I get the sense I probably should have read The Invisible Landscape first, but, since that’s not available at my local library (though Powell’s apparently has a copy at the downtown location, so that might be worth a trip), I started with this one. The first half was hard going. It’s a pretty straightforward description of a trip to experiment with local ethnobotanical hallunicogens in the Amazon, but mostly turns into verbatim reprints of the theories Dennis McKenna came up with at the time (Some sample text: “We speculate it is hyperdimensionally metabolized tryptamine – an alchemical phenomenon which is a correct union of tryptamine… with vocally produced sound mediated by mind”) I can handle the summaries of the theories, but the at-the-time writings of Dennis reprinted here are really more like schizophrenic ramblings than I can take. I should also point out that this is one of the worst-printed books I’ve read in a long while, so the long passages of italicized text were, quite literally, very very hard to read.

Once the book gets past that, it become much more readable, as Terence recalls weird anecdotes (being recruited by alleged ex-Nazi scientists, who then disappear) or lays out more of his theories (mushrooms are programmed organisms sent here from space to communicate information to help us evolve and enter the galactic community).

The only page I seem to have noted for future reference while I was reading it involves a reference to Basil Valentine’s The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony (p. 128), which sounds like a pretty dense piece of 15th Century alchemical literature. I suspect the part that interested me was the citing Sophia, the lowest of the archons, who “selfishly created a universe without undergoing any union except with herself” (since our universe is just, by this theory, her concretized emotion). Quite a lot of the McKennas’ experiences in the Amazon have to do concretized emotion/psychic energy/etc. Also interesting is the interest in Sophia, since these events were happening just a year or so before PKD’s Sophia-related manias in Orange County.

Also, lots of references to I Ching here. I should dig out my books on the subject (all purchased in my late teens after reading Man in the High Castle – more PKD connections) and refresh my memory.

I feel kind of bad saying something negative about an Elmore Leonard novel, but this one really just didn’t grab me. I enjoyed the previous book with Carl Webster in it, but this one just sort of meandered around more than I could take. It rehashed the “marshall and fugitive just want a time-out to talk” motif from Out of Sight, but with no discernible payoff when the sit-down finally went down. Plus, having a character (particularly an SS Officer) run into a beautiful Jewish art thief and disappear from the story with her is kind of a weird decision. Unless your next book is about an ex-SS Officer and his beautiful Jewish art thief girlfriend. Carl could use a break.

The Shark-Infested Custard was apparently written sometime in the mid-70’s, but rejected by the publishers as being too depressing. I can sort of see their argument, but I’m not entirely sure this is really that much more nihilistic than some of the other crime fiction of the time (although I’d hesitate to call this one crime fiction, I’m not sure what else to categorize it as). Swag was published in 1977 and has a fairly similar vibe (as well as a similar “guys who hang out in an apartment complex and start doing odd things” structure). Though, for the most part, Swag sticks to a pretty straightforward “guys decide to embark on a life of crime” structure, as opposed to Custard’s “guys just carry on with their lives, occasionally killing people” structure. Regardless, I enjoyed the book quite a lot. It’s a rare book that gets me to laugh out loud, which this accomplished at least twice. I’m not sure what it says about me that a book deemed to be too depressing to see print made me laugh out loud.

Subtitled “In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience.” Between this and The Aquarian Conspiracy, I’m worried someone reading this list would get the impression that I’m some sort of hippy New Ager.

Anyway, this book was actually a fairly well-researched investigation into near-death experiences (NDE’s). Most of the book consists of anecdotes and comparisons in attitudes between a sample of people who have had NDE’s and those who haven’t and comes to the overall conclusion that people who have had NDE’s have a greater interest in spirituality (but usually less interest in religion), less interest in materialism, more interest in altruism, less interest in social standing. All pretty much what you would expect, but the book gets pretty weird and interesting when it starts discussing increased psychic ability among NDE-people. (I’m aware this sounds unpleasantly like Flatliners, but at least the author is fairly skeptical as well.)

