Ms. Marlowe's Heroin Inflects The East Village
psy 266Professor Kahoud
PSY 266
5/13/13
Extra Credit Assignment
Ms. Marlowe’s writing is very good, fresh, varied and surprising, especially early on and in the sections about New York. “Heroin inflects the East Village,” she tells us; she calls it an “urban drug, an accessory of life lived all night, under artificial light, among indifferent crowds always in a hurry. It belongs with the all-night cafeteria, the after-hours club, the taxi, the tenement, the alley; it answers to the melancholy and feelings of displacement these spaces embody.” She notes: “Cool and dope inform each other; they share an underlying banality of blank affect.” She writes about getting “splendidly high” on “a tender snowy night at the start of winter’s steep slope, the kind of night that makes New York feel cushiony and without corners.” Tripping on LSD, she sees an “unremarkable stretch of Lexington Avenue” transformed “The buildings glistened, they dazzled, they were so high, it made me happy just to watch them being tall.”
Marlowe is the other extreme of the junkie stereotype. Throughout her seven-year addiction, she never shot up, never lived on the street, and never resorted to selling drugs or her body to maintain her habit. In short, she never bottomed out. As a …show more content…
She doles out the sum of her addiction in pieces and pieces, interjecting snippets of her youth, an sharp look at the drug "problem" in the United States, and the steady course of her mannerism along the way. She describes her addiction as a way of negligence down time in an bid to levy demand on her Topsy-turvy life, and a way of apropos exposed and thrill-seeking all in a moment. Declaring it an deed of giveaway will, Marlowe speaks of a life with heroin as couple of have envisioned, a of restraint, consciousness, self-discipline, and really small guilt.
PSY 266
5/13/13
Extra Credit Assignment
Ms. Marlowe’s writing is very good, fresh, varied and surprising, especially early on and in the sections about New York. “Heroin inflects the East Village,” she tells us; she calls it an “urban drug, an accessory of life lived all night, under artificial light, among indifferent crowds always in a hurry. It belongs with the all-night cafeteria, the after-hours club, the taxi, the tenement, the alley; it answers to the melancholy and feelings of displacement these spaces embody.” She notes: “Cool and dope inform each other; they share an underlying banality of blank affect.” She writes about getting “splendidly high” on “a tender snowy night at the start of winter’s steep slope, the kind of night that makes New York feel cushiony and without corners.” Tripping on LSD, she sees an “unremarkable stretch of Lexington Avenue” transformed “The buildings glistened, they dazzled, they were so high, it made me happy just to watch them being tall.”
Marlowe is the other extreme of the junkie stereotype. Throughout her seven-year addiction, she never shot up, never lived on the street, and never resorted to selling drugs or her body to maintain her habit. In short, she never bottomed out. As a …show more content…
She doles out the sum of her addiction in pieces and pieces, interjecting snippets of her youth, an sharp look at the drug "problem" in the United States, and the steady course of her mannerism along the way. She describes her addiction as a way of negligence down time in an bid to levy demand on her Topsy-turvy life, and a way of apropos exposed and thrill-seeking all in a moment. Declaring it an deed of giveaway will, Marlowe speaks of a life with heroin as couple of have envisioned, a of restraint, consciousness, self-discipline, and really small guilt.