Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime

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Mary Celeste

On November 5, 1872, the Mary Celeste left New York, loaded with raw alcohol, bound for Genoa. There were seven crew members aboard, as well as Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife and their two-year-old daughter. A month later, on December 4, the Celeste was found drifting near the Azores, an autonomous group of islands off the coast of Portugal. The sails were run down or blown away, the hatches open, the cabins full of water. There was a sword on the deck, as well as what appeared to be bloodstains. Nine of the barrels in the hold were empty. All that was left was a slate log, which is an hourly record of bearing, speed and wind. The last entry suggested that the ship was abandoned 10 days prior, near the island of Santa Maria.

Wenseslao Moguel

On March 18, 1915 Wenseslao Moguel was captured while fighting in the Mexican revolution. Without trial he was sentenced to be executed by firing squad. Moguel was shot 9 times including a final bullet through his head at close range by an officer to insure death. Moguel somehow survived and managed to escape. Wenseslao went on to live a full life after his “execution”. The above photo shows Moguel in 1937 on the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not radio show pointing to his scar from the bullet that was shot at close range.

BoozeTown

Mel Johnson was the visionary behind the utopian BoozeTown. His city would be comprised of dozens upon dozens of bars and nightclubs, all with different themes. He was meticulous in his planning and fleshed out every detail. Street names would allude to alcohol, such as Gin Lane, Bourbon Boulevard, and 21st Amendment Ave; there would be a moving sidewalk and an electric trolley system which would help escort staggering drunks home (or to another bar); much of the alcohol would be brewed or distilled inside the town which would produce revenue; every bar and liquor store would be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week; drinks would be allowed everywhere, even banks and places of worship; the city would have its own currency, BoozeBucks; there would be a police force, the Party Police, but instead of harassing drinkers they would be there to assist them

Memoirs of a Public Baby

Memoirs of a Public Baby is a book by Philip O'Connor. Seldom has a writer described his own chaotic boyhood and early manhood with so much self-flagellating mockery. Abandoned by his Irish mother, a "fallen gentlewoman," O'Connor grew up in a seedy hotel, in a brewery, in a cellar, in a French peasant woman's pastry shop. In London, he developed an intense dislike of English snobbery as he ran into "a wall of nervous, persnickety tabus" that stifled social interaction. His contempt for bourgeois values and conformity is reflected in wickedly mordant comments on himself, his friends and acquaintances. Like new suits of clothes, he dons and discards intellectual fashions - surrealism, communism, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence. He spends six months in a mental hospital, then has a sexually frustrating affair with a cultured, unbalanced woman who nearly axes him and is herself hospitalized. We leave him in 1945, "started . . . on a halting road to conformity."