Choose Your Poison!

According to Lapham’s Quarterly, “A Magazine of History and Ideas,” Raymond Chandler’s drugs of choice while he worked on The Blue Dahlia were gimlets and vitamin shots and while working on 1954’s Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley tried to enhance his own with mescaline.

It is unsurprising to read that, while tapping away at In Cold Blood, Truman Capote tiffled double martinis while both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Elizabeth Barrett Browning drowned their various sorrows in laudanum.

The piece -- it’s really more of a sidebar -- lists many more authors and their drug of choice. It’s called “Under the Influence” and it’s here. While you’re there, leave yourself time for a good look around. Recent articles include a reconsideration of the ambition of Ezra Pound’s work and Ross Perlin examines why politicians “are always trying, and failing, to make art.”