Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
There was one other surprising revelation I had from Wolfe's
introduction to The New Journalism.  When he talked about how these
experimental novelists were abandoning the "electricity" that comes
from well-rendered, literary social realism, the essential difference
between the constructivist approach of critique I used and postmodern
analysis became even clearer for me.

The critical/theoretical focus of poststructuralists is on the play of
signifiers to create meaning.

By contrast, a constructivist literary approach looks toward the
dramatic whole of a narrative to derive meaning. [Flannery O'Connor in
Mystery and Manners describes this].  Even though the writer starts
with "le mot"––the ideal word for building sentences––the goal, even in
most experimental forms of narrative, is to accrete toward a complete
text with its dramatic whole.

I think the postmodernist discourse on objectivity/subjectivity,
positionality, or le differance––though an apt way to deconstruct
text––gets in the way of an essential question being posed by Wolfe's
observation.  If we observe a young child of 3 to 6 (from most any
culture I know of) as they listen to a story or watch TV, we see a
desire from them to repeatedly experience the narrative over and over. 
This suggests, empirically, that there is an "electricity" of
response.

Creative writing teachers are pushing students toward writing with
dramatic "electricity," but literary theorists and behavioral
scientists, as far as I know, are not asking Wolfe's fundamental
question.   

*** What it is in certain texts over others that elicit this
"electric" response?  

As a practical matter, we know that well-executed conventional
narrative––using the techniques described by Wolfe and many
others––causes the effect. Hollywood has made an industry from
understanding the "electricity" of the traditional narrative that ends
with, mostly, a happy denouement.  I even argue that more experimental
narrative, such as Brautigan's Trout Fishing, cause a more intellectual
"electricity" based on ironic juxtaposition.  

Wolfe poses a fascinating question with this idea of abandoning or
embracing the "electricity" of literary social realism, one that,
should be a fundamental question when examining literature and other
forms of narrative.  

This certainly should be asked in English Departments and by
behavioral scientists. I recently learned that "narrative therapy" is a
method of psychological/psychiatric treatment, so perhaps there can be
more interdisciplinary inquiry eminating from such practices. 
  

    
Finally, as one last element in this idea of an "electric" response by
the reader of narrative, Wolfe's depiction of the New Journalism
showed convincingly that there was not one countercultural technique
for writing prose.

For example, I enjoyed the irony that the New Journalism was a
significant departure from the who/what/when/where/why of old-school
journalism with its sacred cow of "objectivity," but likewise the
approach embraced the traditional literary and mimetic approaches of
social realism.  

This radical traditionalism of the New Journalism is mirrored in my
discussion of the radical traditionalism of hippie culture.  I describe
this in detail in the chapters on The Armies of the Night and Divine
Right's Trip.

If we look at the innovations of Trout Fishing and Slaughterhouse Five
and compare these directly to the innovations of The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test and Fear & Loathing, then we can see how, like the
counterculture, literature was experiencing its own mode of
consciousness expansion.
  

    
>Tiny Tim and his ukelele
 turned the hippie movement pacifism on its head, since watching him
 made you want to punch someone.

Tiny Tim was an odd phenomenon. He got himself identified as "hippie,"
mostly because of his appearance, but musically, he was channeling singers
from the 1920s and 1930s. His "Tiptoe Thru the Tulips" is almost
exactly the same as the 1929 Nick Lucas hit record. Yet the people who
should have been his biggest fans (those who were around when his music was
popular) looked at him as manifestation of everything that was wrong and
ridiculous about "the hippies."

To extend that to literature, I wonder if there were some writers whose work
would have been accepted as mainstream, but their physical appearance forced
them into the counterculture?
  

    
>>> I wonder if there were some writers whose work would have been
accepted as mainstream, but their physical appearance forced them into
the counterculture?

Brautigan.

In the chapter on Trout Fishing, I talk about how Janusz Buda laments
Richard Brautigan's unfortunate association with the "sobriquet of
hippie" and with whimsy.

As a double-edged sword, it's hard to feel sorry for a cultural
association that launched Brautigan into literary prominence, even
though the niche did limit a wider appreciation for his brilliant
juxtapositional irony.

Although, Tom Robbins' appearance was mainstream enough, it's hard to
sympathize with an author with a playful/whimsical style who writes one
of the best "hippie" novels ever with Another Roadside Attraction who
then complains about being linked unfairly to hippies and whimsy.  In
his defense, his work is profound, but this launch to his career as a
novelist has treated him quite well in life.  

