ALAN:
MAPS tracked Leary's final, druggy days in more intimate and revealing detail than the public website,
which
was
more of
a media circus. Evidently Leary made
Huxley's last hours look like a choir boy's!
MERRY:
MAPS — can you explain that for our listeners?
ALAN:
OK, that's the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. This is one of Figurski's numerous
factual
references, in the sense that this organization really existed. The fact that MAPS is also SPAM spelled
backwards is
simply fortuitous. Another coincidence, or not, is that MAPS are the folks who supported a 34-year long term
follow up
study to Dr. Leary's famous Concord State Prison experiment of 1961-63, which looked at the effects of
prescribed
psilocybin use on prisoners' recidivism rates; Concord State is the same institution where Frank Figurski was
held
before his transfer to Walpole.
MERRY:
Uh-huh. We're talking with Alan Richardson, who has published a new collection of his writing about an
obscure
hypermedia novel from 2001, Figurski at Findhorn on Acid. We last spoke with him in 1990 about classic rock.
Richardson's new collection is called 145.txt. We'll be right back after a break.
— Fresh Hair® with Merry Gross, National Public Radio, December 2010
