After my post last night, I found this article on Pynchon’s new book, that makes him appear to be a secret James Bond freak. This morning I found an article about George Walker. Yesterday, George and posted about Oakland and the Hell’s Angels. I’m suggesting Tom and George talk, and, even meet in person. I have put Pynchon on the Bus – in theory! Shuffle these two articles together, and what do you have? I think we have the reality that Project 2025 set out to destroy. Then their locomotive went off the rail with the Epstein Scandal. To get ALL REALITY, back on track, you have to put the train back on the piece of track it derailed from. Does this make any sense? Pynchon Freaks seem to understand this kind of thinking. How about you?
JP
The new novel from Thomas Pynchon
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world,
Why Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland—a Disappointment When It Was Published—is the Novel We Need Right Now
Devin Thomas O’Shea on What a Master of the 20th Century Can Offer the 21st
August 5, 2025
2025 is shaping up to be the year of the Pynch. After 12 years of silence since Bleeding Edge, the 87-year-old author will publish Shadow Ticket on October 7th, 2025. The new novel concerns Milwaukee in the Great Depression—Hicks McTaggart, “a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye” searches for a missing Wisconsin cheese fortune heiress, who ends up entangled with paranormal, Nazi, Soviet, and British agents. “Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer.”
Meanwhile, One Battle After Another (based on 1990’s Vineland) will be Paul Thomas Anderson’s second adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel: 2014’s Inherent Vice starred Joaquin Phoenix as “Doc” Sportello, a counterculture detective who senses that the hippie world of Southern California is shifting off its axis. What tips Doc off is a missing ex-lover, something about a Golden Fang, vanishing Black communities, and the sudden presence of heroine in the hippie diet where previously there was only peace, pot, and LSD, as well as the sense that the world was composed of flimsy construction.
In Pynchon’s spiritually charged 60s, the rules and protocols of the world seemed eminently malleable; dreamed up by post-war stiffs in suits who were losing their grip. The hippies were counter-dreaming something new, and beginning to move in that direction all at the same time, singing the same song, and if were they left alone, what was in-control might slip away, like a woman held hostage by a sadist. A Eurydice captured by the underworld, and a roving Orpheus detective looking for her, are the foundational dynamics in most of Pynchon’s plots—but plot is secondary in the experience of reading Pynchon.
Inherent Vice and Vineland represent two of Pynchon’s “easy” novels, making them a natural adaptation for Anderson, who’s cast Leonardo DiCaprio to play Vineland’s Zoyd Wheeler, or a character like him. One Battle After Another will be set in the 1990s rather than the novel’s Reganomic-Orwellian era of 1984, but the machine-gun car-chase trailer promises the novel’s theme of American blockbuster violence will remain true.
What might be lost on moviegoers is the crestfallen murmurings that came with the 1990 publication of Vineland. In a letter to Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace wrote, “I get the strong sense he’s spent twenty years smoking pot and watching TV.” Salman Rushdie was equally disappointed in his New York Times review: “We heard he was doing something about Lewis and Clark. Mason and Dixon? A Japanese science-fiction novel? There were rumors that he’d bang out a 900-page tome about the Civil War, and instead audiences got a zany book of washed-up hippies versus kookie government agents.”Pynchon published three novels before the great 17-year silence that anticipated Vineland.
What was not clear in 1990 now makes more sense—since 1970, Pynchon had been working on a door-stopper tome about the surveying of the Mason-Dixon line, which published in 1997. In 2006, he published an encyclopedic take-down of industrial capitalism—not the Civil War—in Against the Day. For Vulture in 2013, Boris Kachka wrote one of the most complete biographies of the man who refuses to appear in public, and notes that Pynchon’s Japanese science-fiction novel might refer to an abandoned project about an insurance adjuster hired to survey damage done to Tokyo by Godzilla. Born in 1937 near Oyster Bay, Long Island, as Kachka writes,
The name goes back to Pinco de Normandie, who came to England at the side of William the Conqueror, and carries on through Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, the author’s great-great-uncle, president of Trinity College and the first Pynchon to take issue with the family’s portrayal by another writer (Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote of the “Pyncheons” in The House of the Seven Gables). Thinkers, surveyors, and religious mavericks, the House of Pynchon had settled into middle-class respectability by the time this Thomas Ruggles Pynchon was born.
