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 veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 5,805
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 5 Classics Written Under the Influence
#8408311 - 05/16/08 04:47 AM (3 months, 21 days ago) |
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5 Classics Written Under the Influence
May 16, 2008 - neatorama.com
Many writers seek extreme experiences, including getting drunk / high / ecstatic / wasted / buzzed. And while we're not exactly advocating altered states here, it did seem to take the edge off their writer's block.
So, who says drugs and alcohol aren't useful? For one thing, they're responsible for some of the world's greatest literature. Here are 5 classics written under the influence.
1. Collected Poetry, Li Po (701 - 762)
 One of the best of the T'ang dynasty poets in seventh-century China, Li Po wrote many poems about drinking. In his poems and in many poems of the classic era of Chinese poetry, alcohol has two functions. First of all, it brings friends together to sing, to reminisce, to have great little parties at which everyone gets tight and starts having poetry contests. Well, great!
Second, it acts as a muse, a way to relax and release the poet into fantasies and meditations that are good for the creation of poetry. See? Nothing new. Artists have been saying for centuries that if you take drugs, you make better art. They've often felt that the perceptual expansion offered by drugs lets them have better, more suprising insights. Or at least they think they do!
Li Po and his pals obviously felt that wine helped you be a better poet. Of course, being continuously sozzled comes with its own problems. Legend has it that Li died when, in a drunken state, he tried to embrace the reflection of the moon in a lake and fell in.
2. "Kubla Khan," Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)
 After smoking opium, Coleridge fell asleep, and when he awoke he was on fire with images. He set to writing at a white-hot pace - until he was interrupted. When he returned to the poem an hour later, the vision was gone. He'd lost the moment. The result is one of the wildest, most puzzling poems of all time.
A lot of people like the fact that it was written under the influence: it had a period of great popularity in the 1960s. And back when it was published (1816), people took it as the quintessential Romantic poem: passionate, spontaneous, beyond conscious control. They also liked how "he had it all there - and then lost it," which is a nice little fable about how fleeting inspiration is.
3. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)
 Like many famous writers, Hemingway battled alcoholism all his life. In The Sun Also Rises, one of his best novels, almost every character drinks continually. They're trying to ignore the realities of life after World War I, trying to ignore their hangovers, and, often, just having a great party.
War has torn apart the old ways, and the new ways - ways of nation building, ways of writing, ways of love, ways of being men and women - are full of pain and uncertainty. And these people, though they're adults, in many ways are incomplete, crippled. Jake Barnes, the protagonist, has suffered a war wound greatly compromising his sexual function (how's that for a delicate way to put it?), and the wound becomes a metaphor for the incompleteness that everyone's drinking to forget.
4. Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980)
 Sartre apparently was a big ingester of mescaline to get him, er, up to speed. He also took downers to let him sleep. These facts create a big question for the history of philosophy, don't they?
Now, many readers have felt that despite his fame as the inventor of existentialism and despite his importance in many fields of literature, thought, and politics, he's completely unreadable.
Being and Nothingness, is supposed to be Sartre's great investigation of the experience of the absurdity and lack of intrinsic meaning in existence. When you discover nothingness, it's like a huge turning point, and there's no turning back.
Sure wish the book was better. This thing is a twisty-turny, pompous, sloppy, contradictory mess, written in a celebratedly bad prose, whether French or English. It may be a brilliant book, but it's not a good one. Maybe, applying the Li Po principle above, Sartre should have taken more drugs.
5. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs (1914 - 1997)
 Burroughs was a Beat writer and a heroin addict. His surrealistic novel influenced poets, musicians, and other addicts for the rest of the 20th century. This may be the ultimate in underground cult novels. You'll find its influence in everything from the art of Keith Haring to the poetry of Jack Kerouac to the lyrics of Steely Dan.
One thing that's very impressive (besides the amount of drugs Burroughs reputedly took while compiling Naked Lunch) is how Burroughs uses addiction as a key metaphor for human existence. Everyone is a junkie for something - and everyone is also a narc, an agent of judgment and punishment.
It's a brilliant insight, and it emerges from the jumble of this novel like a flash of drug-induced wisdom. Now, how many films have you seen that explore this theme? Naked Lunch is often called a novel, but it's really a collection of scenes and characters held together by the aforementioned methaphor. In fact, it doesn't hold together. Its existence is more important than its actual worth as literature. But its impact, which continues today in artists, writers, and filmmakers all over the world, is, well, psychedelic.
