LSD, JFK, CIA?

[Paul Mackin]

I wasn't actually IN this thread at its start.  My statement that LSD use and
experimentation would have been already known (by Pynchon readers let me make
perfectly clear, not necessarily everybody in America)  at the time of Lot49
publication was merely by way of challenging your contention  (under a separate
thread) that Pynchon could possibly be conceived of as revealing anything the
least bit secret or forbidden to his readers.

In your post below you argue things I have no considered opinions on at all.
In earlier posts I had commented on the atypicality of Oedipa's situation. This
was not in criticism of Pynchon, what he knew or when and how he knew it. He
can have his housewives do whatever they like. I assumed it was all quite under
his control  and directed to his purpose which probably  wasn't to portray a
typical Peninsula housewife.  Above all I certainly  never said anywhere that
LSD experimentation was either typical or atypical, possible or impossible. I
never myself (that I can remember) speculated on LSD or tupperware's   PURPOSE
in the book. I never thought much about it. For me the Tupperware Party and the
LSD didn't require further explanation. They were familiar icons of the
period.  I'm not the kind of Pynchon reader that looks really "deep". If it's
not on the surface I'm not going to dig it out. Hidden messages are bad
writing.  The only negative thing I think I said against our man--and this was
earlier and in good humor--was that he didn't seem to have a very precise
knowledge of The Peninsula. This was  based on my own knowledge of the Palo
Alto and Menlo Park area plus still frequent visits to a house on East Creek
Drive within a stone's throw of where the experiments took place. Let me expand
the last to say that having the specific locales of the book a little fogged
over was conceivable intentional.

The really unbelievable thing is that you are continuing even in your latest
post to talk about about the proportion of the general population who knew
about LSD as if that statistic  has relevance to anything.

                                                                        P.





Doug Millison wrote:

> This thread started with a discussion of Oedipa as suburban housewife, and
> what the characteristics Pynchon has gifted her with might mean in a
> discussion of COL49.  How to read that she's attended a Tupperware party --
> plastic plays a big role in Pynchon's work? That she's a Young Republican --
> given P's trashing of Republicans, Nixon, and Reagan in GR and Vineland?
> That's she's married to a dj who's helping to pump commercial rock and roll
> out to the youth audience and profoundly alienated from his work? That she
> has a psychiatrist who's trying to get her to take LSD? LSD comes back in GR
> and Vineland.
>
> Where Pynchon got his information about LSD is largely irrelevant to reading
> COL49, isn't it?  He may have had friends in the East and West coast
> artistic community that in the early '60s was experiementing with LSD,
> thanks to people like Tim Leary and Alan Ginsberg who were turning on their
> friends. Or, maybe somebody told him about scientific research into LSD, or
> maybe he happened upon a reference to it serendipitously in his library
> research.  He certainly wasn't getting his information from the mass media,
> which largely ignored LSD as a subject of consistent coverage until after
> COL49 was published.  By the mid-60s, some scientists had published papers
> about their LSD research, there had been a few conferences, it wasn't secret
> (except for the CIA and military research, of course) -- but it wasn't
> common knowledge outside that restricted circle, LSD was in no way a
> household word, and it's still not.
>
> Perhaps Paul and Malign were pals with housewives who were taking LSD back
> in the early 60s, and if so that puts them in a very select group, along
> with Pynchon, obviously.  They've yet to come up with anything that
> demonstrates that more than a relative handful of people in the U.S. (a
> fraction of a percent, at a most generous estimate) ever heard of LSD at
> that time, and I doubt they will, they make a rather different contribution
> to our discussion here.  Nor have they addressed the question of what it
> might mean in our discussion of COL49 that Pynchon makes LSD a prominent
> element therein, and I doubt they'll do that either.