After Dean Young Talks About Wine

Dean Young, "Ode to Hangover":

Hangover, you drive me into the yard
to dig holes as a way of working through you
as one might work through a sorry childhood
by riding the forbidden amusement park rides
as a grown-up until puking. Alas, I feel like
something spit out by a duck, a duck
other ducks are ashamed of when I only
tried to protect myself by projecting myself
on hilarity's big screen at the party
where one nitwit reminisced about the 39¢
a pound chicken of his youth and another said,
Don't go to Italy in June, no one goes to Italy in June.
Protect myself from boring advice,
from the boring past and the boring present
at the expense of an unnauseating future:
now. But look at these newly-socketed lilacs!
Without you, Hangover, they would still be
trapped in their buckets and not become
the opposite of vomit just as you, Hangover,
are the opposite of Orgasm. Certainly
you go on too long and in your grip
one thinks, How to have you never again?
whereas Orgasm lasts too short some seconds
and immediately one plots to repeat her.
After her I could eat a car but here's
a pineapple/clam pizza and Chinese milkshake
yum but Hangover, you make me aspire
to a saltine. Both of you need to lie down,
one with a cool rag across the brow, shutters
drawn, the other in a soft jungle gym, yahoo,
this puzzle has 15 thousand solutions!
Here's one called Rocking Horse
and how about Sunshine in the Monkey Tree.
Chug, chug, goes the arriving train,
those on the platform toss their hats and scarves
and cheer, the president comes out of the caboose
to declare, The war is over! Corks popping,
people mashing people, knocking over melon stands,
ripping millenniums of bodices. Hangover,
rest now, you'll have lots to do later
inspiring abstemious philosophies and menial tasks
that too contribute to the beauty of this world.

No, no, no. Ode to Hangover goes:

Uuueuh
eeeeuuugh
eeuuuu
uugghggh
uuuuggh

eeuh

I don't know about the hangover as the opposite of the orgasm, but Young's argument has fine moments. This turn,

. . . and immediately one plots to repeat her.
After her I could eat a car but here's
a pineapple/clam pizza and Chinese milkshake
yum

in which Young registers that the narrator does "repeat her", is especially fine. The narrator "could eat a car", but instead says that "here's" something else—note how the verb places him in his present situation (as it were, in bed). He could eat a car, but he isn't going to eat anything at all, because "here's", then, a "pineapple/clam pizza and Chinese milkshake". O rly. The suggestive imagery is alluring, but not exotic or rarefied; new experience but nevertheless variations on classics; somewhat more vulgar than fine. Indulgent—like the vigorous, athletic, 'round-the-clock sex that establishes the beginning of romantic relationships . . . and followed by that perfect enjambment ("yum"), spoken in a voice that breaks with the narrator's voice, a lusty and dumbly monosyllabic, lip-licking declaration of joy.

Good lines about sex, but the hangover itself seems less successfully established, until that last pair of lines, which are awfully redeeming. "[T]hat too contribute to the beauty of this world": A person couldn't (and perhaps rightly shouldn't) believe that about himself while he is hungover; it's comforting to think, though, that it might nevertheless be true of whatever small works he can eke out of the day.

Constitutionally I cannot write about hangovers in literature without passing on the greatest description of a hangover ever written, by Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Posted by Kriston at September 20, 2007 9:43 AM