Wow....this book is a trip.

Often I didn’t know where I was in time or space, what was happening, or why, and I liked that. Somehow the apolitical antihero, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, finds himself the poster child of college campus revolt. The college is a thinly veiled Cornell, and every corner is laced with opiates, theatrics, suicidal longing, and total immorality. Dense lists, paranoid rambling, and philosophical heresy fill the pages of this chaotic, whirlwind novel. Hilarious and twisted, the back of my copy (which my good friend lent to me) sings Fariña’s praise in bringing the 60’s to life with the same perfection as F. Scott Fitzgerald did the 20’s. High praise—which I believe he’s earned.

If you liked Catcher in the Rye, Jesus’ Son, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, you’ll like this novel. Gnossos is like Holden Caulfield, if Holden used opium and actually got laid.

I loved the unbridled "youth" of this book, the drug infused, vibrant tales of college hi-jinx and low down powerful writing. Of course, i was just as young when I first read it. Gnossoss the manchild in the promised land of the 60's is brilliant, and I am saddened that Farina died in a motorcycle accident two days after the book was published to rave reviews. He and his wife Mimi, who is Joan Baez's sister, also wrote the premier heroin song of the time, Mainline Prosperity Blues.

Das ist ein Buch, was mir in Erinnerung bleiben wird. Und ich werde es auch nochmal lesen, denn es gibt noch so viel zu entdecken. Hier macht es Sinn, wenn man sich über die damalige Zeit informiert. Was geschah z.B. in Kuba. Wie sah die Stellung der Frau aus oder wie ging man mit Rassismus um. Die Musikszene ist interessant und die damals aktuelle Literatur, ebenso wie die politische Lage. All das wiederspiegelt sich im Roman.
Das Studentenleben mit all seinen Facetten, Drogen, Sex, all das wird einem geboten. Es geschehen lustige Dinge, dramatische, tragische und absurde. Es gibt Intrigen und Verrat.
Die Sprache ist anspruchsvoll und man muss aufpassen, was passiert oder gesagt wird. Selbst wenn die Figuren wirr reden oder handeln (Drogen), ist es wichtig.
Das der Autor mit 29 Jahren bei einem Motoradunfall verstarb, gibt dem Buch einen zusätzlichen Hauch Tragik.

A hip college student tries to avoid involvement in anything meaningful while living a life of hedonistic extremes.

Been Down So Long It Looks like Up to Me, title taken from an old blues song, is just another way to say what a long, strange trip it's been. Richard Fariña, a writer, musician, and songwriter, was killed in a motorcycle accident two days after the publication of this, his only novel, which lends an eerie reality to the frequent invocations of death (Thanatos) in the text. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, hilarious as it's meant to be, is an often misunderstood book. Set in 1958 but with overtones of the 60's, the main character, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, a beatnik, hipster, proto-hippie, college student, and our deeply flawed anti-hero, refuses to conform to the rules of society: he is a bully, thief, and seducer. Seriously unreliable, he lives his life by a code of non-involvement, "exemption," in which he maintains his cool at all costs and refuses responsibility for his actions. Except he doesn't: there are consequences to this life. Although Gnossos is vengeful and willfully oblivious to the effect his actions (often fueled by drugs) have on others (generally those doing him a favor), he later feels guilt for these acts, and in a variant on the laws of physics, his willful acts are paid back doublefold by whatever gods there be. In a darkly humorous and Nabokovian way he's charming; you might not want him for a friend, but you'd want to know him, from a distance perhaps. He's not for squares -- sex and drugs abound. As with J.P. Donleavy's Ginger Man, the reader feels some sympathy for Gnossos' painful inability to conform. But while the reader may ponder the figurative bumps and bruises, Richard Fariña has galloped pages ahead and Gnossos is now miles away, until his exempt status is threatened by love and he's drawn into the edges of campus insurrection. The story is a wild ride, at times reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon, who knew Fariña in college and wrote the introduction, and like Pynchon, the story is a little deeper than expected if you take the time to read without prejudice. The writing is notable for the Whitmanesque lists attempting to encapsulate the times. The ending is unexpected but just right for the excellent Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. Three final notes: (1) just as I feel Catcher in the Rye is best first read while in one's teens, this may be best first read before age 25 or so; (2) for those who will wonder, because it comes up, paregoric is a tincture of opium, apparently legal at the time; (3) I think many of the critics of this book either didn't catch the "pay the piper" theme, or didn't read to the end, which of course is typical of critics. [5★]

This is one of my favorite books, yea it was a first novel with issues, and we were denied the chance for more from Farina. It captures a moment in our past, and in my past as I grew up in the locale he is writing about and knew some of the characters in the novel. Not a perfect book but for someone that grew up in the 60's it resonates. It also inspired one of the absolute worst movies ever made, that is really worth avoiding.

