Lennon fan, yeah, Snopes fan, no. heh
That’s only good for half the Roger Moore, kaylasdad99.
(When the subject is Lewis Carroll, wordplay must be multileveled, out of respect.)
Since Carroll and Lennon have been invoked, one more quote makes a sort of Trinity collage:
A lot of Lennon’s psychedelic lyrics show clear Joycean influence. I often wonder what he made of this passage:
The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture.
The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud.
(Ohmoneymakesmehum… Ohmoneymakesmehum… Ohmoneymakesmehum…)
“Follow Me” by Uncle Kracker. It could be about a secret lover, or it could be about heroin:
You Light Up My Life by Debbie Boone is about her experience with meth.
How about Wikipedia then? Or Beetles Again? Or About the Beatles? The fact you hate Snopes doesn’t make them wrong about everything. But you knew that, right?
And as in that earlier thread, his evidence for his assertion is: “I say so.” That’s why I gave up the argument.
Hmmm…
Such Debbauchery!
Larry Mudd writes:
> As for Alice and drugs, sure, Dodgson was into the laudanum
> and all . . .
Cite? Nothing I’ve ever read about Dodgson mentioned that he used landanum or any other drugs.
Doesn’t even come close to a cite, but Heinlein reerred to Dodgson’s drug problem in The Number of the Beast. Really. Where RAH got the idea, I know not.
f
add it to my previous post
Sending Dodgson laudanum into the Google ether gives back very little in the way of solid info. Nothing to confirm his use of any opiates, and this from LewisCarroll.org in rebuttal:
There’s enough slippage so that it wouldn’t be impossible for Dodgson to have indulged. I’d need much better proof, though, than Heinlein said so. You could fill a book with things that Heinlein said that just aren’t so. Oh, right. He did.
Hmmm… I’ve read a few biographies and The Annotated Alice, but I don’t have them at hand, and I don’t know if they’re the source. I’ve read The Number of the Beast, too, so I suppose I could have picked it up from there, too.
I think The Number of the Beast might actually be a fine cite, if you bend your brain just the right way. After all, the book is predicated on the peculiar ontology that the multiplicity of universal realities that we inhabit are all brought into being by the work of creative fiction.
The only question is, Which Dreamed It?
I don’t know that those lyrics necessarily have to be about drug use. You can need a fix of a lot of other things bresides drugs, sex for instance. It is true that the phrase “I need a fix” is loaded with drug meanings today (and possibly in JL’s day, I’m not really sure), but it really doesn’t have to be about drugs. Or perhaps it is not primarily about drugs for Lennon.
Oh, and I justr looked up the lyrics and they do not say “down to the abyss that I left up town”, they say “down to the bits that I left up town”. I think you may be reading things into the lyrics that aren’t there.
I remember reading that the song was written using stuff he came up with while taking drugs, but that doesn’t mean it’s about drugs any more than a term paper is about coffee. As I recall it had at least something to do with Yoko Ono (Mother Superior was one of his names for her). So really it’s about sex.
And on the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds question, I tend to believe Lennon when he says the title was not intended as a drug reference. These quotes, which I found at Snopes, seem fairly convincing:
I don’t think the matter is settled beyond a shadow of a doubt, but I’m leaning towards the opinion that he didn’t realize the title was an acrostic for LSD until someone pointed it out to him after the album was released, as he said.
Perhaps the British L-S-D currency system?
Lennon was one of the great wordsmiths of our time. Do you seriously think he wouldn’t realize Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds had an LSD ring to it?
I know in his later years he got to be somewhat of a softie, being nice to people and such. But in the 70s he was a contentious bore. Just about any question he was asked turned into verbal sparring match. Lennon had a HUGE chip on his shoulder. Do you think he was going to agree with ANYTHING people “assumed” about the Beatles and his songs? I don’t.
Maybe, just maybe LSD wasn’t about LSD. But if it was, Lennon sure wasn’t going to let us be in on the joke.
Keep in mind Snopes uses a lot of “because I said so” too. Or they put a bit more of an arrogant slant to it by saying “it would be silly to think otherwise”.
Did you even bother to read any of my cites? Or do you not believe them because they agree with Snopes?
Yeses and yeses and yeses, Ilsa.
BTW. Carroll did a little punning on LSD, too:
“Whoa! Lewis Carroll said a head is more enlightened than a Doctor of Divinity!”
What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for.
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I have no doubt Lennon got the inspiration for the song from the picture. But I doubt Lennon was telling the truth about the song not having anything to do with LSD. I don’t remember a happy, jovial Lennon agreeing with ANYTHING the “people” said about the Beatles or his work. Maybe your memory of him is different?
My whole point is, I wouldn’t put it past Lennon to discredit any opinion “outsiders” had about the Beatles or himself. He seemed to like giving the finger to the world.