You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Mike Silverblatt and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Theodore Rozak.

He's the author most recently of a novel, the Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, from Random House.

Recently as well, the University of California Press have reissued his classic study, The Making of a Counterculture,

and his recent book, The Cult of Information.

And those books will, I think, enter into our conversation as we go along.

Now in the memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, which is a novel narrated by the wife of

Victor Frankenstein, alchemy provides the counterpoint to what in Mary Shelley's novel

had been electricity.

And I'm wondering what led you to an interest in the alchemical marriage?

The alchemy is actually in the original book.

I think it's one of my more scholarly discoveries that I found it there.

I was struck when I first read the book,

and I read it originally in close company with

Carl Jung's research on alchemy. The number of clearly alchemical references in the book,

the references throughout to Elizabeth, who is the fiancé of Frank. She's actually his wife

for only about a few hours at the end of the book.

It's a fatal marriage. She spends the rest of the book as his fiancé. She's always referred to as the

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