Thursday, March 29, 2007

What's in a link?

About a week ago, this appeared at a website called Friday Drink Links:

A classic FDL, by request. "I quickly met my second wife, a brilliant graduate student who liked to brag that she had never met a man who could drink her under the table. Then she met me." Liquor and Lit, by Charles Deemer.

This must be why, over the next several days, my essay was accessed over 600 times! The essay, which originally appeared in Oregon Magazine, begins:

B-52, my last drink, June 13, 1993. Yum. Over and out.


Like many writers of my generation, I studied in the
school of liquor and lit. Previous generations of
American writers pointed the way. My literary heroes
when I was learning the craft in the 1960s were (or
had been) hard drinkers if not outright drunks:
O'Neill and Saroyan and Williams, Faulkner and
Steinbeck and Hemingway, Mailer and Baldwin and
Cheever, James Agee. The hard-drinking American writer
was a figure of mythic proportions, and by the time I
graduated from UCLA I was eager to join his ranks.

Read the essay.

Except for the link above, I don't know why else this essay suddenly had so many readers. The same thing happened a while back with my essay about the birth of rock and roll, Birthing Little Richard. Word of mouth happens big time on the Internet.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Charles, "Friday Drink Links" is just one category of archived links at our site...

http://www.coudal.com

We're a small creative firm in Chicago and post all kinds of stuff every day but leave the links about drinking for Fridays where they appear first on our home page. Glad we helped a lot of people find your essay. Cheers, Jim Coudal

Charles Deemer said...

Well, what you're doing, you must be doing right! Thanks for all the traffic.