Hunter Thompson Was Never Really That Old

The Paris Review interview with Hunter Thompson.

A friend of mine once told me that my brother and I were the only people she knew who dropped the “S.” from Hunter Thompson’s name. I don’t really know why I do that. I’ve caught myself referring to him simply as “Hunter” once or twice recently and I feel like a douche whenever I do it.

Anyway, the interview: While I am, again, having fun reading these interviews, I still haven’t gotten as much out of one as I did from the Bradbury interview. Like I said about the Vonnegut, it might have something to do with how familiar I am with the writer before the interview. While I love Bradbury’s writing, I really didn’t know much about him as a person; Vonnegut’s nonfiction is intensely personal, and I know more about Hunter Thompson than any other writer I can think of. I’ve read tons of his letters, the majority of his published output (maybe only 55%, but still a majority — the man wrote a ton.) So I didn’t get too much new information from the interview. I do wonder if that was because it took place in 2000 — Thompson didn’t have the final straws of September 11th and the Bush reelection that finally broke his spirit, but he was slowing down, it felt. He recites his beginnings in Louisville and Eglin AFB, and I use the word recite here specifically.

The most entertaining part of the interview, for me, was about his love of deadlines. He loved the push at the end, and it makes sense when you consider that his first “gonzo” work, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” was a lead followed by pages torn out of his notebooks, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas falls apart into transcripts from his tape recorder at one point. He tells a story about writing a eulogy for Allen Ginsberg that Johnny Depp read for him at the funeral; he got it to Depp a half hour before Depp was due on stage, and most of it’s insults and fabrication. It’s quite tender. Too long to reproduce verbatim, but if you click the link it’s about 3/4 of the way down the page. Definitely worth it.

Two quotes:

On writers who say they can’t work drunk or high: “They lie. Or maybe you’ve been interviewing a very narrow spectrum of writers. It’s like saying, “Almost without exception women we’ve interviewed over the years swear that they never indulge in sodomy”—without saying that you did all your interviews in a nunnery. Did you interview Coleridge? Did you interview Poe? Or Scott Fitzgerald? Or Mark Twain? Or Fred Exley? Did Faulkner tell you that what he was drinking all the time was really iced tea, not whiskey? Please. Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?”

On the writing process:

Interviewer: “Are there any mnemonic devices that get you going once a deadline is upon you—sharpening pencils, music that you put on, a special place to sit?”

Thompson: “Bestiality films.”

Matt Taibbi; Football

Matt Taibbi published a pretty funny blog post this afternoon about the NFL draft, and I’ve given in to the urge to echo-chamber the shit, particularly because in the opening sentence he describes himself as having a “psychotic obsession” with the draft (which if anyone gives a fuck is on tonight at 7:30). I feel like every other story or post I read by Taibbi includes one or more reflections of what I maintain is a desire (conscious or not) to be Hunter Thompson. I just looked through some old posts here that reference both Hunter and Taibbi, and apparently last summer I was convinced that the desire was conscious — and I had ok reasoning. But I also decided, probably way too late, to actually google Hunter Thompson Matt Taibbi” to see if Taibbi ever made public reference to his forbearer. I found an article from the Ithaca Times in which he does. Taibbi:

“I think the Thompson comparisons are embarrassing. I mean, I get it – I’m a humorist with a drug history who covers presidential politics in the first person for Rolling Stone – but in reality it’s silly. That’s sort of like saying Meat Loaf and Pavarotti are both fat singers.”

I’m still unsure if he’s being deliberately disingenuous or if he really doesn’t see similarities between his prose style and Thompson’s. But I think I am coming around to the idea that he’s not actively trying to be Hunter Thompson.

Believe it or not, when I started this post it was gonna be about the draft blog. If you have more than a passing fancy for football (if not the draft) than there are worse ways to spend 10 minutes than reading this blog. Rule number one? “Draft the Weed Guy.” Famous NFL players who were busted in college include Arron Hernandez, Warren Sapp, Percy Harvin, and Randy Moss. Not a bad group. My first counter thought was Ricky WIlliams, but I think that whole thing was less a problem with being high than being high during the game.

Football is that good escapism.

