Declare Books Toward Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me

Original Title:	Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
ISBN:	0140189300 (ISBN13: 9780140189308)
Edition Language:	English

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me Paperback | Pages: 352 pages

Point Of Books Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me

Title	:	Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
Author	:	Richard Fariña
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 352 pages
Published	:	August 29th 1996 by Penguin Classics (first published April 1966)
Categories	:	Fiction. Novels. Classics. Literature. American

Chronicle Supposing Books 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.

Rating Of Books Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me

Ratings: 3.8 From 2780 Users | 264 Reviews

Article Of Books Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me

Like, I imagine, many people who read this book, I picked it up because Thomas Pynchon dedicated Gravitys Rainbow to its author and, when I looked him up on the Internet, it seemed he was an interesting character and it might be worth reading a book by him. The fact that this was his first novel and that he was killed in a motorcycle accident just two days after its publication just adds to the mystery and myth that surrounds Farina.But, if truth be told, this book has little to recommend it to

After attending a book signing party for "Been Down So Long..." Richard Farina climbed onto a guest's motorcycle to attend his wife's birthday party, but he was killed in an accident before arriving. Though his wife had been upset with him at the signing because he had failed to get her a present, she returned home days after his death to find the apart they had shared filled with flowers he'd arranged to have delivered. Much like these forgotten blooms, Farina's sole novel should be considered

I think Farina's editor was as stoned as the protagonist Gnossos in this rambling bizarre rant. It reads like a pedantic, sophmoric coke- fueled binge that can only be understood or endured by someone in an equally intoxicated state. This book features some of the worst dialogue imaginable. Verbal finger painting. It's like the intermission of a Grateful Dead show at the two hour mark where they pluck weird notes to roust hopelessly spaced out audiences. But at least the Dead will eventually

There are two big things this book had working in its favor before I even cracked open Richard Fariña's under-appreciated final gem: The Pynchon connection (which is was what nudged me in the direction of this novel in the first place, albeit more than a year after "Gravity's Rainbow" mournfully introduced me to Fariña) and my own probably-over-romanticized-at-this-point affinity for my college experience, with Pynchon's intro (which includes an obligatory kazoo-choir reference!) being, of

One of the most fun books I've read in a long while. Part blueprint for Animal House/part homage to Farina's famous buddy, Thomas Pynchon. It's a shame this was his only book.

Smirky superior hectoring hipster cultivates cringemaking condescension, bullying braggadocio and sexual sneering in wearisome war on straight society. I really would have liked our protohippy hero Gnossos Pappadopoulis to die of a drug overdose around page seven but he didnt. Could be Gnossos is actually Holden Caulfield on acid. That would account for my immediate and total hatred of him.

I read this in the late sixties and wasn't impressed back then. I first experienced Richard Farina as a mediocre singer and songwriter, and his fiction writing fell into the same category. I guess that much of his reputation rests on his good looks and his early death in a motorcycle accident - also his friendship with Thomas Pynchon. None of which has anything to do with good writing.I have no desire to reread this. I'll trust my early memories.