Word: rotgut
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Vintage Rotgut. For those who want to hear the original version, there is a new Threepenny Opera album in German (Vanguard), fascinating largely because it shows how difficult it is for vintage rotgut to travel. The "chamber orchestra" of the august Vienna State Opera bravely buckles down to the hurdy-gurdy score with its plinky-plink banjos, but it is played with excruciating slowness. The star is a charming Viennese nightclub chanteuse named Liane, who sounds less like Polly Peachum than an operetta shopgirl mooning over an archduke. The record does have its high spots, notably the duet between...
...like a Western Union clerk on the analyst's couch. Morris offers many rewarding moments of major excitement and minor truth. But he deliberately invites comparison with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and beside these great American romantic realists, Morris looks perhaps adult but certainly dull. Where Fitzgerald could turn rotgut into champagne, Morris turns champagne into Alka-Seltzer...
...appear again in Sweet Thursday, which is really a return visit to Cannery Row. It reads like stuff that has been salvaged from the wastebasket. All the characters in Sweet Thursday (who live in Monterey, Calif., Steinbeck's home territory) have a lot in common: rotgut whisky in their bellies, leather in their hides, gold in their hearts and bats in their belfries...