The Going Gets Weird

He has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more--
depart wayfarer, and imitate if you are able one who to the utmost
strenuously championed liberty.-Epitaph for Jonathan Swift

He inhabits his nerve endings; they are on the outside, like the skin of a baby; he seeks thumbprints. The failure of the counterculture--"which values the Instant Reward. . . over anything involving a time lag between the Effort and the End"--to develop a coherent politics infuriates him.-John Leonard, reviewing "The Great Shark Hunt" in the NYT(Registration req'd).

Hunter S. Thompson carried to an extreme the indentification of the personality of a writer with his writing. Working from bits and pieces of factual extracts from his coverage of politics and culture, Thompson expanded and elaborated with manic inventiveness a surreal confrontation between drugged-out adventurers and the more prosaically disjointed unreality of late twentieth-century America. Nothing in the decaying American Dream is as the straight world would like it to be. Rather than join the earnest murmur of conventional journalists, soberly interviewing the rear guard of this decline, Thompson screams and howls in bursts of pyrotechnic stream of consciousness. The result lingers far longer in the collective memory than all the earnest op-ed pieces of the sixties and seventies.

How much this vivid torrent of words owed to the consumption of chemicals of all kinds, and how much to the talent of the writer, is a question which has been asked before, about other writers, especially in the century just past. A large question. Does creativity necessarily flow from excess, from psychological and behavioral dysfunction? Writers especially attract this sort of question, since they deal in words and at least nominally realistic descriptions of experience. Would Faulkner, or Fitzgerald, or Hemingway been better artists if they had been through rehab, instead of drinking like desperate men all their creatively active lives? If Sylvia Plath had been successfully counseled, defusing her suicidal despair, would she have refrained from gassing herself to death in the same apartment in which her children were sleeping, and would this counseling have affected her poetry, for good or ill?

Hunter Thompson embraced the excess that in his writing became a literary technique, creating a satiric juxtaposition between those who have power, and those who shriek that the emperor has no clothes. Who is more dysfunctional, the drugged-to-the-eyeballs gonzo journalist, or the solemn conventioneers in Las Vegas, police professionals learning salient facts about the drug culture, such as a roach is named for its resemblance to a cockroach? Take notes, there will be a quiz. This was ten years before Nancy Reagan told the stoned generation to "just say no." Thirty years on, after "zero tolerance" and mandatory sentencing, busting tons of drugs and lighting bonfires of marijuana across rural America, who now seems to have had the better grasp on reality?

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. We need a pro like HST more than ever.

Hunter S Thompson Ends the Ride

Hunter Thompson's last ride...

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the bats began to take hold. This time I let them.

Selah.


The ride is over. The ticket was paid in full.

I read much of Hunter Thompson's output, from the Hell's Angels stuff back in the 60's to the very last column on the ESPN website, dated February 15, 2005. Like many writers, he outlived his best work, losing energy and fire as he grew older.

I don't know the circumstances that led him to punch his ticket out himself, what demons and torments physical or mental caused the last collapse into self and withdrawal from those around him. Suicide is the last victory of self over living with and for others, it is true.

The retreat to that brink of nothingness is as individual as the man, however, and I will not speculate on Thompson's worthiness or otherwise based on his end alone. When I was younger, I did not hesitate to render judgement in such a case. In the summer of 1961, I was driving on the sands of Daytona Beach when the news crackled over the AM car radio that Ernest Hemingway had died at home in Idaho, victim of what the announcer called a "shooting accident." Later reports filled in details; Hemingway had gone downstairs in his house early that morning, while his wife was still getting dressed, and placed the muzzle of one of his shotguns in his mouth and tripped the trigger.

His wife rushed downstairs to find the room spattered with the brain that had created characters from Jake Barnes to the old fisherman fighting the shark. The shark had beaten Hemingway, more completely than it did the old fisherman. It was a horrible thing to leave his wife to deal with the wreckage of his body and mind. In 1961 I judged Hemingway most severely for that.

I was seventeen.

Now, a life away from that hot Florida day, I am sixty, and of the few things I have learned, the most certain is that each life is unknowable to others, at its most basic. We share much with others, our family, our lovers, our friends, but there is a last redoubt where we keep our deepest self. When that self crumbles, from whatever cause, everything else will collapse into nothingness, and no consideration of love or duty or decency enters into the final act.

After the fact I learned from biographies the sad story of Hemingway's decline into physical and mental decay, the suffering he and his family endured. I don't know what Hunter Thompson's last years were like, other than his writing powers were waning. For me, the jury is still out. I will hope that clemency is more justified than condemnation in Thompson's case, as in Hemingway's.

Iraq blog becoming a book

Some time back, I posted about a soldier in Mosul with the Army who had been maintaining a blog. The soldier's name is Colby Buzzell, now rotated stateside and out of the army. The writing in his blog resembles a 21st century Punk/Skater combination of Hunter Thompson and Ernest Hemingway, both writers he admires.

Now G. P. Putnam's Sons is to publish a book version of Buzzell's blog plus other journal information he had kept on paper rather than posting on his blog. The book, My War, is scheduled for publication in the Fall of this year.

One chapter of the book will be published in March's issue of Esquire.

I highly recommend this guy's work. His style is gritty and immediate. Apart from an irreverence for Army bureaucracy and a sardonic sense of humor, the blog is apolitical. The nearest thing to a political comment I can recall is Buzzell's comment that he could never vote for John Kerry because young Kerry threw his medals over the White House fence.

The archives of the blog entries from Iraq have been taken off line, no doubt to protect the salability of the book. The blog now contains entries about the ex-soldier's life and other material. Still well-written and sharp.

I am going to read the article next month. And I will buy the book next Fall. I hope many others will do the same.