10 Replies to “Gonzo job application”

  1. Weird coincidence. I was mink oiling my motorcycle jacket and boots and took a break to check out SDA – went to Amazon and at random hit the page where he’s describing his run out to the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, it’ll have to be less picturesque, but it’s comin’ in a few weeks.
    (2011 Triumph Bonnie, a classic faster and better than ever…)

  3. Another HST book I have to own. The first HST book I read was Hells Angels when I was in high school. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was one of the funniest books I’ve read and I’ve re-read it multiple times over the last 40 years. I still have the issues of Rolling Stone magazine in which Fear and Loathing was serialized.
    HST was a brilliant writer although he never topped Fear and Loathing in LV. OTOH, maybe I shouldn’t read The Proud Highway as when I read one of his books I find HST-like paragraphs creeping into my medical legal reports and insurance reports.

  4. They don’t take kindly to swooping hallucinatory bats making their way into medical reports, eh?
    The only Thompson book other than Fear and Loathing I’ve read was Hells Angels. Interesting; the voice is there, but the persona isn’t yet.

  5. Black Mamba, no it’s not the bats (which I didn’t see when I retraced HST’s route during a drive from LA to LV) and the 60’s are behind me now. It’s just HST’s irreverent gonzo style of writing which is so easy to slip into when an insurance company asks idiotic questions or when a patient is clearly trying to milk the system. I’ve learned from painfull experience that any report I write late at night after a few drinks needs to be carefully proofread the next day. I’ve had to regretfully delete some of my best sounding paragraphs from medical reports.
    HST wrote a lot of crap during the latter part of his writing career which I think was in large part due to him attempting to live the lifestyle he described in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The Great Shark Hunt is well worth reading but nothing else of his really stands out. There are some great paragraphs in his final works but they are few in number.

  6. An interesting man; I’ve read that in his early days he used to type out F. Scott Fitzgerald stories because you can’t just write like a lazy SOB, you’ve got to learn the craft.
    Destroyed himself with drugs, as is perfectly obvious from any late footage. A paranoid lefty(?) type; but there was something real to do with the American spirit about Hunter. A gun nut, at the very least; so one of our guys as far as that goes.
    Will read the Shark Hunt.

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