Word: alchemists
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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...
Biggest complicating factor is a basic fact of pharmacology: there is no sharp line between poisonous and nonpoisonous substances-common salt can be a poison in excess, and arsenic can be a lifesaver. Dr. Arnold J. Lehman, the FDA's pharmacology director, quotes the Swiss Alchemist-Physician Paracelsus (1493-1541): "Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy." Some chemicals are poisonous over the years even in minute doses, and these the FDA will ban outright. But in the main, under its new legislative charter to protect...
...cold dark before winter dawn, by the TV screen's eerie blue glare, the show's rumpled star looks like an insomniac alchemist. With spectacles sliding down his nose, he brews electrons, protons and mesons while evoking Newton, Faraday, Planck, Einstein and Heisenberg. To watch NBC's Continental Classroom (6:307 a.m.), some 275,000 Americans are sacrificing sleep for science five days a week...