{"id":14560,"date":"2009-09-28T13:29:16","date_gmt":"2009-09-28T13:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=14560"},"modified":"2009-09-28T13:29:16","modified_gmt":"2009-09-28T13:29:16","slug":"the-black-hats-and-porter-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/the-black-hats-and-porter-generation\/","title":{"rendered":"The black-hats-and-porter generation"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"brendanbehan\"<\/div>\n

The story goes that when Brendan Behan<\/b> was asked to come up with a slogan for Guinness, he sat around for months drinking the free samples they’d sent him and came up with ‘Guinness makes you drunk’ (the famous slogan – ‘Guinness is good for you’ – was devised by Dorothy L. Sayers). Did you know that the first mention of the black stuff in literature came courtesy of Charles Dickens<\/b>? I didn’t, but Alan O’Riordan’s article<\/a> in the Irish Times<\/i> traces the literary connections to Guinness, from Dickens to Claire Kilroy<\/a>, via Flann O’Brien<\/b> and Sean O’Reilly<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Flann O’Brien’s mixture of stout and mullioned snug, written at a time when, as Derek Mahon<\/b> has noted, literary pubs had as yet no pictures of Yeats and Joyce \/ Since people could still recognise their faces, their voices,<\/i> has cast a long shadow. Or possibly a stain. There is an obligatory note, for instance, in Claire Kilroy’s All Names Have Been Changed<\/i> , her novel of much stout and many writers. Her somewhat cliched great Irish writer, Glynn, even has a “smattering of buff matter clung to his lapel” \u2013 a definite instance of textile intertextuality.<\/p>\n

Kilroy is not alone in feeling the presence of the black-hats-and-porter generation; as Declan Lynch has noted: “I never pass McDaid’s without getting some race memory, of a time before I was born, when Behan and Kavanagh and Myles used to drink in these places, when alcoholism was regarded as little more than a form of self-expression, one of the few you could get away with.”<\/p>\n

Sean O’Reilly, in The Swing of Things <\/i>, even has an alter ego becoming the drink: “Pints appeared in front of him. He drank them down like they tasted uniquely of himself, brewed from every failure in his life.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sl\u00c3\u00a1inte.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The story goes that when Brendan Behan was asked to come up with a slogan for Guinness, he sat around for months drinking the free samples they’d sent him and came up with ‘Guinness makes you drunk’ (the famous slogan – ‘Guinness is good for you’ – was devised by Dorothy L. Sayers). Did you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buzzwords"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}