Mike Jay's strange tales

World traveler and Strange Attractor contributor Mike Jay is one of the UK's most interesting history writers'a freak at heart but a pro in every sense: a great researcher and story-teller, a prolific scribbler, and a fine stylist to boot. Jay cut his book publishing teeth on trippy topics, starting with the intriguing Blue Tide, and continuing on to the best book on drug use in the nineteenth century, Emperors of Dreams. Then he wrote my favorite book of his, The Air Loom Gang, a marvelous and insightful Oliver Sacks-worthy yarn about an eighteenth-century madman named James Tilly Matthews who was the first person to believe that a remote machine was directly controlling his behavior. Currently Jay is writing the marvelously titled Wild Gas, a history of the Pneumatic Institute, the unconventional scientific/cultural laboratory where British poets and doctors and rabble-rousers first discovered nitrous oxide in the 1790s.

Jay just launched a new website. It's not a blog - unfortunately for us, perhaps fortunately for a book author with lots on his plate - but it does include a number of fascinating articles. Particularly relevant for DoseNation readers are the following:

"Enter the Jaguar": an exploration of the drug-saturated imagery and shamanic lore surrounding the mind-blowing and obscure temple ruins of Chavin in Peru.

"We Burn to Remember." Burners take note: Every year in November, a small town erupts into Bonfire Night, which for sheer mythic Viking fire chaos may outpace that Labor Day Nevada camping trip.

"Mushrooms in Wonderland." This older article anticipates Andy Lechter's Shroom book by questioning the assumptions many heads make about the real psychoactive fungi use presumed to lay behind between nineteenth-century fairy lore.