Our Daily Dead

All the news that is fit to print. Opium is a narcotic analgesic drug which is obtained from the unripe seed pods of the opium poppy. Poppies! Poppies! Poppies!

Our ODDguest Alethea Hayter brings opium to our minds today. She produced a study of opium and literature that is considered a definitive account of the contribution made by narcotics to literary creation. And some big names are involved here: Walter Scott, Poe (surprise!!), Coleridge and Keats.

Opium in its medicinal form of laudanum was routinely given for pain. Walter Scott was said to be too ill to work and was given large doses of laudanum. He was thus able to dictate parts of his novel to a scribe, but hows-about-that?! - he later could not recall a thing about the novel sections he dictated. Hayter revealed that the narcotic gave the taker waking dreams and these had a number of common themes, including the horror of limitless yet enclosed space found in Poe and, to a lesser extent, Coleridge.

Now because the Wizard of Oz came up earlier in this weblog try this one on for trivia: do you remember the name of the book that drove Sean Connery throughout the movie Zardoz? Come on, its right there in front of you: Wizard of Oz == Zardoz (if you drop a letter/word or two) - Sean’s copy had some of the title obscured on the spine of the book if memory serves..

And if you liked Zardoz surely you found A Boy and His Dog just as entertaining. Harlan Ellison has quite the gift.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: news, Opium, narcotic, drug, Alethea Hayter, literature, Walter Scott, Coleridge, Keats, Poe, Coleridge, Wizard of Oz, weblog, Sean Connery

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 10:37 am and is filed under ODD Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.