HUMBLY requesting your help

Dear faithful readers & other masochists,

I am a proud and irascible man, yet one quick to forgive when there's no money at stake, and therefore I turn to you, fellow voyagers on the wine-dark seas, 'umbly beggin' your freely creative assistance in dreaming up a title for the fourth and final Part of my precis of TheLastItalianWineMemoirYoullEverHavetoRead.  I have already referred to this concluding segment as an "apotheosis" of sorts, but there is a problem with this: I have never had an apotheosis before.  In fact, no one I personally have met has ever, to my knowledge, ever experienced such a thing.  Maybe they thought they did, but I'd put that down to tight pants or too much weed.

So, what is an apotheosis in real-world terms?  Is it when one becomes so oneself that one has no choice but to leap off a tall building or drink deep of the gifts of Bacchus?  Or, ideally, both and in that sequence.  Is it when one becomes Steve Wynn or Madonna?  Berlusconi or any star of Law & Order?  What else is there for such a one to do or say except to maintain one's glimmering presumed apotheosity?  And what about me?  I drip with self-knowledge (hence my self-loathing, ça va sans dire) but even I find it excruciating to discern where my apotheosis lieth.  Is it in discovering my Ur-wein, the one that functions as my semiotic and oenic Rosebud?  (Rioja, Bodegas Bilbainas 1949).

You see what a tricky thicket this is. 

Being fundamentally modest and unattracted to the operatic gesture, I had thought of an apotheosis something like the one described by Laurence Osborne in his Accidental Connoisseur.  It rang the right notes for me.  It's generic enough to steal, like the wry ending of some Vittorio de Sica film.  And it's good, closing the story so there's no comedown, no return to quotidian reality, with an apt seizing of the moment and the appreciation of whatever little wine comes my way.  There 's me, sitting on the beach as the sun sets, feeling mellow from all the wine.  Wine in context.  All is reduced to a mystic simplicity.  All manner of thing will be well, and all that.  I like that.  It could work in a sort of neo-realist/magical-realism way. 

I don't know if that's American enough.  Not grand enough, no heroics, no restoration of a greater Order.  Maybe I need to see my apotheosis in terms of Shane.  The sadder but wiser me leaves Valpolicella in a Prius, sun setting behind me as I drive to Slovenia.  I have restored the Order of things in Valpolicella -- first of all, I stopped all those tanker trucks from Puglia from entering the region -- and I'm on my way to Slovenia to stop the making of wine in ancestral bathtubs... no, that has no resonance. 

No, that's being a hater.  Too negative.  Also not a very American thing to be, at least publicly. 

So.  You know, my dear friends, I have no more ideas.  I have run out of Inner Resources.  I feel not only like a very defective blogger (ça va sans dire), but a crummy American and a perfectly lame visionary.  Hence my humble plea for your assistance in devising the best possible apotheosis and ending to the tale.  I invite your ideas, your drafts, your prayers for my restored powers of fabulation. 

May Bacchus fill your goblets continually with wine fit for the optimates.

T. Strappo Hughes

Painting: Bacchus by Rubens.  John Goodman was the model.

Comments

[Strappo]

Oh, and by the way, try not to suggest anything containing the sentence:

"Somewhere a dog was barking."

Thank you for your support.

[Sharon]

Hi Terry. If you're looking for a title for your ascension to Mt. Olympus how about tying it into your new wine importing enterprise, something along the lines of 'Strappo directs nectar of the Gods into discerning oenophile gobs'.

[Strappo]

NO! Violation of church and state! No can do! We must remain pure!

[David J]

'After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water'

[Strappo]

ah so. Thanks a fucking heap, grasshopper.

[David J]

'After fucking enlightenment, fucking pour me another fucking glass!'

[Strappo]

Now that's much more like it. Much more like the putative Real Me.

BTW, you're earlier comment did give me the germ of an idea. So gracias.

[Strappo]

I actually wrote "you're" for "your." After only three sips of rum.

[David J]

Ah,rum-- Ken & you shd join Gabrio on his vacation & we shd all meet up in la Repubblica Dominicana!!
...& you cd bring those wines he's had in storage for a year, as he's traveling with his own stash & can't carry any more...
--& I'm very, very happy to be a trigger for inspiration. One of my (not so secret?) callings, I dare muse...? OUCH!

