The birth of the Hippie

[Mike Weaver]

There was a transition from the beat to hippie era which can't really be 
pinned down. Since the epicentre of the explosion of awareness of it was 
San Francisco, you could date it from the birth of the Diggers and the 
start of the Acid Tests, but you could push it back to the drug 
experiments that introduced Kesey and others to LSD, or the bus journey 
described in Wolfe's Electric Kood Aid (1964  I think). Wolfe notes that 
things had massively changed in California between Futhur (the Neal 
Cassady driven bus) setting off and returning.

Some say Eden Ahbez writer of Nature Boy was the first hippie. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_Boy

Reading for those wanting to explore the history might include
Peter Coyote /Sleeping Where I Fall/.
Emmet Grogan /Ringolevio
/Tom Wolfe /Electric Kool Aid Acid Test
/

Online/The Digger Archives - https://www.diggers.org/

cheers weavercreature
aka Mike but rarely Weaver

/
/

On 03/02/2026 11:38, Mark Kohut wrote:
> Just a note on another good--great post.  I quoted Pynchon himself on
> reasons for the failures of the sixties. I think P saw a real different
> vision of the future of America there, THAT if I am right caught by
> him himself in The Crying of Lot 49. written in 64-65 and published early
> in 1966, a year before Weaver gave us his solid experience and judgment of
> the essential hippie era. Which started in 64, he asserts believably, when
> Pynchon started writing Lot 49....
>
> *1. First Conceived: Mexico City (Early 1960s)*
>
> Pynchon likely first conceived the core of the story while living in *Mexico
> City* between 1962 and 1964. During this time, he was staying with friends
> like Richard Fariña and was deeply immersed in the "exile" culture that
> often fueled his themes of displacement and hidden systems
>
> On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 1:17 AM J Tracy<brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>>
>>> On Feb 2, 2026, at 5:01 AM, Corbeau Castrum via Pynchon-l <
>> pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
>>> There is a double movement: evaluating the results of the 60s based on
>> their own stated aims,
>>
>> who are the  they in your “their stated aims”
>> I was actually alive and graduated from High school  in the 60s, went to
>> Woodstock, marched against the war, and it was not some unified political
>> event. It was part of the flow of time and history, there was no they with
>> some universal stated aims
>>> which certainly included revolution and the overthrow of the "capitalist
>> war machine”;
>> for a very small group.
>>> and evaluating the results of the 60s with respect to our own standards,
>> which would include dramatic cultural changes still with us today (although
>> they are receding in certain vital areas, e.g. access to safe and legal
>> abortions). So those moments of attempted cultural and social revolution
>> were simultaneously a failure and a success; but I think we emphasize the
>> failure in order to come to grips with the ever-mounting social violence of
>> our present world.
>>> Unless I missed something, I don't think there was anyone in these
>> messages who was reducing counterculture radicalism and
>> anti-authoritarianism to a distinct category ("hippies") or set of militant
>> actions.
>> I never said there was  someone saying that. There have been regular
>> assertions that the essence of Vineland is a look at the “failures of the
>> sixties” in the the words of Mark Kohut. I am arguing that this is all
>> juvenile media language, and that Vineland is a localized look at an
>> internal civilizational struggle full of commentary on themes of media
>> culture vs, reality , specifics about the ruthless anti-constitutional
>> behavior of the Government and how it impacted real people caught in the
>> jaws of the culture war. Acting as though young people and communes and
>> political action groups could have somehow changed the culture without
>> other parts of the culture changing is absurd. These are deep historic
>> patterns. In most ways Pynchon seems to be arguing that the system is too
>> big, has too much systemic  momentum  to self correct.
>>> In our increasingly upsetting world, we must always be careful of
>> self-righteous virtue signaling,
>> good that someone is qualified to sort that out. Should I say some Hail
>> Marys?
>>> anger that other people supposedly can't see what we can, our belief
>> that we must know better. We must be wary of the powerful polemics of
>> tankies and other anti-American absolutists.
>> The only thing I am angry about is mass murder. You think that is ok? What
>> is a tankie? And who is the "we” you are talking about?  Is Corbeau Castrum
>> your real name?Are you on the verge of anti- American absolutism. To me
>> America is just a word. I prefer Turtle Island of which i feel myself to be
>> a loving part.
>>> With this in mind, there is a great piece in the LRB by Adam Shatz, in
>> which he tries "to love America with sorrow." (
>> https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n02/adam-shatz/another-country).
>>> Laura, thank you for your response regarding Pynchon's misogynistic
>> tropes. I always have trouble knowing how to handle the representation of
>> violence (especially sexual violence) in art: to what extent does it
>> function as critique versus enjoyment and provocation. I think about
>> Lolita, and the fact that Nabokov explicitly did not want any girls on the
>> cover, a desire that has been repeatedly ignored by publishers ever since,
>> noting also that he was likely abused by his uncle as a child in Russia. In
>> other words, the question is, to what extent should we hold Nabokov (and
>> Pynchon) responsible for the way their art is enjoyed by the sadistic and
>> the perverse? I have no good answer, but I am reminded of the way George
>> Floyd's murder was represented in Power (2024), Yance Ford's documentary
>> about the police. The video was mostly blacked out/censored, while the
>> audio remained—an interesting and productive way of showing the shock of
>> the violence without overwhelming us visually; and perhaps there is also a
>> symbolic association between the color black and death-giving police
>> violence, which leads us back to Pynchon's ultimate statement (in my
>> reading) on blackness in Gravity's Rainbow:
>>> "He had not meant to offend sensibilities, only to show the others,
>> decent fellows all, that their feelings about blackness were tied to
>> feelings about shit, and feelings about shit to feelings about putrefaction
>> and death" (280, penguin).
>>> On Monday, February 2nd, 2026 at 05:02, J Tracy<brook7 at sover.net>
>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Actually There is no Vineland CA. There is a school and school district
>> named Vineland in Kern County, but no town. Kern County is too far south to
>> correspond to where Zoyd grew up where the closest coastal town was Santa
>> Cruz, which would put him in the north end of the San Joaquin Valley at
>> least up to Madera or Los Banos.
>>>> I agree there is the sense of a post apocalyptic setting with Vineland
>> but… not sure the possibility of revolutionary change is entirely past.
>> That leaves out the empire’s own potential for self destruction. and the
>> fast fading enthusiasm for the MAGA version of stupid. Of course I’m a die
>> hard portfolio-carrying anti-fascist, bi-regionalist, mutual aid no war-tax
>> type.. As for apocalypse of some version or other, the planned prison camps
>> under Reagan noted in the novel, do point in that terrifying direction and
>> if you lived in El Salvador or Nicaragua at the time it was as real as your
>> murdered family members.
>>>> Going on about the failures of the 60s or reducing it to SDS radicals
>> or what are called “hippies” is a thin analysis IMO. The cultural changes
>> were large and socially important and the good common sense of
>> inclusiveness, opposition to imperial wars etc. is as obvious as ever. As
>> is the power of the capitalist war machine and the ideology of ethnic and
>> ideological cleansing. So is the creepy politics of sentimentalized
>> patriotism. And the manipulative power of corporate media, then centered in
>> TV, is still a core battleground. The internal battle between shutting up
>> and knuckling under, or refusing and saying no, no...my child is not the
>> property of your filthy blood drenched empire with its army of thanatoids
>> ,... that internal struggle continues.
>>>> The forbidden topic is still wherever the genocide is happening, and
>> where the new scapegoats come on line. That is where the arrests happen,
>> the secret jails, the brownshirts in the streets, the bombed hospitals, the
>> starving children. The jokes change, the look changes, the paths of retreat
>> and escape and profiteering change, the faces of the casualties change, but
>> the trillionaire techno-warfare led march to oblivion continues and the
>> planet gets hotter, because the entire civilization runs on fossil fuels
>> with no plan b and no planet b. We think we are smarter than starting a
>> nuclear showdown, better than the empires of the past, we even claim this
>> is a government of,by and for the people, but we are not making much of a
>> case for it.
>>>> This book is about that very large internal civilizational war. All
>> Pynchon books are about that war. (and other things)
>>>> The way P uses the word hippie in Vineland is unfortunate, There never
>> were some life form called hippies, no defineable culture, no consistent
>> set of values, no lifestyle. no politics. And this imaginary grouping is no
>> more responsible for the turns of US history than anyone else. It was just
>> a trivializing media label, clusters of fashion trends, musical tastes,
>> drug preferences, the ongoing search for another way to live in America,
>> the eternal balancing between conformity and non-conformity. What are
>> called hippies were kids from the suburbs and kids from rural communities,
>> college students taught to think and dubious about the constitutionality of
>> the CIA and CIA wars, disgruntled or enthusisatic academics, grocery store
>> clerks, dishwashers, pot sellers, communalists, Jesus Freaks, feminists,
>> mechanics, the endless pursuit of media attention of movie hits, of best
>> sellers, of military contracts. What part of US society had no longhairs,
>> no punks, no leftists, no dropouts? Grocers, civil rights agitators,
>> carpenters, art freaks, high schools, hospitals, junkies, japanese
>> gardeners, alcoholics, aerospace engineers, cops, renters, businesses the
>> whole fucking glorious and insane and criminal enterprise of America in
>> constant transformation with a thousand verions of what is possible or
>> impossible. The labels , including the label Hippie as Pynchon uses it
>> particulalrly in the early part of the novel are more misleading than
>> informative. I say this as one who lived in Arcata in the 80s and 90s and
>> almost never heard counterculture people call themselves or identify others
>> as hippies. There were dead heads, rastas, teachers, artists, students,
>> ecologists, … not a matter of labels but lives lived.
>>>> The actual world is a side by side jumble of cartoon characters and
>> infinitely subtle compexities. That actual world is , for my money, most
>> realized within P’s writing in the internal struggles of his most invested
>> characters. The complex absurdities of the social and historic dynamics
>> places us and them in a recognizeably real place. The south park
>> caricatures he summons amuse us with their cultural resonance and satiric
>> edge, but if South Park Trump has sex with Satan, our souls are implicated
>> in the tryst, our money is being used by our american Nazis, our
>> grandchildren are being charged for the weapons we buy on their credit.,
>> our politicians are being bribed by the genocidal fascists in Israel and
>> America. Resistance is not a public or intellectual position, it is where
>> the rubber meets the road. It is not what or who we blame. It is what we do
>> or do not do.
>>>> Part of what i am saying is the real value of satire happens whan we
>> point our criticism and skepticism at ourselves since our own lives are the
>> arena af greatest possible change or even the only possible change within
>> our selves, our community.
>>>> So that moves me from 2 cents to 2 bits on Vineland which I now find
>> myself re-reading. I can think of worse fates for a Sunday aternoon. God
>> bless the brave souls in Minnesota and accross the country who actually
>> risk their lives for their neighbors.
>>>>> On Feb 1, 2026, at 9:04 AM, Mark Kohutmark.kohut at gmail.com wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Not her name, her character in the fiction....Plath's “ happens when
>> we point thEvery Woman adores a Fascist/ the boot in the face/the brute,
>> brute heart" ....and her role in the novel...
>>>>> Her name is Free 'N-Easy.....
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sun, Feb 1, 2026 at 8:51 AM Corbeau Castrum <filsducorbeau at pm.me
>> mailto:filsducorbeau at pm.me> wrote:
>>>>>> I'm super onboard with the Viking Vinland reading of the title. One
>> additional thing to note about the Slow Learner introduction is Pynchon's
>> profound misgiving with the aesthetics of the apocalypse, which is very
>> present in GR. Check out these following quotes:
>>>>>> "A pose I found congenial in those days – fairly common, I hope,
>> among pre-adults – was that of somber glee at any idea of mass destruction
>> or decline [...] But the distance and grandiosity of this led me to
>> short-change the humans in the story" (13).
>>>>>> "My reading at the time also included many Victorians, allowing World
>> War I in my imagination to assume the shape of that attractive nuisance so
>> dear to adolescent minds, the apocalyptic showdown" (18).
>>>>>> So the focus on missed opportunities, which is of course very present
>> in GR, is reframed in Vineland without the apocalyptic vibe, even if
>> everything sinister remains ever present. Or rather, it seems to me that
>> Vineland is "post-apocalyptic" in a sense, the opportunities for revolution
>> are passed and yet life still goes on.
>>>>>> What is the controversy regarding Frenesi's name?
>>>>>> On Sunday, February 1st, 2026 at 13:20, Mark Kohut <
>> mark.kohut at gmail.com mailto:mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> Again, in a more local, more Thomas Paine-like look at the failure
>> of the sixties , Pynchon actually wrote in the Intro to Slow Learner, (1984
>> the year) that one of the reasons---the only one I remember him fingering--
>>>>>>> for the failure of the New Left to keep America changing in the
>> right direction--anti-authoritarian-- was the New Left's failure to involve
>> the working class, to work for change for THEM....They were left
>>>>>>> to be cut loose in our polity.......
>>>>>>> And, of course, there is Frenesi and all that controversy of
>> meaning....
>>>>>>> On Sat, Jan 31, 2026 at 8:59 PM J Tracy <brook7 at sover.net mailto:
>> brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>> Vineland is the only P novel where I have not probed very much at
>> the intentionality of the title. The obvious reference to Leif Erickson’s
>> name for the north american continent seems to fit in with his larger
>> vision, but shift the focus from east coast( V, GR) as power center to west
>> coast as the scene of a last stand against encroaching fascism in 1984. It
>> retains his ominous use of the letter V also perhaps quietly refraining TV
>> as theme. Over time in P’s work we find there has been a similar east west
>> traverse of the continent by the Traverse family whose names and lives echo
>> both the land ( Prairie, Lake,) and winding paths of vines as suggested.
>>>>>>>> The wildness of M&D and the Powerful Light of ATD have given way to
>> artificial TV light; empire has prevailed over student uprisings,
>> investigative critics, and infiltrated unions. The last outpost of
>> resistance is family, the occupation of the land, the memory and legacy of
>> resistance along with the memory of a less mediated and monetized life.
>>>>>>>> In the passage you chose, fascism is named and the names of
>> fascists and resistors listed as the focus of discourse among elders. That
>> continues. The names change but the questions have not even faded with time.
>>>>>>>>> On Jan 29, 2026, at 5:29 PM, Corbeau Castrum via Pynchon-l <
>> pynchon-l at waste.org mailto:pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> I don't know if the best way of approaching the question of name
>> interpretation here is through direct correlation. There are, of course,
>> names with easily interpretable puns or meanings (Myron Grunton, Dewey
>> Gland), but to me, much of Pynchon's writing revolves around the production
>> of linguistic atmospheres and networks, relying on an intertextual vision
>> of literature that understands that "books are made out of books"
>> (following Cormac McCarthy). With this in mind, I'm drawn to one of the
>> most powerful paragraphs in the novel, its ultimate statement (imo) on the
>> era of resistance and revolution in the 60, which I will copy below:
>>>>>>>>> "And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial
>> question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist
>> twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and
>> the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all
>> showing the same bright-colored shadows. One by one, as other voices joined
>> in, the names began – some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old
>> reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia
>> – Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger,
>> that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not
>> constellated above in any nightwide remotenesses of light, but below,
>> diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time
>> deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly
>> fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over,
>> because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath" (371-2).
>>>>>>>>> So while the name "Vineland" may not literally mean Weed Atman or
>> Prairie, both names are connected to this vision of a rhizome of stems,
>> strands, and connections at once ecological (life-bringing) and evil
>> (death-bringing). Note also the advancement of this ecological metaphor
>> (material) over the drawn constellations of the stars (idealistic).
>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>> Pynchon-L:https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Pynchon-L:https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L:https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>>
>> --
>> Pynchon-L:https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
> --
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