Some Advice From Hunter Thompson

From a letter to Hume Logan, dated April 22, 1958

“As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

“But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors — but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make that individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires — including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

“As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal) he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).

“In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a patter of his choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life — the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.

[...]

“Naturally, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. You’ve lived a relatively narrow life, a vertical rather than horizontal existence. So it isn’t any too difficult to understand why you seem to feel the way you do. But a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

“So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things the way they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.

“But you say, ‘I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.’ And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know — is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.”

It deserves to be said that Hunter Thompson was just shy of 21 when he wrote this.

The East Coast Shall Crumble And Fall

I am not writing about the earthquake.

I finished Bolaño today.  The stories in the latter half of the book tend further towards the autobiographical than the early ones. Lots more of protagonists named “B.” Lots tramping and flitting in and out of people lives. I think the biggest overarching thing I noticed, however, was the fact that Bolaño seems incredibly comfortable being a writer. I’ve always tried to avoid having my main characters be writers, because it feels like a kind of circle jerk, the fact that writers write about writers. But not only is he comfy writing that way, he seems to happily embody the writer as icon or perhaps has a sense of the ideal writer and works adamantly to be that person. I am uncomfortable doing that. I rarely if ever refer to myself as a writer. Sometimes a journalist, but I don’t even do that very often.

Back towards the beginning of this blog I wrote about how Hunter Thompson and Matt Taibbi both have said that they became journalists because they couldn’t make it as novelists, and I said I had to start writing fiction because I couldn’t make it as a journalist. Well, Bolaño has a similar arc. All of the fiction that he is known and lauded for was written in the 90s, and very early 2000s before his death. Up until then he was a poet — a minor poet, it seems. But he got married and started a family, so he switched to fiction because he could make more money at it. Thompson and Taibbi were/are awesome journalists. Bolaño was an awesome writer of fiction. I mean, his poetry was badass as well, from what I’ve read of it, I’m just trying to get at the fact that these three were all incredibly talented at things they never wanted to do. I can’t decide if this makes me upset or not.

Che, Hunter, and Ego

I’m about halfway through The Motorcycle Diaries, by Che Guevara, and so far, so good. I picked it off my girlfriend’s shelf because I still haven’t managed to renew my library card and I was desperate for something to read. I finished the Rum Diary two or three days ago and I was getting itchy. (I just realized they both have diary in the title. Weird.)

The book also falls into a set that I’ve been getting more and more into recently, that of books that deal with people’s formative years, the awkward time between when we are declared legal adults and when our character and temperament seems to congeal into actual adulthood. Motorcycle Diaries is perfect for this: Che was a young, idealistic medical student, fairly naive but a pretty nice guy. The changes that occur during the book are subtle, but as the book unfolds he starts talking less about getting drunk with people he’s met on the road and more about Chilean mines, the conquistador invasion of the Incan empire, and poverty and death. Still gets drunk a lot, but it’s less prominent.

The Rum Diary was a little different, of course, because it’s a work of “fiction,” and was accordingly crafted by the author to reflect a certain vantage point. Like I mentioned in a previous entry, Hunter Thompson was 22 when he started it, made his character 30 to give him a little more seriousness, and then made him act like a world-weary 50 year old. That alone can tell the reader tons about the mindset he was in while writing.

In the spring of freshman year, lo those four incredibly long years ago, I gobbled up a book called The Proud Highway, which was a collection of hundreds of letters Thompson wrote between the ages of 18 and 30. He obsessively made carbon copies of all his correspondance, which was a godsend for Thompson fanboys such as myself. To be able to look at a great writer at age 19, when I was 19, and see a kid with raging emotions, incredible intensity, even if I was so little like him myself in the details, was simply amazing. He was, to a t, a stupid little kid with an ego. I, too, was/am a stupid little kid with an ego.

In the nonfiction classes I’ve taken, plenty of students, myself included, have written short memoirs. Pretty soon, I got sick of it, and if I felt some desire to get something of an emotional or personal nature off my chest, I put it in fiction. It’s simply that every memoir I wrote or read in a class was navel-gazing to the nth. I have no faith that anything I’ve experienced over my short and easy life is in anyway remarkable, or is something that no one was experienced before. So why would I write a fucking memoir?

