"... a built-in shelf aflame with the spines of the books Marco had been collecting—
Soul on Ice, Ficciones, Cat’s Cradle, Trout Fishing in America, Steppenwolf—and a Coleman lantern in a shade of green so deep it cut a hole through the wall. The books were incandescent, burning from the inside out. She picked one up almost at random, for the color and the feel of it, and she opened it on words that tacked across the page like ships on a poisoned sea. She couldn’t make sense of them, didn’t want to, hated in that instant the whole idea of books, literature,
stories—because stories weren’t true, were they?... and she stroked the familiar object in her hand as if it were a cat or a pet rabbit, stroked it until the paper became fur and the living warmth of it penetrated her fingertips.... And then she was down out of the tree, barefoot in the biting leaves, scattering an armload of books like glossy seeds... With a sweep of her instep, she interred the books beneath the clawlike leaves.... New books, with fiercer colors and truer stories, would sprout up to replace the tattered ones, a whole living library growing out of the duff beneath the tree, free books, books for the taking, books you could pluck like berries. Or something like that...."
From
"Drop City" by T.C. Boyle, the novel I'm reading this week. The story takes place in 1970, and the "she" in that paragraph is, as you might guess, on LSD.
Points if you, like me, have read all 5 of the books named —
Soul on Ice, Ficciones, Cat’s Cradle, Trout Fishing in America, Steppenwolf — and if you did, it almost goes without saying that you read them circa 1970. Did you ever try to read while on LSD? If so, I'll just guess you like that description of picking up a book
almost at random, for the color and the feel of it, and seeing
words that tacked across the page like ships on a poisoned sea and stroking it
as if it were a cat or a pet rabbit... until the paper became fur and the living warmth penetrates the fingertips.
IN THE COMMENTS: cathy said:
If books fit so well in a specific culture and time, I could see where planting them as an offering could work to give birth to a new phase of writing. Also this makes me remember I grabbed a Brautigan book and Whole Earth Catalogue to read for the few days I spent in jail when I was busted for hash. Knew Cleaver a bit, he reformed. He had a benefactress paying his rent in Berkeley but then he got evicted because he had so much junk in his front yard.
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70 comments:
I think minus points for reading some of those books.
I used to ride the elevator all the time with Tom Boyle, since he taught creative writing in the same building I took a lot of classes in in college. USC. I never had his class, even though I majored in English, though my fiancee did.
I told him "if this elevator were faster I could graduate in three years."
Yes, I read all those books in the 1970's, and you won't believe what happened next!
Never read any of them. Heard of all but Ficciones.
Hmm... Hmmph!—I still don’t think It compares to the Inventor of the Lightbulb:
“A Bowery angel smoking a palm tree stubbed his toe on a comet and pimples came out of his toenail as big as mountains. He swore so much that God made eight new planets out of the conversation and peopled and fauna'd and flora'd them eccentrically. The almighty has a vein of humor. He made these planets and peopled them to give amusements to beings on the rest of the celestial plantation. The men were 800 miles long and a quarter inch thick. They slept on telephone poles, and animals with bodies as big as a pea with 900 eyes each as big as a saucer lived on these long men by catching them by the feet and sucking them in like macaroni.”
(But, of course—“YMMV” and all that...)
In college (late 70s) A girlfriend gave me a copy of Trout Fishing in America signed by Richard Brautigan. I did really enjoy his poetry. Years later I gave the book to a very sweet and close friend in Los Angeles who was a lot like the author in many ways and even looked like him. He treasured it. A few years ago, I found my friend sitting in his living room dead from a heart attack, but looking like he was just asleep. After he was taken away, all his friends went through his things and took momentos. I remember finding and taking that book, but I don't know where it is now. I need to find that.
It is rumoured that Brautigan's suicide note read "Messy, isn't it?", which does seem exactly what you would expect from him, but his daughter says he left no note.
Boyle was by far the worst, most overrated writer I was ever forced to read in a literature class.
Never did take LSD, but have read after smoking marijuana.
Retention was awful!
Four of five, 1972-73 - I was assigned Borges in college. I gave Ficciones as a gift to my two oldest sons. They haven't thanked me, don't know if they ever read it (them.) No LSD though.
Boyle was by far the worst, most overrated writer I was ever forced to read in a literature class.
I tried The Road to Wellville, both book and movie.
Didn't make it through either.
A guy named Bruce Hartman has written a whodunit called The Philosophical Detective, in which Our Hero plays Dr. Watson to Borges' Sherlock Holmes. It's available you-know-where.
Never read Soul on Ice or Steppenwolf, perhaps I should. I was too young to read any of them in 1970 :-) I've read Ficciones more than once. I even gave a friend a copy at least twice; not sure if she ever read it.
I've read three of the five. I sympathize with the young lady, the three would have been better if imagined rather than read.
All but Ficciones, which I never heard of. Never on acid. I was in high school. Trout Fishing in America is the one that sticks with me. I probably was not really sophisticated enough for the others, but I read them. I have a vintage Svea stove on the bookcase with my vintage books.
A young lady I was keeping company with back in those days, who had met Brautigan in CA, lent me Trout Fishing in America, which I dutifully read. I made some remark about his ridiculous hat, and that was that. Me and my big mouth.
Yes, but I chose to read "Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail." Weak stuff, though. The acid, not the writing.
I came across Soul on Ice in high school. I was part of an experiment in open education, and they had books like that scattered about, along with Siddahartha and Lord of the Rings.
All I remember was that Eldridge Cleaver liked raping white women. A lot.
And maybe Ken Kesey?
"Minus points for reading some of those". I agree that some of those haven't aged well (Hesse Brautigan, in my opinion -- even Eldridge Cleaver looks more like a museum piece). (and Cleaver dis-owned Soul on Ice.) But there seems to be a widespread failure these days to understand that people are a product of their times. The same comrades that thought transsexuals were mentally ill in the 1970s now agree that transsexuals are heroes of self-identify in the 2010s. I could give other examples. I think you have to identify yourself by the extent to which you *rejected* the accepted norms of the age. "It was cool to be anti-war, but I volunteered." "It was cool to be pro-affirmative action, but I opposed it." "It was cool to be pro-choice, but I was pro-life."
The problem with this line of thought is "It was cool to be anti-slavery, but I was in favor." Sometimes the modern idiom is the correct idiom. But recognize sometimes the modern idiom is not the correct idiom.
I'm afraid there is an overwhelming push to assert that today's beliefs are unassailably correct and to judge historical deviations from today's beliefs as evidence of moral failure. But the people who assert this apparently can't imagine a future in which people mock or condemn them for the beliefs they hold today.
The Beat Generation (sometimes Love Generation) begot many short-lived Hippie authors who wrote under the influence of LCD, peyote and other hallucinogenics. But the drugs didn't bring about death, firearms were the instruments and a sick mind was the trigger.
Two famous authors come to mind: Hunter S.Thompson, famous for gonzo journalism featuring "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas" published in Rolling Stone and Richard Brautigan, author of "Trout Fishing in America", where he loosely connected strange thoughts about fishing such as “Truth is stranger than fishin' and “Excuse me, I said. I thought you were a trout stream. I'm not, she said.” and “He was leaving for America, often only a place in the mind.”
"Gonzo" Thompson was either a journalist or a crazy possessed by guns, booze and drugs. He said in a suicide note that life was boring:
"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt."
Richard Brautigan, the Love Generation’s prickly and whimsical poet-novelist, died what the sheriff’s report termed an “unattended death” on September 16, 1984. Having committed suicide with one of his beloved Smith & Wesson revolvers, Brautigan was not discovered in his home in Bolinas, California until October 25, at which point he needed to be “scooped[ed] up with a shovel”.
Brautigan was 50.
never heard of Ficciones, read all the others except your Trout fishing book; which i'm guessing doesn't have many trouts in it?
But i HAVE read (and own) TROUT by Ray Bergman which i'm guessing is WAY better.
You people would probably like Even Brook Trout Get The Blues by John Gierach,
but there's not all that much trout in that either.
You SHOULD Try The Practical Angler by W C Stewart, Then you could start to learn about trout
4 out of 5, but in the late ‘70’s/early ‘80’s. The hipster’s bookcase didn’t change much in the ‘70’s though by the time the decade was waning you could buy these books in a thrift store for a dime apiece. I think Brautigan has held up well. His America still exists in the Pacific Northwest, though you’re most likely to find it in small towns or smallish cities on the way down like Aberdeen or Longview.
last minute thought: Are we too far away from "even cowgirls get the blues". It's (in my mind) on the order of "trout fishing"-- widely popular, but not really very good. And how about Gary Snyder. Is there anybody who read all five of the authors listed in the Althouse posting who did not also read Gary Snyder?
The selection from T.C. Boyle that you posted doesn't make me want to read him. He uses words in a show offy kind of way, like a single ne'er holding the high notes beyond the beat...,,,..I never read anything by Herman Hesse. Dodged that bullet. Read all the other books though. Ficciones and Cat's Cradle were great. Brautigan was sort of okay in a low impact way. Eldridge Cleaver has undoubtedly aged the worst. He was an extremely rapey kind of rapist. Does his book still get assigned or still sell?
Single ne'er was singer before autocorrect.
Ya know - some of that hippie art has stood up. Thinking “Deja Vu” by CSNY or “Little Wing” by Hendrix.
But, I don’t think the literature or the visual art stands before Father Time and ages well.
Went through five years of engineering school and never heard of the books. Sounds like I would be a more complete person if I had.
Sounds like I would be a more complete person if I had.
You didn't miss much.
Cat’s Cradle, Trout Fishing in America
Just those two.
Did you ever try to read while on LSD?
It's not really possible.
"Did you ever try to read while on LSD?"
See. I missed that too.
If we say that some art hasn't aged well, maybe it's not the art's fault. It could be us, our aging sensibilities, our culture becoming too jaded. Maybe it's us who have lost something, not the art. I probably can't, but I wish I could enjoy these things like I did. I wasn't worse off for it back then. It made me happy. That all goes for LSD, and pot too. I suppose it's dealing with responsibilities, as necessary as they are, that robs us of the worry free joys of youth. If we can drop the habit, retirement and empty nests should give us that stuff back.
Read all five,maybe sometimes on weed, not stuff I read now as some things are best read when young, and some book like Madem Bovery hold up with age, but right now watching Leonard Cohen Tower of Song on PBS, and was knock out byKD Lang and just a little bit of wine. Outstanding PBS production of high artistic quality no wonder Trump folks want to cut funding to PBS
Are we too far away from "even cowgirls get the blues"
Rodney Crowell took that line and wrote a song that's better than either the book or the movie.
Here's Emmylou Harris (with Ricky Skaggs and Albert Lee in the Hot Band) in 1980 doing a live version in Holland:
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues - Emmylou Harris - Live Holland 1980
Read all five,maybe sometimes on weed, not stuff I read now as some things are best read when young,
Robertson Davies maintained that books are best understood when one is the same age as the author when he wrote it.
I take it as a sign of the continuing decline of this great republic that you have a tag for lsd but none for crustacean! On a related note the last time I tried acid (long ago I assure you) I actually thought I was a lobster.
We all read what we enjoy w/o checking for approval. That said, Althouse's reading keeps expanding the list of books I could never, ever be forced to read. Maybe time to change "avatar" & screen name to "Philistine!".
Great novel. Love Boyle. Borges, of course, is in a different class altogether.
Literature threads never have leftie commentators. Like garlic to vampires.
Have not read any of the five.
I read Borges every once in a while, but only in bookstores. It seems more authentic to read his books without buying them.
I read four out of five - not Cat's Cradle. Read Labyrinth which I believe is Ficciones in another translation. Also Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Teaching a Stone to Talk. Read Charles Bukowski, Robert Duncan, John Ashberry. Borges is the only one left on my shelves. When I fixed computers in the Eighties in the days of no repair manuals, I often cooled fiery situations with the thought of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This poem below, Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow, by Robert Duncan stayed in my mind. Not much else left of the Sixties and Seventies except what happened and consequences.
Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.
She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.
It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going down
whose secret we see in a children’s game
of ring a round of roses told.
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,
that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.
Cats Cradle, which I don't remember, but remember thinking was great at the time.
Outstanding PBS production of high artistic quality no wonder Trump folks want to cut funding to PBS
Yeah, that's the reason. Not that their news is left wing propaganda and the rest of the programming is largely intended to serve people who can easily afford to pay for programming, but think that it is there right to have their programming that nobody wants to watch but them paid for by everybody else.
All I remember from Steppenwolf was the description of seeing a clump of grass in the distance on the steppe and thinking it was a wolf, but as you got closer, the illusion disappears, and you can't get it back. I think about that a lot when I hear some new evidence of collusion by Trump with the Russians.
PBS does not need public funding to survive or produce quality content. They just want it. I want my money too, but the difference is it's mine. If you have enough, but you still take from people who don't want to give it, that is true greed.
Purple Haze all in my brain,
lately things don't seem the same,
actin' funny but I don't know why
'scuse me while I kiss the sky.
Same with road to wellville, couldn't get pat the colonic treatments at the Kellogg clinic , as for Latin American fiction how about cortazars hop scotch or anything from early Vargas llosa.
Vonnegut, Heinlein, Tolkien. I too was an engineering student, but my girlfriend showed me some stuff.
*rimshot*
Hi, Dorothy!
Cat’s Cradle in the 70s, Steppenwolf in the 00s, Ficciones in the 80s and again last year. Borges is the best by far. Vonnegut only had one story that he told over and over. I liked Siddhartha better than Steppenwolf, but Hesse is way down on the list.
"Did you ever try to read while on LSD?"
Oh yeah. I only took it as a mental disciplining tool anyway. I wouldn't know how to do it for fun.
My other girlfriend introduced me to Thurber and E. B. White.
Hi Carol!
If books fit so well in a specific culture and time, I could see where planting them as an offering could work to give birth to a new phase of writing. Also this makes me remember I grabbed a Brautigan book and Whole Earth Catalogue to read for the few days I spent in jail when I was busted for hash. Knew Cleaver a bit, he reformed. He had a benefactress paying his rent in Berkeley but then he got evicted because he had so much junk in his front yard.
Books like that can be read on or off drugs. They're mostly idiotic dreamsickles of preening persecution or preening "insight."
While Drop City is great. T. C. Boyle is an actual novelist. We have too few. He sympathizes without indulging. The disease of the age is that people are used to imagining they have done all the work and are more enlightened than anyone in history. When they find themselves in a Boyle book as self-aware as Madame Bovary, it's jarring. But he isn't unkind. He likes people. Novelists have to like people.
u b tortured.
spill.
So, honeys, whut drugs u b on?
gimmie dat fedex numba!
Seriously.
Women.
Say no more.
Myself, I love women.
I could go on, but this is a family blog.
Family.
LSD, mescaline and mushrooms were fun. We did everything on them. Or tried to. Sometimes we jut had to pull the car over and sit for a few hours. But that was 50 years ago when we were immortal. And in a cometely different world and context. T'was fun though.
Only Trout Fishing for me. But I do have almost every Brautigan book and bought them all when I was living in San Francisco not too long after and so they are always stuck in that time and place for me.. a memory of a fantastic time in my life in a place I loved.
Thank you for reviving thet memory here at 5:25am, so strong I can feel and taste it.
Althouse: "The story takes place in 1970, and the "she" in that paragraph is, as you might guess, on LSD."
And then she was down out of the tree, barefoot in the biting leaves, scattering an armload of books like glossy seeds... With a sweep of her instep, she interred the books beneath the clawlike leaves
Love this acoustic version: And She Was
"And She Was" is a song written by David Byrne for the 1985 Talking Heads album Little Creatures. "I used to know a blissed-out hippie-chick in Baltimore," recalled Byrne in the liner notes of Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads. "She once told me that she used to do acid (the drug, not music) and lay down on the field by the Yoo-hoo chocolate soda factory. Flying out of her body, etc etc. It seemed like such a tacky kind of transcendence… but it was real! A new kind of religion being born out of heaps of rusted cars and fast food joints. And this girl was flying above it all, but in it too."
