A Brief History of Making Deals with the Devil: Niccolò Paganini, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Page & More

in Literature, Music, Religion | January 11th, 2018

When the term “witch hunt” gets thrown around in cases of powerful men accused of harassment and abuse, historians everywhere bang their heads against their desks. The history of persecuting witches—as every schoolboy and girl knows from the famous Salem Trials—involves accusations moving decidedly in the other direction.

But we’re very familiar with men supposedly selling out to Satan, dealing—or just dueling—with the devil. They weren’t called witches for doing so, or burned at the stake. They were blues pioneers, virtuoso fiddlers, and guitar gods. From the devilishly dashing Niccolò Paganini, to Robert Johnson at the Crossroads, to Jimmy Page’s black magic, to “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” to the omnipresence of Satan in metal…. The devil “seems to have quite the interest in music,” notes the Polyphonic video above.

Before musicians came to terms with the dark lord, power-hungry scholars used demonology to summon Luciferian emissaries like Mephistopheles. The legend of Faust dates back to the late 16th century and a historical alchemist named Johann Georg Faust, who inspired many dramatic works, like Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Johann Goethe’s Faust, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Mikhail Bugakov’s The Master and Margarita, and F.W. Murnau’s 1926 silent film.

The Faust legend may be the sturdiest of such stories, but it is not by any means the origin of the idea. Medieval Catholic saints feared the devil’s enticements constantly. Medieval occultists often saw things differently. If we can trace the notion of women consorting with the devil to the Biblical Eve in the Garden, we find male analogues in the New Testament—Christ’s temptations in the desert, Judas’s thirty pieces of silver, the possessed vagrant who sends his demons into a herd of pigs. But we might even say that God made the first deal with the devil, in the opening wager of the book of Job.

In most examples—Charlie Daniels’ triumphal folk tale aside—the deal usually goes down badly for the mortal party involved, as it did for Robert Johnson when the devil came for his due, and convened the morbidly fascinating 27 Club. Goethe imposes a redemptive happy ending onto Faust that seems to wildly overcompensate for the typical fate of souls in hell’s pawn shop. Kierkegaard took the idea seriously as a cultural myth, and wrote in Either/Or that “every notable historical era will have its own Faust.”

Modern-day Fausts in the popular genre of the day, the conspiracy theory, are famous entertainers, as you can see in the unintentionally humorous supercut above from a YouTube channel called “EndTimeChristian.” As it happens in these kinds of narratives, the cultural trope gets taken far too literally as a real event. The Faust legend shows us that making deals with the devil has been a literary device for hundreds of years, passing into popular culture, then the blues—a genre haunted by hell hounds and infernal crossroads—and its progeny in rock and roll and hip hop.

Those who talk of selling their souls might really believe it, but they inherited the language from centuries of Western cultural and religious tradition. Selling one’s soul is a common metaphor for living a carnal life, or getting into bed with shady characters for worldly success. But it’s also a playful notion. (A misunderstood aspect of so much metal is its comic Satanic overkill.) Johnson himself turned the story of selling his soul into an iconic boast, in “Crossroads” and “Me and the Devil Blues.” “Hello Satan,” he says in the latter tune, “I believe it’s time to go.”

Chilling in hindsight, the line is the bluesman’s grimly casual acknowledgment of how life on the edge would catch up to him. But it was worth it, he also suggests, to become a legend in his own time. In the short, animated video above from Music Matters, Johnson meets the horned one, a slick operator in a suit: “Suddenly, no one could touch him.” Often when we talk these days about people selling their souls, they might eventually end up singing, but they don’t make beautiful music. In any case, the moral of almost every version of the story is perfectly clear: no matter how good the deal seems, the devil never fails to collect on a debt.

Watch Häxan, the Classic Cinematic Study of Witchcraft Narrated by William S. Burroughs (1922)

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How Reading Increases Your Emotional Intelligence & Brain Function: The Findings of Recent Scientific Studies

in Literature, Neuroscience | January 11th, 2018

Image by Sheila Sund, via Flickr Commons

Reading “availeth much,” to borrow an old phrase from the King James Bible. To read is to experience more of the world than we can in person, to enter into the lives of others, to organize knowledge according to useful schemes and categories…. Or, at least it can be. Much recent research strongly suggests that reading improves emotional and cognitive intelligence, by changing and activating areas of the brain responsible for these qualities.

