eindelijk uit. heb hier zo lang over gedaan maar het was het wel waard om er de tijd voor te nemen. heel interessant om over die post-beatnik psychedelische tijd te lezen, hoe dat allemaal tot stand is gekomen. grappig dat andere figuren en schrijvers hierin voorkomen. hoe die LSD ervaringen werden geschreven vond ik echt wel knap, je werd er echt in meegenomen. ben nu wel benieuwd hoe dit en MK-ULTRA met elkaar te maken hebben gehad? hm. had verwacht dat dit meet culty zou zijn dan dat het was. en jess las dit boek in gilmore girls.

Era il 1962 quando Ken Kesey ( autore de Qualcuno volò sul nido del cuculo) battezza con il nome di Merry Prankers (Allegri Burloni) un gruppo di amici e amiche: uomini e donne accumunati dalla passione per le droghe ed in particolare dediti alla sperimentazione degli acidi.

Tom Wolfe, che proprio in quegli anni cominciava a dedicarsi al giornalismo anticonvenzionale (chiamato poi, new journalism) seguirà l’allegra combriccola durante un viaggio verso New York



E’ l’estate del 1964 quando, a bordo di un coloratissimo autobus ribattezzato n   Furthern (Oltre), i 14 avventurieri partono per un viaggio dai toni missionari.
Distribuire e far conoscere LSD è il loro obiettivo.

Non più beatnik, non ancora hippie, i Merry Prankers rappresentano un punto di rottura che va al di là delle famose porte della percezione che le sostanze psichedeliche aprirebbero.

Rompere gli schemi dell’ ”American Dream”, distorcere l’immagine perbenista e conservatrice, lasciare delle crepe che permettano di fuggire dagli itinerari prestabiliti di scuola- lavoro- casa.

I Prankers sono bizzarri: vestono colorato e contro ogni regola estetica, si comportano in modo inappropriato mettendo in atto una vivace quanto pacifica rivoluzione culturale.
Impossibile non notarli.

”Ho cercato non solo di raccontare ciò che i Pranksters hanno fatto ma di ri-creare quell’atmosfera mentale o realtà soggettiva.
Non credo che la loro avventura possa essere compresa altrimenti.
Tutti gli eventi, i particolari e i dialoghi che ho registrato sono quel che ho visto e sentito io stesso, quello che mi è stato riferito da persone che erano presenti e ciò che è stato registrato su nastro o su pellicola oppure messo per iscritto.”

Così Tom Wolfe spiega in una nota finale che avrebbe anche potuto anticipare il testo così da preparare mentalmente il lettore ad una lettura tutt’altro che facile così come non è facile entrare in sintonia nel viaggio mentale di un’altra persona..


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-QnG...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh2kK...

I had forgotten (successfully) how pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, self-absorbed, and self-righteous hippies were. Maybe, as a full-fledged member of the If-It-Feels-Good-Do-It Generation, I was subconsciously embarrassed by my own pretentiousness, pseudo-intellectuality, self-absorption, and self-righteousness in those days.

But I recently restored my suppressed memory by hooking down Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," first published in 1968. The book I had avoided for thirty years despite glowing recommendations by assorted fellow travelers gave me a flashback that was, well, a bummer. But my reaction only testifies to the power of a work considered by many a nonfiction classic.

In 1966 Wolfe, who later penned The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities, set out to capture in print the essence of the acid-dropping Californian hippie cult led by Ken Kesey, the Typhoid Mary of LSD and author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion." To do so Wolfe employed the techniques of "new journalism" that he, along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and others were then developing to produce nonfiction works that read like novels.

Like a novel, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" uses scene-by-scene construction, records full dialogue, provides the thoughts and emotions of the subjects, and describes in detail their behavior and possessions.

And, like a novel, it puts you there, in the midst of Kesey and his Merry Pranksters: in their Day-Glo bus careening across America, at their acid-laced parties, in their drug-addled minds. Instead of telling you what happened via objective narrative like most journalists, Wolfe shows you, infesting you with all the atmospheric and sensual details. And it works, at least in my case, only too well.

Through a rich, slangy, neologistic stream of consciousness, Wolfe compellingly portrays the insanity, duplicity ("Never trust a Prankster"), and manic, existential muddle of Prankster communal life: The glee in being weird and offensive, the pride in being "cosmic" and unintelligible; the cult-like worship of the charismatic Kesey, and the inevitable crackups, to which the remaining Pranksters remain strikingly callous.

But Wolfe also ably renders the captivating transcendence of the hippie experience: the high energy, high spirits, humor, and creativity--which, for the Merry Pranksters, owed so much to Kesey's wit and inventiveness. For a brief moment it made me long for the days when you could be openly outrageous, say most anything you damned well pleased to anyone, and live free and wild. Maybe even for more than a brief moment.

It made me wish I had been there when some shortsighted Berkeley anti-war-rally organizer invited the celebrated Kesey to speak. But instead of mimicking the militant tone of previous speakers, Kesey, in orange coat and Day-Glo World War I helmet, came to the microphone with a harmonica. Accompanied by the Pranksters' makeshift band, he played "Home on the Range," likened the previous speaker to Mussolini, and chided the 20,000 ralliers:

"Me! Me! Me!...That's the cry of the ego and the cry of this rally!...Me! Me! Me!...Yep, you're playing their game."

Ah, the good old days.

Wolfe then goes on to encapsulate the scene and capture its spirit in his conversational prose:

"--and the crowd starts going into a slump. It's as if the rally, the whole day, has been one long careful inflation of a helium balloon, preparing to take off--and suddenly somebody has pulled a plug. It's not what [Kesey] is saying, either. It's the sound and the freaking sight and that goddamn mournful harmonica and that stupid Chinese music by the freaks standing up behind him. It's the only thing the martial spirit can't stand--a put-on, a prank, a shuck, a goose in the anus."

