Bohemian Lifestyle Research Articles

Absinthe and gamma-aminobutyric acid receptors.

Absinthe is an emerald-green liqueur that achieved fantastic popularity at the close of the 19th century. It was associated with the Bohemian lifestyle and was credited with the inspiration of famous artists and poets (1, 2). Because of its widespread abuse and the associated toxicity of its content of oil of wormwood, absinthe was made illegal in most countries in the 1910s. The most likely ingredient responsible for toxicity is believed to be the terpenoid α-thujone (1–4). Oil of wormwood has convulsant activity as well as activity in killing worms and insects (5). The mechanism of action of thujone has remained speculative until now. In a recent issue of PNAS, Hold et al. (6) provided evidence that thujone acts as a γ-aminobutyric acid type A (GABAA) receptor chloride channel blocker, much like the plant convulsant picrotoxin, and related synthetic analogs.

The proletarian as stranger

This paper argues that the Marxist theory of the proletariat in many ways projects a romanticized self-description or 'false shadow' of its revolutionary spokesmen, and hence more proximately describes the missionary complex and Bohemian life-style of marginalized political intellectuals than a 'really existing' working class. This 'mistaken iden tity play' between spokespersons and their favourite sociological con stituency, which is already alluded to in various historical left-wing and right-wing 'farewells to the proletariat', is more systematically criti cized in recent reassessments by, for example, Bahro, Gouldner, Gorz, or Bauman. Next to its psychological and sociological infrastructure, classical proletarian standpoint theory has also attracted critical atten tion because of its suggestive epistemological linkage between the con dition of estrangement and claims for scientific objectivity. This connection is reasserted by recent feminist and postcolonial standpoint epistemologies - which, however, also tend to repeat the logic of classi cal Marxism's metonymic 'identity play'. The paper concludes with a defence\of the idea of 'situated knowledges', which wishes to preserve the classical liaison between objectivity, distanciation and marginality, while simultaneously rendering it more reflexive in critical confron tation with the ubiquitous 'spokesperson problem'.

Clementina Suárez: Her Life and Poetry

This is a biography of Clementina Suarez (1902-91), the matriarch of Honduran letters, who scandalised Central American society with her bohemian lifestyle, her passionate woman-centred poetry and her dedicated and unconventional promotion of art and literature.

Love, Literature, and Politics in the Machine Age

Love, Literature, and Politics in the Machine Age Lynn Dumenil (bio) Douglas Clayton. Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994. xv 335 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $30.00. In the years shortly before World War I, New York’s Greenwich Village was a vibrant community of mostly young intellectuals enthralled with what one of them, Max Eastman, called a “universal revolt or regeneration, of the just-before-dawn of a new day in American art and literature and living-of-life as well as in politics.” 1 A tenuous sense of coherence united a wide spectrum of people, including such luminaries as John Reed, Emma Goldman, Randolph Bourne, Walter Lippmann, and Margaret Sanger, who congregated at the offices of exciting little magazines like Seven Lively Arts and The Masses or met at the famous salon of Mabel Dodge Luhan to debate socialism, birth control, feminism, free love, Freud, modern art and literature. The village was not only the scene of experimental theater and art, but also of experiments in living — as the young radicals pursued an unconventional life style that flew in the face of bourgeois respectability. With Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel, Douglas Clayton provides a useful addition to our understanding of the men and women who shaped this exciting cultural moment. Although Clayton surprisingly makes no reference to any other scholar’s account of Dell, his eagerness to prove Dell’s seriousness of purpose and intellect seems to have been designed to correct negative views of his subject, such as Leslie Fishbein’s 2 largely critical assessment of Dell as inconsistent and narcissistic. Clayton presents his subject as a literary and social critic of unusual merit and originality, a major contributor to the shape and quality of The Masses, and a novelist of critical and popular acclaim. He further argues that even after Dell ceased to be at the center of American intellectual life (by the mid 1920s), he nonetheless continued to be a serious intellectual who continually grappled with the questions that had concerned him for decades: the contradictions between a life dedicated to art and one dedicated to radical politics; between a life in search of a stable home life and one committed to literature and individual self expression. [End Page 699] Clayton’s account is particularly engaging as he traces Dell’s early life in the Midwest, where he was born in Barry, Illinois in 1887. The recurring depressions of the late nineteenth century had a devastating impact on his family, which laid the groundwork for Dell’s socialism. He was also deeply moved by literature, and thus early on the intertwining of art and radical politics shaped his ideas and character. These interests found fuller expression when he moved to Chicago in 1908 and quickly made a name for himself as a literary critic for The Friday Literary Review, a supplement to The Evening Post. It was also in Chicago that Dell adopted his bohemian life style, constructing an unconventional, “feminist” marriage with Margery Currey. Dell’s “credo of self-expression” eventually led to numerous openly conducted affairs that put a strain on his marriage, which failed shortly before his move to New York and to Greenwich Village. When he arrived in 1913, the rebellion was already in full swing, but Dell seems to have made his mark quickly. As associate editor of The Masses, he expanded the literature review and reinforced the exciting directions Eastman was taking the magazine as “an attention-grabbing hodgepodge of radical politics and culture, with criticism, fiction, and artwork, much of it shot through with irreverence and an irascible, satiric spirit” (p. 110). Dell was active in the founding of the Provincetown Players, the theater group that was to transform significantly American theater. At the same time, he embarked on a long-term live-in relationship with photographer Marjorie Jones. After that affair broke up, he conducted a number of romances, among the most passionate, with Edna St. Vincent Millay. His sexual exploits, coupled with his eager embrace of Freudianism that Dell and others interpreted primarily as a struggle against repression, made him a...