Let's think about Byron the Bulb

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Of course, what was Pynchon doing in Watts in 1966, anyway?

     Owsley moved to Los Angeles to pursue the production of 
     LSD. He used his Berkeley lab proceeds to buy 800 grams 
     of lysergic monohydrate, the basis for LSD. His first shipment 
     arrived on March 30, 1965. He produced 300,000 capsules 
     (270 micrograms each) of LSD by May 1965 and then returned 
     to the Bay Area.

     In September 1965, Owsley became the primary LSD supplier 
     to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters; by this point Sandoz 
     LSD was hard to come by and "Owsley Acid" had become the 
     new standard. He was featured (most prominently his 
     freak-out at the Muir Beach Acid Test in November 1965) in 
     The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a book detailing the history 
     of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters by Tom Wolfe.

     Owsley attended the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966 with 
     his new apprentice Tim Scully and provided the LSD. Owsley met 
     the members of the Grateful Dead in 1966 and began working 
     with them (and financing them) as a sound man. Along with 

                                       Bob Thomas, 

Parenthetical note here: Bob Thomas was the first music director of the 
Renaissance Faire. I'd run into him from time to time. The Owsley crew 
set up and around the Muhalla's [sp?] Coffee House, lotta them 
ex-pat dealers runnin' 'round the Faire back then. We continue. . . ..

     he designed the Lightning Bolt Skull Logo, often referred to by 
     fans as "Steal Your Face" or SYF (after the name of the 1976 
     Grateful Dead album featuring only the lightning bolt skull on 
     the cover, although the symbol predates the namesake album 
     by eight years). During this time he made numerous live 
     recordings of the Dead and other leading San Francisco acts, 
     including Jefferson Airplane, Old and In The Way, and Janis Joplin.

     Owsley and Scully built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead 
     until late spring 1966. At this point Owsley rented a house in Point 
     Richmond, California, and Owsley, Scully, and Melissa Cargill 
     (Owsley's girlfriend who was a skilled chemist) set up a lab in the 
     basement. Owsley developed a method of LSD synthesis which 
     left the LSD 99.9% free of impurities. The Point Richmond lab 
     turned out over 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD 
     they dubbed "White Lightning." LSD became illegal in California on 
     October 6, 1966, and Scully wanted to set up a new lab in Denver, 
     Colorado.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owsley_Stanley

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net
>              Jill:
>              I'm still not sure I get the preterition thing. 
>              I can honestly say that's one huge Pynchon 
>              element that escapes my grasp or lies just 
>              outside of it.. as soon as I think I "get it" I 
>              admit I really do not get it.
> 
> Teacher! Teacher! I get it, always did. All you have 
> to do to understand "preterite" and "preterition" in 
> Pynchon is to understand the "Elect". The Elect is a 
> Calvinist concept [dem W.A.S.P.s agin], this seems 
> to be a variation on "The Chosen People". The preterite 
> are all the rest. Also, preterite is a condition of being in 
> or of the past tense. Of course, that condition of being 
> in or of the past points to older, perhaps discarded, ways
> of living and belief systems.
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/5cbdeh
> 
> Having spent a fair amount of time in Watts right after 
> the "Insurrection" [1965], I find "A Journey Into The Mind 
> of Watts" very much to the point, particularly illuminating 
> as regards Mason & Dixon and The Crying of Lot 49.
> 
> http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/watts.html