Read Allen Ginsberg’s Poignant Final Poem “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias)”

in Life, Poetry | January 24th, 2014

Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997. Less than a week before, after the long terminally ill poet had made parting phone calls to nearly everyone in his address book, he wrote the poem above, “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias).” He once called all his work extended biography, and we might call this particular work a piece of biography extended into speculation, comprising all the places (Tibet, Morocco, Los Angeles), people (composer Philip Glass, noted Tangier expat Paul Bowles, his own relatives), and things (attending concerts, teaching students, smoking various substances) he knew he would never experience again, or indeed for the first time — items left over, in short, from what we might now call Ginsberg’s bucket list. The transcript runs as follows:

Never go to Bulgaria, had a booklet & invitation
Same Albania, invited last year, privately by Lottery scammers or
recovering alcoholics,
Or enlightened poets of the antique land of Hades Gates
Nor visit Lhasa live in Hilton or Ngawang Gelek’s household & weary
ascend Potala
Nor ever return to Kashi “oldest continuously habited city in the world”
bathe in Ganges & sit again at Manikarnika ghat with Peter,
visit Lord Jagganath again in Puri, never back to Bibhum take
notes tales of Khaki B Baba
Or hear music festivals in Madras with Philip
Or enter to have Chai with older Sunil & Young coffeeshop poets,
Tie my head on a block in the Chinatown opium den, pass by Moslem
Hotel, its rooftop Tinsmith Street Choudui Chowh Nimtallah
Burning ground nor smoke ganja on the Hooghly
Nor the alleyways of Achmed’s Fez, nevermore drink mint tea at Soco
Chico, visit Paul B. in Tangiers
Or see the Sphinx in Desert at Sunrise or sunset, morn & dusk in the
desert
Ancient sollapsed Beirut, sad bombed Babylon & Ur of old, Syria’s
grim mysteries all Araby & Saudi Deserts, Yemen’s sprightly
folk,
Old opium tribal Afghanistan, Tibet — Templed Beluchistan
See Shangha again, nor cares of Dunhuang
Nor climb E. 12th Street’s stairway 3 flights again,
Nor go to literary Argentina, accompany Glass to Sao Paolo & live a
month in a flat Rio’s beaches and favella boys, Bahia’s great
Carnival
Nor more daydream of Bali, too far Adelaide’s festival to get new scent
sticks
Not see the new slums of Jakarta, mysterious Borneo forests & painted
men and women
Nor mor Sunset Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, Oz on Ocean Way
Old cousin Danny Leegant, memories of Aunt Edith in Santa Monica
No mor sweet summers with lovers, teaching Blake at naropa,
Mind Writing Slogans, new modern American Poetics, Williams
Kerouac Reznikoff Rakosi Corso Creely Orlovsky
Any visits to B’nai Israel graves of Buda, Aunt Rose, Harry Meltzer and
Aunt Clara, Father Louis
Not myself except in an urn of ashes

March 30, 1997, A.M.

Allen Ginsberg

As much of a final statement as it sounds like, “Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias)” remains, in a way, a work in progress, given the manuscript’s semi-decipherable hand. “Although many of his poems’ first drafts looked like this,” say the caretakers of AllenGinsberg.org, “if anything was unclear, we could just ask. That, obviously, wasn’t an option after April 5 that year.” Ten of Ginsberg’s associates passed the paper around, Google- and Wikipedialessly trying to piece together all of his characteristically far-flung references. The Caves of Dunhuang “went incorrectly transcribed for the first edition as ‘cares of Dunhuang’, since none of us were aware these were caves,” and “when we got to the ‘antique lands of Hades Necromanteion,” we couldn’t find a single reference to it anywhere, and in the end simply stated ‘Hades Gates.’ That’s how it’s published today — still. Till the next edition that is.”

Hear the Very First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading His Epic Poem “Howl” (1956)

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

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Jeremy Irons Reads T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

in Poetry | January 23rd, 2014

In 1914, T.S. Eliot moved from his birth country, the United States, to England at the age of 25 and soon thereafter established himself as one of the most influential poets of this generation, writing some of the best known poems of the 20th century including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), The Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925).

