college life in the '50s...

[pynchonoid]

...is one of the many subjects of a book I've just
gotten around to reading:  _Harvard and the Unabomber:
 The Education of an American Terrorist_ by Alston
Chase.  Very good on the "culture of despair"  on Ivy
League campuses in that decade, and good counterpoint
to what Pynchon has had to say about himself in the
'50s.

Henry Murray, who conducted a series of brutal and
perhaps unethical psychological experiments on Ted
Kaczynski (the Unabomber) while he was an
undergraduate at Harvard, may lurk in the shadows
behind Slothrop's sodium amytal interrogation - Murray
was deeply involved in OSS and later CIA and other US
military-sponsored experiments on interrogation and
other mind control techniques, including the Harvard
experiments involving Kaczynski.   Hundreds of
professors at US universities were involved in one or
another psychological research project for these
creeps in the '50s. No way of knowing, of course,
whether or not Pynchon knew about them, but it's not
inconceivable.

Chase's book is a good read and will be of interest to
some of you, I expect.



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