Ace news hound Keith Loh brought this to my attention tonight. I bet it is the talk of the blogosphere tomorrow. I am a little saddened, since the world is now a little less ridiculous.
Writer Hunter S. Thompson dead at 67
DENVER – Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” fatally shot himself Sunday night at his Aspen-area home, his son said. He was 67.
As a bit of a memorial, let me quote one of my favourite bits from Fear and Loathing, which is also one of the few bits that didn’t make me laugh so hard I dropped the book:
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seemed 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 through 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.
Updated: with notes and some links to relevant comments
I had ordered one of these a couple of weeks ago. I wonder when it will come.
Matt Fraction has a very similar post, with a different–but equally significant–quote.
Gwenda has some reflections on Thompson and growing up.
This was the first time I ever wrestled with how to balance what I felt about someone’s work with what I felt about them as a person. It’s something that still comes up from time to time. I have to say that the bloom on Thompson’s rose died for me then and never really came back, a fact that’s probably as due to the fact I’d read all his best work by then, and only the mediocre was left.
My lasting impression of Thompson is that he was the kind of person it’s better to know of, than to know well.
(Johnny Depp can come fight me if he wants.)
Scalizi has a journalistic take, as well, which starts off with the appropriate twist of humour.
Like every other guy who wrote for a college newspaper in the last 30 years, there was a time I wanted to be the next Hunter S. Thompson, until I realized (as we all inevitably do) that being the next Hunter S. Thompson wasn’t merely a writing aspiration, but a lifestyle choice for which most of us simply didn’t have the pharmaceutical tolerance, even if we had the inclination
I can only agree with William Gibson’s sentiment.
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