Sunday, April 25, 2004
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Finished reading T.C. Boyle's Drop City...entertaining in an adolescent sense. Makes me miss the days of Greasy Lake. In this one he goes too far in establishing the hippie commune's premise and one can immediately see that the entire attempt and the people involved are going to fall on their face. The hippies' failures are attributed to their simple stupidity and selfishness, which is not a bad thing in and of itself but...the work's virtues could have been helped if the commune collapsed under a more rigorously defensible premise. The idea that even a pinch of hippy thinking may lead to a catastrophe would have been more interesting to explore, and the result would have been much more revealing if that were the case. Watch von Trier's The Idiots instead, or Together by the Swede whose name I cannot spell yet. But Boyle's taste in quotes is appreciated.
