Second Opinion

I am reading Martin Booth's richly detailed Opium: A History and I came across a throwaway fact which made me look at Tony Sherrod's Mithrander in another light. Mithridate was an early opium concoction supposedly discovered by Mithridates the Great and popularized by Galen who administered it to Marcus Aurelius that great junkie emperor/philosopher. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridate.

Stephen Jonas, the great junkie poet, wrote "A Poem to Tony Sherrod" that reads "You know how today we store up/shoring up, fragments of better days,/against these our so/fragmentary lives." The poem was published in Floating Bear 35 when that mimeo was at its most druggy. Issue 33 is one of the great mimeos which documented these fragmentary lives.

Mithrandir is definitely a drug reference but the reference to Lord of the Rings there as well. Jack Spicer's The Holy Grail references Tonies in the books of Gawain and Lancelot. One Tony being Tony Ashe and the other being Tony Sherrod.

The image of Gandalf, the Grey Pilgrim, as an aging junkie greatly appeals to me and I would like to think this exact image played into the title of Tony Sherrod's one shot mimeo.

JB

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