…that's part of the literature of mushrooms. And every drug has a similar fascinating history. You all know the story. As Thomas Pynchon says in gravity's rainbow, every school child knows the story of that bicycle ride through the streets of Basel that…

…think a single person could possibly have the breadth and depth of experience to do it alone. I mean maybe a Thomas Pynchon or someone like that. But we're involved in a communication struggle here. We're trying to describe the unspeakable. We're trying to…

…for Albert Hoffman. I welcome my Swiss friends in Basel and Zurich and Bern Sergius Goldwyn the great magician, Thomas Pynchon, the wonderful psychedelic cybernetic novelist who wrote gravity's rainbow, has a wonderful phrase. Do you remember it? In gravity's…

…was a very uncreative use of it and that it should all be fabricated into literature. It's very hard to surpass Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, these people. Everybody genuflects to Joyce but very few people plow in the way he did. I mean Thomas…

…William Gaddis, these people. Everybody genuflects to Joyce but very few people plow in the way he did. I mean Thomas Pynchon is considered a difficult, hallucinatory writer and there isn't 20 pages in gravity's rainbow as obscure as a randomly chosen…

…about at the very beginning this evening, which is the curiously literary nature of reality that it's much more like a novel by Thomas Pynchon Than it is like an equation by Ilya Prigozhin. And why is that? Is it because, in fact, the flesh is word and…

…example but one thing we have to celebrate that probably hasn't been mentioned here today is American Literature is alive and well. Thomas Pynchon has written a brilliant new novel a novel that will make you proud to be a reader of English and an…