Reluctant to ask this but do you or anyone you respect, not like The Rose of Paracelsus. I have only listened to the readings via The psychedelic salon and to be honest it is leaving me flat and I am surprised by the warmth of its reception. Partly the pace and reading is bothering me but I can usually get past that and am reluctant to purchase something that I am so disenchanted with. The essence of my non-enthusiasm is the scattershot absence of plot connecting characters and I really don't give a fuck about how clever and pretty these aimless harvard undergrads are which is all he seems to be saying . In fiction, action engages and description without momentum easily grows tedious. Maybe it begins to move and cohere and engage but how long does this take?
I will be honest Joseph: I have tried to read The Rose a few times, and every time I would up throwing it down, not just tired of reading it but convinced that I have reason to never read it and stop trying. The writing is too tough for me (ie unsatisfying), way too prolix and pseudo experimental and full of useless digressions and arrogant sexual braggadocio. I know people I respect who have read it, enjoyed it for the good parts, and learned real things (its a roman-a-clef in many ways, and they could recognize certain real-life characters and events). But I don't think I will be part of that "reader" group, and it doesn't sound like you will be either! But I give the guy a break: Pickard is a very smart man, an egoist sure, but he had all the time in the world in prison, and NO EDITOR.
Thankful for that and appreciate the compassionate take on Pickard. I feel less alone and free to simply look elsewhere for reading insight and pleasure.
I got a tip for you, a book of deep if ultimately sad psychedelic experience and insight and early pre-Summer of Love freak culture (which I will be reviewing soon as it is finally out in a new edition). William Craddock's 1970 novel BE NOT CONTENT. It's experimental too, but actually really good, some of his attempts to characterize LSD trips are sublime. https://www.amazon.com/Be-Not-Content-Subterranean-Journal/dp/B08RH452XK
I listened to a Podcast recently who's guest, Michael Scott Alexander, wrote a book called "Making Peace with the Universe: Personal Crisis and Spiritual Healing". To sum up his thesis, respectfully, it could be called "the illuminated midlife crisis". He connects the post-30-year-old personal terror, followed by major spiritual and psychic awakenings of significant religious, philosophical, and artistic figures (William James, Buddha, Hamid Al-Ghazali, Mary Lou Williams....).
The connection he lands on apparently is one between the major spiritual traditions and the contemporary therapeutic process. Haven't read his book, but listening to his interview I thought about High Weirdness, which I did read, and how you make a personal crisis connection betwixt your three subjects. I plan on re-reading High Weirdness to see if maybe you actually mentioned the midlife-crisis-iness of it all, but it struck me that it's a thread that perhaps opens Exegesis, Cosmic Trigger and Archaic Revival to an even wider comparison. Does a clever mind that hit 40 and also traveled through chapel perilous end up writing Cosmic Trigger, while a materialism-addled simpleton finds a gray hair and buys a sports car, but both are expressions of something similarly archetypal?
There's so much contextual uniqueness to the Wilson/Dick/McKenna experiences that maybe the fear of mortality creep is cast in shadow. Or maybe I zoned out the part where you frame that in High Weirdness already.
Also, I noticed how much I've related to your weaving a narrative of transition struggle and reconciling the past in to, first, the final episodes of Expanding Mind, and now the Burning Shore. I'm in midlife, so I appreciate hearing that sentiment from your voice amongst the far out subjects I've been grokking from you since before my gut started expanding.
Hey there. I think your approach is fruitful, personally as well as intellectually, but I have to admit I haven't thought that much about it in terms of these writers. Plus they were definitely at different ages -- the McKennas were still in their mid-20s, so they are in a different framework. RAW and PKD were both in their mid/late 40s, so enough for a midlife crisis. RAW also was once a decently employed family man, but by the early 70s was a poor freelancer (and still a family man), so that would intensify those sort of stresses. PKD's life and income was precarious through most of his life, though his family situation was a bit more stabilized around the time of 2/3/74 (but not for long).
