Read Online The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Tom Wolfe
Tags: United States, General, science, Social Science, History, Psychology, Psychopathology, Addiction, Popular Culture, drug abuse, Hippies - United States, Hippies, drug addiction, Applied Sciences, Drug addiction - United States
Ads: Link
grasp of characters so certain, that the reader is swept along... His is a large, robust talent, and he has written a large, robust book"—Saturday Review
AND ON THE LANE — ALL THIS WAS A CONFIRMATION OF
everything they and Kesey had been doing. For one thing there was the old Drug Paranoia—the fear that this wild uncharted drug thing they were into would gradually... rot your brain. Well, here was the answer. Chief Broom!
And McMurphy ... but of course. The current fantasy ... he was a McMurphy figure who was trying to get them to move off their own snug-harbor dead center, out of the plump little game of being ersatz daring and ersatz alive, the middle-class intellectual's game, and move out to ... Edge City ... where it was scary, but people were whole people. And if drugs were what unlocked the doors and enabled you to do this thing and realize all this that was in you, then so let it be ...
Not even on Perry Lane did people really seem to catch the thrust of the new book he was working on, Sometimes a Great Notion. It was about the head of a logging clan, Hank Stamper,
who defies a labor union and thereby the whole community he lives in by continuing his logging operation through a strike. It was an unusual book. It was a novel in which the strikers are the villains and the strikebreaker is the hero. The style was experimental and sometimes difficult. And the main source of "mythic" reference was not Sophocles or even Sir James Frazer but... yes, Captain Marvel. The union leaders, the strikers, and the townspeople were the tarantulas, all joyfully taking their vow: "We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not... and 'will to equality' shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!" Hank Stamper was, quite intentionally, Captain Marvel.
Once known as.. . Ubermensch. The current fantasy ...
... on Perry Lane. Nighttime, the night he and Faye and the kids came back to Perry Lane from Oregon, and they pull up to the old cottage and there is a funny figure in the front yard, smiling and rolling his shoulders this way and that and jerking his hands out to this side and the other side as if there's a different drummer somewhere, different drummer, you understand, corked out of his gourd, in fact... and, well, Hi, Ken, yes, uh, well, you weren't around, exactly, you understand, doubledy-clutch, doubledy-clutch, and they told me you wouldn't mind, generosity knoweth no—
ahem—yes, I had a '47 Pontiac myself once, held the road like a prehistoric bird, you understand ... and, yes, Neal Cassady had turned up in the old cottage, like he had just run out of the pages of On the Road, and ... what's next, Chief? Ah .. . many Day-Glo freaking curlicues—
All sorts of people began gathering around Perry Lane. Quite an... underground sensation it was, in Hip California. Kesey, Cassady, Larry McMurtry; two young writers, Ed McClanahan and Bob Stone; Chloe Scott the dancer, Roy Seburn the artist, Carl Lehmann-Haupt, Vic Lovell... and Richard Alpert him-self... all sorts of people were in and out of there all the time, because they had heard about it, like the local beats—that term was still used—a bunch of kids from a pad called the Chateau, a wildhaired kid named Jerry Garcia and the Cadaverous Cowboy, Page Browning.
Everybody was attracted by the strange high times they had heard about... the Lane's fabled Venison Chili, a Kesey dish made of venison stew laced with LSD, which you could consume and then go sprawl on the mattress in the fork of the great oak in the middle of the Lane at night and play pinball with the light show in the sky . .. Perry Lane.
And many puzzled souls looking in ... At first they were captivated. The Lane was too good to be true. It was Walden Pond, only without any Thoreau misanthropes around. Instead, a community of intelligent, very open, out-front people—out front was a term everybody was using—out-front
AND ON THE LANE — ALL THIS WAS A CONFIRMATION OF
everything they and Kesey had been doing. For one thing there was the old Drug Paranoia—the fear that this wild uncharted drug thing they were into would gradually... rot your brain. Well, here was the answer. Chief Broom!
And McMurphy ... but of course. The current fantasy ... he was a McMurphy figure who was trying to get them to move off their own snug-harbor dead center, out of the plump little game of being ersatz daring and ersatz alive, the middle-class intellectual's game, and move out to ... Edge City ... where it was scary, but people were whole people. And if drugs were what unlocked the doors and enabled you to do this thing and realize all this that was in you, then so let it be ...
Not even on Perry Lane did people really seem to catch the thrust of the new book he was working on, Sometimes a Great Notion. It was about the head of a logging clan, Hank Stamper,
who defies a labor union and thereby the whole community he lives in by continuing his logging operation through a strike. It was an unusual book. It was a novel in which the strikers are the villains and the strikebreaker is the hero. The style was experimental and sometimes difficult. And the main source of "mythic" reference was not Sophocles or even Sir James Frazer but... yes, Captain Marvel. The union leaders, the strikers, and the townspeople were the tarantulas, all joyfully taking their vow: "We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not... and 'will to equality' shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!" Hank Stamper was, quite intentionally, Captain Marvel.
Once known as.. . Ubermensch. The current fantasy ...
... on Perry Lane. Nighttime, the night he and Faye and the kids came back to Perry Lane from Oregon, and they pull up to the old cottage and there is a funny figure in the front yard, smiling and rolling his shoulders this way and that and jerking his hands out to this side and the other side as if there's a different drummer somewhere, different drummer, you understand, corked out of his gourd, in fact... and, well, Hi, Ken, yes, uh, well, you weren't around, exactly, you understand, doubledy-clutch, doubledy-clutch, and they told me you wouldn't mind, generosity knoweth no—
ahem—yes, I had a '47 Pontiac myself once, held the road like a prehistoric bird, you understand ... and, yes, Neal Cassady had turned up in the old cottage, like he had just run out of the pages of On the Road, and ... what's next, Chief? Ah .. . many Day-Glo freaking curlicues—
All sorts of people began gathering around Perry Lane. Quite an... underground sensation it was, in Hip California. Kesey, Cassady, Larry McMurtry; two young writers, Ed McClanahan and Bob Stone; Chloe Scott the dancer, Roy Seburn the artist, Carl Lehmann-Haupt, Vic Lovell... and Richard Alpert him-self... all sorts of people were in and out of there all the time, because they had heard about it, like the local beats—that term was still used—a bunch of kids from a pad called the Chateau, a wildhaired kid named Jerry Garcia and the Cadaverous Cowboy, Page Browning.
Everybody was attracted by the strange high times they had heard about... the Lane's fabled Venison Chili, a Kesey dish made of venison stew laced with LSD, which you could consume and then go sprawl on the mattress in the fork of the great oak in the middle of the Lane at night and play pinball with the light show in the sky . .. Perry Lane.
And many puzzled souls looking in ... At first they were captivated. The Lane was too good to be true. It was Walden Pond, only without any Thoreau misanthropes around. Instead, a community of intelligent, very open, out-front people—out front was a term everybody was using—out-front
Similar Books