A portrait of Pynchon as a 16-year-old depicts a STEM prodigy entering the intensely competitive Engineering Physics Program at Cornell. Pynchon seemed able to soak up everything and anything, then dropped out and joined the Navy in 1955. He sees the world while making a minimal impression on his shipmates—as one Pynchon tracker put it, “It’s my sense that when you’d stop in Barcelona and the sailors would go to bars and whorehouses, he’d go to see a death cast of Chopin’s hands.”
After the Navy, Pynchon returned to Cornell and switched to English. In his first years after graduation, Thomas applied for a Ford Foundation grant to write librettos about Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction stories, but that didn’t pan out. What worked was the early short story titled “Low-Lands,” which concerned a depressed wino named Dennis Flange, a Vivaldi fan who’s whisked away to live in a garbage dump by a party animal named Pig Bodine.
Shot through “Low-Lands,” published in 1960, is a metanarrative around Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applied to art, and the artist as a scavenger, establishing the manic blend of high and low culture that typifies Pynchon’s style—a continuation of the bar set by the high modernists (especially Joyce) who stretched literature as wide as possible, making the novel representative of everything in human experience, including time, sound, taste, the ineluctable modality of the visible, thought itself, and the entire spectrum of culture as experienced on one single day in Dublin. To achieve this encyclopedic scope, Joyce opened every door between the divine thought of Thomas Aquinas and crass Dublin newspaper ads. Pynchon sought to do the same for the American century.
Pynchon enjoyed the kind of early career every ambitious young writer dreams of: a difficult hurdle in any writer’s life is signing with an agent, but back in 1960, a Cornell professor handed Pynchon’s undergraduate student story to Candida Donadio, who secured $1,500 for it—$16,000 adjusted for 2025; an insane break. I don’t know what goes on in the Ivy League literature programs today, but the combination of money, agent representation, and publication put a 23-year-old Pynchon on the fast-track.
Pynchon is so associated with the 1960s that many mistake him as a hippie, but these early works are better understood as beat poet prose, and like the beats of his 1950s milieu, Pynchon used “Low-Lands” money to flee west.
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Pynchon published three novels before the great 17-year silence that anticipated Vineland. During that silence, an important biographical detail wasn’t available to readers—while writing V, his first novel, our author worked for Boeing in Seattle, and wrote technical safety articles like “Togetherness,” which was published in the company’s magazine, Aerospace Safety.
Airlifting the IM-99A missile, like marriage, demands a certain amount of ‘togetherness’ between Air Force and contractor […] As this article goes to press, the safety record of Bomarc airlifts can be summed up in four words: so far, so good. You may recall, however, the optimist who jumped off the top of a New York office building. He was heard to yell the same thing as he passed the 20th floor: so far, so good.
The Boeing CIM-10 Bomarc program was a clandestine Cold War missile system that was, essentially, rigging up North America with nuclear explosives. The program was set up to hide supersonic ramjet surface-to-air missiles all across the continent, with rockets stored horizontally at SAM sites, attached to a launcher with a moveable roof. On the fateful day that inbound Soviet bombers filled the skies above America with godless communism, the horizontal Bomarc missiles would literally become erect, and fire vertically. Bomarc rockets had jets designed to propel a W40 nuclear warhead into high-flying USSR aircraft, which would detonate in the sky, showering the earth with radioactive debris, neutralizing quite a few enemies of American freedom.
As illustrated in Micheal S. Judge’s brilliant audio essay “Thomas Pynchon and the American Reconquista,” in the same year Pynchon was writing about Bomarc safety, a helium fuel tank exploded at the McGuire Air Force Bace in Ocean County, New Jersey. Initial reports claimed contamination only affected the sewer and land beneath the shelter, but the area was showered in weapons-grade plutonium. The warhead didn’t detonate, but according to the Trenton Times, “In June 1987, traces of a radioactive substance used in nuclear warheads (americium-241 related to plutonium) were found about one-half mile from the site.”