I'm thinking more about life stability here, rather that specifically the thought of mortality. Psychedelics and visionary metaphysical experience are in some ways always about death, or often anyway, so its hard for me to compare the death motivation for their works with the specifically midlife articulation of mortal dread. I don't think there is a big change in PKD from earlier in his life (he was always kind of freaked out) and RAW doesnt write/think/freak out too much about death, at least explicitly.
I think about this stuff a lot now, here in my early fifties. My own priorities, drives, dreams and practices have changed a good deal over the last decade, and the more reflective tone of Burning Shore is partly an expression of that. I don't believe it as about the fear of death particularly -- I have long thought about death more than most, and been intimate with metaphysical dread, so that's not really new. But now there is a more concrete question of service, legacy, and pedagogy that I associate with mid-life, as well as an urgency to "cut bait" on lives and possibilities still unlived and to really manifest the energies and practices that are actually part of my life. It's quite the transition!
What follows is not a question, but thoughts about an idea that Terrance McKenna fielded. I hope someone may enjoy or even respond to it.
Terence McKenna once said:
"The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art"
Rather a harsh view of the possibilities of art as a lens for understanding anything.... or everything one might come to understand, whatever "understand" means. One wonders what lies outside the prison and what of that free space can be known. Is there a big door out of this art museum prison with it's weird mix of war porn, tar roads going to the casinos, banks and restaurants, and the whole glorious array of plant leaves swaying and shimmering in the changing wind and light and rain all mixed with the insistent me me me storyboard. Is the exit behind door number 1, door number 2....?
Did Terrence and Buddha and Hildegard and Plato and Jesus and Sophia all describe the same heavenly freedom? There are some lovely parallels in their Ideas of how to make one's way out of the prison ( to my thinking the greatest visionaries all pointed toward peaceable means as essential to getting anywhere worth going). They also refer to a state of mind that is no longer experienced as a private persona, no longer embodied in any separate form or soul. But people disgree and even kill over the different versions of freedom. And so even if they all were describing a similar experience, anything they communicate is prone to distortion through communication( art), power structures, human limits .
And how do you know when it is no longer art, because won't any observer and any observation be a kind of artful camera? And maybe knowing that, knowing that our take on reality is always limited is enough to allow us to escape cultural biases that limit our connection to a deeper evolutionary state of mind. What is becoming obvious through the breakdown of the fossil fuel/monocrop agriculture/war/capitalism based empire is that we need a wisdom that harmonizes with nature and expands our consciousness into a greater and more inclusive spectrum of consciousness than our current techno-manipulative and bio-unfriendly models have provided.
So, while I guess it is getting obvious that I still wonder what Terence meant, It made me think and I feel it is a good try to redefine the nature a prison whose walls are actually quite flimsy and even largely a result of surrendering our imagination to something that is mostly propaganda, that the empire we face cannot rule over those who refuse its authority.
The essence of the gnostic model is that claims of divinity are inherently produced by a false God, an incomplete version of reality. That actual divinity is only ever incompletely and imperfectly perceived by a mortal being. The dangerous part comes where gnostics claim a more direct connection to divinity/reaity. They claim to “know” better than others. Gnosis means Knowledge. Can some actually know more clearly and perfectly than others?
Hey Joseph. You raise a lot of sparkly thoughts and deep questions here. Here is another one: why does Terence call the prison, or the "construct," a work of art? It definitely resonates with some of PKD's thoughts and visions as well. But why art?
For me it highlights the way that our sense of reality is a construction -- it could have been different. It has the arbitrariness of art, or the artful artifact, which also implies the lack of instrumental necessity. Yes things are the way they are for distinct reasons, but they also could have been very different. One might feel imprisoned in the construct of capitalism and technology in a way that makes it feel like Fate or Necessity—that this is how things had to go, as in Ananke or the wheel of astral determinism. But if its art (mostly bad art to be sure), it suggest more room to maneuver, to awaken to our own active creative intimacy with reality.
