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benthic_universityOnce again you find yourself attending an evening class on the Selectech Chapters from Practical Subterranean Mycology. Even though the subject has a tradition nearly as old as the Fall, no one has bothered to rename it so it would form a good acronym.
Today the classroom is looking almost cheerful. Someone had cleared out all the poetic yet grim memento moris. Someone, quite possibly someone else, had then decorated all possible and impossible surfaces of the room in joyful expectations of the Yule, in the best traditions of the four weeks of Advent. And finally a third someone has then replaced all the saints and angels, including the Virgin Mary and even the swaddled baby Jesus in the manger, with elephants, all triumphantly raising their trunks. Since the elephants are wooden or ceramic, they do not toot. But if they could, it would be a cacophony your ears would not appreciate for long.
(Yes, in the manger the baby elephant is carefully swaddled in the finest silk. Yes, there are several elephants hanging under the ceiling whom you can pull by the string and they then flap their gigantic ears, which apparently are how they fly. And yes, several of those flying elephants have musical instruments, such as a lyre, tambourine or– No, that is not a trumpet, that is just a gilded trunk, now that you came closer it is plain to see.)
When you cast your eyes around the room, the edge of the festive Nativity model arranged on the teacher’s desk (the only desk long enough to hold it all) is still attended to by your teacher. He is carefully arranging a shepherd’s crook into yet another elephant’s trunk so that it can lead the flock of sheep forward.
To your great surprise, sprawled in the very back row is another man, one with a veritable moustache, deep velvet blazer and giving the air of cigars and sharp sandalwood cologne. He is impossible to forget once you’ve met him once, the booming voice and a quick and hearty laugh identify him quickly in any salon or classroom: Professor Guildenstern himself. Good to know he is doing better, he even has a healthy colour to his skin!
He is flipping through a thin book. As he goes through it, ignoring the students filtering into the classroom, he says: “Manyar, this is all nice and–”
“I believe we have agreed that thou wouldst not interrupt the lecture. That includes the preparations. If thou dostn’t like the arrangement, I am free to discuss thy concerns during my office hours.” (That translates from academic English as: Sod off.)
Professor Guildenstern takes his leaves.
“And do not steal the teaching props.”
The thin book makes a disgraceful arc to the middle of the desk where it knocks off the comet. The star falls on the floor where it remains like a piece of wood, which it is.
“Well, now that you’ve seen how my predecessor sees our class, I think ‘tis time to move onto new possibilities of Mycology. We have so far talked of the practical every day use we have for fungi even in fields where we suspect it the least and how we adapt the fungi to suit these fields. Not to mention the social benefit.
Today,” he beams with a brilliant smile, “I would like to introduce you all to the area which takes up most of my personal research: Absorption!”
And here he goes, scrawling half-legible letters on the board, his hand barely keeping up with his mouth which itself is barely keeping up with his mind.
“There are several types of fungi that are excellent at absorbing all manner of – pardon the academic jargon – stuff from the substrate. Possibly the most famous is the amethyst deceiver drawing up arsenic. My personal favourite is the quartz deceiver which in similar fashion absorbs ideas from soil and as such fruiting bodies harvested from old colonies can be one of the most potent hallucinogens when eaten.
With little engineering we could strengthen their absorbing properties and for example purify the soil from which we grow our crops of unwanted heavy metals and thoughts. But apparently nobody minds enough to give anyone any funding. Ultimately, in the eyes of investors, people are the cheapest commodity.
Currently the most priced commodity is information and the speed at which it gets to you. The second best priced commodity is the safe encryption of that information. Specimens much like the quartz deceiver, doily milk-stem and the entire serratusfunis genus are capable of soaking up information in some form into their bodies and mycelium network.
A dedicated mycologist can form a fungal archive and file into it at will. Removing information is more difficult and retrieving the information requires knowledge of the archive itself. A good mycologist can put the entire Encyclopedia Britannica into two fungal pots of the bloody saw-stem over the course of five months… and then lose it all over the course of three hours when the atmospheric pressure in his house decides that decimal point is good for throwing darts.” The expression the Mycologist shows is already known throughout London as ‘I did not have a good summer.’
From behind the desk he pulls a low trolley cart with yet another bunch of fungi pots. These hold knotty lumps that look sharp and vaguely blue-brown.
“This beautiful species is known both as the dowager saw-stem, the Rabenhorst’s saw-stem and the knotted onion; all names reportedly because cutting the fruiting bodies releases toxins that stimulate the lacrimal glands. By the way, the toxin also absorbs very quickly through the skin. Dermal exposition takes more for a human body to reach the lowest observable effect threshold, but you will be weeping for hours.
The Rabenhorst’s saw-stem records sounds and upon stimulation quietly reproduces them. For your today’s practical, to get the ropes of it, you will use the finest equipment an archivist can have.”
The finest equipment are two dinner forks with the middle teeth broken off, that is for stimulating the fungus, a stethoscope, so you can hear the fungus, and finally a trowel and a spoon so you can replant and rearrange your archive as needed.
And what exactly is it that you are doing?
“With the help of a typewriter and some string and a lot of coffee I have turned your last practical creations into a neat little collection," the Soft-Eyed Mycologist picks up the thin book Professor Guildenstern had so angrily thrown into the Elephant Nativity before, “And archived it in this specimen. The fungus then proliferated and I replanted it purposefully out of archiving order. With the collection as your guide, your task is to organise it back together. You can keep the collections, by the way. There should be one for each of you.”
The end of the class sees you saved from (or disturbed from, depending on your attitude) from precision archive-gardening. You can go home and wash the ringing whisper of the mushroom out of your ears.
But not before the Mycologist calls out: “I am not yet through all of thy essays, but expect them graded and returned before the holiday season closes the classrooms!”