Yet Eliot considered his Four Quartets cycle to be his finest. Published individually over the course of six years, the series consists of four poems – Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942) – that are profound mediations on time, the cosmos and the divine.

Eliot discussed the cycle with the Paris Review in 1959. “I’d like to feel that they get better as they go on. The second is better than the first, the third is better than the second, and the fourth is the best of all. At any rate, that’s the way I flatter myself.”

The BBC has produced an audio version of Eliot’s Four Quartets with none other than Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons serving as a reader. The video above is a clip of that reading, taken from Burnt Norton.

You can read along to Iron’s leonine narration:

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden.
Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner.
Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush?
Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

The complete cycle read by Irons is on the BBC website for a limited time. (If you want to skip the program’s lengthy introduction, start at the 7:45 marker.)

And if you want to hear the Four Quartets read by T.S. Eliot himself, check out the video below. More readings can be found in our collection of Free Audio Books.

via The Poetry Foundation

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

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T.S. Eliot Reads The Waste Land

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A List of Nelson Mandela’s Possessions Upon Leaving Prison: Surfboard, Exercise Bike & White Cardboard Hat

in History | January 23rd, 2014

Nelson Mandela, who passed away late last year, spent more than a quarter of his life in prisons. For the first twenty years, beginning with his 1962 incarceration in Johannesburg’s Marshall Square Prison when Mandela was 44 years old, there was little hope of clemency from the apartheid regime. By the 1980s, however, international pressure was bearing down on the reigning National Party. Multinational banks stopped investing in South Africa, and several of them, alongside British PM Margaret Thatcher, demanded that Mandela be released. Internally, the country’s tensions were becoming difficult to control, and the regime attempted to enforce order by declaring a state of emergency. The crackdown resulted in further anti-government attacks by the anti-apartheid African National Congress. Eventually, the pressure proved insurmountable, and the 72 year old Mandela was released from Victor Verster prison in 1990.

Upon walking out of Victor Verster, Mandela received the personal property he had relinquished during his time in jail. Above is a photograph of the handwritten list of his personal effects. (Click the image to read it in a larger format.) Our resident Afrikaans expert (i.e., Google Translate) provides an English translation below:

Inventory

Property Mr. Mandela

21 +1 boxes

1 Reisegers* Bag

1 Urn

1 Surf Board

4 Rattan Baskets

1 footstool

1 Large Birthday Card

1 White Cardboard Hat

2 Big Umbrellas

1 Set Weights

1 Exercise Bike

Correct Ontavang:* [illegible]

Urns and rattan baskets are all well and good, but I was most impressed that the great anti-apartheid leader counted an exercise bike and a set of weights among his possessions. Don’t even get me started on the surfboard. Then again, Mandela took his fitness more seriously than most during his lifetime, as he noted in his autobiography:

“I enjoyed the discipline and solitariness of long-distance running, which allowed me to escape from the hurly-burly of school life.”

“On Monday through Thursday, I would do stationary running in my cell in the morning for up to forty-five minutes. I would also perform one hundred fingertip push-ups, two hundred sit-ups, fifty deep knee-bends, and various other calisthenics.”

“Exercise was unusual for African men of my age and generation… I know that some of my younger comrades looked at me and said to themselves, ‘if that old man can do it, why can’t I?’ They too began to exercise.”

“I attended the gym for one and a half hours each evening from Monday through Thursday… We did an hour of exercise, some combination of roadwork, skipping rope, calisthenics, or shadow boxing, followed by fifteen minutes of body work, some weight lifting, and then sparring.”

To learn more about Nelson Mandela and view other original documents, head over to the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Digital Archives.

And if you can help us figure out what “Reisegers bag” and “Correct Ontavang” mean and write the translation in the comment section, we’d appreciate it!

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

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by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

George Orwell’s Harrowing Race to Finish 1984 Before His Death

in Literature | January 23rd, 2014

A few weeks ago, we featured George Orwell’s 1944 letter revealing the ideas that would lead him to write his still widely read, and even more widely assigned, novel/anti-authoritarian statement 1984. The book would come out five years later, in 1949, suggesting that Orwell worked at a pretty good clip to turn out a book of such high stature. Alas, he never lived to see it attain its current place in the culture, and barely even to see its publication. It turns out Orwell had to work faster than you may expect; beset by poor health in various manifestations, he had to finish off the novel’s manuscript, which he had then tentatively titled The Last Man in Europe, before his conditions finished him off. “I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied,” he wrote his agent of the rough draft. “I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB.”

