Mushrooms & Bananas

[rich]

Pynchon's equating fascism with queerness seems a bit outdated nowadays. of
its time I suppose

rich

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 11:39 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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