Folk Stories of Belize: the Magical Powers of Jade

The infamous Jade Head of Belize, considered a national treasure.
Photo courtesy of Ambergris Today.

by douglas reeser on April 11, 2013
In Belize, folk stories abound, both as a means to share lessons, and a medium through which to share history. Folk stories come from a time when culture and history was primarily shared through oral traditions, and are best when they come in the form of the spoken word. Even today, at a time when literacy rates are high in Belize, and nearly everyone except some elders can read and write, folk stories are a means through which tales are told, and connections are made.

One of my favorite folk stories in Belize was told to me while on a hike to some sacred caves outside of a small Maya village where I have done research and have a number of friends. Our party consisted of me, another researcher from Canada, and two Q'eqchi' Maya men in their early 30s, Timoteo, the son of a respected traditional healer, and Pablo, a partner of the local traditional healer's garden, who knew the trails through the bush with an intimacy lacking in the rest of us (the names are aliases). The day was perfect for a hike through the bush - sunny, but not too hot (for Belize anyway!), which made the trails fairly dry, and the walk under the canopy pleasant. When we reached the caves, the stories began.

Consuming Black History: Washington, the Harlem Renaissance, and Black Media

The inaugural issue of The Crisis, 1910

Consumption Junction
by lana lynne on February 22, 2013

Since the 1920s, February (all or part of) has been designated as Black History Month. Each year, this designation rekindles a debate about the necessity of singling out a month to celebrate or acknowledge historically significant African-Americans. Instead of segregating black history, many argue, aren’t history lessons integrated all year long anyway? Isn’t it time to move on? Others believe that such views are shaded by short-sighted idealism, and that Black History Month remains an important placeholder in the long history of race in the U.S.

February also marks the passing of Presidents’ Day, a holiday celebrating the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. Both fit nicely in the context of Black History Month. The former, obviously, for bringing an end to slavery in the U.S., and the latter for signing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which laid out the legal means by which slaveowners could recover their escaped slaves. In Philadelphia, Washington’s dichotomous celebrity in U.S. history is on display at the Presidents’ House, an outdoor museum of the first “White House,” where Washington lived when Philadelphia was capital of the country immediately following the Revolutionary War. Dividing his time between Philly and Mount Vernon, he shuttled his slaves between his two homesteads, effectively skirting the laws which would have required him to free his slaves if they resided in the same state for six months. Today’s Presidents’ House places this element of U.S. history front and center – integrating the consumption of African-American history with so-called mainstream history.

Forced to Work: U.S. Prisons and the New Forced-Labor Camps

~ "Made on the inside to be worn on the outside" ~
"Prison Blues" work jeans made by inmates in
Oregon. Photo from American Ground  

by douglas reeser on January 30, 2013
Sometimes it takes just a slight shift of perspective to reveal the insidiousness of certain practices of the capitalist regime. Over the last 30 years or so, outsourcing of all types of jobs, from service to production, has enabled increased profits at the cost of worker exploitation in places outside of the major regions of consumption. As the continued globalization of the corporate production machine has taken root, so too have fair trade and other worker's-rights movements, that have aimed to fight the exploitation of workers around the globe. These actions are beginning to force corporations to seek new outlets of cheap labor, which has led to a turn back to the center: the ever-growing U.S. prison population.

In the past, prison labor was touted as a means of reforming inmates, and providing them with a skill that would aid in their re-integration with society. Today, prison labor is something much different. It's now a source of incredibly inexpensive, highly controllable labor. Prison labor shows up to work on time, receives no benefits, overtime, or other perks, cannot organize, and is rarely paid even minimum wage. If a prisoner refuses these terms, they are reportedly locked up in solitary. A report from Global Research, a Canada-based globalization research center, has begun to frame this "insourcing" of jobs in way that reveals just how underhanded this development in labor practice is.

First a little prison population background is in order. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in 2011, there were about 1.6 million total prisoners in state and federal prisons in the US. Of those, 1.4 million are male, and almost 1 million are black or hispanic (about 63% of the total prison population). Prisoners in private prisons represent a relatively small fraction of the total number of total prisoners (about 130,000 in 2010), but the privatization of prisons is one of the fastest growing industries in the U.S. All of these prisoners combine to represent around 25% of the world's prisoners, and more than any other country, including China and India, which have 4-5 times the total population of the US.

