Opium Eaters

Here's a review of Opium: Reality's Dark Dream by Thomas Dormandy. http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1044657.ece

Can't forget Thomas De Quincy

And Captain Willard in the deleted French plantation sequence from Apocalypse Now

Fascinating article on "How collecting Opium Antiques Turned Me Into an Opium Addict":

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/journey-into-the-opium-underworld/

Found this through John Coulthart's "Feuilleton" blog, which regularly covers matters of interest to we dwellers in the abyss:

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/

Interesting - just the other night, hunkered in my swamp, sickened at the thought of alcohol, I yearned for a pipeful of opium - a romantic, De Quincey/Coleridge based yearning, to be sure.

Not quite opium, but today we can celebrate the birthday of Albert Hofmann.

Happy birthday to Albert. Just the same, I would prefer opium to LSD at this stage of life.

I actually smoked the real thing a couple of times in my youth. I remember the sensation of weightlessness, as if I were floating a couple of inches off the ground. Euphoric.

Hey, guys... neat group.
Ben, i share your inkling for a lighter fix than alcohol, good weed is so much easier to take on board, and quicker, and easier. Opium, i've never tried it, but i did buy an antique opium pipe some time ago, a slippery slope maybe...?

Farm news

GREEN HOUSE SEED CO.

http://www.youtube.com/user/greenhouseseeds

.... ever smoked then held a pen and wondered how to get the thoughts from brain through hand to paper ? There's a perfect little piece of writing (too lazy to check, but i think it's by vivekananda) at the front of Miller's Air Conditioned Nightmare which basically contends that for every great spirit who manages to express himself successfully there are many more, maybe greater, who never even try. Not sure what i'm getting at except maybe some of us are destined to take our greatest thoughts to the grave, and maybe that's for the best.

Where else to take them but where they might be properly assayed? Bottoms up!

More farm news

How to grow like a pro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT1hry-F_Zg

Ah, the good old days...

These are the good old days to be a pot smoker. 20% THC + CBD = mucho fuerte pot. With WA and CO with legal pot, looks like the west is going to pot. Probably just a matter of time before the rest of the country follows suit.

Out here, where the Inquisition is strong, were I to revert, I'd end up in a less tasteful version of the château d'Yf. So I make Italian digestifs and maybe, occasionally, denature a can of whipping cream.

What happened to the walking stick?

5 - I would like to read the Hofmann/Jünger exchanges.

Even more farm news

Jorge Cervantes' Ultimate Grow DVD part1/3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4ZQlwgWMS0

A more contemporary anthology on aficionados of opium derivatives ... heroin, ya dig:

http://www.cclapcenter.com/2013/04/book_review_the_heroin_chronic.html

19

This seems entirely relevant/irrelevant:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c8iMNL9CjU

McCoy's classic, "The Politics of Heroin"

christ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenkem

Uh, gee, St. Martin's running footman, thanks for enlightening us.

I think I gotta log off and get some fresh air.

Here are couple of useful studies on opium and literary production:

The Milk of Paradise: the Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson and Coleridge, by M. H. Abrams (out of print and available in abused paperback format via unscrupulous online vendors): the author appends 2 poems by George Crabbe, and a story by Thompson.

Opium and the Romantic Imagination: Addiction and Creativity in De Quincey, Coleridge, Baudelaire and Others, by Alethea Hayter.

Also, for fun, Jean Cocteau's Opium: The Diary of a Cure and Geza Csath's story "Opium".

I read in an article somewhere that Francis Thompson's mother gave him a copy of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater in hopes that reading it would help him with his addiction to Laudenum, instead it sent him off the deep end.

That is terribly disconcerting as maternal meddling is typically so therapeutic :) (Where's my works, goddammit).

A new biography on Thomas De Quincey profiled here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/11/24/de-quincey-so-original-so-truly-weird...