy to realize as bumbling into a shop, grabbing the tin, dropping a few pounds on the shopkeep's counter and quaffing the brew in the alley strung out back standing between a few rubbish bins.

So. TOPT it would be.

Why TOPT? Good question. It'd be a lie to say I am in full command of my emotional imperatives, why I do this or that ... all I can say is it seemed fitting I drink it and, even more, that I likely have an undiagnosed masochistic emotional disorder so, in the grand scheme of things, one TOPT wasn't that ruinous.

Or would it be? It's odd, because I clearly possess an addictive personality but as yet I've only succumbed to one addiction—writing—and as that one keeps me in the luxury to which I have become accustomed (the dented tins I purchase at the supermarket are now BRAND NAME), I don't suppose it wholly counts. But as it seems certain there is another shoe still to drop in that arena, I am filled with latent dread regarding what form that eventuality will take.

The past few months I believe I flirted with a low-level red wine addiction. I was training for a boxing match but I'd heard red wine was okay to booze on, even for the (randomly, in my case) athletically-inclined, being good for the blood and heart and your vertebral jellies and duodenum and coccyx and hell, the whole body was much improved and, mine being in much need of improvement, I drank a lot. I'd have a glass along with my sensible dinner, another to digest the meal, a third to wash the taste of the second out of my mouth, one to toast the 10 o'clock news, a nightcap, a middle-of-the-nightcap, hook an IV pouch of merlot above my bed, etc. Okay, so maybe not quite so bad but I took a look at the empty bottles in my kitchen one morning, all that dark glass winking in the unforgiving sunlight—I'll admit I was a little shocked.

But there's nothing sillier than a male wine drunk—seemed idiotic, really, I couldn't conceive of it. When I thought "wine drunk," I could picture the female version: some frumpy old souse in a brassy wig stinking of cigarette smoke, teeth stained red and nylons wadded round her ankles as she swans around clutching a bottle by the neck like she's throttling a goose, oblivious, her wild sashayings tugging at the hem of her too-big flapper-era dress, the sort of dress they used to dance the Charleston atop flagpoles wearing, that dress falling off her shoulders and maybe certain bits of her anatomy, a dirty pillow, both pillows, pop out or maybe not but either way she's too gozzled to give a damn. Maybe it's sexist, I don't know, but I can't picture the male version. The closest I can get is some mopey old Italian fellow wearing a white tee-shirt gone yellow under the arms, suspenders and maybe, for melancholy effect, a brushed-felt fedora; this guy sitting at a formica table in the sallow disenchanting light of a 40-watt bulb, pouring wine from a big-belled whicker-wrapped bottle and drinking forlornly, alone, singing an off-key aria when the bottle's nearly empty or staring teary-eyed and maudlin at an old postcard from Sardinia or maybe a photo of his grandkids, his Sardinian grandkids (one of whom I envision as the fishmonger's bastard child), weeping and singing dirges, or something.

Anyway, that wasn't me. I wasn't Italian, didn't own a fedora or know the lyrics to a single aria. I wasn't a wine drunk so I quit drinking it.

But once I got a taste of TOPT would I be able to quit it so easily? Maybe when that ambrosial liquor hit my tongue I would be eternally, blissfully folded into its malty embrace. Maybe I would wake up under a bridge in lower Edinburgh with my clothes eaten off my frame by wild dogs.

Well, I'd chance it. Problem was, the day did not progress that way. Not at all. It was all highly civil. Bookish, you might even say.

It started when I met my editor, Kate, at my hotel. I'd already ordered a beer but she went with a coffee—an ominous sign. She'd been out the previous night at an awards reception and wanted to take it easy to start out, it being only 5 or so, which was perfectly her right and made fine clean sense but dread wheedled its way into my heart—I had to be good and blasted before sampling TOPT. My tongue had to be dulled by conspicuous prior alcohol consumption and I, like most people, don't really like drinking alone.

