The Dish

London has lost 1,300 of the iconic taverns over the past decade. Feargus O’Sullivan explores why:

Lying at the heart of some of Britain’s most expensive neighborhoods, these pubs were always sitting ducks for developers. But it’s not only the comet-like rise of London residential property values that is causing the disappearances. While the smoking ban and high beer taxes haven’t helped, it’s actually the pub industry’s tough practices that are giving local boozers the greatest problems.

Under the British system, the pub “landlord” (in British pub terminology, this actually means a manager that rents a premises, rather than an owner) must buy their booze from the company they rent the pub from. With no competition, the prices they pay are generally inflated, meaning that even if landlords trim their profit margins, beer still comes out pricier than it otherwise needs to be. While pub companies turn a profit, individual landlords are pushed to the wall. The pub companies then sell off under-performing premises, even though pubs wouldn’t actually be unsustainable if landlords got a better deal.

Admittedly, this pressure has thinned out some dead wood. …. But now the lure of residential property profits is so great that not even landmark pubs are safe from the wave of closures. Indeed, the high ceilings and quirky historic fixtures of old pubs in general are just the sort of thing that make property speculators drool. Pub conversions are all over London now – you can find them for sale, for rent, even on Airbnb.

Previous Dish on the decline of English pubs here. A long thread on American pubs here.

(Photo: London’s now-shuttered Prince of Wales pub is set to be replaced by a Tesco. By Jon Curnow)

Theodore Dalrymple argues that addiction isn’t a disease:

To take only one point among many: most addicts who give up do so without any medical assistance—and most addicts do give up. Moreover, they do so at an early age. The proximate cause of their abstinence is their decision to be abstinent. No one can decide not to have rheumatoid arthritis, say, or colon cancer. Sufferers from those diseases can decide to cooperate or not with treatment, but that is another matter entirely. Therefore, there is a category difference between addiction and real disease.

The pretense that a non-disease is a disease may actually hinder people from deciding to behave better: they will instead wait for their medical savior, as Estragon waits for Godot. Whether this hope is justified or not, the pretense will certainly involve much public expense, just as would fitting out an expedition to discover unicorns somewhere in the world.

To treat addicts as people to whom something has happened rather than as people who have decided to do something is to infantilize them. It is another small step in the transformation of the population into wards of government.

A doctor in the comments section pushes back:

I understand the frustration with categorizing a choice-based malady with other conditions that seem to occur for now reason. But as a doctor, I see lots of people with diabetes, hypertension, or cancer that was caused by their choices.

Drug abuse and addiction are simply on the continuum of diseases, whether self-induced or otherwise. True, rheumatoid arthritis is good old-fashioned all-American disease, but drug abuse, while less pure, still encompasses all the standard attributes of disease. The issue is that due to neurochemical changes caused by the initial exposure to, say, methamphetamine, the victim may lose the ability for further decision making. Thus they induced an essentially incurable disease state in themselves. Calling it a disease helps when it comes to the science of studying it and trying to provide the afflicted with better tools to fight it.

Another commenter:

Dr. Dalrymple. I”ve read most of your books and many of you articles, and I agree with all of them except this one. When you see the destructive power of addiction among both rich and poor, educated and uneducated, and the powerlessness of otherwise intelligent people, it’s hard for me to understand how you view this as essentially a “will power” issue. You’re wildly off base. I’m very disappointed. This is a wholly unsupported thesis. No facts or numbers to justify your rash claim. Highly unusual for you.

But an addiction counselor agrees with Dalrymple:

I retired after spending 25 years counseling alcoholics and drug addicts. IMHO, advances in neuroscience show that there is definitely a physiological component to substance abuse. There are some people who just like doing drugs and alcohol and have no desire to quit, but they are a definite minority. There is a another definite minority who do quit and make it stick, they do not relapse. Then there is the large majority who want to quit but keep relapsing. Some of that may be that they are too lazy to follow a treatment regimen, but for most of these people the problem is that they come from family and social backgrounds that are not supportive of their efforts to stay clean and sober. And no medical intervention can cure laziness or a dysfunctional family/social environment. So government efforts to treat addiction like a physical disease are doomed to failure. But this will only be apparent much useless expenditure of the taxpayers’ hard earned money.

Previous Dish on addiction here and here.

Is “keeping the brand alive” bad for books? Esther Bintliff contemplates the pros and cons of literary franchises:

[M]ost of us like to think that writers create something unique, that characters belong to the authors who created them. We can feel cynical about the financial interests lined up behind literary franchises and spin-offs. Yet the phenomenon of characters outliving their authors has been around for a long time. The foundations of literature itself, after all, are in iterative storytelling. By the time Homer came to write The Iliad, “he was writing it for an audience that already knew the story,” says Marina Warner, professor of literature at the University of Essex. “So I think the actual stratagem [of franchises] is an ancient way of approaching stories; you have a rapport with your audience before you even start, you don’t have to establish the characters. And then, when you take a step that is unexpected or that springs a surprise, that can be very pleasurable for the audience.”

Warner points to the character of Odysseus as an ancient, untethered version of a modern franchise character like James Bond. “Odysseus turns up again and again, until he reaches a modern apotheosis in James Joyce’s Ulysses, as the common man. It’s a step that some characters take, like Frankenstein or the creature – they sort of walk out of the book and take on this extra dimension, that allows them to live on.” For Warner, whether a protagonist outlives their original author is not just a financial decision, but hinges on whether the character possess the qualities that allow them to resonate outside their own era.

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

The late James Merrill (1925-1995) was a supreme poet of childhood and a marvelous love poet, too. The essay about him on the Poetry Foundation’s website introduces him as “one of the leading poets of his generation”, “praised for his stylish elegance, moral sensibilities, and transformation of autobiographical moments into deep and complex meditations.” He was also a true gentleman and a dashing figure at poetry readings or the opera. This weekend we’ll be featuring his work, beginning with “A Renewal.”

“A Renewal” by James Merrill:

Having used every subterfuge
To shake you, lies, fatigue, or even that of passion,
Now I see no way but a clean break.
I add that I am willing to bear the guilt.

You nod assent. Autumn turns windy, huge,
A clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on.
We sit, watching. When I next speak
Love buries itself in me, up to the hilt.

(From Collected Poems © 2001 by The Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University.  Reprinted by kind permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Photo by Jonas Bengtsson)