OFF Re: The Main Scientist behind MK-Ultra - a book recommendation

Wed May 24 10:00:10 UTC 2023

Timothy Leary's *The Psychedelic Experience* was as widely distributed as
the best books that sold in the sixties.
All good bookstores.......it had its eight printing in 1971.

I think Woods' consistent rejection of Pynchon's work is his own and
independent of the "trends and dynamics in his field"
which favored Pynchon, I would argue. Comes from earlier critical
influence, Leavis-like or others.

On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 5:31 AM matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Kai,
>
> Long time, no post; good to hear from you. And thanks for throwing that
> book my way. I was even able to find that chapter you quoted online. Great
> source. So we know that Abramson gave Ginsberg LSD for the first time in
> 1959, but that still doesn't make it clear if that is where Allen heard it
> from.
>
> Harold Abramson, according to Stephen Kinzer, had been an officer in the
> Chemical Warfare Service during WWII. ("Keep mum, she's not dumb!")
> Abramson was one of the CIA's first medical collaborators (Kinzer, p60) in
> 1947; MK-NAOMI was named after his secretary. And later in 1951 he
> administered LSD to Gottlieb under the latter's request - only 6 months
> into the job. Kinzer also states that Abramson gave LSD to people at his
> Long Island home (Abramson was a New York allergist). In '53 Gottlieb gave
> HA $85,000 to run experiments. Would he have let it slip to one of his
> guests that he got the substance from the CIA? Ok, maybe Abramson
> told Bateson who then told Ginsberg. But that still doesn't explain where
> TP might have got the idea (LSD in CoL 49) from. Still, there are other
> possibilities.
>
> From the same page you quoted, there is another passage that is quite
> thought provoking.  "Harold Abramson apparently got a great kick out of
> getting his learned friends high on LSD. He first turned on Frank
> Fremont-Smith, head of the Macy Foundation which passed CIA money to
> Abramson. In this cozy little world where everyone knew everybody,
> Fremont-Smith organized the conferences that spread the word about LSD to
> the academic hinterlands." That got me thinking about publications.
>
> The webpage where I found the text from *The Search for the Manchurian
> Candidate* is called druglibrary.org. And there are other books in their
> bibliography section. I list some here. Check those publication dates.
>    H. Abramson *The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy* (1960)
>    T. Leary  *The Psychedelic Experience *(1964)
>    T.M. Ling and J. Buckman  *LSD and Ritalin in Treatment of Neurosis *
> (1963)
>     Louis Cholden   *Lysergic Acid Diethylamide and Mescaline in
> Experimental Psychiatry* (1956) !!
>
> My point is that well before the Acid tests there were scholarly
> publications that mentioned LSD, quite a few. Could the multi-faceted
> polymath and autodidactic author have come across any of those? I suspect
> that it would have been easier (more probable) for TP to run across one of
> these books than to have actually heard from someone that had been
> administered LSD by one of the many doctors involved in MK-Ultra. I know
> that's a big claim and I would have to look at publication numbers for the
> books and where they were, likely University libraries and private
> collections of practitioners.
>
> Can we take it one step further? As LSD worked its way into society's
> synapses, other cultural producers were opening new positions within their
> respective fields (from Latin and South American writers and abstract
> painters to Ornette Coleman and more) and it all required new language or
> terms to describe and classify what was happening. For example, Michel
> Foucault had an important experience with LSD that sent him in new
> directions in a way that John Barth's reading of Jorge Luis Borges caused a
> shift in that writer's production. Compare all that with a Google N-gram
> chart of the term "postmodern". It really starts to get used in the 70's
> and booms into usage in the '80's before peaking and falling off
> significantly at the beginning of the 21st century. (One must also consider
> that Academia is not immune to trends and the dynamics of the field that
> require that agents act in response to new positions by accepting or
> rejecting them, for example. Consider Benny Goodman's attempt to do Bebop
> style music, or James Wood's consistent rejection of Pynchon. Or simply the
> fact that there are probably very few philosophy papers today that cite
> Bergson's "élan vital".)
>    In other words, the term "postmodern" was an attempt to explain all the
> new weirdness. Architecture, music, art or literature that didn't align
> with earlier models or modes of production could be filed under
> "postmodern". But that is an argument that requires a book to lay it out
> with any clarity.
>
> best regards,
> mc otis
>
> On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 2:01 PM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi Matthew,
> >
> > you write:
> >
> > > So Ginsberg knew before the Committee blew the lid off it all. How and
> > when would be
> > interesting to know. <
> >
> > I think the standard work of Marks (*The Search for the "Manchurian
> > Candidate"*, here p. 129) does answer your question at least partly:
> >
> > "Abramson also gave Gregory Bateson, Margret Mead's former husband, his
> > first LSD. In 1959 Bateson, in turn, helped arrange for a beat poet
> friend
> > of his named Alan Ginsberg to take the drug at a research program located
> > off the Stanford campus [probably the same program Adi Da - see *The Knee
> > of Listening*, chapter 3 - was in a couple of years later - kfl]. No
> > stranger to the hallucinogenic effects of peyote, Ginsberg reacted badly
> to
> > what he describes as 'the closed little doctor's room full of
> instruments,'
> > where he took the drug. Although he was allowed to listen to records of
> his
> > choice (he chose a Gertrude Stein reading, a Tibetan mandala [meant here
> is
> > probably: "mantra" - kfl], and Wagner), Ginsberg felt he 'was being
> > connected to Big Brother's Brain.' He says that the experience resulted
> in
> > 'a slight paranoia that hung on all my acid experiences through the
> > mid-1960s until I learned from meditation how to disperse that.'. /
> > Anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson then worked at the
> Veterans
> > Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. From 1959 on, Dr. Leo Hollister was
> > testing LSD at the same hospital."
> >
> > Best wishes!
> >
> > Kai
> >
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>