Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
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| Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me | |
|---|---|
| Author | Richard Fariña |
| Cover artist | Chereskin |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | College, Novel, Humor |
| Publisher | Random House |
| Publication date | 1966-04-28 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 269 pp |
| ISBN | 0-140-18930-0 |
| OCLC Number | 34666497 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.54 20 |
| LC Classification | PS3556.A715 B4 1996 |
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me is a novel by Richard Fariña. First published in the United States in 1966 the novel, based largely on Fariña's college experiences and travels, is a comic picaresque story of Gnossos Pappadopoulis that takes place in the American West, in Cuba during the Cuban Revolution, and at an upstate New York university. The book has become something of a cult classic among those who follow sixties and counterculture literature.
Fariña wrote the novel during his days as a student at Cornell University. His agent, Robert Mills, began shopping it around as a work-in-progress to several British publishers in 1963. It was eventually submitted to Random House and accepted in April 1965. Jim Silberman was the book's editor. Fariña was paid the advance sum of $5,400 for his novel and its release was announced for the fall of 1965 but was moved to the spring publishing season of April 1966.
On April 30, 1966, two days after the publication of his book, Fariña attended a book-signing at a Carmel Valley Village bookstore, the Thunderbird (to be followed the next day by another at the Discovery Bookshop in San Francisco). Later that day, while at a party, he saw a guest with a motorcycle and went for a ride up Carmel Valley Road east toward Cachagua on the back of the motorcycle. At an S-turn - coincidentally, just above the point on the Carmel River where John Steinbeck set the frog hunt that the Cannery Row denizens make in the novel of the same name - the driver lost control. The motorcycle flopped on one side on the right side of the road, came back to the other side and tore through a barbed wire fence into a field where there is now a small vineyard. The driver survived, but Farina was killed instantly. He and his wife - Joan Baez' sister, Mimi - had quarreled before leaving for the bookstore signing because he hadn't given her a present on that day, her birthday. (Pictures of her at the signing show a strained smile on her face.) It was several days before she returned to their home to find flowers, dead now, that he had arranged to be delivered while they were at the book signing.
Thomas Pynchon, who was close friends with Fariña while they attended Cornell University together, later dedicated his most well-known book Gravity's Rainbow (1973) to him and described Fariña's novel as "coming on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch... hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful and outrageous all at the same time," in an introduction to the paperback version of Been Down....
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
Paramount Pictures began filming a cinematic adaptation of Fariña's novel on May 25, 1970 with principal photography finished by late July. It was shot on location at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. The film was directed by Jeffrey Young and starred Barry Primas (as Gnossos), Linda De Coff and David Downing. It did not receive good reviews and remains hard-to-find on home video.