Corporate Crime Comics

Corporate Crime Comics, 1977, front cover

by douglas reeser on October 24, 2012

"Corporate crime... Corporate crime... I could be robbed or poisoned by corporate criminals and never know it until I read about it in the papers... or maybe never know!"

And so begins Issue #1 of the 1977 publication "Corporate Crime Comics" (CCC) by the Kitchen Sink Press - the first of only two issues. From an era before personal computers, smart phones, and tablets, Corporate Crime Comics is a great example of the creative efforts of activists from the time who sought to get their message out in a way that may grab the attention of a youth-oriented readership. Issue #1 includes around 15 stories of varying length and quality that touch on controversial, unethical, and quasi-legal or illegal corporate (and government) actions, all of which have fairly dire human consequences.

The issue opens with the story of Karen Silkwood, a lab technician who worked for the Texan oil company of Kerr-McGee, which at the time was the largest producer of atomic fuel in the US. Silkwood had become active in unionizing and worker's rights, and had reportedly secured incriminating documents on the company, only to lose the documents - along with her life - in a suspicious car crash. This story was turned into the film "Silkwood" starring Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell and Cher in 1983.

Consumption Junction :: Speaking with Ghosts: Literature in a Culture of Me

Image courtesy of digitaltrends.com

by Lana Lynne on September 17, 2012
My copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, bought for a pretty penny for a freshman English class I don’t remember, is littered with half-formed thoughts jotted in the margins. At first, I only used pencil for these little notes – thinking that my take on something written anywhere from 50 to 300 years ago clearly did not qualify as canonical as what was printed. In grad school, my thinking must have changed, because when I cracked open the Anthology again (instead of buying another copy of the assigned T.S. Eliot’s "The Wasteland"), my comments were written in pen. At that point, I must have figured, my thoughts qualified for more permanency. I was more confident that what I had to say about Eliot’s poem would not cause fits of hysterical laughter from someone who might be reading over my shoulder.

This fall marks the 50th anniversary of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and in an interview in the New York Times, founding editor M.H. Abrams and current editor Steven Greenblatt celebrate the joys of a life enriched by literature. When asked the question, "Why study literature?," they both wax poetic. For Abrams: "Ha — Why live? Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable." And for Greenblatt: "Literature is the most astonishing technological means that humans have created, and now practiced for thousands of years, to capture experience. For me the thrill of literature involves entering into the life worlds of others. I’m from a particular, constricted place in time, and I suddenly am part of a huge world — other times, other places, other inner lives that I otherwise would have no access to." What they both get at, but don’t say, is that literature helps us think critically. By expanding your worldview, or by traveling to the past, or by living other people’s lives for awhile, our brains are exercised in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise be. Our little comments in the margins, no matter how obvious or insignificant or ground-breaking, for that matter, are evidence that we are thinking in new ways. 

The Veins Run North: Galeano Revisited

The lion on the cover of Open Veins, taken from a carving
of the Knat, the Lion and the Spiderweb from Aesop's Fables.
All the great lion could do was scratch himself while trying to
get the knat. But that knat got caught in a spiderweb!

Shared by douglas reeser on August 19, 2012

I first read Eduardo Galeano's "the Open Veins of Latin America" during the summer of 2011. After reading, I shared one aspect of my reaction here on Recycled Minds (which you can read here). I touched briefly on the issue of mineral extraction and how little has changed since Galeano first published the book in 1971. I finished the short piece with: "Galeano’s work is an interesting and engaging piece of scholarship that begs for an updated edition. If you are interested in an understanding of Latin American history and international relations, this is a must read." Such remains true, and what follows is not a complete update, but a poignant reflection on why Galeano's writing remains so relevant to us today, and it may be especially interesting for our readers in the US. We would like to thank George Dardess, the author of this update, for freely sharing his work.

An Ironic Updating of Eduardo Galeano's "The Open Veins of Latin America" 
by George Dardess

Uruguyan writer Eduardo Galeano's 1971 classic, The Open Veins of Latin America reentered the spotlight a couple of years ago when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave a copy to the then newly elected Barak Obama. Whether Obama read the book isn't known, but he should have, and so should we all. Or if we've read it before, we should read it again.