That typically gray but hardy Blairian observation (as in Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell’s given name, taking into account that “Orwellian” has, owing to 1984, a meaning of its own) comes from Robert McCrum, writing in The Guardian of the author’s struggle to complete the book by the end of 1948. “It was a desperate race against time. Orwell’s health was deteriorating, the manuscript needed retyping, and the December deadline was looming.” Feeling beyond help, he “followed his ex-public schoolboy’s instincts: he would go it alone. [ … ] Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting [his borrowed house on a remote Scottish island] night and day, he struggled on. By 30 November 1948 it was virtually done.” On June 8th, the book appeared in England’s bookstores, met by acclaim from Winston Churchill himself on down. Orwell died on January 21, 1950, 64 years ago this past Monday.

Above, we’ve included images of 1984’s manuscript from GeorgeOrwellNovels.com (click on each for a larger version), and you can learn more about it at The Fiction Desk. Do consider giving a read — or, better yet, a re-read — to Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write,” from which McCrum quotes to illuminate the writer’s drive to complete this harrowing final work: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand.”

Read more about this story at The Guardian.

via Reddit

George Orwell’s 1984: Free eBook, Audio Book & Study Resources

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

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James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Recordings (1924/1929)

in Literature | January 23rd, 2014

As much as it is about every part of Dublin that ever passed by James Joyce’s once-young eyes, Ulysses is also a book about books, and about writing and speech—as mythic invocation, as seduction, chatter, and rhetoric, fulsome and empty. Words—two-faced, like open books—carry with them at least two senses, the meaning of their present utterance, and the verso shades of history. This is at least partly the import of Joyce’s mythical method, as it is that of all expositors of ancient texts, from preachers and theologians to literary critics. It seems particularly significant, then, that the passage Joyce chose for the one and only recording of a reading from Ulysses comes from the “Aoelus” episode, which parodies Odysseus and his companions’ encounter with the god of wind.

Joyce sets the scene in the newspaper offices of the Freeman’s Journal, epitome of writing in the present tense, where reporters and editors give puffed-up speeches punctuated by reductive, pithy headlines. Amidst this business, erudite professor MacHugh and Stephen Dedalus wax literary and historical, making connections. MacHugh recites “the finest display of oratory” he ever heard—a defense of the revival of the Irish language that compares the Irish people to Moses and the ancient Hebrews spurning the seductions of an oppressive empire in the person of an Egyptian highpriest: Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.

Joyce recorded the passage in 1924 at the urging of Shakespeare and Company founder Sylvia Beach, who persuaded the HMV gramophone studio in Paris to make the record, under the provision that she would finance it and that the studio’s name would appear nowhere on the product. Ulysses, recall, was in many places under a ban for obscenity (not lifted in the U.S. until 1933 by Judge John Woolsey). The recording session was painful for Joyce, who needed two attempts on two separate days to complete it, plagued as he was by his failing eyes. And yet Joyce, Beach wrote in her notes, “was anxious to have the recording made… He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses… it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.” You can read the speech here while listening to Joyce read above. Beach called Joyce’s reading a “wonderful performance.” “I never hear it,” she wrote, “without being deeply moved.”

While Beach may have been satisfied with the recording, her friend, linguist C.K. Ogden pronounced it “very bad,” meaning, writes Beach, “it was not a success technically” (though it was not, in any case, “at all a commercial venture”). You will notice this immediately as you struggle to hear Joyce’s muted reading. Anxious to preserve his voice in a clearer document, Ogden captured Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake five years later at the studio of the Ornithological Society in Cambridge (he boasted of owning “the two biggest recording machines in the world”). By this time, Joyce’s eyesight had almost completely dimmed. Ogden photographed the text and enlarged it so that the letters were a half-inch tall, yet Joyce still could barely make them out and “supposedly needed someone to whisper along” (Beach, who was not present, imagined he must have known the passage by heart).

