Counterflying on the Pynchon drug 'connection"

[Bryan Snyder]

Just playing Devil's boring Advocate but.

 

 

You do realize how many songs were written under the influence of all the
drugs imaginable that are enjoyed by those who are very anti-intoxication?
I mean. to answer your question better I think:

 

I think the answer (as it is in MANY cases in life I think) is BOTH.

 

I think some parts were very sober and some parts were not. obviously both
sober and drug induced writing is edited, rearranged, parts moved into other
parts. all amalgamated by a total master of diction and style . 

 

 

I think that happens a LOT, in all art.

 

That's all.

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Mark Kohut
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 4:28 AM
To: pynchon -l; Pete Cleland
Subject: Counterflying on the Pynchon drug 'connection"

 

All---

 

As I have posted, I think TRP was working harder than 

ever during the 17 years between published books.

 

A-and, I also believe with much less circumstantial evidence

that whatever drug use TRP practiced, I am willing to bet it

was much less than even the average and never came close

to messing up his mind and had nothing to do with the 'missing'

17 years.   

 

Why? Just a judgment call but.....the guy is incredibly disciplined,

it seems, writing incredibly rich and allusive books by hand on graph

paper, revising, revising, fact-checking, or not revising and getting it
mostly

right in the writing line by line but still fact-checking [see Slow Learner]
and

reading, reading and absorbing into his vision everything he goes after
intellectually,

encrypting it into those poetic structures of novels, learning languages and

the slang thereof! and thinking hard and long and thinking some more every 

minute while he writes, borrowing The Heavenly City of the 18th Century
Philosophers

from Ian McEwan and folding THAT into M & D.....and, yes, I would bet on at
least

one acid trip or a couple-three but I would also bet that the intensity of
GR and the 

depth and beauty of other books (or parts thereof) were written in full
undrugged 

consciousness...... I still wonder whether all of the coffee-drinking in M &
D is supposed

to be a good or bad thing----compared to tea.

 

A good lit scholar/critic, Lionel Trilling, I think, once wrote an essay on
the fact that

many of the greatest American writers, Faulkner, fitzgerald, others, were
...alcoholics

or at least drunk a lot of the time.  He "showed" that however much that was
part of their

characters, they could not write that way and didn't.

 

Do we really think that beautiful, lyrically relentless and incredible
to-the limit comic prose of 

GR was written while his mind was 'on drugs"?.....

 

I don't. 

 

Just Say No,

MK

  

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