The Collapse of the Maya, the Collapse of Today?

Collapsing Architecture at the Mayan site of Lubaantun - "the Place of Fallen Stones" - in southern Belize. What can
we glean from the ancient Maya experience?
Photo courtesy of douglas reeser.

by douglas reeser on March 22, 2012
The more we learn about the ancient Maya, the more it seems that we should be heeding these lessons learned. Environmental changes and (maybe) catastrophes have long been blamed for the contraction of the Maya civilization. More recently, a series of rather modest droughts have been identified as occurring at the same time as people left the great Maya cities. National Geographic has a new (from early March 2012) article by Charles Fishman summarizing the latest data and draws some interesting connections to our own time. After explaining that the advanced water systems of the Maya were ill-prepared for a sustained reduction in rainfall, Fishman concludes about our present day water-knowldege: 

"Our water assumptions are just that: assumptions. We should be building municipal water cultures that have flexibility, multiple sources, the ability to re-use water, the ability to conserve. Real strategic thinking about water isn’t about a new water treatment plant, or a plan to replace aging water mains. It’s about knowing what you’ll do if you’re suddenly faced with a 10 or 20 percent loss of available water, permanently."

Changes in environmental activity are not the only factor being equated with the contraction of the Maya empire. A report in LiveScience by Charles Choi discusses new thoughts that equate the structure of the Maya culture itself with it's own downfall. 

"Archaeologists have pointed out that ancient Mayan societies may have been vulnerable to collapse by their very nature. They apparently funneled wealth to a small ruling elite topped by hereditary divine kings, who had virtually unlimited power but whose subjects expected generosity — a string of military defeats or seasonal droughts could greatly damage their credibility."

Things in the US and elsewhere are pointing in a surprisingly similar direction. A look at the highly religious and very rich Republican Party candidates for president has that country in the precarious position of becoming a Christian State - if it's not already. Further, as has been shown in previous columns here, the wealth of the planet is currently being funneled into fewer and fewer hands. This has not led to a wealthy ruling religious elite in the West, but such a system exists throughout the Middle East, and the wealthy certainly hold power the world over. And don't forget about the ground-up protests in Europe, the Middle East, and the US, a result of growing discontent with the powers that be.

So does this sound familiar? A great society has arisen with advanced science and engineering that has allowed for large, wealthy and concentrated populations. The wealth created by this successful system, however, continues to be concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. That wealthy minority holds power. The majority of the population becomes discontented with the power elite. Drastic culture change results.... Is this our future? Is this our now?

Consumption Junction: "A Word to the Wives"

by lana lynne on March 10, 2012
Check out this promotional video from a 1955 home construction company, a perfect portrait of advertisers' sale of the American Dream in which two friends cook up a scheme to convince the one woman's husband to buy her a new house with a modern kitchen. The plot involves the husband spending an enlightening two and half days trying to keep house with outdated appliances and a long trip to the trash can, and, in this case, the best laid plans of Mrs. Consumer fall right into place. One of the most interesting parts arises in the assertion of a fifth freedom, following from Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous four freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship God, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The savvy friend with the enviable kitchen calls for "freedom from unnecessary drudgery, freedom to go shopping when the urge hits you...or when there's a sale going on."

To Spell or Not to Spell: The Standardized Spelling Debate

1609 edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets

by lana lynne on March 4, 2012
You've probably seen the word game that tests your ability to read words with transposed letters: the senetnce wolud raed somehting lkie tihs. And you probably have no problem deciphering abbreviated text-speak, which often makes it into students' papers, adults' emails, and social networking updates of any age: imo ur gr8! lol! rofl! thnx! etc, etc.

Some people would say that the digital age hath condemned correct spelling (not to mention punctuation) to the tumbrils, that in the age of auto-correct mobile phones and auto-finish internet searches, such antiquated rules must be let go. Take, for instance, the spelling showdown in Wired Magazine a few weeks ago. Anne Trubek, a professor at Oberlin College, wrote a piece calling for the abolition of standardized spelling, to which Lee Simmons of Wired's copydesk responded with an equally thought-provoking piece picking apart Trubek's argument.