And, most importantly, he should be deeply grateful that I am
canonizinng him in The Hippie Narrative. ;=) 

Thanks for joining the conversation, John.  I hope you're enjoying our
great Seattle weather of late!
  

    

Wolfe's
: experimental novelists were abandoning the "electricity" that comes
 from well-rendered, literary social realism,

gets it all wrong about HST. I'm trying to remember the details of the
situation, but, for example, when they check into the hotel in Vegas, aren't
they surrounded by a law enforcement convention, or something? So, when he's
worried about stepping on enormous lizards, or about whether he'll slip and
fall wading through the blood that's thoroughly soaked the carpet, well,
understand the thin veneer of metaphor and that's about as electric as you
can get. (And, as always with good description, just as realistic -- just
with nonstandard codes.)

At least as much that's true of his Kentucky Derby piece, too. It's all very
real.
  

    
Hey, Bruce.  Welcome, and thanks for rejoining the conversation.

What Wolfe is saying in 1973 about the "electricity" of literary
techniques of social realism is not about the use of hallucinated
imagery.  His own book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is filled with
such passages which help, as he says, to build the details of social
status.  The hippie "status" was a kind of anti-status that was very
much defined by such concrete detailing of their surreal/hallucinated
way of engaging the world.

In Fear & Loathing, Hunter S. Thompson uses an autobiographical
point-of-view filtered through a personality besotted by all manner and
type of drugs.  Underneath this, our protagonist/professional
journalist is shakily trying to do his job of reporting on the off-road
car race and, then, the national convention of drug enforcement
agents. Some far out irony, there.

 The traditional conflict/dysfunction driving the narrative has to do
with the way in which the drug-addled state-of-mind of our protagonist
gets in the way of his appointed duty as a journalist.  This is what
gives the book its profluence, its forward thrust that never lets up.  

Fear & Loathing in this "quest" is structured like a conventional
narrative, and his continuous fictional dream is as
"dreamy/nightmarish" as most any ever written, but the author is
creating a highly hallucinated social realism.

The brilliance of this approach as literature was in the way HST
showed how the hallucinated world of his protagonist is, in so many
ways, no less hallucinated than the neon-saturated Las Vegas Strip. 
And, yes, in this far-out, mind-bending way, HST's portrait was "real"
in a nonstandard way, even though his (subtitled) "Savage Journey to
the Heart of the American Dream" reveals a pretty weird "reality." 

The experimentations that Wolfe refers to are the ones which deviate
from developing this immersive quality of the continuous fictional
dream, ones that deviate from what he calls the four primary devices of
the novel: scene building on scene, using realistic dialogue, finding
wider applications for point of view, and this depicting of status life
through concrete detail.

In The Hippie Narrative I describe this foundational literary
structure as one where: "the theoretical basis of creating conventional
fiction is viewed as one which is built on a profluence of prose that
is embedded with an energeic dynamic––the crafting of narrative so that
it is dramatic and forward-moving and driven by the actualization of
potential in character and situation."

Both Trout Fishing and Slaughterhouse Five are the examples I use in
The Hippie Narrative of works that deviate the most from the use of the
continuous fictional dream. Brautigan's work is a seminal and
archetypical example of a juxtapositional narrative form.  S-5 is
refractory, metafictional but, despite all the distractions, still
building toward a narrative climax.  I think few narratives that
experiment with the conventional narrative form succeed as well as
these do in creating an alternative kind of "electricity."  I suspect
that it is these failed departures that Wolfe is refering to in his
observation.     

Both Divine Right's Trip and Cuckoo's Nest have highly conventional
narrative structures that likewise include heavy doses of hallucinated
prose.  This is why, along with the playful/whimsical tone way see, the
use of hallucinated prose is the prime commonality of the hippie
narratives I examine.  This, however, is a stylistic attribute rather
than a structural experimentation.     
  

    

Scott -

First of all, I want to thank you for making me want to read all these
wonderful books again!  I have so many of 'em.  I think I'll start with
"Trout Fishing in America" and "In Watermelon Sugar."

I think I need to reread all of them, because my unformed self of that time
didn't really understand what he was seeing back in the day.  (I was born in
October 1953, so I was a little too young to be a hippie but I am old enough
to have seen the Grateful Dead when they were stil fulfilling the promise of
their founding premise - which was heavily informed by Theodore Sturgeon's
"More Than Human," positing a human gestalt in a 1950s sci-fi style that was
even more choked than Heinlien's in "Stranger" - which I suppose I should
also revisit.)

