Dandelion and the Liver
Lion’s Teeth will fortify any man’s soul, or any female’s
Curative plants — not weeds — have tap-roots 15 feet deep
Treats fashionable nervous disorders, biliousness, neurasthenia, hypochondriasis, melancholy, hysteria, the vapors, spleen, mental fog, dark moods.
In February 1892, Mark Twain published a travelogue recounting his visit to Marienbad, the European spa town where everyone from Nietzsche to Freud had come to take the cure. The essay, titled “An Austrian Health Factory,” detailed his impressions of the “curative springs” where, among other tortures — exercise, fresh air, a spartan diet, being made to “tramp about the hills,” and “drop everything that gives an interest to life” — patrons were forced to endure numerous conversations about their liver. “Go where you will, hide where you may, you cannot escape that word liver,” he wrote, “Wherever you see two or a dozen people of ordinary bulk talking together, you know they are talking about their livers.”
I, too, enjoy talking about my liver. Just ask my husband. Like the spa-goers Twain describes, I’ve come to realize that “a man is not what his rearing, his schooling, his beliefs, his principles make …
Cut Worms
Indie rock abandons the snooty northern campuses and lakes for the dazed desert landscapes of the Southwest
’The cut worm forgives the plough’ — Wm. Blake
Arizona takes the L train
The latest self-titled record from the Brooklyn-based, Ohio-born band Cut Worms opens with an ending. “Don’t Fade Out,” the instant classic which starts the album, sounds like the track that plays as the credits roll on a movie about summer love: “Don’t fade out / Don’t fade out on me / Stay right here where / Love will always be.” The track might just have easily served as the closer to a record suffused with pop songs that seemingly have no agenda to hide, but here it is right at the start. It’s another telling sign that front-man Max Clarke, who named his project after a line from William Blake (“the cut worm forgives the plow”), is up to something other than blowing bubbles and selling pop with his apple-pie voice.
Originally a native of Strongsville OH, Clarke made his way from bagging groceries at Mark’s to having Wilco and Norah Jones cover his songs. He signed with indie-royalty label Jagjaguwar — …
Eight Dollars
A hayseed’s adventures in the old Times Square
Robbed in an elevator by a straight-razor-wielding dwarf
Double the pleasure in adjoining dental suites
Times Square in the 1970s was in some sense the heart of Grub Street, “the world of literary hacks, or mediocre, needy writers who write for hire.” The New York Times, which lent its name to what was then the world capital of cheap porno theater seediness, was the voice of Grub Street, grown rich, obscenely complacent, and obliviously self-assured.
Now picture a Caucasian hick in his early twenties, hayseeds in his socks, with a 60s Canadian haircut and a Maoist-issue canvas proletarian man-purse, moving to NYC to pursue a literary career without a college degree, or high school diploma, friends, or work experience outside the Forest Products industry. The choice might seem imprudent, but such decisions, like going fishing, or on a crusade, are never rational. If my decision to move to New York was motivated by any form of sentient reasoning, it was the product of a self whose desires and fears …