As a self-professed word junky, I most often come down squarely against arguments like Trubek's. Her premise is this: "English spelling is a terrible mess anyway, full of arbitrary contrivances and exceptions that outnumber rules. Why receipt but deceit? Water but daughter? Daughter but laughter? What is the logic behind the ough in through, dough, and cough? Instead of trying to get the letters right with imperfect tools, it would be far better to loosen our idea of correct spelling." She points out that others throughout history have advocated for more sensible spelling rules than the ones that govern English, and that the evolution of language should be embraced, such as losing the apostrophe and the "e" in you're because the recipient will understand you anyway. Any last-gasp effort to keep language static is just snobbery.

Trubek's carefree approach is somewhat exhilarating -- I can see the appeal of throwing caution to the wind for free-form spelling. And that's coming from a native-English speaker. I can't imagine how students of English as a second language would be overjoyed -- until they tried to read a text written by a Texan versus something written by a Pennsylvanian. Did they use a "pen" or a "pin" to write?

In Simmons' rebuttal to Trubek, he allows for some wiggle-room among friends: "if you want to chat in leetspeak or use cutesy abbreviations in your texts, go crazy. You’re talking to your own tribe; they know the code, and they’re willing to indulge your affectations. And let’s be honest: A lot of that intentional misspelling, like the argot of any subculture, is meant to exclude outsiders—such as nosy parents. It’s a badge of membership in your little clique." But Simmons convincingly argues that professional news sites, governmental policies and the like, as well as all communications outside your clique need to be written with standardized spelling to avoid the potential pitfalls of playing with language. "How would contracts be enforced," asks Simmons, "if anyone could say that what appeared to be a promise of 'delivery' was actually a variant spelling of 'devilry'"?

Yes, the English major in me holds me back from willy-nilly spelling -- it was the discipline that taught me the wonder of word origins, the nuances of word meanings, the linguistics of dialects, and forced me to spend hours reading old books written when English spelling wasn't standardized. Is that an effort we really want to resurrect on a daily basis?

"What Branches Grow out of this Stony Rubbish": Urban Exploration from Antiquity to the Present

by lana lynne on February 22, 2012
Last night, I attended a lecture by Thaddeus Squire, one of the founders of the non-profit arts organization Hidden City Philadelphia, at the University of the Arts Design Lecture Series, "Visibly Invisible." Squire gave a brief overview of the romantic explorer with an eye toward modern-day urban exploration, and showed how that trajectory has informed the mission of Hidden City, which is, in its condensed form, to "(re)connect people to place, and place to city" by marrying 19th century Philly "ruins" with art installations.

From the Hidden City website, a photograph of the artist
installation at Founders Hall at Girard College

One of the overall themes of the lecture was the idea of exploring the past for the possibilities of the future, and Squire took us on a tour through history to trace this idea, starting in antiquity with Plato's Atlantis as a place where knowledge resided, up through the centuries to 18th century Italian artist Piranesi and his "prison fantasies," to the more well-known 19th and 20th century romantic explorers like Lewis and Clark, Joseph Rock, and Hiram Bingham. Today, Squire pointed out, we see the contemporary expressions of this long line of exploration in such pop culture icons as Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, and in the fine arts with "ruin porn" photography.

From my own suburban exploration of the abandoned
Pennhurst State School & Hospital (photo by K. Margitich)

Squire's discussion about ruin porn vis-a-vis Hidden City's mission felt a little like I was stepping into the story in medias res, but a few quick searches post-lecture gave me a clearer picture of how the two fit together. From a recent article in The Guardian, we can see how the attraction to abandoned and decaying buildings has a long artistic and literary tradition (take The Waste Land for example), but the appeal always seems to have a fatalistic aspect to it -- that no matter how grand the promises of the future, the present past reminds us of their inevitable failure. In contrast, Squire insisted on casting ruin porn in a more positive light to fertilize the future: "Not loss, not nostalgia, not past, but the possible future."

Although the past is not their primary focus, I can't help feeling that history has a place at the table of present and future. These ruins of modernity are themselves forcing a conversation about what events transpired there, whose lives crossed paths there, and how these stories are connected to the present.

