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Book Loot: Week Ending August 1st, 2010

August 1, 2010 Book Loot
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Hunter S. ThompsonMy postwoman was kept very busy this week, here are the bookish delights she dumped on my doorstep.

Two of these (Lilian’s Story and One Day) were won from various online competitions. I’ve been having such good luck in book related competitions, I wonder whether that luck would translate should I buy a lottery ticket? After watching Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson the other week I was inspired to fill in the gaps in my Thompson library, and the Simon & Schuster editions are so much more pleasant looking than the unbearably ugly MacMillan reissues.

The unstoppable Amanda from Desert Book Chick sent me Expiration Date, and it looks like a mind-meltingly awesome read, you can read her review of it here. August is Classics month over on her blog, and when I stop running my hands lovingly over my Penguin Classics and Modern Library editions and I’ll be writing a guest post for her about reading the classics. It’ll be my first guest post and I’m pretty excited about it.

This week I had to press the “MARK ALL AS READ” button on my book news folder as it got way too unmanageable in the time I spent away from the computer, so this Book Loot is sadly lacking the usual list of fascinating tidbits from the literary world. I’ve been busy with Melbourne International Film Festival screenings, but the past week looks mild compared to the crazy schedule I’ve prepared for myself this week. I’m most looking forward to The Killer Inside Me (I have the book on hold, and would have read it by now too if only some dastardly creature hadn’t kept it for three weeks past the due date.), Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam (and I have the book that inspired this documentary on hold as well) and the newest film from one of my favourites, Harmony Korine, Trash Humpers – and yes, it is what it sounds like.

I’ve also (finally) decided to put up the Google Friend Connect widget, and although my loner tendencies like that it’s just me there at the moment, if any of you would care to join me over there, it is sure to be one hell of a party!

Image: a very young Hunter S. Thompson, via tumblr.

Book Loot: Week Ending April 18th, 2010

April 18, 2010 Book Loot
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This Year's Summer ReadingI know! I said I wouldn’t be buying any books until Clunes, but as luck would have it I found myself in a secondhand bookstore this week. Thinking I wouldn’t find anything I would want to buy, just intending to have a browse around and waste some time – I’m really good at self deception, it would seem – but found a few books that begged to be bought home with me.

My Mum returned from the U.S.A. this week and she brought with her a bounty of gifts, including the Tintin and Capone books above. The Capone book looks really fascinating, stuffed with actual documents from the gangster’s time at Alcatraz. She also visited the set of Gilmore Girls at Warner Brothers Studio, which was exciting enough when she was telling me all about it, but then she pulled out a t-shirt with the logo for Luke’s Diner on it – I may have cried a little bit. As well as all this, she took a passing snapshot of the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco for me, what a champ!

It’s been a really strange week. Two bouts of sickness that hit me out of nowhere, and a major computer malfunction thanks to Microsoft which meant I had to completely reinstall Windows and reformat everything. Luckily nothing was lost, but it was still a bit of a pain. The week wasn’t all bad news though, I found out that I’m going to be getting more hours and new responsibilities at the bookstore from next week. Always good, and hopefully it means a big paycheck due just in time for Clunes.

[image credit: "This Year's Summer Reading" by flickr user ephemera assemblyman]

The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson (1960)

November 10, 2009 Book Reviews
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The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson

The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson’s foray into fiction began with The Rum Diary, which he started writing in 1960 when he was 23 years old, but wasn’t published until 1998.

Paul Kemp is a journalist sent from New York to work on a small, failing newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He spends most of his time at Al’s a small bar and food joint with his fellow journalists, a gang of near-crazy, volatile drunks. It is Hunter S. Thompson so you would expect some wild adventures to follow but it is unusually restrained.  Everything – the strange events, the mundane daily activities of the journalists – is told in a weirdly detached voice, which reads rather blandly. It doesn’t have the trademark Gonzo energy.

By the time we got to the street, I could see the first rays of the sun, a cool pink glow in the eastern sky. The fact that I’d spent all night in a cell and a courtroom made that morning one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. There was a peace and a brightness about it, a chilly Caribbean dawn after a night in a filthy jail. I looked out at the ships and the sea beyond them, and I felt crazy to be free with a whole day ahead of me.

The blurb makes a point about the narrative centering on Kemp’s barely suppressed lust for a colleague’s girlfriend, Chenault, but this never really eventuates. When it does come to the surface, it is nowhere near as interesting as the what is going on in the newsroom. The frantic, harried attitude of the journalists keeps them all on edge, but again, this tension never really reaches a breaking point. When the climax does occur, it happens so quickly, and is written in such a blunt and disconnected way that it loses the potential effect.

Then came noon, and morning withered like a lost dream. The sweat was torture and the rest of the day was littered with the dead remains of all those things that might have happened, but couldn’t stand the heat. When the sun got hot enough it burned away all the illusions and I saw the place as it was – cheap, sullen, and garish – nothing good was going to happen here.

The Rum Diary is a little disappointing, it doesn’t even begin to compare to Thompson’s non-fiction and journalism. It shows just how far he evolved from writing lacklustre fiction to the trailblazing non-fiction madness which made him a countercultural icon.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson (1973)

September 30, 2009 Book Reviews
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Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 brings together articles written by Hunter S. Thompson during his time as a political correspondent for Rolling Stone on the 1972 Presidential campaign, in which George McGovern ran up against incumbent Richard Nixon. Thompson follows the campaign through rallies around the country, the Democratic and Republican conventions, up until the aftermath of the disheartening landslide loss which saw Nixon re-elected. Thompson’s political leanings are strongly toward the Democrats, his sympathies tend to lie with the McGovern camp and he focuses much of his attention there, but he doesn’t withhold his criticisms of the troubled campaign.

“McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as amatter of policy and aperfect expression of everything he stands for.
Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”

Thompson throws the idea of objective political journalism out of the window, and inserts his huge personality and wit into every aspect of his journey through the political landscape. The crazy energy is felt most clearly when Thompson resorts to reprinting his jotted down during proceedings notes, where it is almost as though he can’t even begin to comprehend creating a narrative or story out of the bizarre happenings in the political world. Exhausted by looming deadlines and yet driven by the excitement of all that is happening, the down to the wire reportage imbues the writing with an intense energy that is difficult to escape. Thompson makes the political game interesting – although the extremely peculiar events and circumstances that evolve throughout the campaign also contribute.

“Compared to the Democratic Convention five weeks earlier, the Nixon celebration was an ugly, low-level trip that hovered somewhere in that grim indefinable limbo between dullness and obscenity – like a bad pornographic film that you want to walk out on, but sit through anyway and then leave the theater feeling depressed and vaguely embarrassed with yourself for ever having taken part in it, even as a spectator.
It was so bad, overall, that it is hard to even work up the energy to write about it.”

For all the journalists opinions on how things should have turned out, all their speculation just couldn’t keep up with the sheer unknowable political power of the voting public. All the well-reasoned rhetoric in the world ultimately couldn’t predict the final count. Thompson’s post-election analysis – including a particularly insightful interview with George McGovern – concludes that much of the devastating loss had to do with the loss of faith in the McGovern campaign due to the Eagleton affair (McGovern’s vice-presidential candidate was revealed as having received shock-treatment for severe depression and Eagleton was forced to resign from the ticket.) and the “mood of the nation”, fuelled by growing anxiety following the “social upheavals of the 60s.” Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 is a cynical observation of the world of presidential politics which makes for an utterly compelling read regardless of your knowledge of the American political system.

Book Loot: Week Ending September 27th, 2009

September 27, 2009 Book Loot
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Brace yourself, dear readers.

I didn’t buy any books (gasp! shock! horror!) so I have nothing to report on the rabid book-buyer front this week. Instead, seeing it feels as though it has been a while between reviews, I’ll quickly chat about what I have been reading. I’m working my way through Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar, which, despite it’s heavy use of a Scottish accented prose and slang and a generally downbeat demeanour, is keeping my attention. That is, when that attention isn’t being distracted by Hunter S. Thompson with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72. H.S.T. is managing to captivate me and get me involved in the American politics of 37 years ago with his outlandish wit and fierce mockery of the system. I’ve still got some Chuck Palahniuk books to read, but I think maybe the Palahniuk wave has crashed and I might be a bit over it? I’ll see how I feel when I finish these two books.

I started watching the first season of Mad Men this week, and the incredibly handsome Jon Hamm has me really wanting to read/reread some Jack Kerouac. Anyone else think Hamm would make a great Kerouac if someone had the lack of decency to make a film version of his life? Speaking of Mad Men, here’s me and Don Draper at an after-work rendezvous via the way too much fun on a boring Sunday afternoon at work Mad Men Yourself:

So, Don, what have you been reading?

So, Don, what have you been reading?

Ahem. Cartoon vanity and daydreams of meeting some dashing Don Draper look-a-like over a cocktail or two aside, here are some bookish articles that I found interesting this week. Douglas Coupland writing for the Guardian on his personal circumstances while he wrote Generation X:

“And so I started to write the book. I remember spending my days almost dizzy with loneliness and feeling like I’d sold the family cow for three beans. I suppose it was this crippling loneliness that gave Gen X its bite. I was trying to imagine a life for myself on paper that certainly wasn’t happening in reality. In the book there was the idea that people marooned in life could unmaroon themselves by telling stories to each other. That still seems to me to be a valid way of seeing the world. There was also the notion that telling stories was a way of coping with information overload – hence the book’s subtitle, Tales for an Accelerated Culture. In 1989, information overload meant 50 TV stations instead of 10, as well as push-button phones instead of rotary dial phones – quaint now, but back then it felt real. What was really going on with the writing of X was, I suspect, the use of storytelling as a form of creative pattern recognition from which clues to psychic survival might erupt. That’s possibly what storytelling is in a large sense, and it’s what I do for a living, the most recent evidence of which is Generation A, a follow-up to X where the cultural acceleration experienced by the characters is palpable rather than theoretical.”

Heather Dent over at PopMatters writes a reflective eulogy for Hunter S. Thompson:

“For generation after generation, Thompson rocked/rocks/will rock the dominant paradigm, describes our national character; corruption, inequality, mediocrity, freedom and fun, Fear and Loathing. His words, all the more relevant today, continue to delight and rattle us.”

Over at the New York Times, Arthur Krystal contemplates writers who appear to be terrible conversationalists.

And, finally, in my constant search for news, articles and basically anything of interest regarding Carson McCullers, Google News search turned up a review of a bar in Portland, The Press Club, which has a selection of crêpes named after authors. It appears that the owners have some good taste in literature as one of the crêpes is named after McCullers and I’m curious about how they decided that this particular combination of ingredients – “mozzarella, mushrooms, red peppers, and spinach” – represented Carson McCullers? In lieu of a ticket to Portland, I’m tempted to try and create my own version of crêpe à la Carson and report back on my findings.