So instead, I like to read about the formative years of others, and through that both confirm my suspicions about the lack of novelty in my experience but also allow myself to feel comradeship with these people, and let them do the bragging for me. And if by some luck I see an event in their lives and get a chance to apply it to my own, well, only the better.

Free Red Bull Day at the Office

A woman wearing a burka (burqa?) got on the bus this morning, and while of course all I could see was her eyes, it certainly did seem that she was white. I wonder how many women of European descent end up taking that kind of veil.

In other news: what I had meant to write about yesterday, before I was so rudely interrupted by a dress code, was The Rum Diary. I finished it in about a day and a half; it’s a breezy read, and entertaining. When he started writing it in 1959, Hunter Thompson was 22. Fucking 22! His character, however, was 30, and obsessed with the idea of going “over the hill.” I’m not one to require honestly in fiction, but given the fact that I knew his age at the time of writing, and have read probably too much of his interpersonal correspondance from that age, I was bothered when Thompson’s character Paul Kemp talked, sometimes at length, of feeling like he had experienced it all. It’s a relatively autobiographical novel, so when Kemp spoke I heard Thompson, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the author’s ego was a little out of hand. I’m not sure why this bothered me; Hunter was 75% ego and 75% id, I should have expected it.

It also stood out to me because of a habit I’ve started when writing fiction. The “campus novel,” like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, can get a bad rep as unserious or youthful (pejoratively). So, I simply bumped my characters’ ages up to 23 or 24. Instantly they can be taken seriously. I get the feeling this is what Thompson did, that he felt the things he was writing about but knew it didn’t make sense for a 22 year-old to be saying the things he wanted to say. The problem is, it didn’t really work. Just by saying Kemp was 30 didn’t make his voice any less that of a 22 year-old. And now I’m afraid that’s how I’ll sound. 24 is much less of a jump, but still.

They’re making a movie out of it, too. Johnny Depp, of course, plays Kemp. Weirdly enough, they took out one of the major characters. Weirdly enough, they did the same thing for the film version of Mysteries of Pittsburgh. It bothers me when they do that for book-movie transitions. I judge adaptations against movies like Wonder Boys and Stand By Me. Wonder Boys was masterfully trimmed; taking out an entire character, like Cleveland in Mysteries or Yeamon in Rum Diary, seems like sloppy work, intended not to fit the story into a film but bluntly rewrite it as a film.

Click Here to Read a Fax by Hunter Thompson. His letters are always fucking wonderful. This one starts “Okay, you lazy bitch…”

I’m coming up on 500 words, which I’ve made my post limit, but I want to write about people’s formative years. It’ll be up soon, I hope. I’m on my second free Red Bull and I’ve been typing like a motherfucker.

My Tag Cloud Is Weird (and more cursing)

I wrote today. I think it’s about a thousand words, a part of a very, very amorphous idea I have. I want to create a character through first person narration by the character’s friends and acquaintances at different parts of his life. Kind of like coloring in all the background of an image and hoping everyone can see something in the foreground.

I got the idea from The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (there’s supposed to be a tilde on that). The entire middle section of the book, which is also the books longest section, describes the travels of Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (no tilde there) through narration by their friends and acquaintances. I guess I stole the idea, but I was planning on forsaking the introductory section (which Bolano’s book has) and just plunge right into the stories. I also don’t think the kind of stuff I’m producing right now has the stamina to be a full book (Detective‘s is huge, 600 pages or something like that). Maybe it could be a long short story or a short novella. But really, right now it’s just character sketching, and I’m more pleased with myself for writing it at all than for any quality it might have. Daily writing has never been my strong suit, but I feel like if I start up the habit this summer there’s more of a likelihood I can continue it on into adulthood.

I started reading The Rum Diary as well. When I finished the Teddy book I didn’t have anything to read and I didn’t feel like going to the library, I was too stoned, so I grabbed it off my friend’s bookshelf and set too. I read the first 20 pages in about as many minutes, and it’s a short book, so I decided to just keep going on this slight detour or summer reading.