Is reading essential for the survival of the species? Perhaps not. “Humans have been reading and writing for only about 5000 years—too short for major evolutionary changes,” writes Greg Miller in Science. We got by well enough for tens of thousands of years before written language. But neuroscientists theorize that reading “rewires” areas of the brain responsible for both vision and spoken language. Even adults who learn to read late in life can experience these effects, increasing “functional connectivity with the visual cortex,” some researchers have found, which may be “the brain’s way of filtering and fine-tuning the flood of visual information that calls for our attention” in the modern world.

This improved communication between areas of the brain might also represent an important intervention into developmental disorders. One Carnegie Mellon study, for example, found that “100 hours of intensive reading instruction improved children’s reading skills and also increased the quality of… compromised white matter to normal levels.” The findings, says Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, suggest “an exciting approach to be tested in the treatment of mental disorders, which increasingly appear to be due to problems in specific brain circuits.”

Reading can not only improve cognition, but it can also lead to a refined “theory of mind,” a term used by cognitive scientists to describe how “we ascribe mental states to other persons”—as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes—and “how we use the states to explain and predict the actions of those other persons.” Improved theory of mind, or “intuitive psychology,” as it’s also called, can result in greater levels of empathy and perhaps even expanded executive function, allowing us to better “hold multiple perspectives in mind at once,” writes Brittany Thompson, “and switch between those perspectives.”

Improved theory of mind comes primarily from reading narratives, research suggests. One meta-analysis published by Raymond A. Mar of Toronto’s York University reviews many of the studies demonstrating the effect of story comprehension on theory of mind, and concludes that the better we understand the events in a narrative, the better we are able to understand the actions and intentions of those around us. The kinds of narratives we read, moreover, might also make a difference. One study, conducted by psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano of the New School for Social Research, tested the effect of differences in writing quality on empathy responses, randomly assigning 1,000 participants excerpts from both popular bestsellers and literary fiction.

To define the difference between the two, the researchers referred to critic Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text. As Kidd explains:

Some writing is what you call ‘writerly’, you fill in the gaps and participate, and some is ‘readerly’, and you’re entertained. We tend to see ‘readerly’ more in genre fiction like adventure, romance and thrillers, where the author dictates your experience as a reader. Literary [writerly] fiction lets you go into a new environment and you have to find your own way.

The researchers used two theory of mind tests to measure degrees of empathy and found that “scores were consistently higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts,” notes Liz Bury at The Guardian. Other research has found that descriptive language stimulates regions of our brains not classically associated with reading. “Words like ‘lavender,’ ‘cinnamon’ and ‘soap,’ for example,” writes Annie Murphy Paul at The New York Times, citing a 2006 study published in NeuroImage, “elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.”

Reading, in other words, can effectively simulate reality in the brain and produce authentic emotional responses: “The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life”—that is, if the experience is written about in sensory language. The emotional brain also does not seem to make a tremendous distinction between reading the written word and hearing it recited or read. When study participants in a joint German and Norwegian experiment, for example, heard poetry read aloud, they experienced physical sensations and “about 40 percent showed visible goose bumps.”

But different kinds of texts elicit different kinds of responses. We can read or listen to a novel, for example, and, instead of only experiencing sensations, can “live several lives while reading,” as William Styron once wrote. The authors of a 2013 Emory University study published in Brain Connectivity conclude that reading novels can rewire areas of the brain, causing “transient changes in functional connectivity.” These biological changes were found to last up to five days after study participants read Robert Harris’ 2003 novel Pompeii. The heightened connectivity in certain regions “corresponded to regions previously associated with perspective taking and story comprehension.”

So what? asks a skeptical Ian Steadman at New Statesman. Reading may create changes in the brain, but so does everything else, a phenomenon well-known by now as “neuroplasticity.” Much of the reporting on the neuroscience of reading, Steadman argues, overinterprets the research to support an “[x] ‘rewires’ the brain” myth both common and “mistaken.” Steadman’s critiques of the Brain Connectivity study are perhaps well-placed. The small sample size, lack of a control group, and neglect of questions about different kinds of writing make its already tentative conclusions even less impressive. However, more substantive research, taken together, does show that the “rewiring” that happens when we read—though perhaps temporary and in need of frequent refreshing—really does make us more cognitively and socially adept. And that the kind of reading—or even listening—that we do really does matter.

via BigThink/The Guardian/Harvard

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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A Map of George Orwell’s 1984

in Literature, Maps | January 9th, 2018

Many fictional locations resist mapping. Our imaginations may thrill, but our mental geolocation software recoils at the impossibilities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—a series of geographically whimsical tales told by Marco Polo to Genghis Khan; or China Miéville’s The City and the City, in which two metropolises—Besźel and Ul Qoma—occupy much of the same physical space, and a secretive police power compels citizens to willfully “unsee” one city or the other.