Some notes:

p. 72-73: Lots of descriptions of a city seen as part of the NDE. I hadn’t really heard about this as a common occurance, but apparently this is typical.

I find that particularly interesting in two regards. Firstly, this seems one of the closer correlations with the DMT experience. I know the similarities between the DMT experience and NDE’s is not news to anyone, and is, in fact, the basis for the excellent study and book by Rick Strassman, but I had not previously heard of the cityscapes figuring prominently in NDE’s. It’s especially interesting given McKenna’s speculation that perhaps our human tendancy toward cathedral/spire/pyramid building is based on cities glimpsed in shamanic states.

Also interesting is that as a synchronistic correspondence or perhaps a direct source for Morrison’s ideas of liquid information in The Invisibles. I realize it’s used here as a metaphor, but he took the idea very literally in a clever way.

p. 97 – There’s a bit here that I think could be utilized as part of a fictional post-religious experience here about Joe having trouble reacclimating to American daily life, particularly television. Advertisements seem false and unnecessary – “It just didn’t belong.” Violence, even less realistic violence as in an old Western, would be more than he could take. He had to turn off the TV because it was “total ignorance” to show people killing people.

p. 116-120 – All this bit about Tom Sawyer (not that Tom Sawyer, obviously) and his post-NDE experience was cited somewhere else, but I’m not sure where (possibly The Holographic Universe since that’s what led me to this book in the first place). In short, Sawyer started getting flashes of information on quantum physics which led him to start researching. The word “quantum” popped into his head, followed by Max Planck. Weird synchronicities leading him towards the books on physics he needed to start attending college to learn more about physics. I particularly like the bit in which a fragment of Max Planck’s Scientific Autobiography (which he hasn’t read) shows up in his head.

p. 166-167 – There’s a bit here where he’s discussing the similarities of the psychic abilities NDE-people start to manifest and those described by the Vissughimagga. It’s especially interesting that the Vissughimagga treats these as annoying by-products of the enlightenment process, since they have the tendancy to increase self-esteem.

p. 217-218 – This is the bit that was cited in The Holographic Universe that was weird enough to make me want to track down this book. The chapter is centered around the prophetic visions of the future seen by NDE-ers, most of which he rightly dismisses as hogwash (with the idea that perhaps, at best, they’re visualizing the collective concerns more than any particulary precognitive vision). Most of the visions are standard-brand stuff – world headed towards environment/nuclear collapse unless we all embrace luv luv luv. The last one described, though, is awfully odd. The woman saw three lines of history that would lead toward futures. In trajectory A, she saw “a future that would have developed if certain events had not taken place around the time of Pythagoras three thousand years ago. It was a future of peace and harmony, marked by the absence of religious wars and of a Christ figure.”

The grammar’s a little tortured there, so I can’t tell if he’s really trying to indicate that one of the benefits of this ideal future is that there are no Christ figures, but, regardless, I’m a total sucker for any theory that narrows down a very particular moment in which things went horribly wrong. And dragging in Pythagoras is always a nice touch. (If you’re curious, trajectory B was really bad and destructive and C was much like B, but worse).

p. 241 – Track down the movie Resurrection for more NDE fun.

p. 262 – First off, why have I not actually read any primary sources on Sheldrake and morphogenic field theory? Second off, it’s interesting that this book cites experiments with teaching rats to swim mazes as a valid proof of the morphogenic field theory, but off-handedly dismisses the hundredth monkey example I’ve always heard cited in support of the theory as being “mythic.” The citation leads to what I assume is some sort of critical journal, but there’s no author, article title, etc. listed (the bibliography gives only Investigations 1 (1983)).

As with the movie, I’m not sure I really buy the “global infertility = roving gangs of wood-dwelling murderers” aspect of the story, but at least this is a little more subtle in its condemnation of exploitative immigration policy (in that it’s more like slavery and less like just putting people in cages in the middle of the road for no discernible reason). Unfortunately, the dialogue is pretty stiff and Theo’s arc (i.e., cold, child-killing intellectual who learns to love and hope and then becomes King of England) is kind of hard to take, so probably for the best that they ditched 90% of the book in the adaptation.