BetterThanWiki
NotThatWe'reCountingOrAnythingVille
It's a funny thing, the blogging business.
Because, normally, what you write today is worth even less than fish wrap tomorrow (or sooner) given that, unlike all the stuff hidden away on the old, yellowed newspaper clippings filling my bookshelves to bursting, nobody, including bloggers themselves, ever bothers to actually print out their blather.
But a funny thing has been happening 'round here over the last couple of years or so.
And it is a thing that has ramped up with the recent release of the movie version of 'The Rum Diary'.
So much so that I actually went to the Google cache myself, using the specific search string that has been bringing so many folks here from all over the place recently, to see what the heckfire is going on.
And this is what I found....
Amazing that, don't you think?
Or maybe not.
Of course, given that it is the Google with its weird and twisted freak-powered Booleanism, the folks who do come by are probably a little surprised to discover what the post is really all about.
Which, of course, is not Hemingway's death, but rather Thompson's.
Below is the lede from early 2005. It is, as Bill Murray playing the good Docktor, might have said, 'One of the finest things I've ever written'.....Or....Maybe not...Who really knows, especially given the hard truth, which is that only a fool writes repeatedly for free....
Monday, February 21, 2005
It Never Got Weird Enough.....
Owl Farm
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...
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."
.....What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum, Hunter S. Thompson, The National Observer, 1964.
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...
(The rest is here, for anybody interested...)
____
And, for the record......There used to be dozens of great comments attached to that post, including a bunch from the denizens of the old Whiskey Bar.....And that included jonku, lenin's ghost AND Kate Storm....But they were all disappeared when I refused to pay JS-Kit that egregious ransom for the keys to the old Haloscream....Jeebuz!.... I'm starting to feel like a bit player in an old William Gibson short story that almost, but never quite, saw the light of day....
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