Ross,
I just put "Hell's Angels" in its place in the bookcase yesterday morning. I did this begrudgingly ... Mr. Keys' command that we clean up the "book mess" really messed with me. I like my books in little piles. 
I did the forced cleaning thing with a lot of slamming things about, and a many under-my-breath comments about goose-stepping husbands, mothers, and politicians.
I recently finished reading "Generation of Swine". Dylan Thomas is in my mind for him and for me...
Rage, rage against the dying of the light...
Your remembrance is both moving and visceral… the connection conveyed from Thompson’s writing to aspiring journalists and writers like I imagine you were reading Hell’s Angels those many years ago is clear and familiar.
I couldn’t help smiling as I read how you (like I) scoured the house for your copy— and of the blogger’s spouse’s reaction to the midnight search.
Rage on into the night. He’ll be with us still in his best passages forever.
Heck Ross, I'm trying to trackback to ASZ, and I keep getting errors.... grrrrrrr....
Kate--
Just think of it as a very, very bad Mojowire.
thanks bill.
Sigh. You'd think just once ...
Found my copy of Hell’s Angels and my step-son (25 years old, yikes)asked about it. It is winging its way east to Saskatoon.
I keep having this, "nothing is right" feeling. ummm
Good stuff, Ross. A sad day. I keep expecting a suicide note to be released that indicates that the good doctor couldn't stand being in the same world that would allow a clown like GWB a second term to further screw things up.
From a Rolling Stone article:
Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.
Rick--
After I read Hell's Angels (way after the throw-away Fear and Loathing - which it was; he was he was working like stink on the Reuben Salazaar killing, at the hands of the LAPD at the time and Oscar Zeta Acosta was involved and things were heavy in the barrio when they took off for Vegas) I went looking for the roots....found both original Nation pieces (on microfilm in the campus library) and then really went digging...clearly Thompson was truly a garretted, starving journo-artist when he got the HA book contract (ie. he was reduced to standing on street corners in the Mission in SFrancisco trying to get work as a day laborer) and when he was reviewed in the NYTimes (maybe 20 lines) and he was asked what separated him from his subjects Thompson answered, "I've got a gimmick; I can write").
___
dpu--
He could still stomp...I still went over to that stupid ESPN site once in awhile just to see what he would spew...you know, maybe it's as KateS. suggested somewhere -
...perhaps it was just a bad round of shot-gun golf, which would be fitting somehow I suppose.
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Hmmmm.....
I can just imagine what a young Dr. Thompson would have done with any young screwhead that showed up at his door from American Financial Mortgage.
Who knew that a screed about HST would become a honeytrap for spam.
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Get away sub-prime weasels.....
You and your stinking lot have already wrecked the lives of millions of people and now you're trying to screw with the memory of the good Docktor, who had his own problems with collection agencies and land-rapers when he was young, as well?
Away with you water headed fish eye people!
And if anybody would like a glimpse into Hunter Stockton's latter years of the 'New/Old' they could do worse than look at the linked post from Douglas Brinkley.
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Just been re-reading the bastards letters.
Cripes Almighty the guy could right.
And it didn't just fall from the sky into his hands either. I remember reading something, somewhere about how when he was the proverbial guard dog at the Big Sur Baths in the early 60's that had a copy of Dennis Murphy's
The Sergeant' which he completely annotated in the margins with excortations about what to try and what to ignore.
Which is interesting, given that Murphy and Kerouac were friends too, because while Kerouac's prose may have reached spiralling heights of spontaneity when he was at the top of his game the route Ti Jean took to get there was anything but spontaneous (ie. Kerouac also really worked at his craft to get to a point where he could fire the crackers).
For the record, when you remove 'fat bellied girls' from the equation, this is the most google-bombed item of anything I've written, which is only fitting, I reckon, given that Thompson really was the world's first blogger pumping out letters/comments/rants that were sent to all kinds of people by snail mail back in the days when Interwebs were not even a glint reflecting in the passion-soaked eyes of Tipper Aitcheson before her oxen were Gored for good.
_
For the b-side of the record - despite the relative paucity of comments associated with it, the battle of aspen/fat city piece is the second most bombed
.
Four years gone now.
And unlike Nixon, well, for HST there will always be more.....
.
I saw your link on Ron Mexico's blog and took a look...
I felt that the Rum Diary was a decent and tight little attempt at a novel, and that Thompson succeeded in writing through deviating from his desire to imitate his heroes.
I'm currently trying to put together a study of his works, that focuses on style more than anything, and how he came to be different from the authors he mimicked as a youth.
KRD--
I very much agree.
Have you read about how he went over every single passage of Dennis Murphy's
'The Sergeant' breaking down the language when he was staying in Big Sur? I believe Dawn/Chenault talks about that in one of the oral histories.
I also think that, especially in terms of Thompson's actual narrative voice, not enough attention has been paid to his long infatuation with Donleavy's 'The Ginger Man'. This is something that Ron Mexico has written quite extensively about.
Good luck with the project.
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Getting bombed on verbatim passages out of 'The Edge' from Eastern Europe this week.
What the heckfire's going on out there?
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