J&B

Dear Alan, strange things happen in pandemics. Trains of thought develop and ramify, changing, one even changes trains sometimes (like Mr. Norris). I say this because I just (yesterday evening) bought a bottle of J&B, which I do often enough, in part because I know it’s your favorite, so when I buy it, and when I drink it, I can think of you, which is always a good thing. Anyway, I was having a scotch and soda yesterday evening, idly wondering, as I had many times before, how someone called Justerini and someone called Brooks happened to team up together and make a very nice blended scotch. Looking at the bottle I also noted that they were already suppliers to George III, and then, that the firm was founded in 1749. Aha, I thought, they were probably the equivalent of carpet-baggers seeing if they could make a killing in Scotland in the wake of the ’45 – probably they ran into Davey Balfour and Alan Breck along the way. But this is where the pandemic comes in, because under its influence, its instruction that we must learn the stories that we don’t know, I decided to go in depth into the matter, that is, as any sensible person would, I consulted Wikipedia, who immediately informed me that all my fantasies about the ’45 and Davey and Alan were rubbish. Neither J nor B ever went anywhere near Scotland, and indeed the firm only got into Scotch much later, in the 19th century, I think. Nonetheless, there is at least one very nice element to the true story, always to be remembered when drinking J&B, even, perhaps making a toast: J, that is, Justerini, or, more accurately, Giacomo Giustarini, was a Bolognese, who in 1749, having fallen in love with a soprano, followed her to London, where he ran into, not Brooks, but Johnson (George), with whom he started the firm, mostly

I believe they’re still where they started in 1749, St James’s St, the wealthy always need their wine

dealing in wine (so, originally it would have been J&J). Giacomo returned to Bologna in 1760, whether with or without his soprano history, or at least Wikipedia, does not relate, though we very much hope with. The firm then went through various permutations, Johnson himself was killed in 1785, and I quote, “by a runaway horse colliding with his sedan chair in Piccadilly, while returning from a lunch with the Duke of Queensberry” (not the Marquis, so I suppose they weren’t talking about the latter’s rules). One forgets how very dangerous 18th-century London was. Anyway, it was his son, or maybe grandson who sold the firm to Brooks, and he was the one who, in what I think was a very nice gesture, renamed it Justerini & Brooks, the rest is history, or, perhaps, the world spirits. I like this story, though the runaway horse is harsh, as we now say, or heavy, as we used to. Obviously, though, the great thing is Giacomo and his soprano: and remember, if he had not fallen in love we would not be drinking J&B. So, around 7 this evening, I am going to raise my class to them, wishing them well. Unfortunately, that’s getting rather late for you, isn’t it, but, if you happened to be up … Love, Robert

