White Lines: Writers on Cocaine

Overview

Blow, candy, Charlie, coke, go, ice, rock, snow, crack. Whatever you call it, thrill seekers have surrendered to cocaine's siren call, paid their toll, and sold their souls. Its embrace can be deadly, a place of no return, the ultimate rush, public enemy number one. From the gutter to the penthouse, inner city to outer burb, from the Third World coca farmer to the executive addict, coke is the lifeblood of a global black economy and an outlaw underground. Coke has also been dark muse, torment, and theme to many ...

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Overview

Blow, candy, Charlie, coke, go, ice, rock, snow, crack. Whatever you call it, thrill seekers have surrendered to cocaine's siren call, paid their toll, and sold their souls. Its embrace can be deadly, a place of no return, the ultimate rush, public enemy number one. From the gutter to the penthouse, inner city to outer burb, from the Third World coca farmer to the executive addict, coke is the lifeblood of a global black economy and an outlaw underground. Coke has also been dark muse, torment, and theme to many of our greatest writers. White Lines gathers these literary thrill seekers in a classic and contemporary snort through the fog- and fear-filled streets of Victorian London to the dance macabre of the post-Vietnam culture of the 1970s, from the couch of Dr. Freud and the bacchanal of Mr. Magus, Aleister Crowley, to the narcotic thrill of fin de siecle casino capitalism, White Lines takes you into illicit and artificial worlds, near wild heavens and then deep, down underground. Selections from writers like Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Kim Wozencraft, Terry Southern, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Conan Doyle, Peter Biskind, and Julia Phillips are featured.

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Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews
English editor Zanetti, who collected celebrations of the ultimate outlaw vehicle in She's a Bad Motorcycle (2002), teams up with his filmmaking partner Hyde to present essays about another accessory of the rebel lifestyle. Two entries from Richard Rudgely's Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances set up the reader with some basic facts: "the cultural story of coca," a plant that has played a respected role in Andean culture for thousands of years, "was radically different from that of the crass glitzy beginnings and subsequently sordid short life of its extract cocaine." First isolated in 1860, cocaine enjoyed a few decades of positive press. It was imbibed by Queen Victoria, carried by the first man to fly across the English Channel, and used in Coca-Cola. Sigmund Freud's article "Über Coca" displays the generally favorable attitude typical of those years, relating the doctor's personal experiences and outlining cocaine's uses in treating disorders ranging from digestive problems to alcohol and morphine addiction. From there we move through some less enthusiastic texts, including Arthur Conan Doyle's account of Sherlock Holmes craving the drug's stimulation from "The Sign of the Four" and Aleister Crowley's story of drug-fueled debauchery in Paris ("Au Pays de Cocaine"). Then the editors let the veil drop completely. William Burroughs gets creepy with "Coke Bugs," Charles Nicholls recounts a drug deal gone decidedly wrong in "A Night with Captain Cocaine," and in an excerpt from his autobiography, Miles Davis recalls being so paranoid when coked up that he regularly looked for people hiding under the radiator. Hollywood is also well represented, with desperate accounts by Julia Phillipsand Carrie Fisher, among others; bad boys Brett Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney turn up as a matter of course; and Stephen King provides the single breath of air in the oppressive atmosphere with a three-page account of how he kicked his addiction. Evidence that cocaine has provided a lot of good writers with some very ugly experiences.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781560253785
  • Publisher: Running Press Book Publishers
  • Publication date: 12/28/2002
  • Edition description: First Edition
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 352
  • Product dimensions: 5.80 (w) x 8.90 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Table of Contents

Drugs and the Writer 1
from The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances 3
Dr. Lanyon's Narrative 19
Uber Coca 26
from The Sign of Four 50
from Novel with Cocaine 58
Au Pays de Cocaine 63
Coke Bugs 77
A Night With Captain Cocaine 79
from Snowblind 93
from Panama 107
from After Hours 122
from Miles: The Autobiography 133
from You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again 149
from Easy Riders, Raging Bulls 158
from High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess 169
from Less Than Zero 184
from Bright Lights, Big City 190
from Postcards from the Edge 197
from On Writing 208
from Rush 211
from The Story of the Night 216
from Clockers 234
from Beam Me Up, Scotty 255
New Crack City 272
from Cocaine 278
from Infinite Jest 296
from Weird Like Us 305
from Doghouse Roses 312
from Cocaine Nights 318
from Filth 332
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Sort by: Showing 1 Customer Reviews
  • Anonymous

    Posted February 20, 2003

    Where are the selections from Leary and Thompson which Barnes and Noble states are in the book?

    Great book, but I bought it due to Thompson supposedly having a piece in the book, which I have not found after purchasing. Nor Leary. Odd, maybe I'm dense and not seeing it.

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