Drugs in Pynchon's fiction

[Doug Millison]

Re rj and Paul's back-and-forth on TRP as passive researcher or
enthusiastic participant (much simplified, I know, no harm intended to
either of these noble interlocutors!), it may be worth remembering what his
old girlfriend had to say (IF this is what she said, of course -- we get
these comments through the infamous JS, who may or may not be giving us the
story straight, and who has every reason to slant it so that TRP looks bad;
I must admit that it's hard not to giggle at the way JS has reported these
comments):

"I stayed with Jules because he was the poet and the hippie. We actually
lived in a commune. We weren't pretending. We were the real thing. Tom
didn't stick his neck out and live the way he wrote. [...]  He's very
conventional and old-fashioned and has the values of his generation of the
Fifties from upper class Oyster Bay. He never met a person who said 'dig'
or 'man' or 'it's not my bag.' It's only in his imagination. He'd like to
be one of his characters and wear a black leather jacket and stand on the
corner and spit. Or he'd like to be one of those surfers that he studied
like a sociologist in Manhattan Beach. He's really a professional
sociologist, studying people."
--from _Lineland_

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