The Spirits #135: The Joy Division
Plus: Some novels you should consider reading this summer
~ THE JOY DIVISION ~
40ml gin
20ml French vermouth
10ml orange liqueur
Three dashes of absinthe
Freeze a dainty little cocktail glass. Now, listen. Carefully measure the liquids into a mixing glass and add copious ice. Stir for 45 seconds or so - until Bernard Sumner’s guitar comes in. Strain this mixture into the optimally cold glass and garnish with a lemon zest twist.
Some Joy Division Notes
The drink is by Phil Ward of Death & Co. circa 2008. It’s really just a simple Martini riff, not a million miles away from an Obituary actually, but with the addition of a little orange liqueur to sweeten it slightly. Post-punk nomenclature notwithstanding, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the same combination isn’t there lurking in some ancient bar manual of the 1910s as it feels so classic.
Ward specified Cointreau. I couldn’t resist using a little dash of blue curaçao in tandem w/ some Pierre Ferrand dry curaçao as part of what I can only describe as a bespoke orange liqueur blend. When you use a mere tear of blue - and especially when you combine it with something yellow or orange - it comes out a fetching modernist green, which felt appropriate for this, somehow.
Three more Martini riffs you might enjoy:
YOU’RE WELCOME.
🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
🧑🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here.
➡️ Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.
🏥 And here is a list of trusted charities who are helping people in Gaza.
SUMMER READING
I have read a lot of extremely good novels recently. Almost too many. Not so long ago, I was lamenting the fact that I never seemed to have time for novels anymore - and all I seemed to read was articles and tweets. After some concerted habit-altering plus a few other ambient factors (married to literary critic; discovered audiobooks; depressed by the news, etc), I now worry that I am not reading enough articles and tweets. Election, you say?! And yet I am more tuned in than ever to the news from eternity. Happier, for it, I think. With this in mind (and because actually a couple of you have asked me), I thought I’d collect some of the novels I’ve most enjoyed this year - any of which I think would make an excellent summer holiday companion.
Wellness by Nathan Hill (Pan Macmillan)
Jack and Elizabeth fell in love after a Liz Phair gig in Chicago in the early 1990s - a pair of misfits who thought they’d found their soulmate. Now they’re middle-aged; they’re parents; they’re compromised, languishing, wondering what happened to romance, rebellion, youth! Familiar territory? Perhaps! The novel comes with a trigger warning if you're middle aged. But Hill uses Jack and Elizabeth’s marriage and respective careers (photographer; psychologist) to drill into so many modern malaises that Wellness becomes a kind of a symphony of American dissatisfaction. Think: polyamory, Minecraft, Facebook rants, placebo studies, the dead-end of postmodernism, gentrification, wearables, generational war, reclaimed wood, cancel culture. All treated with great humour and wisdom. Then we move back into Jack and Elizabeth’s respective pasts - and you realise how deeply rooted all this dissatisfaction is. I was hugely entertained, hugely impressed at the organisation of the thing - and more than a little horrified.
The Bee-Sting by Paul Murray (Penguin)
This is the Irish novel by someone called Paul that clearly should have won the Booker Prize. It centres on the financial and emotional implosion of a modern Irish family post financial crash. We alternate perspectives between hopeless car-dealer Dickie, his shopaholic wife Imelda, and their teenage children, rebellious Cass and the absolutely heartbreaking PJ. There are lots of similarities with Wellness (and more than a few shades of AM Homes’s madcap May We Be Forgiven) and that it’s long, it’s absorbing, and it buries deep into the past, too. In this case, it is Dickie who has the overbearingly successful father and Imelda who escaped from rural poverty. It’s a scary book by the end. But what stays with you are the characters, so deeply realised you really just want to give each one of them a hug.
James by Percival Everett (Mantle)
OK, maybe first, read Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn? I never had. It’s wonderful. Percival Everett said he re-read the classic novel 13 times straight before attempting his rewrite without any further reference, the idea being to internalise the text, the better to launch his own improvisation. He tells the story of Huck’s famous river journey up the Mississippi from the point of view of the runaway slave, Jim, who accompanyies the happy-go-lucky boy hero. In Twain’s novel, Jim is a good-hearted, superstitious simpleton. Everett inverts this with characteristically caustic humour. Jim is a cultured, intelligent man who - like all slaves - has learned to play dumb to flatter his white persecutors. It’s a hilarious conceit but this is an appropriately furious novel too. Twain presented the South as a kind of picaresque rural idyll. Here, it is a terrifying hellscape - anyone could basically murder or maim Jim at any time and all the judges would nod and say, well, nothing to be done. I can’t recall a novel that exposes the madness and evil of slavery with such visceral intelligence.
