In high school, I'd read Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" and "Island," Tom Woolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream," and maybe a few others as I experimented with my own related real-time experiences with friends or tens of thousands of similarly addled others first at late-'80s Dead and then early '90s Phish shows. I recently read (and didn't love) DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible after watching DMT: The Spirit Molecule multiple times on Netflix, loving the descriptions of the DMT experience, the molecular interconnectedness of plants and animals, the promise or at least possibility of a burst of endogenous DMT upon death in particular, and of course I get all giddy when Dennis McKenna talks about elves in the form of self-dribbling basketballs. With this, when I saw Tao announce it a few months ago on Facebook, I immediately preordered it since it's up my alley, or aligns with an interest dormant since my teen and early college years stirring again, most likely among mid-life crisis rumblings related to a resurgence in playing music and listening to The Dead again after nearly two decades away from it. There's something about his writing/perspective that seems to prefer a sincere response, without restraining or softening critique (see my review of Shoplifting from American Apparel) or erring on the side of praise. In 2004, I posted one of his first stories on the weird little lit site I edited from 1999 to 2014, Tao actually first invited me to Goodreads in 2007, and I talked to him for a while at a Karl One Knausgaard event at McNally-Jackson Books a few years ago, but I don't use the "potential conflict of interest" tag I use when I know someone whose book I'm writing about, even if I've been an online literary acquaintance of this author for ~14 years. Loved the transition from Terence McKenna's psychedelic extremism ("heroic doses") to Kathleen Harrison's sustainable plant-centricism (most troubling mental states can be alleviated by looking at a leaf for two minutes), along the way detailing the histories and chemical consistencies of DMT, LSD, psilocybin, salvia, cannabis, and Tao's own experience with each, as well as his own history and existential consistency thanks to video games, punk music, literature, depressions, anxiety, alienation, pharmaceutical drugs. Loved reading this, loved holding it on the subway with its subtitle and author-drawn mandala, wanted nothing other than to read it when I wasn't reading it, loved the symbiosis of life and literature in the third-person epilogue, loved how this champions complexity and at least once uses the word "complexify," but ultimately it's the overall structure I most appreciated the morning after finishing it, the clearly delineated rational movement through its subjects, with every conclusion more like a propulsion into the next chapter, the divisions as clear as the segues, layering like that as the author self-transforms in life and lit like Terence McKenna's self-dribbling mirrored basketball elves composed of visual language. In exploring these ideas and detailing his experiences with psilocybin, DMT, salvia, and cannabis, Lin takes readers on a trip through nature, his own past, psychedelic culture, and the unknown. In Trip, Lin's first book-length work of nonfiction, he charts his recovery from pharmaceutical drugs, his surprising and positive change in worldview, and his four-year engagement with some of the hardest questions: Why do we make art? Is the world made of language? What happens when we die? And is the imagination more real than the universe? McKenna, the leading advocate of psychedelic drugs since Timothy Leary, became for Lin both an obsession and a revitalizing force. While reeling from one of the most creative-but at times self-destructive-outpourings of his life, Tao Lin discovered the strange and exciting work of Terence McKenna. Part memoir, part history, part journalistic expos�, Trip is a look at psychedelic drugs, literature, and alienation from one of the twenty-first century's most innovative novelists- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for a new generation.
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