My Hunter S. Thompson Thread

[Unitik908]

Dear Readers,

I apologize… for over the past 3 years I have been living a lie of sorts. In my signature during the early days of my forum use, a thread was dedicated to the passing of Dr. Gonzo himself. Yet, it was a rush decision to throw him the ranks of the Gazzaloddi 24x3 Tire and fellow forum member Michael Atkinson’s cat. Alas, it was my ill informed immaturity that keep him in the subconscious of my psyche, not my honoring one of the most original writers of all time.

In recent weeks, I bit the proverbial bullet and finally got my lazy ass out and went the library. Having the author in the title on my mind for some months my goal was already set. My main literary goal was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by HST, instead though I was left with The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America, for the former apparently was borrowed and never returned.

At any rate I have begun reading the two current books with a ferocious sluggishness, which without further explanation would appear on the surface a paradox, but explain I shall. I never in my life have taken more than a week on a 100 page section of a book that I was actually enjoying. If it took much longer than that to spark my fancy, my interest would soon shrivel and blow away, yet in Hunter S. Thompson’s The Proud Highway, it has taken me nearly that long to get through page 128 and I am still overpoweringly enamored to the book.

Unlike my previous few books this is no murder mystery fiction; this is the early life (his twenties and thirties) of a man who was too weird to live. It is a strange biography of sorts that he personally narrates through letters to friends, family, co-workers, and just about everyone else. This hodge podge of letters forms into how young Cuubly Cohn established himself in what he does. The one time air force sports editor to the now famous man whose life was shrouded in fantastical mystery. He saw life through a different set of eyes, one slightly askew from the average American. He took on the fame with a bittersweet embrace. On one side, hating to make a spectacle out of a simple meeting in a public setting yet building his mythic for the world to see.

Anyway I am sadly aware I’ve begun to prattle on about the literary styling’s of a deceased southern man, so I’ll make my closing short. As a possible writer in training, I feel as though my eyes have been open to a whole new world of words. Not just his amazing stories and his ability to make the most ordinary and mundane, exciting and addicting, but his pure artistry with words lends him, in my eyes, equivalent to the greats of our time. As a new fan, I know I have only scratched the surface of this genius’s work, so my fun just beginning.

I know there must be other big fans out there, GILD? Anybody? If so what’s your favorite book? Let us discuss the man, the mystery, the mythe who is Hunter S. Thompson. Until then fellow one wheelers, I Remain

Ever balanced

Chase

[Geeta]

Fear and Loathing

unitik: you will love fear and loathing.

[munimanpete]

A truly weird literary genius…big fan of the good Doctor. I own Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, could lend it to you sometime, you will love it. I agree with everything you say about his writing style and personality, you’ve said it all well enough already so I won’t repeat…There are some interesting interviews with Thompson on youtube if you haven’t already looked, he really was one unique individual, and while a lot of what he writes about seems so outlandish it is easy to imagine when it’s him…

On another, but still related note, we recently had our huge end of year university party to mark the end of lectures for another year and the start of exams and then summer. Basically everyone wakes up at 4am, starts drinking, get dressed up then head out to uni for a ridiculous day.
My costume this year:

[unisteve]

I’ve only read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but the movie version and Where the Buffalo Roam (another movie, starring Bill Murray) are both quite good.

Thompson is a really interesting and complex dude. Worth reading and reading about.

[UniGeezer]

Does anybody know why, or have a theory as to why he decided to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head, and not leaving a note? There was no evidence of foul play.

[munimanpete]

I believe there was a note:

“No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.”

Apparently he had said he would feel trapped if he didn’t know he could kill himself when he pleased…guess it was that time.

[UniGeezer]

@munimanpete

I believe there was a note:

“No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.”

Apparently he had said he would feel trapped if he didn’t know he could kill himself when he pleased…guess it was that time.

Can you cite the source of that note? I googled at least a dozen different articles about his death, but not one made mention of a note being left.

[feel_the_light]

I met the man

On green street, in Key West, after I had done a juggling show, in the late 80’s.

An irritating sort of self important prick who stood to close to me while he jabbered on with a cigarette stuck in my face. I don’t remember anything he said and I sort of blew him off.

I wouldn’t remember any of this, except that my friend Chris Vahn, who was an aspiring writer, and a reporter for the Miami Herald at the time, ran up to me to ask me what the good Dr. had said. He impressed on me the fact that I was a dick who had just blown off Hunter Thomson. Despite having read Hunter’s Hell’s Angel’s book in high school, I had no idea who he was. I remember Chris’s chastisement of my dumbness better then I remember what Hunter said to me.

He was a great man, perhaps my favorite work of his is his eulogy for Nixon. You guys have to read this.

http://www.counterpunch.org/thompson02212005.html

[GILD]

@Unitik908

As a new fan, I know I have only scratched the surface of this genius’s work, so my fun just beginning.

One more of us…

I guess you can say I’m a bit of a fan.

(Really must get a better picture taken…)

My favourite writings by Thompson are without a doubt his political work.
Fear and Loathing is fun and all, but his political stuff kicks huge arse.

I’ve also enjoyed the collections of his personal letters.
Reading those along with a collection like

is a fascinating exercise as you can read the article in question and then read the correspondence between him and his editor(s) about the particular article.

His letter to William Kennedy on the morning after the JFK assassination is another critical piece of writing in the Thompson library.