Today the classroom is looking almost cheerful. Someone had cleared out all the poetic yet grim memento moris. Someone, quite possibly someone else, had then decorated all possible and impossible surfaces of the room in joyful expectations of the Yule, in the best traditions of the four weeks of Advent. And finally a third someone has then replaced all the saints and angels, including the Virgin Mary and even the swaddled baby Jesus in the manger, with elephants, all triumphantly raising their trunks. Since the elephants are wooden or ceramic, they do not toot. But if they could, it would be a cacophony your ears would not appreciate for long.
(Yes, in the manger the baby elephant is carefully swaddled in the finest silk. Yes, there are several elephants hanging under the ceiling whom you can pull by the string and they then flap their gigantic ears, which apparently are how they fly. And yes, several of those flying elephants have musical instruments, such as a lyre, tambourine or– No, that is not a trumpet, that is just a gilded trunk, now that you came closer it is plain to see.)
When you cast your eyes around the room, the edge of the festive Nativity model arranged on the teacher’s desk (the only desk long enough to hold it all) is still attended to by your teacher. He is carefully arranging a shepherd’s crook into yet another elephant’s trunk so that it can lead the flock of sheep forward.
To your great surprise, sprawled in the very back row is another man, one with a veritable moustache, deep velvet blazer and giving the air of cigars and sharp sandalwood cologne. He is impossible to forget once you’ve met him once, the booming voice and a quick and hearty laugh identify him quickly in any salon or classroom: Professor Guildenstern himself. Good to know he is doing better, he even has a healthy colour to his skin!
He is flipping through a thin book. As he goes through it, ignoring the students filtering into the classroom, he says: “Manyar, this is all nice and–”
“I believe we have agreed that thou wouldst not interrupt the lecture. That includes the preparations. If thou dostn’t like the arrangement, I am free to discuss thy concerns during my office hours.” (That translates from academic English as: Sod off.)
Professor Guildenstern takes his leaves.
“And do not steal the teaching props.”
The thin book makes a disgraceful arc to the middle of the desk where it knocks off the comet. The star falls on the floor where it remains like a piece of wood, which it is.
“Well, now that you’ve seen how my predecessor sees our class, I think ‘tis time to move onto new possibilities of Mycology. We have so far talked of the practical every day use we have for fungi even in fields where we suspect it the least and how we adapt the fungi to suit these fields. Not to mention the social benefit.
Today,” he beams with a brilliant smile, “I would like to introduce you all to the area which takes up most of my personal research: Absorption!”
And here he goes, scrawling half-legible letters on the board, his hand barely keeping up with his mouth which itself is barely keeping up with his mind.
“There are several types of fungi that are excellent at absorbing all manner of – pardon the academic jargon – stuff from the substrate. Possibly the most famous is the amethyst deceiver drawing up arsenic. My personal favourite is the quartz deceiver which in similar fashion absorbs ideas from soil and as such fruiting bodies harvested from old colonies can be one of the most potent hallucinogens when eaten.
With little engineering we could strengthen their absorbing properties and for example purify the soil from which we grow our crops of unwanted heavy metals and thoughts. But apparently nobody minds enough to give anyone any funding. Ultimately, in the eyes of investors, people are the cheapest commodity.
Currently the most priced commodity is information and the speed at which it gets to you. The second best priced commodity is the safe encryption of that information. Specimens much like the quartz deceiver, doily milk-stem and the entire serratusfunis genus are capable of soaking up information in some form into their bodies and mycelium network.
A dedicated mycologist can form a fungal archive and file into it at will. Removing information is more difficult and retrieving the information requires knowledge of the archive itself. A good mycologist can put the entire Encyclopedia Britannica into two fungal pots of the bloody saw-stem over the course of five months… and then lose it all over the course of three hours when the atmospheric pressure in his house decides that decimal point is good for throwing darts.” The expression the Mycologist shows is already known throughout London as ‘I did not have a good summer.’
From behind the desk he pulls a low trolley cart with yet another bunch of fungi pots. These hold knotty lumps that look sharp and vaguely blue-brown.
“This beautiful species is known both as the dowager saw-stem, the Rabenhorst’s saw-stem and the knotted onion; all names reportedly because cutting the fruiting bodies releases toxins that stimulate the lacrimal glands. By the way, the toxin also absorbs very quickly through the skin. Dermal exposition takes more for a human body to reach the lowest observable effect threshold, but you will be weeping for hours.
The Rabenhorst’s saw-stem records sounds and upon stimulation quietly reproduces them. For your today’s practical, to get the ropes of it, you will use the finest equipment an archivist can have.”
The finest equipment are two dinner forks with the middle teeth broken off, that is for stimulating the fungus, a stethoscope, so you can hear the fungus, and finally a trowel and a spoon so you can replant and rearrange your archive as needed.
And what exactly is it that you are doing?
“With the help of a typewriter and some string and a lot of coffee I have turned your last practical creations into a neat little collection," the Soft-Eyed Mycologist picks up the thin book Professor Guildenstern had so angrily thrown into the Elephant Nativity before, “And archived it in this specimen. The fungus then proliferated and I replanted it purposefully out of archiving order. With the collection as your guide, your task is to organise it back together. You can keep the collections, by the way. There should be one for each of you.”
The end of the class sees you saved from (or disturbed from, depending on your attitude) from precision archive-gardening. You can go home and wash the ringing whisper of the mushroom out of your ears.
But not before the Mycologist calls out: “I am not yet through all of thy essays, but expect them graded and returned before the holiday season closes the classrooms!”
Re: Before Class
Date: 2025-12-28 08:11 pm (UTC)They always feel like they take too much advantage of her, with her endless hospitality. But they don't know what they'd do without her, truly.
Re: Before Class
Date: 2025-12-28 09:34 pm (UTC)