Was Pynchon influenced by Leary, R.A. Wilson?

Tue Aug 29 09:20:18 CDT 2017

It crossed my mind that somebody, including me, especially me, might go,
"You think Inherent Vice is transcendent and sublime?"  Well, no.  I'm not
talking about those books, I'm talking about the main three.

On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 9:13 AM, Seymour Landnau <seymourlandnau at gmail.com>
wrote:

> What's annoying about "Pynchon with training wheels" is the absurd and
> noxious suggestion that transcendent writing like Pynchon's can be
> learned.  That with training you can wheel with the wizard.  You can't
> nobody can.  Whether you believe that his consciousness comes from tiny
> flashes of light bopping about in his brain, or is channeled from a sixth
> dimensional Arcturan, anybody with half a brain would agree that whatever
> it is it is "god given".
>
> What makes the writing "divine" isn't its erudition, or the way it juggles
> vast concepts across the spectrum of human understanding with life's
> terrors and joys and everyday minutiae.  It's the singular(ity!) way it,
> the writing I mean, the way it, what's that word that describes the way you
> sort, of, string words together, in a way, how do you say, that's pleasing
> but, but what's more, is, it is, what's a word, what's a word, sublime.
>
> Nobody learns how to be sublime.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 4:49 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>>
>> To me "Gravity's Rainbow with training wheels" sounds like a pretty good
>> description of
>>
>> *Illuminatus! *The last year in school all the cool people were reading
>> it (in translation). We made music, played theater, took a lot of drugs.
>> And Shea & Wilson (whose other books like *Prometheus Rising* or *Cosmic
>> Trigger* were also read at that time) provided a reference frame and
>> introduced us to authors like Lovecraft, Crowley and also Joyce. A-and It
>> took just a couple of months before I read my first Pynchon, which was *Gravity's
>> Rainbow* in translation ...
>>
>> So don't speak ill of Robert Anton Wilson!
>>
>> While Leary was certainly an ambivalent figure with a number of issues
>> (by this I'm not saying that he doesn't have merits in psychology and the
>> early psychedelic movement),  Wilson always appeared rather likeable to me.
>>
>> Whether Pynchon is actually "influenced" by the writings of Leary and/or
>> Wilson (here this could only be the case regarding Pynchon II), I do not
>> know. His writing simply takes place on a higher level.
>>
>>
>>
>> Am 28.08.2017 um 10:52 schrieb Mark Kohut:
>>
>> Your " clearly" can't even be proven from what we know and, of course, what most want to believe. And as if his habit of making "cross-disciplinary connections"--wtf is THAT in him besides metaphors-making genius, praised from Aristotle on as the highest kind of " intelligence".
>>
>> All of the annotating and criticism exploring P's creative sources and jackshit re these guys.
>> He is too smart for all of them. Which is one reason THEY admire him.
>>
>> Wtf is that list in your post, from " music scale" to "control"? Seems to me like a"junior-grade Pynchon" list satirizing literary criticism.
>>
>> "Junior-grade Pynchon" per that commenter means it is effectively a joke, bad Pynchon parody.  Or else like Shakespeare retold for kids.
>>
>> A--and, I think you've got the dark web in BE about as wrong--although again his ambiguous depth of symbolic use is not easily summarized--as can be.
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>>
>> On Aug 28, 2017, at 12:33 AM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> People often consider Wilson and Shea's The Illuminatus Trilogy to be
>> junior-grade Pynchon, as in the link below, where one commenter
>> describes it as "Gravity's Rainbow with training wheels".
>> http://www.librarything.com/topic/32913
>>
>> On Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 11:18 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> I have been reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger( 1 and 3) and am now starting into some Leary writing, which I found one of the more interesting parts of the Trigger books. Leary was more scientific than he is credited with, though clearly was left in the lurch by the outlawing of the intriguing chemistry brain interaction  which is one of the most fascinating in nature’s pharmacy and deserves open scientific, therapeutic and artistic inquiry.
>>
>> Clearly P experimented with the same substances and has the same habit of making cross disciplinary connections as Leary and Wilson: music scale, male female electro chemistry, poetry as code, alchemy, tarot, communication accross time, psychology-science-political power games-control vs. freedom. Both use humor in powerful ways, and Wilson read and admired P and Joyce enormously. The main philosophic difference seems to be along the lines of pessimism/ optimism for the human condition. Leary/Wison see the potential to break non-functional conditioning whereas P sees those habits as more pervasive and operating on dangerous feedback loops. For P redemption/liberation/clarity is rare and individual with little impact on the macrocosm. On the other hand, there is an arc of movement toward optimism since GR.
>>
>> At the end of bleeding edge we are dropped off in a dangerous world made worse by the police state approach to IT , but with a nodding invitation of a departure into the  Deep web as an outpost of free exchange, ghosts and new games. The internet and virtual reality were intriguing frontiers to Leary/Wilson also.
>>
>> Any thoughts on a Leary, Pynchon, Wilson connection
>>
>> -
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>>
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>> .
>>
>>
>>
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