I haven't gotten too far into your book yet, but I was really glad to see
"The Fan Man" included in your canon.  That book showed up right around the
time "Greetings from Asbury Park NJ" entered my consciousness, and the two
seemed of a piece to me: effervescent tales of east coast urban life.  Not
that Springsteen was every much of a hippie, but he and Kotzwinkle sounded
the same to me at that moment.  Kotzwinkle turned out to be one of those
brilliant writers who never sounded the same way twice, and the whole worls
knows what Bruce evolved into.

As for Tom Robbins, you credit him for his strong female characters, but I
gave up on him after three or four books, because it seemed to me he was
writing thsoe characters to impress the chicks.  You know, for the same
reason so many of us became musicians: to get laid.  His plots were little
more than trellises upon which to drape his florid, aphorism-laden prose (in
February of this year I heard John Perry Barlow, who knows Robbins, charac-
terize his writing as "spitting out a number sticker every other sentence"
while pointing out that he isn't quite so interesting in person).  The ending
of "Attraction" seemed completely cheap and facile to me; by the time I
finished "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues," I had decided Robbins' writing was
all about sucking up to girls by creating female characters to flatter them.
Maybe I'd revise that opinion if I reread some of his works, but I think I'll
put him hear the botton of the re-reading queue.
  

    
Omigod, David.   You are so right about Robbins.
  

    
Fock.  I meant BUMPER sticker, of course.  When am I gonna learn to proofread
my posts?
  

    

BTW, I really loved that Grogan excerpt from the front of the book,
reproduced here in <107>:

> these low-money people get confused and upset because here are these creepy
> longhaired punks who grew up with meat at every meal and backyards to play
> in and the kind of education which is prayed to God for, and they threw it
> all away for what?

The Deadhead community continues to this day as an overprivileged underclass.
I've had a haunting song hook in the back of my mind for decades, "the
volunteer homeless," that never took on enough weight to erit development
into a song.  But it's interesting to encounter kids in my travels who are
too young to have seen the Grateful Dead perform but dress in the full
regalia.

(I'd recommend Steven Hurlburt and Fluornoy Holmes 2006 film "Dreadheads,"
which depicts this culture.  And for contrast, take a look at "The Grateful
Dead Movie," shot in October 1974, and see how little tie-dye and how few
dreadlocks you fine.  It is, however, a brilliant portrait of the Deadhead
culture before it became commodified.)
  

    
Maybe it's because I read his early novels at the same time as many of the
oones you're describing, but I keep wanting to add John Barth to your list.
Especially Giles Goat-Boy and The Sotweed Factor. Any thoguhts abut Barth?
  

    
In response to the critiques of Robbins--

He is one of the most imaginative and wise novelists writing today,
though his wisdom is often not perceived because he is also a wise ass.
 The puerile indulgences of his style distract readers from the
profound expressions, but they are there.  

Granted, character isn't one of his consistent strengths, his dramatis
personae being too often didactic mouth pieces or sensationalistic
caricatures, but he IS capable of drawing memorable & well-developed
people in his narratives--the Zillers & Marx Marvelous, Sissy Hankshaw,
Alobar from Jitterbug Perfume, Ellen Cherry & Boomer Petway from
Skinny Legs & All. And in Skinny Legs he even brought to life
'inanimate objects' as compelling characters.

I also agree with Scott that Amanda from Another Roadside Attraction
is an enchanting portrait of a fully liberated woman. I don't think
that Ellen Cherry, who is developed as a very real woman with a
credible history & both virtues & foibles, could be construed as a
character created just to impress women.  

Characters aside, Robbins can turn out a garden variety metaphor (as
opposed to an extended metaphor) with as much if not more brilliance
than any other novelist or poet out there.  Because he is constantly
shooting for showstopping lines his 'misses' are conspicuous, but I
think they are insignificant compared to the quantity & quality of his
'hits'...& I admire his perpetually aiming for the genius inspired
line.  His humor, wit, & wisdom qualify him as a national treasure, &
whether or not he is "interesting" in person is irrelevant to his worth
as an author.  
  

    
RE: Scott's latest comments on Trout Fishing in America...At first I
did wonder about so modular a text of vignettes being included as a
'narrative,' but I came to the conclusion that Scott was justified in
doing so.  Unlike, say, Bob Dylan's so-called "novel" Tarantula, the
chapters of Trout Fishing cohere with a thematic unity (surreally
twisted Americana) & narrative perspective, and they build upon one
another toward a fulfulling climax, probably even more so than the
"routines" (Burroughs' word) in the episodic "novel" Naked Lunch.  
  