The Material by Camille Bordas (Serpent’s Tail)
The Material has an extremely funny conceit. It’s a campus novel set in a Chicago school for stand-up comics. We have the nervous, competitive, mostly hopeless stand-up students. And we have their teachers, failed or cancelled stand-ups themselves, trying (maybe not that hard) to make their students funnier. Can humour be taught, is the question. The action unfolds over a day with a showcase comedy battle as the finale. What I liked most of all about the novel was its tone: light, playful, philosophical. Its hard to marshal a large ensemble cast, weaving in and out of their thoughts, and Bordas (who is French btw, writing in her second language) does so with a sureness that reminded me of John Updike’s Couples. There’s some enjoyable riffs on comedy in there too, taking in Andy Kaufman, Jim Carrey, etc, which I suspect fans of Stewart Lee will lap up. Some lovely descriptions of Chicago, too.
You Are Here by David Nicholls (Hodder)
I can’t think of a better companion for an English holiday. Particularly if it’s raining - which it almost certainly will, by the way. I had never read David Nicholls’s squillion-selling One Day but I did watch the recent Netflix adaptation and thought it was just wonderful. You Are Here is kind of the wistful, middle-aged counterpart: an autumnal romance, set on a gloomy walking holiday from the Lake District to Northumberland, coast-to-not-quite-coast, where our two slightly past-it leads began, slowly but surely, to fall for one another. Nicholls really is a wonderful writer, one whose commercial success might paradoxically mean he’s even a little underrated - but his insights into the human heart are always precisely calibrated and there’s funny jokes on every page. One of those books you’re just delighted to return to, every time.
You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue (Harvill Secker)
And this one is a total trip, kind of Wolf Hall on 5MeO-DMT soundtracked by T-Rex. It’s set in Tenoxtitlan, 1521, at the time one of the largest and most intricately advanced cities in the world. The Caxtilteca (which is what the Aztecs call the Castillians, i.e. the Spanish) have just arrived at the court of Moctezuma. Are they prisoners? Are they conquistadors? We know how it will end. But what happened in those Borgesian labyrinths, pristine gardens and skull-strewn monoliths prior to the denoument is one of the great enigmas of history - and one that has long fasinated me (I blame my long afternoons playing Civilization on my Amiga 500 as a kid). What Enrigue does, extremely effectively, is to animate the strangeness of the encounter on both sides - no mean feat given the inaccessibilty of 16th century Mesoamerican thought. Both the Spanish and the Aztecs are borderline repulsive to one another. Moctezuma and Hernan Cortes both commit acts of inexplicable cruelty within the novel. But all our customs are inexplicable in the fullness of time.
THE PLAYLIST
Joy Division would of course be too obvious and not a little depressing. And yet:
NB: This playlist (ideally) updates with fresh songs each week, rather in the manner of Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ list. But this is personally curated by me. Save/download and you should have a fresh supply of cool music in perpetuity. I store all the archive lists in one long megaplaylists, which you can find here.
CABINET POSTS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
🐿️ Amaretto
🧡 Aperol
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🕊️ Bénédictine
❄️ Brancamenta
🍌 Crème de Banane
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🫐 Crème de Cassis
🌷 Cynar
🌸Elderflower Liqueur
🏝️ Falernum
🦅 Fernet-Branca
🌿 Green Chartreuse
🐻 Kümmel
🍒 Maraschino
🌵 Mezcal
🦙 Pisco
🐂 Sherry
🌻 Suze
NEXT TIME
I hope you don’t mind, I’m going to take a couple of weeks off the Spirits. Partly as I want to concentrate on the election! And partly as I want to be able to plan on the front foot, as it were. There will be an ANCHO REYES issue of the Cabinet coming your way before long. But other than that - I will see you on the other side of this terrible Government!
🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸🍸