Well, if you ever want proof of how sixties totems don't really age well, this is the book for you. The cult following has been long if somewhat subterranean, its duration due in part to the unfortunate circumstance of its author dying in a motorcycle accident only a couple dozen hours after its publication (and only a few months before the mythological motorcycle accident of Farina's "brother-in-law," Bob Dylan). It also helps your literary endurance to have gone to Cornell with both Thomas Pynchon and C. Michael Curtis of Atlantic Monthly fame. Readers will be forgiven for wondering, in fact, if Pynchon didn't have a hand in the book since its manic energy and style are simpatico to both V and The Crying of Lot 49. When I first read this the summer before I went to college (right after the edition with Farina's face on it came out---the new edition with the upside down crotch shot doesn't do much to sell the legend) there were even rumors that Pynchon WAS Farina, or Farina WAS Pynchon. Or something like that. In the end, reading the book is a lot like watching WILD IN THE STREETS or maybe even VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS (best scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy40TT... thanks, MST3K): it's best enjoyed with tongue in cheek. Maybe in the end the important thing this book documents is how the youth rebellion associated with the sixties had a hard time rising about juvenility. (Suffice to say that a moral stand in this plot revolves around flipping off the evil campus VP). All that said, you can still watch clips of the Berkeley Free Speech days and appreciate why aggressive generational politics was necessary back in the day: old people really acted like mean old people before 1966. Nobody above 25 gave two shits about being cool or hip. So the book really captures the late 50s period when weed, premarital sex, and long hair were indeed considered threats to the social order. That makes for an interesting if not always sympathetic document. As many commentators have remarked, rebellion here is a boys club---you can draw a straight line from the humor to Animal House and realize frattiness was in the blood even if you were vehemently anti-frat. Anyway, worth a gander for nostalgia's sake. Farina's musical career is actually more emotionally engaging if you aren't put off by the sort of folk music that prefers dulcimers to acoustic blues noodling and has titles like "Reflections in a Crystal Wind." Personally, I dig it, baby. RF's wife was the gorgeous and highly underestimated Mimi Farina (Joan baez's kid sister). She survived her husband by thirty-five years but still died way too young, nearly a decade ago now.

I remember reading this and loving it and wondering why the hell I never heard of Farina before. Joe Short recommended it to me, as usual it was another successful suggestion by the man.

I have none of the romanticized nostalgia for the ‘60s and am thankful to find no such idealization in this novel. I can see why some folks wouldn’t like it: “coolness” and literature are uneasy bedfellows. Plenty of readers choose the introspective path early on precisely because the cool kids are always being such assholes. But Farina is not simply singing a hymn to every magic moment of selfless abandon and shitfaced partying (aka “being cool”). As TRP observes in the Intro, “Death, no idle prankster, is always, in this book, just outside the window.” What’s menaced is something in all of us, if not our literal selves. Farina dubs it Exemption and Immunity. There are other names, some flattering, some condescending: youth, hope, idealism, transcendence, nirvana, love, omniscience, and so on. The prose is decidedly not delirious but the tight flow of a high and alert IQ out for a romp. The novel is a species of the disenchanting Bildungsroman, yet there is no surrender even when the Spirit knows it has been conquered. It is not the univocally upbeat monologue of a drug-addled egotist; other characters voice concerns that can’t be ignored, try as Gnossos might. Here’s Pynchon again: “In the course of the book, Gnossos looks at a number of possibilities, including Eastern religion, road epiphanies, mescaline, love. All turn out to have a flaw of some kind. What he’s left with to depend on is his own coherence, an extended version of 1950s Cool.” What is anybody going to do with the road ahead when they just want to read, fuck, and think? Farina—nobody’s fool—saw that road pretty clearly, took the turn too sharp, lived fast, died young, but thankfully left us this flawed gem as a kaleidoscopic perspective on coming of age when there’s no place for you in the future.

A beautifully fucked-up phantasmagoria packed with sex, idealism, drugs and malignant monkeys, Fariña wrote only this one novel and it's a great pity he died so young. A novel very much of the 60's but one that is definitely not stuck there.

I have not run into a stream of consciousness writer who has this much style in his language. He has been a huge influence on my own writing.

Well I read it 40 years ago and it is still in my brain as one of the most memorable books at the time. I must hve injoied it, I've read hundreds if not thousands of books sence then, and is still on my mind, maybe i'm weird, but there it is.

I did not dig this book.