I really like Hunter Thompson’s pre-Gonzo stuff — Hells Angels is a badass piece of reporting — and Rum certainly isn’t Gonzo. It is the product of a very young guy, only 22. The prose still has his voice but it isn’t full-throated yet, if that makes any sense.

I know I mentioned Hunter Thompson as an imposing figure in my head what with the youth with which achieved some measure of an interesting life, and this book is definitely good to combat that. It does two things simultaneously: First, it pounds it into my head that Hunter Thompson did not pop out of the womb and great writer. Second, it shows me that even if someone’s first major attempt at their work isn’t nearly of their later quality, it doesn’t automatically mean the early book is shit. Cause this may not be the full Hunter, but it ain’t bad.

No one ever wants a blog post longer than 500 words, so before I go I have some links. Apparently it’s all about the links.

Matt Taibbi’s blog I referenced the other day is definitely worth a look : Taibblog

and so is his Goldman Sachs article: The Great American Bubble Machine

My mom worked for Philadelphia Stories, and look at her award information.

That’s about it for now. Still figuring out WordPress shit, but it’ll flow better soon I’d hope.

“Pope’s Heart Sits There Like A Piece of Hamburger”

I’ve liked Matt Taibbi for a long time. Many moons ago, my brother showed me a column Taibbi wrote for the New York Press called “The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope.” As a lapsed Catholic, I can tell you that indeed, it was a very funny list. (#49 “After beating for the last time, Pope’s heart sits there like a piece of hamburger.”)

I mean, you just don’t see that sort of deep-seated, vulgar malice every day. Plus I was fucking 16 when I read it. I roared.

So the Taibbi goes on to snag the National Affairs desk at Rolling Stone, which was created back in 71 for Hunter Thompson. As I believe I mentioned before, I think Taibbi takes that heritage very, very seriously. One of his most well known articles describes Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” I mean, that’s some good verbiage, and I’m not one to accuse people of derivativeness lightly, but sentences like this give me the feeling that he thinks about who he is trying to live up to very frequently.

The vampire squid article, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” is also a really sick piece of journalism. Taibbi goes right to the heart of what pieces were in place for the financial collapse of 2008 to occur, and went on to do a whole host of other articles about the financial sector. I think it’s a book now.

At this point, I’m still with Taibbi. Cheers to him, he’s done good work. But over the course of these last couple years, he’s become unabashed about sitting in judgement of other people. It was unnoticed when he was doing it about Goldman, ’cause fuck they need to be judged, but he got away with it and clung to it like guns and religion. A recent article: “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?” Good point. Then he comes back a few issues afterwards with “The People vs. Goldman Sachs” Again, yes, Goldman are fuckwads, but I’m focusing on Taibbi here and what seems to be his complete comfort with speaking for all of us who are moral.

And, of course, there’s the Supreme Court of Assholedom. This is a real thing, started by Taibbi, who serves as Chief Justice, on his Rollingstone.com blog. The 9-justice court sits in judgement of questions such as “Is Hosni Mubarak an asshole?” and “are you automatically an asshole is you publicly tweet pictures of your junk?” (The Weiner Ruling came out today: yes, Taibbi says, he is an asshole.)

When he started the court, I figured it would be a light-heart middle finger to people who piss me off, but it’s since become a bizarrely formal and serious affair. The justices debate, albeit in their own unique ways, on philosophical distinctions and considerations when ruling on whether someone is an asshole or not. Many of the cases begin with “The People vs….” which again looks like Taibbi setting himself up as final moral arbiter.

But I still sometimes feel like he’s just fucking around himself, he can’t possibly be that self-absorbed, right? But it’s a question, one that I’d like to submit to the Court: Is Matt Taibbi an asshole?

Better Just Write a Novel, Then.

At some point, Hunter Thompson said that he got into journalism because he couldn’t make it as a novelist. No one wanted to publish Prince Jellyfish or the Rum Diary, and he preferred not to starve, so he started taking jobs writing about pretty much anything, and his distaste for the work prompted him to build his theory of working for newspapers and magazines: whatever I can get away with. Once the Kentucky Derby piece came out, and he saw exactly how much he could get away with, Gonzo was born.

