A cup of tea
Jun. 14th, 2006 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
"What should I blog about?" a Click Opera reader e-mailed me last night. The answer, Mischa, is that a good blogger should be able to blog about anything. Just pick something at random -- I'm drinking a cup of tea right now, so let's pick that -- and, if you're a seasoned blogger, a rambling writer, or a member of the "commentariat", a series of different approaches should immediately start swimming through your mind. Think of the cup of tea as a cup of tea, by all means (this is perhaps the most difficult thing, Grasshopper), but think of it also as an opportunity, a metaphor, a challenge, a narrative-structuring device.Here's a series of approaches that just occurred to me as I lay in my morning bath (always a great place to get ideas, I find):
1. Quotation: British rock writer Paul Morley once described Howard Devoto's writing as "a slice of life and a cup of tea". Thinking about that, I cast my mind back to yesterday. I was sitting in the garden, reading the 100th edition of art magazine Frieze, a particularly outstanding issue of the magazine, and thinking how I now read it -- particularly the articles of Michael Bracewell -- with the same fervour I used to reserve for the New Musical Express. (This in itself might explain why I seem to have more of an art career than a music career these days. I still find the discourse around art very interesting, although I know from the low ratings art topics get on Click Opera that not many of you share my enthusiasm.) But I was also thinking how the
particular era of NME I read religiously -- the post-structuralist, ultra-pretentious early 80s NME -- was, with the exception of Morley and a couple of others, very badly written; a cross between PR hype and hip self-mythologization, with a few traces of 70s gonzo underground press stuff. You'd encounter a cup of tea in there as a meta-metaphor, perhaps, but very rarely get a good straightforward, well-written description of an actual cup of tea. And, you know, there are still people around today -- I could name names -- who could split memes and Deleuze-Guattari the hell out of them, but could never, ever simply describe a cup of tea. A hot, steaming, delicious cup of tea, capable of restoring the palate and reviving appetite! 2. Anecdote: A bridge between the actual cup of tea and tea's metaphorical or cultural meaning is anecdote. The one that pops into my mind is how I was on a plane once, an Air India flight between Japan and Thailand. The stewardess asked me what I wanted to drink, and I said "Tea, please." "Which kind of tea?" Stupidly, I answered "Normal black tea, British tea." "Black tea is Indian tea," replied the Indian hostess, tartly. What's interesting to me about this anecdote is that, on an Indian plane flying between Japan and Thailand, I lost my bearings: I no longer knew what qualified as "normal". Most of the passengers were Japanese; "normal" tea for them would be green tea. The staff were Indian; "normal" tea for them would be Indian tea. I was British, "normal" tea for me would be the Indian tea we, because we're imperialists, have re-named "English breakfast tea" or "Earl Grey tea" or something equally revisionist. Honestly, you could write a whole blook about the implications of that one anecdote.
3. Binaries: To keep writing about the cup of tea, we must milk it (what a silly metaphor, one pours a little splash of milk into tea, one doesn't milk the tea's udders to collect the stuff!), find symbolic meaning in it. A cup of tea can stand for all sorts of things. Let's look for a binary: aha, easy, tea versus coffee! We can divide the world into tea drinkers and coffee drinkers. Potentially explosive! Political! I like it! Tea drinking, of course, is more ancient, more Asian. Already, Click Opera must side with tea (if we didn't already). Coffee-drinking, of course, we all know, is American. It's associated with getting all rabid and manic, paranoid and aggressive, calling up talk radio shows and ranting about I-raq and I-ran. Yes, let's milk the tea and ride the resulting binaries all the way to the Middle East!
4. Politics: Where there are binaries (and in language they're everywhere, the cat's cradle by which the whole machine operates) there's inevitably politics. If coffee-drinking is American, for instance, tea-drinking is anti-American, deeply (and refreshingly) subversive of the would-be hegemony of the United States in the 21st century. (We know this is a doomed hegemony, of course, because we know that a nation of tea-drinkers is scheduled to overtake America around 2040.) We can, if we like, get topical and tie this in with the latest survey by the Pew Research Group, which reports goodwill towards the US falling to record low levels in... well, in all the countries where people drink the most tea!
5. Personal: That's the sort of entry that will get 100+ comments, but won't really go anywhere. If you can't be bothered fighting that old battle all over again, why not just charm your audience with a relaxing stroll through consumer nostalgia: make a blog entry (or article, or non-fiction book, or blook) about all the different tea fads you've lived through. Let's see, there were those big communal tea urns at boarding school, and you drank the thick strong milky tea while eating baked beans and bacon in the refectory. Then, a bit later, Twinings introduced Earl Grey tea bags, which seemed at the time like the height of sophistication. (Now they're what junior estate agents in London drink as "normal tea"; the perfume is just another form of sugar.) Then, when you went to university, a Roxy Music fan introduced you to Darjeeling and smoky, mysterious Lapsang Souchong. (Ah, the Indonesian poetry of these tea variety names -- the texture they add to your prose, an exoticism of the palate!) The next big revelation was tasting Japanese green tea in Japan, and the slow graduation from insipid green tea bags to top-grade loose leaf. A period of iced oolong one hot New York summer. The discovery of Yunaan in a Paris adventure travel agency on the Rue Saint Anne... Or what about telling people how one of your first recorded songs was a punk parody called "Tea"?
