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Author Topic: An odd druggy bibliography
BLAKE 3:16
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Babbler # 2978

posted 26 February 2003 09:10 PM      Profile for BLAKE 3:16     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
My Own Private Druggy bibliography, etc.

While our society is addicted to drugs from Prozac to sugar to nicotine to cocaine, booze, and Tylenol, the use of certain drugs that alter consciousness ((aka change our minds) whether you really inhale or not), is seen as negative, monstrous, and disturbing. A great many of the most important artists and intellectuals of the 20th century used or abused drugs in ways that were at times creative and other times socially or selfdestructive. Regular users of intoxicants include Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde was written during a six day cocaine binge), Walter Benjamin , Aldous Huxley, Louis Armstrong, Jack Kerouac, Bob Marley, and Canada’s own Elizabeth Smart, bill bissett, Leonard Cohen and more rock musicians than you could shake a doob at. Below are a few books or articles you might be interested in.

Artaud, Antonin, Selected Writing, editied by Susan Sontag, Noonday Press, New York,1976: Especially important are his esays on Van Gogh and other assorted writing on opium and and addiction.

Benjamin, Walter, On Hashish
http://www.wbenjamin.org/translations.html

bissett, bill, inkorrect thots, talonbooks, Vancouver, 1992

Dick, Philip K., The Man in the High Castle, Berkley Books, New York,, 1981: This is the best novel by author of Blade Runner and Minority Report.

Goldin, Nan, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Apertrure, New York, 1996: A collection of photos by an important underworld drug addicted art phtographer

Lilly, John C., The Centre of the Cyclone, Bantam Books, New York, 1973: A strange book by one of the most dedicated psychedelic scientists, lots on drugs and dolphins (?!?)

Marshall, Richard, Jean-Michel, Basquiat, Whitney/Abrams, New York, 1993: A fabulous catalogue from an exhibition of Basquiat’s paintings and drawings. Basquiat was a chronic drug user, and was inspired by other Afro-American geniuses with drug problems, especially saxaphonist Charlie Parker. Also see his biography, A Quick Killing in Art , as well as Basquiat, the film based on his life.

Neil, Al, Slammer, Pulp Press, Vanouver, 1981: One of Canada’s greatest unknown artists and his anecdotes about geting wasted and making collages, playing experimental jazz, and raising hell.

Reid, Stephen, Jackrabbit Parole, Seal, Toronto, 1988: A semiautobiographical novel by Canada’s most famous junkie.
.
Venright, Steve, Straunge Wunder or the Metalirious Pleasures of Neuralchemy, Torotoiseshell & Black, Toronto, 1996: Very psychedlic poetry. Also see Venright’s more recent collection, Spiral Agitator. See Venright’s web site at http://www.torporvigil.com/


From: Babylon, Ontario | Registered: Aug 2002  |  IP: Logged
Trespasser
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posted 27 February 2003 07:13 AM      Profile for Trespasser   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
And then there's Avital Ronell and the Crack Wars:

quote:
You coined this word: Narcossism. Can you elaborate on this concept?

I wanted to suggest that narcissism has been recircuited through a relation to drugs. Narcossism is supposed to indicate the way that our relation to ourselves has now been structured, mediated, that is, by some form of addiction and urge. Which is to say, that to get off any drug, or anything which has been invested as an ideal object -- something that you want to incorporate as part of you -- precipitates a major narcissistic crisis. Basically I wanted to suggest that we need to study the way the self is pumped up or depleted by a chemical prosthesis.

It seems that addictions are the sine qua non of human ontology. It would be interesting to hear you describe a subject without addictions.

Since I link it to the death drive and beyond the pleasure principle, the Freudian readings of pleasure that are never pure, they aren't necessarily on the side of wholesomeness and health. I try to say how that's a myth and a mystification: the virginal pure body that would be non-addicted, absolutely outside of addiction. That's why I include bodybuilding, vitamins, technology. I think that the structure of addiction is fundamental. That isn't to say that it can't be negotiated, managed, or somehow brought into a rapport of its own liberating possibility. I want to suggest that there are no drug free zones. Now, it could be that there are good and bad addictions. I don't see how one can write, or be an artist, or think without some installation of the addictive structure.

Do you think that pleasure leads one towards the death instinct? Or are there two types of pleasure?

The double nature of pleasure is something that I wanted to trace out. For pleasure to be what it is, it has to exceed a limit of what is altogether wholesome and healthy. Our idioms reflect this: when we like something we tend to say we were "blown away" or "It killed me," and other deadly utterances. To the extent that pleasure is something that one seeks, it also has to make us confront the limits of our being. Otherwise it's something like contentedness, which can be shown to be in fact an abandonment of pleasure. In our Constitution, we're invited to pursue "happiness" not "pleasure."
I'm interested in a certain kind of honesty about thinking what constitutes pleasure or human desire. That includes our nuclear desire. We must wish to get blown away. If we practiced Nietzschean indecency.... Nietzsche said you have to be rigorously indecent, and really think about those desires. Once desire is on the line, there's going to be destruction and a turning around of values. What I called in Crack Wars "a destructive jouissance."

In Crack Wars, you list the following people as coffee addicts: Bach, Balzac, Voltaire. Were there more coffee addicts?

What interested me originally before I generalized this into a book about addiction, mania, literature, was the history of coffee. In Hegel, you can see the way he grinds coffee into his argument--usually metaphorically. You can really follow the coffee bean throughout the history of philosophy, and come up with extraordinary developments. There's someone called Malsherbes who wrote about this. Just the relation to coffee as a miraculous opening. At one point Hegel writes about coffee and its substitute. One could trace the history of wars in terms of the coffee bean. Even literary history: who drank how much coffee? And where? What kind of a social space the cafe produces? The Viennese cafe and Wittgenstein, Thomas Bernhard, Arnold Schoenberg.



From: maritimes | Registered: Aug 2001  |  IP: Logged
butterhead
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posted 27 February 2003 06:28 PM      Profile for butterhead        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
If addiction to various drugs, activities and
structures is the sine qua non of human ontology,
why bother to use the word addiction. They are
simply a normal component of our being. Very
few people question the constructs of their
daily routine.

If nature had not intended for opiates to lock
onto opiate receptors, we would not have evolved
in the manner we have. Ditto for other receptor
systems.

Humans are born into a culture, and into a
language system. Does it make sense to say that
you are addicted to processing ten thousand words
a day. Our existences have meaning within the
rich tapestries of social organization. To say
that a cultural phenomena is a prop for an
addictive personality doesn't make sense. A
symbol processing animal lives in a sea of
words and signs, much like a fish lives in the
water.

Do we alter our moods and conscious states? Yes.
Is it part of our biological and cultural evolution? Yes.


From: Windsor | Registered: Aug 2002  |  IP: Logged
BLAKE 3:16
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posted 06 March 2003 03:54 PM      Profile for BLAKE 3:16     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
On the topic of addiction I would say that I am addicted to words, to reading. I find it a compulsive activity In Antonin Artaud's writings on opium and addiction he talks about the possibility and actuality of being addicted to books, masturbation, and any number of other addictions.

To be clear the above mentioned bibliography was presented to me for comment, and I was given permission to post it. My friend says it is a work in potential progress.


From: Babylon, Ontario | Registered: Aug 2002  |  IP: Logged
mighty brutus
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Babbler # 3148

posted 06 March 2003 05:29 PM      Profile for mighty brutus     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
You might want to consider changing your handle to Blake 4:20
From: Beautiful Burnaby, British Columbia | Registered: Oct 2002  |  IP: Logged

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