I cannot remember which came first, Brautigan or LSD. I suspect the LSD did. Trout Fishing changed my approach to writing and probably ended my writing career right then and there in school (I remember my writing prof telling me to lay off the Brautigan-esque style.) But years later, I still enjoy picking through bits of Revenge of the Lawn.
Read the others except Ficciones. While Steppenwolf was good, it was Siddhartha that caught me back then. Probably the two books that had the most impact on me in those days were Trout Fishing and Siddhartha. Wonder how they'd read today?
Oddly enough, I have a copy of Trout Fishing in America, in a small stack of books in my living room, having acquired it in the early seventies. Loved the picture on the cover; two fashionable homely people as I imagined living in sixties San Francisco. Never read on LSD, however I remember a delightful new year's eve with two student nurses, standing in my living room,howling at the ceiling, a more productive use of acid.
Read Cat's Cradle and Steppenwolf as a teenager and thought they were groovy, man. Read Ficciones in translation much later, and have read it several times since. None on LSD. I don't think reading anything on LSD would work.
Borges is head and shoulders above the other writers on that list.
I'm reading bulgakov's master and margarita, in a world that didn't believe in god, tip of the hat to nietsche, they find it hard to deal when the devil comes calling,
"Did you ever try to read while on LSD?"
Yes, when I was about 14. This was in 1971. I spent the night at a friends house. He was into drugs. I wasn't, but he talked me into taking two hits of strawberry barrel acid. First high ever. Whoa!
Anyway, at one point I was reading a Tarzan comic book. For some reason I thought the plot line had something to do with is mom, a big-ass gorilla. Someone was trying to hurt her and it really upset me. After I came down I realized that the story was about Tarzan fighting a gorilla. Freaky!
About a year later, I felt a flashback coming on. I didn't want to get high again (didn't like it), so I started reading Treasure Island out of a desire for normalcy. Read the whole book. Don't remember a thing about it.
I’m assuming all of you read these books while in college. I attended Salem State for less than one semester. Didn’t like it. Didn’t like the dorms, the cafeteria, the classrooms. Everything seemed strange. Mostly the people were strange. They were very different from me. I came from a white trash background - alcoholic parents, on welfare, eight kids, chaotic house. I looked like it, dressed like it, talked like it, and probably smelled like it. I was very uncomfortable and felt alien. I was unable to make any friends.
There were no books at home, so I never developed the habit of reading. And at college reading was the key. You had to read. Besides, I couldn’t sit still long enough. I had to move, do something even if it was just running nowhere. Probably ADHD, but that didn’t exist back then.
So, I dropped out and joined the Army. That’s where the action was. But Viet Nam was winding down and I ended up in Germany. First day there, guys on the bunk across from me were shooting up heroin. I didn’t go down that path, but I did trip a few times. At any time during the early seventies, probably half the soldiers in Germany were drunk, high, stoned or tripping at any given time.
I do remember one trip, though. It was New Year’s Eve and a group of us were out and about Hanau and I saw this black guy with a fur trimmed jacket. At the tip of every strand of fur was a small glowing light. I went up to him and said, “Wow! That is so beautiful, man!”, and reached out to touch his collar. He looked at me like I was crazy. My friends pulled me away before I got into a tussle. Can you fight while tripping?
Then when we were back at the barracks, I was sitting in a big chair facing the open windows. And the fireworks began. On New Year’s the Germans light off fireworks in celebration. As the shells exploded the sparks seemed to come straight at me and then sweep past me. I was pressed into the chair and couldn’t move. Wave upon wave of light beams making it seem I was accelerating into the universe. My heart was pounding. It was exhilarating and frightening. I think that was my last trip.
I didn't realize this was an old post and probably a dead thread. But it was cathartic for me, anyway.
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