Feb 1 2010 8:33 pm
the goods UPDATE
T-shirts and stickers have arrived. Check out the "buy stuff" tab at the top right of the page. Huge props to my brother for getting the website in order. Thanks again Adam.
In other news, everyone here is synchronized with sickness, spewing their germs into the air like so much invisible spray paint. A microbe raced through this town and I can feel my immune system struggling.
This is the meaning of community. The way we share each other’s bacteria and viruses, accents and craft beer, fly patterns and favorite water, t-shirts and stickers. How taut are these strings? To what limit can they stretch before snapping, before contracting like a torn ligament, lost in a tight mess? Where are the durable fibers reaching out in airplanes, dormant in mail, instant on the internet, imbued with the tenacity of our modern world? Which ones matter and how big is this network? What consequences does it have for introspection and understanding, for constructing the stories we tell ourselves about who we are? I want these stories to be rocks, foundations for manipulating the world to my ends, but they usually turn out to be more like an articulated marabou intruder: looks great in the vise, but falls apart into a sloppy mess in the water and with desperation I smear it with the slime of frozen salmon roe.
Buy a t-shirt. Slap a sticker on your Bugger Barn, your kegerator. Stretch those durable fibers. Tell everyone your story.
UPDATE: you are the best. Mediums are sold out. Only 4 larges left. And behold below the blurry magic of the mysterious and highly sought after ladies' Fishbeer t-shirt.
Jan 24 2010 12:02 pm
100 soup cans
The majesty of the great outdoors is truly apparent sitting on the dock at dusk with a fly rod in your hand. Gaze out into a sky filled with migrating geese and songbirds and some other romantic shit. Your father and your grandfather both put their right arms on one of your shoulders. It’s physically awkward, your grandfather has to reach forward to get his arm on the pile so his hand and wrist stick out in front of your face at a weird angle, but this is the best way to communicate the kind of sentimentality I’m after here. Not to mention the intergenerational transmission of sporting tradition.
An orange sun setting over a long northern lake burrows deep into your soul and stirs your spirit like an unitchable hemorrhoid. Everything is just so goddamn pleasant. It’s OK we didn’t catch any fish. I just like being on the water.
This is truly indulgent, but winter is brutal. And that in itself, I realize, is cliché.
The last several weeks have been really cold. I walked to work everyday and my face ached. Though now it’s warmed up and things are back to normal for Indiana. Consistently gray skies. Thirty five degrees. Sort of rainy. Occasional bouts of freezing fog. This weather grinds on an already delicate psyche and erodes my nerves bit by bit. I’ve been doing some serious reading about skagit heads. Might get myself another switch rod.
Then an email arrived from a guy named Dave Motes. Turns out he has a website. Turns out I’ve seen his website before.
I quite like his approach to writing about fly fishing. He has been rejected from the “pine-paneled fraternity” of Grays Sporting Journal a number of times. He says fuck it all: “postmodernism has struck, and I have set the hook.” Now I’m not a big fan of that word, “postmodernism,” but dude’s got a way of thinking about fly fishing writing that I am sympathetic with. He even “wrote a fishing story in which nobody fished” and suspects that at “this rate, my next story will feature a dry river and a party of anglers slaughtered like sheep.”
I say kill them all Dave. Kill them all dead.
And submit something to The Drake.
Though I also have to say that Grays is not all sentimental bullshit. There is some very good writing there despite the magazine’s many flaws. As for fishing stories with no fishing but lots of violence, consider another venerable institution of fly fishing fancy writing, the Traver Awards in Fly Rod and Reel. If I recall correctly, the thing that jumped out at me last year was some bit about a bus hijacking. There wasn’t any fishing in that part. Traver Award winners are more often than not pretty damn sappy, but there are bright spots.
So now I’m going to one up you Dave. I’m not going to read any of your stories. You don't need fishing in your stories? I don't need stories in my stories.
The text is ephemeral and the narrative is constantly revised in the face of shifting cultural allegiances. The whims of pity, rage, and jealousy steer our ship. The wet, sloppy, gaseous human condition is almost too much to bear, but we all handle it somehow, and we all still think we’re special. But the revolt against sappy, cliché bullshit is just another tired trope in the human creative tradition. I just happen to like it better than the alternatives.
