Mushrooms & Bananas

[David Morris]

I think the Bigfoot's addiction to, and supply of, chocolate-covered frozen
bananas was a sexual slur of sorts: Big tough fascist really likes to suck
on dicks.

David Morris

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 10:28 AM, Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
wrote:

> "Electrical banana -  gonna be a southern craze.”  -  way before GR -
> while he was writing maybe.
>  (Southern = London town/Kensington).  Donavon - 1966/67.    About a
> 14-year old girl named Saffron,  fwiw)
>
> (“I’m just mad about 14 and she’s just mad about me - they call me mellow
> yellow - quite rightly.”)
>
> (So mellow, he's so yellow)
> Electrical banana
> Is gonna be a sudden craze
> Electrical banana
> Is bound to be the very next phase
> They call it mellow yellow
> (Quite rightly)
> Lyrics from <a href="http://www.elyrics.net">eLyrics.net</a>
>
> ****
>
> Tambien: -   The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), was officially produced
> by Warhol, though critics agree that his most important contribution,
> besides providing the now iconic banana image for the front cover.
> https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/excess-under-control-the-new-sensibility-in-midcentury-art
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Velvet_Underground_%26_Nico   (also '67)
>
> *********
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Electrical-Banana-Masters-Psychedelic-Art/dp/8862082045
>
> *********
> The song was rumoured to be about smoking dried banana skins, which was
> believed to be a hallucinogenic drug in the 1960s, though this aspect of
> bananas has since been debunked.[7] According to Donovan's notes
> accompanying the album Donovan's Greatest Hits, the rumour that one could
> get high from smoking dried banana skins was started by Country Joe
> McDonald in 1966, and Donovan heard the rumour three weeks before "Mellow
> Yellow" was released as a single.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellow_Yellow
>
> *********
> Inherent Vice - page 140:
>
> a hippie belief of the moment
> I don't know about the magazine articles, but this rumor was making the
> rounds at just about this time. It is odd, however, that Bigfoot's
> addiction to, and supply of, chocolate-covered frozen bananas is described
> in such detail here, and then is never mentioned again in the novel.
> My immediate thought was that this was a reference to Arrested Development.
>
> *********
> Becky
>
>
>
> > On Mar 30, 2016, at 2:14 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On the question whether the banana breakfast - in general: the farming
> on the roof - is a good counter-cultural "Fuck Death!", or in itself just
> an artificial and synthetic strategy of death-orientated survival.
> >
> > On pp. 92-93, Katje  just entered the scene, it says: "She's alone in
> the house, except for the secret cameraman and Osbie Feel, who's out in the
> kitchen doing something mysterious with a harvest of mushrooms from up on
> the roof. They have shiny red-orange cups with raised patches of
> whitish-gray veil. Now and then the geometry of her restlessness brings her
> to glance in a doorway at his boyish fussing with the Amanita muscaria (for
> it is this peculiar relative of poisonous Destroying Angel that claims
> Osbie's attention, or what passes with him for attention)---flash him a
> smile she means to be friendly, but which to Osbie seems terribly worldly,
> sophisticated, wicked."
> >
> > Thing just is that in the case of Amanita muscaria (dt. "Fliegenpilz"),
> in contrary to the magic mushrooms of the psilocybin type, it's not
> possible to cultivate it in artificial surroundings. According to my
> knowledge, you cannot grow these mushrooms in greenhouses or boxes! They
> can only grow in conjunction with a living tree. "Amanita cultivation in a
> lab environment has always been a frustrating prospect due to the symbiotic
> relationship of this mushroom to its host trees, most of which are Birch
> trees that occur naturally in the wild. But if one has the right host trees
> in their area, and resides in the proper temperate zone or elevation, one
> can try and simply take a few dried or fresh caps that are in sporination
> (fully flattened or upturning with longitudinal tears along the
> striations), crush them up thoroughly, and mix the crushed pieces into the
> top soil. See if it will take. If one doesn’t want to make the initial
> investment of the caps simply chop up the stems from sporinating specimens,
> which will naturally have collected some of the falling spores, and mix
> with the soil" (amanita-shop.com/amanita-cultivation). So what you need
> is a garden, a greenhouse on the roof won't do it.
> >
> > I'm not sure what to make of this.  Did Pynchon know about the
> impossibility to grow Amanita muscaria the way he describes it and thought
> "Hey, a little magic realism cannot do any harm". If so, the whole  farming
> on the roof motif, including the initial banana breakfast, could indeed be
> read as basically positive. It's so very counter-cultural and "Fuck Death!"
> that it even makes Amanita muscaria grow without any birch or pine tree
> around ... But if Pynchon actually knew about the impossibility, a reading
> along the lines of Laura's skepticism regarding the motif of good nature in
> Pynchon would also make sense. Then the cultivation appears be another
> example of war ridden science going beyond the zero by practicing something
> which appeared (and still appears) to be impossible. What fits this reading
> is the fact that the effects of Amanita muscaria are actually not so much
> psychedelic yet deliriant, dissociative and sedative-hypnotic. Via the
> early use by Siberian shamans the mushroom is associated with the north.
> Not exactly the direction of the sky Pynchon favors in terms of his
> cultural cosmology.
> >
> > Does Osbie Feel - "He leads her to a back room fitted out with
> telephones, a cork board with notes pinned all over, desks littered with
> maps, schedules, An Introduction to Modern Herero, corporate histories,
> spools of recording wire"  (p. 536) - somehow represent Pynchon himself?
> >
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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