To learn about next year's festival and to check out their daily newspaper, click here.

Minerals, Oil and the (Still) Open Veins of Latin America

Drawing from the cover of "Open Veins of
Latin America" by Eduardo Galeano.
Image courtesy of henryjacksonsociety.org

by douglas reeser on September 28, 2011
Written in 1971 (the English version came out in 1973), Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America offered a glaring critique of the relationships between Latin American countries and the world powers of Europe and the United States. It remains a moving account of the historical roots of the relative underdevelopment and poverty that persists throughout the region. While much of the book is thought provoking, I thought I would share a short excerpt that describes oil and mineral extraction. Galeano opens the third chapter with this discussion (and keep in mind that this was written 40 years ago!):

“Petroleum continues to be our world’s chief fuel, and the United States imports one-seventh of the petroleum it consumes. Bullets are needed to kill Vietnamese, and bullets need copper: the United States buys abroad one-fifth of the copper it uses. Shortages of zinc cause increasing anxiety: over half comes from abroad. Planes cannot be built without aluminum, and aluminum cannot be produced without bauxite: the United States has almost no bauxite. Its great steel centers – Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit – do not get enough iron from the Minnesota deposits, which are on the way to exhaustion, and there is no manganese within the United States: one-third of its iron and all of its manganese are imported. Nor has it any nickel or chrome of its own to produce jet engines. Tungsten is needed to make special steels and one-fourth of that is imported.”

“This growing dependence on foreign supplies produces the growing identification of the interests of U.S. capitalists operating in Latin America with U.S. national security. The internal stability of the world’s greatest power is closely linked with its investments south of the Rio Grande. About half of those investments are in the extraction of petroleum and minerals, indispensable for the U.S. economy in peace and war.”

Today, the "great steel centers" are largely inactive, military expenditures will exceed $700 billion in 2011 (according to this Time article) and the reliance on resources from outside of the U.S. is as great as ever. I did a little digging, and found a document from the Mineral Information Institute that cites a 2011 report from the U.S. Geological Survey showing U.S mineral imports in 2010. Imports of most of the minerals mentioned above have gone up since the time of Galeano's writing (by percentage consumed): copper from 20% to 30%; zinc from 50+% to 77%; and 100% of bauxite and manganese. We also know that today the U.S. is going to extreme lengths to secure access to oil outside of its borders. In other words, not much has changed in 40 years, and it may be argued that the issues that Galeano raised in 1971 have continued and even worsened over time.

With the constant barrage of news and information, I think people tend to view many of the problems we face in the world as new and unique to our time in history. In fact, the sheer amount of new information serves to obscure history. Revisiting our history reveals that we have known about and discussed the issues that continue to plague us today. Galeano’s work is an interesting and engaging piece of scholarship that begs for an updated edition. If you are interested in an understanding of Latin American history and international relations, this is a must read. 

Consumption Junction: Women in the Workforce

1941 (Library of Congress)

by lana lynne on September 15, 2011

In the early 1700s, at the dawn of the commercial marketplace, author Eliza Haywood published her first novel, Love In Excess, to great critical and mass acclaim, earning it equal billing with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Caruso as one of the most popular novels of the early eighteenth century. The novel was a somewhat racy exploration of women's private and public lives. Not much biographical information is known about Haywood, other than that she wrote professionally and acted in the theater to support her two children.

In the mid-1800s, writer Fanny Fern, a contemporary of (and more financially successful than) Herman Melville, published her semi-autobiographical novel Ruth Hall, which delved into a woman writer's negotiation of the publishing industry and her marriage and family. Ruth Hall was a smash hit with readers (although a bit less so with literary critics, who couldn't understand why a woman would write such a scathing piece on the marketplace and marriage).

In the early 1900s, two of the most popular writers of the time, Edna Ferber and Fannie Hurst, explored similar themes -- women's need to balance the marketplace or the workforce with family life. In some cases, women's foray into the workforce was met with treacherous consequences (i.e. loss of husband/relationship to children); in other cases, female protagonists balanced the two brilliantly. Biographically, Ferber never married, nor engaged in any romantic relationships at all, as far as anyone knew, and Hurst raised eyebrows with her separate living arrangement with her husband.

