Grace/Slick

[John Carvill]

It's an intriguing thought, Janos. Certainly White Rabbit is a song
which demands inclusion on any GR/Pynchon playlist. And, what with my
resurgent Beatles obsession, mention of The Fool can't help but remind
me of the artist collective who did the mural on the Beatles' Apple
Boutique, which was eventually white-washed off following council
complaints. Paul McCartney said that one idea they had was to
reserruct the mural by keeping the building white, but having the
mural projected onto the side of the building. Which would have been
way cool.

Back to GR and rabbits, here's something from the GR wiki, which
incorporates some thoughs which occurred to me regarding Pirate (and
Osbie's) rooftop garden:

 "...not far from Chelsea Embankment, by Corydon Throsp, an
acquaintance of the Rossettis' who wore hair smocks and liked to
cultivate pharmaceutical plants up on the roof"

This is a pretty posh address for this lot, is it not? Kensington? The
area includes the famous Chenye Walk where Keith Richards, not
unfamiliar with Osbie Feel's kind of mushrooms, once lived. As did
Rossetti, who we're told Throsp is on nodding terms with. Rosetti's
wife died of a drug overdose, he took to keeping wombats as pets, one
of these wombats used to attend the dinner table, and was said to have
provided the inspiration for the Dormouse character in Alice in
Wonderland.

That Dormouse's advice - "feed your head" - was used at the end of
Jefferson Airplane's mushroom flavoured, Alice-inspired song 'White
Rabbit'. Way later on in the book, Slothrop has a dream in which a
statue of the White Rabbit in Llandudno is giving him sage advice, but
he loses it as he wakes. Oddly enough, the drug that killed Rosetti's
wife was laudanum, which isn't very different from 'Llandudno'. Of
course that's almost certainly just a coincidence, but all of the
foregoing is the sort of stuff you find yourself digging up by chasing
after the countless references Pynchon sews into the fabric of the
book.

Cheers
J