The Gnostic/early Christian claim is that understanding or vision or awakening can overcome fate, at least spiritually. (ie, your body may still be in prison but now you know, and will presumably be free at death.) But how can you corroborate such knowledge, as you ask? William James was very clear about this: mystical experience happens, but none of the rest of us are under any obligation to believe the propositions or claims that emerge in the wake of such an experience.
I think one answer here, which you allude to, is that the really important takeaway is not the New Vision but rather the deconstructive knowledge that that walls and stories and agreements are flimsier than they appear. As a work of art is also an artifice, a mere artifice, and can be dismantled and reimagined with greater ease than the attitude of Fate or Necessity gives you, since these tell us there isn't so much what we can do.
Noting that the prison is "a work of art" is one way of acknowledging that freedom equals loss. Psychedelic exploration brings many of us to the dissolving fringes at the alleged edges of Things. Good ol'-fashioned artmaking—particularly experimental and improvisational work—can take us there, too, and in the process both illustrate and echo the porous nature of "reality."
Gnosis, "direct downloads": these feel true and essential to those of us who experience them, but no fact-checking is available. Think of it as a kind of angelic a priori mode.
That's such a key point Tif: direct downloads are ineffable, even apparently essential and true, and yet there is no fact-checking. William James was very clear about this. Even as he carved out room for genuine noetic (ie "gnostic") mystical experiences that involved a quality of knowledge, he insisted that this is no warrant for anyone else to believe.
People complain about "individualism" in spirituality today, as if it is nothing but commodity capitalism turning us into consumers. But it is also a reflection of this more grounded and skeptical understanding of mystical knowledge and experience. It doesnt mean we can't compare notes and make patterns and come up with protocols that have a better probability of "working" (whatever that is) than others. But the sort of agreements that form religions are something else, a shared narrative, a theater of conviction and symbolic stage sets, or an intellectual operation that reduces the diversity of experience to "one perennial truth" behind it all.
and yet, erik, aren't we still trundling, falling, swimming toward what *feels* or *seems" like a One Truth? something equally ineffable and inevitable?
religions provide the trappings and constructs (as do traditions of arts, dialogue, science, and whatever-else-have-you) but to me it feels like our drive toward a truth or grand acknowledgment of the Bigass Mystery is kinda baked in. those of us who want more knowledge or experience of it may be inexorably drawn, regardless of whichever narrative, theatre, or practice takes us there...
Yes, I am not a nihilist who thinks we should just accept that we are only farting around until we die. There does seem to be a drive both to integrate and transcend, but perhaps God or the goal is the subtlest of McGuffins in the end.
Patience my friend! My class will be reading COL49 I think in February, and I aim to write something then, at least about Pynchon in general. I love the idea of having a more back and forth discussion about Pynchon but I don't know if we have the readers here to support it. Worth considering! What would you like to see?
I have enjoyed and wrestled with Pynchon's body of work for years. I would love to discuss any aspect of specific or general consideration of his writing. I understand that interest may be limited. Perhaps only an attempt to start something interesting will tell.
Having lived in Arcata, and enjoying TP's comic voice and because it is partly about the migration of california counterculture up into the northern part of california along with the Reagan years and the parallel to 1984 I would highly recommend the off beat Vineland for consideration.
I have been meaning to reread Vineland, though I am not sure I ever finished it way back when. COL49 is so short, maybe one thing I could do is to release my lecture on the book in Feb, and then convene an online discussion with members about the book a month later, giving people time to read it. That could be fun.
