Monday, February 21, 2005
It Never Got Weird Enough…..
Woody Creek, Colorado
…..for him.
“DENVER (Reuters) – Hunter S. Thompson, who pioneered “gonzo” journalism and became a counterculture celebrity with works such as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” fatally shot himself at his Colorado home on Sunday night, police said. He was 67.”
Before he started to get stupid, and worse – famous, Thompson wrote this about the last days of Ernest Hemingway:
“Ketchum was Hemingway’s ‘Big Two Hearted River’, and he wrote his own epitaph in the story of the same name, just as Scott Fitzgerald had written his epitaph in a book called ‘The Great Gatsby’. Neither man understood the vibrations of a world that had shaken them off their thrones, but of the two, Fitzgerald showed more resilience. His half-finished ‘Last Tycoon’ was a sincere effort to catch up and come to grips with reality, no matter how distasteful it might have seemed to him.
Hemingway never made such an effort. The strength of his youth became rigidity as he grew older, and his last book was about Paris in the Twenties…..Like many another writer, Hemingway did his best work when he felt he was standing on something solid – like an Idaho mountainside, or a sense of conviction.”
Now, Thompson was no Fitzgerald, and try as he might he could never quite write an even halfway decent Hemingwayesque novel, this despite the fact that he wrote thousands, if not millions, of phrases, paragraphs and entire journalistic set pieces in that strange Hemingway/Gonzo fusion that in the end became cliche for all to see, both in print and, especially, all over the Blogosphere. But back in the days when he was really stomping on the terra, a careful read always gave you the sense that it was more than just technique and that HST was standing hard on conviction, even when he was going a hundred miles an hour:
