poxblog

New reviews: Culture Wars, British Medical Journal

I tripped across two reviews, making me wonder how many reviews are out there that that I don't see.

E. Michael Jones wrote a long, thoughtful piece in CULTURE WARS and Gavin Yamey wrote a very nice one in the British Medical Journal.

Read E. Michael Jones's Monsters of the Id if you are interested in the Dracula myth linked to beliefs about syphilis. Bram Stoker is my latest candidate for POX II. His is the only death certificate that I have found that lists syphilis (tabes dorsalis) as a cause of death. More about this one in a future post. Right now I'm reading Dracula. It is Jones's hypothesis in the POX review that Wilhelm Reich was syphilitic and that the lightning energy of late syphilis was seen in his orgone theory. Fascinating. I will have to check to see what Reich's health was like in the years before his mental balance slipped.

Lou Salome Maligned

Email to S.F. Chronicle reviewer:

Dear Jane,

As a great fan of Lou's, I find it sad to see that a sensationalistic caricature like Betsy's Piroleau's "Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love" can get published by a reputable house like Viking without at least a little fact checking-- and be reviewed so enthusiastically by the Chronicle.

Deborah Hayden
POX: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis
Basic Books, 2003


A few notes on your review:

Lou Andreas-Salome was considered a brilliant peer of Sigmund Freud and
one of the founding mothers of psychoanalysis. The toast of 1912 Vienna,
the celebrity author and intellectual wrote more than 20 books, along with
countless essays, articles and reviews arguing, among other things, that
women are the naturally polygamous superior sex. She was also one of the
world's great seductresses. Her list of literally hundreds of lovers and suitors

Not true. Lou kept a very revealing personal journal. I just checked with her biographer, Rudolph Binion, who probably read just about every word she wrote, and he estimated that she had at most nine lovers in her lifetime. (RIlke, Bjerre, Pineles, Gebsattel, Ledebour, Tausk, a Russian whose name we have both forgotten and two others that he wasn't sure of). She was serially monogamous and did not do one night stands.

included Frederick Nietzsche and the nihilist philosopher Paul Ree
(she lived with both in a menage a trois), the poet Rainier Maria Rilke, even Freud.

Lou never lived with Nietzsche and Ree in a menage a trois.They had suggested living together in Paris in the winter of 1883 to be part of the literary circle around Turgenev, but the arrangement was to have been purely scholarly. If you read the exquisite twenty-five-year correspondence between Lou and Freud, you will see how absurd it is to call him a "lover or suitor". Note also that you managed to misspell both Nietzsche's and Rilke's first names in the same sentence. Rainier is the mountain.

Pox Notes

Good week for POX.

The high point was a wonderful blurb from Oliver Sacks, just as the paperback was going to press. Ellen and I worked together to go over the reviews and pick out blurbs. I reread all fifty reviews carefully. Very enjoyable. Pondered back and forth about adding one more line add the end of the Beethoven chapter, disagreeing with George Marek: to the music it doesn't matter if Beethoven had spirochetes or a hangnail. Decided to leave it as is. So it's a wrap and will be out on December 23rd.

Hour interview on NRP with Joel Martin, airing on November 1 on lots of stations. He asked good questions and I went a bit farther out on a limb than I have on past interviews. Will see where that goes. The Taiwan edition went to press, alas, at the last minute with no photos on the jacket. Their design was lovely, but they used the Corbis images, which had to go, and no time to replace them. Too bad. I'll have to be sure to figure out replacement images with the other two foreign editions.

One comment already on the MS/spirochete link, a request for the article. I guess this is what makes a blog fun (and useful).

Starting to think about the next writing project. Obvious ideas are the Lou Salome/1882 article, which I left midstream when I digressed on Nietzsche's syphilis, and on and on, or more on Lincoln, or more on Hitler. Or something entirely different? Yesterday I started an outline for an article (or short book?) on syphilis and the Lincoln scholars, and expansion of my too-short Lincoln chapter. Five pages and just a start. How much do I want to do continue with that? I searched through The Atlantic to reconstruct the history of how Lincoln has been written about in the long history of that magazine.

Oscar Wilde: syphilis pro and con

Finished a first draft of 1,250 words of article for OW journal, sent off to Ashley in Cape Town. He's on holiday, checking in Monday his time; he'll write an answer of similar length and we'll publish them together.

London Review of Books

Bert emailed that the 9/11 London Review of Books has a review of POX by Hugh Pennington, "eminence grise" of bacteriology from Aberdeen. Although he emailed me a copy (it's almost 3,000 words)-- it's so much more fun to read a review in hard copy. I found one in San Francisco at a smoke shop, the one that recently gave out an $88 million dollar lottery ticket, and I went next door to Pesce and had a cappucino and two delicious tapas dishes and read it on the page. "Pox breaks new ground by casting syphilis--up to a point--as a romantic pathogen, as tuberculosis was long seen to be." "Her approach is sensible and her choice of sufferers sensible." How nice.

Australian PBS and Korean translation

So I've wanted a blog, and now I have one -- a few minutes setting up TypePad, and here it is. What to include? Assorted Pox Chores, reading, some note-taking with the idea of starting another writing project? This box has the aspect of the famous Blank Sheet of Paper. Which reminds me of a lecture by Robert Hass some years back at the now defunct Clean Well Lighted Place. He said that you never have to face a blank sheet of paper because you can always start with notes and scraps and thoughts and see where it leads. Like the infamous footnote of the first hypertext hero, Tristram Shandy, the footnote that leads out of the text toward who knows where?

Today. Email from Sue Clark with info that the interview we did last week will air on Australian public broadcasting on Sunday: www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind. The piece is edited from our interview and one with "the leading syphilis doctor in Australasia, Prof Basil Donovan."

Some progress with the frustrating project of getting images to replace the Nine Outrageously Expensive ones from Corbis (i.e. $561 per image!!!) for the three foreign editions (Latin America, Taiwan, and Korea). John emailed the Library of Congress images to Isabelle-- the splendid Schubert, the fuzzy Maupassant. The Library of Congress promises to replace quickly the picture of the Freud Circle sent by mistake instead of Hitler. I found several lovely spirochetes (shaped like the edge of a lasagna noodle) on the web today, and have emailed for permission to use them. That leaves only one public domaine Nietzsche and one public domaine Flaubert to find.

How hard can that be? But where?? Isabelle says the Chinese are ready to go to press in September. Reminds me of childhood scavenger hunts, asking neighbors for a blue comb, a chicken feather. Now this would be a good use of a blog: if someone would post advice on how to find these pictures.

How bizarre to think of POX translated into Korean, today, when North Korea has just announced itself to be a nuclear power.