Month: February 2013

Sam Scott previews “synthetic alcohol,” a compound being tested on humans that could be on the market in two years:

It has a chemical structure similar to benzodiazepine, a class of psychoactive drugs that treat anxiety and insomnia. The as-yet-unnamed drug can produce alcohol’s desirable effects such as sociability and relaxation, but without negative effects such as nausea.

“We can get rid of most of the toxicity. We’ll have a compound maybe 100 times safer than alcohol,” claims [David Nutt of the Brain Sciences Division at Imperial College London]. This means less damage to the heart and liver, but it also lets you wake up fresh. “Because it targets a specific receptor in the brain, we can reverse the effects if people want to drive home,” adds Nutt. The antagonist could come in the form of a pill, or a dissolvable film that is placed under the tongue.

Update from a reader:

Call me crazy but isn’t that smoking pot?

Brooks Sterritt picks out lines from the Bard that feel oddly at home in contemporary hip-hop. A few favorites:

“I’ll teach you how to flow.” (The Tempest)

“He speaks plain cannon fire, and smoke and bounce.” (King John)

“Holla, you clown!” (As You Like It)

“Trip no further, pretty sweeting.” (Twelfth Night)

“The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us,” – Franz Kafka.

Via Brain Pickings, Virginia Woolf wonders:

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.

An excerpt from her diary in 1920:

Will Wilkinson rebels against the idea that “[a] serious person should try to write posthumously”:

[It] is much in the same vein as “Live every day like it’s your last.” It’s a nice idea until you think about it. After you kill a man just to see what it feels like, then what? Who wants to spend every day on the phone with the same twelve people repeating “I just want you to know that I love you very much”? Nobody does.

He continues:

We are, in fact, motivated in no small measure by competitive drive. But, as Hume suggests, only the extraordinarily vain will be able muster and sustain the will to produce when “up against” the whole eternal pantheon of letters. The petty contest for merely local glory gets the scale of useful emulation about right. It’s probably better for literature if we don’t try to play dead.

In his 1971 novel, The Abortion, Richard Brautigan imagined a home for the “unwanted . . . and haunted volumes of American writing.” In 2010, Brautigan fan John Barber brought to life the Brautigan Library. Wes Enzinna visits the stacks:

Patrons from across the United States have paid twenty-five dollars apiece to house their unpublished novels here, books with titles like “Autobiography of a Nobody” and “Sterling Silver Cockroaches.” The shelves hold 291 of these cheap vinyl-bound volumes, which are organized into categories according to a schema called the Mayonnaise System: Adventure, Natural World, Street Life, Family, Future, Humor, Love, War and Peace, Meaning of Life, Poetry, Spirituality, Social/Political/Cultural, and All the Rest. Bylines and titles don’t appear on the covers. “The only way to browse the stacks is to choose a category and pick at random,” Barber explains. “Are you in the mood for Adventure or the Meaning of Life?”

Why Brautigan is an appropriate namesake:

At the end of his life, Brautigan — despite tremendous commercial success early in his career for works like Trout Fishing in America — couldn’t get his own work published, and he blamed the “eastern critical mafia” for brutal reviews and for ruining his reputation. Brautigan’s work isn’t widely read today — Thomas McGuane’s criticism in 1973 that Brautigan was an anachronism, “nothing but a pet rock! A fucking hula hoop!” has, perhaps, proved prophetic. Yet Brautigan has nonetheless become a patron saint for failed writers, a novelist and poet in whose work — and the peculiar library named after him — thwarted authors find refuge.

Read some descriptions of the Library’s collection over at its website. Dish fave: