Perish the Taught!

Psycho-Analysis

Superego: "Virtue is its own reward."

Id: "But vice is also nice, and would suffice."

Superego: "Would you want to perish twice?"

Ego: "Might I address what, in principle, our reality is?"

Hair: "Do-Re-Mi"

Hair Poster

Wikipedia

Remember, from that old musical Hair, the "Do-Re-Me" song that so offended everybody by its choice of off-color subject matter and explicit terms? I was just recalling it from how I first heard it -- more on that later -- and at that time construed the lyrics, which I take to be more or less correct:

I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Do-Re-Mi,
Pellagra-oh!
Country linguist,
Pedal faster!

Father, why do these words sound much vaster?

Constipation
Can't be done.
Join the wholy gorging.
Come and suture,
Everyone!

That's how I understood it in 1967 at ten years old, anyway, when I heard it late at night in my grandparents' dirt-floor basement through the earphone from my tiny battery-free transistor with its alligator clip attached to my bed's iron bedstead for an electrical source sent circulating by the very radio waves that brought the music to my ear, and I still can't understand why folks found it so offensive ("Constipation" excepted) . . . though I can't swear to recalling the precise words in my forty-four-year-old memory from my ten-year-old mind.

But please, don't correct me if I'm wrong . . .

Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

Doc Sportello?

Illustration by Erik T. Johnson

(Image from NYT)

Thomas Pynchon has come out with another book rooted in the countercultural sixties, his Inherent Vice. Back in February 1973, that would still have been avant garde literature, but it now feels more like ancient history. Perhaps even more ancient than the sixties since its antihero, the private eye Doc Sportello, harkens back to the to the pre-sixties gumshoe antiheros created by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler . . . but less into whiskey and more into pot.

I haven't read the novel, just Walter Kirn's New York Times review "Drugs to Do, Cases to Solve" (August 20, 2009), but I might read it since Kirn makes it sound funny, as in this passage on StarKist's Charlie the Tuna commercial:

"It's all supposed to be so innocent, upwardly mobile snob, designer shades, beret, so desperate to show he's got good taste, except he's also dyslexic so he gets 'good taste' mixed up with 'taste good,' but it's worse than that! Far, far worse! Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty."

I suppose that one needs to have experienced the popular StarKist commercial to get the humor and to have lived the sixties to undertand the point, Charlie as expression of an inverted paranoia -- 'They're not out to get me!'

Meanwhile, the paranoiacs of Pynchon's countercultural universe suffer the opposite problem "paranoia [as] a version of normal pattern­making amped way up by . . . [the] intake of hallucinogens." They foresee that, unlike Charlie, they're the ones "to be caught, processed, put in a can." Such countercultural paranoia was, in hindsight, utterly lucid thinking. Drugs were illegal. The cops and the government and the culture were all out to get them. Even those paranoiacs had real enemies.

On Doc Sportello's StarKist riff and its like, Kirn observes:

These manic outbursts aren't arbitrary, of course, but cluster around the novel's core concern with the waning of the Summer of Love, when all was balmy and celestial, into the chilly Autumn of Authority, which Pynchon implies has yet to end.

Realistically speaking, of course, that countercultural world couldn't have survived and was itself more an expression of Pynchon's infamous 'entropy' than the 'square' world of authority, which does at least know how to organize and defend itself.

Call it the 'square' world's inherent virtue.

"Two Hearts"

"Two Hearts"

(Image from Wikipedia)

Damn! Sometimes, only a simple expletive undeleted makes sense of the serendipity.

For years now, I've been calling to mind a story that I read back in 1975 in The Last Whole Earth Catalog, an odd, hippie-type book-length mishmash of ecology, philosophy, and hucksterism inspired, in part, by the 'thought' of Buckminster Fuller as refracted through the psychedelic sixties.

When I say "calling to mind," I mean without recalling, precisely, the author of that story.

The story was Divine Right's Trip, and I read it because my high school friend Pete Hale showed me the catalog, which was the strangest thing that I'd ever seen, but also strangely compelling. I even read Plato's allegory of "The Cave" in that weird, motley book.

Anway, I couldn't recall the author, but I do have trouble with names, always have had, so I'd long ago given up trying to dredge that from the dregs of my memory, but then what happens? I pick up a book that my mother gave my daughter Sa-Rah for Christmas -- Peter S. Beagle's Last Unicorn, the deluxe edition with "Two Hearts" and also an interview conducted by Connor Cochran -- and read it through over the course of a week or so while exercising on our stationary bicycle, and what do I discover in the 2007 interview, "A Conversation with Peter S. Beagle"? This reminiscence by Beagle about the gaggle of writers whom he met during a year at Stanford on a Stegner Fellowship in 1960:

An amazing gang. I admit that at times I felt completely overwhelmed. There was Larry McMurtry, the first friend I made there, known now for Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show and the screenplay to Brokeback Mountain. He was only a couple of years older than I was, and really talented. He wrote most of Leaving Cheyenne during our session. There was a 25 year-old Ken Kesey, at that point working on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. There was Judith Rascoe, who was the niece or great niece of a very influential critic named Burton Rascoe; Judith went on to write stories and some very good screenplays. There was a Scottish guy named Robin MacDonald, whose wife, Joanna Ostrow, was Bronx Jewish like me. Robin was the one with the fellowship, but Joanna turned out to be the real writer. She would sit in on the class and years later, after the class was long over, she published an excellent novel called In the Highlands Since Time Immemorial. There was Chris Koch, an Australian writer whose best-known work over here is probably The Year of Living Dangerously. He started that one while he was at Stanford. But my closest friend in the class was Gurney Norman, from Hazard, Kentucky. Gurney and I took to each other immediately. As we've often said, he was my first redneck and I was his first City Jew. We used to sit up nights comparing childhoods. We're still in touch today. In fact, I visited him in Kentucky a few years ago and wrote all about it in the forward to The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche, my first collection from Tachyon Publication.

"'Gurney Norman' . . . now there's an echo of some name in my memory," I thought but couldn't place him. Other names were immediately recognizable. Larry McMurtry? Yeah, I read Lonesome Dove when I was living in Tübingen. Ken Kesey? Yeah, I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when I was in high school and later even shook hands with him when I was in Berkeley. Chris Koch? Well, I've not read his work, but I saw the film version of The Year of Living Dangerously while I was living near Stanford. But Gurney Norman? Something struck me as familiar about this unplaceable name. So, I looked him up . . . and there he was, the man who had written Divine Right's Trip!

What do I think of that story? I don't know anymore. At the time, I liked it because its story of a hillbilly hippie from the Appalachians made sense to me, a hillbilly 'hippie' in the Ozarks. But I might be as disappointed with it now as I was upon my second viewing of Bootleggers, a movie that I had greatly enjoyed upon first seeing it in high school, probably because it was filmed partly in Calico Rock, Arkansas and showed those high White River bluffs that you can also see in some of the photos from my Ozark photoblog.

But to get back to Peter Beagle and his friend Gurney Norman among the Stegner fellows . . . that must have been a fascinating bunch of writers to have had as a cohort! I suppose that they didn't know that they'd all find success, of course, and maybe only the reminiscence makes it sound so great.

But it nevertheless says something touching about the potential for unexpected connections forged between two hearts across profound differences . . . and I know a bit about that.