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Monday, February 21, 2005
Black Ass at the CrossroadsHow come our outlaw journalists keep blowing their heads off? Gary Webb hit a mysterious ceiling in his career; but I keep thinking of Thompson's brooding piece in The Great Shark Hunt called "What Brought Hemingway to Ketchum?" (Excuse any errors in the title; most of my books are on a ship in the mid-Atlantic.) A shotgun to the head was a way out for Hemingway after the juice had started to drain, and Thompson had just shown himself to be a lousy prognosticator with a cocky Rolling Stone piece retailing the reasons Kerry would win in November.
But who knows? There's also the good old black ass, Hemingway's (and I think Winston Churchill's) evocative term for depression.
UPDATE: Marc writes a fine obituary that remembers "Strange Rumblings in Aztlán" fondly but vivisects the big bad Thompson image, which of course dried up his genius. "The mourning" -- for the real Thompson -- "started long ago."
ALSO: Walcott agrees that Thompson's death was "Hemingwayesque." But if you follow his link to Steve Gilliard you should also read Marc, as a tonic.
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
11:33 PM
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