Hi Erik. This isn’t a question, more of a comment for discussion. First I’m really enjoying Death is just around the corner. I even signed up to unlock all the Pynchon episodes. It triggered thoughts that I’ve had for awhile. That is the intersection of the assassination of JFK and the 60’s counterculture and the reaction of the power structure. I was 13 when JKF was killed. In a way he was a father figure to me and I’m sure I’m not alone. I view the 60’s counterculture as an emotional acting out from the trauma of that event, which was never resolved. The politicians-power structure were freaked out by the chaos and determined to shut it own. Michael Judge calls it the American Reconquista in his pod cast. We’ve heard about the drug wars as a reaction to criminalize dissenters. I was in Madison WI late 60’s early 70’s and the power structure there blamed it on outside agitators from New York so they tripled the out of state tuition. But the emotional power to undue the shattering of consciousness was never addressed. And few have ever discussed it and some still bury it. Chapo Traphouse did a review of the Chicago 7. They pretty much trashed it along with the 60’s in general Although none of them were even alive at the time. The only thing recently that addresses it is Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” which is why it is so brilliant. Just some thoughts I needed to express. Comment if you wish. Peace
Well you are really going to dig the Death is Just Around the Corner episodes on the Crying of Lot 49, because one of his main arguments is that one of the things the book is trying to process is the assassination of JFK, which is does by mostly by not speaking the name of the dreaded trauma except very allusively. I think there is a lot to be said for your vision of the traumatizing nature of that murder and how it inflamed a generation. While I can't follow Judge down everyone of his labyrinths, I think it is objectively obvious that the attempt to understand JFK's assassination, not just "who did it" but what it represented, opened up the cesspool of American corruption, covert violence, arrogance, etc etc. You couldnt ignore it anymore. I haven't listened to the Chapo doodz on the Chicago 7 -- did they trash Sorkin's portrayal or the activists themselves? To be frank (and over-generalizing), I am usually unimpressed with millennial attempts to grapple with history as a whole, but especially that period. I have read a number of interesting articles assessing the film and its telling omissions and changes. One notable one: in the film they read the name of Americans dead in Vietnam; in reality they read the names of Americans AND Vietnamese. There's Hollywood...
Reluctant to ask this but do you or anyone you respect, not like The Rose of Paracelsus. I have only listened to the readings via The psychedelic salon and to be honest it is leaving me flat and I am surprised by the warmth of its reception. Partly the pace and reading is bothering me but I can usually get past that and am reluctant to purchase something that I am so disenchanted with. The essence of my non-enthusiasm is the scattershot absence of plot connecting characters and I really don't give a fuck about how clever and pretty these aimless harvard undergrads are which is all he seems to be saying . In fiction, action engages and description without momentum easily grows tedious. Maybe it begins to move and cohere and engage but how long does this take?
I will be honest Joseph: I have tried to read The Rose a few times, and every time I would up throwing it down, not just tired of reading it but convinced that I have reason to never read it and stop trying. The writing is too tough for me (ie unsatisfying), way too prolix and pseudo experimental and full of useless digressions and arrogant sexual braggadocio. I know people I respect who have read it, enjoyed it for the good parts, and learned real things (its a roman-a-clef in many ways, and they could recognize certain real-life characters and events). But I don't think I will be part of that "reader" group, and it doesn't sound like you will be either! But I give the guy a break: Pickard is a very smart man, an egoist sure, but he had all the time in the world in prison, and NO EDITOR.
Thankful for that and appreciate the compassionate take on Pickard. I feel less alone and free to simply look elsewhere for reading insight and pleasure.
I got a tip for you, a book of deep if ultimately sad psychedelic experience and insight and early pre-Summer of Love freak culture (which I will be reviewing soon as it is finally out in a new edition). William Craddock's 1970 novel BE NOT CONTENT. It's experimental too, but actually really good, some of his attempts to characterize LSD trips are sublime. https://www.amazon.com/Be-Not-Content-Subterranean-Journal/dp/B08RH452XK
Dear Dr. D,
I listened to a Podcast recently who's guest, Michael Scott Alexander, wrote a book called "Making Peace with the Universe: Personal Crisis and Spiritual Healing". To sum up his thesis, respectfully, it could be called "the illuminated midlife crisis". He connects the post-30-year-old personal terror, followed by major spiritual and psychic awakenings of significant religious, philosophical, and artistic figures (William James, Buddha, Hamid Al-Ghazali, Mary Lou Williams....).
