Hunter S. Thompson was insane. Really, genuinely sick, and not in a way that’s fun or exciting, but rather, sad.

A lot of the stuff he says here would be interesting if it was true. But he sets out pretty early to make sure you know not to trust him. He’s not going to narrate the truth. He’s not going to attempt to. His brain is not up to the task of conveying knowledge from the world into a book. Nobody is fact-checking.

Salacious gossip that you know is bogus lacks much of a thrill, don’t you think? Instead of being exciting and important, it’s just poor taste.

Poor man. He needed to be in therapy, not reporting on a presidential campaign.

The account of the Democratic National Convention in Miami would be worth something. If I could trust it. There’s a neat procedural chess match internal power machinations feel to it. There’s very clever strategy that goes on, and is entertaining to read about. If it even happened.

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Mad Ducks and Bears by George Plimpton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I don’t understand what the point of this book was. There were some pretty funny parts. And there were some pretty funny parts that turned out to be lies. And there were some pretty funny parts that seemed like swirling mists over deep canyons of truth, or something.

The book is mostly anecdotes. I’ll retell a few.

One of the guys is at dinner with Plimpton in a restaurant. He starts telling Plimpton how the mouth gets too much of the food, and other parts of the face deserve a chance. He puts a bunch of oily salad on his forehead. He is the NFL’s most dominant defensive tackle. Plimpton suggests he try his nose or ears, since there, at least, he has orifices. The guy calls the waiter over and starts telling him how people at another table were throwing salad at him. See how it stuck to his forehead? He becomes loud, and the waiter asks them to leave. Outside, Plimpton tries to get him to recant his story about the other diners throwing food. He won’t. He insists they were.

This reminds me of elementary school. I think it’s a way that men have of passing down secret knowledge, which is that if you lie brazenly enough, and never ever ever admit it’s a lie, and dig the deepest pit in your soul to hide the lie in, so that it’s almost as though you really do believe it, well, then you can get kicked out of a restaurant.

Another time, they put on a charity golf tournament where their goal is to annoy the golfers in the most creative ways possible. The have tons of live animals wandering around the golf course: goats, chickens, a Galapagos tortoise, all kinds of stuff. The set booby traps. They play loud noises and have a little person driving a tank around.

One of the pranks is that they’ve taken one of the golf holes and drilled it out so that it’s like fifteeen feet deep. Plimpton recounts seeing a foursome encounter this obstacle.

No, one of the foursome says to his friends, he’s not going to put his hand down that hole. There are probably snakes down there.

This is the funniest moment in the book.



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On Tennis: Five Essays by David Foster Wallace

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Two things:

First, I think it’s important for a novelist, especially one who wants to write grandly and with a wide scope — a maximalist — to engage deeply with other arts besides writing. There’s so, so much in these essays that points to important themes in Infinite Jest; you can see how all his thinking turns around the same constellation of subjects. It’s wonderful.

Second, I’ve been thinking for a few years about DFW’s footnotes. I’ve decided that they’re an attempt to resist the one-dimensional direction of writing. He’s writing a sentence. He has two different ideas that connect to the sentence. Both are important. But the temporal sequence of spoken and read language only allows one of the ideas to be directly connected. The other has to go somewhere else.

Well, why? Actual thought, and any object of such thought, contains whole jumbles of ideas, all connected to each other in all sorts of ways, such that it’s impossible to put them in an order that doesn’t distort the whole set by neglecting some connections and emphasizing others.

With a footnote, DFW can move along another dimension, briefly, showing a facet of the jumble that’s relevant, but connects to the whole along different principles from the main flow of the narrative. Since the flow of the narrative is usually somewhere on a spectrum between ‘completely artificial’ and ‘mildly suggestive of truth’, with ‘aesthetically pleasing’ a hopeful third point to aim for, this resistance to that monodimensional tyranny of language gives a better sense of the thought as a whole than otherwise.

This is something that I sometimes imagine that computers could help us with, except that the human eye pretty much only focuses on one thing at a time — and so the path through any set of words, no matter the arrangement, is always going to be linear, even if they move around or interact with you. It seems the thought is always non-linear, and the mode of expression always linear.

Anyway, his reflections on why sports biographies are so bad are pretty great. I think he could have gotten some even more interesting ideas out of it, since it’s probable, I think, that the cliches athletes use are shadows of vast archetypes that, real or not, move in currents beneath the world, and it may be that their (the athletes’) genius comes in part from a refusal to ironically resist those archetypes. Or, that’s what the essay made me think about.



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Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession by Søren Kierkegaard

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Don’t read reviews of Kierkegaard. Read Kierkegaard instead.



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Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a totally fascinating peek into the old South of the 30s. Half travel memoir and half folklore catalogue, it’s never boring and it really seems to give a sense of what things were like in the places she visited. The first half is Ms. Hurston gathering stories around Florida. It’s full of Brer Dog and the Devil and John and the Lord and Ole Massa, intercut with the day-to-day life of the little towns and logging camps around Polk County. The second half is all about Hoodoo and takes place in New Orleans, and in place of stories she’s recorded all sorts of spells practiced by the conjurers she studied under. It’s hard not to believe in some of the things she says she saw and heard of.

In particular I want to highlight the book’s ending, which is deeply strange and mysterious, and not at all how you expect either a collection of folklore or a travel memoir to end.



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