Drunk--some with wine, others with words

In Man and Superman, Bernard Shaw portrays John Tanner as a man drunk with words. In Iraq we describe a drunken man as dringa. I am drunk with biography. There are now biographies, not only of people but of things: there is a book titled LONDON: THE BIOGRAPHY and another titled THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. Lately I read biographies of Stalin, Mussolini and Rasputin. Yea, I adore naughty people's biographies. Right now I'm reading biography of Billie Holiday, singer, nigger, junkie, small-time prostitute, gaol inmate and what-not, but personally humane, nice, sincere, intimate and what-not. This is not only Billie's biography but the biography of an entitre era, the 1920s-1950s, the jazz and blues golden era in Harlem where friends gathered in house-parties to drink punch amidst heart-to-heart conversation of an excited crowd talking, laughing, telling jokes and anecdotes and every now and then there is someone, often Billie, to sing to the accompaniment of trumpet, drum and piano, and late at night to sit down in a merry spirit and eager stomach to eat ox knuckles, lamb feet and pig heads, counterpart of our Iraqi pacha