These are the words, images, and beers that inspired the GBH Collective this week. Drinking alone just got better, because now you’re drinking with all of us.
READ.// “All my adult life I have kept a distance from other people, it has been my way of coping, because I become so incredibly close to others in my thoughts and feelings of course, they only have to look away dismissively for a storm to break inside me.” I have been absolutely, totally, completely obsessed with the My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knausgaard since Alicia Kennedy recommended it in her newsletter. This sprawling, six-volume dramatized memoir takes you deep inside the Norwegian author’s existential angst, but it’s so much more than that: It’s a meditation on life and death, meaning and being, sex and love and literature, and just about any thought that passes through his head. There is great truth in the seemingly mundane, and something about these books relentlessly grips me.
LOOK.// Food Instagram long ago became overwhelming to me, but I have to admit, I love looking at pretty pictures of other peoples’ dinners when deciding what to cook. I’ve recently rediscovered my love for Canadian food blogger Laura Wright, who serves up gorgeous, plant-based meals at The First Mess. Vegan, healthy, and incredibly flavorful, her food is a constant source of inspiration.
DRINK.// A selection of beers from Allagash Brewing
In one of those quintessential farther apart/closer than ever quarantine experiences, I recently got to drink beer from Allagash Brewing Company for the first time thanks to a GBH colleague. I started with the White, of course, just as citrusy and spicy-sweet as promised, and moved on to the North Sky: a dangerously silky-smooth, sippable Stout at 7.5%, striking the perfect balance of chocolate and coffee notes.
READ.// “Her black hoof snapping forward against those snarling mouths was so fast, so pure, just there and back, leaving a perfect arc of red droplets behind it. But hooves aren’t always enough.” When was the last time a book scared you? Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians isn’t just creepy—it’s poetic and gutsy and dreamy and impossible to put down.
LOOK.// Mitch Epstein’s photography exhibit, “Property Rights” (at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art) concretizes the sometimes-abstract issues of border conflicts, public vs. private lands, and environmental battles. The virtual exhibition model is especially effective here as it offers context, artist’s commentary, and interactive graphics that help illuminate the specific conflicts portrayed in the photographs.
DRINK.// Ayinger Celebrator Doppelbock
A recent beer shipment arrived for me with an Ayinger Celebrator seemingly thrown in as an afterthought. This beer is never an afterthought for me—it’s so rich, caramely, and bready, yet finishes relatively dry, with a cozy malt depth that seems to soak down into my weary bones and spiritually revive me. What I’m saying is, it’s pretty good.
READ.// “We might like to think we are most drawn to lovely, ‘clean’ smells—laundry, linden blossoms, a eucalyptus breeze—but more often than not our greatest sensory delight comes from our most intimate, and most odiferous, nooks and crannies.” Post-COVID, I’ve become even more obsessed with all things olfactory than I was before. I’m constantly ordering perfume samples; I just picked up Harold McGee’s mammoth new work on the subject, Nose Dive; and I tore into this fascinating piece about all of the above by New Yorker staff writer Rachel Syme.
LOOK.// It’s pretty harrowing stuff, but I thought the New York Times’ new data visualizations about how global warming will impact different parts of the world in different ways are incredibly effective (and terrifying).
DRINK.// Cloudwater Brew Co. & DEYA Brewing Co.’s I Forgot Your Snapback
This “fizzy yellow beer” may look like an ordinary Lager in the glass, but hover your nose near the rim and you’ll quickly discover a surprise: It’s made with herbal, floral gruit rather than hops. Drinking this beer—refreshing, striking, if a little reminiscent of potpourri—brought me back to Eoghan Walsh’s piece about the history (and new renaissance) of gruit beers in Europe, and it was wonderful to taste a little bit of that legacy for myself.
Curated by The GBH Collective
