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WRITERS AND THEIR CAFÉS

coffee-break-1454539196ejwWRITERS AND CAFÉS go together like coffee and a biscotto. Perhaps the connection started in the place where coffee houses first evolved, Ottoman Turkey. There it is said the men met over small, sweet cups of Turkish coffee to socialize and entertain one another with backgammon and poetry.

Later, when coffee came to Europe, the Viennese cafès were de facto office sites of many well-known writers. The Austrian journalist, Alfred Polgar (1873-1955), admired for his witt at Vienna’s Café Central, wrote that coffee houses were “a place where people want to be alone, but need company to do so.” Maybe writers needed the noise and the caffeine to keep up the will and energy to face one white page after another.

CAFÈ CENTRAL, Vienna

Boris Vian (1920-1959), the French polymath (his abiiities included writing and poetry) claimed that “if there had not been any cafés, there would have been no Jean-Paul Sartre.” That’s an exaggeration of course, but one with which we might agree makes its point. I’ve read that Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir hung-out in Paris at Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore. The former was also a favorite of Rimbaud.

We are told that Pushkin found courage in coffee – not alcohol – before his last and fatal duel in 1837 at The Literary Café in St. Petersburg. Byron, Casanova and Henry James had their favorite coffee houses in Vienna. Lorca met Dalí at the Cafe de Oriente in Madrid, and Kafka worked on Metamorphosis at the Café Stefan in Prague. Oscar Wilde was famous in coffee houses throughout Europe, though perhaps not for having pen in hand.

HEMINGWAY, HADLEY and Friends, American Ex-pats in Paris

The connection between writers and coffee houses was well established by the time the lost generation was meeting in Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway wrote about Cafe La Rotonde and Le Dome Cafe in The Sun Also Rises. He also frequented the Dingo Bar along with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Djuna Barnes.

The Pedrocchi Cafè  (1831) in Padua, like many of the old coffee houses, is still in operation and is one of the world’s largest. It was Stendhal’s home-away-from-home …

… and so the affinity continues into recent times. The Elephant House in Edinburg is the “birth place of Harry Potter.”

THE ELEPHANT HOUSE, Edinburg, “the birthplace of Harry Potter”

Photo credits ~ Header photograph courtesy of Keven Phillips, Public Domain Pictures.net. Next photo courtesy of morgueFile. Cafè Central and Hemingway and Friends are in the public domain and via Wikipedia. The Elephant House Cafè is courtesy of Nicolai Schäfer licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license via Wikipedia.

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Wanted: A simple cuppa joe priced right for “starving” poets and writers

morning-coffeeStarbucks says they are going to start putting religious quotes on cups. The very first one will say, ‘Jesus! This cup is expensive!’ Conan O’Brian 

… and if it seems expensive to well-paid television personality, O’Brian, imagine what it seems to poor poets and writers.

I stopped with a friend at a Starbuck’s for a quick fix the other day. She is elderly and normally goes to her little neighborhood café – a cozy one-shop family-owned affair – to write. She’s not familiar with the big commercial chains, so it’s not surprising that her conversation with the young barista went something like this:

Friend: “I’ll have a small coffee.”

Barista: “You’ll have a tall coffee.”

Friend: “No. I just want a small coffee.”

Barista: “Oh, yes. A tall coffee is a small coffee.”

Friend: looking a bit cross-eyed, “Ah, okay.”

Barista: “Miss, will that be a decaf.” (It was almost four in the afternoon.)

Friend: “No thank you! I just want a small black coffee.”

Barista: “Okay, a tall regular coffee, no room.”

Wow! I think it took me less time and effort to negotiate the payment on my first house and my friend’s order didn’t even get into the challenges of flavored coffee drinks: “I’ll have a small – no make that a tall – decaf mocha with whipped cream – make that a nonfat, decaf mocha with whipped cream – no hold the whipped cream … do you have soy? – I’ll have a soy decaf mocha with whipped cream. Small. No! I mean tall. Make it iced. Oh, wait a minute. Is your soy gluten-free? I better not take a chance. I’ll have a tall, iced nonfat mocha without whipped cream.Thanks! How much? An arm and a leg! Okay, and here’s my right eye for a tip. Good job! Thank you.” It’s all a bit of a jolt: java jive talk included.

When I finished writing this, I was suddenly compelled to look up the American expression “coppa joe,” which I associate with World War II. Here’s what Wikipedia says of it’s uncertain origin:

  • Possibly a shortening of “cup of jamoke“, from Java + Mocha: this origin was given in a military officer’s manual from 1931, around when the term first appeared.
  • Alternatively, perhaps a use of joe ‎(“fellow, guy”), signifying that coffee was the drink of the common man.
  • Another theory suggests that US soldiers in World War I (1914-1918) referred to a serving of instant coffee made by the G. Washington Coffee Refining Company(founded in 1910) as a “cup of George”, and that the common abbreviation of the name “George” (“Geo.”) was then read as “Joe”.
  • Another theory derives the term from Josephus Daniels (1862-1948), the Secretary of the U.S. Navy who abolished the officers’ wine mess and thus made coffee the strongest drink available on ships. Snopes considers this is unlikely because it says there is no attestation of the phrase “cup of joe” until 1930, 16 years after the 1914 order banning the wine mess.Confusingly, some other sources consider the Daniels derivation unlikely for the opposite reason: they say “cup of joe” predates the order.

© 2015, words, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; photograph courtesy of George Hodan, Public Domain Pictures.net