No, not traditional, objective reportage, but something more, something that cuts to the heart of the moment and tells a deeper truth.

Wolfe nonetheless manages to do all this full-immersion, colloquial reporting without taking sides, without preaching, advocating, or admonishing. Along with the pandemonium and celebrity and wild joyousness of the Merry Pranksters, he shows you the psychotic reactions, the Hell's Angels gang bangs, and the betrayals. And you believe every word of it, even when his minutely detailed reporting and at times overly rich prose become tedious.

But, as in fiction, the details are everything. And the only way to get them right is to do your homework, which Wolfe did in spades. In addition to on-the-scene reporting and the usual documentary research, he conducted interviews with Kesey, various Pranksters, and others on the scene, such as writers Larry McMurtry, Hunter Thompson, and Robert Stone. He delved into Prankster archives--films, tapes, letters, diaries, photos--and into Prankster minds.

In an author's note at the book's end, Wolfe writes: "I have tried not only to tell what the Pranksters did but to re-create the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it. I don't think their adventure can be understood without that."

In "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" Wolfe succeeds in re-creating the megalomaniacal atmosphere of a movement that profoundly changed our culture. In it he reveals the roots of the mass drug-taking and mass permissiveness that linger yet today.

Kesey's own story in the interim seems a sad microcosm of our culture: After his LSD experiences he never wrote another work that approached the verve and sweep of his first two novels. Later, from his website, he sold Prankster memorabilia, films, and T-shirts reading "Never Trust a Prankster."

weird and good. he has a special talent for describing the psychedelic experience in the most disgusting ways possible. like watching some brightly coloured larval spawn erupt on an attenborough documentary. a lot of talk about plumbing. it was great

I had a brief interaction with Tom Wolfe last November.

He came to speak to my class in one of those rare "Oh wow, Columbia Journalism might be worth it" moments. Inexplicably, he started in on a lengthy out-of-context run about how the New York Sun was a disgrace of a newspaper. I happened to be working there as a reporter at the time (and hating it), it was one of those surreal coincidences that seem to happen to me on an eerily regular basis. He asked for questions, my hand shot up first, and I prefaced with "Hi Mr. Wolfe, big fan of your work, and I write for the NY Sun...." He hemmed and hawed, we both laughed and shared a little moment.

As for the Acid Test, well, it's a masterpiece of writing.

My favorite idea presented in the book.

"A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. Once, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you are the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that.... You can't go any faster than that... We are all doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movies of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movies of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means."

An absolute slog. What was an interesting subject to begin with derails into the author writing as if he's on the acid trip with the merry pranksters, overwrought inside jokes, and strangely used punctuation. Hoo boy am I glad to be finished this one. I guess I'm just off the bus.

I read it in the psychedelic 60s , so I can't remember ; but probably was far out , like I was then !

I thought I would enjoy the story of the birth of the hippy subculture. To me it means being tuned in with yourself and with nature, and not being overly materialistic.
Ken Kesey was a charismatic figure, who believed that 'tuning in' through use of LSD was THE WAY to be 'On the Bus'. The book is full of his dogmatic, paranoid fantasies, and rejecting anyone who didn't agree with his philosophy as squares and 'Off the Bus'. It is not always completely clear about whether a viewpoint is Kesey's or Tom Wolfe's but there is also an element of bigotry toward blacks and hispanics that I found very offensive.
There were very ambitious elements to this book about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, especially Tom Wolfe's use of psychadelic stream of consciousness to give the effect of being on LSD.
An interesting passage was the description of going to see the Beatles play at the Cow Palace. Apparently, being high on LSD and surrounded by thousands of screaming teenagers makes for a bad trip.
When Kesey was arrested on a marijuana charge, he decided to fake a suicide (ineptly, I may add) and run off to Mexico where he denigrates the lifestyle of the inhabitants at length. By the time he returned, he found that others had moved on and he was no longer the center of the hippie culture in San Francisco.
The only one of the Pranksters that I could relate to was Carolyn 'Mountain Girl' Adams (later Jerry Garcia's lady for many years). She somehow seemed more real and less pretentious than the rest of the bunch.

I've been trying to finish this for a while. If the experience of reading it wasn't so much like an acid trip itself, I might be able to get past halfway. Each chapter starts out like a story but slowly devolves, sometimes into sheer chaos. I'm interested in the people being talked about, especially after reading On the Road, but I just can't slog through. I may come back to it.

I did not like this book at all and the only reason I finished was that I read it for a book group. I don't think I was Tom Wolfe's intended audience for this. I lived through that era but led a very conventional life so there was nothing for me to identify with. I loved the other books by Wolfe that I read - The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Man in Full. And I understand why Wolfe chose to write this book in the style that he did. But it did nothing for me. I felt like having a big party to celebrate finishing it.

This book was okay. Tom Wolfe was always an outsider, a New Yorker, even a (gasp) Yalie. He was never really 'on the bus' if you know what I mean. But for a square, he explains the scene pretty well. The pranksers were like the scenesters of any era: self-absorbed and fairly boring pricks. It is an interesting book for one fact if nothing else: it's kind of the only book written in the 60's about the 60's. HS Thompson didn't really get rolling til the early 70's (Hells Angels came out in the 60's, but it wasn't til Fear and Loathing in 1970 that he really got it together, and even then it was the beginning of the revisionist nostalgia 60's. . .), and I'm hard pressed to think of another book from the era ABOUT the era.

I'm now reading In Cold Blood, written in 1965, the year the pranksters dosed my mom at the Trips Festival in SF. And shit, if Capote isn't from a whole different world than those day-glo banshees. . .