V won the Faulkner First Novel prize in 1964—a novel concerning a Dennis Flange-like protagonist named Benny Profane; an ex-Navy Orpheus who goes hunting for the sacred in the contaminated sewers beneath New York City, finding alligators and a deranged priest who preaches to the rats.
V contains a lengthy treatment of the Herero Genocide in Namibia, South West Africa—an often overlooked ethnic extermination, and torture campaign, committed by the German Empire before the Nazis. As Ariel Saramandi wrote in Electric Lit:
The story goes that Pynchon stumbled on the genocide while looking for a pamphlet on Malta. He then devoted himself to reading everything he could on it… It’s no small feat, considering that V. was published in 1961 and most of the history books on the genocide were written in the 2000s. The Herero massacre wasn’t even really talked about until mid-1990s.
As Saramandi points out, the Herero war crimes are written in a powerful, furious voice. They are witnessed by Kurt Mondaugen, who becomes a central character in Gravity’s Rainbow, connecting colonial violence to the fascism that erupts in the imperial core. Journalists wishing to interview Pynchon about V, and the Faulkner prize, sent him fleeing his home for a motel, skipping town to hide in Mexico City, establishing another generationally rare path in any author’s story—though he’s a known figure in his New York City neighborhood, Pynchon has never appeared in public.Most encounter Pynchon through Lot 49—short enough to fit on a university literature syllabus and “explain the 60s” to students.
In the tradition of encyclopedic literature, from The Anatomy of Melancholy to Melville’s Moby-Dick, following the high modernists in opening the full aperture of the novel to take in as much as physically possible, Pynchon produced Gravity’s Rainbow; a massive, carefully constructed sand mandala composed of everything in World War II. Because of his experiences with the Bomarc, and his place in American Empire, Pynchon’s magnum opus contains everything from Loony Tunes, to Nazis, to the technical specifications of a German V2 rocket—Pynchon’s Melvillian whale. All is equal in the eyes of the rocket, but many horny sadists prowl the earth wielding god-like technological might, eager to fuck and kill all living things.
A version of The Crying of Lot 49 was originally a part of the bigger Gravity’s Rainbow project, but Pynchon pulled Lot 49 out as a stand-alone novel and sold it for $10,000 in 1966—$98,000 today. Most encounter Pynchon through Lot 49—short enough to fit on a university literature syllabus and “explain the 60s” to students. In a famous passage, California housewife turned totality detective Oedipa Maas observes the way in which Californian suburban sprawl is, itself, like a computer.
The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns, a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.
Many were, and are, attracted to Pynchon because of the abnormal discloser in his books, especially in a pre-internet age. Lot 49’s unhinged Dr. Hilarius seeks to dose his California patients with LSD, and reveals that he is a client of Operation Paperclip—a US program to launder Nazis into the United States, giving them citizenship. Dr. Hilarius admits he is a former Buchenwald concentration camp intern, and the Zyklon B manufacturer I.G. Farben (now Bayer), which produced the poison of the Holocaust’s gas chambers, plays a prominent role in Gravity’s Rainbow. Werner von Braun embodies the central driver of V2 metaphor in Pynchon’s mandala—Von Braun was a Nazi rocket scientist before he became a stalwart NASA American, who now has his own bust in Huntsville Alabama.
The Bomarc missile program was connected by an early version of the internet called the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system. This system used early computers and data networking to communicate about that mythical Soviet air attack, and without explicit knowledge, beyond the purview of consent, Pynchon knew that Americans of the 1960s were being enclosed in a vast, dangerous, inhuman, technological system. A vicious, spreading, computerized deity who is not the true God, but rather a gnostic demiurge.
