Puck

Mary the Jewess or Maria Prophetissima or Miriam the Prophetess or – well, we don’t really know what her name was or when, exactly she lived, and so we call her any number of names, each according to her preference and ideology.

Mary was a chemist, avant le lettre, that is, she was an alchemist. She probably lived in the first century A.D. and probably in Alexandria, but may have thrived as early as the third century B.C. According to Wikipedia’s skimpy entry,

The most concrete mention of her name in the context of alchemy is by Zosimos of Panopolis, who wrote in the 4th century the oldest alchemy books known. The legendary Greek writer Ostanes mentions her as “the daughter of the king of Saba.” In the Alexander book (2d part) of the Persian poet Nezami, Maria, a Syrian princess, visits the court of Alexander the Great, and learns from Aristotle, among other things, the art of making gold. Whatever the epoch of Maria may have been, few doubt her existence.

Mary’s name is preserved in one of the names of the double boiler, well known to every cook: the bain-marie is used when a constant temperature is needed to heat a substance or when something needs to be heated gently. Hollandaise sauce, for instance, is just not possible without Mary’s invention. Read the rest of this entry »

The great folk singer and American Utah Phillips died in his sleep Friday night at the age of 73 in his home n Nevada City, Calif. He struggled with heart disease for a long time and, as Chris, a friend of his said,

Utah has caught the westbound, and I am at a great loss.”

Here’s a snip from the family’s obituary:

Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country. His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.

Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his “elders” with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.

“He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the ears,” said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksingerand close friend.

In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler.

Utah ended a letter to his friends at KVMR in Nevada City with these words:

The future? I don’t know. But I have songs in a folder I’ve never paid attention to, and songs inside me waiting for me to bring them out. Through all of it, up and down, it’s the song. It’s always been the song.

For more on Utah, his life, his music, including podcasts and videos, visit utahphillips.org.

I read Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles: The Strange Realm of Fungi, by Lucy Kavaler, which has been republished in the Authors Guild Back-in-Print series of notable books. I reviewed Mushrooms a while back, and said in part:

Originally published in 1965, Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles stands as a landmark in popular science writing. There had been field guides to fungi before her, but Kavaler’s book may be the first to broadly and popularly survey those life forms without which Gaia would have no groove.

When originally published, Kavaler’s Mushrooms was described as “fascinating” by Time magazine in a lead review, and as “superb” by the New Haven Register.

I asked Kavaler a few questions via email, about drug plants and using the Web to once again market her book. Here is her reply; the voice of the interviewer is interpolated by Kavaler. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Heloise & Abelard: A New Biography
by James Burge
Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006

For lovers, the story of Abelard and Heloise is a constant reminder that love is a dangerous thing, and that a couple is, as the old saw runs, “a nation of two.” You’d think that the example of Abelard and Heloise (just one of many examples of dangerous lovers and their dangerous loves) would keep couples on the straight and narrow; and maybe it does, but not without a certain frisson that keeps the story alive after 800 years.

To refresh your memory, recall that Abelard was the greatest philosopher of his day. He hailed from Brittany and went to Paris around 1100, ostensibly to teach, but really to argue. If, as the popular imagination has it, Heloise had a body made for love (which, by contemporary accounts, she did), Abelard’s was made for arguing. He was short but wiry, as sinuous as his famed rhetoric. As James Burge demonstrates in his superb biography of a love affair, Abelard quickly conquered his foes in medieval logic and established himself as the philosopher du jour. For a while, he was in the camp of the politically empowered, and it was doing this period that he met Heloise. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

The King, the Crook, and the Gambler: The True Story of the South Sea Bubble and the Greatest Financial Scandal in History
by Malcolm Balen
Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2004

Nearly 300 years ago, a group of financial speculators dreamed up a plan to make money from England’s national debt. In an age when someone making £100 a year was considered wealthy, the national debt was huge: about £9 million. The idea behind the South Sea Company was that British merchants would trade English goods in South America, then controlled by Spain and Portugal. The problem was that Spain and Portugal wouldn’t allow any such thing to happen: they had a strictly controlled monopoly. What actually happened was that John Blunt, the director of the South Sea Company, ended up convincing the British government to sell its debt to the public through the Company in the form of shares. From the profits of the share sales, the Company would then repay the debt. Moreover, “in the persuasive but intrinsically nonsensical analysis” put forward by the South Sea Company, “as surely as night follows day, the bigger the debt, the greater the profit.” Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land
John Crowley
William Morrow, 2005

Here’s what we know. In June of 1816, Lord Byron, John Polidori (Byron’s personal physician), Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) and Claire Claremont all gathered at Byron’s place on the shore of Lake Geneva, Villa Diodati. 1816 was a “year without a summer” because the year before a huge volcanic eruption had sheathed the planet in a blanket of sun-blocking dust. On what must have been one of many dark and stormy nights that summer, the above-named crew sat around a fire and told stories. (See Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic for a wonderfully kinky version of the story of that famous night.) It was so much bone-chilling fun that young Mary (she was not quite nineteen at the time) suggested that they all write supernatural stories. And all agreed.

