RE: mild drug SPOILER Re: other stoned detectives? Re: finished IV…

[Carvill John]

I was really only referring to pot smoking. I just see a *possible* disparity between al the reviews saying that Doc is whacked all teh time, and the amount of narrative time in which Doc is *explicitly* described as too stoned to operate normally. I know what happens when you smoke a joint! I was just thinking out loud, how often in the book does Doc really seem stoned? Is it really as often as we think? Answer might be yes. I was just ponderin'...

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> From: dougmillison at comcast.net
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: mild drug SPOILER Re: other stoned detectives? Re: finished IV…
> Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:54:20 -0700
>
> He can smoke pot all day and not be stoned? ;o) He's got to have a
> buzz pretty much all the time don't you think, as often as he mentions
> smoking a joint? Even with commercial grade stash, and at various
> points notes that he's smoking higher-potency Colombian, "thai stick",
> resinous Asian pot. And what a fine surprise pleasure that was, back
> in the day -- the move from commercial pressed brick weed to buds that
> had been handled with care, like the cut from black and white to color
> in The Wizard of Oz.
>
> Whatever his actual consumption turns out to be during the days and
> nights covered in IV, Doc strikes me as a wake-and-bake kind of guy,
> not uncommon back in that day, even less so in present day California
> with a booming medical cannabis cottage industry. (You can take a
> weekend seminar over at Oaksterdam University -- affiliated with the
> Blue Sky in Oakland -- coffeeshop and learn how to be a "budtender" at
> a licensed cannabis club, how to grow it in your garage or backyard,
> how to make "concentrates" and thus join what I've heard described as
> a small but growing army of new wave artisanal hashmakers centered
> here in the SF Bay Area, how to cook with it and prepare various kinds
> of "edibles". ) All it takes is a doctor's prescription.
>
> I'll make notes when I re-read IV, so I can keep track of how much Doc
> smokes and when. Gotta fight the short-term memory loss, you know.
>
> Joe mentions PCP, recalling a batch of that substance that moved
> through Fort Worth, Texas in the late 1971-early 1972 period,
> introduced as "synthetic THC", it froze a friend of mine on the couch
> for hours listening to Johnny Winter one afternoon and evening. He
> later reported that his field of vision was like looking through the
> wrong end of a telescope. Same era, Quaaludes and Sopers became
> popular in some circles, too.
>
> I had a wild weekend in LA in early fall 1972, with some GI buddies we
> drove down from Ft. Ord in Monterey to one guy's family home in
> Topanga Canyon where among many fun and mostly illegal activities we
> wound up attending a party full of movie and music business hippies. A
> fun time was had by all. Pynchon's not exaggerating by much in IV, if
> that experience is anything to go by.
>
>
> On Aug 10, 2009, at 3:50 PM, Carvill John wrote:
>
>>
>> Is he though? The more reviews I read, coupled with my second proper
>> run through IV itself, makes me question how much of the time Doc is
>> really stoned. He rools joints, and smokes, but to what extent is he
>> really out of it, how much of the time?
>>
>> ---
>

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