Joyce chose to read from the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of the experimental text—a passage “overflowing,” writes Mental Floss, with “allusions to the world’s rivers.” He reads in the voice of an old washerwoman, and begins with a most succinct statement of the temporal dimensions of language: “I told you every telling has a tailing.” Where Ulysses foregrounds literary history, Finnegans Wake dives deep into geologic time, and privileges the oral over the written. These are the only two recordings Joyce ever made, and they surely mark what were for him central locations in both books, though he also chose them for their ease of reading aloud (and, perhaps, memorizing). The Modern Word collects information on the various commercial releases of the Joyce recordings, many of which include readings of Joyce poems and stories by Frank McCourt, Colm Meany, Stephen Rea, and others. And while many of those readings are very good, none of them can match the thrill of hearing Joyce himself speak from the past.

James Joyce, With His Eyesight Failing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book

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Find works by James Joyce in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Cooking Can Change Your Life: A Short Animated Film Featuring the Wisdom of Michael Pollan

in Food & Drink | January 23rd, 2014

Michael Pollan, the bestselling author who describes himself jokingly as a “liberal foodie intellectual,” published Food Rules in 2009, a handbook that offers “straightforward, memorable rules for eating wisely.” The one I remember best is Rule #2. “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” That’s because it’s likely processed and “designed to get us to buy and eat more by pushing our evolutionary buttons, our inborn preferences for sweetness and fat and salt.” A few other noteworthy suggestions and assertions include:

Rule #6: “Avoid foods that contain more than five ingredients.”

Rule #20: “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.”

Rule #37: “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”

Rule #17: “Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans.”

That last rule gets taken up again in How Cooking Can Change Your Life, a short animated film just released by the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA). The audio in the clip is an outtake from a longer talk that Pollan gave at RSA in London, last May. Listen to the talk in full here. Below, we’ve also posted another RSA video that takes more Food Rules by Pollan and renders them in stop motion animation. This second clip first appeared on our site back in 2012. (For a more sustained intellectual experience, see our previous post: Michael Pollan Presents an Edible Education, A Free Online Course From UC Berkeley.)

Science & Cooking: Harvard Profs Meet World-Class Chefs in Unique Online Course

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Albert Einstein Holding an Albert Einstein Puppet (Circa 1931)

in Physics, Theatre | January 22nd, 2014

The Yale Puppeteers, consisting of Forman Brown, Harry Burnett, and Roddy Brandon, came together in the 1920s and spent almost the next seven decades touring the United States, putting on satirical performances that featured puppets in starring roles. They also staged performances at the Turnabout Theater from 1941 to 1956, turning it into a Hollywood institution.

In 1965, while speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Harry Burnett reflected on his career and recalled how the puppet troupe “entertained Charles Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Lionel Barrymore,” and even “presented a special show for Dr. Albert Einstein when he visited the street while teaching at Caltech.” That’s likely the origin of the early 1930s photo above, which features Einstein posing with an Einstein marionette. The website Retronaut provides a little more background on the photo:

Einstein saw the puppet perform at the Teatro Torito [a predecessor to the Turnabout Theater] and was quite amused. He reached into his jacket’s breast pocket, pulled out a letter and crumpled it up. Speaking in German, he said, ‘The puppet wasn’t fat enough!’ He laughed and stuffed the crumpled letter up under the smock to give the puppet a fatter belly. This is a wonderful photograph that Harry treasured. Harry Burnett also kept the letter in a frame and loved to retell the story and at the end give his pixish laugh.

The story of Burnett and his comrades was told in a 1993 documentary, Turnabout: The Story of the Yale Puppeteers. Unfortunately it’s not available online.

via Dangerous Minds

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Sonic Youth Guitarist Thurston Moore Teaches a Poetry Workshop at Naropa University: See His Class Notes (2011)

in Music, Poetry | January 22nd, 2014

It’s not unusual for introspective indie songwriters to make forays into poetry. Some do it rather successfully, like Silver Jews’ Dave Berman; some, like Will Oldham, stir up the poetry world by turning against poetry. Then there are indie stars like the indefatigably youthful Thurston Moore—formerly of Sonic Youth, currently of Chelsea Light Moving—who was asked to teach at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Better known for his numerous ventures in the New York experimental art world, Moore led a three-day poetry workshop at the Boulder, Colorado school’s summer writing program in 2011.

