James Merrill

So, she's skimming When Memory Speaks by Jill Ker Conway and picks out James Merrill and starts sending me pictures of pages from his memoir.

Merrill in 1973

Photo unattributed on Wiki

Next, I find Merrill's biography by Langdon Hammer

Langdon Hammer

Photo from Yale University - Unattributed

which leads to an interview with James's nephew, Robin Magowan 

Robin Magowan

Photo from Red Hen Press website - Unattributed

who wrote, among other things, Improbable Journeys. 

Photo from Northwestern University Press website - Unattributed

So, I'm transcribing Marc Fishbones' memoir and he's telling how he opened his shop, The Black Orchid in Stonington, Connecticut in 1997 and how his landlord was the Chief of the Mashantucket Pequot who also own the Foxwood casino. So'I'm looking at Google Maps seeing where these places are and then read in Merrill's Wiki page that Merrill and his partner of three decades, David Jackson, moved to Stonington in 1955. And if it hadn't been for Marc, I'd have let it slide by. But now I know.

Yesterday, when Daniel Chamberlin's latest Void Contemplation Tactics arrived, it contained a plethora of references to Paul Bowles who I'd tracked down through a mention of Mrabet in Patti Smith's M Train. Along with The Sheltering Sky and much else, Paul translated Mrabet's stories.. 

All the above has some relation to Victoria N. Alexander's book  The Biologist's Mistress, in which she elaborates and expands on Lynn Margulis's & Dorian Sagan's theories of symbiogenesis in which chance plays a stronger role than genetic mutation.