[ 3 / biz / cgl / ck / diy / fa / ic / jp / lit / sci / vr / vt ] [ index / top / reports ] [ become a patron ] [ status ]
2023-11: Warosu is now out of extended maintenance.

/lit/ - Literature

View post   
File: 55 KB, 500x330, Hunter-S-Thompson-Birthday-Bash.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4807206 No.4807206[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

trange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? 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.

>> No.4807242

>>4807206
OH! OH! OH! I know this one!

Whot is "The most overwrought and overrated Baby Boomer Bard writer to ever have lived"?

>> No.4807249

>>4807242
Kerouac?

>> No.4807262

>>4807242
Ginsberg?

>> No.4807276

>>4807249
>>4807262
Ha!
Well played.

>> No.4807289

You know, if I had to come down off a high like that and grow up, I might have voted for Reagan too.

Might have.

>> No.4807438

>>4807242
Overwrought -(of a piece of writing or a work of art) too elaborate or complicated in design or construction.
shit man, if you find Thompson to be elaborate or complicated, you should go back to reading Green Eggs and Ham

>> No.4807462

>>4807242
Who is, "a writer everybody takes as a Writer, instead of as a humorist?"

>> No.4807479

>>4807438
this. Zed, you are also a fag because I can identify you by name.

>> No.4808332

>>4807289
Wait what? Why?

>> No.4808355

Kerouac and Thompson are similar in that their heroic, mythic image is in a lot of ways larger and more visible than their actual writing. In fact this is kind of true of a lot of writers of that period and basic social position.

They're different in that Thompson, at least until he started buying his own bullshit, was a much better, much truer writer. Fuck Kerouac.

>> No.4808376

>>4808355
And funnily the people both appeal to are, from my experience, far more likely to renounce thompson