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| Gonzo Forever. Hunter S. Thompson |
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Amid all the excitement and despair occasioned by the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, few have paused to remember what he told Playboy magazine when they interviewed him several years ago.
Describing how he found his literary voice while writing a story about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's magazine, he said "I'd blown my mind, couldn't work. So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody." After the article was a success, he said to himslef "If I can write like this and get away with it, why should I keep trying to write like The New York Times?"
So the questions are; why should writing make sense?; why should a writer be bothered to defend his points with reasoned argument?; why shouldn't a writer be free to expell his thoughts willy-nilly onto paper like a baby defecating in a diaper?
If those and similar questions and the responses to them don't matter to you, you will likely love reading the collected oeuvre of Hunter S. Thompson. (By Scott Rose)
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