295.36: ' "Micro" Graham '

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 Doug sez:

> I'm puzzled by David's comments re 60s vs 90s LSD.  LSD is LSD. Higher or
> lower doses, maybe; or perhaps the current item is adulterated in some way.
> Having said that, I have it on good authority that the Orange Sunshine and
> Clear Light (aka Windowpane) in 1969 and 1970 was indeed righteous, space
> travel material. One reason was that the hits included a large dose (250
> mikes, if memory serves, the case of Orange Sunshine), and experienced
> trippers often took two or more hits.

  LSD is indeed LSD. 250 mikes has always been a reasonable dose. In the early
  80s, when I entered the stage, there were these "White Micros" (- while my   
  second trip the sky was rotating with Egyptean Gods and ESP turning into real 
  telepathy). In the late 80s and early 90s there were "yellys" (- but only the 
  white ones were really good; the red ones to follow, though not without   
  effect, definitely did not have 250 mikes) & papers called "Shillum smoking   
  Dragon" (- and that's what was painted on them). Since the mid 90s there are  
  papers around which were, in '93, introduced as "Albert Hofmann jubilee trips" 
  (- 50 years earlier Hofmann, as everybody knows, discovered not the substance 
  itself, but it's psycholytic effect. Riding on a bike like nobody before ...). 
  On the front side it simply says "LSD 25", on the backside there's a drawing 
  of the substance's chemical structure. They are, regarding the issue, all you 
  can ask for ... 

> "The Promise of Space Travel" murals sound a lot like the pictures in
> Disneyland's Tomorrowland, not all that far from one of the centers of the
> U.S. aerospace industry. The parallels grow even stronger when we get to
> Pokler's story and Zwolfkinder.

  In Mathew Winston's old biographical piece from 1975 it says that the 
  stock-broker company Pynchon & Co (- where George M. Pynchon was taking   
  part) published a book called "The Aeronautics Industry" (: my amateur   
  retranslation)in 1929, which was meant to attract poterntial investers.

> Nice try, Kai, but I still don't buy the straightforward identification of
> LSD=death. 

  Well, thank you. I don't want to buy it, too, and I hope somebody else will 
  bring in readings that show GR as "acid affirming". But up to now this   
  interpretation still makes sense, no?


>In his elaboration of the chemical industry cartel, TRP seems to
> clearly associate with death and War those *people and corporations* that
> have co-opted the psychedelic experience and who have tried to control it
> through synthesis, but the novel as a whole seems to rather joyfully affirm
> the psychedelic experience in itself. 

  With your last statement here I, of course, agree. But maybe the serious 
  sociologist and the joyful narco anarchist do not get along with each other to 
  well inside the person we "know" as Thomas Pynchon ... 

> When you get right down to it,
> melting into the landscape, talking to the trees and listening to them talk
> back, Slothrop's travel through his own repressed racial and American
> ideas, and the rest of the novel's hallucinatory material could come as
> easily from LSD as from mushrooms or from any number of synthesized
> psychedelics.  Terrance and I exchanged several posts on this topic awhile
> back.
 
  As I posted before, I think it makes the discussion easier when we   
  differenciate between TRP's personal user taste & the novel's modelling of   
  drugs. It's quite probable that Mr. P. made his own psechedelic experiences   
  with LSD (- in Vineland we here little 'til nothing about mushrooms), but   
  nevertheless - Back to nature! - decided to model mushrooms as the   
  non-corporative alternative which helps us to escape the white visitation.

> Speaking of MDMA, isn't the active ingredient in nutmeg (Osbie's choice in
> the early innings) chemically similar?  I thought I read something like
> that recently.

  Yes. "Nutmeg's essential oils include safrole, which is similar to MDA, and 
  myristicin, which is related to MDMA. Conversion of these non-amine oils in 
  the presence of ammonia into the amine forms (e.g. MDA and MDMA) has been   
  demonstrated in the laboratory, giving rise to speculation that a similar   
  process occurs in the body to produce mental effects" (Eisner, p. 141). When I 
  was 15, I read in a book that Charlie Parker had used nutmeg when he was in 
  jail and couldn't get the chronic. Enthusiastically, as young people are, I 
  directly ran into my mother's kitchen and stole a whole glass of nutmeg powder 
  and somehow managed to swallow it's content with a lot of water. Though there 
  was a significant effect, I could hardly enjoy it, because, as a side effect, 
  there was a really terrible headache. So I never did this again.

         Best, Kai