In the early autumn of 1967, "Esquire" magazine carried a piece of "Been Down."

I was a high school senior and immediately bought a copy at Orr's Books across from Witchita, Kansas East High School. I devoured the book and loaned my copy to many of my friends. Something was happening even in south central Kansas. What it was wasn't clear.

Farina's style blew our minds.

I haven't been able to re read it. Mostly, it was obviously sexist, even to an unreconstructed teen male.

It's kind of like On the Road, as my friend explained, but better and less known. I think I still like On the Road better, but this had some priceless parts - a favorite was when the main character goes to a formal dinner at a fraternity house - and overall I loved it.

BEWARE THE MONKEY DEMON WHEN YOUR INTEREST SHIFTS

This feels like one of those books that would've sent 16-year old me absolutely head-over-heels - not that I didn't enjoy it, but that its youthful, mescaline-tinged anarchism might have felt even more outrageous to mid-GCSEs Archie. Gnossos is some strange amalgamation of both the thoughtful Boddhisatva of Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums and the foot-dragging, subversive misanthrope of Holden Caulfied in Catcher, with sprinklings of Charles Highway in The Rachel Papers, but navigating the uptight conservatism of a late-fifties East Coast college campus rather than the cold streets of New York or the buddhist-digging, beret-wearing poets of San Francisco. The same criticisms which are appropriately directed towards those other characters - i.e. their rampant misogyny - are equally as valid here (duh) but still a very enjoyable read. Also an interesting style of writing, clearing paying homage to the Kerouacs and Gary Snyders of the world in its often Beat-esque spontaneous prose which bounces along like some frantic Mingus bassline. Reading made even better after learning about Richard Farina, his friendships with Dylan and the Baez sisters, and his motorbike crash which seems to have eerily foreshadowed Dylan's much-mythologized accident a year later. Shoutout to Jess for a recommendation so niche that even the most pretentious of Greenwich Village bookshops were unable to provide me with a copy.

Richard Fariña stands at the crossroads of postmodernism and beat culture…
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me – the title is already a pure poetry. And everything that you may find inside is thoroughly innovative and absolutely and fantastically postmodern but the tale is about the retreating into the past beat generation… A requiem of sorts.
Not for nothing Thomas Pynchon dedicated his Gravity's Rainbow to Richard Fariña.

I am invisible, he thinks often. And Exempt. Immunity has been granted to me, for I do not lose my cool. Polarity is selected at will, for I am not ionized and I possess not valence. Call me inert and featureless but Beware, I am the Shadow, free to cloud men’s minds.

The hero’s name Gnossos is a talking name – it is derived from the Greek term ‘Gnosis’ and may be interpreted as a ‘possessor of esoteric knowledge’.

“We share a dissipating current, Gnossos. Like transformer coils, you see, we mistake induction for generation. Vicarious sampling is all that remains; the sour evening game of the academies.”

Mankind is on the wrong as usual. And on the quest to find the meaning, hiking through the psychedelic landscapes, one may find instead human meanness without limits.

I just finished reading Positively 4th Street and wanted to reread Been Down so Long it Looks like Up to Me- while I had previously enjoyed the book for various reasons, albeit somewhat dated, reading it now with background knowledge of Farina and his time at Cornell made it newly enjoable.

Richard Farina is something of a role model to me. If I could model my life after his I would - all except the dying in a motorcycle accident two days after my first novel is published. But besides this I would like to:

1. release acoustic driven music with my beautiful girlfriend/wife

2. Publish a novel centered around a smooth-talking, fast-living, drug-ingesting protagonist named Gnossos (yes, that's right his name is Gnossos and you don't even wanna know his last name)

3. Participate in campus demonstrations against draconian campus policies.

and 4. Be Thomas Pynchon's best friend and have Gravity's Rainbow dedicated to me; I mean how fuckin' cool would that be.