The connection he lands on apparently is one between the major spiritual traditions and the contemporary therapeutic process. Haven't read his book, but listening to his interview I thought about High Weirdness, which I did read, and how you make a personal crisis connection betwixt your three subjects. I plan on re-reading High Weirdness to see if maybe you actually mentioned the midlife-crisis-iness of it all, but it struck me that it's a thread that perhaps opens Exegesis, Cosmic Trigger and Archaic Revival to an even wider comparison. Does a clever mind that hit 40 and also traveled through chapel perilous end up writing Cosmic Trigger, while a materialism-addled simpleton finds a gray hair and buys a sports car, but both are expressions of something similarly archetypal?
There's so much contextual uniqueness to the Wilson/Dick/McKenna experiences that maybe the fear of mortality creep is cast in shadow. Or maybe I zoned out the part where you frame that in High Weirdness already.
Also, I noticed how much I've related to your weaving a narrative of transition struggle and reconciling the past in to, first, the final episodes of Expanding Mind, and now the Burning Shore. I'm in midlife, so I appreciate hearing that sentiment from your voice amongst the far out subjects I've been grokking from you since before my gut started expanding.
Thanks, and is there something to the above?
Sincerely,
Lower Back Pain in Los Angeles
Hey there. I think your approach is fruitful, personally as well as intellectually, but I have to admit I haven't thought that much about it in terms of these writers. Plus they were definitely at different ages -- the McKennas were still in their mid-20s, so they are in a different framework. RAW and PKD were both in their mid/late 40s, so enough for a midlife crisis. RAW also was once a decently employed family man, but by the early 70s was a poor freelancer (and still a family man), so that would intensify those sort of stresses. PKD's life and income was precarious through most of his life, though his family situation was a bit more stabilized around the time of 2/3/74 (but not for long).
I'm thinking more about life stability here, rather that specifically the thought of mortality. Psychedelics and visionary metaphysical experience are in some ways always about death, or often anyway, so its hard for me to compare the death motivation for their works with the specifically midlife articulation of mortal dread. I don't think there is a big change in PKD from earlier in his life (he was always kind of freaked out) and RAW doesnt write/think/freak out too much about death, at least explicitly.
I think about this stuff a lot now, here in my early fifties. My own priorities, drives, dreams and practices have changed a good deal over the last decade, and the more reflective tone of Burning Shore is partly an expression of that. I don't believe it as about the fear of death particularly -- I have long thought about death more than most, and been intimate with metaphysical dread, so that's not really new. But now there is a more concrete question of service, legacy, and pedagogy that I associate with mid-life, as well as an urgency to "cut bait" on lives and possibilities still unlived and to really manifest the energies and practices that are actually part of my life. It's quite the transition!
What follows is not a question, but thoughts about an idea that Terrance McKenna fielded. I hope someone may enjoy or even respond to it.
Terence McKenna once said:
"The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art"
Rather a harsh view of the possibilities of art as a lens for understanding anything.... or everything one might come to understand, whatever "understand" means. One wonders what lies outside the prison and what of that free space can be known. Is there a big door out of this art museum prison with it's weird mix of war porn, tar roads going to the casinos, banks and restaurants, and the whole glorious array of plant leaves swaying and shimmering in the changing wind and light and rain all mixed with the insistent me me me storyboard. Is the exit behind door number 1, door number 2....?
Did Terrence and Buddha and Hildegard and Plato and Jesus and Sophia all describe the same heavenly freedom? There are some lovely parallels in their Ideas of how to make one's way out of the prison ( to my thinking the greatest visionaries all pointed toward peaceable means as essential to getting anywhere worth going). They also refer to a state of mind that is no longer experienced as a private persona, no longer embodied in any separate form or soul. But people disgree and even kill over the different versions of freedom. And so even if they all were describing a similar experience, anything they communicate is prone to distortion through communication( art), power structures, human limits .