That’s not to say such maps cannot be made. Calvino’s strange cities have been illustrated, if not at street level, in as fanciful a fashion as the narrator describes them. Miéville’s weird cities have received several literal-minded mapping treatments, which perhaps mistake the novel’s careful construction of metaphor for a kind of creative urban planning.

Miéville himself might disavow such attempts, as he disavows one-to-one allegorical readings of his fantastic detective novel—those, for example, that reduce the phenomenon of “unseeing” to an Orwellian means of thought control. “Orwell is a much more overtly allegorical writer,” he tells Theresa DeLucci at Tor, “although it’s always sort of unstable, there’s a certain kind of mapping whereby x means y, a means b.”

Orwell’s speculative worlds are easily decoded, in other words, an opinion shared by many readers of Orwell. But Miéville’s comments aside, there’s an argument to be made that The City and the City’s “unseeing” is the most vividly Orwellian device in recent fiction. And that the fictional world of 1984 does not, perhaps, yield to such simple mapping as we imagine.

Of course it’s easy to draw a map (see above, or in a larger format here) of the three imperial powers the novel tells us rule the world. Frank Jacobs at Big Think tidily sums them up:

Oceania covers the entire continents of America and Oceania and the British Isles, the main location for the novel, in which they are referred to as ‘Airstrip One’.
Eurasia covers Europe and (more or less) the entire Soviet Union.
Eastasia covers Japan, Korea, China and northern India.

These three superstates are perpetually at war with each other, though who’s at war with whom is unclear. “And yet… the war might just not even be real at all”—for all we know it might be a fabrication of the Ministry of Truth, to manufacture consent for austerity, mass surveillance, forced nationalism, etc. It’s also possible that the entirety of the novel’s geo-politics have been invented out of whole cloth, that “Airstrip One is not an outpost of a greater empire,” Jacobs writes, “but the sole territory under the command of Ingsoc.”

One commenter on the map—which was posted to Reddit last year—points out that “there isn’t any evidence in the book that this is actually how the world is structured.” We must look at the map as doubly fictional, an illustration, Lauren Davis notes at io9, of “how the credulous inhabitant of Airstrip One, armed with only maps distributed by the Ministry of Truth, might view the world, how vast the realm of Oceania seems and how close the supposed enemies in Eurasia.” It is the world as the minds of the novel’s characters conceive it.

All maps, we know, are distortions, shaped by ideology, belief, perspectival bias. 1984’s limited third-person narration enacts the limited views of citizens in a totalitarian state. Such a state necessarily uses force to prevent the people from independently verifying constantly shifting, contradictory pieces of information. But the novel itself states that force is largely irrelevant. “The patrols did not matter… Only the Thought Police mattered.”

In Orwell’s fiction “similar outcomes” as those in totalitarian states, as Noam Chomsky remarks, “can be achieved in free societies like England” through education and mass media control. The most unsettling thing about the seeming simplicity of 1984’s map of the world is that it might look like almost anything else for all the average person knows. Its elementary-school rudiments metaphorically point to frighteningly vast areas of ignorance, and possibilities we can only imagine, since Winston Smith and his compatriots no longer have the ability, even if they had the means.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Ian McKellen Recites Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, Backed by Garage Rock Band, the Fleshtones, on Andy Warhol’s MTV Variety Show (1987)

in Literature, Music, Television | January 1st, 2018

80s revivalism can be done badly and it can be done well. Those old enough to remember the decade seem best placed to recreate it, but the success of Stranger Things offers an excellent counterexample. The millennial Duffer brothers did a marvelous job of conjuring the look and feel of mid-80s mise-en-scène by stitching together close viewings of a dozen or so films—from the massively popular E.T. to more obscure flicks like made-for-TV Mazes and Monsters (not to mention such precious archival footage as this.)

When it comes to music however, 80s retro tends to confine themselves to early hip and hop and electro, the synthpop of Gary Numan and Duran Duran or the cheesy hair metal of Mötley Crüe. But this lens misses the significant 60s revivalism that emerged at the time. Garage, surf, and psych rock and the jangly sounds of The Byrds inspired R.E.M., the B52s, the Replacements, the House of Love, and the Fleshtones, a much lesser-known NYC band who may never have gotten their commercial due, but who certainly appealed to 60s art star Andy Warhol.

