Writing on Drugs

[Doug Millison]

...is the title of a new book by Sadie Plant,  (since I haven't seen 
the book yet I don't know if she mentions Pynchon, but, how could she 
have missed him?), briefly reviewed in _Publishers Weekly_, 3 July 
2000:  "Plant's fast-paced primer demonstrates how narcotics, 
stimulants, and hallucinogens have inspired and influenced writers 
through the ages. Beginning with opium's influence on De Quincey, 
Coleridge and Poe, and moving on to cannabis and hashish (Baudelaire, 
Rimbaud, Flaubert), cocaine (Stevenson, Freud, Doyle) and speed and 
LSD (Kerouac, Burroughs, Leary), she misses nary a literary toke, 
snort, or shot. Along the way, Plant (_Zeros + Ones_), a British 
cultural studies scholar, presents a great deal of hard, cold fact. 
[....] The final sections, on the 1960s, are the book's best. Here we 
find writers, poets, and pohilosphers reflecting on what Herbert 
Marcuse called a 'revolution in perception,' a necessary and 
complementary aspect of the 'social liberation' then being expressed 
in the body politic. Plant ends her journey with a thoughtfully 
postmodern turn, suggesting that to write under the influence of 
drugs 'is to plunge into a world where nothing is as simple or as 
stable as it seems.' "
-- 

d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>