And how do you know when it is no longer art, because won't any observer and any observation be a kind of artful camera? And maybe knowing that, knowing that our take on reality is always limited is enough to allow us to escape cultural biases that limit our connection to a deeper evolutionary state of mind. What is becoming obvious through the breakdown of the fossil fuel/monocrop agriculture/war/capitalism based empire is that we need a wisdom that harmonizes with nature and expands our consciousness into a greater and more inclusive spectrum of consciousness than our current techno-manipulative and bio-unfriendly models have provided.
So, while I guess it is getting obvious that I still wonder what Terence meant, It made me think and I feel it is a good try to redefine the nature a prison whose walls are actually quite flimsy and even largely a result of surrendering our imagination to something that is mostly propaganda, that the empire we face cannot rule over those who refuse its authority.
The essence of the gnostic model is that claims of divinity are inherently produced by a false God, an incomplete version of reality. That actual divinity is only ever incompletely and imperfectly perceived by a mortal being. The dangerous part comes where gnostics claim a more direct connection to divinity/reaity. They claim to “know” better than others. Gnosis means Knowledge. Can some actually know more clearly and perfectly than others?
Hey Joseph. You raise a lot of sparkly thoughts and deep questions here. Here is another one: why does Terence call the prison, or the "construct," a work of art? It definitely resonates with some of PKD's thoughts and visions as well. But why art?
For me it highlights the way that our sense of reality is a construction -- it could have been different. It has the arbitrariness of art, or the artful artifact, which also implies the lack of instrumental necessity. Yes things are the way they are for distinct reasons, but they also could have been very different. One might feel imprisoned in the construct of capitalism and technology in a way that makes it feel like Fate or Necessity—that this is how things had to go, as in Ananke or the wheel of astral determinism. But if its art (mostly bad art to be sure), it suggest more room to maneuver, to awaken to our own active creative intimacy with reality.
The Gnostic/early Christian claim is that understanding or vision or awakening can overcome fate, at least spiritually. (ie, your body may still be in prison but now you know, and will presumably be free at death.) But how can you corroborate such knowledge, as you ask? William James was very clear about this: mystical experience happens, but none of the rest of us are under any obligation to believe the propositions or claims that emerge in the wake of such an experience.
I think one answer here, which you allude to, is that the really important takeaway is not the New Vision but rather the deconstructive knowledge that that walls and stories and agreements are flimsier than they appear. As a work of art is also an artifice, a mere artifice, and can be dismantled and reimagined with greater ease than the attitude of Fate or Necessity gives you, since these tell us there isn't so much what we can do.
Noting that the prison is "a work of art" is one way of acknowledging that freedom equals loss. Psychedelic exploration brings many of us to the dissolving fringes at the alleged edges of Things. Good ol'-fashioned artmaking—particularly experimental and improvisational work—can take us there, too, and in the process both illustrate and echo the porous nature of "reality."
Gnosis, "direct downloads": these feel true and essential to those of us who experience them, but no fact-checking is available. Think of it as a kind of angelic a priori mode.
That's such a key point Tif: direct downloads are ineffable, even apparently essential and true, and yet there is no fact-checking. William James was very clear about this. Even as he carved out room for genuine noetic (ie "gnostic") mystical experiences that involved a quality of knowledge, he insisted that this is no warrant for anyone else to believe.