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 Snape
Mighty Ravendark
Registered: 08/04/03
Posts: 2,002
Loc: Montreal, Quebec
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Re: 5 Classics Written Under the Influence [Re: veggie]
#8408577 - 05/16/08 08:27 AM (3 months, 21 days ago) |
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There's also Edgar Allan Poe... Charles Baudelaire... Guy de Maupassant...
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So mysterious is your world,
concealed beyond the stars
Far away from the earth,
it flows one with time and dark as the night
Million shapes and colours
are storming inside your mind
Creating endless dimensions
Forming universes without walls
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Penguarky Tunguin
Touching Your Taint
Registered: 08/08/04
Posts: 9,692
Loc: Nonlocal
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Re: 5 Classics Written Under the Influence [Re: Snape]
#8408798 - 05/16/08 09:55 AM (3 months, 21 days ago) |
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Nietzsche
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Every mistake, intentional or otherwise, in the above post, is the fault of the reader.
A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.
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Hyper_Panda_GO
Team Action!
Registered: 05/28/06
Posts: 9,512
Last seen: 3 hours, 2 minutes
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Re: 5 Classics Written Under the Influence [Re: veggie]
#8409166 - 05/16/08 11:54 AM (3 months, 21 days ago) |
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Awesome topic
Don't forget Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon was quoted as saying "most of the time I was so fucked up I didn't even know what I was writing" or something along those lines
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There is no valid reason you should be reading this
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Penguarky Tunguin
Touching Your Taint
Registered: 08/08/04
Posts: 9,692
Loc: Nonlocal
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Re: 5 Classics Written Under the Influence [Re: Hyper_Panda_GO]
#8409169 - 05/16/08 11:55 AM (3 months, 21 days ago) |
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On what I wonder? The drink?
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Every mistake, intentional or otherwise, in the above post, is the fault of the reader.
A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.
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Hyper_Panda_GO
Team Action!
Registered: 05/28/06
Posts: 9,512
Last seen: 3 hours, 2 minutes
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On everything, I assume, he seems like a man with prime connections
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There is no valid reason you should be reading this
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KetamineKatalyst
Skyhighatrist
Registered: 01/26/08
Posts: 839
Loc: beneath the surface
Last seen: 5 hours, 51 minutes
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Re: 5 Classics Written Under the Influence [Re: Hyper_Panda_GO]
#8409361 - 05/16/08 12:45 PM (3 months, 21 days ago) |
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Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson got fucked up and wrote aswell!
The list in the OP is kinda lame, but interesting nonetheless.
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We've got the ketameans to change the world
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daytripper23
Wanker
Registered: 06/22/05
Posts: 1,591
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what was Neitzche on?
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Penguarky Tunguin
Touching Your Taint
Registered: 08/08/04
Posts: 9,692
Loc: Nonlocal
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Re: 5 Classics Written Under the Influence [Re: daytripper23]
#8409678 - 05/16/08 02:16 PM (3 months, 21 days ago) |
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Opium
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Every mistake, intentional or otherwise, in the above post, is the fault of the reader.
A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.
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PinballWizard
Naive and Gullible as usual
Registered: 03/20/04
Posts: 2,667
Last seen: 13 minutes, 22 seconds
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Re: 5 Classics Written Under the Influence [Re: veggie]
#8417147 - 05/18/08 04:41 PM (3 months, 19 days ago) |
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Cool read.
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gumkeegan
stand on your Head of State.
Registered: 02/08/08
Posts: 105
Loc: somewhere out there
Last seen: 22 days, 13 hours
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Re: 5 Classics Written Under the Influence [Re: PinballWizard]
#8417739 - 05/18/08 07:11 PM (3 months, 19 days ago) |
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anyone know of any works of music or art that we developed while using  SHROOMIES?
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MARCH HARE: A very merry un-birthday... to you!
MAD HATTER: Who, me?
MARCH HARE: Yes U!
MAD HATTER: Oh me!
MARCH HARE: A very merry un-birthday... to me!
MAD HATTER: Who, U?
MARCH HARE: Yes, me!
MAD HATTER: Oh U!
o is only o if you go.
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