HST

>genuine intelligence
O K

I think DFW was a better author than HST or Hemingway, but he just tried so hard. I'll have to agree with that prick booktuber about the fact that DFW's prose is pretty much dedicated to making you think he's a good writer - it's like even his writing was an ironic attempt at being sincere.

He wasn't really great at much. I guess his pioneering of gonzo journalism was pretty cool and a big step forward, but his writing was only very good at being "unique" and easily digested.

Entertaining, easy reading. Some of his work as a journalist abroad, especially South America is pretty interesting.

I do wonder if he was just a supreme bullshit artist though.

Not if I fuck your dead father first pussy

I would literally kill you if you were in the room with me. Everyone gets to say whatever they want behind a keyboard

Literally bro? You would Literally kill me? Like literally?

Despite his shit self-destructive politics (except his stance on guns. How the fuck did that happen? Though then again, marxists have made the world forget how one of the most important things about the civil rights movement was to allow niggers to bear arms), he's great because he, while unbridled and unapologetic, willingly scathing, is also non-pretentious.

He paints himself as an asshole telling a story, and that's what he is. And it's entertaining as fuck. Low brow? Absolutely. But there's nothing wrong with being low brow if you can deliver like Thompson. Even his fucking ESPN column was a riot.

In my own country I am in a far-off land
I am strong but I have no force or power
I win all yet remain a loser
At break of day I say goodnight
When I lie down I have a great fear
Of falling.
– François Villon
Roll em, boys
1
California, Labor Day weekend… early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw
motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levi’s roll out from damp garages, all-
night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland,
heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur… The Menace is loose again, the
Hell’s Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning
freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles
an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches… like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a
monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your
daughter’s leg with no quarter asked and none given; show the squares some class, give em
a whiff of those kicks they’ll never know… Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it
on… Little Jesus, the Gimp, Chocolate George, Buzzard, Zorro, Hambone, Clean Cut, Tiny,
Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, Mouldy Marvin, Mother Miles, Dirty Ed, Chuck the Duck, Fat
Freddy, Filthy Phil, Charger Charley the Child Molester, Crazy Cross, Puff, Magoo, Animal
and at least a hundred more… tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and
bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys
flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst
of dirty thunder…

>if i watch one of the depp movies before i read the book, i read it in his voice.

youtu.be/NHeSC_Ws5Ic

In the middle of an interview he gets in a shootout with his neighbor. Pretty funny.

He became a meme in his own life and suffered from it. Plenty of people will criticize him because they read Fear and Loathing in high school, bought into the idea of Raoul Duke, tried to emulate it and came off as assholes. Now they'll denounce him as a way of denouncing their teenage nonsense.

It's fashionable to rag on him and the Beats because pseuds with only a tangential relationship to the broader world of literature will obsess over one of their books without fostering a continuing interest in the themes that are explored.

I do think he's a fantastic writer, but I could understand why someone else would reject him. He holds personal importance for me, he was a jumping off point to other works.

Good post.

He was alright at first, but the drugs and booze and alcohol got too much.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 was his last good work

Did you know he went to Zaire to cover the Ali/Forman fight?
No, you didn't.
Because he never wrote it. He was zonked out by the pool the whole time.
By the end of the 1970s he stayed at Woody Creek doing drugs and drinking and expected the world to come to him.

Hedonism without nihilism.

You said it better than I could

It's a shame he's only well known for Fear and Loathing

Proof that HST is dogshit. Incredibly low standards.

Thanks senpai

The trajectory of his career is as fascinating as the work itself. Drug use was inexplicably tied to his voice but his creativity fed the lifestyle, never the other way around. I used to think if he got sober, he would have puttered out but now I think a quieter life may have lended us a Thompson with an evolved voice and fresh perspective.

Look at the careers of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, or even Marc Maron. They all created art that energized a part of the human voice that had been left dormant in their lifetimes and it was assisted by drug use. They all got clean, eventually, but their creative output remained impressive. David Bowie went from sporting Nazi paraphernalia on some joy ride through Germany to a proper English gentleman, Iggy Pop's latest record was the realization that he's the last of his kind, and Maron was able to take the openness of an early morning come binge and translate it into uninhibited, long form conversations with some of the best artists in the word.

I would have loved to see the evolution of Hunter.

Every American should read Fear & Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72. It will shock you how little American politics has changed in 44 years.

Nothing. He's an American pop lit author.

I'm a anti gun-control marxist, and you're a retard if you think absolutely any thinker of any worth in the history of marxist critique ever bothered to be pro or against guns, because this shit is only a question in the US, the rest of the world simply doesn't care.

Also, you're clearly not pro-guns or individual liberties or anything, you're just against what you pereceive as marxism. If you did, you would see how being anti-gun control aligns with the rest of his arguments on absolute personal freedom and responsability.

HST was basically a beat journalist.

Stuck overseas with only The Great Shark Hunt. Trip sucked, but at least I learned about Nixon.

Sounds okay to me considering the only reason people dislike the Beats is because they had a cringey fauxintellectual fashion movement riding in their wake. The dirty secret is that Burroughs and Keruoac and yes Ginsberg too are at the least good writers.

