I am always fascinated by the paths to discovery, the chance happening onto something you didn’t know existed yet always wanted. It’s been a thread, without my really realizing it, of much of my career, from leading the team building the Endeca discovery engine, to the goby “things to do” discovery app, to The Hawaii Project, a book discovery engine, and to an as-yet-unnamed music discovery system I have been building in my head.
Yesterday’s discovery path was sufficiently amusing I thought I’d write it down.
I have a thing for cocktails. And books. And cocktail books :). I have a cocktail book running around in my head I want to write some day, so I’m periodically surfing the web looking at or for interesting cocktail recipes. I was looking for a recipe for homemade Grenadine (pomegranate juice and sugar, basically) and stumbled upon the following article.
Amongst other interesting tidbits, I found this interesting cocktail:
Journalist, explorer, occultist, and infrequent cannibal William Seabrook created the Asylum, consisting of one part gin, one part Pernod, and a dash of grenadine (poured over ice, but not shaken). He said it would “look like rosy dawn, taste like the milk of Paradise, and make you plenty crazy.”
Wait what? sometime-cannibal? WTF? I had to go read more about this person. (yes, I made this Homeric-sounding cocktail, and…one ounce of Pernod is A LOT. VERY anise flavored. The things we do in the name of science….Interesting cocktail, not an everyday drink, but interesting. )
So, a quick glimpse at Seabrook on Wikipedia yields a very intriguing character. Turns out he was a writer and occultist, a friend of the well-known Aleister Crowley. And yes, a sometime-cannibal. With an apparent penchant for bondage.
William Buehler Seabrook (February 22, 1884 — September 20, 1945) was an American occultist, explorer, traveler, cannibal, and journalist, born in Westminster, Maryland.
and
…In the 1920s, Seabrook traveled to West Africa and came across a tribe who partook in the eating of human meat. Seabrook writes about his experience of cannibalism in his novel Jungle Ways; however, later on Seabrook admits the tribe did not allow him to join in on the ritualistic cannibalism. Instead, he obtained samples of human flesh from a hospital and cooked it himself.
His book The Magic Island, based on his travels in Haiti, is credited with the introduction of the “zombie” to popular culture (the undead creature, not the cocktail!).
Later in life, he committed himself to an institution for the treatment of severe alcoholism, and wrote a book about his experience called (you guessed it) Asylum, whence the name of his cocktail.
And then I found the real nugget: “In Air Adventure he describes a trip on board a Farman with captain Renè Wauthier, a famed pilot, and Marjorie Muir Worthington, from Paris to Timbuktu, where he went to collect a mass of documents from Father Yacouba, a defrocked monk who had an extensive collection of rare documents about the obscure city at that time administered by the French as part of French Sudan. The book is replete with information about French colonial life in the Sahara and pilots in particular.”
Now, one of the best books I’ve ever read is Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, simultaneously a philosophical exploration as well as an exciting adventure story, describing his flight through the Sahara, his eventual crash and escape. So Air Adventure is ringing some bells…I track down a copy of Air Adventure. Here’s the opening paragraph:
It was only when the sandstorm rose up from the Great Sahara, ripped us down out of the pretty sky, and taught us that it could make skeletons out of airplanes as easily as camels, that we really began to get acquainted with the desert, or to take it or ourselves seriously.
Pretty promising. And such a strange path to discovery, of a book I should have known existed! Air Adventure was published in 1933; Wind Sand and Stars in 1939, so Seabrook pre-dates Saint-Exupéry, but cannot find any evidence they knew of each other.
In 1945, Seabrook died by suicide — an overdose of sleeping pills. Maybe I won’t be making more of those Asylums after all.