Monday, February 21, 2005

Proto-blogger, Gone

Hunter S Thompson lived a full life, touching many, and creating a writing style that lives on in every blog.

Hunter

His inspirational writing and life is engendering many eulogies, some at blogcritics, here and another emotive post. Round up at the occasional rant.

Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.
Source: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Mahalo

The New York Times briefly eulogizes him, with an apt defintion of gonzo, and blogging
style of first-person reporting that came to be known as "gonzo" in the 1960's, where the usually-anonymous reporter becomes a central character in the story, a conduit of subjectivity.

"Nobody really knows what it means, but it sounds like an epithet," he said in an interview that, for him, journalism "can be an effective political tool."


The Guardian has a slightly longer piece, having been awake while we were sleeping
The approach won him praise among the masses as well as critical acclaim. Writing in the New York Times in 1973, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt worried Thompson might someday "lapse into good taste".

"That would be a shame, for while he doesn't see America as Grandma Moses depicted it, or the way they painted it for us in civics class, he does in his own mad way betray a profound democratic concern for the polity," he wrote. "And in its own mad way, it's damned refreshing."


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