[David J]

...see, after the wine biz, with yr fame & bucks you help me establish this great label for sustainable artisanal (blabla) products which channels a sizable percentage of profits to social causes...see, after wine, we make choklit!!

[Strappo]

This is disturbing in so many ways, amico mio...

I always thought my muse was someone like Helen Vendler, for Chrissake.

[Strappo]

Take that one up with Ken, who would like to do a hostile takeover of Michel Chaudun in Paris.

As to giving it to social causes. Dude...

[David J]

"Every time we went to Paris, my husband Milton (Grañas) and I used to stop by Richart's chocolate store and we dreamed of running a similar store in Puerto Rico," said (Nannette) Rosa.

One day, she wrote a three-page letter to company president Michel Richart explaining her plan. She received a letter back from him, expressing deep interest in the project. Further conversations followed and a visit from Monsieur Richart himself to the island gave birth to the second store of its kind in the Americas.

(My last acting jobs were in projects under Nanette's helm, & where her husband Milton was DPhotography...
Exquisite curmudgeon (you don't have a corner on th category) who blogs on wine in Spanish, Manuel Camblor, has relocated to the Dom Rep, & his wife in interested in Fair Trade'd gourmet products...'if you build it, they will come'...qui va piano, va lontano...' There is nothing like a deep blue Utopical horizon to keep us going, carissimo.

[David J]

...better to drown there/than to fade away--;)

[Strappo]

I'll show this to Ken. He may get inspired.

BTW, I'm not a curmudgeon. I'm ages too young, and don't you forget it!

[David J]

Curmudgeon-in-training?
(Manuel Camblor just turned 40 himself!)
BTW, ever make th effort to read any of the bloggers in Spanish?
I try to follow Manuel (La Otra Botella), & 'De Vinis Cibisque' by Joan Gómez-Pallarès in Barcelona, but they both are very generous & detailed in their write ups, so they do tend to go on...& on, sometimes...
Seriously, if you want more info on Milton & Nannette's work with Richart, it will give me a pretext to get back in touch with them.

[Strappo]

Hardly look at many blogs in English anymore...today was an exception.

Well get in touch w/ M & N if you need a pretext...mention Michel Chaudun, who is on the Left Bank and has another shop in Tokyo, where his wife is from.

[Strappo]

sorry, old boy -- dinner was delivered and I aught up w/ 3 episodes of Weeds.

[Doug Cook]

You should have Virgil come and guide you through the ... oh, no wait, that's been done. And who would the Virgil of the wine world be, anyway?

[strappo]

Who else but Hugh?

[Doug Cook]

Hugh - quite plausible! guiding you through the gironi of vineyards... perhaps in one, certain critics are buried head-down and left for a long hang-time as punishment for their sins, waiting for a vendemmia that never comes. Or a girone where certain winemakers are forced to gorge themselves eternally on oak chips, while you and Hugh wander about in search of a wine you once tasted by a producer named Beatrice...

Another wacky idea. Your vignaiolo from the second episode returns. I want to know more about that character. We all know that crusty old peasants are really deities come to test mortals in the most humble of guises (it's in all the legends and fairy tales, it must be true). He set you on the path to enlightenment. Will he not be disappointed when you fall off that path? Will he return to set you aright? Help you on the path to apotheosis? Enquiring minds want to know.

[Strappo]

Now you're outclassing me, damn you. Seriously good (funny) suggestions.

Maybe the wizened old winemaker could really be the guy I used before who got up in front of the cameras and said, "They are wise, these old vines of mine. Wiser than any man." Of course a complete bullshit artist, as was established then. Hm?

[David J]

Wow, Doug *is* the shitsnitz for real!
Think I'll sign up on his ablegrape thingie on th absolutely humbling & snarky strength of that thar comment.
--& then tuck tail & browse thru my old Spanish translation of La Divina...

[Strappo]

Doug is relatively awesome. I may have to amalgamate the germs of ideas that both of you provided me. Bravi.

Now, as to "La Divina," I am confused. You talking about La Divina Senorita M?

[Jeremy Parzen]

I thought I had an apotheosis once but then realized it was just the weed...

sincerely, lonely in Los Angeles