Moore was very much in demand. Anne Waldman, co-founder of Naropa’s writing program with Allen Ginsberg, said at the time, “We’ve been trying to get him for a while. We need him.” (Poetry teacher Kenneth Goldsmith recalls that the only one who wasn’t impressed with Moore was the recently departed Amiri Baraka, who said “he needs to work on those poems.”) Thanks to some very chatty students, we have detailed descriptions of Moore’s teaching style, as well as scans of his class notes. See the first page of Moore’s notes to himself for “Poetry / Music Workshop #1” at the top and a transcription of his elliptical, idiosyncratic method below:

Teacher improvises on electric
guitar while
     students write single words
each to his/her own sense of
     space and Rhythm and evocation
For 4 minutes
     the guitar is recorded on
        cassette recorder
       or computer
Recorded music played back
      through amp. while students
   Read aloud their writing
Simultaneously, All recorded
by cassette rec’r or comp.

MAKE CASSETTES

Student Katie Ingegneri, who interviewed Moore, brings us the page of text as well as the video above of Moore reading at Naropa. According to another one of Moore’s former students with the unlikely name Thorin Klosowski, the first day of the workshop consisted of a “rambling, three-hour introduction” during which Moore “revealed that when he initially moved to New York in the ’70s, it was not to make music, but rather to be a writer.” Klosowski’s piece includes additional pages of Moore’s notes, like that above, which cites countercultural hero Emmett Grogan’s autobiography, Ringolevio. Klosowski tells us that once things loosened up, Moore “did a better job of teaching than when he was pretending to be a lecturer.” The workshop also included some “gossipy tidbits”:

For instance, did you now that Kim Gordon had a texting relationship with James Franco? That Stephen Malkmus hates slam poetry? Or that even after years of being out of print, Moore’s list of ten essential free jazz records he wrote for Grand Royale was still brought into record stores (Twist & Shout and Wax Trax included)?

Moore had visited Naropa once before. In 2006 at a benefit for Burma Life and La Casa de la Esperanza, he read from his books Alabama Wildman, What I Like About Feminism, and Nice War and played some songs from Sonic Youth’s Rather Ripped. Hear the audio of that event above.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Download Over 300+ Free Art Books From the Getty Museum

in Art, e-books, Museums | January 22nd, 2014

Yesterday, we wrote about the Wellcome Library’s opening up of its digital archives and making over 100,000 medical images freely available online. If you’ve already made your way through this choice selection (or if the prospect of viewing a 19^th century leg amputation doesn’t quite pique your curiosity) have no fear. Getty Publications just announced the launch of its Virtual Library, where readers can freely browse and download over 250 art books from the publisher’s backlist catalogue.

The Virtual Library consists of texts associated with several Getty institutions. Readers can view extensively researched exhibition catalogues from the J. Paul Getty Museum, including Paul Cézanne’s late-life watercolours, when the painter raised the still life to a high art (Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, 2004), as well as the woefully underappreciated Flemish illustrations of the 15th and 16th centuries (Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript, 2003). The collection also contains detailed treatises on art conservation from the Getty Conservation Institute, and scholarly works from the Getty Research Institute, both of which include a multitude of books on specialized topics. Fancy reading about the relationship between Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, the two legendary 17^th century painters who lived in the Netherlands’ city of Antwerp? There’s a book on that. Intrigued by all the prostitutes in French impressionism? Try Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (2003). Perhaps you’re partial to ancient vases, and have already read The Colors of Clay (2006), Pots & Plays (2007), and Greek Vases (1983)? Don’t worry, the Getty’s virtual library has at least 8 more vase-oriented books.

All of the Getty’s virtual library volumes are available in PDF format, and can be added to your Google Books library. If you’re looking for more free art books, don’t miss our post from last year: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online.

