Word: alchemist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Latter-Day Alchemist. The plot is standard. An ambitious small-town disk jockey makes a tape of a teenager named Anna Lou Schreckengost singing at a country-club dance and sends it to Sid Harper, A. & R. man at Manhattan's Blackwood Records. Anna Lou and her grandmother are flown to New York for an audition...
...Ishlon tells her story in a two-part stream of consciousness, first through the oversimplified mind of the girl in a kind of Schreckengost-written prose, then through the hypomanic mind of the A. & R. man, who has abandoned serious composing and now sees himself as "a latter-day alchemist, compounding dross voices with banal notes to produce gold." Novelist Ishlon insists that Anna Lou Schreckengost is no one in particular. She could be an approximation of Cincinnati's Doris Kappelhoff, who-with 1946-3 Sentimental Journey-made famous her new name, Doris Day. But coincidence falls closer...
...Zosimos of Panopolis was an alchemist and Gnostic of the 3rd century who suffered some remarkable visions from which he derived the arcane principle: "Nature applied to nature transforms nature." * Bergman's domestic milestones: married at 25 to Dancer Else Fisher, divorced after two years, one daughter; married at 27 to Stage Director Ellen Bergman (no kin), divorced after five years, two sons, two daughters; married at 32 to Journalist Gun Grut, divorced after nine years, one son; married at 41 to Pianist Kaebi Laretei, his present wife...