The Knotted Line of Sherry Relations

or

Knotenlinie von Jerezweinverhältnissen

Caro Tomo, unfortunately this is a very long and involved story with periodic appeals to long and involved backstories, but does not every story deserve to be told? Well, actually, absolutely not, but I’m afraid you’re stuck with this one, so sit back, relax, let it wash over you, or, perhaps better, just reach for the delete button … Anyway, it does begin with you, and yours, because there we all were zooming along, and you all had lovely glasses of Amontillado in your hands. I had a lovely cup of tea, just as good, given the time difference, nonetheless, the thought came to me: when last did I hold a lovely glass of Amontillado in my hand? To which the answer, clear and strong, was: not for too bloody long! But why? I asked myself, and here I almost hesitate … for family and friends it was who caused the lack. But – and look out, here comes backstory – that’s not quite fair. Because, the thing is I used to be a tremendous sherry snob. Amontillado … maybe, just maybe, but truly, the only true, truest, children of Jerez de la Frontera are Fino and Manzanilla. Ok, ok, so Manzanilla is made down the road at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, so sue me. But there it is, sad but true … But! Recently I was talking to my friend Christine about Grandpa, and going to lunch on Sundays with him, and listening to his wonderful stories of skating a hundred miles on the frozen Connecticut River, and reciting Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome with tears streaming down his cheeks, Even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forebear to cheer! You remember. And also, first thing he would give us a glass of sherry, Harvey’s Bristol Cream. I hadn’t thought of Harvey’s Bristol Cream for a very long time, and it may be that the last time I drank a glass of it may have been at Grandpa’s. So then I started thinking well, if it’s good enough for Grandpa … and then, yes, so maybe they – family and friends – really weren’t keen on Fino and Manzanilla, and maybe that’s not such a terrible lapse of taste. Because as soon as I thought of it I remembered how good the Harvey’s Bristol Cream was when I was eleven or twelve years old – autre temps autre moeurs, I suppose Grandpas today don’t give their grandchildren glasses of sherry, Cream or otherwise. But a word of advice: never spill a glass of Cream sherry over the keyboard of your computer (or, for that matter, of your clavichord), it makes the keys stick something frightful, a Fino or a Manzanilla would do far less damage, my poor space bar is still having a terrible time spacing – spaced out you might almost say. So, anyway, I decided to become truly ecumenical in my sherry appreciation. More than that, to demonstrate my ecumenicism I decided that, on any sherry occasion, instead of drinking, say, just an Amontillado, or a Fino, or, even, Harvey’s Bristol Cream, I would start at the dry end, Manzanilla, and then go on down the line. I’m not sure who would have more contempt for this practice, the English ruling classes or los de Jerez de la Frontera (not to mention de Sanlúcar de Barrameda), though I desire the good opinion of the latter much more than of the former. But … you will see immediately – whatever the opinion of the English ruling classes or that of los de Jerez de la Frontera y de Sanlúcar de Barrameda – that this is an extremely bad idea, since it means that at the least you will be drinking five or six glasses of sherry. Yes. So I very quickly modified the process, but still, it did present to my mind the idea of a line of sherries. And so … now we come to something that you will find very interesting, surely. (All right, all right, I won’t call you Shirley.) It happened that I was talking to another friend of mine, GWF, about his concept of the “knotted line of measure relations”, or, as he puts it, Knotenlinie von Maaßverhältnissen, he does have a way with words. And let’s not palter with the truth, I was having a hell of a time figuring out what on earth he was talking about. So he was trying out different examples: the series of natural numbers, the notes of the scale, and I was sort of getting it with the scale when he began on metal oxides – he does love chemistry – and he could see that I was going down for the third time. But then, his eyes happened to fall on the various sherry bottles on the counter. Taking that deep breath indicative of the effort required to explain things to the feeble-minded, he said: Sherry. Manzanilla, Fino, Oloroso, Amontillado, etc. – I think that he, and, I suspect, los de Jerez de la Frontera, look down on Cream Sherry as an English aberration (even though they make it, los, that is) so forbore to mention it. – You know which one you’re drinking, but they’re all sherry. There is a quantitative progress from the driest to the sweetest – a mere alteration of quantity. But, when you drink an Amontillado, and then an Oloroso, is there truly no qualitative difference? Well, then, there is a knotted line of sherry relations, or, to speak in the only language adequate to the demands of speculative philosophy – he says things like that sometimes – ein Knotenlinie von Jerezweinverhältnissen. You see, there is a merely quantitative progression, dry to sweet, which simply continues. And yet, at the same time, at a certain point, something happens: it isn’t Amontillado anymore, it’s Oloroso. And