If you had to point to one continuous theme in all of Pynchon’s work, it is a silver Christian fish bumper sticker turned right-side up to look like a rocket. Our science worship has usurped the God worship of previous centuries, but ultimately points to Old Testament outcomes: Apocalypse, holocaust, and the fascistic desire to dominate. The phallic sex-death drive of the 00000 V2 rocket—produced using concentration camp labor—ends the world of Gravity’s Rainbow, but also begins the nightmare with a horror; you will never hear that screaming which comes across the sky, because the impact of a supersonic rocket outpaces the noise of the explosion. A rocket fired into a crowded city— technology used for indiscriminate extermination of civilians. Characters in Gravity’s Rainbow traverse The Zone with instant death hovering overhead; a paranoia known to the civilians of Gaza. The October 7th release date for Shadow Ticket may not be a coincidence.
*
Pynchon’s Orphic characters are often detectives who are tuned to the right the spiritual right frequency, discovering clues and linkages of the system without ever beholding the entire totality. For Fredric Jameson, totality detection is fundamentally important because investigating the linkages of reality includes all sorts of stuff They don’t want us to think about (like the way our labor might be better organized, for example) . In Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality, Jameson points to detective characters in novels as unique kinds of fictional protagonists who track down, and uncover veiled relationships like yours and mine to the Boeing corporation, or the State of Israel, or the people of Gaza, who are only so many linkages away. Another big concept in Pynchon is maps, and cartography, and in a way, reading fiction creates an empathetic map. Exploring Pynchon’s novels, and cross-referencing his complex jokes, exercises empathetic cartography.
Originally titled Mindless Pleasures, Gravity’s Rainbow won the 1974 National Book award, which Pynchon sent the comic Irwin Corey to accept. The author put out a collection of early short stories in 1984 titled Slow Learner, but stayed vanished until 1990, when Vineland published. In the interim silence, a sizable amount of scholarly work was churned out.It’s maybe no accident that Vineland begins with a washed-up hippie, Zoyd Wheeler, whose finances depend upon proving his insanity to society.
Harold Bloom gushed over Pynchon, anthologizing and awarding him a seat at his table of eternity next to Joyce and Melville. The early scholarship reflects this academic enthusiasm, and when Vineland published, it was like feeding popcorn to a tank of starving sharks. They were expecting blue-ribbon chum—a Finnegans Wake about the Civil War; something that would out-scale Gravity’s Rainbow, and give scholars something to decode for decades.
It’s maybe no accident that Vineland begins with a washed-up hippie, Zoyd Wheeler, whose finances depend upon proving his insanity to society. Annually, Wheeler has to demonstrate his manic-zaniness by jumping out the window of a local business. He does this to the fanfare of the media, thus securing his government disability check.
Wallace thought the master had slipped, Rushdie was pissed, but Vineland is a lovely 300-page novel. It’s a funny one about the 1980s hippie diaspora, but when it published, critics couldn’t see that it would be part of a series of “accessible” stoner detective yarns.
Vineland is apt for our moment since the plot is set in motion by Reagan’s slashing of the federal government, unwittingly severing millions of connections, setting in motion events beyond anyone’s control, resurrecting the suppressed. The novel centers Wheeler as a “transfenistrating” father who begets the dialectical reversal of a hippie—Prairie Wheeler, a 1980s Northern California punk girl. Characters in Vineland are numbly transfixed by television, and violence permeates the culture of 1984. The trailer for One Battle After Another is action-packed and gun-heavy, bringing to mind a passage in the novel in which the narrator asks Weed Atman, the washed-up Jesus-like embodiment of the hippie, “Weed, how about picking up the gun? We know it’s supposed to be wrong, but we don’t know why.”
Once he would have proclaimed, “Because in this country nobody in power gives a shit about any human life but their own. This forces us to be humane—to attack what matters more than life to the regime and those it serves, their money and their property.” But these days he was saying, “It’s wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he’s all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?”
Image Courtesy of George Walker
MERRY PRANKSTER GEORGE WALKER’S TALES OF DROPPING ACID WITH KESEY AND TRAVELING WITH NEAL CASSADY ON FURTHER
Benito Vila·May 9, 2018
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Known as “Hardly Visible” when he was on the bus with Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady, George Walker counted Gut Terk, Hunter S. Thompson and Terry the Tramp among his friends and still carries the torch for the Pranksters’ spirit
Merry Prankster George Walker, a.k.a “The Psychedelic Courier,” today remains a force in the shifting mainstream American consciousness. Since the early 1960s, he has been actively cultivating a cure for the stiff, crass, black or white straightness of the 1950s and continues to encourage colorful expression in whatever medium he can find. “Further” is more than a motto for Walker, he’s been “on the bus” before there was one.