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

The Getty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Public Domain (and There’s More to Come)

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by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 37 ) |

Alice B. Toklas Reads Her Famous Recipe for Hashish Fudge (1963)

in Books, Literature | January 22nd, 2014

Alice Babette Toklas met Gertrude Stein in 1907, the day she arrived in Paris. They remained together for 39 years until Stein’s death in 1946. While Stein became the center of the avant-garde art world, hosting an exclusive salon that welcomed the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toklas largely preferred to stay in Stein’s shadow, serving as her secretary, editor and assistant.

That changed in 1933 when Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (read it online) – a retelling of the couple’s life together with Toklas serving as narrator. The book is Stein’s most accessible and best-selling work. It also turned the shy, self-effacing Toklas into a literary figure.

After Stein’s death, Toklas published The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook in 1954, which combined personal recollections of her time with Stein along with recipes and musings about French cuisine. Yet it wasn’t her stories about tending to the wounded during WWI or her opinions on mussels that made the book famous. Instead, it was the inclusion of a recipe given to her by Moroccan-based artist Brion Gysin called “Hashish Fudge.”

In this 1963 recording from Pacifica Radio, Toklas reads her notorious recipe. The snack “might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR,” Toklas notes in her reedy, dignified voice. Then she gets on to the recipe itself:

Take one teaspoon black peppercorns, one whole nutmeg, four average sticks of cinnamon, one teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of Cannabis sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.

Toklas concedes that getting the key ingredient “can present certain difficulties” and recommends finding the stuff in the wild, which might have been possible to do in the early 1960s. Nowadays, the best course of action is to move to Washington, Colorado or Uruguay.

In the recording, Toklas then goes on to recall how hashish fudge came to be included into her book.

“The recipe was innocently included without my realizing that the hashish was the accented part of the recipe,” she says without a trace of facetiousness. “I was shocked to find that America wouldn’t accept it because it was too dangerous.”

“It never went into the American edition,” she says. “The English are braver. We’re not courageous about that sort of thing.”

Via UBUweb

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

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by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Download 100,000+ Images From The History of Medicine, All Free Courtesy of The Wellcome Library

in Art, Biology, History, Science | January 21st, 2014

The Wellcome Library, in London, specializes in the history of medicine. While the institution has long offered a good digital collection for browsing, the library announced yesterday that they are making more than 100,000 historical images free to download under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. (Users can distribute, edit, or remix at will; the license even allows for commercial use, with attribution.)

The Wellcome’s holdings represent the institution’s long-term interest in collecting art related to medicine, the body, public health, and medical science. The drop-down menu labeled “Technique” in the standard search box returns a staggering array of types of visual culture, from aquatint to carving to fresco to X‑ray. The library reports that the earliest image available is from 400 AD: a fragment of papyrus from an illustrated herbal manuscript, featuring a faded color drawing of a plant.

Some images in the collection are, perhaps unsurprisingly, squirm-inducing (an 1851 Japanese woodcut showing an amputation of the lower leg; a Dutch etching depicting a 17^th-c mastectomy; a German illustration showing 17th-century monks performing eye surgery). But there is plenty of beauty here, as well. I loved an a 19^th-c woodcut of a sumo match, and a Tibetan illustrated manuscript used in the production of medicines.

Browsers interested in dipping a toe into the stream of images may try out the galleries listed on the Images homepage. The “Olympic Sports” gallery offers an 1829 engraving of the famous conjoined twins Chang and Eng holding badminton rackets, and an 1870 illustration of recommended ring exercises for lady gymnasts. The “Witchcraft” collection (under the “Favourites” tab) contains many illustrations from historical books covering witchcraft in Europe and the American colonies, along with a more surprising 19^th-century Malayan black-magic charm.

Rights-managed images are marked as such in the thumbnail results that appear after a search. Although the archive requires you to enter a CAPTCHA to access the free images, you can select several thumbnails on the search-results page in order to bulk-download files for many images at the same time. The sample files I requested arrived on my desktop at 300 dpi.

The image above is an illustration of a mechanical hand from 1564.

h/t @kirstinbutler

Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.

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Download 100,000+ Images From The History of Medicine, All Free Courtesy of The Wellcome Library

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