{"id":139,"date":"2015-03-04T16:08:30","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T16:08:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.electrictext.net\/wordpress\/?p=139"},"modified":"2015-04-09T16:11:23","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T16:11:23","slug":"response-to-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.electrictext.net\/wordpress\/response-to-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"Response to Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"

On March 4<\/span>, the Electric Text read two twentieth century American poets.<\/p>\n

On April 4, a member smoked a joint, ate a pint of Ben and Jerry\u2019s Americone Dream, and wrote about it.<\/p>\n

Fittingly, the session began distracted. A quote from Carrie Fisher\u2019s Wishful Drinking<\/em> (2012) sent the group on an \u201cintellectual errand.\u201d How does one buy pot in a lid?* A quick trip to Urban Dictionary<\/em> revealed that a \u201clid\u201d of pot was \u201ccommon terminology used in the 1960\u2019s and 1970\u2019s in the United States to describe approximately one ounce of marijuana.\u201d Apparently, before a scale was typical pothead paraphernalia, a coffee can lid did for approximating\u2014something akin to a dime bag.<\/p>\n

The first piece was \u201cRecuerdo\u201d (1919) by Edna St. Vincent Millay and the second was Wallace Stevens\u2019s \u201cThe Emperor of Ice-Cream\u201d (1923). How might we think about these pieces together? And why would we want to think about them in relation to drugs?<\/p>\n

The twentieth century scholars pointed out that Millay and Stevens aren\u2019t really the \u201csort of modernists\u201d that interest NYU\u2019s English department, which tends to favor T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, and Frank O\u2019Hara. More importantly, however, English scholarship in general just doesn\u2019t seem to be invested in literature and drugs. Literature and sex, yes, but not drugs.<\/p>\n

The first task became methodological, a question of fit. If, as Fisher reminds us, there is \u201ca lid for every pot,\u201d what type of academic project pairs with marijuana? There seemed to be a consensus among the group that it isn\u2019t that we can\u2019t write about drugs. It\u2019s that something feels<\/em> wrong about doing it.<\/p>\n

A member then asked for clarification: Were we interested in drug taking as an analytical tool or an object of study? Poets like Allen Ginsberg, for instance, write openly about drug use and its effects on \u201cthe best minds of [their] generation,\u201d and scholars have little difficulty discussing the historical use and effect of drugs (see Tanya Pollard\u2019s Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England<\/em>, Oxford University Press, 2005). But to seriously consider drug use as a creative if not productive research tool or question is something different, even if poems like \u201cRecuerdo\u201d** remind us of the ways a particular substance once unfolded our interiority and opened our senses to \u201cseeing without limitation\u201d the \u201cimportance of objects\u201d in all of their \u201cbeautiful strangeness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, the suggestion of drug use as a methodology for the reading and writing of literature almost instantly incited the group to Romantic musings of ephemeral inspiration. Yet the subjective experience of drug use seems to pose an impossible barrier to a legitimate argument or discussion of\/for\/with it in the academy. The evening\u2019s group leader discussed the difficulties encountered during one attempt to do just that, not the least of which was a feeling of compromised authority given the position from which one typically writes an academic essay. An argument that would take seriously \u201chigh\u201d thoughts and experiences would, in some way, be expected to a) posit those thoughts and experiences as useful and not irresponsible and b) assert some \u201cexpertise\u201d regarding those types of experiences, what would elsewhere be referred to as \u201cstreet cred.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Such concerns with expertise, authority, and control (characteristic of the paranoid academy) seem antithetical to theoretical inquiry about a mode of perception to which one \u201crelinquishes control.\u201d As one member pointed out, what we mean when we talk about a drug\u2019s ability to key us into the \u201cbeautiful strangeness\u201d of objects (apples, pears, and ferries and cigars, wenches, and ice cream) is similar to the kino-eyes (Kinoks) of early twentieth Russian film-making\u2014\u201clife caught unawares\u201d by the eye of the camera\u2014the reification, perhaps, of Emerson\u2019s \u201ctransparent eyeball\u201d: \u201cI am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God\u201d (\u201cNature\u201d 1836). Within a field that embraces, in so many ways, the deconstruction of identity and its relationship to the body, it does seem odd that, in the case of drug use, the taboo \u201cpresumes an authentic self\u201d that can only ever be compromised by the very physical experience of taking \u201cmind-altering\u201d substances.<\/p>\n

Must such experiences be sacrificed to the gods of professionalism?<\/p>\n

Does it matter that I wasn\u2019t high when I wrote this?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* \u201cAnyway it worked because Charlie actually managed to marry twice, (probably someone with nursing ambition), which just goes to show that there\u2019s a lid for every pot. Sometimes there are as many as nine lids for the same pot. Also when I was a teenager I could buy pot in lids. But I don\u2019t think you can anymore\u2026 can you?\u201d (44-45).<\/p>\n

**Recuerdo, a souvenir, memory, or memento.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On March 4, the Electric Text read two twentieth century American poets. On April 4, a member smoked a joint, ate a pint of Ben and Jerry\u2019s Americone Dream, and wrote about it. Fittingly, the session began distracted. A quote from Carrie Fisher\u2019s Wishful Drinking (2012) sent the group on an \u201cintellectual errand.\u201d How does […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","filesize_raw":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electrictext.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electrictext.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electrictext.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electrictext.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electrictext.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.electrictext.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140,"href":"https:\/\/www.electrictext.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electrictext.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electrictext.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electrictext.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}