Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes (ISBN 0-8065-1167-2) is a short story anthology by Terry Southern, first published in 1967. It consists of twenty-four stories first published in Esquire magazine, Evergreen Review, Harper's Bazaar, Hasty Papers, Nugget Magazine, The Paris Review, and The Realist. It was republished in 1990 with a new introduction by George Plimpton.
[edit] Stories
- Red-Dirt Marijuana
- Razor Fight
- The Sun and the Still-Born Stars
- The Night the Bird Blew for Doctor Warner
- A South Summer Idyll
- Put-down
- You're Too Hip, Baby
- You Gotta Leave Your Mark
- The Road Out of Axotle
- Apartment to Exchange
- Love Is a Many Splendored
- Twirling at Ole Miss
- Recruiting for the Big Parade
- I Am Mike Hammer
- The Butcher
- The Automatic Gate
- A Change of Style
- The Face of the Arena
- The Moon-shot Scandal
- Red Giant on Our Doorstep!
- Scandale at the Dumpling Shop
- Terry Southern Interviews a Faggot Male Nurse
- The Blood of a Wig
[edit] Plots and themes
Like much of Southern's work, Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes presents a detailed portrait of American culture during the 1950s. Many stories, in particular You're Too Hip, Baby, The Blood of a Wig, and The Night the Bird Blew for Doctor Warner, explore the mentality of the hipster and the pretentiousness of countercultures.
Other stories, like Recruiting for the Big Parade and Twirling at Ole Miss, present unusual non-fiction, and may be viewed as an early form of gonzo journalism.
The majority of the book's stories, like the eponymous Red-Dirt Marijuana, simply present detailed character sketches and bizarre flights of fancy. In The Sun and the Still-Born Stars, a Texan farmer wages a surreal, Beowulfian struggle against a mysterious sea monster. In Love Is a Many Splendored, Franz Kafka receives an obscene crank call from Sigmund Freud. Beneath these strange juxtapositions, Southern explores themes of alienation, love, and truth.
The collection has been widely praised by authors such as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, William S. Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, and Kurt Vonnegut. Joseph Heller characterized it as "the cutting edge of black comedy."
