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Seaweed (ca. 1909) - Paul Chabas
An example of early 20th century academic kitsch.
The Machine Stops (1909) - E.M. Forster
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs. --E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (1909)
The Machine Stops is a short science fiction story by E. M. Forster. It first appeared in The Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909, and was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops [Jul 2005]
see also: machine - science-fiction - science-fiction (novels)
The first recorded use of 'marihuana' in the United States
The first recorded use of 'marihuana' in the United States, in 1909, was in Storyville, the red light district of the port of New Orleans that is universally regarded as the birthplace of jazz. According to Ernest L.Abel: 'It was in these bordellos, where music provided the background and not the primary focus of attention, that marihuana became an integral part of the jazz era. Unlike booze, which dulled and incapacitated, marihuana enabled musicians whose job required them to play long into the night to forget their exhaustion. Moreover, the drug seemed to make their music sound more imaginative and unique, at least to those who played and listened while under its sensorial influence.' --Russ Cronin via http://www.ukcia.org/potculture/20/madness.html [Jul 2005]
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