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Philip Spiess
Okay, what is it with animal urine? What does coyote urine do for one? Does one make small candles out of tapir urine? I do know that for centuries horse urine (and occasionally human urine) was essential in the tanning of hides to make leather (I believe it broke down the cellular structure -- but don't quote me on that). I also know that Gandhi often drank his own urine -- which, I understand, may be kind of necessary if one is in the desert and dying of thirst (it's apparently neutral in terms of acid and/or bacteria) -- but Gandhi never was stranded in the desert. So much for "passive resistance" (does anyone remember that the poet Shelley was one of the first promulgators of "passive resistance," not Gandhi?). By the way, Shelley's comrade in poetic Romantic arms, Lord Byron, was accused of drinking human blood out of a human skull -- but it was really only red wine (though it was a human skull he drank it out of). And he did help to cremate his friend Shelley, who had drowned, on the beach at Spezia, Italy, in 1822. [N.B.: If you're traveling in England, by all means make a visit to Byron's estate of Newstead Abbey, outside of Nottingham; the darling hedgehogs running amuck in the gardens remind one of the croquet sequences in Alice in Wonderland.]
Note to Laura: Apropos of catheters, we had to read a novel by Willa Catheter before we started AP English with Miss Keegan in our sophomore year at WHHS (Shadows on the Rock, I think it was, or Death Comes for the Archbishop; it was not My Antonia). Willa Catheter, an American novelist prominent in the 1920s, but who subsequently faded (except with Miss Keegan), had a sudden revival in the 1980s when academic feminists were desperately looking for American female writers (but they paid no attention to such excellent and interesting writers as Sarah Orne Jewett, Celia Thaxter, and the African-American writer Harriet Wilson). In my own opinion, Willa (yes, I know it's) Cather's best novel is The Professor's House, which deals to some extent with the discovery of the Anasazi cliff-dwellings at Mesa Verde, Colorado (now a National Park), in the preservation and protection of which Willa Cather played a major role.
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