Quote:
Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
I would 2 this, but I've never read a single page of HST. Or Austen. Primarily because the people who recommended each to me in college made such horrendously poor decisions in their respective personal lives at the time that I assumed they were incapable of judging good and bad.
Rebus sic stantibus.
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If all you took away from HST was the drugs and the absurd stories, you missed the point. You really missed the point.
I've read a wall of books in my life but only one voice stood apart. His prose was like a fucking sledgehammer. He never gets credit for the way he made the fucking words MOVE across the page. No other writer flat out exhausted the reader like Thompson did. F&LinLV is not by far even close to his best book, or his finest work. For that, you should flip through The Great Shark Hunt and read "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved."
To the stupid cur who wrote that HST was the poster boy for a failed counter culture movement, you're right. He bought into a lifestyle that's unpopular. But unlike you, you smug little shit, posting on a chat board while you suck ass at your little job to pay for your little life, he did things his own way. You and I - we never did that. Our lives aren't our own. Maybe HST was a sad charicature in his old age. But what are you? I mean, really, what talent did you flash upon the big screen? What set you apart from the crowd? You're a fucking dime a dozen lawyer. Where are you to stand in judgment? You're just another suit - dead in 70 years. You won't even be remembered by anyone other than your goddamned family. What was the grand point of your existence? You may as well have been a weed. You'll levae nothing but issue, who, if they learn from you, will lead equally insignificant lives. Another upper middle class "striver," thinking you've got it made in the shade. Fool.
I may be no better ultimately, but I admit it. You don't want to respect anyone who lived on his own terms because it makes you confront the fact that you don't.
Now, shred me. Go ahead. Call me a crazy fucking idealist, an immature lunatic, a pompous arse. You have to, don't you? You have to reinforce the facade that you're living the American Dream, don't you. Keep kidding yourself.