Richard Fariña’s music with Mimi is some of the best of 60’s folk. He hung around with Thomas Pynchon and Bob Dylan, two all-time huge talents. Pynchon dedicated Gravity’s Rainbow to Fariña and wrote the introduction for the 1983 reissue of this book. I was fully on board the Fariña train after reading David Hajdu’s Positively Fourth Street. The mythology surrounding the man is immense. Not to mention that I’m very friendly to hippie/psychedelic culture. I say this just to make the point that I thought I was the ideal reader for Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.

That turned out not to be the case. What I did like was the general patchouli-scented atmosphere, the drugs, the music, the jive talking, slang, etc. There are a few beautiful turns of language from Fariña the narrator (“pupils adrift in a sea of mulberry blood vessels”) and I especially enjoyed when he went into “listing off a lot of similar things” mode, particularly on the descriptions of food. Kind of reminded me of Henry Miller. I admire the writing on the level of craft and skill with language.

Unfortunately, Fariña used his considerable talent with words to paint a pretty repulsive picture. I did not find Gnossos Pappadopoulis to be an endearing or sympathetic character in the least… and he’s there for every scene of the book. Like others have noted, there is a wide streak of chauvinism running through the book. The female characters in the book are there for Gnossis to have sex with, or they have big boobs/bouncing ass, or they’re repressive narc-types. It’s very Hugh Hefner. There is a lot about the main character’s “periscope.” Fariña even has a twelve-year old girl see Gnossos’s boner (why???). The cringe-y sex scenes have not aged well and will likely ruffle modern feathers. As Pynchon notes in the intro, Pappadopolis is abusive. I understand this is college, they’re horny, it was a different time, sure… but the main character (who is ostensibly a stand-in for Fariña) felt scummy. And it seems like the point of the book is that he’s a really groovy cat. Or am I missing something?

To tell the truth, I did find the book pretty riveting and read it fairly quickly over the last week. But maybe I was just excited for it to end. Going in, I was expecting something funnier or more joyful? Turns out it was kind of a bad trip. Who knew the “Pack Up Your Sorrows” guy could get so negative? I’m still a fan of the music though. And, Thomas Pynchon, if you’re reading this, I appreciate your recommendation and wish I had enjoyed the book more. Also, Kate, if you’re reading this, thank you for gifting me this book and sorry for writing this review.

**Spoiler**
So that I remember why I found this book's ending so disturbing - Gnossos cuts the tip off of his condom before having sex with his new girlfriend (of course she was a virgin when they met) Kristin McCleod so he can get her pregnant without telling her. On a whim he then leaves for Cuba and calls her dad (whom he has never met or spoken to) to say he “probably knocked up his daughter.” While in Cuba he realizes he inadvertently got “the clap” from Kristin during the condom-tip-cut-off episode, presumably because she had been with the hospitalized professor Oeuf behind Gnossos’s back. So what does he do in retaliation? Takes her to an abandoned Dairy Queen parking lot where he bounds-and-gags her and forcibly gives her a suppository of heroin, then leaves her there. In the next chapter, he reads in a newspaper that she’s getting married to Oeuf, who is the new dean of the college, and who has arranged for Gnossos to be drafted into the army. Then it just ends. What the hell????

There are two big things this book had working in its favor before I even cracked open Richard Fariña's under-appreciated final gem: The Pynchon connection (which is was what nudged me in the direction of this novel in the first place, albeit more than a year after "Gravity's Rainbow" mournfully introduced me to Fariña) and my own probably-over-romanticized-at-this-point affinity for my college experience, with Pynchon's intro (which includes an obligatory kazoo-choir reference!) being, of course, a voyeuristic delight of the highest order right until the moment it crashed back to heartbreaking reality and the novel's not-entirely-fictitious collegiate antics serving as a not-entirely-unpleasant reminder of why I was so reluctant to let go of college life.

And then, during the year's last handful of blessedly slow days at the Crappiest Place on Earth, I discovered that actually taking my lunch hour to hunker shoelessly down in the backseat of my car with a blanket and a book is pretty much the best thing to ever happen to my sanity professional life. Observe the photographic proof of my sublime on-the-clock refuge:

n  n

(Thank bouncing Baby Jesus that Fariña's Cornell chum desensitized me to complex equations interrupting literature.)

So now a novel that was published two days before its author's far-too-early death has found an even fonder association in my own personal landscape, thanks to my unyielding dissatisfaction with and need to escape from a job that takes me farther and farther from where I wanted to be at this point in my life.

I am so glad that I read this book now, rather than as a starry-eyed undergrad with dreams of running the NYT and writing The Greatest American Novel of My Generation on the side. I have a better sense of how life is not something that can be planned for, that growing up is fucking hard even with a willingness to let one's inner child have a say every now and again, that death is always lurking around every corner, and coming to this novel without even one of those hard lessons under my belt would have reduced this from a poignantly frenzied love song of youth's last discoveries to an instruction manual for college kids who just want to shake things up (not that there's anything inherently wrong with living in the moment and taking inconsequentially stupid chances, for those are the backbone of the best Hey, Remember When...? tales). I absolutely would have embraced any opportunity to cause a scene at a formal frathouse dinner like Gnossos Pappadopoulis (Fariña's thinly veiled stand-in for himself) did, just as I had also proclaimed myself in love with wrong guy after wrong guy based on a series of limited-engagement liaisons, as Gnossos did with Kristin, his obsession in green knee-socks and loafers.

My tendency to relate too personally with literary characters came out to play for keeps as Gnossos became a clearer and clearer picture; save for a few lapses into first-person narration, this is a story told mostly in third-person with a focus on GP, so it takes some time to get a sense of his motivation and how others perceive him (it takes a little longer to reconcile the two seemingly at-odds realities). And perhaps I was imposing my own inner workings on Gnossos but I left this book with a sense of awed kinship inspired by his mostly successful attempts to hide his soft heart under an ornery facade. He wants to feel, he wants to live, he wants to be earnest in his devil-may-care approach to throwing himself into living but he is woefully, painfully afraid of doing so because fully embracing life means also acknowledging that death is the inevitable end game.

Gnossos seems like the kind of maniac ringleader whose enthusiasm and passion attract unresisting friends and followers in droves but his attitude obscures a desperate desire to fall in love rather than indulge in a series of unemotional physical encounters, which is what it seems will finally help him stop fighting thanathos with an unequivocally driving life force. Had I not read Pynchon's "Entropy" in college, I would have probably missed the significance of how Gnossos has hermetically sealed himself inside every room he occupies in an attempt to artificially preserve life against the natural encroachment of death -- until his night with Kristin has him throwing open windows with the zeal of a man possessed. He is a character who fights the unpleasant reality with the much more pleasing act of losing oneself in the moment and clinging to that happiness as if that's all it takes to preserve that joy for eternity. As his attempts at pleasant stasis become more desperate and he loses control over situations that initially plopped him on top of the world, it becomes more obvious that this is a guy who wants freedom without responsibility -- and, in the end, isn't that what college is all about?

It's Bukowski once you've swapped the booze for drugs. It's Hunter S. Thompson with an overt awareness that death is nipping at his heels. It's Kerouac as a college kid. It's Pynchon with narrative restraint. But most of all, it's both proof that Fariña's early death was a huge loss to the literary world and a tribute to a screamingly talented artist who knew how to find the biggest truths in the smallest moments while laughing and kicking death in the ass. Because as much as Gnossos (and, presumably, Fariña) feared death, his ability to suck the marrow from every moment is the ultimate victory of life.

Excellent, quirky, nearly forgotten sixties cult novel. He caught the 60s before they happened. Married Joan Baez's sister. Died in a motorcycle accident on his way home from this book's publication party. I love this book. Read it when I was 18. Still love it.

Not sure how I missed this book in my college years. This book should have been right up there with the Fear & Loathings, "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", Vonnegut, Kerouac, Hesse and "Stranger in a Strange Land". Reading it 30 years after college (and almost 45 years after its publication) dilutes the shocking impact of the hipster-guru inner dialogue and outrageous acts of the main character, Gnossos. On the other hand, I get more of the cultural and historical references now than I would have then.

This semi-autobiographical work of fiction (by Richard Farina, a person I knew nothing about until reading "Positively 4th Street") follows the antics of a man too smart, worldly, spiritual and drug-addled to still be in college. I think we all knew that person, or someone like him, who seemed to get good grades without studying and was always impervious to consequences for actions that would get others thrown in jail. There are the now familiar scenes of drug trips, mystical experiences, an orgy, a trip to Cuba during the Revolution and a student uprising. All told in prose that is occasionally inpenetrable but always "hip". Overall, I found this to be hilarious fun and would've given it 5 stars but for the misogynist scenes that are quite out of fashion in this day and age.

So much fun. I wish it weren't his only one.

Won't forget the monkey demon, can't forget the monkey demon, stalking a dreamed darkness in which the words I'm reading might just probably have to've been Pynchon words and then you glance skittish back over your shoulder, onto the book's cover, and they're not his words, they're his buddy's, and that's an A+ bewilderment.