When Warhol remade himself as a TV personality in the 80s with his MTV variety show Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes he cast the Fleshtones as the backing band for rising theater and film star Ian McKellen, a match-up that represents another hallmark of 80s pop culture—the postmodern juxtaposition of genres, styles, and registers which Warhol helped pioneer 20 years earlier when he brought kitschy silk-screened soup cans, sexy street hustlers, and the Velvet Underground into the art scene.

Warhol’s television work turned this impulse into a multimedia circus featuring “The high and the low. The rich and the famous. The struggling artists and the rising stars,” as Warhol Museum curator Geralyn Huxley puts it. In this particularly fitting example, McKellen and the Fleshtones bring Shakespeare’s racy Sonnet 20 to young, hip MTV audiences in 1987. L.A. Weekly lists a few of the “cool points” from the clip:

A young, hot, already insanely talented Ian McKellen
Wearing awesome New Wave fashions
At Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1987
Backed by cult group the Fleshtones
Reciting a Shakespeare Sonnet

What’s not to love? Start your 2018 with some Shakespeare-meets-garage-rock coolness from 31 years ago—and revisit more of Warhol’s MTV variety show at our previous post. For serious students of the decade, this is essential viewing.

Ian McKellen Reads a Passionate Speech by William Shakespeare, Written in Defense of Immigrants

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Favorite Literary Work of Every Country Visualized on a World Map

in Literature | December 28th, 2017

Begun by user “BackForward24” and crowdsourced through Reddit, this map of the world illustrates the most beloved/popular book of each country by pasting a scan of the book cover over its space on the world map. For book lovers who want to read themselves around the world, it will prove invaluable. (And if you can’t read the map, no worries, there is a text version available.)

But let’s unpack the larger (and yes, first world) countries first. The United States is represented by To Kill a Mockingbird, which ticks off a lot of the marks that make it quintessentially American: most high schoolers have read it, and it deals with both racism and our shameful history and the faith that the law can eventually right wrongs. Canada has Anne of Green Gables. Great Britain has Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Ireland Ulysses (no surprise there.)

Our Australian readers might want to weigh in on Tom Winton’s Cloudstreet (a quite recent novel), and New Zealanders please tell us about The Bone People by Keri Hulme.

My takeaway and possibly yours from the map is how many titles are new to the Westerner. Europe has some familiar titles: Spain gets Cervantes’ Don Quixote (of course), Italy gets Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and France gets Les Misérables by Hugo. And while Russia is represented by Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Eastern Europe is rather unfamiliar, at least compared to South America, where Argentina has Borges’ Fictions, Chile has Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits, and Colombia has Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, all well known from decades of prizes, book club attention, and film adaptations.

This Reddit thread contains much criticism and debate, so please check it out. Some good points are raised: if the Iliad represents Greece, why not the Mahabharata/Ramayan for India? “Honestly there is work to do (in) the Africa part,” says another (very politely). There’s also debate over countries not being represented at all, such as Tibet (under Chinese occupation), along with Western Sahara, Somaliland, Kashmir, Balochistan, and Kurdistan. Frankly, if you start trying to talk about the culture of nations, there will be debate over what constitutes a nation. (I’m not sure if Palestine is covered, but some Redditors are voting for Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin.)

Another thing to keep in mind: the novel is very much a Western genre. For many countries, that might not be the case. However, I sense that that debate (and future map) will be another Reddit thread, somewhere, sometime.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Hear Lou Reed’s The Raven, a Tribute to Edgar Allan Poe Featuring David Bowie, Ornette Coleman, Willem Dafoe & More

in Literature, Music | December 28th, 2017

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It’s not immediately apparent that Lou Reed and Edgar Allan Poe would have that much in common. It’s true Reed inherited a gothic sensibility (though one could argue that this element in the Velvet Underground came mainly from Nico and John Cale), and he worked in a self-consciously literary vein. But in almost every other respect, he spoke a totally different idiom. Drawn to the seedy bars and street corners rather than the great houses, laboratories, and scholar’s nooks of Poe, Reed inclined his ear toward the common tongue, in contrast to Poe’s carefully composed Romantic diction.

