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Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me · Nov 12, 09:03 PM
After, oh, thirty-five years, I’ve been rereading Richard Fariña’s novel of beatnik / campus / proto-hippie drug culture, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. I’m getting ready to teach a new course, The Literature of American Popular Music, & have to decide on a final book list this week. I remember loving the book when I was twenty. Much more than, say, On the Road, though neither of those books could compete for sheer fucked-up energy with Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King or J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. The protagonists of the latter two novels are a bit older than Gnossos Pappadopoulis, the hero of Fariña’s novel, in years if not in reality-testing finesse. And they pre-date youth culture. One of the interesting things about Fariña’s novel is that it paints a picture of the birth of youth culture. It it a window on the birth of the American teenager as a cultural construct.
It is remarkable how well the novel holds up. Fariña has a genius for both language & narrative. What worries me is whether my students are up for the density of historical & literary allusion. Clarkson students are, alas, hopelessly square & without meaningful literary background. If I teach this book, I’m going to be doing a lot of explaining. Maybe I could set up a wiki so students could collectively decode the slang, drug references, literary allusions, etc. Probably can’t do that in Blackboard, so it would have to be an external link to something freestanding. Might work, though.
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I love the idea of a wiki for collective decoding. I’ve just taught Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things, and a tool like that would have been great.
— steve 11/12/2006 09:46 PM #
Steve, thanks for the vote of confidence. Teaching books for which our students don’t have the “encyclopedia” (to borrow from Umberto Eco) is a problem, for sure.
— jd 11/12/2006 09:49 PM #