What this brief look back through literary history can show us is how women (and men!) have always been concerned with the gender politics of the work force. Hundreds of years ago, these professional women writers were trying to figure out how to balance career and family. This is not to say that today's concerns about these same issues should be dismissed, but rather that the struggle has a long history, one which gives a more nuanced perspective to today's critique of gender and class problems in the workplace and job market.

In a recent interview with Guernica Magazine, historian Stephanie Coontz talks about gender inequality and class disparity in the job market from the Depression to the present. One of the most interesting aspects of her discussion, to me, was the situation of women after World War II and how it compares to today's situation.

"...as the postwar economy expanded, many government and business leaders began to believe that women workers were needed to fill shortages in the service sectors of the economy. So there was a campaign to get wives to rejoin the labor force after their children had reached a certain age. Of course this was not done for the sake of women’s emancipation, but from the need for a lower-paid, non-union segment of the labor force that could more easily be hired and fired or mobilized as part-time workers.

"So there were these contradictory messages for women. You weren’t supposed to compete with men, and you were supposed to stay home when your children were young. But then you were supposed to stop being a “parasite” and go get a part-time or low-paid job that would contribute to the gross national product and our ability to out-produce the Soviet Union. But you shouldn’t get a job that paid enough to threaten your husband’s identity as the primary breadwinner or interested you enough to compete with your total absorption in your role as wife and mother. Advice books in the 1950s and 1960s actually said this!

"There are equally contradictory messages today. Now middle-class women are encouraged to enter the rewarding and challenging careers that used to be reserved for men. But once they have children—which is typically just as their careers are hitting their strides—there is still a tremendous sense that becoming a full-time mother is the way to go. So there is all this social approval of career women “opting out.” But low-income women—the ones whose jobs make it much harder to combine motherhood with full-time employment—are now the ones considered parasites if they try to stay home with their kids. Instead they are pressured to find jobs, any jobs, no matter how ill paid or how long the commute and the work hours. Middle-class children are thought to 'deserve' full-time mothers in the home; poor children are not. And at the same time many conservative legislators are pushing to restrict the ability of women, especially low-income women, to control when and if they have children."

Coontz's critical comparison shows how men and women's struggle with gender roles has been perpetuated into late capitalism. Moreover, it shows how class stereotypes and political propaganda now serves to reinforce this same struggle that has been experienced throughout the history of the commercial marketplace.

Read Coontz's entire interview here.

Consumption Junction: "Home Brew'd is Best"

~ hops! ~ 

by lana lynne on 4.5.11

Rumor has it that the clumsy, unwelcome feet of corporate colonization has just marched across the Discovery Channel to oust the show "Brew Masters." Evidently, the Beer and Whiskey Brothers have it on good authority that Big Beer threatened to pull their advertising from the network if "Brewmasters" wasn't given the boot. Whether the truth comes to light remains to be seen, but I can't help but wonder what the U.S.'s beer-loving forefathers would think of such paranoia.

In the course of unrelated research on the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, PA, two glimpses into the country's brewing past were unearthed. From the book The Buried Past comes the story of a grand parade in 1788 staged to honor the U.S. Constitution. A league of brewers, led by Germantown brewer Reuben Haines, "marched with 'ears of barley in their hats, and sashes of hop vines, carrying malt shovels and mashing oars [and] a standard...decorated with the brewers arms and the motto,...'Home brew'd is best.'"

And from the 19th century gardening notes of early-urban-farmer Charles Wister Sr., whose summer house was located in Germantown, comes two homebrew recipes:

Molasses Beer
10 bottles of water
1 bottle of ale
1 pint of molasses.
Mix and place in wooden barrel.

Fred Brown's Ginger Beer
4 oz. of brused ginger
1 oz. of cream of tarter
Juice & rind of 2 lemons
5 lbs of loaf sugar
Put the above in a yellow jar, and pour 5 gallons of water on it. Let stand 12 hours.
Decant the liquid and add 1 pt. of good ale or port.
Put in bottles with cork and lay down.
In two or three days it will be fit to drink.

Enjoy!