Keeeeeesy now, foax....

[Jan Klimkowski]

Think I'll take a wander amidst the debris of that eighty-miles-an-hour both 
accelerating into the moment head-on smackbang JGBCRASH  that took place 
just a while back...

"Notion" is a wonderful book to read, in the way that Stone's "Dog Soldiers" 
engages and makes you keep turning those pages, and in the way that "The 
Recognitions" doesn't.  But "Notion" is a very different kind of book from 
"The Recognitions".  The amazing thing about GR is that it manages to be 
both the ultimate book of the CounterCulture and of interest to scholars of 
literature.  I once lent my copy of TR to a friend who'd devoured GR and, 
yeah, surprise surprise, she managed about 82 pages before handing the thing 
back to me with disbelief.  As has been mentioned, TR is not a pleasure to 
read first time.

Almost as astonishing though was Cal's comment that he's "never heard any 
reliable criticism that says Notion is better than Cuckoo's Nest". 
  Firstly, what is "reliable" criticism?  Indeed, whilst we're at it, what 
is a reliable critic?  For myself, I prefer unreliable critics.  There are 
plenty in the ListWorld who could thread that one for years.     Secondly, 
most of the people I mingle with would be far more likely to pick up 
"Notion" rather than "Cuckoo's Nest" again - IOW the people I know who read 
Kesey and Burroughs and DerBeats and Vollmann and the cyberpunks find more 
in "Notion", and personally I prefer their opinion to that of some AssProf 
trying to think up a way of integrating Kesey into a grand and marginal 
tradition of American literature in order to extend his tenure by a coupla 
terms which the only Kesey litcrit I've read really stank of.

Cal then goes on to say: "Next you'll be telling us that unless we've 
dropped acid, then we don't really understand Pynchon."  Well,  it sure 
doesn't do any harm...  As I've opined before on these pages, GR is one of 
the great books about altered states - whether access to these states is 
facilitated by Zones, chemicals, magic hi and lo, extreme physicality, 
poetry, religion, science, etc etc.  And I still think it's possible that 
one of the reasons why the title "Mindless Pleasures" was junked was so that 
GR couldn't be written off by hostile critics as 
justanothersixtiesbookaboutdrugs....

Trippingly
jan


PS re Pynchon and sf, it has of course been rumoured that, immediately 
post-GR, TP was writing an sf novel as well the Mason-Dixon book.  And in 
the 1984 Luddite article he writes that the next great challenge will come 
"when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, 
molecular biology and robotics all converge".  TP also seems to have read 
quite a bit of sf.  However, my sense is that the incursions from other 
worlds in his works have at least as much to do with surrealism, the 
blurring of lines produced by the Tube/popular culture, and the various 
western mystical traditions whose legacy can be seen in Kabbalism, the 
Golden Dawn and the Blandian fate of Masonry.