Books like Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me

Richard Fariña stands at the crossroads of postmodernism and beat culture…Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me – the title is already a pure poetry. And everything that you may find inside is thoroughly innovative and absolutely and fantastically postmodern but the tale is about the retreating into the past beat generation… A requiem of sorts.Not for nothing Thomas Pynchon dedicated his Gravity's Rainbow to Richard Fariña.I am invisible, he thinks often. And Exempt. Immunity has been granted to me, for I do not lose my cool. Polarity is selected at will, for I am not ionized and I possess not valence. Call me inert and featureless but Beware, I am the Shadow, free to cloud men’s minds.The hero’s name Gnossos is a talking name – it is derived from the Greek term ‘Gnosis’ and may be interpreted as a ‘possessor of esoteric knowledge’.“We share a dissipating current, Gnossos. Like transformer coils, you see, we mistake induction for generation. Vicarious sampling is all that remains; the sour evening game of the academies.”Mankind is on the wrong as usual. And on the quest to find the meaning, hiking through the psychedelic landscapes, one may find instead human meanness without limits.