Weed and the influence it has on literature over the years that have transpired?
Thomas Pynchon
>>8012254
Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir
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by Andrew Gordon
[This article appeared in The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel, ed. Geoffrey GrDUDEeen, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994): 167-78.]
This is a story aboWEEDut the sixties: it's about me and some friends of mine, it's about Berkeley, and it's about Pynchon. It's about a decade in which we were all young together and thought we would stay young forever. Berkeley was our Vineland, a dream of a perfect new world. The time was ripe, America was ours, and we were going to change the world: Paradise Now or ApocalyLMAOpse Now.
Neither one happened. As the decades pass, is anything left of that refuge, that Vineland, apart from memory and isolated dreams? Where are the sixties now? Where are we? And where is Thomas Pynchon?
We are stardust, we are golden,
We are billion-year-old carbon,
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.
(Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock")
Ultimately, I suppose this story is all about me. Everything you write always is, disguise it as you may. I don't know what I can tell you about Thomas Pynchon, but I can tell you something about myself, about the impact that the sixties and Berkeley and Pynchon had on me. Vineland looks back on the late sixties, and I'm going to look back on 1964-67, from ages 19 to 22, when I was first going out into the world on my own and when my life became enmeshed with the fictions of Thomas Pynchon. I want to trace some of the parallels between life and fiction.
According to his friend Jules Siegel, when Pynchon lived in Mexico in the sixties, "The Mexicans laughed at his mustache and called him Pancho Villa." There's a hoary old joke whose punchline goes, "Did I know Pancho Villa? Hombre, we had lunch together!" Mine goes, "Did I know Thomas Pynchon? Man, we smoked dope together!" Except it's no joke; it really happened.
I often feel that way about the nineteen sixties in America: they were no joke, they really happened to us, and they happened to me, although in retrospect they boggle the imagination and seem too incredible to be real. The truth of the sixties is stranger than fiction. As Philip Roth wrote about the period, "is it possible? is it happening?" ("Writing American Fiction" 121). That's why the sixties have so rarely been captured well in American fiction, except by a few authors such as Pynchon: if somebody told you the history of the decade as a story, you wouldn't believe it. You'd wonder: Is this for real? Is this some kind of joke? Is it supposed to be farce or tragedy? You wouldn't know how to feel, to laugh or to cry.
And although I met Thomas Pynchon one evening in Berkeley in June of 1967, I cannot say I really know him. He remains for me a figure as mysterious and ungraspable as Pancho Villa, a dope-smoking guerilla warrior of the imagination, disappearing into his Mexican desert.
>>8012254
any others? is it true shakespear sniffed some of the old snuff snuff
>>8012455
People know so little about Shakespeare that there's lively debate about whether he even existed or if someone else wrote his stories. So whether or not he used snuff is a bit of a pointless question/
>>8012455
don delillo
norman mailer
early david foster wallace
>>8012462
damn dude lmaothanks. I've got a copy of underworld I want to read
>>8012252
WHAT IF, LIKE, WE USED TO BE MONKEYS AND THEN WE DID DRUGS AND GOT SMARTER FROM DOING THE DRUGS?!
SMOKE SOME ITS GOOD
MOM'S GONNA FREAK!
weed is wicked gay
>>8012513
nah dude fuckin 420 blaze it up senpai