Matt Taibbi has said something similar. I don’t feel like looking up the quote, but he too said he got into journalism because he was failed novelist. I’m less inclined to believe this out of hand, because Taibbi has a weird complex about Hunter now that he sits in the same chair as the Hunter did at Rolling Stone, but it very well could be the truth, and these two journalists can’t possibly be the only embittered ex-fictioniers in the group.

What I’d like to get at, I think, is that for the last five weeks I’ve had my first experience with a non-student publication of journalism. So far I’ve written about 700 words a week, and each one has been like pulling out a splintering molar (which I did once as a kid; do not try this.) Over the last few days I’ve written something like 1.500 words of fiction. Wouldn’t it be kinda funny, you know, if I ended up hating journalism enough that I have to go back to writing fiction? I haven’t written fiction for years outside of classes, because I have a strong distaste for coming up with plots. At least in nonfiction the plot is already there.

I’m exaggerating a little, of course. I don’t hate this internship too passionately, and my ascendant desire for fiction was mildly premeditated. After graduation I decided to make a concerted effort to write for myself a little bit, and I’m sick of memoir — the whole navel-gazing thing just makes me feel like an ego with a microphone. So I decided to give fiction another shot, and it almost feels like it’s working. Almost.

Big.

Today I am not in a mood to mocked by the beautiful weather and sun. I’m not sure why, exactly, but I’m pleased to be in the fluorescence of the computer lab for a little. I’ve acquired the bad habit of reading about incredible human beings. Right now it’s the young Theodore Roosevelt, who at 24 became the Republican Minority Leader in the New York Assembly, and introduced and passed the Civil Service reform bill, with the help and aid of Gov. Grover Cleveland. The winter before, he finished his massive book The Naval War of 1812, which was the definitive work on the subject for a fucking century. I feel like every six pages he does something thoroughly impressive and I get simultaneously excited by what I’m reading and seriously disheartened by my lack of anything impressive in my short life. The only consolation is that Teddy seems not to be planning much of it out in advance, just being totally admirable in any given situation.

Then there’s Giaconda Belli, the rich and aristocratic housewife in Leon, Nicaragua, who starts writing poetry and drifts into the artistic circles, and becomes first a Sandinista supporter, then agent, then major player, and she’s having meetings with Ortega and Castro in the 70s. In 79, when they finally did overthrow Somoza, she was 31.

Oh, and Raphael Nadal just won his record-tying sixth French Open Championship. He’s only ever lost one match at the tournament. He’s 25. He won his first at 19.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez published the Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor at 27, the same year a publisher accepted Leaf Storm.

When Hunter Thompson was 21, he got himself (somehow) honorably discharged from the Air Force, drove from Eglin AFB in Florida to Jersey Shore, PA, got a job with a paper there, and had to skip town a week or two later when he broke the office vending machine, crashed his boss’s car, and make some unwelcome advances at the daughter of a prominent citizen in town.

Obviously I’m not doing myself any favors, when it comes to trying to make decisions for my upcoming blank page of a life, by surrounding myself with the stories of these people. I’m sure many people find this kind of stuff inspiring, and I do sometimes, today just might be a kvetching day for me. (Are the any appreciable differences between “kvetching” and “bitching?”)

I think over the past year and a half (although thoroughly declining through 2011 so far) I had a desire to be great, or famous, or as Teddy would put it “big.” I feel genuinely embarrassed at even mentioning that; I’ve never been comfortable with that kind of egotism.  But I did want to be famous, preferably as a writer, at a young age, which would then provide me the opportunity of growing old and becoming some sort of elder statesman figure for a group or organization. I just blushed typing that, I think.

To say that my paradigm has shifted is a bit of an understatement. Right now I’m focusing on deciding if I’m staying it Pittsburgh after my lease is up or running to the West in a desperate attempt to feel like I’m doing something. I need a job. I need an apartment. Hopefully even a little sense of fulfillment. There’s no room or desire for fame or prestige in this.

Like I said earlier, the consolation of Teddy’s story is that he doesn’t seem to have planned anything too far in advance. He rolled with it, and god damn it I’m gonna roll with it too.