Mushrooms & Bananas

Thu Mar 31 11:52:16 CDT 2016

I guess there is some of that in Bigfoot's banana, but I think it's more an
undermining of the macho facade than an "equating" queerness with
anything.  I think his depictions of homosexuality in GR are VERY dated
(and unfortunate), but I think by the time he wrote BE, he must have been
much more enlightened.

David Morris

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 10:45 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Pynchon's equating fascism with queerness seems a bit outdated nowadays.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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