Keeeeeesy now, foax....

[Cal McInvale]

Jan Klimkowski searches the wreckage for some mushrooms:

>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.

Perhaps I should have said "responsible," a word closer to my intended
message. Nonetheless, it just goes to show you that opinions are like...
well, you know the rest.

>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.

Jeez, watch how you swing those cliche! You could put an eye out!

>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....

Excellent. Now why don't you tool down to your roughest part of town, buy
some smack & shoot up while reading Naked Lunch. Then you tell me if it
doesn't do any harm. Lissen, oh wordly wise one, I have a very colorful
drug background, most of which stemmed from exactly the attitude you seem
to convey. Getting hooked on heroin didn't do one friggin' thing for my
appreciation of Burroughs, Jim Carroll, or (much later) Kurt Cobain.
However, spending six hours on my knees in a dirty bathroom, shivering and
vomiting, did make me realize the danger irresponisbile advocates of
drug-use.


Cal McInvale       e-mail:  godot at wolfe.net
WWW: http://www.wolfe.com/~godot/index.html
--------------
What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not
the still photographs of finished character but the movie, the soul in
flux.  -- Thomas Pynchon