Chap 4 YoYodyne, factory of war

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jun 1, 2009, at 1:46 PM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> if she is going on a quest, from a home ("safe as houses") to a motel
> to a play, being stripped of layers of clothing (and, by implication,
> other types of insulation) to come closer to the world, there probably
> would be a place en route where she'd encounter the
> military-industrial complex...

All these arrows to the CIA in the Sixties. "Safehouse", "military- 
industrial complex", LSD . . .

I think of the alliances between LSD and politics in 1964 & 1966. I  
think of that mirror in the bathroom and visualize cameras behind that  
mirror. MKULTRA either closed up shop or widely expanded their  
operation during those years.

Right at the beginning of "A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the  
Wilderness" by Pierre-Yves Petillon:

	The Crying of Lot 49 remains, arguably, the most emblematic
	text of the American sixties, and one that, a quarter-century
	later, has best retained its magical spell over the reader.  When
	this fictional UFO first fell from the strange skies of America, the
	effect, at least on the European side of the Atlantic, was
	definitely eerie and even downright (as we had not yet learned
	to say) "mind-boggling." The few of us who had been there at all
	saw it as nothing more than a hilarious "black humor" cartoon of
	the current southern California's "freaked-out" scene. Some
	already knew about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, having read
	The Psychedelic Experience two years before and noticing Dr.
	Hilarius was obviously Timothy Leary scarcely transmogrified.
	This was the year when Dr. Leary, spurred on by Marshall
	McLuhan, coined his slogan "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" - and
	at the time this seemed a fairly adequate summary of the story
	told in The Crying of Lot 49.

I read CoL49 for the first time in 1979—30 years ago—and the sense of  
it being a "sixties" document really didn't occur to me at the time— 
not like Heinlein or Hesse or "The Electric-Kool-Aid-Acid-Test.". Over  
time I see that its topicality in its time was a primary feature and  
perhaps one of the reasons that the author disparaged it. At this  
distance I'm looking for evidences of the CIA, much as I was looking  
for the sources of government propaganda via the Tube in Vineland.