SLAP HAPPY LARRY

All mushrooms are edible. Some only once.

Lithuanian proverb

In this episode of Talk Nerdy, Cara is joined by Dr. Lawrence Millman, world-renowned mycologist and author of “Fungipedia: A Brief Compendium of Mushroom Lore.” They talk about his fascinating journey from Ph.D. in English Literature to explorer and ethnographer to global expert on fungi. And of course, there’s a ton of mushroom talk.

I live in a part of the world where deadly poisonous mushrooms grow rampantly under certain conditions. The Amanita phalloides is also known as the Deathcap mushroom.

https://twitter.com/DocOnSkis/status/1249876091516227584

Unfortunately, these deadly poisonous mushrooms look very similar to tasty and nutritious mushrooms that grow in other parts of the world, for example Asia’s popular straw mushroom.

“If you collect fungi and eat them, always keep two extra in the refrigerator — one for the doctor and one for the person doing the autopsy.” https://t.co/3aM95duwa1 pic.twitter.com/RFaSvuHFfi

— Ann Jones (@jones_ann) January 13, 2021

In 2012, two people died after eating these mushrooms at a New Year’s Eve dinner party in Canberra, and in 2014 four people were seriously poisoned.

Food Safety News

Death by poisonous mushroom must be a harrowing way to go, because you don’t die immediately. Rather, you feel worse and worse, and no doubt realise at some point that you have eaten a deathcap. However, by the time you start to feel ill, it is too late.

Emily Dickinson’s Poem About Mushrooms

The Mushroom

By Emily Dickinson

The mushroom is the elf of plants,
At evening it is not;
At morning in a truffled hut
It stops upon a spot.

As if it tarried always;
And yet its whole career
Is shorter than a snake’s delay,
And fleeter than a tare.’

T is vegetation’s juggler,
The germ of alibi;
Doth like a bubble antedate,
And like a bubble hie.

I feel as if the grass were pleased
To have it intermit;
The surreptitious scion
Of summer’s circumspect.

Had nature any outcast face,
Could she a son contemn,
Had nature an Iscariot,
That mushroom, — it is him.

Mushrooms in Hayao Miyazaki Films

Food is important to Hayao Miyazaki, and mushrooms are an important part of Japanese cuisine, so naturally mushrooms feature heavily in his animated films.

Mushroom Men

Mushroom and Toadstool Shade Umbrellas

THE MUSHROOM AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Shalini Sengupta thinks together ‘the mycological turn’ in the humanities and the narrative and aesthetic work that mushrooms do in some modernist literature. She draws from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and the research of Sam Solomon and Natalia Cecire. Modernist mushrooms, if they are a thing, exist in the writings of Alfred Kreymborg, Djuna Barnes, and Sylvia Plath, and the photography of Alfred Stieglitz.

Shalini is a final year PhD student at the University of Sussex, UK. Her thesis explores the concept of modernist difficulty in British and diasporic poetry through the lens of intersectionality. Her academic writings have appeared/are forthcoming in Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. In 2021, she was selected as a Ledbury Emerging Critic.

New Books Network

Header illustration: ‘Periwinkle Painting the Petals’, by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite 1923