ANOTHER SAD SANDWICH

I’ve been a bit slow picking up on this.  One morning In April of this year, a box of cheese and sausage sandwiches (actually some reports say they were rolls, but I think you could argue that a roll is in any case a form of sandwich) were left on the doorstep of Mueller Technik, a car parts company in Steinfeld, Germany, along with a note saying help yourself. Now you and I might suspect that these sandwiches had been tainted in some way (fecal matter, psychedelics, whatever) but apparently it was a tradition for employees of the firm to buy sandwiches for each other.  They tucked in.

It was only in the afternoon that one of the workers noticed a “strange substance” on them, not poop or LSD, but as lab later tests confirmed, rat poison.  They contacted the police and 150 emergency personnel arrived to take care of the “victims.” How’s that for socialized medicine?  The company only employs 240 people, of whom 25 were duly hospitalized.  No, I don't know why the ambulances apparently have ads for Maltesers on them.  

Frank Soika, the police spokesman said, "We don't believe the amount of poison used would have been deadly, but it could have caused serious illness." The managing director of Mueller Technik, Helmut Kohake (that’s him above far left), told a press conference that there’d been no problems with staff, and nobody had been fired, but that he’d look into protective measures, perhaps including the fencing off the premises, which seems a bit job, looking at the picture at the top of this post.  "You don't know whether something like this could happen again," he said.

All of which suggests to me that Mr. Kohake has not read Agatha Christie’s Sad Cypress, because if he had he would surely have thought it might be an inside job (actually a thought you could have even without Agatha Christie).  Sad Cypress is a Poirot novel and the whole thing centers around poisoned, and apparently deadly, fishpaste sandwiches. It’s a courtroom drama, and some of it’s quite punchy stuff. 

“Mr Abbott, the grocer, in the box.  Flustered – unsure of himself – (slightly thrilled though at his own importance).  His evidence was short.  The purchase of two pots of fish paste.  The accused had said ‘There’s a lot of food poisoning with fish paste.’  She had seemed excited and queer.”

Anyway (spoiler alert), it’s the tea that’s poisoned, not the sandwiches, which is a bit of a disappointment – and morphine is the poison. The murderer quite cleverly drinks some of the deadly tea, and then uses apomorphine as an emetic to purge herself of it.  William Burroughs would have been thrilled, but I’m guessing he wasn’t much of an Agatha Christie reader either. 

So anyway, I trawled around the net and found this rather extraordinary poison sandwich story from the Perth Daily News, dated 7^th June 1932, this is quite punchy too:

RAT POISON SANDWICH:  Eater is Now in Hospital

Rat poison spread on a piece of bread was the

strange supper a man prepared for himself, and

ate, last night,according to the story he told

the police today.  He told the story from a bed in the

observation ward of the Perth Hospital.

He is:—  Jack Hopkinson (27), of  the Cremorne

Arcade off Hay-street.

Hopkinson was picked up in a state of collapse

under the Town Hall clock shortly after 9 a.m.

today, and was conveyed to Perth Hospital by

a St. John ambulance van.

Later, he told a constable that he attributed his

collapse to the fact that he had eaten rat poison

Last night, he said, he spread a rat poison paste

on a piece of bread and ate it. It did not have the

effect  expected, he claimed, and early today

he ate some of the paste 'neat.'

Then he collapsed.

So you see, those German victims really didn’t have too much to worry about just from eating a rat poison infused sandwich.  Say what you like about Agatha Christie, but she knew her poisons.

Meanwhile, keeping abreast of popular culture, there’s the video for Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s “Telephone” (a video that has nothing whatsoever to do with the song’s lyrics)  but it does feature Lady Gaga making sandwiches, which may or may not in themselves be poisoned (like all great works of art it’s capable of multiple interpretations), then she does the “sandwich dance,” (above, which I rather like) and one way or another Tyrese Gibson ends up dead.  Ironic or what?

SWIGGING WITH SCRIBBLERS: WHY DRINKERS WRITE

While looking for something completely different, I happened to find this wonderful picture of Samuel Beckett. 

There’s something about that untouched glass of red wine that looks utterly inviting and enticing, and you know it’s in Paris, and looking at it, I think it might be the best-tasting, most inspiring glass of wine in the whole history of the world.  You think I’m exaggerating?

And I began to wonder if I could find pictures of my other “favorite” authors with a drink in front of them.  Since my favorite (and I know it’s a dodgy term) authors include Borges, Kafka and Pynchon this was clearly not going to be an absolute easy task.  Since the list also includes Chandler, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ballard and Christopher Hitchens, it might in part seem like shooting drunken fish in a barrel, but all in all, it wasn’t quite as straightforward as I’d expected.  Hitchens admittedly was easy:

But Kerouac was surprisingly hard.  OK, I was just image-searching the Internet, not trawling through library archives, but I had the feeling I’d seen loads of pictures of Jack with a drink in his hand.  Maybe so, but I can’t find them now.  The best I can do is the one below.  I guess it’s hard liquor in that little cup.  And note the pipe.

Raymond Chandler proved surprisingly difficult too.  He’s seldom photographed without a pipe or cigarette, and quite often he’s holding a cat (a good standby prop for author portraits), but no sign of the office bottle, a martini or a gimlet.  However, there is this scarcely improvable one, sitting between Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Blond, a position in which you’d definitely need a drink.

No problem with finding a picture of Burroughs holding a drink, though it’s rather easier to find one of him holding gun.  And we all know how well guns and drink went together in Burroughs's life.  

And I did find this gorgeous picture of Borges and Ballard; plenty of bottles in the background, and Ballard clearly has a drink in his hand, though admittedly Borges doesn’t.

I can see why certain authors might think it’s bad for their image to be seen with a drink in their hand, though others of course think it’s more than fine.  Ernest Hemingway ran the gamut of guns, drink and cats, sometimes more than one at a time.

And what about female authors?  I imagine they might might be even less willing to be photographed booze in hand, even if they have some reputation for enjoying a drink, even for writing about it.  Dorothy Parker for instance, always looks amazingly prim in her photographs.  This is the best I can come up with:

Although whenever an actress plays Dorothy Parker on screen or stage, a drink is a ubiquitous prop.  Here’s Jennifer Jason Leigh in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.

As for some of my other fave raves: Joan Didion – no, she looks like she’d keel over if she ever had so much as a glass of sherry, though there are many, many pictures with cigarettes.  Angela Carter, Renata Adler, Lydia Davis: no boozy picture that I can find.  No cigarettes or guns either, though Lydia Davis is often seen with a cat.  So thank heavens (in so many ways) for Deborah Eisenberg. I can’t say that I’ve found zillions of pictures of the divine Ms. E staggering around, gin bottle in hand, but there is this deeply wonderful picture of her: drink in one hand, Wallace Shawn in the other (so to speak), he in turn being a writer who’s obviously unafraid to be seen with a drink in his own hand.  Hurrah. 

               Is this connection between booze and writing important?  Well, it does seem that many a writer likes a drink.  Of course many a plumber or carpenter likes a drink too, but writers get to write about it, and then their biographers write about it again.  There’s a new book out by Olivia Laing, titled The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink;  it's about  Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Carver, Cheever, Berryman and Fitzgerald.  

As for why writers drink, well a million words probably won’t answer the question, but there are some fairly wise one here from Blake Morrison writing about the book in the Guardian:  “Why do writers drink? Why does anyone drink? From boredom, loneliness, habit, hedonism, lack of self-confidence; as stress relief or a short-cut to euphoria; to bury the past, obliterate the present or escape the future. If Olivia Laing's entertaining book fails to come up with a simple answer, that's because there isn't one.”