But while it’s hard to imagine Poe thinking much of Reed’s rock and roll, the themes of sexual obsession, madness, terror, and morbid reflection that Poe brought into prominence seem to find their fruition over 100 years later in the work of the Velvets (and the thousands of post-punk bands they inspired), and in much of Reed’s subsequent solo work—up to his final album, the critically-reviled Lulu with Metallica, which his longtime partner Laurie Anderson declared full of “fear and rage and venom and terror and revenge and love,” and which David Bowie pronounced a “masterpiece.”

While we know where much of Reed’s personal angst came from, we can also hear—in the vivid shock of his imagery and the extremity of his emotions—the echo of Poe’s crazed protagonists. Leave it to Reed, then, to take on the task of interpreting Poe in the 21st century, in his 2003 album, The Raven, a collection of Poe-themed musical pieces (“This is the story of Edgar Allan Poe / Not exactly the boy next door”), with such collaborators as Anderson, Bowie, Ornette Coleman, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Antony, Elizabeth Ashley, and Willem Dafoe, who reads a Reed-adapted version of the poem at the top (track 9 in the album below), over a video tribute to B horror actress Debbie Rochon (for some reason).

What did Reed seek to accomplish with this conceptual project? As he himself writes in the liner notes, “I have reread and rewritten Poe to ask the same questions again. Who am I? Why am I drawn to do what I should not?… Why do we love what we cannot have? Why do we have a passion for exactly the wrong thing?” These are timeless philosophical questions, indeed, which transcend matters of style and genre. Again and again, both Poe and Reed pursued them into the darkest recesses of the human psyche—the places most of us fear to go. And perhaps for that reason especially, we are perenially drawn back to their work.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Why Should We Read Charles Dickens? A TED-Ed Animation Makes the Case

in Literature | December 26th, 2017

You can’t go near the literary press lately without hearing mention of Nathan Hill’s sprawling new novel, The Nix, widely praised as a comic epic on par with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Novelist John Irving, to whom Hill has drawn comparisons, goes so far as to compare the novelist to Charles Dickens. Such praise goes too far, if you ask Current Affairs editor Brianna Rennix. In a caustic review essay, Rennix unfavorably measures not only The Nix, but also the postmodern novels of Wallace, Pynchon, McCarthy, Franzen, and DeLillo, against the baggy Victorian serialized works of writers like Dickens and George Eliot. “Books like Middlemarch,” she writes, “took seriously the idea that novels had the power to transform human life, not merely—as seems to be the goal of a lot of postmodern novels—to riff off its foibles for the purpose of making the author look clever.”

It’s possible to appreciate Rennix’s essay as a reader of more ecumenical tastes—as someone who happens to enjoy Dickens and Eliot and all the authors she dismisses. There’s much more to the postmodern novel than she allows, but there are also very good reasons particular to our age for us turn, or return, to Dickens.

In the TED-Ed video above, scripted by literary scholar Iseult Gillespie (who previously made a case for Virginia Woolf), we get some of them. For all the fun he had with human foibles, Dickens was also a social realist, the greatest influence on later literary naturalism, who “shed light on how his society’s most invisible people lived.” Unlike many novelists, in his own time and ours, Dickens had the personal experience of living in such conditions to draw on for his authentic portrayals.

Nonetheless, Dickens’ did not allow his enormous popular success to blunt his compassion and concern for the plight of working people and the poor and socially marginalized. The engrossing, highly entertaining plots and characters in his novels are always pressed into service. We might call his motives political, but the term is too often pejorative. The “Dickensian” mode is a humanist one. Dickens’ did not push specific ideological agendas; he tried, as Alain de Botton says in his introductory video above, “to get us interested in some pretty serious things: the evils of an industrializing society, the working conditions in factories, child labor, vicious social snobbery, the maddening inefficiencies of government bureaucracy.” He tried, in other words, to move his readers to care about the people around them. What they chose to do with that care was, of course, then, as now, up to them.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Eudora Welty’s Handwritten Eggnog Recipe, and Charles Dickens’ Recipe for Holiday Punch

in Food & Drink, Letters, Life, Literature | December 22nd, 2017

’Tis the season to break out the family recipes of beloved relatives, though often their provenance is not quite what we think.

