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by: Richard Farina
List Price: $16.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.88 You Save: $5.12 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780140189308
ISBN: 0140189300
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: May 01, 1996
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Sales Rank: 320239
Studio: Penguin Classics
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
This is the ultimate novel of college life during the first hallucinatory flowering of what has famously come to be known as The Sixties. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me follows haunted ur-hippy Gnossos Pappadopoulis upon return to his old university town that's just tilting into a new era, and Gnossos' involvement in a swirl of sixties-style drug taking and the search for love and the meaning of it all. It is a hilarious and haunting book.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - An American Classic
It's hard to knock this surrealistic journey from the mind of a truly original talent. At turns hilarious and horrifying, the sensibility behind the story shines through at every page, a post-apocalyptic coda to "Huckleberry Finn."
Rating:  - The Beat Sound without the Beat Soul
This is a tough book to critique - it's championed by Thomas Pynchon and other people from that era as a book as important to the Beat Generation as "On the Road" and work by Ginsburg and Burroughs. The language has a jazz styling that captures the sound of the era. The lack of rhythm and disjointed prose, coupled with characterization as detailed as a haiku, seems in line with the generation that brought us "Howl." Yet, there is something not quite right here, something missing, something unsatisfying. ... Read More
Rating: - a good book about a strange life
this is real and worth reading for those who want to know about the strange times of beat era lifestyles. he doesnt dwell on the sex exploits, but they are there. as they were for all during those days (and still today). the best part is the way you see how open to change all the world was. the controls were much less than and odddball behavior was not anaylyzed. it just happened and changed the way people lived.
Rating: - We Don't Like It When Someone Breaks the Rules
I was compelled to read this book. I had just read David Hajdu's wonderful biographical book, *Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina*, a book that I highly recommend to readers generally interested in Dylan and Baez and the cultural phenomenon of the 60s zeitgeist, or to readers wanting to know more about the U.S.'s fascination with folk music during the late 50s and early 60s.
I'll get to Farina's book in a second, but first ... Read More
Rating: - A specter of Cornell's past ?!
Farina captures with his semi-autobiographic book the spirit of the 60s as well as the spirit of Cornell and its campus life as it used to be and maybe sometimes still is.
Sometimes crude and to some maybe offensive, often surprising, but never boring, Farina tells the story of his hero Gnossos Pappadopoulis and his friends and opponents. Gnossos seems to navigate free spirited and independant through the shallows of his life and love, but more and more it becomes obvious that he is just a pawn in other ... Read More
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