Die Knotenlinie von Jerezweinverhältnissen

it happens all at once, just as water doesn’t gradually thicken like porridge, at one instant it is liquid, the next it is ice. So there is a continuous line of quantitative change, and it can imagine itself as nothing more than that. But, on closer inspection, the line has knots in it every now and then, what are they? they are the points where Manzanilla, all at once, is Fino, where Fino … and so on. People say that I make things needlessly difficult, but I like using images, or, as we Germans say, bilden, when I can. And the image of the knotted line seemed to me a valuable one. And in fact, another young friend of mine, Markus Schneider, you may know him, pointed out to me that the image of the knotted line suggests an actual concrete object, the knotted rope used by sailors – in my day at least – to calculate the speed of a ship as it sails. You British call it a chip log, I believe, but we agree to measure nautical speed by the knot, as you say, or knoten, as we do. And measure – the dialectical unity of quantity and quality – is precisely what we are talking about here. Anyway, I wish I’d thought of that before publishing, a good image. But you see, he went on, the line, or rope, continues – quantity changes and keeps on changing – with never a care. And yet … behind its back, at some point, quality changes, something becomes other than it was. I have explained to you the difference between quantitative and qualitative change haven’t I? A qualitative change changes what something is. Quantitative change is indifferent to quality, it merely makes something more or less. But there are limits, at a certain point one more change of quantity and water turns to ice, Amontillado to Oloroso. So, perhaps, rather than saying that the qualitative change is behind the back of the quantitative, rather, the quantitative change sets a snare for the qualitative. And how far does the process extend, why, to infinity – yes, all right, with sherry that may sound a bit odd, but the logic of change, the dialectic of quality and quantity applies to sherry as much as to everything else. Well, perhaps I will stop there, and not tell you about the continuing discussion, or, rather, monologue punctuated by anguished expressions of incomprehension, which went on for a long time – and when we got to the Measureless, or Maßlose as he would say, Man! was it rough. So, suffice it to say that without your glass of Amontillado there would have been no line of sherry bottles to take on the burden of demonstrating the knotenlinie at least. So here’s to you! Though this is Oloroso, not Amontillado, as of course you can see from the hue, and that it is one further knot down the line.

And so I remain tu fratello devoto ma misurato, Bobby

A Loaf of Bread

Dear Markus, I want to tell you about all that your wonderful loaf of bread has done for me. By far the most important thing is that it was so good. The Americans are a great people, yes, but bread is just not their thing, they have so many other things on their minds. So to have a whole, real and true, loaf of bread before one, in America, is a wonder. And then, you can’t just think of yourself with such a loaf in front of you, but of it, you must live up to it. What does it deserve? Well, at least in my judgement, what it deserves, most absolutely, is butter. Yes! So simple. But, well, not so simple. We were speaking of the Americans, that great people, and they truly are a great people – the Hot Fudge Sundae, the Milkshake, the Cheeseburger!!!! – but … trying to avoid a pun, butter? No. I will try not to impose on you my harrowing experiences with “butter” in the US of A. Finally, quite recently I have decided, not that I deserve good butter, but hey, I’m old, I’m going to have good butter, and I like to eat good things that do indeed deserve good butter. So I did have real butter (Irish, which will turn out to be appropriate) for your bread. I also decided that the bread and butter went very well with some cheeses, especially English – Red Leicester, for example. But, well, you know, it was a good loaf as loaves go, and as good loaves go it went. But I wanted to go on, even without the bread, with the butter and cheese, and I realized that the best way of doing this was with a particular kind of biscuit, though, oddly, called a cracker – as you say, trying to understand the English and their biscuits is a mug’s game – the Jacob’s Cream Cracker, to be precise. Not at all the same as your bread, but very nice in its way. I hadn’t had them for a while, but you can get them at Cost Plus, so … I happened to see on the label that they are made in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, which happens to be in Leicestershire. I think I may have driven through it once, but it’s such a cool name that I decided to look it up. And then, under Business, there was no sign of Jacob’s, but only United Biscuits (Biscuits of the World Unite!), so then I looked up Jacob’s itself … and you’re probably thinking that I have way too much time on my hands. But then I discovered something I didn’t know, and which really accounts for all this. I didn’t know that Jacob’s was originally an Irish company, which later opened an English branch, and the two eventually separated. But, most important, the Jacob’s biscuit factory in Dublin featured importantly in Irish labor history and working-class struggle, first with a strike at the factory in 1911, and then when the Jacob’s workers came out in solidarity with other striking workers during the Dublin Lock-out of 1913 – one of the key events in Irish labor history. I did know about the Lock-out, and the central role in the struggle of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, founded in 1909 by James (“Big Jim”) Larkin and James Connolly. When I was young, people like me, and Alan, were very much taken up with the Irish Revolution, in part because of the ongoing “Troubles”, which we saw, naively, no doubt, as a failure of understanding: the IRA had forgotten its own working class and socialist origins. Anyway, for us, two of the most important figures, and I feel this today as I did then, were Larkin and Connolly. Both were socialists, members of the working class fighting for the working class. Both spent time in the US, and, I think, both were members of the IWW, at least Connolly was. Connolly was also an Irish nationalist. He was one of the leaders of the Easter 1916 uprising, proclaiming the Irish Republic (Larkin was still in the US). The uprising was necessarily doomed to failure – the citizens of Dublin jeered at the defeated revolutionaries as they were marched to prison, and yet, within a year or two … Anyway, the leaders of the uprising were quickly executed by the English, with extraordinary vindictiveness, though English public opinion entirely supported the executions, and, to be fair, England was in the middle of a desperate war, though that was part of the point: in what way was it Ireland’s