(Imagine the cognitive dissonance upon discovering that Mother swiped “her” Italian Zucchini Crescent Pie from Pillsbury Bake-Off winner, Millicent Nathan of Boca Raton, Florida…)

When it came to crediting the eggnog she dubbed “the taste of Christmas Day,” above, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty shared it out equally between her mother and author Charles Dickens:

In our house while I was growing up, I don’t remember that hard liquor was served at all except on one day in the year. Early on Christmas morning, we woke up to the sound of the eggbeater: Mother in the kitchen was whipping up eggnog. All in our bathrobes, we began our Christmas before breakfast. Throughout the day Mother made batches afresh. All our callers expected her eggnog.

It was ladled from the punch bowl into punch cups and silver goblets, and had to be eaten with a spoon. It stood up in peaks. It was rich, creamy and strong. Mother gave full credit for the recipe to Charles Dickens.

Nice, but perhaps Dickens is undeserving of this honor? The contents of his punchbowl bore little resemblance to Mother Welty’s, as evidenced by an 1847 letter to his childhood friend, Amelia Filloneau, in which he shared a recipe he promised would make her “a beautiful Punchmaker in more senses than one”:

Peel into a very strong common basin (which may be broken, in case of accident, without damage to the owner’s peace or pocket) the rinds of three lemons, cut very thin, and with as little as possible of the white coating between the peel and the fruit, attached. Add a double-handfull of lump sugar (good measure), a pint of good old rum, and a large wine-glass full of brandy — if it not be a large claret-glass, say two. Set this on fire, by filling a warm silver spoon with the spirit, lighting the contents at a wax taper, and pouring them gently in. Let it burn for three or four minutes at least, stirring it from time to Time. Then extinguish it by covering the basin with a tray, which will immediately put out the flame. Then squeeze in the juice of the three lemons, and add a quart of boiling water. Stir the whole well, cover it up for five minutes, and stir again.

This sounds very like the “seething bowls of punch” the jolly Ghost of Christmas Present shows Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, dimming the chamber with their delicious steam.

It’s also vegan, in contrast to what you might have been served in the Welty ladies’ home.

Why not serve both? In the words of Tiny Tim, “Here’s to us all!”

Eudora Welty’s Mother’s Eggnog (Attributed, Perhaps Erroneously, to Charles Dickens)

6 egg yolks, well beaten

Add 3 tbsp. powdered sugar

Add 1 cup whiskey, added slowly, beating all the while

Fold in 1 pint whipped cream

Whip 6 whipped egg whites and add to the mixture above.

Charles Dickens’ Holiday Punch (adapted from Punch by David Wondrich)

3/4 cup sugar

3 lemons

2 cups rum

1 1/4 cups cognac

5 cups black tea (or hot water)

Garnish: lemon and orange wheels, freshly grated nutmeg

In the basin of an enameled cast-iron pot or heatproof bowl, add sugar and the peels of three lemons.

Rub lemons and sugar together to release citrus oils. For more greater infusion, let sit for 30 minutes.

Add rum and cognac to the sugar and citrus.

Light a match, and, using a heatproof spoon (stainless steel is best), pick up a spoonful of the spirit mix.

Carefully bring the match to the spoon to light.

Carefully bring the lit spoon to the spirits in the bowl.

Let the spirits burn for about three minutes. The fire will melt the sugar and extract the oil from the lemon peels.

Extinguish the bowl by covering it with a heatproof pan or tray.

Skim off the lemon peels (leaving them too long in may impart a bitter flavor).

Squeeze in the juice of the three peeled lemons, and add hot tea or water.

If serving the punch hot, skip to the next step. If serving cold, cool punch in the refrigerator and, when cooled, add ice.

Garnish with citrus wheels and grated nutmeg.

Ladle into individual glasses.

Learn more about these and other festive holiday drinks in Master of Wine Elizabeth Gabay’s essay “Celebrating Christmas and New Year With Punch.”

Image above via Garden and Gun

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Brief History of Making Deals with the Devil: Niccolò Paganini, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Page & More

How Reading Increases Your Emotional Intelligence & Brain Function: The Findings of Recent Scientific Studies

A Map of George Orwell’s 1984

Ian McKellen Recites Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, Backed by Garage Rock Band, the Fleshtones, on Andy Warhol’s MTV Variety Show (1987)

The Favorite Literary Work of Every Country Visualized on a World Map

Hear Lou Reed’s The Raven, a Tribute to Edgar Allan Poe Featuring David Bowie, Ornette Coleman, Willem Dafoe & More

Why Should We Read Charles Dickens? A TED-Ed Animation Makes the Case

Eudora Welty’s Handwritten Eggnog Recipe, and Charles Dickens’ Recipe for Holiday Punch

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