Counterflying on the Pynchon drug 'connection"

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Do you have any idea how much of Beethoven's "Late Period" was aided/abbeted by Laudenum?
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Bryan Snyder" <wilsonistrey at gmail.com>
> 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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