James "Big Jim" Larkin

James Connolly

war. Irish public opinion was transformed by revulsion against the executions. The extreme of vindictiveness came with James Connolly’s execution. He had been severely wounded in the fighting, and probably would have died anyway. But the English were determined to execute him. Since he could not stand, he was tied to a chair to face the firing squad. On the first anniversary of his death, a banner was hung on the front of Liberty Hall, in Dublin, home of the ITGWU, the Irish Women Workers’ Union, and the Irish Citizen Army:

JAMES CONNOLLY MURDERED MAY 12TH 1916

The police had it down in less than an hour, but … back for a moment to 1911, August, when the men workers at Jacob’s Biscuits went on strike for better working conditions. On 22 August 1911, the women workers came out in solidarity with them, and they did so largely through the organizing efforts of Rosie Hackett, then just eighteen. She was one of the founders, with Delia Larkin, Big Jim’s sister, of the Irish Women Workers’ Union in September 1911; and she mobilized the Jacob’s workers, men and women, to come out with the other striking workers during the Lock-out of 1913. She was also active in the Irish Citizen Army, formed by Larkin and Connolly, of members of the ITGWU, to defend workers’ demonstrations from the police. The ITGWU and especially the ICA were the centers of organization for the Easter Uprising. Because she had training as a printer she was one of those who printed the Proclamation of the Irish Republic on the night of 23-24 April 1916. She is said to have handed the Proclamation, ink still wet, to James Connolly. The reading of the Proclamation by Padraic Pearse on the steps of the General Post Office marked the beginning of the Uprising. Rosie Hackett was stationed under the command of Constance Markievicz in the area of St Stephen’s Green and the Royal College of Surgeons, which saw particularly heavy fighting. In preparation, she had taken six months of first aid training, so was one of those who tended the wounded in, ironically, the Royal College of Surgeons. After the defeat, she with other members of the ICA was briefly imprisoned. (Constance Markievicz, although one of the leaders, to her disgust, was not executed because she was a woman). So, back to 12 May 1917: the police took down the banner.

Liberty Hall, Dublin (an old postcard, I think the banner must have been put in later)

 But Rosie Hackett, Helena Molony, Jinny Stanahan and Brigid Davies decided that they weren’t going to let that stand. They printed another banner, attached it to the top parapet, and defended it by barricading themselves on the roof with, amongst other things, a ton of coal. It took the police most of the day to get to them – the banner was there until six in the evening. Rosie said later “it took four hundred policemen to take four women”, and this was why no one was arrested: too embarrassing.

On the steps of old Liberty Hall before its closing and demolition, 1958

Well, you’ve probably guessed that the main point of  all this is to celebrate Rosie Hackett. There are very few pictures of her, and none that I can find from the time of these events. But this one does at least show why she was sometimes affectionately referred to as “little Rosie Hackett”: “I have a very kind remembrance of Little Rosie Hackett of the Citizen Army, always cheerful and always willing; to see her face about the place was a tonic itself”, Nora O’Daily, another first-aider at the Royal College of Surgeons, Easter 1916. But notice that all those hulking men know that she, little as she is, belongs there with them, at the place that was the heart and soul of their struggle. I suppose that this is a very obvious thing to say, but anyone who has the slightest interest in early 20th-century Irish history knows about Larkin and Connolly – and so they should! But I only found out about Rosie Hackett – who is now one of my great inspirations – because of your loaf of bread. Of course it was completely wonderful just on its own and requires no further justification. But … so thank you, and K and I as well, Robert

The Shoebox, Denver

June 2020 – January 2021