The Millennial Writer on Drugs
In the shadow of De Quincey, Coleridge, and Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin and Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson, Henri Michaux and Carlos Castaneda, Lin joins a literary history whose resonance depends on the relative sympathy for aesthetic and intellectual solipsism on the part of its audience. Like dreams, the recounting of drug experiences is liable to put its reader to sleep: the language to accurately evoke the extremes of physical and mental sensation isn’t readily available——in most cases, “you had to be there.” For many writers on drugs, these stacked odds have led to breakthroughs in formal innovation: Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Burroughs’s cut-up method, or Thompson’s perfection-by-caricature of New Journalistic methods.
Andrew Marzoni reviews Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Psychedelics and Education: A conversation with Kenneth Tupper
Ethnographers have documented the shamanic and psychedelic practices of indigenous people for centuries. This 1560 account from the Catholic evangelization of the Aztecs, by the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún, was published in a pharmaceutical trade publication in 1951 (the piece allegedly caught the attention of the banker Gordon Wasson, who then went on to become the 20th century’s most influential ethnomycologist). Points of resonance with western experiential education (e.g. the vision quest) are evident, but these indigenous practices are more likely to be conceptualized by westerners as superstitious ritual rather than as means of gaining meaningful knowledge about the cosmos or human condition.
Lindsay Jordan talks psychedelics with Ken Tupper.
History as the New Ideology of Patriotism In Russia: An interview with Alicia Ganieva
…the world I was depicting was a very male dominated world of very brutal tension between different branches of Islam, between relatives, and between different gangs on the street. Everything was so far away from what is supposed to be literature written by a woman. So I chose this male pseudonym and it happened to be a life changing decision because when my identity was revealed, of course there was a big outrage and uproar and maybe some sadness on some people’s parts because some of them, especially my countrymen, said that a girl from a good family didn’t have any right to depict the street colloquial language and dialogue of this male dominated world. And others were really sure that I was some bearded stranger, some savage from the Caucasus. Of course, a very colonial way of thinking about the inhabitants of these fringes of the country.
Olivia Capazzalo and Smith Freeman interview Alisa Ganieva.