    
>>> I was really glad to see "The Fan Man" included in your canon. 
That book showed up right around the time "Greetings from Asbury Park
NJ" entered my consciousness, and the two seemed of a piece to me:
effervescent tales of east coast urban life.  Not that Springsteen was
every much of a hippie, but he and Kotzwinkle sounded the same to me at
that moment.  Kotzwinkle turned out to be one of those brilliant
writers who never sounded the same way twice.


Hi David. I appreciate that you've cracked open the book and you're
weighing in.

Again, The Fan Man (1974) was my publisher's suggestion, but I did
have a novel writing teacher, Dennis Giovanetti, who read a section of
The Fan Man back in 2001 to our class. This was in response to my early
attempt to write my own novel in first person, present tense. He was
basically disuading me from this Point of View because, as he put it,
present tense is "so hot and unrelenting."

But William Kotzwinkle, with this totally way out there character,
pulls it off brilliantly.  The Fan Man, I argue, is a largely
undiscovered masterpiece of this hippie canon.  

In addition to being such a highly comic caricature of Horse Badorties
and a rather sophisticated spoof on Beat/Hippie spiritual pretense,
the book is very seamless––a continuous fictional dream––from start to
finish.

As for Springsteen, he had a touch of the hippie sensibility in him,
especially that great Dionysian penchant for filling the arena with
immersive hard rock! 
  

    
>>> From David Gans:  As for Tom Robbins, you credit him for his
strong female characters, but I gave up on him after three or four
books, because it seemed to me he was writing thsoe characters to
impress the chicks.

It's interesting to me how many serious readers of Tom Robbins say
that his first novel, Another Roadside Attraction, is their favorite. 
For The Hippie Narrative, I included Even Cowgirls Get the Blues more
because it helped articulate the shifting Zeitgeist from hippie to
feminism/environmentalism than because it was highly compelling for me.
 I did like Cowgirls, and for the reasons Robyn articulates so very
well, even though all of Robbins' humor is hit and miss, I think this
novel works well as literature.

Another Roadside Attraction, by comparison, elevates itself to a
higher plane of literature.  Like Slaughterhouse Five, but for
different reasons, Another Roadside Attraction sets its thematic stakes
quite high.  Robbins, in this work, succeeds very well in portraying
the spiritual explosion of the hippie 60's.  Without spelling it out,
through this complexly alluring and centered persona of Amanda, he
captures the essence of consciousness expansion, which is at the heart
of what Ken Kesey asserted, until his death, was the most important
legacy of the counterculture.

Robbins may have been trying to evoke a constant stream of laughter
and may have been writing to attract the chicks (only he knows on
this), but from his first two works alone and the significant appeal he
has had among liberated women, I think he should be recognized as a
great feminist author.

Thanks to your sharing the MP3 download, I also heard John Perry
Barlow's response to the woman's complimentary take on Robbins.  Hey, I
love a great bumper sticker, and Robbins has his share. One of his
greatest strengths as a writer is in his imaginative similes: "The day
was rumpled and dreary.  It looked like Edgar Allen Poe's pajamas."

Robbins lives about 15 miles from where I do.  With this, he nailed
our most common Skagit Valley weather pattern.

I do understand how his sometimes sophmoric and try-too-hard tone
might turn you off, but I agree with Robyn.  In the realm of the hippie
and feminism at least, he is a national treasure.
 
  

    
>>> The Deadhead community continues to this day as an overprivileged
underclass. I've had a haunting song hook in the back of my mind for
decades, "the volunteer homeless," that never took on enough weight to
erit development
into a song. 

David, I love your traveling rock troubadour's perspective on Deadhead
culture, especially the phrase overpriviledged underclass (a phrase
that has more lyrical song potential for me than the "volunteer
homeless").  


>>>  (I'd recommend Steven Hurlburt and Fluornoy Holmes 2006 film
"Dreadheads," which depicts this culture.

Where can this be found?  Sounds fascinating.  I also want to find
"Gas-s-s-s-s," Robyn's suggestion.  


>>> And for contrast, take a look at "The Grateful Dead Movie," shot
in October 1974, and see how little tie-dye and how few
dreadlocks you fine.  It is, however, a brilliant portrait of the
Deadhead culture before it became commodified.)