But all personal coolness aside, "Been Down So Long.." is actually a good novel. While a bit dated (as this was written in the sixties), and a bit misogynistic (he lies about using a contraceptive just so he can get some), the novel is buzzing in style, dripping in a sixties coolness and an extemporaneous desire for change. Gnossos, while sometimes loathsome, is also entertaining to be around. This is not a novel I would recommend to most women; they might like it if they are into Bukowski or something similar, but most probably will not. I think I like the novel more than I think it is actually good. When I picked it up the title struck me as something so modern, like the title of some indie rock band's second album, and when I read the first chapter it was written with such verve and humour that it immediately had me hooked. More so than that the ending threw me for a loop and showed me that this was more than an "On The Road" wanderlust excuse to drink and take drugs (although there is a rather large element of that) But more so it was about the effects of trying to maintain a detached cool in the midst of so much cultural change; and even more universal than that, it's about trying to go through life and never be embarrased or made foolish, and only portray the most laid-back, witty, and insouciant calm that no real person actually has. And, of course, anyone who drinks, takes drugs, lies and sleeps around is the complete opposite of these things; he's an insecure man who has been down so long that it starts looking like up.

Most likely few people, perhaps militant fans of mid-tier 60s folk, will come at this book from any other direction than from the Thomas Pynchon connection, like I did. Pynchon's Introduction to my copy has a lot of interesting things to say about the background behind the novel - the inspirations for the characters, Fariña's storytelling abilities, how stultifying life during the mid-50s was - but whether it's due to his sentimental memories, its similarities to his own early work, or perhaps some ability to see things in the book I can't, he rates the book much more highly than I do ("like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch", in his infamous phrase).

It's at heart one of those books that's almost more a reaction to the artistic conformity of the 50s than it is a work of its own. The plot is a mix of the kind of cheerful antisocial hooliganism of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and Animal House, while the writing style is more reminiscent of contemporaries like Ken Kesey or Jack Kerouac; think fast, irreverent, funny, loose, filled with drinking and drugs and friends breaking rules. There's a lot of overlap with the Whole Sick Crew from Pynchon's V. So much of the book is obviously based on Fariña's personal life, like the setting, the characters, the stories like the wolf one, and probably the dialogue, that it comes off like he took "write what you know" extremely literally. The Gnossos Pappadopoulis is not completely a Mary Sue protagonist, but his overwhelming coolness - like the climactic rally scene where Gnossos is adulated for seemingly no reason at all - says perhaps more than was intended about the author's self-image. I'm willing to believe Pynchon that Fariña was a better person than his hero, however there are a few scenes in the book, such as the resolution with the Kristin character, that are repulsive and not in a good way (then again, the same is true of Pynchon's books as well).

Another reason why the book seems a bit lighter than, say, one of Pynchon's novel's from that period, is that the novel isn't really about much. Gnossos doesn't grow or change much; his self-image of Exemption from the nastier sides of life come off as much more juvenile or adolescent than McClintic Sphere's "keep cool but care" mantra from V. Also, though there's tons of drug use in the book, there isn't the same fascination with druggy/nerdy ideas that his friend had; compare the scene with L'Hôpital's Rule here to the brilliant band-pass filter scene of Kilroy in V. In terms of writing style, there are many sentences with lists like in V., but they don't have the same kind of ring to them even though both authors have an affinity for the same Miles Davis and Mose Allison tunes that permeate their respective atmospheres. I don't mean to compare the two novels or writers so much, yet they are so nearly similar in so many ways that it's almost unavoidable - there's even a fun raga instrumental called "V." on one of Fariña's folk albums.

Ultimately, Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up to Me comes off like a fascinating alternate take or set of demos from a band that was in the same scene as a more famous group yet whose career never took off in the same way. Fariña's tragic death obviously affected Pynchon deeply, and maybe that's why his books published after the accident do treat death and mortality a little more seriously than Fariña's does. I'm not sure the famous writing advice that dealing with death is required to be a "serious" writer is really true since there's no one way to write a novel, but this one seems to lack something that would put it in the first tier of novels from the time. Maybe if he'd lived this book would be seen as the beginning of something great instead of the merely acceptable half-forgotten relic it is now. Still, it is filled with the kind of exuberance that's moving at times and delivers its own brand of enjoyment, so if you've sworn an oath to track down every piece of literature connected to Pynchon, like I have, then this is a decent stop after Oakley Hall's Warlock.