What followed is history: Mary wrote Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus, the grandmother of all science fiction novels. The rest of the Diodati gang went on to fame or obscurity, as the case may be, but none followed up on Mary’s challenge. Or did they? Polidori, in fact, wrote a short novel called The Vampyre, generally credited with being the first tale of blood-sucking in English. But there’s a controversial line of evidence that strongly indicates that Polidori, more than a bit of a blood-sucking sycophant, stole the idea and plot of The Vampyre from Byron. There’s a scrap of a prose manuscript by Byron on that subject, and it seems likely that Byron, before he told Polidori to hit the road, conveyed to his doctor, in great detail, the nitty-gritty of the vampire tale. So Polidori’s novel, this line of reasoning goes, is really “Lord Byron’s novel.” Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Borges: A Life
by Edwin Williamson
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinean writer, led a fascinatingly diverse life almost entirely within the city limits of Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires was, in the early twentieth century, one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities on the planet, and so it is fair to say that Borges experienced numerous worlds without needing to leave home. Born in 1899, he was bilingual from the first, as his grandmother was British. His parents were in conflict over Argentinean politics, which perhaps influenced Borges’ seeming non-partisanship in his writing.

Indeed, if there is a problem with Williamson’s Life, it is the reduction of Borges’ life, character and work to this conflict between his parents. Williamson frequently tries to psychoanalyze the life and work in terms of this conflict and, as far as it goes, this provides insight. But did his parents really shape Borges’ entire life? The evidence provided by Williamson himself indicates otherwise. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
by Michale Houellebecq
Publisher: McSweeny’s, 2005

French bad-boy novelist Michel Houellebecq (pronounced well-beck) is famous for his Platform and Elementary Particles, books stuffed with depressing, depressed and amoral characters who love to sexually humiliate each other. Houellebecq has been accused of writing misogynistic narratives, but you’d have to have tunnel vision to see them that way: Houellebecq doesn’t just hate women, he hates the entire human race. Houellebecq is, in other words, an misanthropic existentialist’s dream date.

Houellebecq’s dream date, in turn, is H.P. Lovecraft. If Houellebecq is the international star of a new wave of illiberal misanthropism, Lovecraft (1890 – 1937) is the pater familias of that wave. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Dante in Love: The World’s Greatest Poem and How It Made History
by Harriet Rubin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2004

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is arguably the greatest poem written in any language, ever. Harriet Rubin has written a wonderfully passionate account of the back-story of La Divina Comedia: how it came to be written and the world Dante wrote it in. Indeed, the book is passionate to the point of devolving into emotional mayhem.

Alighieri was a minor Florentine politician who ended up on the wrong side of Roman papal power in 1302. For the purpose of staying alive, he went, in essence, into hiding. It is no coincidence that the Divine Comedy is the story of an exile in Hell, and that it is full of political intrigue and revenge. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

De Kooning: An American Master
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Knopf, 2004

Willem de Kooning painted big canvases that reflected the way he lived: large. He juggled up to five love affairs at one time (and kept them all secret from each other and his wife, Elaine, with a variety of code door knocks), out-painted his rivals, such as Jackson Pollock, and was perhaps only happy drunk and asleep in a gutter. It was there, to riff on Wilde, that he saw the stars. De Kooning was the bohemian: part artist, part intellectual, part alcoholic playboy and pure adventuresome genius.

He was born in Rotterdam in 1904, and stowed away to the U.S. in the mid-twenties. He was already a master draughtsman, and went to work in New York as a commercial artist and window dresser. He made a pretty good living that way. In the 1930s, though, he abandoned commercial art in favor of the more dangerous path: “pure” art. De Kooning quit his jobs at the height of the Depression and just in time to help formulate a major wave in American (and world) painting: Abstract Expressionism. Read the rest of this entry »