“’Further’ was my idea.” This was said to me softly, as if no one else was meant to hear or to know. The quiet statement came from George Walker–the modest Merry Prankster, sailor, racecar builder, cultural observer, performance artist and storyteller–at a memorial in Reno in late February for his long-time friend and confidant “Gut” Terk, the outlaw biker chieftain turned psychedelic artist.
Video courtesy of Bo Bushnell, curator of Outlaw Archive
An Oregonian attending law school at Stanford University in the early 1960s, Walker’s post-Palo Alto circle consisted of an extraordinary crew of cultural pioneers that included Terk, journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Hells Angel Terry the Tramp (John Terrance Tracy), entrepreneur Steward Brand, one-time wife Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, musician David Crosby, counter-culture hero Neal Cassady and novelist Ken Kesey.
In a BBC interview, Kesey recalled how he, Walker and Sandy Lehmann-Haupt drove back to California in late November 1963 from the Broadway opening of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (Kirk Douglas, the play’s producer, had taken on the role of Randall McMurphy, the novel’s protagonist). Kesey described the trio experiencing the aftermath of the John F. Kennedy assassination while on the road, saying, “What you saw in people’s faces coming across the country–there was a grief–everyone in the United States felt it; not so much that we’d lost Kennedy, but that we’d lost a chance at a real different, better, hipper, gentler world. So we decided to do the most American thing we could do–travel across the country–to the World’s Fair [in New York City, the summer of 1964] and then come back again–to experience the American landscape and heartscape. And we set out like Travels with Charley, where [John] Steinbeck set out to find the soul of the real America, and we found it.”
George Walker attributes that we’re-on-a-mission-we-need-a-bus moment as shaping the Merry Pranksters’ style and look: “If you look at pictures of us in early 1964–and even later–we’re typically all wearing stripes, and almost everything was red, white and blue; it came out of that trip back. I remember, one day, we were in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, stopping to see some friends. Kesey, Sandy and I were high on peyote and we saw this huge red, white and blue billboard, for maybe an oil company or something like that, and the blue sky–and being high like we were–together with the snow on the ground somehow created an image in our minds and we all felt it–it galvanized this whole feeling of patriotism–after all, we had just seen [the film] How The West Was Won back in New York and that was truly patriotic stuff–we had this feeling, this sense, that we were pioneers crossing the country and that carried into the flags we flew, our wearing flag costumes and the stuff we did.”
In searching for the “right” vehicle to carry their crew back to New York, Walker, Kesey and their friends scoured bus listings all over the Bay Area and beyond–even back home to Eugene–until they came across a listing for a 1939 International Harvester school bus in Atherton [near Palo Alto] that had been converted into a camper vehicle. Walker recalls, “It had a rudimentary kitchen, a refrigerator, a stove and bunk beds built into the back and a settee that folded out into a bed. Ken bought the bus on the spot for $1,500 and that was the beginning of it.”
That may have been the origin of Further–the brightly-painted bus which became an indelible symbol of Sixties’ counterculture by way of Tom Wolfe’s 1968 Electric Kool Aid Acid Test–but it was far from “the beginning”. Walker traces the origin of the Merry Pranksters back to Perry Lane, a bohemian community that came together in what had been World War I military housing on the outskirts of Stanford University. It was there that Kesey brought “home” the psychoactive drugs he had been given at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, as part of a CIA-funded research experiment [Editor’s note: Taking part in those drug experiments while enrolled in a graduate writing program at Stanford, Kesey became an orderly at the facility and soon found his keys fit certain “locked” doors; his experiences as an orderly led him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest].