To William J. Kennedy:

November 22, 1963

Woody Creek
I am tired enough to sleep here in the chair, but I have to be in town at 8:30 when Western Union opens, so what the hell. Besides, I am afraid to sleep for fear of what I might learn when I wake up. Ther is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything - much less the fear and loathing that is on me after todays murder. God knows I might go mad for lack of sphinx - I want to kill because I can’t talk.
I suppose you will say the rotten murder has no meaning for a true writer of fiction, and that the “real artists” in the “little magazines” are above such temporal things. I wish I could agree, but in fact I think that what happened today is far more meaningful than the entire contents of the “little magazines” for the past 20 years. And the next 20, if we get that far.
We now enter the era of the shitrain, President Johnson and the hardening of the arteries. Neither your children nor mine will ever be able to grashp what Gastby was after. No more of that. You misunderstand it, of course, peeling back only the first and most obvious layer. Take your 'realism" to the garbage dump, Or the “little magazines.” THey are like a man who goes into a phone booth to pull his pod. Nada, nada.
The killlin has put me in a state of shock. The rage is trebled. I was not prepared at the time for the death of hope, but here it is. Ignore it at your peril, I have written Semonin, that cheap bookstore Marxist, that he had better tell his boys to buy bullets. And forget the dialectic. This is the end of reason, the dirtiest hour of our time. I mean to come down from the hills and enter the fray. Tomorrow a cabled job request to The Reporter. Failing that, the Observer, Beyond that, god knows, but it will have to be something. From now until the 1964 electrions every man with balls should be on the firing line. The vote will be the most critical in the history of man. No matter what, today is the end of an era. No more fair play. From now on it is dirty pool and judo in the clinches. The savage nuts have shattered the great myth of American decency. They can count me in - I fell ready for a dirty game.
Fiction is dead. Mailer is an antique curiosity. The stakes are now too high and the time too short. What, O what, does Eudora Welty have to say? Fuck that crowd. The only hope now is to swing hard with the right hand, while hanging onto sanity with the left. Politics will become a cockfight and reason will go by the boards. Ther will have to be somebody to carry the flag.
My concept of the new novel would have fit this situation, but now I see no hope for getting it done if, indeed, andy publishing houses survive the Nazi scramble that is sure to come. HOw could we have known, or even guessed? I think we have come to the point.
Send word, if you still exist.
-HST

The “Wave Speech” is probably worthy of all the praise it’s received over the years.
From the Wikipedia:

The “wave speech”

The “wave speech” is an important passage, at the end of the eighth chapter, that captures the hippie zeitgeist and its end. As a writer, Hunter S. Thompson considered it to be “probably the best thing I’ve ever written”:

[I]“ Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.[/I]
”

Some critics and readers believe this wave speech was Thompson’s favourite passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the writing of which he was proudest, often citing it during interviews, and reading it when asked to read aloud from the novel.

The Song of the Sausage Creature is a fun piece of writing I’ve always liked.

There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.

This extract may be one of my favourite Thompson sentences:

This motorcycle is simply too g**damn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you’re ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.

This thread is also required reading.

[MrBoogiejuice]

The Great Shark Hunt (particularly the story he tells of feeding acid to Ralph Steadman at a yacht race and getting busted painting ‘F*** the pope on the side of a very expensive yacht’), Hells Angels, Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas are my favourite of his books.

I need to re-read The Rum Diaries. I don’t remember being too enthralled by it but I think I read it too soon. I keep hearing murmurings that a film is being made of it but it seems to be taking a long time to appear.

I can’t put into words how much I love his writing and how he lived his life. He was the dude of all dudes.

My mam had the great fortune to work with Ralph Steadman in London in the 70’s and the even greater fortune to meet Mr Thompson. She worked at a publishers as an editor and tells excellent stories of having to clamber over toilet cubicle doors to wake up writers and poets comatosed with booze.

[GILD]

@MrBoogiejuice

I need to re-read The Rum Diaries. I don’t remember being too enthralled by it but I think I read it too soon. I keep hearing murmurings that a film is being made of it but it seems to be taking a long time to appear.

Johnny Depp is doing it and it got held up behind him finishing the three Pirates movies first, I believe it’s in production at the moment.

A 2009 release date seems to be on the cards.

[munimanpete]

Yeah I believe HST had this to say about it while he was still alive:

I must read more of his work, summer is coming and uni is ending! Perfect time.

Also, some very cool tattoos GILD.

[MrBoogiejuice]

Genie-arse.

[Unitik908]

indeed GILD, those are pretty gnarly, did anyone notcie my sad attempt at writing an early Thompson style letter?

Chase

[GILD]

ferocious sluggishness

…should’ve been a dead give-away.

[Unitik908]

@GILD

…should’ve been a dead give-away.

I thought it to be a nice touch.

Chase

[munimanpete]

@feel the light

He was a great man, perhaps my favorite work of his is his eulogy for Nixon. You guys have to read this.

http://www.counterpunch.org/thompson02212005.html

Cool read, I don’t know a whole lot of detail about American Politics at that time so Hunter S. Thompsons’ is definately an interesting perspective to view it from.

[johnfoss]

@feel the light

He was a great man, perhaps my favorite work of his is his eulogy for Nixon. You guys have to read this.
http://www.counterpunch.org/thompson02212005.html

Wow! Pretty harsh. I wonder what he would have written about the Bush (W.) years, preferrably 10-20 years afterward when there’s room for more perspective. How would Bush stack up against Nixon?

[zerojosh]

My roommate just carved a Hunter S. Thompson jack-o-lantern, it looks pretty good!

[MrBoogiejuice]

@johnfoss

Wow! Pretty harsh. I wonder what he would have written about the Bush (W.) years, preferrably 10-20 years afterward when there’s room for more perspective. How would Bush stack up against Nixon?

In the documentary Breakfast With Hunter S Thonmpson he deals up a good chunk of vitriol for W.

But yeah, 'twould’ve been lovely to hear more from him on the subject.

I’ve always wondered what Bill Hicks would have had to say about him too.