I think this came out at the peak of when was when I was a Deadhead. 
Isn't this the partially animated movie that features tapping feet as
"foothills." I thought it came out after the Dead were reunited a bit
later in the '70s.  Maybe I'm confused here.

As for the dreadlocks, I see this as an example of how the hippie
subculture continued to evolve well after the '60s. I see dreads as an
outgrowth of Reggae music's huge influence in the late '70s.
  

    
>> from John:   I keep wanting to add John Barth to your list.
Especially Giles Goat-Boy and The Sotweed Factor.

I've heard of Giles Goat-Boy, but haven't read John Barth. I will put
this on my reading list. Thx.

Also, back to your question related to Tiny Tim that evoked my
Brautigan response.  I want to add that, even though Brautigan owes his
literary success to his close association with the hippies, when I say
that this limited him, I don't mean that he ever would have been a
mainstream success in the manner of a Steven King, but that his seminal
influence as a postmodern author might have been more widely
appreciated.  The hippie monicker hid this, I think.
  

    

Could you name a top ten list of women writers who are significant 
in the hippie literary movement?

Also, are there significant publishers and editors you associate with 
the movement?  I can think of a bunch of self-help publishing -- The 
Whole Earth Catalog and many more. I can think of some newpaper 
publishing communes and collectives that put out some intersting work.
 
  

    
(that should read newspaper and interesting. Sorry bout that.)
  

    
>>> from Robyn:  Unlike, say, Bob Dylan's so-called "novel" Tarantula,
the chapters of Trout Fishing cohere with a thematic unity (surreally
twisted Americana) & narrative perspective, and they build upon one
another toward a fulfulling climax.


Just as with John's comments about John Barth, Robyn's mention of
Dylan's Tarantula, or when trying to find a literary work to inculde
from a hippie woman, when I wrote The Hippie Narrative, I had a
persistent concern that there might be some great work of hippie
literature I missed.

Now that the book is published, I'm quite ok with what I have, the
cultural gestalt these works create and the literary void they fill as
a comprehensively considered grouping.  I would ,of course, welcome
continued discourse on this and the inclusion of other worthy
candidates. Maybe I would drop Been Down So Long in a second edition. 
Hey, I'm not a literary Hall of Fame voting committee of one, but I did
reason my way through an extensive narrowing process.

I do confess that I haven't read Dylan's Tarantula.  However, by
deduction, is there anyone who thinks that if THE Bob Dylan had penned
a literary novel of substantive lasting value, that this book Tarantula
wouldn't be routinely raved about to this day? For this amazing
lyricist to have also mastered the literary form, would have elevated
Dylan to yet higher stature than the considerable acclaim he already
recognizes and deserves.  From what I've gathered secondhand, Tarantula
is a stream-of-consciousness attempt at a novel by a writer where this
was not his forté.
  

    
>> from Gail:  Could you name a top ten list of women writers who are
significant in the hippie literary movement?

Hi Gail.  No, I can't. Check out posts  #9 and #10 where I discuss my
interest in finding a significant work of hippie narrative to include
in this book.  Ancillary to the hippie scene were The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Freidan and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson that I mention in
The Hippie Narrative, and, of course, Joan Didion's significant essay
"Slouching Toward Bethlehem" that I discuss at length.  But as for a
work of literature that met any of the criteria I laid out for this
project (see the bottom of post #4), I had no success with this.  And,
like The Fan Man that was recommended for me to include, if I had found
a published, but forgotten, work of a literary hippie narrative by a
woman, I was predisposed to include it. Maybe there's something out
there.  I don't know. Much of the hippie era that preceded the upsurge
of feminism in the early '70s was sexist.  I discuss this in the
chapter on Stranger In A Strange Land.  In it Kaaren Kitchell makes
some very telling points on page 102.  In our Inkwell conversation,
Diane Shifrin has had some great things to say about this, too.  As she
suggested, it would be awesome to get a female hippie perspective on
the era, even belatedly.      

>>> Also, are there significant publishers and editors you associate
with the movement?  I can think of a bunch of self-help publishing --
The  Whole Earth Catalog and many more. I can think of some newpaper
publishing communes and collectives that put out some intersting work.

Stewart Brand, as you mention; Raymond Mungo of the Liberation News
Front and Walt Crowley from The Helix in Seattle both have books about
their publishing experiences.  All those many unsung champions of free
speech working at underground newspapers across America during the late
'60s and early '70s provided extremely important voices to the
counterculture movements.  

