The Weekly, April 15, 2024
Hi all,
I'm writing after a somewhat comically full weekend: vans breaking down, kids birthday parties, kids soccer games, doing our taxes because I put it off way too long... you get the idea.
All of which is to say: I don't have much in the way of thoughts or articles-in-draft for you today, as I try to for this newsletter. But thanks all the same for reading!
Books
I'm writing a piece for Comment on Tolkien and history, particularly Tolkien's idea of "the long defeat" so to help get me into the right mental frame I'm doing some World War I reading. WW1 is the event that shattered Tolkien in a very real way, I think. He fought at the Somme and virtually all the young men he'd been friends with before the war were killed in the war. You can find a lot of Tolkien's experience of the war popping up in different passages of his work. His depiction of the Dead Marshes in The Two Towers really is a reimagining of the Somme itself. Another famous scene, when Luthien dances for Beren in the woods of Menegroth in The Silmarillion was likewise drawn from an experience Tolkien had while convalescing after being injured in the war. He was having a picnic in the woods with Edith, his wife, and at one point she got up and began to dance between the trees in the woods. As part of the reading, I'm going through Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory as well as Tolkien and the Great War by Garth. I am also going back over bits of Shippey's Tolkien: Author of the Century volume which is one of my favorite books of any kind and is an essential read if you enjoy Tolkien.
Articles
Kirsten Sanders on advice for writers
Andrew Errington on forgiveness, wisdom, and Bluey
Mary Harrington on right-wing progressives
Uri Berliner on how NPR lost the public's trust
Derek Thompson on the Americans who need chaos
Elsewhere
I made something cool last week one night after kids were in bed. I was trying to come up with some Tolkien themed cocktails and the one I was most curious about was some kind of "ent draught" that is supposed to be like what Merry and Pippin drink in Fangorn Forest with Treebeard. So I started with a Last Word variant and tried to up the herbal, vegetal quality while also keeping it fairly proofy, and wanting to make it something you really felt as much as you tasted. So this is what I came up with, though I'm not sure it'll be the final:
Ent Draught
1.25 oz chartreuse
.75 oz gin
.75 oz lime juice
.25 oz fernet branca
Fernet is incredibly powerful so I knew if I just swapped it straight with maraschino it would overpower the drink. This method mostly worked. But next time I think I'm going to cut the chartreuse to 1 oz and up the gin to 1 oz as well. Part of my reasoning with that heavy chartreuse pour was wanting a greenish color for the drink. Unfortunately, the fernet meant that the drink was a very unpleasant looking brown-green color. That said, I'm not sure how to fix that so probably it just needs to be served in a container that conceals the color.
Anyway, color aside I was fairly happy with it. It's incredibly dry so it's not something to give someone new to cocktails, but fernet and chartreuse are both super complex flavors so pulling them together was fun and I think it mostly worked. YMMV, of course.
Under the Mercy,
~Jake