>2016
>being a Marxist
I tipped my fedora.

Well Im actually an anti-gun control marxist as well and Marx certainly had some opinions on gun control.

"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered.... Any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated by force if necessary"- Yo boy Karl (:

>understanding the world is still shaped by ideologies political and otherwise despite nerds quoting the year as if they somehow live in the exception to history

You have a problem with this?

>It's a shame he's only well known for Fear and Loathing

the problem is that people read the wrong fear and loathing and end up associating him with the posturing and self-mythologizing of fear and loathing in las vegas instead of the sincere quest for moral redemption in fear and loathing on the campaign trail

But /pol/ told me communists disarm you then massacre you

Edgy modern stalinists are almost exclusively anti-gun cucks, and the Communist regimes all disarmed their populaces while consolidating power, but wasn't one of Marx's main ideas that every worker needs a rifle over his mantle to go shoot the oppressors or some shit like that?

Edgelord proto-redditor shock jock, literally Maddox tier. The underside of the barrel where all the pill bugs and earthworms eat each other's shit.

Yes, and this is also one of the hypocrisies of black support for the Democratic party

>Everyone gets to say whatever they want behind a keyboard
yeah they do dont they

i never understood this argument. the ones in power will always be better armed than the plebs what difference does it make if they have a gun or not, they're eternally outgunned anyways

i honestly feel like gun control is a fucking non-issue blown out of proportion

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

>the ones in power will always be better armed than the plebs what difference does it make if they have a gun or not, they're eternally outgunned anyways
Tell that to the USA, they've been getting cucked by third world peasants with rifles for decades.

Look at the Taliban just taking over again now that the Westerners have been moving out. Determined men with rifles will always be a tremendous threat to any occupying force, own government included, no matter how many drones you have.

How would one emulate Hunter Stockton Thompson's life of writing, drugs and irresponsibility?

Bump

sage

First you have to get in a time machine to when a talented journalist could get away with all that crazy shit

I wonder if its possible anywhere? All the Asian shitholes with no internet don't seem to have much drugs or counterculture movements. Africa maybe? Needless to say you would need to be a native of the country you were doing it

>what difference does it make if they have a gun or not, they're eternally outgunned anyways

They could make it expensive for the government in money and lives. The Vietnamese didn't have to win, they just had to hold out long enough. The war became too unpopular to sustain, and the Americans went home. This is exactly how the Americans won their independence in the first place, so they know whereof they speak.

Bumparoni salad

He's the unconscious archetype that boring, white male twenty somethings unknowingly seek to emulate

White 20something males aim to be drugged out journalists?

Honesty.

You can call him pretentious or edgy or whatever if you want, it's simply not true. He lived the life he lived. He immersed himself in a dangerous culture and portrayed it the way it was. When he wrote about politics he wrote with self-admitted bias instead of hiding behind sophistry. He never really pretended to be anything except a demented junkie with an opinion.

He's not a genius or intellectual by any means and the people who admire him are idiots who missed the point, but he has earned his place in literary history.

It seems 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 to 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.

why is it always arty white males that like to shit on white males....guilt much?

As a boring white twenty something, yes

He's really funny, a great humorist, earnest and honest as fuck, as candid and frank as it's possible for an author to be. His personal integrity is such that he had to insist on the radical subjectivism of his "gonzo" method. The hermeneutic function of objectivity (as regards journalistic or scientific discourse) is to create an artificial space between the active author and the passive reader, in which an illusion or mystique of authority and competence is established. Hunter circumvented this relationship by treating his readers (like other "confessional" writers like Rousseau and De Quincey) like an extended network of intimates, which accounts for his remarkable directness.

Your a red, you are therefore automatically for gun control.

Because they do.

The Rum diary is interesting within the context of his other work. His early realist novel, unpublished for 30 years, something Charles Bukowski readers would like. Its the book I've most enjoyed from Thompson

His early stuff was great, but he wrote absolutely nothing of value after 1980. Zilch.

>i honestly feel like gun control is a fucking non-issue blown out of proportion

yeah, gun control is for democrats what abortion is for republicans. its a never ending crusade meant to drum up moral outrage but will never actually yield results.

Hunter was decidely self destructive, and by the time he shot himself he'd basically ruined his brain. Yes, drugs fed his creativity, but they ultimately ruined his life too.

read his 9/11 piece
espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1250751

This was pretty good. Makes me tempted to fuck off to a third world beach country.

he was the real deal
what he did, he did it right, also this

This is hilarious.

>All the Asian shitholes with no internet don't seem to have much drugs

nigger are you crazy?

'72 was his last good work.

I agree, I read Kingdom of Fear recently and he was a parody of his former self, it was quite wanky to read.

His political and cultural analysis was on point senpai, he might have been a demented junkie with an opinion above all else, but he was also very articulate (wether you like his style or not, you can't deny he has a very unique Hemmingway rambling on drugs kind of prose, and even 50 years after constant imitators of his style, it's still fairly easy to recognize his work opposed to someone trying to imitate him.

thompson never could have done this, he was a solid alcoholic by his late twenties if not sooner

the rustle brand of his day