Walker said, “We–Chloe Scott, Vic Lovell, Roy Sebern, Jim Wolpman and Jane Burton–would go to Kesey’s and take some of these things. Most of them had names that nobody’s ever heard of. Perry Lane became the place where we would hang out and do all this stuff. I took my first peyote in late 1961 and that was the first psychedelic I took, and then shortly thereafter I took some of the stuff that Kesey had. Things called IT-290 and MC-14; those were the military designations of those things. Any time we could find it, we’d smoke a little weed, which wasn’t ubiquitous like it is now. Sometimes you wouldn’t even find any weed for weeks at a time.”
We had this feeling, this sense, that we were pioneers crossing the country and that carried into the flags we flew, our wearing flag costumes and the stuff we did.
Walker dates the phrase “Merry Prankster” to a specific moment–The Great Alaska Earthquake on March 27, 1964: “That was the first time I took LSD. I had taken other psychedelics but never LSD. We were running around the Bay Area when we heard the earthquake reports on the radio, and later we went down to La Honda where Kesey had moved after Perry Lane. When we came into Kesey’s compound, [cameraman] Mike Hagen said, ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ and [writer] Ken Babbs responded with, “‘Tis I, the intrepid traveller, come to lead his merry band of pranksters across the nation, in the reverse order of the pioneers. And our motto will be ‘the obliteration of the entire nation’. That statement was the beginning of the term ‘Merry Pranksters’. I remember it like it was last week.”
Also on the scene at Perry Lane, and again in La Honda, was Neal Cassady, the hero of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road [as the fictional Dean Moriarty]. Walker remembers, “Cassady was really into smoking weed and was always really interested in people. He came around Perry Lane one time looking for Rom Bondoc, to get high and found Kesey instead. He kept coming around, seeing us and hanging out with us. When the bus thing happened–of course, Cassady was the penultimate driver–he said, ‘I’m going to take you guys. I’ll drive this thing to New York.” Which he did; that’s when we all really got to know him well.
At Gut Terk’s memorial, Walker was asked if it was possible that Cassady, who was known to sustain several conversations at once, could have voiced other people’s thoughts. Walker smiled at the question and reported, “Neal once said to me, ‘I’m just a telepath; I’m not sure why that’s such a big deal to some people.’”
Walker’s connection to Cassady lasted long after the 1964 bus trip, continuing through to Cassady’s death outside of San Miguel de Allende [Guanajuato, Mexico] in early 1968, and, beyond that, to the present.
“A lot of what I do now comes from Cassady,” explains Walker. “He talked a lot about karma. Our response back then was: ‘What the hell is karma? What do you mean?’ It was a word we didn’t even know. A year after he died, Cassady started appearing to me in visions, giving me instructions. One of the things he was telling me was to read Edgar Cayce and study that material, and learn what we’re really about because we’re all mistaken–everybody thinks that in your human lifetime you have to get all you can and that’s all there is to it. It’s different from that. We need to evolve our consciousness. We need to do better if we want to keep occupying the Earth.”
We had ‘Never Trust a Prankster’ written on the bus. It doesn’t mean that pranksters are unreliable and untrustworthy. It really means to say more about expectations: if you’re hanging around pranksters, you’re likely to be surprised by something that we do.
One of the creative projects Walker currently works on is a collection of his experiences with Cassady: “During the Acid Test days, Kesey got busted a couple times for pot. In those days, that was taken seriously and he decided he didn’t want to deal with it. He split in late ‘65 and went to Mexico, as a fugitive. By early ‘66, we realized other people could do this Acid Test stuff better than we could, so we all went– Babbs, me and Hassler [photographer Ron Bevirt] and a couple other people–we took the bus and went to Manzanillo [Colima, Mexico] and met Kesey. After we got established, after a month or two, we all realized we should have brought Cassady. So I went back and got him. We finally went back north to face the music, but Neal and I came back the next winter and ended up in San Miguel de Allende. It’s a story I’ve been working on for ten years now; it’s very complex.”
By late 1968, frayed from the non-stop fury of The Acid Tests and “The Summer of Love”, which together earned San Francisco the focus of the media and middle America, the Merry Pranksters decided to host “The Convention to Decide the Fate of the Universe” in an abandoned mine outside Virginia City, Nevada.
