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Dec. 10th, 2001
Sadie Plant, Writing on Drugs
Dec. 10th, 2001 11:48 pmAn oddball book about drugs, since it tries to have not only a section about writers and writing, but one about politics and social response, and a little one about neurobiology tucked in between. (There are actually no demarcated sections, but there are clearly shifts in emphasis.) The political and particularly the neurobiological section seemed cursory to me, though maybe because that's the ground I've been over more. The first section (and really it's at least half), though, was intriguing.
Opium and Flaubert (Flaubert?), cocaine and Freud and Conan Doyle, drugs and religion, Phil Dick, all of them and lots more are juxtaposed and tied together here. The text moves along by throwing forth pseudopods.
The Romantics, of course. But Plant does particularly well with her theme that opium was for them not a general agent of fantasy: it was a specific antidote to what they felt, to the leading edge of modernity -- it reset the pace.
Michaux is another "of course", but I've never read Michaux. I'll certainly have to; the quotes here are expressive.
I also hadn't seen Artaud or Deleuze and Guattari or Foucault read from this angle before. They seem to make a great deal more sense, and I do not mean that in a backhanded way.
The book has one very frustrating failure, and that is the failure to provide references. There is a bibliography, but no indication where in which book any interesting point came from. For example, was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde written on a six-day coke binge? Interesting factoid. Impossible to pin down.
Opium and Flaubert (Flaubert?), cocaine and Freud and Conan Doyle, drugs and religion, Phil Dick, all of them and lots more are juxtaposed and tied together here. The text moves along by throwing forth pseudopods.
The Romantics, of course. But Plant does particularly well with her theme that opium was for them not a general agent of fantasy: it was a specific antidote to what they felt, to the leading edge of modernity -- it reset the pace.
Michaux is another "of course", but I've never read Michaux. I'll certainly have to; the quotes here are expressive.
I also hadn't seen Artaud or Deleuze and Guattari or Foucault read from this angle before. They seem to make a great deal more sense, and I do not mean that in a backhanded way.
The book has one very frustrating failure, and that is the failure to provide references. There is a bibliography, but no indication where in which book any interesting point came from. For example, was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde written on a six-day coke binge? Interesting factoid. Impossible to pin down.