295.36: ' "Micro" Graham '

[Doug Millison]

At 12:03 AM +1300 11/17/99, Tim Thomas wrote:
>Or from dreams, nightmares, weird euro-folktales, mythologies, literature,
>poetry, film, and heck, even the authors Imagination! I don't disagree that
>drugs (and their culture, economics, experience, mythology etc) are
>important to the novel  - but to argue that the 'hallucinatory' aspects of
>the writing come from psychedelics is too simplistic.

And you will look in vain throughout nearly 3 years of posts on Pynchon-L
to find one in which I attribute TRP's inspiration to psychedelic drugs.
But, the fact is, many passages in GR bear comparison to descriptions of
hallucinations produced by LSD and related substances -- passages in Tim
Leary's _High Priest_, to name one book that comes to mind. And no I am not
naming Tim Leary as an "influence" on TRP. This is not to say that TRP
wrote like this because he was on acid or anything of that sort. Whether
it's from direct personal experience or not (and I would be surprised to
learn he hasn't taken LSD), TRP does incorporate a huge sample of 50s and
60s experience into his novels, including drugs (re the "microgram"
reference here, for example, and the direct mention of LSD -- how many
serious authors were writing about LSD in the '60s, in their great American
novels?), along with the obvious historical research. Psychedelics or not,
TRP's literary imagination is awesome and that's no Valley Girl-speak.

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