Hunter S. Thompson
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The great anti-establishment icon of the 1970s and 1980s, Hunter S. Thompson, allegedly took his own life with a handgun in his Aspen, CO home on February 20th. He left the single word "counselor" typed haphazardly in the center of a sheet of paper in his typewriter.
He had been in a phone conversation with his wife, asking her to come home from the gym to help him on a column he was writing. Suddenly, his wife says, he went silent on the other end of the phone. She heard no shot. Thompson was a Louisville native who grew up in the Highlands and attended Male High School. He became famous for his crazed post-Beat style of journalism, which left the reader in a state of vertiginous wonderment as he cut thru the bullshit even as he spackled it back in with his own. Though his best-known work is the breakthrough Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, for my money his finest hour is his 1959 novel The Rum Diary. In it, he writes like the early Jack Kerouac's dark twin, and sums the era up with Burroughs-like incisiveness: "I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles -- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going." Quite unlike Burroughs, however, Hunter was that rare breed of writer who, myth and hype aside, really did write better under the influence of drugs and madness. As critic Kurt Loder pointed out recently, Thompson spawned a whole generation of young writers trying to follow in his footsteps, failing to understand that he was already an accomplished seasoned journalist before he became a walking pharmacy. Bill Murray portrayed Thompson in the incredibly low-budget "Where the Buffalo Roam", and Johnny Depp, who played him in the recent film adaptation of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", will reprise the role in an upcoming film of "The Rum Diary". Recently Thompson had been an increasingly outspoken critic of the U.S. Government's role in 9-11, and was working on a massive expose of 9-11 and the Bush administration at the time of his death. Blogger Mack White says: "Thompson's family says he was not depressed, nor was he in enough pain to kill himself. In fact, by all reports, he was quite happy. He was talking on the phone to his wife, getting ready to work on his column, when he decided it would be wise to kill himself, so that he could go out (we are told) while still at the top of his form, even though this would mean not finishing his column or his expose on 9/11 (potentially the most important thing he would ever write) (?)..."
Ron Whitehead's eulogy:
"....People continue to say that there will be no audience for Thompson's work, that no one will understand or care. Yet as I travel across America across the world working with young people, of all ages, I witness a movement, amongst young people, away from the constraints of non-democratic puritan totalitarian cultures. I see a new generation that recognizes the lies of the power elite, a generation that is turning to the freethinkers the freedom fighters of the 50s and 60s, recognizing honoring them as mentors...."
"...In Jewish mysticism the prophet often bears the facade of madness. Hunter S. Thompson stands in direct lineage to the great writers and prophets. And as with the prophets of old, the message may be too painful for the masses to tolerate, to hear, to bear. They may, and usually do, condemn, even kill, the messenger. Hunter stood as long as he could. He fought a valiant fight. He was a brave yet sensitive soul. He was a sacred shaman warrior. He saw. He felt. He recorded his visions. He took alcohol and drugs to ease the pain generated by what he saw what he felt. He lived on his own terms. He died on his own terms. Did the masses kill Hunter? Did he kill himself?..."
"...We must look beyond the life of the artist to the work the body of work itself. That is the measure of success. Like those who have re-examined Orwell's 1984 to find a multi-layered literary masterpiece, we must look deep into Thompson's work and find the deep multi-layered messages. His books, especially the early ones and his letters, are literary masterpieces equal to the best writing ever produced...."
http://www.insomniacathon.org/rrIHTRW01.html
photo credit: Christopher Felver. |