As Walker remembers, “When Ken decided he wanted to do this, we had to tell people and, of course, in those days there was no Internet. You had to go around or call people on their telephones. I had a Lotus sports car that I had put an elaborate psychedelic paint job, with lots of day-glo and glitter, and I had a jumpsuit that was similar. My job was to tell people we were doing this ‘convention’, so I drove around the Bay Area talking to people; one of them was Gut [Terk] because he knew cool people like Arab [artist Gary Finnoe] that we didn’t. Anyway, when we got out to the mine, we took DMT [Dimethyltryptamine, a hallucenogenic], which really confuses you, and we had some nitrous oxide. Nothing much came of our ‘convention’ really, except that we decided that the Universe was really too far gone for us to decide its fate. It was an excuse to have fun, in a new place, and make it sound really important. That’s what we set out to do–have fun–we weren’t trying to change the world; we were into having fun.”
Having fun is key to Walker still, and the spirit of being a Merry Prankster is evident in his thinking even as the original Further slowly rusts on the Kesey farm in Oregon, having heroically and aptly fulfilled its intended purpose of transporting its riders to a place of learning. Walker said recently, “A trick is something that fools you; a prank is something that surprises you. We had ‘Never Trust a Prankster’ written on the bus. It doesn’t mean that pranksters are unreliable and untrustworthy. It really means to say more about expectations: if you’re hanging around pranksters, you’re likely to be surprised by something that we do. Our goal is to do it in a positive way, a way that’s enlightening.”
If something stops changing, it literally stops existing because existence and change are the same thing.
Continuing that thought, Walker added: “We had another saying which is even simpler: ‘Nothing Lasts’. What that means is: to be attached to any state of being, within yourself or externally, is a losing mindset, because nothing lasts. If you’re attached to something remaining in its current state, you’re sure to be disappointed, because nothing will remain like it is. Change is the same as being. In fact, nothing exists without change. If something stops changing, it literally stops existing because existence and change are the same thing. That’s the Einstein-ian notion of the interchangeability of energy and matter. If you think of matter as being things–stuff–it’s all mutable; it’s interchangeable with the energy. Energy and change are the same thing. If something has any energy at all, it’s changing; it isn’t in a static state. There is nothing anywhere in the universe that’s in a static state, that’s not changing; it can’t remain the same. It’s an absolute impossibility for things to not change.”
“On the Bus” today: George Walker on the edge of consciousness now
I’m really pretty enthusiastic about today’s youth, who seem to be a lot like we were. I see music concerts and festivals going on every weekend, all over the country, with thousands upon thousands of young people getting together, often getting high and listening to music. A lot of that music today is about higher consciousness; it’s not just shoddy stuff. There are a lot of messages in it; there are keys to real knowledge and wisdom in it that can be used to open all the locks we have.
With people getting out, getting together, and getting involved, they’re daring consciousness; they’re trying to feel better about life and about the world. I see this as a really good thing: these kids are getting high, dressing up, listening to good music and dancing–freeing up their spirits. That’s the way to open minds.
We have to open our minds to see things in ways that allow us to better understand what’s really happening, and to clear away the traditional stuff we were told. Enlightenment isn’t something that’s going to happen all at once. It’s like any evolution; it happens one day at a time. Something happens, and then something else happens, and then there’s a mutation here. Most mutations are unsuccessful, but if somebody suddenly sees better, or hears better, or gets stronger, or smarter, or more aware, then that mutation spreads. That’s why all these festivals are so valuable–getting people talk to each other–that’s the way consciousness spreads.
BBC film, “Tripping”, featuring Ken Kesey:
The film features interviews with Jarvis Cocker (lead singer of Pulp), Malcom McLaren (manager of The Sex Pistols), Hunter S. Thompson (writer), Marianne Faithfull (singer/songwriter), Jann Wenner (publisher of Rolling Stone Magazine) and Carolyn Cassady (wife of Neal Cassady).
Rosamond Press 
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