A review by tittypete
High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Erik Davis

2.0

Too smart for me. I read Cosmic Trigger and Valis and couldn't really make heads or tails of them. Too esoteric and mumbo-jumbo-y. Thought this book would help make sense of the weirder pieces from RAW and PKD (never read Mckenna but the third part of the book is about his trips in South America) but it's an MIT phd thesis. So super dense. Lots of 10-dollar words. Fairly dry. The first couple dozen pages are just about landing on working definition of 'weird'. Basically, these 3 dudes had some wild consciousness breakthroughs in the 70s and rambled about it, came up with theories and tried to name the entities they supposedly were in communication with. The author sorta ties things together. Most of it went over my head. Overly frequent use of 'hermeneutics'.