I was primed to like this being a fan of Richard&Mimi's music, captivated by what I learned in Positively 4th St: the novel about the couple, Bob Dylan&Joan Baez, and of course his association with Tommy P.

such a sucker for the tragic myth&romance swirling around the book&its author AND regarding the book's content which I should get into. great storytelling. so many great scenes, evocatively, sensorily, rendered. great characters. great writing if often ridiculous: trippy 60s, beat, hippie vibe. I dig it, I dig. poetic/cryptic. the search for meaning is not dated if the desire for gurus mostly is. it was more sinister&pessimistic than I anticipated. I laughed out loud a few times.

weirdly maybe I was reminded of how the character Augie March, like Gnossos, (if fairly different, still) is an appealing, attractive character whom everyone seems to want on their side, have a little possession over. both characters reject and suss out others' b.s.

of course Pynchon's intro is lovely. he gives the Cornell backstory to the story with perspective on the times. he delivers a spoiler, be warned.

Now I want to read Warlock!

One of the strangest books I've ever read, a bizarre and perverse adaptation of the Odyssey; complete with a giant turd in the narrative, it's an indictment of the counterculture of the 1960s, a response against academia and prestigious schools, and of course, set amidst the backdrop of Cornell University and Cuba, both places that Mr Farina was familiar with.

My friend John Jay suggested this to me. It was a very rich book. It was like taking a peek into someone's interesting college life back in the day. I think it's too bad that Richard Farina died before he had a chance to give us any more of his wonderful books. I think he could have really done something.

Like, I imagine, many people who read this book, I picked it up because Thomas Pynchon dedicated Gravity’s Rainbow to its author and, when I looked him up on the Internet, it seemed he was an interesting character and it might be worth reading a book by him. The fact that this was his first novel and that he was killed in a motorcycle accident just two days after its publication just adds to the mystery and myth that surrounds Farina.

But, if truth be told, this book has little to recommend it to anyone other than students of the Sixties. The book cover states: Richard Farina evokes the Sixties as precisely, wittily and poignantly as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age”. That might well be the case (I was only 5 years old when the book was published and only 9 years old when the Sixties turned into the Seventies, so I can’t really comment), although somehow I doubt it: the writing isn’t great (I cannot see how some people came up with a theory that Farina and Pynchon are/were the same person) and the story isn’t actually all that interesting.

Interestingly, the book cover also says the book as Thomas Pynchon writes in the introduction, "comes on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch." I’ve read the introduction twice including once as a web version I found where I could use the text search option, and I can tell you he doesn’t say that (I believe he may have said it on the dust jacket of one edition, but certainly not in the introduction included in this edition).

So, not a complete waste of time (the section with the wolf story redeems it a bit), but 1.5 stars rounded up to 2.

I read this in college. I practically stayed up all night to finish it. I really loved it. It's not a book everyone would love, but I did.

This is the worst book I have ever read. Yes, it's trippy, but it's also sexist as hell, sensationalist, and extremely pretentious -- in both style and matter. It's counter-culture in all the stupid ways -- oooh, drug-taking is awesommmmeeee man -- and not critical of the protagonist, whose name actually means "knowledge," as he acts on the same base prejudices that make mainstream culture so rotten. A hands-down trash book.

Wonderful wonderful wonderful wonderful wonderful!!!

To understand why I wanted to like this book badly, the following information is of interest; Richard Farina was not only the husband of Mimi Baez, the younger sister of Joan Baez, a close friend of Bob Dylan and a heavy drinker, he also died very early in a motorcycle accident. His novel is considered as beat literature, which earned my attention and the title of his book (after a jazz song I can’t remember rn) is brilliant.

Nonetheless I had my problems getting through the book. Farinas writing style is mesmerizing - catching and unpredictable. If you’re looking for a book that has bukowski’s brutal dirty honesty and kerouacs jazzy prose you better call Farina.

But beware of the misogyny between his lines and gnossos - the absolute insufferable main character. whenever I had a little empathy for him, he destroyed it with his nasty attitude and this way it's almost impossible to have any feelings other than contempt for this asshole.

The other thing is that his book lacks depth - you think a book full of university students should lead to meaningful conversations and complex thoughts? Whenever gnossos had a train of thoughts that was worth listening to, it got wrecked by meaningless blah blah about turning on women.

But to come back to the misogyny; the whole pitch of the story is the strict rules of the university regiment not allowing woman to be out after 11pm. gnossos and his friends are determined in planning a revolution; free the girls from curfew! feministic, a few would think. heroes, I thought. So how can a story that has such a good base to be feministic and heroic become misogyn after all?

The book had so much potential in its themes and atmosphere. I wanted to like Farinas book so bad because it was the first and only novel but I still hold up some hope for his poems.

The hipster novel, far surpassing anything by Kerouac. Drugs, sex, nuclear tests, the Cuban Revolution---and that's just for starters. BTW, Farina was a friend and classmate of Thomas Pynchon, who dedicated "Gravity's Rainbow" to him. Richard, a Cuban-American, was also a folk singer and married to Joan Baez's sister Mimi at the time of his death by a motorcycle accident.

"Like backtracking in the snow, where you're going is where you've never been but it looks like you were there already, so everybody hunts the other way."

that quote is worth the 5 stars in and of itself.

Try not to lose your Exemption, Daddy-O.
Hey Nonny No.

Overflowing with life and the undeniable, incendiary energy of its period. Unfortunate that we didn't get more work from Fariña before his untimely death.

before
Picking this up seems like a very logical progression from Stone Junction: both mystical journeys, both introduced by Thomas Pynchon, both books I remember loving a decade ago but don't really remember.

I'm a little nervous re-reading this, because it shines in my mind as one of the best things I ever read, and I certainly don't want to prove that untrue. But I'm sure it's as amazing as I remember it, right? Right????

after
Spoiler: wrong.

This past summer I went to a "Summer of Love" exhibit at MoMA. Let me just make it clear that I was raised by hippies and even lived on a hippie farm for the first few years of my life; Grateful Dead was my favorite band until I was 13, and I still compost every single carrot peel and eggshell, even though it means schlepping a gross drippy bag of rotting fruit bits on the subway twice a week. So yeah, I obviously went to the "Summer of Love" exhibit at MoMA with very high hopes.

Turned out I actually found it really confusing and depressing. Not because the art was bad; it was great. But all the "trippy" neon and psychedelic tie-dye and black-lit swirls just felt so silly to me, so overdone and clichéd and kind of pathetic.

But here's the thing: none of that stuff was clichéd. It's just that every freaking thing that's been done since ripped it off, reducing and devaluing it all by sheer oversaturation into something cloying and mass marketed and hokey.

And so it is with Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. I know that in the '50s when this was written, the jargon, the attire, the struggles and quests were groundbreaking and awe-inspiring and amazing. But now... it's just been copied ad nauseum, more and more reductively and simplistically each time, by so many awful wannabes, that the whole thing feels stale, a little clunky, a little sad.

And so oh la. This is still an amazing book, but in a crushing blow I've had to demote it from my "perennial favorites" shelf to "formative reading." I mean, this book had a dramatic effect on me as a teenager, but -- though it grieves me to admit -- it just didn't blow my mind as a semi-adult.

For those who've never read it, it's absolutely worth a look, as long as you're prepared to be kind to it, and meet it on its own terms: serious psychedelica, spirit quests, campus unrest, an inevitable road trip to Cuba, and lots and lots and lots of drugs.