Jan 17 2010 3:06 am
Maddie and Adam I'll miss you
Yeah, so, we call it Man Overboard when it’s really called Old Overholt but when you split a whole bottle in two hours between four or seven people in addition to a case or two of beer and a handful of mojitos it will make you feel like a man lurched over the gunwale of a boat in rough seas. Sure, I ate the pizza. Even Ben went to get fresh doughnuts on his skateboard in his bathrobe just one hour ago. His wife didn’t want him to, she has such delicate hands for removing fresh madeleines from the pan from the oven. I understand this. I thought shit, he’s an adult, a physicist even, he can handle this kind of mission, despite his wife’s incessant tenderness. I’ll just stand outside in the cool, humid air and think about how cold it was two weeks ago when I was still holed up in my leather chair with a cornucopia of pharmaceutical grade narcotics, chewing tobacco, and High Life. Now all the snow except that in the lee of particularly big mounds of dirt and/or curbs has melted. I may even go fishing later today. Just as soon as I sleep this off.
Jan 12 2010 12:35 pm
wear this website
Though filled with much winter angst that runneth over into every one of my emails, web comments, and personal interactions, I take some solace in great Pennsylvania writers that mention my home town and the company of artists that make badass t-shirt/sticker designs for this website.
Mr. Julian Hensarling came over this morning and did his magic CS4 thing to some ideas I had for a logo. Julian, you are the man. Please find them below. It is a smallmouth bass in a nonic pint glass. I’ll break your arm so you gotta wear a...sling. The white design/black background will go on a black, heavy duty t-shirt (centered on the chest) and the black design/white background will go on a sticker.
I’m doing this mainly because I want to have shirts and stickers for myself, but I’m hoping perhaps some other people do as well. I’m going to order the usual assortment of men’s M, L, and XL shirts, but if you want a shirt in some other size, let me know as soon as possible: matt [AT] fishbeer [DOT] com. Shirts will be $15 for M-XL, $17 for XXL and larger. Stickers will be $1 each. I’ll give you a sticker if you buy a t-shirt. They’re fun for the whole family. We'll have a pay pal thing set up here at some point in the near future.
Now for some John Updike, from Rabbit, Run:
“If he is heading east, south is on his right. And then, as if the world were just standing around waiting to serve his thoughts, a broad road to the right is advertised, ROUTE 100 WEST CHESTER WILMINGTON. Route 100 has a fine ultimate sound. He doesn’t want to go to Wilmington but it’s the right direction. He does want to go to West Chester, however, because he has heard it is the most awesome city in the most awesome state in the most awesome country.”
I made that last sentence up. Just in case you were wondering.
Help a brother out. Let me know about the shirts.
Jan 11 2010 12:16 pm
X100 history of beer lecture #6: Pre-Industrial England
Turns out it’s been more than a year since I've posted any lectures from X100, the history of beer class that I designed and taught at Indiana University for nine, count them, nine semesters. That's all over now, but I still have these lectures that contain years of my sweat, my tears, and a whole shit-ton of stolen, copywrited images.
When we left the story (lecture #5), we were looking at hopped beer brewing in continental Europe from roughly 1200-1600CE and its spread to England beginning about 1400. I refer to the period in England up until about 1750 as the "pre-industrial period."
In lecture #6, we'll take a closer look at the pre-industrial period in England, how beer was brewed, where it was brewed, who brewed it, the kinds of beer that were brewed, and some of the social and cultural forces that shaped this period in England’s brewing history.
Lecture #6 draws heavily on Pamela Sambrook’s excellent book Country House Brewing in England 1500-1900 (link to Google Books). The English country house brewery is a powerful source for historians of brewing because it was very resistant to change. While common (for-profit) breweries were rapidly “modernizing” through the 1800s and 1900s, the country house brewery putted along happily as if it were still 1695. Sambrook documents many of the extant country house breweries, interviews surviving brewers, and scours brewers’ books, butler logs, and house inventories to produce a vibrant picture of the pre-industrial brewery in England.
In lecture #7 we’ll turn to the practices and beers brewed in the common brewer context during the pre-industrial period.