I drink it in the morning and it has a good effectIt's hidden in a cardboard box that no-one can detect
It's made by careful labourers in lands of poverty
And shipped around the ocean for c-connoisseurs like me
It's an artificial stimulant, exaggerates well-being
I'd like to give it up but I would die without that feeling
When I'm walking past the cafe and I smell the caffeine
I enter and I sell my soul for that god of nectars, tea
We haven't even mentioned Proust's madeleine yet. There's a million words of blogging right there, if your cork-lined room has wifi. And what's up with all these pictures of Prince Charles when you image google "a cup of tea"? Which makes me think...
6. Sociology: How about a Brit-bashing article about how, in Britain, a cup of tea passes -- and substitutes -- for empathy? If someone's really upset, instead of setting the thing that's upsetting them right, you make them a cup of tea. If you're Tony Blair or the Prince of Wales and everyone hates you, you pose with an "ordinary person" drinking a cup of tea. No, a mug of tea. Hold it up, make sure the pictures are taken, drink enough of it not to seem rude, then let your minders rush you off to the next appointment.
So there you are, Mischa, blog about a cup of tea. Or anything, really.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 10:48 am (UTC)I blogged on emotional issues I have with society.. but in any case, I think tea is a much better topic..
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 10:53 am (UTC)And yet this entry is proof of the contrary, since it is more-than-usually rambling, nothing-y, with its faux binaries plucked out of the air (you might just as well have said coffee was Italian or French or something; everyone knows American 'coffee' is dishwater). Get a grip, Momus!
TEA TIME TALES
Date: 2006-06-14 10:54 am (UTC)PS. IS THERE ANY CHANCE OF YOU EVER PLAYING KARIN K OR PAULO R AGAIN?
THE PROTAGONIST!
Re: TEA TIME TALES
Date: 2006-06-14 11:03 am (UTC)(To your question: yes! And hello, Protagonist!)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 11:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 11:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 11:25 am (UTC)I'm curious what the Momus take is on "pearl tea."
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 11:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 11:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 11:42 am (UTC)Where did it all go wrong? Quite possibly with the addition with milk by the Viennese in the 17th century, thereby pacifying its Ottoman threat. It's the absence of such additives that has Okakura Kakuzo raise the purity of Japanese tea above all others in his Teaism/Taoism wonderings (http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/tea.htm).
My memory of early 80's NME drink preferences is most of the staff claiming to drink nothing but cocktails. Ian Penman to thread, perhaps...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 11:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 11:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 11:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 12:16 pm (UTC)Art
Date: 2006-06-14 01:16 pm (UTC)Anyway, mostly this week I have been thinking about how great an artist Hans Bellmer actually is. I would have a hard time trying to find an album that is as good as this drawing...
http://www.galleryofsurrealism.com/HBMA-1972AA.htm
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 01:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 01:58 pm (UTC)I'd make a quip about you 'serving him tea', but that's too obvious...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 02:01 pm (UTC)He asked if it was miffed or tiffed. Apparently it matters to him whether the milk is poured before the tea or the other way around.
Heard this? (http://www.cheapsurrealism.com/sounds/19Oops!IDiditAgain.mp3)
I just returned from Arkansas (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO2d1Md8u-4). We went to a "Chinese restaurant". The waitress asked me if I would like my tea sweetened or not. I said not, imagining I would receive a pot of hot unsweetened green tea.
She brought back a tub of unsweetened iced tea. I then proceeded to pour packets of sugar in it while the rest of the table looked at me like I was nuts. Later in an ice cream parlor the lady behind behind me couldn't decide if she wanted her tea sweet or unsweetened. The guy behind the counter snapped "you better decide now because I don't like to sweeten it after." It apparently involves some type of syrup that goes in the glass first.
Bringing this story semi-circle back to Richard Thompson.
tea hee
Date: 2006-06-14 02:07 pm (UTC)Best post ever.
But you fogot one important topic...
Blogging about blogging.
Or perhaps it was implied.
There are 10 types of people in the world..
Date: 2006-06-14 02:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 02:15 pm (UTC)is it a crime to put honey in my green tea? i can think of few things better than that, but it seems like it's the wrong way to drink it.
Frieze
Date: 2006-06-14 02:47 pm (UTC)http://www.myspace.com/43264703
thanks,
matt
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-14 02:56 pm (UTC)What to put in tea?
Date: 2006-06-14 03:07 pm (UTC)If you care about tea rules though, the main no no for green tea, and any tea other than black, for that matter, is milk. But, now, we have Green Tea lattes, so really just do it like wine, drink what you like, and everyone else can just bugger off.
Re: Frieze
Date: 2006-06-14 03:09 pm (UTC)