Notting Hill Editions (nottinghill-editions.com) publishes a steady stream of essays in lovely, compact volumes, on topics that almost always hit my sweet spot. Recently there’s been Smoke, more of a fable than an essay, on the cultural implications of smoking, written by the late John Berger and beautifully illustrated by the Turkish artist Selçuk Demirel: “Once upon a time, men, women and (secretly) children smoked.” Then there’s Nairn’s Paris, which brings back into print Ian Nairn’s opinionated guide to Paris, first published in 1968. Not surprisingly, some details are out of date (meals in Paris at 15 shillings, including wine?)—but Nairn’s sentences still gleam: Père-Lachaise Cemetery described as “a generalized serial vision of melancholy, clop-clopping along the chestnut avenues stuffed with mausolea”; Place des Vosges as “a formal effect stranded like a whale in the bustling Marais.” One of Notting Hill’s more eccentric recent offerings is Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment by Andrew Lees, “one of the world’s leading neurologists,” who writes about the influence on his medical career of the Beat writer (and notorious former heroin addict) William S. Burroughs. In Mentored, Lees describes his repeated attempts to find a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, testing various drugs, at different dosages, on rats and (occasionally) on himself; shades of Burroughs’s notorious Dr. Benway! “The purpose of my self-experimentation was to determine whether deprenil, in contrast to the first wave of non-selective monoamine oxidase inhibitors, could be taken safely with tyramine-rich foodstuff like Gorgonzola cheese, pickled herrings, chocolate, Chianti wines, pulses and Marmite.” Warning: do not attempt this at home!