People complain about "individualism" in spirituality today, as if it is nothing but commodity capitalism turning us into consumers. But it is also a reflection of this more grounded and skeptical understanding of mystical knowledge and experience. It doesnt mean we can't compare notes and make patterns and come up with protocols that have a better probability of "working" (whatever that is) than others. But the sort of agreements that form religions are something else, a shared narrative, a theater of conviction and symbolic stage sets, or an intellectual operation that reduces the diversity of experience to "one perennial truth" behind it all.
and yet, erik, aren't we still trundling, falling, swimming toward what *feels* or *seems" like a One Truth? something equally ineffable and inevitable?
religions provide the trappings and constructs (as do traditions of arts, dialogue, science, and whatever-else-have-you) but to me it feels like our drive toward a truth or grand acknowledgment of the Bigass Mystery is kinda baked in. those of us who want more knowledge or experience of it may be inexorably drawn, regardless of whichever narrative, theatre, or practice takes us there...
Yes, I am not a nihilist who thinks we should just accept that we are only farting around until we die. There does seem to be a drive both to integrate and transcend, but perhaps God or the goal is the subtlest of McGuffins in the end.
So is there a discussion begun about COL49? If so where does it start?
Patience my friend! My class will be reading COL49 I think in February, and I aim to write something then, at least about Pynchon in general. I love the idea of having a more back and forth discussion about Pynchon but I don't know if we have the readers here to support it. Worth considering! What would you like to see?
I have enjoyed and wrestled with Pynchon's body of work for years. I would love to discuss any aspect of specific or general consideration of his writing. I understand that interest may be limited. Perhaps only an attempt to start something interesting will tell.
Having lived in Arcata, and enjoying TP's comic voice and because it is partly about the migration of california counterculture up into the northern part of california along with the Reagan years and the parallel to 1984 I would highly recommend the off beat Vineland for consideration.
I have been meaning to reread Vineland, though I am not sure I ever finished it way back when. COL49 is so short, maybe one thing I could do is to release my lecture on the book in Feb, and then convene an online discussion with members about the book a month later, giving people time to read it. That could be fun.
It sounds worthwhile and fun to me
Hi Erik. This isn’t a question, more of a comment for discussion. First I’m really enjoying Death is just around the corner. I even signed up to unlock all the Pynchon episodes. It triggered thoughts that I’ve had for awhile. That is the intersection of the assassination of JFK and the 60’s counterculture and the reaction of the power structure. I was 13 when JKF was killed. In a way he was a father figure to me and I’m sure I’m not alone. I view the 60’s counterculture as an emotional acting out from the trauma of that event, which was never resolved. The politicians-power structure were freaked out by the chaos and determined to shut it own. Michael Judge calls it the American Reconquista in his pod cast. We’ve heard about the drug wars as a reaction to criminalize dissenters. I was in Madison WI late 60’s early 70’s and the power structure there blamed it on outside agitators from New York so they tripled the out of state tuition. But the emotional power to undue the shattering of consciousness was never addressed. And few have ever discussed it and some still bury it. Chapo Traphouse did a review of the Chicago 7. They pretty much trashed it along with the 60’s in general Although none of them were even alive at the time. The only thing recently that addresses it is Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” which is why it is so brilliant. Just some thoughts I needed to express. Comment if you wish. Peace
Well you are really going to dig the Death is Just Around the Corner episodes on the Crying of Lot 49, because one of his main arguments is that one of the things the book is trying to process is the assassination of JFK, which is does by mostly by not speaking the name of the dreaded trauma except very allusively. I think there is a lot to be said for your vision of the traumatizing nature of that murder and how it inflamed a generation. While I can't follow Judge down everyone of his labyrinths, I think it is objectively obvious that the attempt to understand JFK's assassination, not just "who did it" but what it represented, opened up the cesspool of American corruption, covert violence, arrogance, etc etc. You couldnt ignore it anymore. I haven't listened to the Chapo doodz on the Chicago 7 -- did they trash Sorkin's portrayal or the activists themselves? To be frank (and over-generalizing), I am usually unimpressed with millennial attempts to grapple with history as a whole, but especially that period. I have read a number of interesting articles assessing the film and its telling omissions and changes. One notable one: in the film they read the name of Americans dead in Vietnam; in reality they read the names of Americans AND Vietnamese. There's Hollywood...