Afterwards we headed to the reading. I met Chloe, publicist, Paul, foreign rights agent for both myself and Nathan Englander, who I met shortly thereafter and found to be a delightful fellow, along with Steven who chaired our panel. We read and signed some books and went out for dinner. Doug Johnstone, a fine Scottish writer, came with us; I ate haggis, but it was pretty frou-frou, served in a filo cup. The talk was urbane, sophisticated.

This would not DO!

I wanted ruinous appetites! I wanted squalor! I wanted TOPT!

We went to a bar afterwards. More urbane talk. It was wonderful, everyone was lovely—inwardly I withered. The bar was upscale, mood-lit, beer taps shining—inside of me a little piece died. Not the piece the TOPT would've surely killed, either; another piece.

It was late when we got out. We said our goodbyes and parted. I walked around, despondent. Every shop closed. Where did one even buy TOPT? I was drunk, my day had been great overall, I'd met some wonderful people ... the next instant I was gutted, wretched, empty and unfulfilled, the 8 or 9 imperial ounces I'd set aside in my gut, earmarked for TOPT, a sucking black vortex.

I called my missing lovers' name into the starless Scottish night: "TOPT!"

I thought maybe I could find some understanding jakey in an alley somewheres, that I might hunker down beside and share his can of Purple Death but that scenario seemed to end with me getting stabbed and whapped with a shillelagh so I went back to my hotel.

The next morning I was hung over, my heid fairly nippin', and I slumbered until the cab came to pick me up at 9 am. I thought the hair of the dog might be a good idea—but if TOPT was really all it was fabled to be, that would be much more than a hair, something along the lines of taking a huge bite out of that mangy cur's arse so, much as I would've liked to and much as it meant my trip culminated a touch unfulfilled, I didn't want to get arrested on the airplane for reeling around the cabin and/or urinating where or upon whom I should not, so I didn't ask the driver to stop for a tin.

You'd think this story had a sad ending, wouldn't you? Not so!

A few days later I'm in St. Catharines, Ontario. In the booze store, walking the aisles, roaming along and lo and behold what do I see ...

... like a chalice ...

... a holy grail ...

...wreathed in a penumbra of beatific mellowing light ...

... CROWN SUPER LAGER. Big purple can. Export of Scotland. Right here on my own shores.

The Old Purple Tin.

I almost trip and fall, so mad is my dash for it. What the hell? Of all the booze to import, why would our liquor board bring in this poison? I envision the conversation that must've taken place:

CANADIAN IMPORT MINISTER: The social fabric of my fair country is alarmingly sturdy. Do you, my good man, have anything that might weaken it?

SCOTTISH EXPORT MINISTER: Here's a jazzy little number. TOPT. It won't completely tear the fabric in half, but it'll put a few bloody big rips in it!

[MINISTERS CHUCKLE WHOLEHEARTEDLY, SHAKE HANDS]

CANADIAN IMPORT MINISTER: You magnificent bastard, that's got it! Anything I can do to render your social infrastructure a howling shambles?

SCOTTISH EXPORT MINISTER: Arrange a Celine Dion concert in Glasgow?

Of course I grab a tin—$5! Ridiculous!—and head down to a set of stairs near downtown trafficked by the local homeless population, overlooking a weedy parking lot and beyond it, the highway. Seemed the right sort of place.

TOPT tastes ... it tastes bad. Like shit, is how it tastes, not to put too fine a point to it. Maple syrup mixed with motor oil fermented for a week in a football player's cleats. This I thought while drinking it. And I drank it all. Choked it down even as it went warm—the taste mutated with the increased warmth; maple syrup and motor oil the same, but now it had been fermented in a hiking boot, and the hiker it had been yanked off of had perished of frostbite and a few of that hiker's blackened-gumdrop toes were still in the boot at time of fermentation. Still, on the ladder of all the self-destructive acts I've committed upon myself, drinking one TOPT occupied a low rung.

I crushed the tin, having vanquished its contents, tossed it into the weeds and walked away feeling pretty nauseous.

I should feel sorry for littering in this, our environmentally sensitive age.

Should, yes, and yet failed to.

---CRAIG DAVIDSON