| Topic: |
Science > Prophecies-Of-Nostradamus |
| User: |
"Su Zanadu" |
| Date: |
10 Mar 2005 09:58:04 PM |
| Object: |
"The Last Outlaw" -- Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005 (pssst! Amy) |
(see paragraph in brackets)
By MIKAL GILMORE
Probably no other twentieth-century author seemed so inseparable from
his own stories as Hunter S. Thompson. His best-known book, Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas, is a landmark, defining work. Like Herman
Melville's Moby-*****, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, it peers into the best and worst
mysteries of the American heart. But Fear and Loathing is also the story
of the sort of life Hunter Thompson lived. The drugs and drink should
have killed him, the anger should have worn him down, and maybe in the
end, it all contributed to how he died that night in February. But
Thompson never regretted how he lived. It was essential to how he did
the work that he did. In a dark time, he sought to understand how the
American dream had turned a gun on itself. Nobody in modern literature
has come closer to answering that question, and perhaps Thompson came
closer than anybody should. He would have had it no other way. He never
flinched, even in his last moments.
Thompson began his writing career in the Air Force, in 1957. Not yet
twenty-one, he was already looking to test his limits -- not to mention
the limits of just about everybody he would write for. He'd enlisted
because a judge in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, ordered him to
-- Thompson had run into some serious legal trouble just days before his
high school graduation. At Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, Thompson
wrangled his way into a job as a sports editor, and set about pissing
everybody off. One night, he remade the camp's newspaper at the last
minute, inserting a front-page story that exposed an improper discharge
the base had granted a star football player to help his professional
career. His commanders were livid. One officer noted, "[This] airman,
although talented, will not be guided by policy or personal advice and
guidance. Sometimes his rebel and superior attitude seems to rub off on
other airmen staff members. He has little consideration for military
bearing or dress and seems to dislike the service and want out as soon
as possible." The newspaper's editor, a master sergeant, arranged for
Thompson's honorable discharge in the fall of 1957. Hunter filed a final
story, describing a drunken nighttime riot at Eglin Base, resulting in
the explosions of airplanes and the rape of female cadets -- none of
which ever happened.
Thompson soon took a job at a small newspaper in Pennsylvania. But it
didn't last long; he fled after wrecking an editor's car. He ran as far
as New York, where he landed a job as a copy boy at Time magazine. In
his off time, he was reading the Beat authors and poets: Kerouac,
Burroughs, Ginsberg and Corso. He revered Kerouac above all -- his work
was all about freedom of the self in a convention-bound society. The
message reverberated with Thompson: He was beginning to chafe at his
Time job, and when he demanded that the magazine make him a reporter,
his editors booted him. He pushed his limits more, staying up nights
drinking and writing a novel, Prince Jellyfish. He finished a first
draft in early 1959, but he knew it wasn't working.
[That same year, he met Sandy Dawn -- his first serious girlfriend. He
took a job at a sports magazine in Puerto Rico, brought Sandy down there
with him, but ended up writing for the magazine as little as possible
when he found out he'd mainly be covering bowlers.]
<snort!> :)
For the next few years, he moved around a lot -- sometimes with Sandy
(he would marry her in 1963, succumbing to his mother's pressure),
sometimes without her, frequently taking his frustration out on her in
unkind ways, and seeing other women when the desire and opportunity
meshed. He grew angry at not getting published. He started getting into
guns -- shooting at bottles, beat-up cars and other big and noisy items.
It became one of his life's favorite pastimes.
In 1962, he started writing for the National Observer -- then the most
adventurous newspaper in America. He filed several stories from South
America. Some of them seemed so strange as to have been made up (the
editors could never verify the articles' accuracy), though others --
stories of poverty and abuses of life and justice in places like Brazil
-- felt frighteningly accurate. While he was in South America, something
central happened to Thompson's development as a writer: He began taking
drugs. He'd developed dysentery, which meant he couldn't drink alcohol
as much as he liked, and so he started to ingest various stimulants --
including coca leaves and amphetamines. He used the stuff so much, his
hair fell out during his time there. Thompson eventually determined that
the right drugs, in balance with the right amounts of alcohol, would
help him churn out an increasingly prodigious -- and for a time, an
amazingly inspired -- amount of writing.
Thompson left the National Observer in 1964, and he and Sandy moved to
San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, where a young community --
drawn together largely by the city's burgeoning and inventive rock &
roll scene -- was coalescing around daring new sets of ideals regarding
drug use, sexual relationships and opposition to America's increasingly
deadly involvement in Vietnam. Thompson sympathized, but he thought the
idealism was too naive and vulnerable to all manner of dangers and
disenchantment. In 1965, he wrote an article for The Nation about the
Bay Area's other outsider community, the Hell's Angels. These were lost
men, *****-ups who had no hopes and who found meaning and comfort in
their hard-bitten solidarity -- but they also, Thompson believed,
signified a new breed of dangerous subculture that America hadn't seen
before. Thompson later expanded the article into a full-length book.
Frightening but riveting, Hell's Angels was Thompson's first major work.
"His language is brilliant," said the New York Times Book Review, "his
eye is remarkable, and his point of view is reminiscent of Huck Finn's.
He'll look at anything; he won't compromise his integrity. Somehow his
exuberance and innocence are unaffected by what he sees."
(Excerpted from RS 970, March 24, 2005)
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7092354?pageid=rs.NewsArchive&pageregion=mainRegion
.
|
|
| User: "Absolute Zero" |
|
| Title: Re: "The Last Outlaw" -- Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005 (pssst!Amy) |
11 Mar 2005 10:23:10 AM |
|
|
Su Zanadu wrote:
(see paragraph in brackets)
8<
[That same year, he met Sandy Dawn -- his first serious girlfriend. He
took a job at a sports magazine in Puerto Rico, brought Sandy down there
with him, but ended up writing for the magazine as little as possible
when he found out he'd mainly be covering bowlers.]
<snort!> :)
I sympathise... in PR too. :)
-A
.
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