John Muir, as a very practical matter wrote and self-published one of
the absolutely most important books I've ever read: The Idiot's
Complete Guide to Volkswagen Repair.  He followed this with the People
Guide to Mexico (and then, to who knows where).  Mother Earth News was
an important voice for Back-to-the-Land self-reliance. The Foxfire
Books.  As much as it became a symbol for the commoditizing of the
counterculture, Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone was a major publishing
influence, mainly in the music world.  His magazine also served as the
main outlet for Hunter S Thompson.  I also think that Steve Gaskin and
The Farm have published numerous fascinating books that are wonderful
portraits of a hippie culture that sustained itself in Tennessee.  

I'm just riffing with this, there are many, many more that I am sure I
have missed...
  

    
Just chiming in here to second the recommendation of the "Dreadheads"
documentary, which you can find here:

http://www.dreadheads.com/
  

    
When I opened my computer this morning, there was a headline that said
"'The FBI's Most Wanted Women,' Only Eight Have Ever Made the List."
Angela Davis was in the photo.  

As for key female hippie writers,(for "those villains who would be
hippies"), this isn't literature, but perhaps the single most defining
piece of prose-poetry to portray the hippie epoch.  It still gives me
chills when I hear it sung:

I came upon a child of god
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
Im going on down to yasgurs farm
Im going to join in a rock n roll band
Im going to camp out on the land
Im going to try an get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I dont know who l am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

By the time we got to woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devils bargain
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

(Joni Mitchell never made it to Woodstock herself because of a prior
commitment to appear on the Dick Cavitt TV show.  These three stanzas
offer an amazingly condensed anthem for the hippie era: 

the utopian idealism, 

a turning-into-butterflies belief in the possibility of
transformation, 

the cabalistic distrust of "the establishment" with its the war planes
and devil's bargain, 

the concern over environmental degradation (smog), 

the tribal (Woodstock Nation) sense of hopefulness that
we-can-change-the-world, 

the feeling of spiritual transcendence (in something turning),

a heightened sense of urgency, 

a youthful (I don't know who I am) confusion of identity 

coupled with the urge to join this bigger happening (a cog),

a spirit of openess (life is for learning) 

the Dionysian reaction of a back-to-the-land(garden) utopianism 

the central importance of the rock n roll band.  

Then there is the great music/melody to accompany these lyrics. Joni
evokes so much––three verses and it's all there––a whole
countercultural epoch wonderfully distilled into a beautiful little
narrative.)
  

    
Thanks for sharing this Dreadhead link, Gary! 
  

    
Re: Tarantula...Anyone acquainted with Bob Dylan's album liner notes
has basically experienced all there is in terms of style & content in
Tarantula.  The textual format is vignettes of heavily surreal prose
poetry, usually a diffuse character sketch of some far-out figure,
alternating with satirical fictional epistles that evince his acid
wit...as opposed to the other sections which just evince acid.  The
epistolary passages lampoon both 'straight' people & hipsters & are
quite amusing.  Much like John Lennon's books, Tarantula is clever but
never profound.

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood in Ought-Three I viewed a double
feature of Roger Corman's Sixties hipsploitation films The Trip &
Gas-s-s-s-s.  The Trip, starring Peter Fonda & Dennis Hopper, attempted
to simulate a lysergic acid experience, but all throughout the
showing, the audience was laughing at how dated & silly it came off, &
how it didn't resemble a real acid trip at all.  It seemed, as with
Wolfe's, that it was an outsider perspective of the LSD experience, and
in the Q & A with Corman that followed the screening, when asked about
how experiential was his research for the film, he hedged, but it
seemed that he didn't actually drop it but was drawing on the
experiences of those who had (like Fonda).  

Whereas The Trip incited unintended laughter, after Gas-s-s-s-s the
audience erupted into long enthusiastic applause.  It was obvious, I
think, to most everyone that we had seen unearthed a neglected classic
of Sixties film.  The script by Terry Southern was brilliant & funny
(intentionally so).  Yet in the discussion with Corman afterward, he
regarded The Trip as the superior film,  citing the experimental visual
effects & camera work, and didn't take the comedy Gas-s-s-s-s so
seriously (also, he didn't have a pleasant experience in making
it--trouble with his production studio, which he left thereafter).
Perhaps this is why Gas-s-s-s-s was not released on digital video disc
until lately, but it is available on a disc from MGM's "Midnite Movies"
series, with the film Wild in the Streets on the obverse.